“Mebbe not, I reckon.”
Intentionally rolling the words on his tongue in old Tokyo dialect, Okamoto glanced at his wife, who loathed this verbal affectation and would have forbidden its use in her house if she hadn’t known that any criticism from her would only incite him to persist. She said nothing, pretending not to have noticed. Like someone whose expectations have been disappointed, her uncle turned to O-Nobu.
“Is Yoshio-san so severe?”
O-Nobu merely grinned, saying nothing.
“I see by your smile that pleases you.”
“What does?”
“You needn’t play dumb with the likes of me. I ask you in earnest, is Yoshio-san so serious?”
“I really couldn’t say. But why do you ask so seriously?”
“I have thoughts of me own about this—depending on your answer.”
“Goodness gracious! Then I’ll tell you. Just as you suspect, he is rather severe. What about it?”
“You swear?”
“What a fuss you’re making.”
“I’ll get right to my point. Assuming what you say is true, that he’s a severe person, if it is, he’ll never be right for someone as good at insults as you. Now Auntie here, she ought be a perfect fit.” As he spoke he nodded at his wife with his chin as she sat beside him in silence.
O-Nobu felt brushed by a sense of loneliness like a wind out of the distance. Observing herself, abruptly gripped by sadness, she was surprised.
“How lucky you are, Uncle, not a care in the world.”
O-Nobu would have liked to laugh off her uncle’s remark as a casual jest on the spur of the moment that proceeded from his assumption that she and Tsuda were, if anything, an excessively intimate couple, but her heart was too undefended to allow this. Even so, her determination to conceal her wounds, presenting herself to others as the wife of a man with no deficiencies, prevented her from revealing any of the things she was feeling deeply. She blinked rapidly to camouflage the tears she could feel would shortly be welling in her eyes.
“Even if I am a perfect fit, it wouldn’t make any difference at my age. Right, O-Nobu?”
Seen as younger than she was wherever she went, her aunt turned her pure, lustrous eyes to O-Nobu, who said nothing. Neither did she neglect to avail herself of the first opportunity to conceal her feelings. As if amused, she laughed aloud.
[ 62 ]
O-NOBU’S REWARD for preferring her uncle, an in-law, to her aunt, a blood relative, was her certainty that he doted on her. She understood profoundly the mixture of easy affability and nervousness that constituted his temperament, and she comported herself in a manner that perfectly suited both aspects of his makeup; because her actions were enabled by the flexibility that comes with youth, she was able almost effortlessly to please her uncle and satisfy herself. Believing that he was observing her behavior at all times with an affirmative eye, she sometimes wondered how her immovable aunt could be so unbending.
What she knew about handling the opposite sex she had learned from her uncle exclusively, and she believed she would have only to apply his training to her husband to succeed in her marriage. When that man turned out to be Tsuda, she was aware in the beginning of slight differences in their approach to doing things, a new experience that she observed with a certain wonder. Frequently she encountered situations that required efforts either to train her new husband to be someone like her uncle or to reconstitute the person who was herself, already fully formed, to accommodate him. Her love was for Tsuda. But her sympathies were reserved for someone modeled on her uncle. Often at such times she found herself thinking, if only this were her uncle he would be pleased by what she had done. At such times her nature ordered her to tell her uncle everything. But she was willful enough to defy this command, and having managed until now to choke things down, she couldn’t bring herself to confess at this late date.
In that sense, O-Nobu had continually deceived her aunt and uncle, and she was confident that they had allowed themselves to be deceived for her benefit without misgivings. At the same time, she was sensitive enough to have perceived that her uncle on his side was keeping a secret with regard to Tsuda no less substantial than her own that he wanted to admit to her but was unable to reveal. What she had seen hidden inside his heart was that he had disliked Tsuda as her choice for a beloved husband. Without going to the trouble of an actual comparison, she surmised easily enough that his negative reaction was due to differences in sensibility that lay between them. O-Nobu had become aware of this soon after getting married. And she had additional evidence. Apparently coarse but refined in his own way, apparently unheeding and at the same time acute, his dispassionate words belying the kindness in his heart, O-Nobu’s uncle seemed to have conceived an intuitive dislike for Tsuda at their first meeting. Detecting behind his question “You like that sort of person?” what felt like the echo of other words, “That means you never liked someone like me,” O-Nobu had shuddered in spite of herself. However, by the time she had replied to his question with one of her own, “What do you think, Uncle?” he had moved beyond the awkward impediment he had placed between them.
“Go to him. If he’s the one, don’t worry about any of us,” he had replied with kindness in his voice.
Another bit of evidence remained. Though her uncle had said nothing to her directly, she had heard his most unsparing criticism from her aunt’s lips.
“He looks as though he thinks every woman in Japan should be in love with him.”
Curiously, O-Nobu wasn’t put off or even surprised by the remark. She was confident she could love Tsuda with all her heart. And she expected, and was reassured to feel certain, that she would be loved completely by him. Because her first thought had been, “Here he goes, criticizing as usual,” she had laughed aloud. In the next instant she interpreted his denigration as jealousy and felt secretly pleased with herself.
“He’s already forgotten how sweet he was on himself when he was a young man,” his aunt had said supportively.
Sitting in front of her uncle now, O-Nobu couldn’t help recalling this moment from the past. Whereupon she had the feeling that his frivolous jesting about Tsuda’s “severity” and her suitability or unsuitability as the wife of such a man might have been significant in a way she hadn’t recognized.
I have a feeling I was right about what I said. I hope not, but if something does come up, not now maybe but later on, I want you to come straight to me and tell me all about it.
In her uncle’s eyes, O-Nobu read these compassionate words.
[ 63 ]
HAVING COVERED her sentimental moment with a laugh and wishing to move away from the pain she was feeling, O-Nobu broached to her uncle and aunt the subject on her mind.
“What was that party all about?”
She had given her uncle notice that she would have something to ask him, and now she sought an explanation. But instead of providing an answer as he should have, he turned the question back on her.
“What did you think?”
Placing a particular emphasis on “you,” her uncle looked observantly into her face.
“How would I know? And what an odd question out of nowhere. Don’t you agree, Auntie?”
Her aunt grinned.
“Your uncle says a scatterbrain like me wouldn’t understand, but you certainly would. ‘She’s so much cleverer than you,’ he tells me.”
O-Nobu could only smile uncomfortably. She did have an idea, of course, a vague conjecture, but she wasn’t being pressed for it and she had been taught too well how to be a lady to reveal it as a display of her own cleverness.
“I haven’t the foggiest—”
“Take a guess. You must have a pretty good idea.”
Reading in his face his determination to have her venture something first, O-Nobu, after bantering back and forth, said what she supposed.
“It wasn’t a miai?”*
“What makes you think so? That’s how it looked to you?” Before validat
ing her guess, O-Nobu’s uncle persisted in posing her questions in response to hers. Finally he laughed heartily in a loud voice.
“Bull’s-eye! So you are cleverer than Sumi after all.”
This attempt to place their cleverness on the scales of a balance the women dismissed with ridicule.
“It doesn’t take a genius to figure out a simple thing like that, right Auntie?”
“No, and I don’t imagine you were that thrilled to be complimented for it.”
“Goodness, no!—it’s almost an insult.”
O-Nobu was recalling how brilliantly Madam Yoshikawa had played the table in her role as go-between.
“I had a feeling that must be it. Otherwise why would Yoshikawa-san have been working so hard to draw out Tsugiko-san and that Mr. Miyoshi.”
“But our Tsugiko has a gift for resisting. One tug at her and she pulls into herself like a turtle. She’d fare much better if she were more like you—a girl with some moxie.”
“Because I’m pushy and say whatever comes into my head? I’ve no idea whether I’m being praised or scolded—when I see a reserved person like Tsugiko-san I so wish I could be like her.”
As she spoke, O-Nobu reviewed with an unpleasant feeling of dissatisfaction last night’s gathering, which, in her view, had ended in failure for herself precisely because it had provided her with no room to exhibit what her uncle had chosen to call her moxie.
“I’m wondering why I had to be there.”
“You’re Tsugiko’s cousin.”
If the only reason was that she was a relative, there were any number of others who should also have attended. Moreover, the prospective groom had come alone; with the exception of the Yoshikawas, there was no one representing the other side.
“I still don’t understand. Does that mean that if Tsuda hadn’t been sick, he would have been obliged to come too, as a relative?”
“That’s another matter. There was another reason.”
O-Nobu’s uncle explained that one of his objectives had been to provide Tsuda and O-Nobu with a new opportunity to socialize with the Yoshikawas, which he assumed would be good for them. Hearing this as a revelation of his kindly nature as she liked to imagine it, O-Nobu was grateful; at the same time, she wondered with a certain resentment why, in that case, he hadn’t done more to promote a deeper acquaintance with Madam Yoshikawa. To be sure, he had seated them at the same table with that end in mind, but he seemed unaware of the possibility of a result that might be worse psychologically than before he had acted to bring them together. No matter how painstaking they might be, O-Nobu felt moved to conclude, men were, after all, just men. On the other hand, she thought more generously but with a sigh, no one who didn’t know about the subtle something that lay between Mrs. Yoshikawa and herself could have been expected to do better.
* A miai is a meeting arranged and attended by the families of two people considered likely candidates for marriage.
[ 64 ]
ALLOWING THE thought to drop by the wayside, O-Nobu pursued the point that continued to trouble her. “I understand what you intended, and I know I should be grateful. But there must be something more to this.”
“Maybe, but even if there weren’t, I think you can see from what I’ve already said that inviting you was more than worthwhile.”
“I suppose—”
O-Nobu felt obliged to concur. But it seemed to her that the manner of the invitation had been too urgent to be entirely explained by this. It turned out that her uncle had characteristically retained one final element.
“Actually, I wanted your assessment of the prospective groom. I’m asking because you have a gift for seeing into people. What did you think of him? A good bet for Tsugiko? A bad idea?”
O-Nobu was uncertain, in view of his typical behavior, how seriously he intended his question.
“Such an important role for me. I’m honored.”
Laughing as she spoke, O-Nobu glanced at her aunt and, observing her to be unexpectedly somber, changed her tone at once.
“I don’t see how someone like me is qualified to assess anyone. Besides, all I did was sit there for an hour. No one could learn much from that—unless they were clairvoyant.”
“Well, there is something clairvoyant about you. That’s why everyone wants to hear your opinion.”
“I hate it when you mock me.”
O-Nobu pretended to dismiss her uncle. But the taste of a certain pleasure was flirting with her. It was self-satisfaction with its source in her certainty that people did apparently think of her in that way. But this was a fragile pleasure easily damaged by undeniable facts that were an occasion for disappointment. Her husband’s case came to mind as damning evidence to the contrary. Before her marriage, O-Nobu had been confident that she had seen through to her husband’s nature with a clarity that exceeded clairvoyance, but in the time that had since elapsed, her confidence, as a lucent sun is mottled with dark sunspots, had been tarnished by misapprehensions and misplaced feelings. Having learned from her experience as time passed that her intuition regarding her husband might well require emendation, O-Nobu, who was just now beginning to bow her head in acknowledgment of this dolorous truth, was not so young that a little flattery from her uncle could restore her to good spirits.
“There’s no way to know much about anyone without spending time with them—”
“Nobody needs you to teach ’em that.”
“I’m just telling you I have nothing to say after just one meeting.”
“You sound like a man. A woman will have something to say after one look, and often she’ll hit the mark. I’m asking you to give me something for future reference. I’m not going to hold you responsible, so give it a try.”
“But how can I? I’m not a fortune-teller, right, Auntie?”
Her aunt didn’t support her as she normally did. Neither did she take her uncle’s side. Though it didn’t appear she wished to push O-Nobu for a prediction, she did nothing that might have inhibited her husband from pressuring her. Her attentive expression suggested she was eagerly interested in anything, however insubstantial, in the nature of an evaluation of a potential husband for her precious daughter now preparing for the first time to marry.
O-Nobu felt obliged to deliver herself of one or two anodyne remarks.
“He seems very respectable. And very poised for his age.”
Her uncle was waiting for more; when she added nothing, he prompted her with a question.
“Is that all?”
“I was sitting two seats down—I could barely see his face.”
“I guess it was foolish of me to put our oracle in that seat—but you must have something more than those clichés, something more in line with your special gift that would catch the essence of the man.”
“But I don’t—not after one meeting.”
“But what if you absolutely had to say something after just one meeting? You’d find something to say.”
“I have nothing.”
“Nothing at all? What’s happened to that intuition of yours?”
“I lost it when I got married—now I’m numb.”
[ 65 ]
ALL THE while she was engaging at length in verbal head-butting with her uncle, different thoughts were playing incessantly across her mind.
She didn’t doubt that Okamoto acknowledged her and Tsuda as a prime example of matrimonial harmony. She also understood, however, how unlikely it was that he had revised the dislike he had felt for Tsuda from the time of their first meeting. Accordingly, she felt certain that he must be observing skeptically the intimacy she and her husband appeared to share. To put it another way, beneath his surprise that a woman like O-Nobu should succeed in loving a man like Tsuda, he maintained his confidence in the astuteness of his own vision. His conclusion, that it was O-Nobu and not himself who had misjudged the man, seemed to have sifted down to the bottom of his heart like a fine powder, ready at any time to diffuse itself into the surrounding air.
&nb
sp; Then why does he persist in pushing me for my thoughts about Miyoshi?
O-Nobu failed to understand. She was aware that he regarded her privately as a wife who had misjudged her husband, and to put her awareness aside and respond to his request without hesitation would have taken more courage than she possessed. In the end, her only choice was to hold her tongue. But to someone who had grown accustomed over the years to her immoderate lack of reserve, her silence on this occasion was hard to comprehend. Her uncle turned away from her to her aunt.
“This child’s a bit of a different person since she got married. She’s become timid. I wonder if that’s also her husband’s effect—it’s odd.”
“It’s because you keep hounding her to say something; it sounds more like a scolding than a request—who could handle that?”
Her aunt’s attitude was less admonitory toward her uncle than protective of her. But O-Nobu’s heart was now too full of her own feelings to rejoice at this.
“But isn’t this a matter for Tsugiko to decide? All she has to do is make up her mind and it’s done, she doesn’t need me to get involved.”
O-Nobu couldn’t help recalling the moment when she had chosen her own husband. Discovering Tsuda, she loved him at once. Loving him, she confessed her desire to become his wife to her guarantors at once. Receiving permission, she married him at once. And from start to finish, she was ever her own protagonist. The responsible party. She couldn’t recall ever being inclined to disregard her own intentions and rely on others.
“What in the world does Tsugiko-san say?”
“She says nothing. That girl is more timid than you.”
“If the principal party is acting that way, what can we do?”
“Exactly right! Timid as she is, there’s nothing we can do.”
“She’s not timid. She’s docile.”
“Since she isn’t saying anything, it hardly matters which. Or maybe she can’t say anything because she has nothing to say.”
O-Nobu profoundly doubted that two people whose connection was as tenuous as this could ever become a genuine couple. Not when even my own marriage is turning out this way, she reasoned. Unable to perceive her cousin’s situation as closely resembling her own, she saw only the logic in front of her nose. It seemed less ridiculous than frightening. How superficial her cousin was, she even thought.