Silver Like Dust (15 page)

Obaachan presses her lips together, concentrating. “Well, we found ways to kill time, I guess. They had different shows and things, like a show with different
ikebana
, or flower arrangements. And sometimes they had
kabuki
performances, you know, Japanese theatre. We went to those, I guess, and then sometimes, he would come to our apartment and talk, but only if my parents were there.” She pauses. “But mostly we saw a lot of movies.”
Casablanca. For Whom the Bell Tolls. Meet Me in St. Louis
. “I saw every single one they showed there.” She grins sheepishly, turning to look at me. “I told you I’ve always liked movies,” she says.

My grandmother wasn’t the only one who looked to movies as a source of diversion. In the three years that Heart Mountain remained open, they were the most popular form of entertainment for the prisoners, with a total attendance of 600,908. At first, the authorities showed these movies in the mess halls, a few hours after the evening meal. One showing would begin at seven, and then, maybe an hour into the film, when the first reel ran out, they would load the second reel, and someone would carry the first reel to a different mess hall, where another showing would begin for a second audience. Then, on October 24, 1942, two “theatres” officially opened, “The Dawn” and “The Pagoda.” Tickets were ten cents apiece, but my grandmother never paid to see a single film.

Before the theatres opened, the authorities had announced a contest to see which prisoner could come up with the best name for each one. Obaachan’s mother submitted the name “The Dawn” and won herself a lifetime pass to see as many movies as she wanted. Of course, as an invalid, Mama could not use the pass, so she asked for permission to give it to her daughter, and the authorities agreed to the transfer. Thanks to Mama’s inventive mind, my grandparents were able to enjoy many “dates” for half the cost.

“What did your parents think of Ojichan?” I feel sure that my own father would have disapproved of the bragging, the expensive clothing, and the ostentatious personality—but I don’t mention this.

“They liked him,” Obaachan says, as though she’s surprised I would need to ask. “First of all, he spoke Japanese, so they liked that. Remember, my parents didn’t speak English. And as I’ve said, your grandfather was the type of person who could talk with anyone. So they approved, if that’s what you mean. We were married by December, you know, four months after we got to Heart Mountain. December 12. My mother said it was a good omen, that date.”

From the beginning of their relationship, my grandfather had made clear to Obaachan his intentions: he wanted to get married and have a family, and he planned to do it soon. I imagine that in those final months of 1942, as the war pressed on and their life at Heart Mountain seemed to feel more and more permanent, Ojichan would have done his best to woo my grandmother, to secure her as his wife. He would’ve continued working to impress her with fabulous stories from his youth—and the wealth of worldly wisdom he’d gained from that youth. Sixty years after first hearing these tales, Obaachan still recalls them, sometimes more vividly than stories of her own. My grandfather would be pleased, I think, to know that his attempts to gain Obaachan’s interest made a lasting impression. With his colorful personality and his desire, even as a man in his seventies, to be the focus of a crowd’s attention, he would be happy to know that his efforts weren’t wasted.

“Did I ever tell you about the millionaire I worked for in San Francisco?” Ojichan asked one evening, when they were walking home from a movie. Without waiting for a response, he continued. “I was a houseboy. I ran errands, helped the gardener. I spent a lot of time with the chef, doing prep work, washing dishes, cooking.” The family owned a vineyard, and even during the Depression, they had enough money for servants. Each Monday morning, the lady of the house would make up a menu with the chef, tell him what she wanted to eat that week, and the chef would go to the market, or send Ojichan, and they’d make whatever the woman had requested.

Obaachan had never met a millionaire, let alone worked for and lived on the property of one, and my grandfather’s story caught her attention. She had eaten in a restaurant only a handful of times, and that alone was a big deal to her. Back in Los Angeles, even though her family had never gone hungry, her mother planned their meals around what her father was able to bring home from his job at the produce market. The idea of deciding what you felt like eating, without giving a thought to the cost, and then having a person whose primary job was to buy your food and prepare it for you, was almost beyond her ability to imagine.

“The food was wonderful,” my grandfather said. “Delicious, elegant. I wish you could have seen the way they set up the table each night. Starched white linens, tall candlesticks with real silver holders, fine English china. I only hope I can live like that someday—that the two of us can, together—without having to think about money.” Ojichan chuckled and kicked at a heap of snow, and the two continued on their way.

I wonder if my grandfather’s taste for fine things—and his attraction to the power those fine things implied—began when he was working as a houseboy for that family. What I do know is that by the time he met my grandmother in 1942, his affection for fashionable clothing, expensive whiskey, and well-made shoes was already strong. In photographs taken at Heart Mountain, my grandfather is always dressed as though he’s heading to an afternoon at the races, or a polo match, or some high-society event. His thick hair is combed to the side, his shirt is stiff and tucked in, and his khakis show a neat crease down the middle of the leg. How he managed to look so dapper in the dust-laden bachelor barracks remains an eternal mystery.

Obaachan admits she was swept away by my grandfather’s good looks and fancy clothes. She was inspired, too, by the big dreams he had for himself, for his ambition and his belief that anything at all was possible in America, despite their situation. Because of his fondness for nice things, his plans for the future often involved making a lot of money. He was always coming up with schemes to make it big: creating new inventions that would fill some niche, or starting a shipping company. In San Francisco, he’d heard countless stories of people striking it rich, and he seemed convinced, even in the somber confines of the internment camp, that America was a land without limits, that this time of trouble would pass.

I slow the car and turn into Obaachan’s neighborhood. At the half-acre lake near the entrance to her development, I pull over so that we can take a quick look at the water. A blue heron spots us, spreads its wide wings, and flies off. Yesterday, on our way to the supermarket, we saw a young alligator in this pond, and we’re hoping to find it again. The alligator’s small enough—maybe three feet in length—to be interesting but not frightening.

“There,” Obaachan says, pointing. “Is that it?” She covers a yawn with her hand. Usually, she doesn’t grow tired until late afternoon, but radiation treatments, notorious for their enervating effect, make her sleepy, even before lunch.

I tell her I think what she sees is just a clump of leaves near the pond’s drain. We pull away slowly, still looking for it. Obaachan reaches for the garage door opener, which is tucked in the middle console.

“It didn’t take your grandfather long to start talking about marriage,” she says. “In fact, it became his primary topic of conversation.” She was willing to wait. Something deep inside of her was not yet ready to take that step. “Maybe I felt too young. Or it simply could have been that I was still overwhelmed by all the changes I’d experienced in such a short time.” She doesn’t remember specifically what made her hesitate to say yes to him—he was, after all, handsome, smart, and interesting—and yet she held back.

“I was not the type of girl who’d spent her childhood believing that once I got married, my life would be complete. Many women thought that way back then. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be married; I hoped that I would someday have a family. It’s just that I was in no rush.”

My grandfather, on the other hand, was very ready. Having left his homeland and his family as a teenager, he was desperate for a family in America, and tired of living alone. Shortly after Ojichan had arrived in San Francisco, he’d learned that his father had passed away. He’d decided even before the war broke out that he would never return to Japan. More than anything, he wanted to be a husband and a father, and he went to great measures to let my grandmother know he was serious.

“He could be very convincing,” Obaachan says, turning to look out the window.

I remember this about my grandfather. When we were children, he would persuade us to join him in silly games with magic tricks—pretending he could pull off the upper half of his thumb was a favorite of his—and ugly masks he picked up at costume stores, chasing us around the house, roaring like a monster. At the same time, he had enough of an edge that we knew we shouldn’t push our luck by mouthing off or being disrespectful. My mother had warned us not to cross the line with him.

Even as a young man, my grandfather had been persistent, and he had a way of commanding Obaachan’s attention and, sometimes, of captaining her very will. He could so convincingly present an argument, even about something meaningless like the best way to cook fish, that she often found herself struggling to come up with a response. “He was much better with words than I ever was,” Obaachan says as we pull into the driveway.

Depending on the day, my grandfather would alter his approach to getting her to marry him. Sometimes, he would press his hand into hers and look at her, his dark eyes dancing. It was time, he would say with tenderness. They knew each other well. They got along. They would be a good match; he promised. He was ready, and she was, too. She just didn’t realize it. Besides, what was the point in waiting? Other times, when he grew frustrated, he would shrug his shoulders and kick the dust. Perhaps this was all a waste of his energy, he would say. Maybe she wasn’t serious about him; maybe she was only biding time until someone better came along. The accusations would mount.

But the tactic that weighed most heavily on my grandmother’s imagination was one that seemed the product of sheer desperation. Ojichan’s most compelling approach was to play with her fears: there’s a war going on, he would say, staring intently into her eyes, sad and serious. Who knows what will happen? In many respects, he was right.

By the fall of 1942, the war was no longer just a series of reports people listened to on their radios or watched on the newsreels at the movie theatres. For many, dim-out regulations, scrap-metal drives, air-raid alerts, and radio silence had become a part of everyday life. Automobiles, typewriters, sugar, rubber, gasoline, and fuel oil were all rationed. In the Pacific, the Battle of Guadalcanal had been raging since early August. Then, in October, the Germans and British began fighting at El Alamein in North Africa. In November, the rest of the Allies invaded North Africa in Operation Torch. Clearly, the war was growing, stretching its territory, swallowing more continents, countries, and lives. No end was in sight.

Obaachan steps out of the car. She sighs and shakes her head. “I think he knew he could get me to bend on that one. Of course I knew there was a war, and I was all too aware that my future, like everybody else’s, was precarious.” At the time, she worried that she might never leave Heart Mountain, that her room there might be her final one, that the image of the plains and that solitary mountain in the distance, seen through the holes of the barbed-wire fence that surrounded the camp, would be the last view she’d ever know.

Along with the uncertainty of her future, my grandmother worried as well that she might not find another person who would love her and want to marry her, like my grandfather did. She might end up alone, and many years later, wish she’d taken her chances with him. It was true that at the time, she wasn’t sure that she loved him, but she knew that she cared about him, that she admired him, that she found him attractive. But was that love? She wasn’t sure. What she was sure about, though, was that he loved her.

“I think that’s why I said yes, in the end,” Obaachan says as she walks toward the house. “I knew that he loved me. That he really, really loved me.”

I remember my grandmother saying it just that way before. I suspect there was more to her decision to marry Ojichan than this—that it was not only the assurance that he loved her that led her to say yes to him. Fear about the war and the uncertainty of her future must have played a bigger role than she lets on. It strikes me as strange, too, that my grandmother does not mention her love for Ojichan when we talk about her marriage, but I don’t know how to bring up this detail without somehow sounding accusatory, or worse yet, disrespectful.

By the time my grandparents would marry, on December 12, 1942, a little over a year would have passed since the bombing of Pearl Harbor. During that year, my grandmother had dropped out of college, been forced from the only home she’d ever known, lived in a whitewashed stall of a fairground barn, and resettled in a Wyoming concentration camp. I think I can understand the long shadow so much uncertainty would have cast on her, and her desire to solidify at least one small element of a life that seemed to be spinning unbearably out of her control.

Chapter 8

T
HE TRADITIONAL
J
APANESE SYSTEM FOR ARRANGING A
marriage was complicated, so my grandmother’s decision to say yes to my grandfather was only the first in a series of steps leading to a wedding. First, both of my grandparents had to choose a representative, someone who could attest to their good character and respectability. Obaachan selected an older couple from Los Angeles, folks who had known her all her life and who were also interned at Heart Mountain. The couple paid a formal visit to my grandfather and assured him that Obaachan was a moral person from a solid family. Had Ojichan’s parents been around, they would have been part of the conversation. Likewise, my grandfather found someone at the camp who was willing to speak to Obaachan and her parents on his behalf. He asked John Tamura, who was a “block manager” and an esteemed person at Heart Mountain, to serve as his representative. John Tamura was older, closer to Obaachan’s parents in age, and his broad shoulders and straight back gave the impression of someone with dignity and authority. Also, Obaachan’s parents had known him back in Los Angeles, which gave him that much more credibility in their eyes. They knew he was not simply some guy whom my grandfather had paid to speak on his behalf. They trusted Tamura’s judgment. After Ojichan had been formally represented by Tamura, he had to approach Obaachan’s parents himself and ask for their blessing.