“I’ve heard of parents writing teachers to thank them, but not teachers writing parents,” Lena said. “Do you realize that’s the second teacher who has written to us with the same message, both using the word
I’d noticed, yes. And Greg was listening, smiling to himself.
“What was it like at your schools, Bin, when you were a child?” Miss Carrie asked. “After the war, I mean.”
Three faces looked at me, waiting for an answer. But I rarely talked about my schools.
“I learned to use my fists,” I said. That was all. But my mood had changed and I had altered the mood at the table as I’d tipped into darkness. Too late to catch myself. Lena watched as I shut down.
“Pass your plate,” said Miss Carrie, promptly changing the subject. “We’re having plain stew. No luxuries, I’m afraid, even though it’s a celebration: Greg finishing middle school with straight A’s; the butcher donating bones for the stew; you returning home after being out and around the Empire.”
At the word
I had recently returned from a trip to both Malta and Gibraltar. I was still earning part of my income from magazine and book illustrations—especially from two loyal editors. They knew I would travel, and they sent work my way or sent me away to the work. My paintings had been selling, and I was buoyed by that. But I was looking forward to a time when I would not have to rely on outside work at all. I was obsessed with supporting the family —Lena told me often enough—even though we both had earnings. I was also trying not to repeat myself on canvas, feeling frustrated just as I was trying to move in a new direction. I had had two exhibitions of my own, both held at Nathan’s gallery. I had participated in many group shows, but other responsibilities had a way of moving in on my time. I had a show coming up and Nathan had great hopes for it, as did I—although, as always, I had doubts. There were always doubts.
After dessert, we moved to the living room and Miss Carrie brought out an unopened bottle of Daddy’s decades-old brandy. For Greg, she had made fruit punch. There was an upright piano along one side of the room, but the cover had always been pulled over the keys. This night, the cover was rolled back and the ivory keys exposed. Miss Carrie saw me looking that way and remarked that the piano had been purchased before she was born. She had taken lessons as a child, but the piano had been placed in storage when Daddy marched off to the Great War and she and Mommy followed as far as England.
“We rented this house for the duration of the war while we were away,” she said, “but the piano was never the same after coming out of a damp warehouse. We kept it, nonetheless, and I’m glad I still have it. I suppose I’ll sell it someday, when I can no longer pay my taxes. I wish I had learned to play properly when I was a child. But I was more interested in what was happening around me than in practising scales. The teacher Mommy sent me to before the war provided lessons in her living room, and for years I was compelled to go to her house every Thursday after school. Heavy maroon drapes were pulled across the double windows right next to her piano, and not a speck of natural light was permitted in the room. There was a musty odour, too, disagreeable and depressing. I felt that the drapes had sealed in the century before mine, and now I can’t help but associate piano lessons with that jowl- cheeked woman and the smothering odours of cheek powder every time she squeezed onto the bench beside me in that airless room. Still, our own piano was played after the war. This old house hosted many parties, and there was always someone who knew how to play. We even hosted the famous war ace, Billy Bishop, one evening. He was staying at the Chateau Laurier, and Daddy bumped into him there and invited him. A dashing officer. His uniform is in the War Museum here but whoever arranged the display did not do justice to the great pilot.” She looked back to the piano. “Bishop stood in that very corner during a singsong at one of Mommy’s parties.”
“I took piano lessons for a while,” Lena said, and Miss Carrie and Greg and I looked at her in surprise. Lena shook her head. “Oh, not that many years. I insisted on playing everything by ear, and that did not please my teacher. I studied as far as grade eight in my conservatory exams, so I have the piece of paper. I played to amuse myself, mostly. I miss it, I suppose. But I haven’t given piano playing much thought, because I’m so busy teaching all the time. And we have so much recorded music to keep us company at home.”
After we returned home, Greg went straight to bed—
“Every emotion you’ve ever learned,” she said, as we got into bed, “has been turned inside. Locked in. But it will come out, even the anger. It has to. How can it not?”
I knew she was talking about the reference to my fists over dinner. But I was past anger—I thought. And the old anger I had carried around for so many years had not been about school. Not really. It had been about—and I had to face it—it had been about everything. Removal, exile, dispersal, being on the outside. Being given away— now
“You’ve told me some things that happened in your past,” Lena said. “And I know I haven’t heard them all. You have a right to be angry. The anger is part of your story.” As far as she was concerned, everything that happened to a person was added on to the cumulative story.
She continued. “All of those things that happened, they’ve also made you different from everyone else. They’ve made you the fine artist you are. But there are times when your dark side hangs over you like a mantle, a heavy cloth. We hardly ever talk about this, but there have been days when I’ve wanted to yank off that mantle, drag it away and shout, ‘Move over! We all have pasts, we all have backgrounds!’ Sometimes, when I’m trying to understand all of this, I get angry myself,” she said. “So figure that out.”
Silence.
But she wasn’t going to stop there. “If the moods always trace back to your first father,” she said, “remember that you’ve also had choice. Two role models. One who seethed with anger—with good reason. Another who had the same reasons to be angry but managed to create peace around himself and everyone else. Maybe, just maybe, you ended up being a better father yourself because you were able to choose. You are a father, a good one.”
To love a child. Yes. I understood what it was to love a child.
But to give one away?
Having two fathers had always created a complex double measure. And if all I had to do to be a father myself was to love Greg, then I had been doing that. But my intent was also to keep our family of three, now four— three plus Miss Carrie—safe and close, and I did worry about that. I knew there was no reason to worry, but I did. I was always trying to protect everyone. It was part of the fates. There could be sudden losses—every Japanese Canadian knew that.
And then there was Lena’s family, unlike mine in every way. Her family had come from one place, Montreal or close by. Too close, she sometimes complained, only a two-hour drive away. Whereas my family was scattered forever: uncles, aunts, cousins, brother, sister, nieces, nephews, anywhere and everywhere in the country, unseen and no longer really known. Except through Kay. She was the one who had the information; she was the one who tried to round everyone up, if only in her head. She was the one who informed me that Uncle Kenji’s son, a cousin younger than I, had finally moved back to Vancouver Island’s west coast and now fished for a living. That Uncle Kenji, who still lived near First Father in Kamloops, drove to the coast every spring—a full day’s journey by truck—to visit his family and to go out on the boat with his son.
Auntie Aya now lived in a long-term residence for psychiatric patients in Vancouver, and Mother’s brother, our Uncle Aki, lived in an apartment nearby so that he could visit her every day. Sometimes, she came out on a pass for two or three weeks, but she always had to go back to receive the care she needed. I wondered if, for Auntie Aya, Baby Taro’s bones had ever fallen silent, or if they still rattled in the baking powder tin. There had been something fragile about Auntie Aya from the beginning, but after Baby Taro’s death, whatever broke inside her was never put right again.
My brother, Henry, had moved from job to job for many years until the mid-eighties, when he’d found
