Light and dark

[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 validating 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.