A Girl Like You (42 page)

She is sadly lacking family and as far as I can make out you are her only friend in New York. Can you think of what to do for her?

I should warn you that it won’t be easy trying to talk her into anything. She can be very stubborn, but I guess you know that.

I feel strongly that you are the one to help her now. I hope that you will understand that I am not trying to get rid of her. I want to do my best for her. I’m convinced that the best is not to be found here in Freeport.

She will be angry that I have contacted you and I feel bad not taking her into my confidence about it, she is not a child, after all. But she would only arrange to be off somewhere if she knew that you were coming, so I must risk her wrath.

I hope that you will come soon.

With warmest wishes,

Frances Robinson

Gathering

Being back in Joseph’s apartment doesn’t bother her. It’s nothing more than a staging post to her now. And it’s not for long, just time enough to find a home to bring Cora to if that’s what’s needed.

Frances has offered to deal with the sale of the salt marsh house. There’s no point in hanging on to it, and if she is to make a home elsewhere she will need the money.

“It’s temporary,” Satomi tells Joseph. “So, ground rules: no presents, no outings, no talk of marriage, just friendship.”

“Agreed. What’s better for us two than friendship?”

“Oh, other fish to fry, Joseph?”

“Possibly.”

Joseph has never known her so full of determination, so sure of her agenda. She has made herself known to the Japanese community in her old New York neighborhood, and won’t be ignored this time. She has persisted, and some of them on her behalf are looking for Cora too now, writing to their relatives on the West Coast requesting information. And she has joined the Japanese American Citizens League, who are fighting to put right the injustices the Japanese internees have suffered. It’s amazing to her that she didn’t know they existed outside of the camp before. They had fought for the right of Japanese-Americans to join the military
then, and given Haru back his pride. She hopes with their help she can do the same for herself now.

She is entitled to a fairer settlement of her farm, they say. They will help her fight for it. It will be her purpose now to find Cora and be part of that fight.

Frances phones. The salt marsh house has sold.

“So soon, Frances.”

“Well, it’s a good enough house, Satomi.”

She thinks of the airy rooms, the unsullied light, the way it sits so solidly on its patch of earth. She wonders if the washy colors that she and Abe loved are to the new owners’ taste. Perhaps it is already returned to the more conventional browns and creams that she and Abe had thought dull. Who, though, could not love the view of those bleach-white marshes, the way the streams braid through them on their way to the ocean? She would have stayed there if she could, if Abe hadn’t lingered in every room. One Robinson widow will have to do for Freeport.

“They look like a happy family,” Frances says. “Four children, little sweethearts. Oh, and a puppy. That house needs a dog, don’t you think?”

“Yes, it’s a house meant for joy.” She breathes deeply.

“Oh, Sati, I’m sorry. Damn my practicality. I didn’t think.”

Cape Cod

There has been a letter from Dr. Harper. His search has come up with news of a child called Mary who might be their Cora.

Only the tiniest clue, Satomi, so I’m warning about having high hopes. I wait for months for replies to my inquiries, and when I get one there is hardly any information at all. The child is in a Catholic orphanage in Los Angeles, she is of the right age and came to them without papers, and that’s about it. It’s by no means confirmed to be Cora. I’ve twice followed this kind of information up without success. It’s unlikely, but I’m hoping for third-time lucky. And how many Japanese Marys do you know? It’s likely her name was changed to Mary. It’s that Catholic thing, claiming people for the Church, naming them after saints. Still, Mary, hardly the most original, is it? No one can verify anything because the child came via another orphanage and no one thought to ask how she ended up there in the first place. I’m waiting for them to send a photograph. I’ll be in touch if and when they do.

The news, brief as it is, has astonished her, as though finding Cora had been a fantasy, something she longed for but couldn’t
quite believe in. She has to agree with Dr. Harper, the chance that it could be Cora is slim, but the thought of it has made her anxious to find a home, to make it ready.

“You can bring her here if you want,” Frances had offered.

Satomi knows that she won’t. If the child is Cora, she wants to take her to somewhere permanent, somewhere that is forever.

Joseph is unsettled by the news. He thinks of Satomi caring for the child, making a life out of it, giving up her own. Her hopes are up, though, and he can’t bear the thought of her being disappointed.

“What are the chances this Mary could be Cora? It’s a long shot at best,” he warns. “It might not be her, dear girl. You do know that, don’t you? We have no idea whether this Mary was even in Manzanar.”

“She’s an orphan, a Californian Japanese, so she must have been there.” She doesn’t want Joseph’s doubt, she has enough of her own.

“It’s possible she’s a recent orphan, don’t you think?”

“Possible, but if she’s not, then she must have been in Manzanar. It was the only camp with an orphanage. Every orphaned West Coast baby, toddler, and child ended up there.”

“Extraordinary.” Joseph scowls.

“Well, just the threat of those babies,” she says. “Who knew what they were capable of?” She had meant to sound sarcastic, but her voice shook as a surge of the old anger surfaced.

She thinks of the children, their dear faces, their names fresh on her tongue. She remembers their characters, the half-feral little boy who was always in trouble for fighting, and the two-year-old slow to speak, whose first word when it came was,
Wait.

“God, that whole thing, the camps, Cora, it’s awful, Sati,” Joseph says. “Unfair.”

Suddenly she is weeping, haunted by the images in her head. She sees Cora’s questioning eyes, Tamura’s eyes, she has always
thought. She pictures her shy smile, hears her sweet voice. She has let Cora down, not worked hard enough to find her. All through her time with Abe she had let Cora slip. She had indulged herself in happiness, thought it her time, her due. She had played at being an all-American wife, reinventing herself as someone who hardly remembered the suffering in the camp, the people who had meant so much to her. Why had it taken Abe’s death to show her how badly she had lost her way?

“I’m going as soon as I hear back from Dr. Harper, Joseph. I’ll find us a home, Cora and me, and then I’m going to California.”

“What can I do to help?”

“You could send a car to bring Dr. Harper from Lone Pine to Los Angeles.”

“I thought a plane, dear girl. A small plane, you know.”

“I think he’d like that.”

“If it must be by the sea, must be out of the city,” Joseph says as they set out from uptown, “Martha’s Vineyard is the place.” He has a house in mind. A house perfect for Satomi, he thinks, fingering the details in his pocket.

“Why there in particular?”

“Well, you’ll like it, that’s for sure. And I know people there who will look out for you.”

“I don’t need people to look out for me.”

“Everyone needs people looking out for them, Sati. I don’t know why you have to go at all. What’s so bad about the city anyway?”

“Oh, apartment buildings, sirens in the night.” She is thinking more, though, of where she wants to be rather than where she does not. It’s still the East for her, but not the city, not farmland either, somewhere new to make her own.

“I hardly know you these days,” Joseph says.

She isn’t hiding anymore, doesn’t need him to save her from
anything. There is an air of impatience about her, she is on the move. He is the one running to keep up.

He hopes she’ll settle for Martha’s Vineyard, it’s familiar territory, and he can visit her there whenever he wants. He hasn’t told her, but he has found a new love, a Russian who claims to be a count, although he hardly believes that. Suddenly he is ready for monogamy, ready to let go of the promise to his father.
I’m like a boy again
, he thinks,
all mouthwatering desire, viewing the world as though it has just been made, thinking everything in life good enough to bottle. Satomi was right. Love is the thing.

On the Vineyard, Satomi’s expectations of it and the house are not met. “I thought this house was made for you.” Joseph can’t hide his disappointment.

“Well, for one thing, Joseph, I can’t afford it.”

“Don’t let that be a problem, Sati. I can help, you know that.”

“You do enough already.”

She wants it to be the money from the Freeport house that buys her new home. A gift to her and Cora from Abe.

“It’s not for me, far too big,” she says, thinking of the atrium that mimics a hotel lobby. The house is full of such pretensions, the atrium, the Cinderella staircase, the high ceilings decorated with overblown plasterwork. And the air in it is stale, sour, lifeless somehow.

“Who lived here before, Joseph?”

“Oh, some old aunt, I expect. It’s always some old aunt. These houses don’t come up too often. Dead aunt’s shoes, you might say.”

Outside, the dark waters of Nantucket Sound seem to isolate the island, imprisoning its inhabitants. She had hoped for color, reflection, but the sea looks cinereous, black in parts, as though pools of oil swim just below its surface.

“Might as well be barbed wire,” she says as they board the ferry back to the Cape. “Sorry, Joseph, but I can’t live here.”

“But the Vineyard is charming, everyone says so.”

“It’s not for me.”

A half a mile or so from the small town of Eastham, with a relaxed realtor and details in hand, they view a cedar-shingled cottage that sits on the bay, looking east toward the Atlantic Ocean.

“It’s ready to move into,” the realtor says. “The owners have moved on.”

Satomi smiles. “I can breathe here,” she says.

“It’s too small,” Joseph insists. “A doll’s house.”

“It’s perfect, Joseph. Just the right size for Cora and me, and a spare bedroom for you when you come.”

He imagines himself with Leo, his Russian, in the attic bedroom, and smothers a smile. The details promised three spacious bedrooms.

“If you don’t mind the ceiling touching your head,” he says. “And you would have to shoehorn wardrobes into them.”

The cottage is a child’s drawing of a house, a broad-framed building with end gables and a chimney right in the center of the steeply pitched roof. It has been built low to withstand the Cape’s storms in winter, and to be cool in summer.

There are chalky blue shutters on all but the attic windows, and there’s a wooden porch with steps down to the shore. Clumps of beach rose not yet in bloom streak across the sand for as far as the eye can see.

“
Rosa rugosa
,” the realtor says. “Grows like a weed around here. Miles of red, in its season.”

“Miles of red,” Satomi repeats dreamily.

Long ribbons of memory are stirred in her. The plant had grown in Angelina at the roadsides, on bits of scrubland, anywhere that the earth was dry. Tamura had thought it pretty. Aaron had dismissed it as a weed.

She had conjured up a place like this in her imagination moons ago, so that now it feels like coming home. She and the house suit each other.

“Everything could do with a coat of paint,” Joseph says, trying not to let his exasperation show.

She nods, although she finds the shabbiness of it rather charming. The house is more than a shelter. You can feel the life in it. Hardy people have lived here, fishing folk, perhaps.

“Whalers, at one time,” the realtor says, as if reading her thoughts. “Trawling for right whales.”

“How do you spell that?” Joseph’s interest is roused.

“Just as it sounds. They were called that because they were right in every way. Big creatures full of baleen, their blubber so thick you could float them in dead. Easier to bring ashore, you see.”

Satomi wanders off, leaving Joseph and the realtor talking.

“Leviathans,” she hears him say. “Enormous heads. You occasionally see their tail flukes from here. Getting to be a rare sight, though.”

Over the sound of the sea, the gulls can be heard impudent in the air. The soft
phut
of an outboard motor churns in the distance. Behind her and farther along the beach, other cottages are scattered about, and behind them an acre or so of woodland, where stringy stands of pitch pine are set among bayberry and beach plum. It’s a bare-boned landscape, a monochrome wash. Japanese calligraphy comes to mind, and she adds an imaginary skein of geese, a dark arrow of them in the pale sky.

Promise, she thinks, is thick in the air here, in the vinegar-sharp trace of bramble, the vibrant tang of ozone. Even with the dipping sun hot on her face she can imagine winter here, snow and the spindly trees with their roots gripping the earth as they bend in the wind toward the ocean. It’s the edge of the land, the
tipping point, where everything holds on tight to its bit of America. The late afternoon light is too pure to be called dusk, it’s a moment in time that no one has bothered to name.

Something taut in her is unwinding itself, settling. If home is to be found anywhere, she feels that it is here. Cora, she thinks, will have the bedroom with the faded wallpaper, shells on a flowing seaweed tracery. The light in the room comes from the sea, soft slate with touches of violet. An old paddle fan fixed to the ceiling has a string pull hanging from it, low enough, she thinks, for a child to reach. She will take the room opposite for herself, which, like Cora’s, looks out over First Encounter Beach.