Commodore Perry's Minstrel Show (20 page)

They would not all bathe, but they would leave the men alone. The girls would prepare their aunt's bath and sit around its edges, watching her and thinking things over, before the strangeness of everything caught up with Tsune and she asked to be alone.

22
.
Angelface

EINOSUKE WAS RIGHT
about Manjiro. He had indeed taken the Americans to the Pavilion of Timelessness on the night after the geisha house meeting entirely on a whim—because he could no longer stand Lord Abe's duplicity, the dishonorable nature of his plan. And Tsune was right, too, in telling the others that now that he had acted he was intractable. But as to Manjiro himself, oh how he wished he hadn't acted at all! Oh how he wished he could undo everything, rolling his life back to when he lived in Shimoda with his tutor and worried only about his studies and the ordinary loneliness that played upon him during countless lonely nights! What did he care what happened to these Americans, whether Perry got them or Ueno jailed them or even cut their heads off, if he, in the meantime, lost his father's goodwill, his brother's respect and friendship, and maybe even the chance to marry the only woman he had ever loved? Oh, he had acted without thinking what his actions would mean in the long run! And damnable Keiki was turning him into a hero for it, too, in these ridiculous posters that were beginning to appear everywhere, even on the back roads!

For their part the two Americans didn't react in a uniform way to the news that they had been falsely invited ashore, but when they were finally made to understand that their lives were in danger, that rogue swordsmen hunted them, and that Manjiro was trying to return them to their fleet at great risk to himself, Ned, at least, grew serious and helpful, putting on the monk's clothing that his new friend Keiki had given them (in exchange for his harmonica). He remembered that he could act as well as sing, and took to acting like a Buddhist monk. Coming ashore for a day or two had been okay with him, since it had gotten him away from those rank-smelling sailors and unending card games, but now he was ready to go back. So he walked out of Edo wordlessly, hair and eyes hidden under a sloping hat, and each night he waited in the darkness while Kyuzo, who was also with them, hurried off to some nearby village for food and drink. He put his trust in Mangy, and thought about home.

For Ace, however, all of this was an entirely different matter, and though he acted like Ned did during their daytime walking, he was convinced that he was where he should be, that the itch he'd been feeling his whole life long was about to be scratched by Japan.

For three days they made good progress, but on the fourth exhaustion caught up with them, and as they sat rubbing their feet by the side of some stream, the tongues they had held during the day began to waggle. And to make matters worse, Kyuzo sat beside them like a curious owl, and insisted on having everything translated for him.

“I figure it this way,” Ned said, when Ace expressed surprise that no one had tried to talk to them as they walked along. “People here don't much cotton to religious folks, they ain't drawn to \'em like we all are at home.”

“Not everyone cottons to religious folks at home,” said Ace.

“What?” asked Kyuzo. “What did he say?”

Manjiro's thoughts were awash with what his own fate might be, and he was continually fighting off showing disgust for all three of his traveling companions. What he really wanted to say was, “To hell with monks and to hell with you, see how my life is ruined?” In actual fact, however, all he did was drink from a bottle of saké that Kyuzo had purchased in a nearby village, sometimes translating properly, sometimes not, while Ace told them the story of his life, of growing up in the forests of Pennsylvania.

This is how the story went:

As a boy Ace had loved the forests. He had trapped and hunted in them often with his father, and by the age of nine had learned their pathways and clearings far better than he'd learned the workings of his own young mind. He knew how to make a rabbit snare from the leafy branches of a willow tree, how to turn hemlock bark and river mud into a salve for cuts and bruises, and he could recognize vast varieties of mushrooms, the deadly from the delicious, no matter how insignificant the differences.

Soon after Ace's thirteenth birthday his father was killed in the forest behind their house, mauled by a thin and sickly bear who at first had appeared to be dead herself, lying among the springtime wildflowers. Ace's mother had always disliked the forests and after his father's death moved the family—herself and Ace and his little sister, June—to Philadelphia, where she quickly found work putting up preserves in a building that June insisted on calling “The Apricot Factory.” Ace was at first inconsolable with the move—he missed the forests desperately and he missed his father more, but in Philadelphia something unexpected occurred. They were living in a room near the city's central market, in the same building that housed “The Apricot Factory.” In some of that building's upper floors there was a music school, and when spring came and the weather grew mild, Ace and June would often wait on the stairs for their mother to finish work, and pass the time by listening to the music school students singing and playing various instruments. Most of the students were women, with one boy among them, not much older than Ace, and by the end of a single day of listening to him, Ace made June laugh by ascending the steps until he was staring in the school window, all the while singing along, his mouth a perfect zero and a perfect imitation of the music teacher's surprise.

The school gave Ace a scholarship. He became the teacher's protégé, the pride of everyone, and worked so hard and well that by the time he turned sixteen he had not only gained a reputation as the best young tenor in Philadelphia, but had begun building a name for himself, the tendrils of which stretched off toward the more demanding singing world of New York Ace's life seemed set, and he began to believe that his father's death and the subsequent loss of his beloved forest served the unknown purposes of fate, of God's mysterious plan for him.

But then, on a cold March morning in 1847, the building that housed the music school burned down, razed by a fire that started in a bucket of burning apricot pits, something someone had lit on purpose in order to keep warm.

There were dozens of advertisements, bills and posters, nailed along the panels next to the building's front door, but the only one untouched by the fire's savage tongue, the only one unsinged even at its edges, announced the coming auditions for a traveling minstrel show. Before that day Ace had had no interest in minstrel shows. He had never even seen one. But this was no ordinary show and Ace came to believe that the poster advertising it had not been saved from the flames for ordinary reasons. The show was called “Colonel Morgan's Dark and Mighty Abolitionists,” and its single purpose, so said the ad, was to “help eradicate the abomination of slavery in these United States.”

Ace passed his audition and during the first of his almost seven years with Colonel Morgan, studied the issue of slavery until a vehement opposition to it was born in his heart. He came to believe that slavery was not only a great enough evil to bring down the United States, but anathema to God himself, and that the ttue purpose of his life, the single reason he had been taken from the forests and given his wonderful singing voice, was to fight against it. So he not only sang in the shows, but began to write them as well.

Then one clear fall evening, during a midnight show in Boston, Colonel Morgan was killed by an up-from-the-South slave owner who stood out of the audience, shouted a string of curses, and cocked and fired his gun. The slave owner tried to shoot others, too, but his pistol jammed and Ace and Ned, who was also in the show, jumped down from the stage, lyrics still leaking from their mouths, to wrestle with the man until the pistol unjammed, clefting Ace's chin with a passing bullet that wedged into the slave owner's brain.

As it happened Commodore Perry, himself an abolitionist, was in the audience that night, sitting two rows behind the slave owner. The Commodore had missed most of the show because he had been preoccupied, busy considering what aspects of American culture he might take as entertainment for the Imperial Court of Japan.

But though he missed the show, he didn't miss the shootings, and when Ace and Ned stood out of all that smoke it was he who used his naval rank to escort them out of there.

When they arrived in Japan Ace didn't know anymore whether his life was to be led as an outcast, whether he'd been born merely to kill some no-account slave owner, or whether God had got him through all his troubles so that he could serve some higher purpose, the essence of which, he now felt certain, would one day soon, quite miraculously, unfold.

THAT WAS ACE'S STORY
, or at least the version of it that Manjiro translated for Kyuzo, and it had a surprising effect on Manjiro, making him think about his own fate in more stable ways than those which had infected his mind on the first three days after their departure from Edo. It was nevertheless Ned, not Ace, who caused his thinking to take an even more radical turn, forcing him to consider stopping at his father's castle, to see if there wasn't some action he could take to salvage his ruined life.

He had gone to stand away from the Americans after Ace's story, lettting Kyuzo and Ace work out a rudimentary way of communicating without him, and was absently writing Tsune's name in the dirt with a stick when Ned came up to ask what he'd written down.

“It is the name of a woman,” Manjiro said, “the name of my…”

He paused trying to think of what word to use.

“The name of your sweetie?” Ned offered. “Your beloved? Your wife? I had me a wife once. How about writin' her name down, Mangy? It don't matter ‘bout her real name, I always called her ‘Angelface.'”

Manjiro knew both halves of the name, but like the idiomatic expressions he had run across on shipboard, when put together like that they didn't make much sense. What kind of language was this he had been studying, that could allow such untenable combinations? Angelface! He should have studied German. He should have studied Dutch!

“‘Angel,' like on high,” Ned prodded, “like one of them lovelies that sings in the celestial chorus. And after that just regular old ‘face,' like the gloomy one you're lookin' at me with this very moment. It means she's pretty, Mangy, though she run off first chance she got and divorced me soon as she could.” Something loosened its grip on Manjiro when he heard those words and he said them to himself several times over, in order to make sure of their meaning.
“She run off the first chance she got, divorced me as soon as she could
. “If a foreigner, if such an obviously unschooled fellow as this one in particular, could smile and find lightness in his step even after such cruel treatment at the hands of his actual wife, why couldn't Manjiro stop wallowing in this newfound self-pity, why could he not, at least in some small part, get ahold of himself?

“Angel is ‘
Tenshi,'”
he explained, writing it out in the dirt next to Tsune's name. “And in Japanese ‘face' is
kao
. Like this.”

Ned bent down to frown at the roughly written characters, but then stood back up and started to laugh. “Well, ‘cow' sure enough suits her,” he said.

For reasons unfathomable to him this little joke—perhaps the first he had ever truly understood between these two languages of his—moved Manjiro as much as Ace's entire story had, making him resolve to cast the ignoble grumblings that he'd been wallowing in out of his heart and to stop by his father's castle. He would face his father and he would face Einosuke, too, before continuing on to Shimoda. He would try to explain himself and win their support. Who knew, maybe he could get a semblance of his old life back? And if he couldn't, if his capricious action had burned the bridge he had so longingly built toward Tsune and a life of study, then maybe he could garner a little bit of Ned Clark's spirit, his unadorned acceptance of whatever came his way.

“Well, cow sure enough suits her.”

Manjiro looked at Ned again and smiled.

23
.
Hired for a Bad Cause

THEY WEREN'T REALLY
very far from Odawara—they had to pass it by to get to Shimoda—so on their fifth morning out of Edo, when Manjiro saw a stranger on horseback on the road in front of them, he told the Americans to hide in the nearby trees, lest it be one of his father's soldiers. Kyuzo wasn't with them, because he had gone into the nearest village for information and supplies.

When the Americans were gone he rubbed his shaved pate—his hair, topknot and all, had been left on the floor of the Pavilion of Timelessness, snipped from his head by Tsune so he could pass as a monk—and took a drink from a ceramic saké bottle that they had filled with water before breaking camp that morning. By the time he put the bottle back down the rider had closed the distance between them and was waving his arms, to tell him to stay where he was. The rider was a samurai, but not one of his father's soldiers. His horse was old and unimpressive but the man himself was young. He seemed to want to make the horse prance, to cover the distance between them with a certain bearing, and when the horse wouldn't do it he put on a frustrated smile. “A man's beast should not also be his burden,” he said as he dismounted. He looked at the monk before him carefully, not to determine whether or not he was one of the escaped foreigners, but to see if he appreciated the cleverness of his comment.

“Good morning,” Manjiro said.

“Is it?” asked the samurai. “Tell me, monk, what's good about this morning in particular, as opposed to, say, yesterday's morning or tomorrow's?”

“There is only a little breeze,” Manjiro answered, “and it's getting warm.”