The Japanese Lover(9)

The dramatic changes started the next day. Alma began to pack her bags and decided that very little of what she had would be of any use to her in her new life. She had to simplify. First she went shopping, and then got together with her accountant and her lawyer. She allotted herself a modest pension, handed the rest of her wealth over to Larry without instructions as to how he should spend it, and announced she would be going to live at Lark House. In order to avoid the waiting list she purchased the right to become a resident from an anthropologist, who for the right price was willing to wait a few more years. No one in the Belasco family had ever heard of the place.

“It’s a rest home,” said Alma vaguely.

“A nursing home?” asked Larry with alarm.

“More or less. I want to live the time I have left without complications or burdens.”

“Burdens! I hope you don’t mean us!”

“And what are we going to tell people?” exclaimed Doris.

“That I’m old and crazy. That wouldn’t be far off the mark,” Alma replied.

The chauffeur drove her there with her cat and two suitcases. A week later, Alma renewed a driving license that she hadn’t needed in decades and bought a lime-green Smart car. It was so tiny and light that once, when it was parked on the street, three mischievous youths tipped it on its roof and left it with its wheels in the air like an upended tortoise. Her reason for choosing it was that the garish color made it visible for other drivers, and its small size meant that if by some misfortune she ran someone over, she would most likely not kill them. It was like driving a cross between a bicycle and a wheelchair.

“I think my grandmother has serious health problems, Irina,” Seth told her. “And she shut herself up in Lark House out of a sense of pride, so that no one would find out.”

“If that were the case, she’d be dead by now. Besides, no one shuts themselves up in Lark House, it’s an open community where people come and go as they like. That’s why we don’t admit people suffering from Alzheimer’s, who might get out and wander off.”

“That’s exactly what scares me. My grandmother could get lost on one of her excursions.”

“She always comes back. She knows where she’s going, and I don’t think she goes there alone.”

“Then who does she go with? A boyfriend? You can’t possibly think my grandmother stays at hotels with a lover!” Seth said mockingly, but Irina’s serious expression cut his laughter short.

“Why not?”

“She’s ancient!”

“It’s all relative. She’s old, not ancient. In Lark House, Alma is considered young. Besides, love can strike at any age. Voigt thinks it’s good to fall in love when you’re old: it keeps you healthy and wards off depression.”

“How do old people do it? In bed, I mean?” asked Seth.

“Taking their time, I suppose. You’d have to ask your grandmother that,” Irina responded.

Seth soon succeeded in winning Irina over, and the two of them began trying to solve the puzzle. Once a week, Alma received a box containing three gardenias that was left at the reception desk by a delivery boy. The box never included the sender’s name or the florist’s, but Alma displayed neither surprise nor curiosity. She also regularly received yellow envelopes, again with no indication as to who had sent them. Alma would throw these away after extracting from them a smaller envelope, with her name and old address at Sea Cliff handwritten on it. None of the Belasco family or their staff had either seen these envelopes or forwarded them on to Lark House in the bigger yellow ones. They knew nothing about the yellow envelopes until Seth mentioned them. He and Irina were unable to discover the identity of the sender, or why two envelopes and two addresses were necessary for the same letter, much less where this unusual correspondence ended up. Since Irina found no trace of the letters in the apartment and Seth nothing at Sea Cliff, they assumed Alma must have stored them in a safe-deposit box at her bank.





April 12, 1996

Yet another unforgettable honeymoon with you, Alma! It’s been a long time since I saw you so relaxed and happy. And for us to be greeted like that, in Washington, with the magical sight of one thousand seven hundred cherry trees in bloom! I saw something similar in Kyoto many years ago. Does the cherry tree my father planted at Sea Cliff still bloom each year?

I remember how you stroked the names inscribed in the dark stone of the Vietnam Memorial and told me that stones speak, that you can hear their voices, that the dead are trapped inside the wall and cry out to us, outraged at their sacrifice. I’ve been thinking about that. There are spirits all around us, Alma, but I believe they are free and do not harbor any resentment.

Ichi





THE POLISH GIRL


To satisfy Irina and Seth’s curiosity, Alma began by telling them, with the lucidity that preserves crucial moments for us, of the first time she saw Ichimei Fukuda. She met him in the splendid garden at the Sea Cliff mansion in the spring of 1939. In those days she was a girl with less appetite than a canary, who went around silent by day and tearful by night, hiding in the depths of the three-mirrored wardrobe in the bedroom her aunt and uncle had prepared for her. The room was a symphony in blue: the drapes were blue, and so too the curtains around the four-poster bed, the Flemish carpet, the birds on the wallpaper, and the Renoir reproductions in their gilt frames; blue also were the sky and the sea she could view from her window whenever the fog lifted. Alma Mendel was weeping for everything she had lost forever, even though her aunt and uncle insisted so vehemently that the separation from her parents and brother was only temporary that they would have convinced any girl less intuitive than her. The very last image she had of her parents was that of a man of mature years, bearded and stern looking, dressed entirely in black with a heavy overcoat and hat, standing next to a much younger woman, who was sobbing disconsolately. They were on the quay at the port of Danzig, waving good-bye to her with white handkerchiefs. They grew smaller and smaller, more and more indistinct, as the boat set out on its journey toward London with a mournful blast from its foghorn and she, clutching the railing, found it impossible to return their farewell wave. Shivering in her travel clothes, lost among the crowd of passengers gathered at the stern to watch their native land disappear in the distance, Alma tried to maintain the composure her parents had instilled in her from birth. As the ship moved off, she could sense their despair, and this reinforced her premonition that she would never see them again. With a gesture that was rare in him, her father had put his arm around her mother’s shoulders, as if to prevent her from throwing herself into the water. She meanwhile was holding down her hat with one hand to prevent the wind from blowing it off as she frantically waved the handkerchief with her other.