When the Emperor Was Divine

IN A STRANGER’S BACKYARD

When we came back after the war it was fall and the house was still ours. The trees on the streets were taller than we remembered, and the cars more run down, and the rosebush our mother had once planted alongside the narrow gravel path that led up to the front steps of our house was no longer there. We had left in the spring, when the magnolia trees were still in bloom, but now it was fall and the leaves on the trees were beginning to turn and where our mother’s rosebush had once stood there was only a clump of dead weeds. Broken bottles were scattered across the yard, and the juniper hedge by the side of the porch looked as though it had not been watered, even once, during the years we had been away.

We carried our dusty suitcases up the narrow gravel path. It was late in the day and a cool breeze was blowing in off the bay and in the yard of the house next door a man in his shirt sleeves was slowly raking leaves. We did not know him. He was not the same man who had lived in that house before the war. He leaned on his rake and nodded once in our direction but our mother did not wave to him or nod her head, even slightly, in return. There were many people, she had warned us, who would not be happy to learn we had come back into town. Perhaps this man was one of these people—a member of the American Legion, or the Homefront Commandos, or one of the Native Sons of the Golden West—or perhaps he was simply a man with a rake our mother had chosen not to see, we did not know.

At the top of the porch steps she reached into her blouse and pulled out the key to the front door, which she had worn, on a long silver chain, the entire time we had been away. Every morning, in the place where we had lived during the war, she had reached for the key as soon as she woke, just to make sure it was still there. And every evening, before she closed her eyes, she had touched the key one last time. Sometimes, in the middle of the day, she had stroked its jagged ridges with her thumb as she stared out the barrack window. Once, when she thought no one was looking, we even saw her put it into her mouth and close her eyes with delight. It was spring, and the air smelled of sage, and she was reading a letter from our father. We turned our heads away. The key had become a part of her. It was always there, a small, dark shape, dangling—visibly and sometimes invisibly, depending on the light, and what she was wearing, and even, at times, it seemed, on her mood—just beneath the surface of her clothes. If she took it off, surely terrible things would happen. Our house—that faraway speck on the map—would fall down, or go up in flames, or simply disappear. The war would last forever. Our mother would cease to be.

But now we watched as she pulled the chain up over her head—she did this effortlessly, naturally, as though it were something she did every day—and slid the key into the lock. Her hands were steady. Her fingers did not tremble. The wind was blowing through the branches of the trees and in the yard next door a man we did not know was slowly raking leaves. Our mother had not waved to him. She turned the key once in the lock. She turned the key twice. We heard a click and then the door swung open and she took off her hat and stepped into the foyer and after three years and five months we were suddenly, finally, home.

THE HOUSE DID NOT smell good. We did not care. The paint was peeling away from the walls and the window frames were black with rot. Shreds of lace curtain dangled in front of the soot-covered panes and the floor was littered with empty food tins and shards of broken glass. Against the far wall where the piano had once stood we saw our mother’s felt-covered card table beneath a pile of old newspapers. Nearby, in the corner, three folding chairs. A metal stool. A broken gooseneck lamp. The rest of our furniture was gone. It did not matter. We were home. We were lucky to be home. Many of the people who had come back with us on the train had no homes to return to at all. Tonight they would be sleeping in hostels and churches and on cots at the YMCA.

We put down our things and ran from one room to the next shouting out, “Fire! Help! Wolf!” simply because we could. We flung open the windows and doors. The smell of the sea blew through the empty rooms of the house and soon the other smell, the smell of people we did not know (they drank milk, they ate butter, they ate cheese, all these things our mother claimed she could tell from their smell) began to fade away.

We had not smelled the sea in years.

In the kitchen we turned on the faucet and watched the water come pouring out of the pipes. At first the water was brown with rust and then it ran clear. We lowered our heads to the faucet and drank. Our throats were dry from the long ride back and our clothes were covered with dust. Our mother let the water run over her hands and then she turned off the faucet and wiped her hands on the front of her dress and walked out the back door and into the yard and stood on the tall weedy grass in the shade of the trees as the leaves fell all around her.

This was a strange and unfamiliar sight: our mother, in shade, beneath trees. We watched as she caught a falling leaf in her hand and held it up to the light. We watched as she let the leaf go. In the place we had come from there was sun but no shade and the only time we ever saw trees was at night, in our dreams.

MANY PEOPLE HAD LIVED in our house while we were away but we did not know who they were, or where they had gone, or why we had never received a single check in the mail from the man who had promised to rent out our house. This man was a lawyer, his name was Milt Parker, he had shown up at our door the day after the evacuation orders had been posted and offered our mother his services. “I’ll take care of everything,” Mr. Parker had said. But where was he now? And where was our money? And why had our mother been so quick to open the door to a stranger? Because strangers had knocked on our door before. And what had happened? Nothing good. Nothing good. They had taken our father away.

“Fool,” our mother said now, “I was a fool.”

Upstairs, in the rooms where we had once slept, and dreamed, and many times fought, we found soiled mattresses and old magazines filled with pictures of naked young men and women. Their bodies were perfect. Their skin, smooth and pale. Their limbs were wrapped around each other in ways we did not yet know were possible. “You’ll know soon enough,” we heard our mother utter softly, under her breath, as she tossed the magazines aside, although later she would deny that this was true. (But it was true, she had said it, we would know.)

At the end of the hall, in the room where she had locked up our most valuable things—the View-Master, the Electrolux, our collection of old Dime Detectives, the wedding china that she had set out only on Sundays (Why didn’t we use those dishes every day of the week? she would later ask)—there was hardly anything left at all. Empty boxes were scattered across the floor, and on top of the windowsill, lined up in a neat row, stood the remnants of some long-ago game of Monopoly: a pair of white dice, a tiny red hotel, the smallest green wooden house in the world.

Water had seeped through a crack in the ceiling and on the walls there were brown stains and words scrawled in red ink that made us turn away. “We will paint them over,” said our mother, and several months later, when we had money to buy paint, we did, but for years we could not get those words out of our heads.

THAT NIGHT, the night of our first day back in the world, the world from which we had earlier been sent away, we locked all the windows and doors and unrolled our blankets on the floor of the room at the foot of the stairs that looked out onto the street. Without thinking, we had sought out the room whose dimensions—long and narrow, with two windows on one end and a door at the other—most closely resembled those of the room in the barracks in the desert where we had lived during the war. Without thinking, we had configured ourselves exactly as we had in that long narrow room during the war: our mother in the far corner, away from the windows, the two of us lying head to toe along the wall on the opposite side of the room. Without thinking, we had chosen to sleep, together, in a room, with our mother, even though for more than three years we had been dreaming of the day when we could finally sleep, alone, in our own rooms, in our old house, our old white stucco house on the broad tree-lined street not far from the sea.

When the war is over, our mother had said.

As we tried to fall asleep in that white stucco house we could not stop thinking of the stories we had heard about the people who had come back before us. One man’s house had been doused with gasoline and set on fire while his family lay sleeping inside. Another man’s shed had been dynamited. There had been shootings in the valley, and gravestone defacings, and unannounced visitors knocking on doors in the middle of the night.

Nice to see you again, neighbor. How long do you plan on staying in town?

There aren’t any jobs here. I’d think about moving on if I were you.

People around here have got plans for you.

Plans, we wondered. What kinds of plans?

For what seemed like hours we lay awake beneath the blankets in our very best clothes—“We will not be caught dead in our pajamas,” our mother had said— waiting for the sound of gunfire, or a sharp rap on the door, but all we heard was the wind in the trees and the passing of cars outside on the street and finally, toward dawn, the familiar sound of our mother snoring.

WE WERE FREE NOW, free to go wherever we wanted to go, whenever we pleased. There were no more armed guards, no more searchlights, no more barbed-wire fences. Our mother went out to the market and brought back the first fresh pears we had eaten in years. She brought back eggs, and rice, and many cans of beans. When our ration books arrived, she told us, she would buy us fresh meat. She dug up the silver she had buried in the garden before we had left and she set the card table for three. The knives were still sharp. The forks and spoons had not lost their shine. As we sat down in our chairs she reminded us to eat slowly, with our mouths closed and our heads held high above our plates. “Don’t shovel,” she said.

But we could not help ourselves. We were hungry. We were ravenous. We ate quickly, greedily, as though we were still in the mess hall barracks, where whoever finished first got seconds and slow eaters were left behind to make do with only one serving.

Later on, in the evening, we turned on the radio and heard one of the same programs we had listened to before the war— The Green Hornet—and it was as if we had never been away at all. Nothing’s changed, we said to ourselves. The war had been an interruption, nothing more. We would pick up our lives where we had left off and go on. We would go back to school again. We would study hard, every day, to make up for lost time. We would seek out our old classmates. “Where were you?” they’d ask, or maybe they would just nod and say, “Hey.” We would join their clubs, after school, if they let us. We would listen to their music. We would dress just like they did. We would change our names to sound more like theirs. And if our mother called out to us on the street by our real names we would turn away and pretend not to know her. We would never be mistaken for the enemy again!

THE TOWN SEEMED much the same as before. Grove Street was still Grove, and Tyler Street still Tyler. The pharmacy was still there at the end of the block, only now it had a new sign. The mornings were still foggy. The parks were still green. Swings still hung down from the trees (swings will always hang down from the trees) and children—well fed, laughing, with their heads tossed back into the wind—still swung. The girls on the streets still wore black Mary Janes. Their mothers still wore black pumps. The old man in the rumpled gray fedora was still standing at the corner calling out for his lost dog, Isadora, who had run away long long ago. Perhaps he is standing there still.

In the windows of the houses on our block we saw the faces of our old friends and neighbors: the Gilroys and the Myers, the Leahys, the Wongs, the two elderly Miss O’Gradys, from whose yard not a single tossed ball had ever been returned. They had all seen us leave, at the beginning of the war, had peered out through their curtains as we walked down the street with our enormous overstuffed suitcases. But none of them came out, that morning, to wish us goodbye, or good luck, or ask us where it was we were going (we didn’t know). None of them waved.

They’re afraid, our mother had said.

Keep on walking.

Hold your head up.

Whatever you do, don’t look back.

Now when we ran into these same people on the street they turned away and pretended not to see us. Or they nodded in passing and said, “Gorgeous day,” as though we had not been away at all. Once in a while someone would stop and ask our mother where we had been—“Haven’t seen you for a while,” that person might say, or “It’s been ages ”—and our mother simply lifted her head and smiled and replied, “Oh, away.”

For it was true. We had gone away and now we were back but our father had yet to come join us. In his letters he said he would be released any day now, any day. But when that day would be he could not say for sure. It could be tomorrow, or two weeks from tomorrow. It could be in six months.

Would he know who we were when he stepped off the train? (We were older now, and darker, from all the years in the sun. We had grown.)

What would he be wearing?

Would he have any hair left?

What would his first words be? (I’d like to… I’d love a… You don’t know how I’ve…)

And was it true, what we’d heard? (Disloyal… a traitor… a great fan of the Emperor’s.)

LATE AT NIGHT, in the barracks, we used to lie awake on our cots and discuss chocolate. We used to dream of milk shakes, and sodas, and toasted ham-and-cheese sandwiches. We used to dream of home. Did they miss us? Were they talking about us? Had they even noticed we were gone? Would they look at us funny when we came back because of where we had been? And so it seemed like a dream to be able to walk down to the corner store and buy a bar of candy and an ice-cold bottle of Coke. The girl behind the counter was older now, and prettier. She wore dark red lipstick and was swaying back and forth to a song on the radio whose words we did not yet know. When she saw us she turned down the music and stared.

“Coke’s still a nickel,” she said softly.

On our way home we looked for the place on the sidewalk where we had once carved our initials but that place was no longer there. We drank our Coca-Colas. We ate our chocolates and tossed the wrappers into the wind. We plucked a handful of flowers from someone’s front yard. We counted Okies on the street. We counted Negroes. We counted gold stars in our neighbors’ front windows. At the corner we stopped and bought a copy of the Gazette for our mother, who had sworn off the papers long ago. All that war news just wears out my eyes.

But now, now she could not get enough of the headlines.

Shirley Temple had just gotten married?

“Impossible!”

No nylon stockings in the stores until spring?

“If I’d known I never would have bothered to come back.”

And no two-way stretch girdles?

We saw her look down at her stomach in despair.

“Just suck it in!”

“What do you think I’ve been doing all these years?”

We tossed the flowers into her lap and ran back out onto the street.

THE WAR RELOCATION AUTHORITY had sent each person home with train fare and twenty-five dollars in cash. “It doesn’t add up,” our mother had said. Three years. Five months. Twenty-five dollars. Why not thirtyfive, or forty? Why not one hundred? Why even bother at all? Twenty-five dollars, we later learned, was the same amount given to criminals on the day they were released from prison. With this money our mother bought us each one new pair of shoes a full size too large. “You’ll grow into them,” she told us as we stuffed wads of tissue into the toes. She bought us new underthings, and washcloths, and a thick cotton mattress that we took turns sleeping on in the front room at the foot of the stairs until the night the whiskey bottle shattered the window. After the night the whiskey bottle shattered the window we dragged the mattress upstairs and slept in the room that faced the back of the house—the room with the words on the walls. Over the words our mother taped pictures of flowers torn from an old nursery calendar, and across the windows she hung some split rice-sack curtains so no one could see inside, and in the evening, when it began to grow dark, she wandered through the front rooms of the house turning off the lights one by one so no one would know we were home.

EVERY DAY, all around us, more and more men were coming home from the war. They were fathers and brothers and husbands. They were cousins and neighbors. They were sons. They arrived, by the thousands, on the huge battle-scarred ships that sailed into the bay. Some of them had seen combat on Okinawa and New Guinea. Some had fought on Guadalcanal. Some had made D-day landings in the Marshalls, on Saipan, Tinian, Luzon, and Leyte. Some had been found, more dead than alive, in prison camps in Manchuria and Ofuna at the end of the war.

They shoved bamboo splinters under our fingernails and made us kneel for hours.

We had to stand at attention with our hands at our sides while they beat us.

We were just numbers to them, mere slaves to the Emperor. We didn’t even have names. I was 326. San byaku ni ju roku.

We had to make deep bows, even to the coolies and the rickshaw runners.

If we go easy on the Japs we’re crazy.

Best day of my life? The day Harry dropped that beautiful bomb.

There were victory parades in their honor, with horses and trumpets and great showers of confetti. Mayors on windy platforms stood up and gave speeches, and children in red, white, and blue waved the flag. Squadrons of returning B-29s swooped down out of the sky and flew overhead in perfect formation as down below, on the streets, the crowds roared and wept and welcomed the good men home.

We kept up with the stories in the papers. More Rescued Prisoners Tell of Japan’s Torture Camps. Some Forced to Wear Metal Bits, Others Starved to Death. Trapped Yanks Doused with Gasoline and Turned into Human Torches. We listened to the interviews on the radio. Tell me, soldier, has it made a big di ference to you, losing your leg? We looked at ourselves in the mirror and did not like what we saw: black hair, yellow skin, slanted eyes. The cruel face of the enemy.

We were guilty.

Just put it behind you.

No good.

Let it go.

A dangerous people.

You’re free now.

Who could never be trusted again.

All you have to do is behave.

On the street we tried to avoid our own reflections wherever we could. We turned away from shiny surfaces and storefront windows. We ignored the passing glances of strangers. What kind of “ese” are you, Japanese or Chinese?

AT SCHOOL our new teachers were kind to us, and the students in our classes polite, but at lunchtime they would not sit with us, or invite us to join in their games, and not a single one of our old friends from before— friends who had once shouted out to us, Your house or mine? every afternoon, after school, and in whose backyards we had dug holes and built forts, friends whose mothers (tall, slender women in sparkling white kitchens) had invited us to stay for supper (“We’ll call your mother”) and whose fathers, on clear nights, had shown us the stars (“Now stand still and look up!”), friends with whom we had gone skating, every winter, at IceLand, and whose birthdays (Jimmy Buchanan, May 26, Edison Wong, October 3, the Trudeau twins, Cora and Dora, June 29) we still remember, to this day—came up to us to say, “Welcome back,” or “Good to see you,” or even seemed to remember who we were.

Perhaps they were embarrassed—we had written to them (hello, how are you, it’s very hot here in the desert) but only one person (Elizabeth, Elizabeth, where had she gone?) had bothered to write back.

Or maybe they were afraid. (Later, we would learn that the postman, Mr. DeNardo, had told them that anyone who wrote to us was guilty of helping the enemy. “Those people bombed Pearl Harbor! They deserved what they got.”)

Perhaps they had never expected us to come back and had put us out of their minds once and for all long ago. One day we were there and the next day, poof, our names had been crossed off the roll books, our desks and lockers, reassigned, we were gone.

And so we mostly kept to ourselves. We moved silently through the halls with our eyes fixed on some imaginary point far off in the distance. If there was whispering behind us—and there was—we did not hear it. If the other students called out to us unkindly—and they did, not often, but often enough—we did not hear them. In class we sat in the back where we hoped we would not be noticed. (Keep your head down and don’t cause any trouble, we’d been told, weeks before, in a mess hall lecture on “How to Behave in the Outside World.” Speak only English. Do not walk down the street in groups of more than three, or gather in restaurants in groups of more than five. Do not draw attention to yourselves in any way.) We spoke softly and did not raise our hands, not even when we knew the answers. We followed the rules. We took tests. We wrote compositions. The Happiest Day of My Life. What I Did Over My Summer Vacation. What I Would Like to Be When I Grow Up (a fireman, a movie star, I’d like to be you!). We stared out the windows. From time to time we glanced at the clock (soon the bell would ring and it would be after school and we could go home). Always, we were polite.

We said yes and no and no problem.

We said thank you.

Go ahead.

After you.

Don’t mention it.

Don’t worry about it.

Don’t even think about it.

When our teachers asked us if everything was all right we nodded our heads and said, yes, of course, everything was fine.

If we did something wrong we made sure to say excuse me (excuse me for looking at you, excuse me for sitting here, excuse me for coming back). If we did something terribly wrong we immediately said we were sorry (I’m sorry I touched your arm, I didn’t mean to, it was an accident, I didn’t see it resting there so quietly, so beautifully, so perfectly, so irresistibly, on the edge of the desk, I lost my balance and brushed against it by mistake, I was standing too close, I wasn’t watching where I was going, somebody pushed me from behind, I never wanted to touch you, I have always wanted to touch you, I will never touch you again, I promise, I swear…).

After school we gathered our books and walked home along the clean, sunlit streets, past the yellow fire hydrants and the bright green lawns now covered with leaves. Sometimes groups of boys would appear out of nowhere and circle us slowly on their bicycles without saying a word. Sometimes we heard whistling behind us but when we turned around there was nobody there. Sometimes one of us would suddenly stop on the sidewalk and point to a neighbor’s front window. Wasn’t that our mother’s Electrolux Mrs. Leahy was pushing back and forth across her living room floor? Didn’t the Gilroys’ mohair sofa look awfully familiar? Hadn’t we seen that rolltop desk in Mr. Thigpen’s library somewhere before? One day we even thought we saw our father himself flapping his arms up and down like a stork in Mrs. Murphy’s pale pink bedroom—what on earth was he doing over there?—but it was only Chang, the Murphys’ new houseboy, plumping pillows.

AT NIGHT we often heard footsteps on the stairs. The sudden creaking of floorboards. Strange sounds coming from the kitchen. Somebody was opening the cupboard. Somebody was raiding the icebox. Somebody was whistling to the tune, “Let me straddle my old saddle beneath the western sky….” Somebody was tapping, softly, at the back door (It’s him!). We’d go out into the hall and see our mother standing in the darkness by the window in her thin cotton nightgown, peering out through a gap in the curtains. “Just keeping an eye on things,” she’d say. Or she would motion us over and point to the dark empty spot in our front yard. “Where’s my rosebush?” she’d whisper.

During the daytime she spent hours scrubbing the layers of dirt off the floors. “Who were these people?” she asked us again and again. She dusted and swept and cooked. She washed the windows with lemon juice and vinegar and replaced the broken glass panes with tin squares. On sunny afternoons she went out into the backyard in her work gloves and her floppy straw hat and she raked up the fallen leaves into piles, which we jumped in and scattered once more to the wind. She cleared the weeds from the overgrown pathways. She pruned back the hedges. She tore out the rotting trellis from the middle of the garden, which had seeded itself and gone wild. Deep down in the underbrush, she found things. A doll’s head. A lady’s black silk stocking. A stone Buddha lying facedown in the dirt. “So that’s where you were.” We lifted it for her gently, brushed off the fat belly, saw the enormous round head, uptilted, still laughing.

In the evening, as darkness fell and casseroles rose and men did or did not come home from the office, we often found her sitting on the high metal stool in the kitchen with her back to the window, slowly filing her nails.

“So quiet,” she’d say.

WE USED TO LIVE in the desert. We used to wake, every morning, to the blast of a siren. We used to stand in line for our meals three times a day. We used to stand in line for our mail. We used to stand in line to get coal. We used to stand in line whenever we had to shower or use the latrine. We used to hear the wind hissing day and night through the sagebrush. We used to hear coyotes. We used to hear every word spoken by our neighbors on the other side of the thin barrack wall. Where’s my razor, where’s my comb, who took my toothpaste… ? We used to steal lumber from the lumber pile when the guards were not looking. We used to steal gum from the canteen. We used to place nails on the tire tracks left behind by the Jeeps that made the rounds at the end of the day. We used to go swimming in the irrigation ditch. We used to play marbles. We used to play hopscotch. We used to play war. I’ll be MacArthur and you be the enemy! We used to try and imagine what it would be like when we finally returned home.

Our phone would ring off the hook. (“How was it?”)

Neighborhood ladies bearing angel food cakes would line up at our front door to welcome us back (“Yoo hoo, we know you’re in there!”).

On Saturday afternoons we’d arrive at the picture show just as the lights were going down and make everyone stand up in their seats to let us pass by (“Excuse me, pardon me, pardon me…”).

On Sundays we’d spend all day in the park flying kites.

We would accept all invitations. Go everywhere. Do everything, to make up for all the years we had missed while we were away. Yes, the world would be ours once again: warm days, blue skies, the endless green lawns, cold frosted glasses of pink lemonade, bicycles skidding across the gravel, little white dogs on long leashes with their noses pressed hard to the ground, the streetlamps coming on every evening at dusk, in the distance the clang of the trolley cars, small voices crying out, No, I won’t, the sound of screen doors slamming, the quick patter of footsteps running across driveways, mothers with wet hands—Mrs. Myer, Mrs. Woodruff, Mrs. Thomas Hale Cavanaugh—stomping out onto front porches and shouting, Just wait ’til your father gets home! BUT OF COURSE it did not happen like that. The days grew suddenly cool. The skies turned damp and gray. Children everywhere picked up their socks. They cleaned their rooms. Mr. Myer never came home (shot down on his eighth raid over Rabaul). Mr. Woodruff never came home (disappeared in Bataan during the first months of the war). Mr. Cavanaugh came home but he was not the same man—the man with the telescope who had once shown us the stars—as before.

“Gassed,” we’d heard one man say.

“Addicted to morphine.”

“Ran into him just the other day at the Safeway. That man’s shell-shocked. Doesn’t even know his own name.”

“It’s Daddy,” we imagined little Anna Cavanaugh whispering furiously into her father’s good ear.

“What? What was that you said?”

Then we remembered our own father, who had been taken in for questioning in his bathrobe and slippers on the night of Pearl Harbor, and we felt ashamed.

Is the Emperor a man or a god?

If a Japanese battleship is torpedoed in the Pacific do you feel happy or sad?

Which side do you think will win the war?

IN NOVEMBER the last of the leaves turned from yellow to brown and blew down in drifts from the trees. The nights were long and cold now and our money had almost run out. Most evenings for supper we ate cabbage and rice. Once a week, on Saturdays, we ate sardines from the bait shop. We used the same napkins for several days in a row. On the nights that we bathed we used the same bathwater. Our mother counted out every penny, every nickel and dime. She made up new rules. Change out of your street clothes the minute you come home from school. Don’t let the water run while brushing your teeth. Whatever you do, don’t waste. Save that bread bag. I’ll use it to wrap up your sandwich tomorrow. Save that piece of string. I’ll add it to my lovely string ball. Finish your carrots. Remember, there are children starving in Europe. Don’t throw away that rubber band. That tin can. That drop of fat. That sliver of soap. When our shoes began to wear thin before we had grown into them she fitted them with pieces of cardboard and told us to avoid any puddles that might lie in our way. The next day she began looking for work.

The ads in the papers all said help wanted, will train, but wherever she went she was turned down. “The position’s just been filled,” she was told again and again. Or, “We wouldn’t want to upset the other employees.” At the department store where she had once bought all her hats and silk stockings they would not hire her as a cashier because they were afraid of offending the customers. Instead they offered her work adding up sales slips in a small dark room in the back where no one could see her but she politely declined. “I was afraid I’d ruin my eyes back there,” she told us. “I was afraid I might accidentally remember who I was and… offend myself.”

The following week she found a job in a shirt factory sewing on sleeves but was fired after one day. Couldn’t keep my seams straight. She left an application at the neighborhood drugstore. I thought the owner might remember me. Finally she began cleaning house for some of the wealthy families who lived up in the hills. The work, she insisted, was not hard. You just smile and say yes ma’am and no ma’am and do as you’re told. If she was asked to scrub the floors she got down on her hands and knees and she scrubbed the floors. If the leaves of the miniature indoor tree needed dusting she picked up a damp rag and dusted the tiny green leaves one by one. If the lady of the house was lonely and wanted to talk our mother put down her rag for a moment and listened. “I know what you mean,” she might reply. Or, “That’s a shame.” She was friendly, she told us, but not too friendly. If you’re too friendly they’ll think you think you’re better than they are.

On her days off she took in washing and ironing to make a few extra dollars. She strung up clotheslines across the backyard and whenever we looked out the window we could see the private undergarments of people we did not know—the lonely shipping heir, the jovial bachelor doctor, the glamorous war widow whose young husband had died on Omaha Beach (“Introduce her to them!” we’d suggested to our mother as she hung up their things side by side, to which she had replied, “It’s too soon”)—floating ghostlike between the bare black branches of the trees.

With the money she earned our mother bought new lace curtains for the windows that faced out onto the street. She polished the rusty brass knocker. She set out a welcome mat on the steps by the front door. Little by little, she accumulated things. One of her employers gave her a set of dishes and a camel’s hair coat that looked as though it had never been worn. Someone else gave her two silver candlesticks, which she took to the pawnshop the very next day. At the Salvation Army she bought us our own dressers and beds and from that day on we each slept alone—our mother, downstairs, in the bedroom she had once shared with our father, and the two of us, by ourselves, in our old rooms upstairs.

THE TELEGRAM WAS DELIVERED on a foggy wet morning in December. Leaving Santa Fe Friday. Arrive Sunday, 3 p.m. Love, Papa.

For the next several days we did nothing but wait for the hours to pass. We went to school. We came home. We stared at the clock. He’s in Albuquerque now. He’s in Flagsta f. He’s crossing the Mojave…. Our mother cleaned and she cooked. She carried the telegram with her, in her pocket, wherever she went—to work, to the post office, to the market to buy bread. Sometimes, in the middle of supper, she pulled it out and examined it under the light just to make sure that the words were still there, or that they had not mysteriously rearranged themselves, while she was not looking, into some other message.

“What if it’s not real?” she asked us. Or had been delivered to our house by mistake? Or sent to us, as a joke, by the same man who called up in the middle of the night to tell us where we could go?

It’s real, we told her. No joke.

ON SUNDAY, near dusk, our father’s train pulled into the station. A light rain was falling and the windows of the train were streaked with water and soot and all we could see on the other side of the glass were dark shapes moving. Then the train came to a stop and a small stooped man carrying an old cardboard suitcase stepped out of the last car. His face was lined with wrinkles. His suit was faded and worn. His head was bare. He moved slowly, carefully, with the aid of a cane, a cane we had never seen before. Although we had been waiting for this moment, the moment of our father’s return, for more than four years now, when we finally saw him standing there before us on the platform we did not know what to think, what to do. We did not run up to him. We did not wave our hands wildly back and forth and shout out Over here! to him. And when our mother pushed us gently, but firmly, from behind, and whispered, Go to him, all we could do was stare down at our shoes, unable to move. Because the man who stood there before us was not our father. He was somebody else, a stranger who had been sent back in our father’s place. That’s not him, we said to our mother, That’s not him, but our mother no longer seemed to hear us.

He put down his suitcase and looked at her.

“Did you… ” she said.

“Every day,” he replied. Then he got down on his knees and he took us into his arms and over and over again, he uttered our names, but still we could not be sure it was him.

OUR FATHER, the father we remembered, and had dreamed of, almost nightly, all through the years of the war, was handsome and strong. He moved quickly, surely, with his head held high in the air. He liked to draw for us. He liked to sing for us. He liked to laugh. The man who came back on the train looked much older than his fifty-six years. He wore bright white dentures, and he’d lost the last of his hair. Whenever we put our arms around him we could feel his ribs through the cloth of his shirt. He did not draw for us, or sing songs for us in his wobbly, off-key voice. He did not read us stories. On Sunday afternoons, when we were bored and could think of nothing to do, he did not tie pieces of bent tin onto twigs and put on shadow plays for us from behind hanging white sheets. He did not make us stilts.

Of course, our mother was quick to point out, we were too old now for stilts, too old to be read to, too old for shadow plays from behind hanging white sheets.

Yes, yes, yes, we replied, and too old to laugh!

He never said a word to us about the years he’d been away. Not one word. He never talked about politics, or his arrest, or how he had lost all his teeth. He never mentioned his loyalty hearing before the Alien Enemy Control Unit. He never told us what it was, exactly, he’d been accused of. Sabotage? Selling secrets to the enemy? Conspiring to overthrow the government? Was he guilty as charged? Was he innocent? (Was he even there at all?) We didn’t know. We didn’t want to know. We never asked. All we wanted to do, now that we were back in the world, was forget.

IN THE BEGINNING he wandered slowly from one room to the next, picking up objects and looking at them in bewilderment and then putting them back down again. “I don’t recognize a thing,” we heard him whisper. In the afternoon he lay down on the couch and let himself drift off into sleep only to awaken, moments later, with a start, not knowing where he was. He sat up and shouted out our names and we came running. “What is it?” we asked him. “What’s wrong?” He needed to see us, he said. He needed to see our faces. Otherwise he would never know if he was really awake. On the train, he told us later, he had dreamed again and again that he’d fallen asleep and missed his stop.

He wore the same loose baggy trousers every day and was convinced that someone was watching the house. He did not like to use the telephone—You never know who might be listening—or to eat out in public. He rarely spoke to anyone unless he was spoken to first. Why go looking for trouble? He was suspicious of everyone: the newspaper boy, the door-to-door salesman, the little old lady who waved to us every day as we passed by her house on our way home from school. Any one of these people, he warned us, could be an informer.

They just don’t like us. That’s just the way it is.

Never tell them more than you have to.

And don’t think, for a minute, that they’re your friend.

Little things—the barking of a neighbor’s dog, a misplaced pen, an unanticipated delay of any sort—could send him into a rage. One afternoon, after a long wait at the bank, he pushed his way to the front of the line and began pounding on the floor with his cane. “I don’t have all day!” he cried out. We turned away and pretended not to know him. None of the other customers in line said a word. “You think they care?” he shouted at us as we slowly made our way toward the door. We covered our ears with our hands and kept on walking.

HE NEVER WENT BACK to work. The company that had employed him before the war had been liquidated right after Pearl Harbor and there was no job for him to return to. Nobody else would hire him: he was an old man, his health was not good, he had just come back from a camp for dangerous enemy aliens. And so he stayed at home, day after day, poring over the newspaper with a magnifying glass and scribbling down words in a little blue notebook. Sometimes he went out into the yard and watered the grass, or he swept off the front porch. And every afternoon, when we came home from school, he fixed us a snack: jelly and crackers, or a plate full of apples carefully peeled and sliced.

He always seemed happy to see us. “So tell me the news,” he called out to us the moment we walked through the door. We sat with him in the kitchen and talked about school. The weather. The neighbors. The same things we’d talked about before the war. Nothing more. He leaned forward in his chair as though he were listening but no matter what we said—a moth flew into Miss Campbell’s ear during dictation, Donald Harzbecker has been grounded for life—his response was the same. “Is that so?”

Always, it seemed, he had something else on his mind.

Maybe he was thinking of our mother. Maybe he missed her and was hoping she’d come home from work soon. Maybe he was trying to imagine her, at that very moment, as she gazed back at her own reflection for the hundredth time in the toilet bowl of some stranger. Still there? Or perhaps he was remembering the promise he’d made to her, years before, right after they’d first married—You’ll never have to work —and he felt bad that he hadn’t come through. There were heavy blue veins around her ankles now, and her hands were red and rough, and every evening when she climbed up the front steps her feet seemed to move more slowly than they had the evening before. Or it is possible he wasn’t thinking of our mother at all. It is possible he was troubled by something he’d read in the paper earlier that morning— Lend Lease Diapers Used as Turbans by African Sheikhs! or Jap Emperor Repudiates Own Divinity!—and he’d had about as much news as he could take for one day.

BIRDSONG GREW FASTER, and shriller, and the chill slowly lifted from the air. Our mother rose early every morning and made us breakfast, then tied a white scarf over her head and hurried off to catch the next bus. She wore a shapeless black dress, sensible shoes, no lipstick. In a large brown shopping bag she carried an assortment of brushes and rags. Got to make it all shine. She moved briskly and did not complain. “Be good,” she called out to us on her way out the door.

It was a relief, she told us years later, to wake up every morning and have someplace to go.

As the days grew longer our father began spending more and more time alone in his room. He stopped reading the newspaper. He no longer listened to Dr. I.Q. with us on the radio. “There’s already enough noise in my head,” he explained. The handwriting in his notebook grew smaller and fainter and then disappeared from the page altogether. Now whenever we passed by his door we saw him sitting on the edge of his bed with his hands in his lap, staring out through the window as though he were waiting for something to happen. Sometimes he’d get dressed and put on his coat but he could not make himself walk out the front door.

Every once in a while we’d try bringing him his hat and inviting him to come out with us for a walk but he just smiled and waved us away. “You people go on ahead,” he said.

In the evening he often went to bed early, at seven, right after supper—Might as well get the day over with—but he slept poorly and woke often from the same recurring dream: It was five minutes past curfew and he was trapped outside, in the world, on the wrong side of the fence. “I’ve got to get back,” he’d wake up shouting.

“You’re home now,” our mother would remind him. “It’s all right. You can stay.”

THE FIRST SIGNS of spring: mild days, buds in the fruit trees, no more long lists of the dead. The mothers were all back in the kitchen now. The last of the fathers on our block—those who could—had come home, they were safe. The sun was in its place. There, up above us, but not too high. Strength was slowly returning. Speech was beginning to come back. In the school yard. At the park. On the street. They were calling out to us now. Not many of them. Just a few.

At first we pretended not to hear them, but after a while we could no longer resist. We turned around and nodded, we smiled, then continued on our way.

For two weeks in April the magnolia trees blossomed with pale white flowers and the skies were blue and clear. Purple hyacinths and narcissus came up in the garden, and tall stalks of mint, and every evening, at dusk, we wandered out into the yard and watched the starlings gathering in the trees. At night we slept with the windows wide open, and in our dreams we could hear singing and laughter and the endless turning of the leaves in the wind and in the morning, when we woke, for one brief moment we could almost forget we had ever been away.

In May, when the heat settled in and roses everywhere burst into bloom, we wandered the streets every day after school in search of the rosebush our mother had once planted in our front yard. At first we saw it wherever we looked—in the Gilroys’ front yard, and the Myers’, and lying low among the rhododendrons in the prize-winning garden of the Misses O’Grady—but upon closer inspection none of these rosebushes turned out to be ours. They were too big, or too small, or their petals too pale, and after a while we gave up and turned our attention to other things. But we never stopped believing that somewhere out there, in some stranger’s backyard, our mother’s rosebush was blossoming madly, wildly, pressing one perfect red flower after another out into the late afternoon light.