A True Novel Read online

  As I came to understand in later years, the Atwoods took pride in being not only white Anglo-Saxon Protestants but in having ancestors who were among the earliest Europeans to settle in the New World. Atwood’s own forebears had arrived about two hundred years ago, and his wife belonged to the Daughters of the American Revolution. Descendants of early settlers like the Atwoods were the America’s aristocrats. Their pride in their families’ having fought in all of America’s glorious wars—the War of Independence, the Civil War, and World Wars I and II—was reflected in the array of firearms and medals with colorful ribbons.

  I WONDERED WHERE Taro Azuma slept. In the attic of the main house? Or in an apartment above that large garage? (I had recently seen a chauffeur living this way in the movie Sabrina, at a rescreening in one of the theaters near the station.) Wherever his room was, it would have to be more spacious, or at least better decorated, than any of the rooms in our house. Having seen Azuma in person, I conveniently forgot my indignation on first hearing the expression private chauffeur; I felt there was something unusual—something romantic—in his everyday life. Even the term private chauffeur seemed to have left the banal world of “retail,” “customer service,” and “head office” for a storybook realm.

  “ANYONE FOR RAMEN?” my mother asked, reaching for the apron on the back of the chair.

  “Me!” My father raised his hand like a first grader.

  “How about you, Minae?”

  “Just a small bowl,” I answered. Luckily, she was always the one who got these late-night cravings for ramen, so I was excused from helping her.

  While she was tying her apron, my father told us again, “Americans treat us well enough when there’s a profit to be made, but it’s worth keeping in mind that, deep down, they often look down on us.” I nodded in agreement, as I’d had my own small share of awkward moments at school.

  “But at least the Atwoods aren’t as bad as the Goldbergs. Oh, yes, by the way, Miss Sone’s mother wrote us a thank-you note.” My mother seemed suddenly to have remembered this, holding a pot under the faucet.

  “Did she?” There was interest in his voice. “That’s decent of her.”

  “After all, we did take good care of her daughter.”

  “That we did.”

  “It seems rather unfair that it’s the parents who go to all the trouble, but it’s the children who get the thank-you gifts.” She was referring to the kimono Miss Sone had left for my sister and me. “Minae, would you run upstairs and get her note from my dresser?”

  I brought down the airmail envelope and handed it to my father. Stirring the ramen in the pot, my mother watched as he pulled out the letter and opened it.

  “Nice handwriting, don’t you think?”

  “Very. Too good for the likes of me. I can’t even read it.” He put down the delicate sheets of handmade Japanese paper covered with elegantly flowing brushstrokes. I wasn’t happy. Why did I end up with parents who were so unappreciative of the art of calligraphy, whose history went all the way back to the Heian court of a thousand years ago?

  “Don’t ask me how, but I did make out the part where she says she sent us some Senryo rice crackers,” my mother said, laughing. Senryo was her favorite brand. My father joined in her laughter; they were both in a good mood.

  My mother had mentioned the Goldbergs because of a series of events that we referred to as the affair of the Goldbergs’ maid.

  One weekend several weeks earlier, my mother had gotten a phone call from a Miss Sone. It took her a little while to figure out that this was the daughter of someone my father knew through an American named Goldberg. Having arrived in the States a week before, Miss Sone was staying with the Goldbergs but had become desperate to move into a hotel and had no idea how to go about it. She rattled on and on at high speed. Though my mother couldn’t catch the details of the matter, she understood that this woman at the other end of the line wanted at all costs to get away from where she was, so she told her she would be right over to pick her up. As soon as she was off the phone, the two of us hopped in the car and headed over to the Goldbergs’ house.

  “House” wasn’t the word to describe it. “Mansion” or “manor” would be more appropriate. As we approached, we could see two large suitcases sitting outside the front door. Mrs. Goldberg came out, all smiles, and greeted my mother with a handshake. A young Japanese woman in her twenties was standing behind her, wearing a well-tailored suit and a frozen expression on her face. She hardly said a word, and her goodbye to Mrs. Goldberg involved making an even stiffer face. But as soon as we were in the car and on our way, out poured a torrent of words describing the misfortunes that had befallen her in the past week.

  Her father, a long-term business associate of Mr. Goldberg’s, had died about a year earlier—before he ever got around to taking up the Goldbergs on their repeated invitations to have his daughter come to the States for a visit. The offers had been made in return for the lavish entertainment her father treated them to every time Goldberg and his wife traveled to Japan on business, inviting them to dine in places like the Mikado in Tokyo, where there were chorus girls, and the Ichiriki in Kyoto, where there were geishas. After her father’s death, Goldberg had moved on to business relationships with other Japanese, but the daughter assumed she would still be welcome if she visited them, and so she’d left for America.

  Mrs. Goldberg was kind enough to pick her up at Kennedy Airport, but, from the moment they arrived at the house, nothing went as expected. They treated her simply as another maid, asking her to clean the house, do the laundry, and iron their clothes. They even made her use the back door and eat in the kitchen with the other household help. Soon the astonished young lady decided to make an escape, but she had no idea where she was. She had no car. She hardly spoke English. She finally thought of calling us, having brought our telephone number with her just in case she needed to speak to another Japanese. The events of those days at the Goldbergs’ had shaken Miss Sone to the core, especially since she was from a well-to-do family where jewelers and kimono merchants routinely made house calls. In the car on the way to our place that day and during the meal that followed, she held forth so rapidly and breathlessly about how shocked and indignant she was that we could barely find a pause in which to express our sympathy. My mother told her that there was no need for her to stay in a hotel; since Nanae was away at school, she was welcome to her elder daughter’s room for the remainder of her time in the States. She stayed with us for ten days before returning to Japan. The entire time, she never ceased going over the details of the affair. Then, just before she left, she gave us as “a token of appreciation” a formal furisode kimono, the kind with the long-hanging sleeves for unmarried girls—one so expensive my mother would never have dreamed of buying it for her daughters. Miss Sone also left us a gorgeous brocade obi to wear with it.

  Mr. Goldberg, an East European Jew who had arrived in New York in a boat full of immigrants, was the very antithesis of Mr. Atwood. He started out so poor he even slept in subway stations, but over time he managed to make a large fortune for himself. He did a good deal of business with Japan, and his residence, nicknamed the “Goldberg Palace” among the Japanese who knew him, was the trophy house of a nouveau riche, in stark contrast to the Atwoods’ place. The front doors opened onto a hall with a ceiling so high and a carpet of such a deep scarlet that visitors were dazzled, and rising from the hall was an imposing curved staircase, looking for all the world as if a femme fatale from some old Hollywood movie would make her appearance down it.

  To top it all were the gold faucets. Mrs. Goldberg, a Latin American Jew, heavily made up, with blazing red hair teased high, was rumored to be of modest origins as well. She received her Japanese guests by first proposing in her heavy Spanish accent “Let me geev you a tour of the house,” and then guiding them through numerous rooms, ending with the master bedroom, where above the king-size bed hung a large oil painting depicting her in the nude. Before her guests had time to re
cover, she prodded them toward the connecting bathroom where—with a flourish—she pointed at the golden faucets on the sinks, shower, and bathtub. “They’re based on our name, real eighteen-carat gold.” These words, delivered from glistening, brightly colored lips, were the final touch. The Japanese were flabbergasted by the tackiness of it all. During the long years I lived in the States, attending high school, college, and graduate school there, most of the handful of people I got to know well were Jewish, but the Goldbergs were the only ones whose lifestyle imitated the sort of caricature they attracted.

  “This is called Okinawan bingata,” my mother explained, folding the bright-patterned kimono. Her eyes sparkled as they always did when she came across something sumptuous and beautiful. As Miss Sone was rather plump, her kimono wrapped in ludicrous abundance around my then-slim waist when I tried it on. Later, I couldn’t see it without thinking about the young lady who made such a sudden appearance in our home. Though she only planned to stay three weeks in the States, she brought with her two large suitcases, containing not only the magnificent set of kimono and obi she left us with, but the entire assortment of precious and cumbersome items required to get dressed in a furisode: a braided cord to tighten and support the obi and a scarflike piece of material to adorn it; a double-layered under-kimono; two rolls of under-obi and several strings to hold the kimono and the under-kimono in place; a pair of white tabi socks; and matching gold purse and sandals—all in silk except the fine cotton tabi. She must have anticipated appearing in full attire at parties that would be held in her host’s grand mansion. I felt sorry for her. It was a stark reminder of the way so many Americans regarded the Japanese—a way that people living in Japan would never have imagined. Back in an earlier time, the few Japanese who traveled abroad were of noble birth, or sons of oligarchs, and how they may have been treated I cannot say, but many Americans at that time did not consider Japanese people as members of the same category of human being as themselves. From their point of view, there was no difference between Taro Azuma and Miss Sone. They were just Japanese. No, not even that. They were just some Asians.

  Nonetheless, the fact was that back in Japan, Miss Sone was a young lady of good family.

  When the two of us were alone, she soon steered the conversation to the subject that apparently interested her most: whom she might marry, marriage being an event she felt should take place fairly soon. “I suppose I’ll have to settle for an arranged marriage,” she said. “I do want to marry for love, but I think it would only work with someone from a family where the men have been going to university for the last hundred years.” To my ears, the comment came as a shock, accustomed as I was since early childhood to the postwar notion of equality—propagated under the American Occupation—and brought up by parents whose marriage was unconventional to say the least and who saw themselves as free spirits. Reading too many novels and spending years in the States must also have reinforced my historically naive view that one married only for love. Her comment, for some reason, left a long-lasting impression on me.

  “SHE’S RIGHT TO be outraged at being treated like a maid just because she’s Japanese. Even so, I’ve never seen anyone so angry,” my mother said as she was placing bowls of steaming ramen in front of us—mine a small portion, as I’d requested.

  “Compared to the Goldbergs, I guess the Atwoods aren’t all that bad,” my father said.

  “They aren’t parvenus,” she conceded.

  “No. Atwood was born rich.”

  Still, according to him, Atwood was wary about his driver getting too close to someone like my father, in case it gave him a clearer picture of his position and made him demand higher pay and better working conditions.

  “I’m sure Azuma wants to get out of there sooner or later, but he’s got the visa to worry about.”

  “Yes.”

  “He can’t just walk out of the place.”

  “Obviously not.”

  “I’m sure it’ll work out for him eventually. He seems quite capable,” my father said, adding, half to himself: “On the other hand, without a high school diploma, it’ll be hard for him to get a job with a Japanese firm.”

  With that final remark, he turned his attention to the bowl of ramen in front of him.

  None of us could possibly have known how far Azuma was from finding Atwood’s treatment unfair. Though both were Japanese, he and Miss Sone had entirely different expectations of America. That was Azuma’s strength. No matter how humiliated or infuriated he might be, he had nothing to go back to.

  One could even go a step further and say that it was his good fortune to have the kind of start in America that he did. Many immigrants seeking a better life never get a glimpse of how the average American lives, confined as they are to the bottom of society, rather like pond dwellers deprived of sunlight. But Azuma, hired as a driver for a rich man like Atwood—not a rich man like Goldberg—had the rare opportunity to spend his everyday life close to members of the American establishment. He observed how they talked and behaved, how they spent their time, and how they thought—even what their prejudices were. He absorbed the kind of knowledge not taught in classrooms but only available in places like the preparatory schools where the privileged send their children, and so gained an overview of American society that would have been impossible if he were just crawling around at the bottom of the pond. This “breeding” he acquired at the Atwoods no doubt contributed substantially to his later success in life.

  Not that the Atwoods were that rich, since those were the years of relative economic equality in the States. Later the American economy went through years of stagnation, then made a miraculous comeback, marking record highs over extended periods and producing a new, large class of the very rich. Among these was Taro Azuma, riding the wave of prosperity and making more money than Atwood ever did. Our visit to the Atwoods took place decades before this new breed of people started to lord it over America.

  IT WAS A month or two later when my father once again came home in the limousine. This time Mr. Atwood must have been in the car, for his driver did not come in. After going to greet my father in the front hall, my mother and I went back to the breakfast nook. To our surprise, he followed us directly into the kitchen still in his coat and hat and plunked a brown paper bag onto the table. This being unlikely to contain any presents for us, we peered into it dubiously. Inside were the old Linguaphone tapes.

  I pulled out the thin cardboard boxes one after another and stacked them on the table.

  “But why …?”

  We both stared at him.

  “Believe it or not, Azuma has memorized the whole set,” he told us proudly, almost as if he had done it himself, taking off his hat and starting to unbutton his coat.

  “Really?”

  “He copied out the whole textbook too, so other people could use the original if they wanted. When he told me, I had a hard time believing it myself.”

  My mother and I looked at each other.

  How could he have memorized the whole thing? Looking at the pile of cardboard boxes on the table, I felt skeptical; but as a mental picture of him came back to me, it somehow seemed possible.

  “That guy is very studious.”

  In his youth, my father himself had been very studious. I’d heard family legends about him carrying too many books in the front folds of the coarse cotton kimono the prewar students wore when they weren’t dressed in school uniform. If a book slipped out and he leaned over to pick it up, more came tumbling out after it. Had his parents lived longer and circumstances allowed him to continue his studies, he would almost certainly have been much happier becoming a scholar of English literature. I suppose it was natural that he quickly took a liking to anyone who was determined to study. He didn’t expect much from my sister and me, partly because he had given up on us, sensing that we resembled our pleasure-loving mother both by nature and culture, and partly because he belonged to a generation that didn’t expect much of women anyway. On the other hand, h
e had a firm belief that men ought to study. When he said of someone that he was “very studious,” you knew it was a high compliment, on a par with remarking that someone had “a brain in his head.”

  After going upstairs to change, he returned to continue his report.

  Since Azuma’s room was separate from the rest of the house, he was able to stay up till dawn to listen to the tapes on an old tape recorder borrowed from Atwood. Helpful too was the fact that his job allowed plenty of time off during the day. My father told him how impressed he was. Azuma replied that studying for the written test for a New York driver’s license immediately after his arrival had been a tougher challenge.

  “He thought Atwood wouldn’t take him on if he failed the test, so he was desperate to learn all the English in the driver’s manual, looking up practically every word.”

  By coincidence, I happened to be taking driver’s ed in high school and was preparing for the written test myself. For me, the textbook was a curiosity. It was the only English textbook I could understand from beginning to end, but its content was the most prosaic imaginable, featuring instructions on stopping behind a school bus or the correct number of feet before a traffic light at which to switch on a turn signal. Looking back, though, I can see that it made perfectly good sense for a person arriving in the States to start learning English with the aim of getting a driver’s license. Yet, being all too naively literary, learning English for me meant reading the classics, dictionary in hand. Not that I did this myself; I just thought it was the proper way. Learning the language by reading the driver’s manual seemed a bit ludicrous.

  The way my father put it was more sympathetic.

  “The guy’s never had any real education in English, so he doesn’t have a clue how to go about it. I think I’m going to lend him some of my old textbooks.”