The Japanese Lover(34)

For a while Alma seemed to have adapted to her aunt and uncle, her cousins, and the Sea Cliff mansion, but at puberty she once again became the sullen child she had been when she reached California. She was an early developer, and the first hormonal onslaught coincided with Ichimei’s indefinite absence. She was ten when they were separated, promising to stay together in their thoughts and by writing; eleven when his letters started drying up; and twelve when the distance between them became insuperable and she resigned herself to losing Ichimei. She fulfilled her obligations without protesting at a school she detested and behaved in the way her adopted family expected, trying to remain invisible so as to avoid questions about her feelings that would have unleashed the torment of rebellion and anguish she kept bottled up inside. Nathaniel was the only one she couldn’t fool with her irreproachable behavior. He had a sixth sense for detecting when his cousin was shut in the wardrobe and tiptoed there often to persuade her to come out of her hiding place, speaking in whispers in order not to wake his father, who had sharp ears and was a light sleeper. He would tuck her up in bed and lie next to her until she fell asleep. He too was going through life walking on eggshells but with a storm raging inside him. He was counting the months he had left at school before going to Harvard to study law, because it had never occurred to him to go against his father’s wishes. His mother wanted him to go to law school in San Francisco instead of vanishing to the other side of the continent, but Isaac insisted the boy needed to get far away, as he himself had done at that age. His son had to become a responsible, upstanding man, a mensch.

Alma took Nathaniel’s decision to go to Harvard as a personal affront and added her cousin to the list of those who had abandoned her: first her brother and her parents, then Ichimei, and now him. She concluded it was her destiny to lose everyone she loved most. She was still as attached to Nathaniel as on that first day at the quayside in San Francisco.

“I’ll write to you,” Nathaniel assured her.

“That’s what Ichimei said,” she replied angrily.

“Ichimei is in an internment camp, Alma. I’ll be in Harvard.”

“That’s even further away. Isn’t it in Boston?”

“I’ll come and spend all my vacations with you, I promise.”

While he was preparing for his departure, Alma followed him around the house like a shadow, inventing excuses for him not to go, and when that didn’t work, inventing reasons for loving him less. When she was eight she had fallen in love with Ichimei with all the intensity of childhood passions; with Nathaniel it was the calm love of later years. The two of them fulfilled different roles in her heart, but they were equally indispensable: she was sure that without Ichimei and Nathaniel she wouldn’t survive. She had loved the former vehemently; she needed to see him all the time, to run off with him to the Sea Cliff garden, which was full of tremendous hiding places where they could discover the infallible language of caresses. After Ichimei was sent to Topaz, Alma was nourished by her memories of the garden and the pages of her diary, filled to the margins with all her sighs and regrets written in tiny handwriting. Even at this age she gave signs of her fanatical tenacity for love. With Nathaniel on the other hand, it would never have occurred to her to go and hide in the garden. She loved him devotedly and thought she knew him better than anyone else. In the nights he had rescued her from the wardrobe, they slept together holding hands; he was her confidant, her closest friend. The first time she discovered dark stains in her underpants she waited trembling for Nathaniel to come back from school so she could drag him off to the bathroom to show him the evidence that she was bleeding down below. Nathaniel had a vague idea of the reason, but not of the practical steps to take, and so he was the one who had to ask his mother, as Alma didn’t have the courage to do so. He knew everything she was going through. She had given him copies of the keys to her diaries but he had no need to read them to know how she felt.



* * *



Alma finished secondary school a year before Ichimei. By then they had lost all contact, but she regarded him as still being with her, because in the uninterrupted monologue of her diary she was writing to him, more out of a habit of loyalty than any sense of nostalgia. She had resigned herself to never seeing him again, but as she had no other friends she fed a tragic heroine’s love with the memory of their secret games in the garden. While he was working from sunup to sundown as a laborer in a beet field, she reluctantly consented to the debutante balls her aunt Lillian insisted she attend. There were dances at the Sea Cliff mansion, and others in the interior courtyard of the Palace Hotel, with its half century of history, its fabulous glass roof, enormous crystal chandeliers, and tropical palms in Portuguese ceramic pots. Lillian had assumed the responsibility of making sure she married well, convinced it would be easier than it had been to marry off her own rather plain daughters, yet she found that Alma sabotaged all her best-laid plans. Isaac did not like getting involved in the lives of the women of the family, but in this instance he could not remain silent.

“This hunt for a husband is not worthy of you, Lillian!”

“How innocent you are, Isaac! Do you think you’d be married to me if my mother hadn’t lassoed you?”

“Alma is still a child. There ought to be a law against getting married before you are twenty-five.”

“Twenty-five! At that age she’ll never find a good match, Isaac. Everyone will be taken,” said Lillian.