Commodore Perry's Minstrel Show (7 page)

“Stay awhile folks,” said the minstrel. “Come now, gather \'round. This'll be better for your eyes and better for your ears too… Better for every part of you than a ride on that ridiculous monstrosity. It ain't the real thing but we are. And that's a promise from me, Ace Bledsoe, the star of the show.”

When he smiled the people nearest him leaned away, most of them afraid. Manjiro could see fear in the eyes of his family members, too, and that made him strangely happy. He wanted to speak English now, to show off. This was the man who had given him the chocolates so shouldn't he acknowledge him, use his years of study to say hello? He had not had a chance to speak English casually since his tutor left Shimoda.

“It is true,” he said in English. “This entertainment is fine.”

“Who's there?” asked Ace Bledsoe. “Hey! If it's not the same fellow from before!”

He dropped his piano stool and jumped off the stage, coming down like a spider with his arms out. People wanted to run, but at the same time were calmed by Manjiro, captivated by hearing him speak the spidery tongue.

“Howdy do?” said Ace, sticking out his hand. But then he dropped his act, telling Manjiro very quietly, “I've been looking for you. I thought you might show me the town.”

Manjiro's intention was to present Einosuke, who had just brought peace to the family in an elegant and generous way, but when he turned to do it, Einosuke surprised him by standing back, and his nieces were already glued to their aunt in the rear, so the person closest to the grinning foreigner was quite suddenly his sister-in-law, Fumiko. She held her ground, but when the man came closer and reached out an oily black hand, she was so completely startled that she stared up at him, her own white face and blackened teeth a mirror image of him. Something passed between them, or more accurately from him to her, and a trembling started deep in her heart which she instantly mistook for fear.

“Pleasure's mine,” he said, in his regular voice. “Ace Bledsoe's my name. I hail from the free state of Pennsylvania, not far from New York. We don't cotton to slavery, never mind what you see here tonight.”

In part Fumiko could see now how truly opposite they were, the Americans and the Japanese, that it wasn't Manjiro but her husband and her father-in-law who had been right all along. This man's white teeth might bite her if she didn't run, and his sticky black skin, if she let it touch her, might mark her so badly that she would never again get clean. In larger part, however, she was appalled to understand that she was drawn to this man, that there was a look in his eyes, behind his dark makeup, that she recognized. She tried to concentrate on his lips, which continued to smack out impossible sounds, but his eyes drew her strongly and she simply could not look away.

How ridiculous it was, how outrageous and offensive and horrifying! Only a moment earlier she had been happy, pleased with her husband's speech and to be walking here with her beautiful girls, yet now that she saw this American's face her deepest childhood memories came back to her; that of a mud monster from the depths of Lake Biwa, slime and water dripping off of him, plus that of a gallant and genuine
koibito
, who would one day carry her off and who, she had always told herself, she would instantly recognize.

It was an impossible, a nearly unbearable moment for Fumiko, and before she could do anything about it, before anyone could intercede, she began to cry. Oh, it was humiliating! She tried to stop immediately, of course, but the more she resisted the more her tears flowed. When the American saw them he cocked his head like someone's pet dog, so she slammed her eyes shut, lest he discover for himself her tumultuous state.

Einosuke and Manjiro came to her quickly, though it seemed to Fumiko like an hour had gone by, and when Einosuke touched her she was finally able to break the spell that had so overcome her, by sighing and shaking herself. She opened her eyes again, squinting at the ground, then pulled out a handkerchief. Her tears had already ruined her powdery makeup, streaming down her face like a slug clearing a trail.

“You must tell him something!” she hissed, suddenly furious with the men in her family. “Find some excuse, Einosuke! Tell him I am in mourning. That's it! Hurry now! Tell him some relative has died!”

“But who?” asked her husband. “None of your relatives are even sick just now.”

Manjiro, however, put her request into English without taking any more time.

“It is not your countenance that distresses her,” he said, “but the face of a favorite aunt who has recently died.”

“Sorry to hear it,” said Ace, trying to imagine how he could possibly resemble this Japanese woman's aunt. “I've lost family members of my own, so I know it's hard.”

Lucky for everyone, the other musician came out just then and glared from the edge of the stage. It was time for the show to begin, past time actually, and the man who was facing Fumiko, throttling and rifting her heart, was late.

He took Fumiko's hand and shook it, then before she could cry again, dropped it and shook everyone else's, one at a time.

7
.
He Didn't Care about the Neighbors Anymore

WHEN EINOSUKE
and Fumiko got home that night they immediately began quarreling in the garden room. They were alone in the downstairs portion of the house—the girls had gone to bed, Aunt Tsune was off with Lord Tokugawa's entourage, and Manjiro and his father had stayed to see the last performance of the minstrel show—but around them Edo was listening.

“I realize I should have shown more strength, that I should not have let that creature see my tears,” Fumiko began, “but I was not prepared. No one, least of all you, my husband, told me the foreigners would look the way they did, that they should hold such powerful weapons in the features of their faces!”

The other half of what she had felt she had already begun to dismiss, to attribute to the move to Odawara, to the fact that her period was coming, even to the trouble she'd been having with her maid, the extraordinary difficulties of her life these last few days.

Einosuke was tired and wanted to change his clothes and go out to work in his garden, to rake and smooth the pebbles and extract the latest set of soggy leaves. What he did not want to do was talk about the Americans, and so he replied without consideration. “I was at a loss when you cried,” he said. “Luckily Manjiro rescued us.”

Fumiko understood as well as anyone that it was a wife's job to soothe the wounded sensibilities of her husband, but this time it had been her sensibilities that had been wounded, she who had broken so horribly into tears, and what she wanted now was to be soothed herself, and to purge forever those untoward thoughts.

“Do you not remember that it was my idea, not Manjiro's, to invent the dying relative?” she asked. “That it was I who, even in my shock, tried to rescue the situation?”

“To claim a recent death might explain your tears,” Einosuke told her, “but it also might make us seem harsh for coming to the treaty-signing ceremony so soon after a death in the family. In America I bet there is a proper time of mourning, just like there is in Japan.”

Not once in a year did Fumiko's anger vent itself outwardly. That, no doubt, is why Einosuke still didn't see it coming.

“Ah,” she slowly said, “so if it is Manjiro's idea you will offer credit but if it is mine you will criticize. It seems to me that a recently dead aunt requires the same consideration no matter whose invention she might be.”

“Do you know where we put the rake with the shortest handle?” Einosuke asked. “I can't find it anywhere. I hope you didn't allow O-bata to lend it to that neighbor again. Last time I had to go and ask the man directly before he gave it back.”

He had stepped down off the porch and was bending to peer under it, looking among his orderly collection of garden tools. He had spoken quietly because the neighbor in question was sometimes outside at odd hours and could be lurking just across the fence right now. Einosuke imagined him sitting down low, purposefully shaking the base of one or another of his horrid little trees.

The most painful sting often comes from the smallest bee, and Einosuke was hurt just as much as he would have been had Fumiko whacked him with the handle of that missing rake when she said, “You are my husband, but you are a vain and foolish man sometimes.”

He remained bent for a moment, staring into the darkness under the porch, but when he stood back up the darkness in his eyes was replaced by fire. “All this trouble, all this talk!” he hissed. “Is it too much to ask that such things be left outside, that they not be so readily ushered into a man's home?”

“At the moment I'm not concerned about what is inside or outside a man's home so much as I am about what is inside or outside the man himself,” Fumiko replied. “Speak plainly if you are to hiss at me, don't rely on form.”

Fumiko was older than her sister, and not so beautiful, but she had at least as much skill with words. Her own voice had remained calm.

“How can you attack me after such a day!” Einosuke shouted, knowing even as he spoke that if he couldn't find better words to fight with he should opt for silent indignation and continue looking for his rake. He glanced up at the flat side of their house, at the second floor window behind which his children were supposed to be sleeping. He imagined the maid, O-bata, crouched there listening, her eyes as large as plums. Tomorrow, he knew, she would repeat every word he said to the awful neighbor's maids.

Fumiko understood that Einosuke's upward glance was his best argument, but she was too angry to worry about what people thought. “Why was I crying?” she heard herself ask. “You are my husband. If you know me so well, tell me why I did such a thing.”

Her words remained steady, but they had come out as loudly as Einosuke's own, so the next thing he did was hurry back inside the room and close the doors.

“Can't we be a little circumspect?” he asked, but her look told him that she expected an answer to her question. She had cried because the foreigner was terrifying and ugly, she had already said that much, yet it could also be something unrelated, like how much work was left for her to do before they left Edo for Odawara. Einosuke busied himself with an arrangement of his
obi
and his
netsuke
and then sat down and poured the waiting tea, but Fumiko was waiting, too, for his reply. He wanted to find the deeper reason for her tears before he once again committed himself by speaking, but however much he thought about it, all he could come up with was the ridiculous notion that she was crying over that made-up aunt who had died.

Fumiko herself was desperately sorry she had asked the question. What did she expect him to say? And why couldn't she deal with this strange abnormality of hers alone?

“The death of an invented relative reminded you that life is short?” he tried. “Strange though it is, it reminded you that you don't have such a long time left with your children and me, not so much time to spend with the living, uninvented, ones?”

What a feeble and stupid thing to say! He knew he would have fared better either to admit his ignorance of why she was crying or simply to slump there awaiting sympathy, like a defeated and puffed-up frog. Now that the words were spoken, however, he stood behind them, bravely hoping that exhaustion would get her and she would not go on.

Fumiko sat down and leaned forward, putting her hands around her teacup in order to get hold of herself. Einosuke believed that that was a good sign, for her deepest level of anger would not allow her to touch a cup of tea poured by him.

“Go on,” she said, “what else?” She simply couldn't stop herself.

My God, he thought, what else? What else could there be? But softly now he spoke as if he had been sure of his first answer all along. “Not only the children, but our way of life. Whatever will become of our daughters and our baby boy when they learn that men with such ugly faces control the world, roaming it in black ships and stopping wherever they like to force themselves ashore? How can we deal with such barbarians?”

To speak this way had begun as a supreme act of daring, but now he let himself be grave, captured by the words that his own heart so deeply believed. What
would
happen to their children under conditions such as those? Einosuke hadn't forgotten the speech of reconciliation he had only that afternoon made, but tonight he remembered all the reasons he had had for opposing the Americans in the first place, and when he looked at Fumiko now, there were tears in his own eyes.

“Oh, my husband!” Fumiko cried. “Of course I understand that just as my teeth are black and my face is powdered white out of a sense of decorum, so that man's face was made up contrarily, to give us pleasure, not pain. But when he looked at me I saw the future too clearly. Oh, Einosuke, you and your father were right after all! We should have been steadfast from the beginning! That we and the Americans are op-posites, that we can never understand each other, was reflected in that man's face tonight! Whatever will happen now? Whatever will become of the life we know?”

Fumiko's voice cracked as she let tears more completely spoil her face than they had earlier, but she also crawled around to Einosuke's side of the table and fell against him, wetting his chin and mouth, sorry for her earlier disloyalty, but satisfied with her lie. And as she wept Einosuke's own posture improved, his own eyes dried. Oh, he had a most wonderful, most perfect wife, a wife who could see into the center of an issue while men, especially the scoundrels in the Great Council, spent their time fighting over semantics, over phrases in a document that would do nothing, in the end, but gain entry into Japan for the outside world as a whole. Oh, why had he not been adamant when he had the chance, why had he not been firm? Never mind that his voice was small, why hadn't he spoken with its full volume anyway, casting his father's lot with the pure isolationists, just as his father, in his deepest heart, also wanted?