Butterfly's Child (36 page)

She stepped down and embraced him. “I think we will do better than try.”

“No more leaving,” he said.

“If you don't leave …” She put a hand flat against his chest, then against hers. “Neither will I.”

They turned and walked to the bottom of the stairs, where Mrs. Fukuda was waiting with her congratulations.

The doctor warned him
that she had changed in the past months, but at first he did not recognize the woman who was led into the parlor by a coarse-looking nurse. “Sit down, Mrs. Pinkerton,” the nurse said, guiding her, none too gently, into the chair opposite his.

She was shockingly thin, her dress hanging wilted on her frame, and the eyes that he had loved, sapphire and full of life, were dull. Her face was gaunt, almost skeletal.

“Hello, darling,” he said, and reached to take her hands. He had planned to say, Happy anniversary. “You're not wearing your wedding ring,” he said.

“They wouldn't glue it on,” she said in a flat voice. Was it humor or madness?

“I've brought you some presents.” He laid a large wrapped box on her lap. Her fingers plucked at the bow; he unwrapped it himself. “From Montgomery Ward,” he said, standing to hold up a silky blue dress.

She touched it as if she didn't know what a dress was. He felt a wrench of guilt, thinking of how he'd scolded her when she'd bought dresses on her own, trying so hard to please him.

He opened the next box, in it a blue shawl that he arranged around her shoulders. She seemed to like that, at least; she drew it close around her.

“Lemon crisps!” He held out an opened tin of cookies. “Mother made them. She remembered they're your favorite sweet.” She made no move to take one.

“You need to eat, darling.” He shook the tin. “Have you not been eating?”

He should take her home to Cicero; his mother and sister would see that she ate. She wasn't violent, the doctor said. But it would be hard on Mary Virginia and Franklin to see her like this, and he was hardly at home now, on the road for days at a time.

He wanted her back; he wanted to be able to tell her everything. He took her hands again. “Katie,” he said, “I miss you.”

She stared at the floor.

“Do you know me, Katie? I'm Frank, your husband.”

“Frank,” she said, with something like a smile.

“That's right. Look, sweetheart, I almost forgot, I brought you a book of poems—maybe you could hide it under your mattress,” he said in a mock whisper.

The Kate he knew would have laughed.

“Where are the babies?” she whispered.

“With Mother.” Thank God she didn't know that the twins were living with the Keasts in the farmhouse. “Everyone is fine,” he said. “The children are fine.”

Her face went blank. It must be the medicine. Last time the nurse said she was taking new medicines.

He led her to the sofa and put his arm around her, hoping that she would lean against him, lay her head on his shoulder. But she was rigid; he could not move her. She'd always had a will of iron, he thought with a flash of anger.

“Goodbye then,” he said, but did not move. He looked around the parlor, nicely furnished. She had no idea of the sacrifices made to keep her out of the state asylum. She might be glad he'd sold the farm—she'd always hated it—but she'd be humiliated to know the Cases had bought it, humiliated to know that the Moores were making contributions toward her upkeep. Aimee Moore's penance, he thought bitterly; if not for her, Kate probably wouldn't be here.

He reached into the tin of cookies, ate one, then another—too sweet, but he kept eating.

The nurse reappeared. He stood, brushed the crumbs from his shirt into his hand, and put them in his pocket.

The nurse lifted Kate; she seemed limp as a doll.

“What's wrong with her?” Frank cried. “She's worse.”

“She tried to run away on two occasions. We've had to confine her.”
The nurse's eyes were large and moist. She was kinder than she had first appeared.

He did not look back as he left the room and went outside. He mounted Admiral and pressed him into a canter, managing to hold back his tears until they were well away from the asylum.

Ed McAuley's farm wasn't far, outside DeKalb. Last year he'd bought a fancy combine. He could use a second plow, all the land he had. Frank couldn't bear the thought of going home to his empty bed, the picture of Katie on the dresser.

He spied McAuley and his men in the middle of a vast cornfield. On the way out to them he broke off an ear of corn and inspected it: much meatier than any he'd ever grown. Must be a different variety. His years of farming gave him an advantage over other salesmen, who came at it from a business point of view.

McAuley didn't need anything, he said, but directed him to the neighboring farm, a fruitless call. The old geezer said he hadn't recovered from the panic of '07 and anyhow the old farm equipment was best; he was still using his father's plow and harrow and didn't intend to change. No point in arguing.

It was a late-summer afternoon that under other circumstances would have been beautiful, hot but with a nice breeze, the kind of day when Kate and his mother had made strawberry ice cream and they all sat out on the porch eating it, looking out at the sunset. The little quarrels of those days seemed inconsequential now. Those ridiculous beets.

In DeKalb he could stop in at the whorehouse. He felt filthy to think of it after seeing Kate, but a man had to survive somehow. He pressed Admiral harder, but he couldn't canter for long. Getting to be an old man like himself.

But once he reached town, the thought of the whorehouse sickened him. He stopped by the saloon for a bottle of whiskey and a sandwich, then went to the White Rose Hotel and drank himself to sleep.

Benji and Rinn were
married in the spring, at the shrine where they had met in Maruyama. A slight breeze stirred the leaves of the plum trees and lifted a wavy strand of Rinn's hair that had escaped her Shinto headdress. Mr. and Mrs. Tsuji and Haruki stood with them, and Megumi and Mrs. Fukuda, all in their best kimono. Benji looked at Rinn and his improvised family; at the shrine, decorated with long strips of folded white paper for the wedding; at the flowers coming into bloom; and up at the sky, the blue less intense than an American sky. Everything was shot through with beauty. He had never dreamed of such happiness.

Keast would be glad for him. He felt a sting of guilt; he must write to Keast.

Benji and Rinn settled in at Mrs. Fukuda's house; she insisted that they take as much space as they needed and appointed herself honorary mother-in-law. She taught Rinn to shop and cook, at first with limited success. The rice was sometimes scorched and the tempura soggy or greasy.

Privately, Rinn said Mrs. Fukuda made her nervous—all that hovering. “And the time of your arrival is unpredictable, so planning the meal precisely is impossible.”

“I'm building our future,” Benji replied.

With Mr. Matsumoto's handsome gift of money for their marriage, Benji began to collect antiques for a shop of his own. Some days he walked throughout the city and into the countryside to buy from small shops and street vendors, carrying home lacquer chests, suits of samurai
armor, wooden boxes of tea bowls tied together with string. At night in bed Rinn massaged his knotted arms and shoulders.

“You're spoiling me,” he said.

“From me you will always receive exactly what you deserve,” she said with a laugh, and fitted her body next to his.

In the spring and summer evenings they went for long walks along the waterfront and beside the Nakashima River, looking down over the bridges at the water where, he told her, he had once believed kappas were waiting for him. In August, at O-Bon, the festival of the dead, they lit a candle on a small straw boat for his mother's spirit, which joined thousands of other boats floating in the darkness toward the sea.

In January, Rinn gave birth to a boy, Shoichi. At first they called him Little Buddha, because he was cheerful and bald. Rinn worried that when his hair grew in it would be wavy, Benji that it would be blond, but he was relieved that his son's eyes were black, though too round to be those of a pure Japanese.

Friends brought gifts—a kimono for Shoichi's first-month blessing at the shrine, a samurai doll, a kite for boy's day—and offered congratulations for such an auspicious beginning to the New Year. Mr. Matsumoto sent an even larger gift of money than before, delivered by a representative of the American consulate.
This is part of what I had planned to be an inheritance to you
, he wrote,
but I think it is best that you have it now, when you have greatest need
.

“Haven't the gods smiled on us?” Rinn said, as she sat nursing the baby one night in their room. “From such beginnings to this.”

“Yes,” Benji said, but when she handed him the baby, warm in his blanket, and he looked down at his son—the miraculous fingers and toes, the delicate blue vein at his temple—he was filled with melancholy as well as tenderness.

As time passed, he sank into an unaccountable sadness that sometimes felt close to despair. Rinn asked what was wrong. “Nothing,” he replied, and one morning at breakfast snapped, “Leave me alone.”

She jumped from the table, packed Shoichi onto her back, and left without a word. He went to the door and called after her, but she didn't look back.

She'd cheer up, he thought; she'd return in a friendly mood after talking to people in the shops and on the street, showing off Shoichi and exchanging gossip. But that night she was cool, and when they went to bed, with Shoichi between them as usual, she turned away without saying good night.

He went to lie beside her on the tatami and stroked her hair. “I need you,” he said. She rolled off her futon onto the floor beside him; they made love without speaking, then he held her so tightly that she wriggled free. “The baby should have his own place to sleep,” he said, as she moved away. “That's what's wrong.”

“A baby needs his mother,” she said. “You don't understand.”

“Why wouldn't I understand that?” he shouted.

The baby woke up and began to cry. “Look what you've caused,” she said, pulling Shoichi to her.

He flopped down on his futon, tears spilling from his eyes. Shoichi went quiet as Rinn began to nurse him. She shifted herself and the baby closer to Benji. “In Japan,” she said, “the baby futon is called the river, between the solid banks of his parents. We are solid together,
ne
?”

He took her hand and kissed it. “Yes,” he said, but for a long time after Rinn and the baby fell asleep, he lay curled alone beneath his quilt, listening to the quiet sounds of their breathing, and when he finally slept, jolted awake from a dream he could not recall.

Matsumoto and Son:
He stenciled the name on the front window in gold. He cleaned and painted the interior, built cabinets, shelves, and display cases of fine wood. “To my worthy competitor!” Mr. Tsuji said, laughing, when he brought sake to toast the completion of the shop.

“Don't worry,” Benji said, “I could never match the Japan Shop.” He wouldn't have as many customers, he knew, but he hoped some discriminating tourists would eventually find their way to him. He planned to specialize in antiques and fine arts, particularly woodblock prints of geisha and courtesans.

One afternoon in summer, not long after the formal opening of the shop, Benji looked up from the counter, surprised to see a Japanese woman in Western clothes looking at a display of silk fans. Her hair was cut in a modern style he disapproved of, and she wore a dress that showed her legs.

She moved about the room, inspecting a case of pearls, tea bowls from Kyoto on a shelf, all the while glancing at him. He looked down at his inventory list as she approached the counter.

“Excuse me,” she said with a bow that would have been more graceful in kimono. “I understand you specialize in ukiyo-e of the flower and willow world.”

“Yes,” he said, “paintings and prints by Utamaro, Moronobu, and Kiyonaga, for example. I have no imitations.”

She asked to see a selection, and since she seemed an unlikely customer, he brought only a few from the back of the shop and arranged them on the counter. “Here is an unusual Sharaku portrait of a courtesan. The silver background is made of crushed mica,” he told her. “Very fine.”

“Mmm. Though I am interested only in geisha.”

“I see.” Why didn't you say so, he thought, but pointed out a portrait of a geisha gazing into a mirror. “One of Utamaro's most interesting, in its use of perspective,” he said.

“Mmm-hmm.”

Couldn't she speak? These modern women had no manners. “Here is a lovely print of two geisha from the Gion district in Kyoto. That's the Kamo River behind them. And this one is dressed in the style of a Tokyo geisha.”

“Very nice,” she said. “But not quite what I am looking for.”

Fuming—she was wasting his time—he went to the back for more prints and arranged them on a table, pointing out the subtleties of design, composition, and coloration. “These are the most exquisite,” he said. “You'll find none better—but of course they are costly.”

“I see.” She bent over each one, raising and lowering her eyeglasses, then straightened and looked and him. “Have you been proprietor of this shop for a long while?”

“Long enough,” he said. A rude question deserved a rude answer.

“But you are not a native of Nagasaki, I believe.”

His face went hot. She was insufferable. “I was born here,” he said in a level voice, and began to gather the prints. He refrained from asking if she was Japanese.

She tapped the edge of one of the prints, Moromasa's
A Beauty Under a Plum Tree
. “This one interests me,” she said. “The figure is reminiscent of a former geisha who was sometimes referred to as Cio-Cio-san.”