Butterfly's Child (31 page)

“Want to take the reins?” Frank asked him.

Franklin shook his head.

“Gum?”

Franklin looked at him. “How will Benji find us?”

Benji. Frank stared straight ahead, took a breath to steady himself.

“I don't think Benji will be back, son.” He put a hand on Franklin's knee. Franklin jerked away and looked the other direction, into the woods.

“I wasn't the one to go flouting a photograph,” Frank said.

“Frank,” his mother said.

“Well, I wasn't.” His ears went hot. And he hadn't been the one to go sending dirty laundry to some opera writer in Italy. He had written to the man—Puccini was his name, in Milan; Lena had found the address—but hadn't received an answer to his request for an explanation about the theft of his life.

In his new work he would be Tom Pinkerton—that's how he'd introduced himself at Wilkes Brothers' central office in Chicago. He'd have to remain Frank in Cicero, his home base, with the family there, but no one in Cicero knew an opera from an owl hoot.

Frank touched the whip to Admiral's back and jolted him into a canter. Mary Virginia woke up and began to cry. “Shh,” his mother said. “It's all right.”

“I want Blondie,” Mary Virginia wailed.

“There will be cats at your cousins' house,” his mother said. “I'm sure you can have one as your own.”

“I want Blondie. I didn't even get to tell her goodbye.”

Frank thought of the whiskey packed with his shaving things in the small suitcase. When they stopped for lunch, he could get the bottle out while rearranging things in the cart. The Swede would probably be glad of some fortification too.

“Slow down, Frank,” his mother said. “You're jiggling us to bits, and the cart can't keep up.”

Frank pulled Admiral to a sharp halt, leapt out of the buggy, and walked back to the cart. “Let's change places,” he said to the Swede. The Swede shrugged and stepped down; he didn't ask for an explanation—he never did. They set off again.

That night they stayed at a hotel in Sycamore, and after a slow start the next morning because of his mother's dyspepsia, and two hours lost to a broken axle in the afternoon, they arrived late at his sister's house.

“The children have gone to bed,” his sister whispered, “but we've saved some supper for you.” She looked disapproving, her forehead etched with wrinkles. She was a younger version of his mother: brown-haired, heavyset, though without the kind heart. His brother-in-law, Morris, in the background with his pipe, was a weak-chinned man who owned the local feed store and was active in church affairs. He wouldn't think to offer a drop of whiskey.

Frank looked at the gleaming brass umbrella stand, a rubber plant with leaves so shiny it looked waxed. His sister's famous housekeeping.

He declined supper, left his mother to settle the children, and went out to the shed. A lamp was burning there and the place was warm, the coal stove already installed. There was a narrow bed, a tall oak dresser, a hat rack for his hanging clothes, a braided rug. No desk, as he'd expressly requested for his work. Probably thought he wouldn't reimburse them. Tomorrow he'd buy a grand desk with plenty of drawers. He was going to be a success—a natural salesman, they'd said in Chicago—and he knew the ropes, with his experience; he'd introduce labor-saving equipment to farmers all over Illinois. A big rolltop desk. He'd put it by the back window, facing the orchard.

He stripped off his outer clothes, got into bed, and downed the rest of his whiskey. Enough to burn his innards but not enough to knock him out.

It was just as well he'd sold the farm. Maybe that Italian had done him a favor. He was a traveling man at heart, not a farmer, and at last he'd make a decent living, enough for a pretty cottage where there would be room for all the children, his mother too if she liked.

The mattress was thin and hard. For what seemed like hours he hung at the edge of sleep, a jumble of his father's maxims coursing through his mind—glass houses, stitch in time, small leak great ship, well done twice done, sticks and stones.

He got up, took Kate's pillow from the trunk, and lay in bed holding it, a soft goose-down pillow that still retained some of her scent. The truth is, Katie, he told her, I'd have lost the farm eventually.

He woke to the noise of stones pounding the roof, but when he looked out the window saw only a windfall of apples dropping from the trees.

Benji's salary included
living quarters above the Japan Shop, in a small apartment shared with Mr. and Mrs. Tsuji; he occupied their son Haruki's former room. Haruki, a tall, thin, bespectacled man who was a houseboy for an American missionary couple in the Oura district overlooking Nagasaki Bay, came for dinner the first Sunday.

“My parents are curious about your background,” he said in English, as he sat down at the table. “I have offered to translate.”

Benji thanked him but said he would like to try to manage in Japanese, since this was now his home. Haruki looked disappointed. “Ah,” he said. “I understand.”

For dinner, Mrs. Tsuji served champon, a thick Chinese soup that was a specialty of Nagasaki, she said. When Benji pulled a tentacled sea creature from the soup and quickly nestled it beneath the noodles, Haruki laughed.
“Ika,”
he said. “Squid.” Benji described his first encounters with American food, the peas he'd chased with a fork, the slabs of beef.

Mr. Tsuji asked about his history in America. Benji told them about growing up on the farm, the long return journey to Japan to find his mother's family. “And has your mother died?” Mrs. Tsuji wanted to know. They all looked so interested that he poured out the story: his geisha mother and American father, Frank's desertion and return with an American wife, his mother's suicide.

Mrs. Tsuji gasped and covered her mouth. The men stared at him.

“I have heard of something like this,” Haruki said.

“When? From whom?”

“I overheard some foreigners chattering about it at my former employer's house, a few years ago.”

“What did they say?”

“Just as you described. I remember that at the time it struck me as perhaps a romantic foreigners' tale.”

“But it happened; I was there when she killed herself.”

“Ah so?”
Mrs. Tsuji said. “How old were you?”

When he told her, she said, “Poor boy,” and patted his hand. “This is truly a tragedy,
ne
?” She gave Haruki a stern glance.

Benji took out the tin containing the picture. “These are my parents,” he said. There was silence as they passed the photograph around the table.

“Could I talk to your employer?” Benji asked Haruki.

“I am sorry to say that she no longer lives in Nagasaki.”

“But I must find my mother's family. Maybe someone else will remember.”

“Your search is best made in Maruyama, I think,” Haruki said. “I will be happy to guide you, but I must caution you that the geisha world is secretive.”

“And my son does not know the geisha,” Mr. Tsuji said with a laugh. “You must be a rich man to be acquainted with the geisha.”

“I can manage to guide him quite well,” Haruki said stiffly.

On Haruki's next day off, he and Benji climbed the hill to Maruyama in the early afternoon. June's rainy season had begun, a hard rain pelting against their umbrellas. “We won't see so many people in the street on such a day,” Haruki said. “But at least we can begin our inquiries.”

Benji wanted to take in every detail—the pattern of flagstones on the street, the glimpse of startlingly green moss through a slatted gate, the entrance to a shrine that seemed familiar—but Haruki strode ahead through the narrow, twisting streets. He didn't have much time, he'd said; “Mrs. Foreigner” required him back early, to serve at a musical evening.

He finally slowed his pace on a quiet back street where there were several handsome wooden buildings, each two stories high. Geisha residences, Haruki said. Along the upper balconies hung red and white lanterns, each with a geisha's name written in black. “When she goes out to her parties at night, she carries her own lantern,” he said. “Yoshi,” he read aloud, “Suwa, Tsuru, Shige.”

The gates to all three houses were locked; they rang and pounded, but
no one came. At one house a woman's face appeared at an upstairs window and was quickly gone, a pale blur.

“We will visit the shops frequented by geisha,” Haruki said. “This is my next idea.”

They went into a kimono shop where a stooped woman with missing teeth was waiting on another elderly woman, smoothing out a length of brown silk patterned with golden and dark brown bats. “Perhaps she is an
okasan
,” Haruki said in a low voice, nodding at the customer. “A geisha mother.” When Benji whispered back for him to ask, Haruki shook his head. “It would not be polite to inquire directly,” he said.

When the customer left, Haruki told the woman about their search and Benji showed her his mother's picture. She shook her head. “There are many hundred geisha in Maruyama,” she said.

They visited a tabi shop that sold the white socks worn with kimono; a geta shop, where a man and his son made wooden clogs of all heights, including the high ones favored by geisha; and a store that specialized in long clay pipes like those Benji had seen in woodblock prints of geisha and courtesans, but no one recognized his mother's face.

Discouraged, they went into a bar for some warm sake. The bartender, after hearing of their quest, said they must go to the tea shop around the corner, owned by Chiye-san, a former geisha renowned for her discretion.

Chiye-san was a silver-haired woman with erect posture, dressed in a black silk kimono. Benji guessed she was in her fifties, but she had a mysterious beauty, a long oval face, a wise expression. She brought them tea, poured it with graceful precision.

“Excuse me, Chiye-san,” Haruki said with a bow. “We are looking for information about a former geisha, the mother of this young man …” He nodded at Benji; she bowed in his direction. “Her name was Cio-Cio-san, and she lived in Maruyama in the eighteen-eighties and 'nineties but died tragically by her own hand—when this man's father”—he nodded at Benji again—“returned to Nagasaki with an American wife.”

Benji laid the picture on the table. Chiye-san lifted it, holding it in both hands, then carefully set it down again. “I am sorry,” she said, with a bow. “It could be that I have seen her, but I do not recall. My memory is beginning to fail me, I'm afraid.”

“But I have to find someone who knows her,” Benji said, trying to keep his voice level. “What do you suggest?”

She looked out the open door into the rain, then turned back to them.
“Please forgive me for saying that Cio-Cio is perhaps not a geisha name in itself. We are all associated with the butterfly. Many have a butterfly crest on their kimono.” She gestured, palm up, to the small butterfly embroidered on the sleeve of her kimono. “We usually have a professional name, but perhaps there has been no Cio-Cio in Maruyama.”

“But … look …” Benji turned the photograph over to show Chiye-san the writing on the back of the picture. “Doesn't that say Cio-Cio-san?”

“Yes,” she said. “Pardon me. I must be mistaken.” She bowed again, her hands on her thighs. “I wish you good fortune in your search,” she said, and retreated to the rear of the shop.

They started down the hill, following a narrow street of stone steps. Benji thought of the day he'd learned his mother's name, sitting on Frank's lap on the plow, and of that fall, when the butterflies in the garden had seemed a visitation. Mr. Matsumoto hadn't mentioned anything odd about his mother's name.

“Chiye-san is wrong,” he said. “All my life I've heard of Cio-Cio-san.”

“Perhaps a pet name given by a foreigner who cannot pronounce Japanese,” Haruki said.

“My father knew a little Japanese—he was here for a while.”

They passed a stone torii; Benji knew from the book he'd read in Plum River that a torii marked the entrance to a shrine. He looked in—there was a garden, blue hydrangeas heavy with rain, a small shrine set at the back. Haruki pointed out another geisha house just below the shrine.

“The shrine seems familiar,” Benji said. “Maybe I lived in that house.”

“No one but geisha and their apprentices live in a geisha house.”

“Are you certain?” Benji said, looking back at it. “Not even children?”

“Perhaps some girls in training, but no boys, I am certain. I know about geisha because I am Japanese.”

“I'm Japanese too. My mother was a geisha.”

“But your father is American.”

The implication was clear. It was just as Mr. Matsumoto had warned. In Japan he was not pure Japanese. In America he was not an American. He was a mongrel, belonging nowhere.

“My mother came from a samurai family,” he said. “I'm going to find them.”

Haruki was silent, then said, “Please forgive my rudeness. I am certain that you will,” and they continued in silence through the heavy rain.

*  *  *

A few days later, when there was a break in the weather, Benji returned to Maruyama by himself and went to the shrine he'd noticed before. Looking at the paths that twined through the garden, the masses of hydrangeas, the open shrine sheltered by a roof, he felt a quiver of memory. A woman in a flowered summer kimono was praying before the shrine; he stared at the back of her neck, a graceful stem beneath her elaborately arranged hair. She might be a geisha.

When she moved away, her face turned from him, he stepped to the front of the shrine and looked into its dark interior, at the wooden and bronze objects there. He had no idea what any of it might signify. He pulled the long braided straw rope to ring the bell for the god's attention and clapped twice; somehow he remembered that. He closed his eyes and waited.