The Japanese Lover(13)

The boy greeted her with a bow and kept his head down while he introduced himself.

“I am Ichimei, the fourth child of Takao and Heideko Fukuda. It is an honor to meet you, miss.”

“I am Alma, the niece of Isaac and Lillian Belasco. An honor to meet you, sir,” she replied, taken aback but amused.

This initial formality, which as time went on became tinged with humor, set the tone for their lifelong relation. Alma was taller and more robust, and so looked older than him. Ichimei’s slender frame was deceptive, because he could pick up heavy bags of soil effortlessly and push a laden wheelbarrow uphill. His head was large compared to his body; he had a honey-colored complexion, black eyes set wide apart, and thick, unruly hair. His adult teeth were still emerging, and when he smiled his eyes seemed to disappear.

For the rest of that morning, Alma followed Ichimei around as he planted the seedlings in the holes his father had dug and pointed out the secret life of the garden to her, the roots beneath the surface, the near-invisible insects, the tiny shoots that in a week would be several inches tall. He explained about the chrysanthemums he was taking out of the greenhouse, and how they were transplanted in spring to flower at the start of autumn so that they could provide color and life to the garden after all the summer flowers had withered. He showed her some rosebushes still in bud and revealed how you had to remove most of them so that the remaining ones gave big, healthy blooms. He told her about the difference between plants coming from seed and those growing from bulbs, the ones that preferred sun or shade, the native ones and those brought from elsewhere. Takao Fukuda, who was keeping his eye on them, came up and proudly announced that it was Ichimei who carried out the most delicate tasks, because he had been born with a green thumb. The boy blushed at this praise.

From that day on, Alma waited impatiently for the gardeners to arrive, as they did punctually each weekend. Takao Fukuda always brought Ichimei and occasionally, if there was extra work to do, he was also accompanied by Charles and James, his older boys, or by Megumi, his only daughter. Several years older than Ichimei, she was only interested in science and detested getting her hands dirty with soil. Ichimei remained patient and disciplined, carrying out his tasks without being distracted by Alma, trusting his father to give him half an hour off at the end of the day to play with her.





ALMA, NATHANIEL, AND ICHIMEI


The house at Sea Cliff was so vast, and its inhabitants always so busy, that the children’s games went unnoticed. If one of the adults suddenly noticed that Nathaniel was spending hours with a much younger girl, the interest soon passed, because there was always something else to attend to. Alma had grown out of what little devotion she felt for dolls, and instead learned to play Scrabble with a dictionary and chess out of pure determination, since strategy was never her strong point. For his part, Nathaniel had grown bored of collecting stamps and going camping with Boy Scouts. Both became absorbed in the plays for two or three characters that he wrote and then they put on together in the attic. The lack of an audience never bothered them, because the process was far more interesting than the outcome, and they were not seeking applause: the pleasure resided in fighting over the script and rehearsing. Old clothes, discarded curtains, battered furniture, and odds and ends in various stages of decay were the raw material for their disguises, props, and special effects; their imagination supplied everything else. Ichimei, who often came to the house because he had no need of an invitation, was only allowed to take on minor roles in their theater company because he was such a lousy actor. This lack of talent was compensated for by his prodigious memory and his skill at drawing. He could recite verbatim lengthy monologues inspired by Nathaniel’s favorite characters, from Dracula to the Count of Monte Cristo. He was also in charge of painting the backdrops. But this camaraderie, which helped rescue Alma from her initial sense of being an abandoned orphan, was not to last long.

The following year Nathaniel began his secondary education at a boys’ school based on the British model. His life changed overnight. As well as starting to wear long trousers, he had to face the endless brutality of youths learning to be grown-ups. He was not ready for this: he looked more like a ten-year-old than the fourteen he actually was. He was not yet suffering from the merciless bombardment of hormones; he was introverted, wary, and unfortunately for him loved books and hated sports. He would never be boastful, cruel, or vulgar like the other boys, and since none of this came naturally, he tried in vain to copy them; his sweat smelled of fear. On the first Wednesday of classes he came home with a black eye and his shirt stained from a nosebleed. He refused to answer his mother’s questions and told Alma he had bumped into the flagpole. That night, for the first time he could remember, he wet his bed. In his horror, he stuffed the soaking sheets up the chimney, where they were only discovered at the end of September, when the fire was lit and the house immediately filled with smoke. Lillian could not get her son to explain what had happened to the sheets either, but she guessed the reason and decided to intervene. She went to see the headmaster, a red-haired Scotsman with a drinker’s nose, who received her behind a regimental desk in a dark-paneled room presided over by a portrait of King George VI. He told Lillian that a proper dose of violence was seen as an essential part of the school’s educational methods. That was why they encouraged tough sports, quarrels between students were resolved in a ring with boxing gloves, and discipline infractions were punished by caning on the backside, which he himself administered. Blows made men. That was how it had always been, and the sooner Nathaniel learned how to gain respect, the better for him. He added that Lillian’s intervention made her son look ridiculous, but since Nathaniel was a new pupil, he would make an exception and not mention it.