“That is correct.”
“He’s good at chatting people up.”
“No one is better.”
“Who’s he chatting up now?”
“We will leave that entirely to Mr. Otani. Because he is doing the chatting, he alone must choose those to whom he wishes to chat.”
“What does he do besides chat? Is he a reporter?”
“Mr. Otani does many things well, though he is a humble man who, if you praised him, would deny his competence and plead that he is only lucky.”
Whenever it came to revealing anything about Nakama Otani, Mr. Yoshioka became secretive and often responded to my questions with answers that seemed to be answers only if you didn’t think too hard about them.
We were passing under bare-limbed maples through which snow streamed, and though my subject wasn’t snow, I took the opportunity to reveal my recently gained erudition. “ ‘The sleet falls / As if coming through the bottom / Of loneliness.’ ”
“Naito¯ Jo¯so¯,” said Mr. Yoshioka. “A poet of the seventeenth century. He was once a
samurai, and then he became a priest. A man of many disciplines.”
“Sorry I can’t say it in Japanese.”
He obliged: “ ‘Sabishisa no / Soko nukete furu / Mizore kana.’ ”
He looked so pleased that I had memorized even one haiku, and his smile was the widest I had ever seen on him, but he didn’t inquire what had inspired my interest. Because haiku were important to him, almost sacred, maybe he thought that to ask such a question would be too personal. More likely, he knew that my respect for him was the source of my interest in that poetry, and he would have been embarrassed to hear me say as much.
And so the months passed with me suspended in a peculiar state. I felt that I was walking a ledge, yes, but each time I looked down, the ledge was only two feet off the ground. Maintaining a high degree of wariness and the suspicion for which I was known—at least to Mr. Yoshioka—proved difficult when none of the bad guys came sneaking around.
We kept waiting for more bombs to explode, like those that had trashed the military-recruitment centers. Surely if Fiona Cassidy was a skilled bomb-maker, she’d had plenty of time in 6-C to build more than two. But nothing exploded.
When the calamity occurred on Wednesday, April 19, 1967, it was nothing that I’d been anticipating.
At Saint Scholastica’s, all the students in the fourth grade were gathered in the music room during the sixth period, practicing the choral piece we would sing as our part in the annual spring recital. The head of the music department, Mr. Hern, was a civilian, not a priest. He knew music, but he wasn’t much of a disciplinarian. Some of us boys were horsing around, singing “banana” though the word was hosanna, that sort of thing, when Sister Agnes entered in a rustle of habit, and went directly to the piano, where Mr. Hern was playing well the song that we were doing our best to sabotage. He took his hands off the keys the moment that he saw her, and she whispered something to him, and all of the kids stood on the tiered chorus platform in respectful silence because Sister Agnes was a dedicated and effective disciplinarian.
When she asked me to come with her, I frantically tried to think what I’d done that warranted her attention. I was sure it couldn’t be that she’d been walking by the music room and heard me sing “banana,” but as far as I could recall, I hadn’t committed any other offense that day.
She walked with me to her office, one hand on my shoulder all the way, which was unusual, as if she thought I might try to escape. When I glanced at her surreptitiously, I saw tears standing in her eyes. I thought that the punishment soon to be administered must be so dire, even this no-nonsense nun had pity for me.
Ushered ahead of Sister Agnes, entering her office, I startled when I saw my mother waiting there, standing at a window with a view of sycamores in early leaf. She turned when she heard us, and her face glistened with tears.
I ran to her, and she knelt to take me in her arms, and I asked what I had done. She said, “Nothing, sweetie, not you, you’ve done nothing. It’s your grandma. We don’t have her anymore, Jonah. We don’t have her. She passed away a little while ago, and she’s with God now.”
Ten months earlier, when Tony Lorenzo died, I had thought I knew what Mrs. Lorenzo must be feeling; but now I realized that I had not understood her pain at all. Surely it was as sharp as mine, and mine was excruciating, of such intensity that for a moment I couldn’t breathe. And then I thought, Grandpa Teddy, and I didn’t believe that I could bear to see him racked by grief.
Because Grandma Anita worked for Monsignor McCarthy and because she had done so much good for others in her life, the viewing before the funeral Mass was at the cathedral. So many flowers flanked and backdropped the casket. Among the usual roses and chrysanthemums stood a singular arrangement, not the largest but the most striking, consisting of white peonies with purple-tipped petals combined with purple orchids. I knew from whom they must have come. I took the condolence card from the arrangement and pocketed it. I read it much later, when I was alone in bed at Grandpa’s house and unable to sleep. The name of the sender was not included on the card, but it didn’t need to be. The neatly hand-printed message identified him, and I read it many times before sleep claimed me.
Dawn breaks
And blossoms open
Gates of paradise.
As I explained near the beginning of this story, we stayed with Grandpa Teddy for a week, and then we returned to our downtown walk-up.
I no longer allowed myself to be impatient for some word from Mr. Yabu Tamazaki of the Daily News or from the chatting-up expert, Mr. Nakama Otani. In a low-grade fever of superstition, I felt that my previous impatience, my desire for action, might have in part brought upon us the drama that I didn’t want, Grandma Anita’s death.
Sure, juju was probably nonsense, but if by some one-in-a-million chance it was not nonsense, then somewhere there was a photograph of me sleeping and a fabric eye that perhaps could watch me even from a great distance, and both were in the possession of a woman with purple-blue eyes and a bloody mind and the darkest of dark hearts, who would use those magical items if she knew how.