When the Emperor Was Divine (3 page)

“Can I call you Ted?”

“If you like.”

“Are you a rich man?”

“Not anymore.” He folded up the handkerchief and put it away. “That's a nice scarf you've got on.”

“My father gave it to me. He used to travel a lot. He bought it for me the last time he went to Paris. I asked him to bring me a bottle of perfume but he forgot. He brought me this scarf instead. It's very plain, isn't it?”

He did not answer her.

“He bought himself a pair of shoes while he was over there, too. Fancy ones with little holes punched into the leather. And wooden shoe trees to put inside of them at night.” She looked down at her scarf again. The edges were frayed and worn. “The thing is, I already
had
a blue scarf. He bought me one the
last
time he went to Paris.” She sighed. “This isn't what I really wanted.”

Ted Ishimoto took off his glasses and held them up to the window. “Someday it might be,” he said. He blew on the lenses and then wiped them on his shirt sleeve. “Is your father with you on the train?”

“No,” said the girl. “They sent him away. He was in Missoula for a while and then he was at Fort Sam Houston. Now he's in Lordsburg, New Mexico. He said there were no trees there.”

“No trees!” said the man and then he shook his head sadly, as though this were a strange and terrible thing. “Does he write to you?”

The door to the lavatory opened and a woman came out and smiled at the girl. “Your turn,” she said.

The girl looked at Ted Ishimoto. “Don't go away,” she said. She went inside and stared at her face in the mirror above the basin and knew what she saw: a plain girl in a plain blue scarf. She turned on the faucet but the faucet was dry. She tilted her head back and said, “Aaaah,” and then she smiled, but only just a little, and only at the corners of her mouth. She didn't look like herself when she did that. She looked like her mother, only not as mysterious.

When she came out she held the door open. “My father never writes to me,” she said, even though this was not true. He had written to her every week since his arrest last December and she had saved every single one of his postcards.

“That's a shame,” said Ted Ishimoto. He reached for the door but she did not let go of it just yet. She pointed down the aisle. “Do you see that lady over there?”

He nodded.

“Do you think she's pretty?”

“She's lovely.”

“She's my mother.

“Your mother is a very beautiful woman.”

“I know. Everyone says that. She's watching us.”

“That's her job,” he said. “She's tired. I can see it in her eyes. Tell her everything will be all right.” He bowed quickly and stepped into the lavatory. “You'll have to excuse me now.”

The girl let the door go and walked slowly back to her seat. In the middle of the aisle a young girl of five or six was playing with a dirty doll on the floor. The doll had curly yellow hair and big china eyes that opened and closed.

“What's your doll's name?”

“Miss Shirley.” The young girl held the doll up shyly. “Mama bought her for me from the Sears catalog.”

“She's beautiful.”

“You can't have her.”

“That's all right.” The girl continued down the aisle. She walked past several snoring passengers and a man who had fallen asleep with a newspaper folded over his face. She saw a young woman reading
Burma Surgeon
and an older man reading the
Webster's Dictionary
and underlining words with a red pencil. She saw two boys fighting for a window seat and a pair of middle-aged women sitting quietly side by side knitting identical pairs of thick woolen socks in preparation for the bitter winter months yet to come.

When the girl found her seat and sat down the old man in front of her turned around and said something to her again, and again she did not know what it was. She wondered where his wife was, or if he even had a wife at all. She looked for his ring finger but his ring finger was one of the fingers that was missing. “What's he saying?” she whispered to her mother.

“Something about strawberries. He used to grow strawberries.”

“That's very nice,” the girl said to the old man.

He bowed his head and smiled.

“He doesn't understand you,” said her mother.

“Yes he does.”

Her mother took out a hairbrush from her purse and said, “Turn around.”

The girl turned toward the window and closed her eyes as her mother began to brush her hair. “Pull hard,” she said.

“What happened to your bow?”

“Harder,” said the girl. The brush made a sound like soft cloth ripping. “It fell out.”

“You've got such pretty hair. You should wear it down more often.”

“Too hot.”

“Who were you talking to back there?”

“Nobody,” said the girl. “A man. A rich man.” She paused. “Ted,” she said softly. “He said to tell you everything would be all right.”

“He can't know that for sure.”

“He said you were beautiful too.”

“Did he?”

“Yes he did.”

“You shouldn't believe everything a man tells you.”

The girl turned around and looked at her mother's face. There were little lines around her eyes that she had not noticed before. “When did you stop wearing lipstick?”

“Two weeks ago. I used it all up.”

The girl stood up and shook out her hair. Outside the window she saw a restaurant on the side of the highway called Dinah's Shack. Three big trucks were parked in front of Dinah's Shack. There was no other building around for miles. Bright yellow lines were painted on the asphalt but the trucks had not parked between them. They had parked wherever they wanted to. The door to the restaurant opened and a man wearing boots and a cowboy hat stepped out into the heat of the day, laughing at something that someone inside—maybe it was Dinah—had just said to him. When he saw the train he stopped and watched the cars go by and then he touched the brim of his hat with his forefinger and walked across the lot to his truck.

The girl did not know what it meant when a man touched his hat. Maybe it meant the same thing as a nod, or a hello. It meant that you had been seen. Or maybe it meant nothing at all. She reached into the pocket of her dress and fingered the knot on her ribbon. Then she reached for her scarf and turned to her brother. “Tell me something,” she said, “is this not the most beautiful scarf you have ever seen?”

The boy sat up straight in his seat and blinked several times.

“Tell me the truth,” said the girl.

“I always do.”

“Well?”

The boy paused. “I remember you wore a prettier one last year.”

“I didn't wear a scarf last year.”

The girl turned around and looked down the aisle to see if Ted Ishimoto had come out of the lavatory yet. She saw the door open and a young woman with a baby come out. The baby was crying and its face was bright red. The front of the woman's blouse was wet. Ted Ishimoto was gone.

She reached into her suitcase and took out a worn pack of playing cards and began to shuffle the deck. “Pick a card,” she said to the boy, “any card.”

The boy did not answer her. He was looking for something in his suitcase.

“All right,” she said, “
I'll
pick a card.” She pulled out a card from the middle of the deck and slipped it out the window. “Guess what card that was.”

“I am not in the mood for cards right now.”

“What's wrong?”

“Nothing,” said the boy. “I forgot my umbrella. I thought I brought it but I didn't.”

His mother gave him an orange. “You can't remember everything,” she said.

“And even when you can you shouldn't,” said the girl.

“I wouldn't say that,” said her mother.

“You didn't,” said the girl.

“We'll find you another umbrella when we get off the train,” said his mother.

“We're never getting off this train,” said the girl.

“We are,” said her mother. “Tomorrow.”

The boy began to hit the side of his head with the orange.

“Stop that,” said his mother.

The boy stopped. He bit down hard into the thick skin of the orange and the juice ran down his chin.

“Not like that,” said his mother. She took the orange and began to peel it slowly in one continuous motion. They were in no hurry, after all. “Like this,” she said. Her hands were thin and white and had only recently begun to spot with age. She had married late and had her children late and now she was aging early. “Are you watching me?” she asked.

“Yes,” said the boy. He opened his mouth and she placed a section of orange on his tongue.

The girl slipped the remaining cards one by one out the window until there was only one card left in her hand: the six of clubs. She could think of nothing special about the six of clubs. She turned the card over and looked at the photograph of Glacier Falls on the back. The summer before last her father had hired an Indian driver—a Hindu, he had called him—to take them to Yosemite and they had stayed at the Ahwahnee Hotel for a week. She had bought the deck of cards at the gift shop and her brother had bought a red wooden tomahawk. Every night they had eaten dinner in the fancy dining room beneath the enormous chandeliers. The waiters had worn tuxedos and called her miss and whatever she had asked for they had brought to her on a round silver tray. Every night she had asked for the same thing. Lobster. The lobster at the Ahwahnee was very good.

She wrote down her name across the six of clubs and slipped the card out the window.

TOWARD EVENING the train was near Elko. A man on the side of the road was stepping out of an old red truck. A woman sat in the passenger seat, staring straight ahead. The girl knew what the woman was staring at. She was staring at nothing. There was nothing out there to see. The man kicked the door of the truck over and over again as steam rose up from under the hood. “That's right, just kick and kick,” said the girl. A raven flew across the sky and then the truck disappeared.

Her brother tapped her arm.

“What is it?”

“Trampled,” he said. “That man was trampled.” He licked the tip of his finger and drew an X through the dust on the window.

The girl opened her suitcase and gave him a piece of paper and a pencil. “Here,” she said, “you can draw on this.”

The boy drew a large square and inside of the square he drew a little man in a suit with giant shoe trees for feet. “That's Papa,” he said. He added a mustache but something about the mustache was not quite right.

“Too wide,” said the girl.

“That's it.” He erased the mustache and part of the man's mouth and then he drew the mustache again, only not as wide, but forgot to fix the mouth. He gave the pencil back to his sister. “You draw,” he said.

She took the pencil and drew a sky full of stars above the man's head.

“Give him a hat, too.”

She drew a wide black fedora with a tiny feather tucked beneath the hatband. The girl was very good at drawing. The year before last she had won first prize at Lincoln Elementary School for her line drawing of a pinecone. She had simply concentrated on
seeing
the pinecone and the drawing had drawn itself. She had hardly looked down at her pencil at all.

Soon the boy fell asleep and she took out her father's postcards from her suitcase. One of them showed a tiny man fishing on the bank of a river. Beneath him were the words
Greetings from Montana, The Treasure State.
Another one showed the highest stack in the world. The highest stack in the world was in Anaconda, Montana. She flipped through the pictures of the Indian pueblos and the ancient cliff dwellings until she came to the postcard of the largest and finest auditorium in New Mexico: the Seth Hall Gymnasium at Santa Fe High School. Seth Hall looked like an enormous adobe house, only with cross bars over the windows. On the back of the card her father had written her a short note:
Finally,
summer has arrived. I am in good health and hope you all are
well. I know your birthday is coming up soon. Please let me
know what you would like and I will order it from the City of
Paris department store in San Francisco and have them send it
to you. Be good to your mother while I am away. Love, Papa.
At the bottom of the card there was a P.S. and then a line of text that had been blacked out by the censors. She wondered what it was her father had wanted to tell her. She had not written him back—every day was like every other day and she could never think of anything new to say—but the blue silk scarf and the tiny bottle of Sweet Serenade perfume had arrived in the mail on her birthday anyway. She had used up the Sweet Serenade a long time ago. Now she could not even remember what it smelled like.

Outside the window dusk was falling. The mountains glowed red along the ridge tops and behind them the sky had turned deep violet. A soldier—a different soldier from before—walked through the car calling out, “Shades down.” From sunset until sunrise they had to keep the shades drawn. She put the postcards away and pulled down the shade. Her mother placed an old wooden suitcase beneath the window and sat down on the lid so the girl and boy could have the seats to themselves. “Lie down,” she said to them. “Try and sleep.”

LATER THAT EVENING the girl awoke to the sound of breaking glass. Someone had thrown a brick through a window but the gas lamps were broken and it was too dark to see. She was sweating and her throat was dry and sore and she wanted a glass of cold milk but she could not remember where she was. At first she thought she was in her yellow bedroom in the white stucco house in Berkeley but she could not see the shadow of the elm tree on the yellow wall or even the yellow wall itself so she knew she was not there, she was back in the stalls at Tanforan. But at Tanforan there were gnats and fleas and the awful smell of the horses and the sound of the neighbors on either side fighting until late in the night. At Tanforan the partitions between the stalls did not reach all the way up to the ceiling and it was impossible to sleep. The girl had slept. Just now she had slept. She had slept and dreamed about her father again so she knew she was not at Tanforan, either.