Irish Chain (36 page)

“Excuse me. Could you hold that story just a minute?” I asked, pulling out my tape recorder. “Do you mind if I record this? It’s easier than trying to take notes.”

“Not at all,” she said and began her story again. As we moved page by page further into the albums, the hostility against the Japanese-Americans progressed. The first pictures were of festivals and celebrations—an especially touching one was that of a Japanese-American float that won first place in the 1936 San Celina Fourth of July parade. Dozens of smiling Japanese children in all-white outfits waved at the camera from a float covered with flags and patriotic bunting. There was a photograph of the head of the San Celina Japanese-American League presenting twenty cherry trees to be planted in front of the city hall, and one of a smiling Japanese baseball team sitting in wooden bleachers somewhere, cleated shoes casually propped up on the seats in front of them.

She turned the page and pointed to a jagged-edged photograph of a teenage girl standing in front of O’Hara’s Department Store. “This is my good friend Toshi Ikeda’s daughter. She worked in the linens department. Only on call, of course, or for holidays. Japanese were not hired for full time back then. Mostly we worked in our family’s fish businesses or picking fruits and vegetables in the fields. But Hati was so smart and so pretty, they had to hire her.” She touched the picture tenderly.

By my third cup of tea, Mrs. Yamaoka had warmed up enough to me to start talking about the days right before the evacuation.

“At first,” she said, “we’d heard only noncitizens would be sent away. It was a shock when the newspapers announced that all Japanese would have to leave. We couldn’t believe it.” Her face sagged slightly.

“What did you do?”

She gave me a perplexed look. “What could we do? We were good citizens. We would not break the law. We did as we were told.”

Remembering Mr. Kuroda and the Sukami sisters and how they also seemed to passively give in when their rights were so blatantly taken away, I couldn’t help but ask, “Didn’t you say anything? Didn’t you...” I paused, not knowing exactly how to put it.

She sighed and turned another page in the album. “You are like my grandsons. ‘Why didn’t you fight back, Granny?’ they always ask. Fight back? Against who? The president of the country? The whole army? Our friends and neighbors? We just accepted it, I tell them—the law is the law and you’ve got to obey. Then they get angry, say we were weak, say they would have been different, fought back. I say you don’t really know what you do until it happens. And I hope it doesn’t ever again. To anyone.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, embarrassed by the shallowness of my quick judgment. “What about your store? Mariko told me that you were helped by Mr. O’Hara. How did you know him? Were you friends?”

She gazed out the window behind me, a distant look in her dark eyes. “I think Mr. O’Hara probably have no friends. Not the happiest man. So sad how he died.”

“Yes, it was,” I said. “I’m sorry to be so forward but why would he loan you money, then?”

She poured another cup of tea and held it under her nose, inhaling deeply before she drank. The heat steamed her eyeglasses opaque. She removed them and wiped them off with the edge of her dress. “Toshi told us to ask him,” she finally said.

“Did she tell you how she knew he was doing this?”

“All she say it was least he could do after what he stole. My husband was already gone, taken away to a camp. I went to Mr. O’Hara’s store, and the lady at the desk there, when I told her Toshi’s name, sent me to the office where they do the payroll and the man there arranged to buy our store. I signed some papers that I kept with me all through the camp, wrapped in a silk scarf of my mother’s. When we get back, after the war, my husband looks at papers and goes to O’Hara. We get our store back next week. We kept it until my husband died ten years ago.”

“Didn’t you find it odd that he would help you, a stranger?”

“We didn’t question. So many people were unkind that when someone wasn’t, we didn’t ask why.”

I didn’t know how to ask the next question. I spoke hesitantly. “Mrs. Yamaoka, your friend, Toshi...”

She reached over and patted my hand, the wisdom and kindness of her age rescuing me from embarrassment. “She is gone, my friend Toshi. For eight years now. Ah, how I miss her.” She turned a page in the album and tapped her fingernail on a black-and-white photo. “Here we are, Toshi and me and Hati.” The two women in their thirties linked arms and smiled widely in the bright sun. The teenage girl stood to the side, a slight distance between her mother and Mrs. Yamaoka, wearing the mysterious half-smile of youth. They all wore plain A-line skirts and flowered blouses. Behind them, a lilac bush bloomed.

“May I borrow this?” I asked. “I’d like to copy it for the book. I’ll take good care of it.”

“Yes,” she said. We spent another half hour going through her albums with her telling the story behind each picture. I chose five more pictures for possible use for the book and thanked her for her time.

“Come back, please,” she said, walking me to the door. “Not many people are interested in our old stories these days.”

“Well, maybe more will be after this book comes out,” I said.

A half hour later, I pulled my truck into the last row of San Celina’s new library. The less-than-year-old building seemed to balance precariously on a bluff overlooking a knee-deep lake in Central Park that usually dried up and made a fine soccer field in August. Since it was a Monday, the two-story, gray concrete fortress whose design couldn’t possibly inspire the urge to read in anyone except homesick ex-cons, was crowded with the usual crazed teenagers working on term papers due last Friday. With the help of a Snickers bar and two bucks, I persuaded a kid with kohlrimmed eyes to sell me his spot at one of the microfilm machines. I checked out the reels of the
San Celina Tribune
from September 1941 through February 1942 and settled down to read. Almost two hours later, I had a sheaf of photocopied articles and an even stronger curiosity about Mr. O’Hara and his altruism. I’d skimmed most of the articles and discovered a strange twist in his story. Until the day Pearl Harbor was bombed, according to the papers, Mr. O’Hara was indeed, as Russell Hill had recalled, at the front of the pack for relocating the Japanese. He was, in fact, the president of two civic associations who were adamant about the perceived menace of the Japanese-Americans. They were the San Celina Farm Bureau and the San Celina Association of Retail Distributors. Oddly, though, two days after he received notification about his brother, the
Tribune
ran a short piece stating that Mr, O’Hara had resigned as president of both groups. And according to the ledgers, it wasn’t long after that he started buying out Japanese businesses, legally guaranteeing they would be returned to the sellers after the war. Nothing I’d discovered made sense. His brother had been killed at Pearl Harbor. Mr. O’Hara was against the Japanese even before that. How could his brother’s death cause him to suddenly become the Japanese-Americans’ greatest patron? And there was something else, too, something nagging at the back of my mind. Something else about this particular time I’d heard about recently. On the way home, it occurred to me. Dr. Brownmiller’s house call. That happened right around the same time. I’d have to call Sissy and see if she could give me the exact date on the medical record. But what connection could that have with Mr. O’Hara, except that Miss Violet and Oralee were involved with it and they were involved with him? It reminded me of the remark Gabe had made about fingers pointing at fingers. There was no doubt now that the three of them had been involved in something and that particular something changed all of their lives. And unless there was a record of it somewhere, the only person who knew what connected all of them was Oralee ... and perhaps the killer.
If
, I said to myself, this has anything to do with their murders. I could just be making a story out of pieced-together facts because, except for Edwin, all the people I suspected were people I cared about. Even, a mocking little voice said, or maybe especially, Clay O’Hara.

I wanted so badly to call Gabe and run all this by him. I didn’t realize until we’d started fighting about this case, how much I’d come to depend on his friendship. When we weren’t arguing, he had a comfortable gentleness about him that made it hard to believe I’d only known him three months. I hated admitting it, but it would be hard to imagine my life without him now, and that thought frightened me. I wondered if it had anything to do with his never having known Jack. He knew me only as Benni Harper, single person, not part of a couple. Jack would never be a real person to Gabe and for some deep psychological reason that I knew I’d never figure out, it made it easier to be with him.

Not that you necessarily will be anymore, I told myself. But maybe that’s the way it was supposed to be. Like when a person gets divorced—I’d had enough friends go through it—and there’s the transition person, the person who helps you get back in the stream. Maybe that’s what Gabe was, my transition person. And those relationships never work out. Everyone knew that.

I tried to convince myself of that as I pulled up in my driveway. I kept trying while calling Sissy and talking her into giving me the date on the old medical record—December 14th—the same day of the telegram telling Mr. O’Hara about his brother’s death. And I almost had myself convinced when I pulled out the ledgers and noted that the date of the first loan was December 20th.

Compulsively, I glanced at the clock at eleven o’clock, Gabe’s usual calling time, cursing myself as I watched the minutes tick past. You aren’t right for each other, I told myself, you argue too much, you both want control, you grew up in completely different decades under entirely different circumstances, your lifestyles would never be compatible. Never. By eleven-thirty, I had completely convinced every part of my body and mind that it didn’t matter, that it was for the best.

Well, every part except my tear ducts.

19

I STOOD SHIVERING in front of my closet the next morning in my long waffle-cotton underwear trying to decide what to wear to today’s opening of the sampler exhibit. I finally chose a new pair of blue jeans and a moss-green wool sweater. After some consideration, I pulled on my Reeboks rather than boots. Opening days usually meant a long time on my feet.

Sure enough, I gave three impromptu tours to senior citizen groups in three hours. One good thing, it didn’t leave me much time to think about either the murders or about Gabe. I brought all my notes, photocopies, tapes and pictures and threw them on top of my desk. Once I got the exhibit underway, I intended spending the rest of the afternoon really making progress on the book. If nothing else, I was going to decide which pictures I definitely wanted to use. I was shuffling through them when the phone rang.

“How’s it going?” Elvia said.

“Okay, I guess. We opened the new exhibit today. Gave three tours and I haven’t even eaten yet.”

“Hungry?”

I glanced at my watch. It was almost noon. “I didn’t realize it was so late. Yeah, I am. What’s on Jose’s menu today?”

“Corn and shrimp chowder. And he’s baked your favorite sourdough biscuits.”

“Pour me a bowl. I’ll be there before it cools. Do you have time to join me?”

“I can fit it in. Any special reason, or you just miss my brilliant conversation?”

“You can help me choose the pictures for the book. They’re all so good I’m having a hard time deciding.” I almost brought up what happened with Gabe yesterday. No, I thought, biting the words back. Forget it. Just forget it.

Blind Harry’s was back to normal after the weekend festivities, even though today was officially Mardi Gras. There were only four other customers in the coffee house for Tuesday’s lunch special—a couple of students drinking foamy coffee drinks and eating baskets of crispy Cajun onion rings with Louisiana hot sauce, and an older couple in matching French berets arguing over whether they should split a ham or turkey sandwich.

I spread the pictures across the round table and tried to decide which would tell the Japanese people’s story the best. Elvia joined me at the same time Jose brought over our soup and biscuits. She picked up the picture of Mrs. Yamaoka, her friend Toshi and Toshi’s daughter, Hati.

“Look at those shoes,” she said, pointing to the ankle-strapped platform heels both older women were wearing. “Classics.”

“The lady in the dark skirt is in her eighties now,” I said, trying to imagine myself at that age. “And that’s her best friend and her daughter. During the relocation, they were sent to different camps and didn’t see or write to each other for four years.”

Elvia looked up at me, her dark eyes sober. I knew what she was thinking. She and I had never been apart for more than a few weeks since we were in second grade. How would we have felt if we’d been in Mrs. Yamaoka and her friend’s position? It didn’t seem possible that something like that would ever happen to us. But then, it probably hadn’t seemed possible to Mrs. Yamaoka and Toshi either.

“How did these people survive?” Elvia said softly, holding the picture closer and studying it.

“With an incredible amount of courage,” I said. “Some of them are bitter, but it’s amazing how forgiving most of them are. Maybe there’s something to learn there. It’s as if they knew that if they were bitter; it would be like losing twice. That is certainly a wisdom beyond what I can understand.”

“Perhaps,” Elvia said. “But what happened to them seems unbelievable to me. I’d like to think I would have protested. Fought back somehow.”

I didn’t say anything. Who can understand why we act the way we do in certain situations? And who could, or should, judge someone else’s reactions? Since talking to Mrs. Yamaoka, I not only realized it wasn’t as simple as that but, also, that each of us has to make those decisions alone. Like my fighting back when I was mugged. I made that decision and it worked out okay, but it could have just as well ended in tragedy. Each situation is unique, as is each person. How we react is a perplexing product of our genetic structure, our environment, and that special, unidentifiable spark that makes each of us an individual soul. The part of us that loves when it should hate, forgives when it should blame, survives when it should die. The part of us that scientists will never be able to corral and tag in one of their little test tubes.