Butterfly's Shadow (23 page)

He was about to close the bag when Nancy handed him
an envelope, the postage stamps oddly coloured, the ivory paper grainy and rough-textured like some rare old book.

Inside was a photograph of a woman, pale-skinned, black hair cut short and severe. She wore a flowing dark dress, her hands resting in her lap, white as marble. Bleached out in the printing, her features were barely visible, but above the unsmiling mouth Joey saw that her eyes were almond-shaped.

‘It’s Cho-Cho,’ Nancy said. ‘It’s your mother.’

After the arrival of that first letter from Nagasaki, addressed to Mary, there had been furtive family conferences when Joey was out of the house. Mary felt betrayed:

‘To conceal his marriage, his family! Henry was not honest with us; we deserved better. And now this.’

Nancy thought the letter should be acknowledged, though it was clear Joey did not wish to revive the past: it seemed that Cho-Cho was indeed dead – to him. Louis felt unqualified to pronounce – this was women’s business.

Time passed. Then Nancy wrote back – briefly, ambiguously. Just how should a wicked stepmother pitch a description of a stolen boy’s condition? To say he was happy and settled might well seem callous, emphasising Cho-Cho’s lack of importance to him. In the end she simply said the boy was fine, and doing well at school. She sent a snap of him at the beach, sunlit and gleaming from the sea, a thinner, younger Ben. She added that he now knew his mother was alive; a shock for the boy, and one he would need time to get used to, but – a tentative suggestion – perhaps Cho-Cho would like to send a photograph for Nancy to pass on to him?

There was no response, and she regretted writing, but much later, a second letter had arrived, containing a photograph, and a brief note: ‘I do not want to intrude into your lives. The past was a bad place, not to be revisited. The good that has come out of it is that my Joy – your Joey – is happy.’

*

Joey stared at the photograph now. He felt confused, betrayed. Where was the figure in the kimono he recalled, glancing over her shoulder, hair piled high, the graceful curve of neck and cheek? The woman he had tried to hold on to by covering sheets of paper with scribbled sketches, laborious drawings. Sometimes he had pressed the paper to his face, breathing in deeply, trying to retrieve her elusive fragrance through her image, trying to keep her fresh in his mind; the woman he had walked beside on the seashore, who had run out into the spring rain with him, face tilted up at the sky, laughing . . . This woman was a stranger.

‘She looks different,’ he said.

‘Different from what?’

‘From the way I remembered her.’

He replaced the photograph in the envelope and slipped it into his pocket.

He checked the bag one last time and his fingers touched the old spinning top. He pulled it out, balancing the battered sphere in the palm of his hand.

‘She gave it to me.’

Nancy, unaware that it was Ben who gave him the toy, that it was Suzuki who bought it, did not contradict his unreliable memory. Only Cho-Cho could have described the true scene.

He closed the bag. ‘I’ll say goodbye to Gran.’

In the wide bed Mary seemed insubstantial, barely disturbing the blanket.

She peered up at Joey. ‘You’ve grown so tall . . .’

She was plucking fretfully at the patchwork covering, angry with herself for being unable to ‘get down there’ and harangue the men in charge. This whole internment business was being mismanaged, in her view: why hadn’t the Church done something? The Quakers had protested, why had the Methodists not raised objections? She felt mortified. Raising herself from the pillows, she gripped Joey’s arms and kissed him fiercely.

‘We’ll pray for you.’ Adding hastily, ‘Not that there’s anything to worry about, of course.’

He touched her soft, papery cheek and ran down the stairs, swallowing to hold back tears. When Nancy was at work it was Mary who had collected him from school. She would hug him, before he grew too old for such things, her face smooth against his, and step out smartly to keep up with his skipping, jumping pace. Now, the outside world was contained in the view from her bedroom window. Only her mind still moved, restlessly.

‘Listen, kid,’ Louis said, and then seemed to have no further words available. He cleared his throat, squeezed Joey’s shoulder, hugged him, punched his arm, gestures standing in for language that escaped him.

Nancy straightened his jacket and slipped a scarf round his neck.

Joey said, protesting, ‘Hey, I’ll boil!’

‘It might get cooler.’

She held him tightly, her face buried in his jacket, dry-eyed.

‘I’ll write every day. You write when you can.’ She shook her head. ‘What am I saying? You’ll be home before the mail gets delivered. Once they realise.’

Once they realise what? The sentence was never finished. Once they realise he’s not ‘really’ Japanese?

Walking down the street he felt Nancy watching him from the porch, arms crossed, clutching herself, holding on. At the corner he turned and waved and saw her step back into the house, closing the door quickly behind her.

He hefted Louis’s travel bag, shifting it from left to right hand. It was a strong bag, serviceable, but heavy even when empty. Joey could have taken something lighter, but to reject the bag would have hurt Louis’s feelings and today was hard enough already. Not for him to twist the knife.

The first time he had presented his papers, the official at the desk checked the details against a list before him.

‘Joseph T. Pinkerton, right?’ A routine glance up, down to the papers, up again. A double take.

‘So . . . Okaaay. Let’s check this out . . .’

How many lines had he waited in, since then? How many blurred-ink imprimaturs had been stamped on how many forms, how much checking of documents, instructions and counter-instructions followed . . . how many moments of perplexity?

Here lay confusion: all-American Joe Pinkerton,
but
born in Nagasaki. Son of an Oregon hero, a gold-medal swimmer,
but
maternal parent Japanese – and what was her name again, the mother? What kind of a name was
that
?

Joey grew accustomed to the discomfiture, the mistrust and the hostility engendered by the mismatch of his identity and appearance.

He was aware that he stood out as disconcertingly as if a wolf had been rounded up with the sheep. They were a herd, docile; they were slight, he was big-boned. They were dark, he was fair. Their murmured exchanges lapped around him in a language he had no knowledge of. They glanced up at him, anxious, puzzled. He looked them over with a dispassionate, assessing glance, this tired, huddled, relatively small mass. He had learned the categories: the Issei, who came over early and were never permitted citizenship; the Nisei, the second generation, born and raised American. Citizens. How fragile the word now seemed. And where did he fit into this categorisation?

There was an odd smell in these stark rooms, acrid, almost chemical. This too Joey learned to categorise: he came to recognise it as the smell of the sweat that breaks out on the skin of frightened people.

Registration had been the first shock, his realisation that here the human element did not exist; documentation ruled. There were no discussions, no nuances. A piece of paper,
a signature, a stamp. Sheep and goats. Blessed are the pure in blood for they shall inherit the earth. The Japanese mother, the birthplace, these were the facts that categorised him. Duly identified, registered and above all documented, Joseph Theodore Pinkerton was set on a path without deviation. All that remained was to pack his bag and report back: a number, a cypher, tagged with a shipping label and dumped in a room to await transportation. Around him, other numbers, registered and tagged, waited in lines – men, women, children; ignorant of what was in store for them, gradually filling a vast hangar which had once been something else – possibly a postal depot or a storehouse, but was now the Portland Civil Control Station.

Walking into the control station he experienced his first encounter with the new order; a moment that somehow encapsulated all that was to follow.

As he made his way into the reception area, a guard lounging by the doorway caught his eye and beckoned him over amiably.

‘Sir? May I help you?’

Joe held up his bag, tagged and numbered. ‘Well now, you tell me . . .’

He watched the guard’s face switch expressions with the speed of a kid’s flicker-page booklet – from benevolence to astonishment to something approaching rage.

‘Okay, buster. Get back in line with the rest.’

He got back in line, looming over the heads of those around him, blue-eyed and six feet tall. No wonder the guard had mistaken him for a person.

The Portland Assembly Center – previously the Livestock Exhibition pavilion – had been hastily converted to its new role, that of way station, a halfway house while the detention centre proper was set up elsewhere.

Climbing from coaches and buses the ‘evacuees’, as they now were, milled about, uncertain where to go next. An elderly
couple came towards Joey; then bowed and instinctively side-stepped, murmuring an apology. He wanted to grab them, shake them, spell it out: they didn’t need to get out of his way or apologise. He, too, was just a number.

Waiting in yet another line, leafing through a discarded newspaper, Joey paused at the obit page, glancing over a montage of faces: the famous recently deceased. Lives of achievement or notoriety reduced to a block of newsprint. His eyes slid down the names:
Bronislaw Malinowski, born Krakow, Poland 1884 . . . influential British anthropologist and the founder of Functionalism.

He patted his bag, tracing the pack of books inside, among them his copy of Malinowski’s
Argonauts of the Western Pacific
, the pages dog-eared and marked with coffee stains. All that travelling – Papua New Guinea, the Trobriand islands, the Solomon Sea – and then the great man shuffled off his mortal coil in Connecticut, on a stint as Visiting Professor at Yale. We’re all connected, Malinowski said. Joey Pinkerton, resident alien, was also American.

A guard tapped him sharply on the arm with his baton: ‘Keep up with the line, feller.’

So: not American, not any more, his old identity consumed in the flames of Pearl Harbor, the waves that closed over the sinking ships washing away the last traces. Now, magically transformed, he had been reborn Japanese. The enemy.

He stood for a moment, swept by a sense of unbelonging, out of reach of earth and sky and air around him, like a fish floundering out of water. Silence rang in his ears.

Gradually, as though reaching him from a long way off, a susurration of meaningless words filled the air. He became conscious of grit in his shoe, an itching between his shoulder blades, thirst. He became aware of his surroundings.

In the distance an ugly, apparently derelict building sprawled, bulky against the sunlight. Next to him, a boy’s voice:

‘I guess that shit-hole has to be it. Home from home.’

Bawled instructions and counter-instructions; shouts, whistles . . . a wall of amplified noise falling on the bewildered crowd. A few boys of Joey’s age found themselves taking charge of what was becoming an unmanageable flock. Like a docent on a school outing Joey guided lost children back to their parents, took a pregnant woman’s bag, motioned others on ahead of him. Most were dressed with formality, as though bound for a family outing; the women in hats and gloves, the children unnaturally neat. But the faces were anxious, bemused. Old ladies wept quietly, trying to remain invisible.

When they reached the vast barn, it engulfed them, a labyrinth of empty spaces, like an unfinished theatre awaiting set-dressers and cast. Brusquely moved on by armed soldiers, the evacuees trailed through the corridors: elderly men and women, young mothers, grim youths, children, looking about them apprehensively. Part of some predetermined pattern, they waited. A strong smell of animal dung hung in the air.

Flimsy boarding divided the building into cramped temporary ‘apartments’. As Joey paused at a doorway a thin, dark boy with a scar on his cheek edged in behind him.

‘Jesus. They told us not to bring mattresses, but have you checked out these babies?’

On each iron bedstead an envelope of mattress ticking was filled with prickly hay.

Wordlessly the pair stepped into the cubicle and threw their bags on two of the beds.

‘Joey Pinkerton.’

‘Sat
Ichir
. Since we’re all Japs here.’