From the time I moved here, I was very fortunate to understand the nature of these relations. Even when I received welcome cards and sweets baskets from my immediate neighbors, I judged the exact scale of what an appropriate response should be, that to reply with anything but the quiet simplicity of a gracious note would be to ruin the delicate and fragile balance. And so this is exactly what I did, in the form of expensive, heavy-stock cards, each of which I took great care to write in my best hand. Each brief thank-you was different, though saying the same thing, and I know that this helped me gain quick acceptance from my Mountview neighbors, especially given my being a foreigner and a Japanese. And as I’ve already intimated, they all seemed particularly surprised and pleased that I hadn’t run over to their houses with wrapped presents and invitations and hopeful, clinging embraces; in fact, I must have given them the reassuring thought of how safe they actually were, how shielded, that an interloper might immediately recognize and so heed the rules of their houses.
But Mary Burns, somehow, decided to breach that peace with me. I was planting pachysandra in fresh beds beside the driveway, when I heard someone say, “Do you always work so hard?”
I turned around and saw a woman in faded red slacks and a sleeveless white blouse, a white velvety band holding back her sliver-streaked flaxen hair. She stood where the drive met the street. She wore delicate suede loafers and no socks, and I recall noting the differences in skin tone between her arms and shoulders and neck, and the narrow white shock of her ankles.
“You’ve been working all weekend, I know,” she said, her hands locked behind her in an almost girlish pose. “And last weekend, too. Never anybody to help.”
I stood up and brushed the moist sod from my knees. For the last few weekends, I’d been digging up the grass along the driveway, turning it over, breaking it down, and was only now planting. I recognized her face, but of course I didn’t know who she was, and when she introduced herself by saying we were neighbors, I was immediately ashamed. I fumbled with my work gloves to shake her hand.
“Will you allow me to learn your name?” she asked with mirth.
“I’m very sorry,” I said, feeling completely disheveled. “I am Franklin Hata.”
“You’re the doctor,” she said knowingly, releasing her firm handshake.
“No, I’m not,” I told her. “People call me Doc, but I’m not a physician. I own the medical supply store in the village. Many years ago some customers and other merchants got to calling me that, and somehow it stuck. I wish sometimes it wasn’t so, but nobody seems to want to call me Franklin. I don’t mind, but I would never wish to mislead anyone.”
“You’re not a doctor?” she said, still somewhat confused. She had stepped onto the grass of the front lawn, right onto the property. She was casually surveying the house, which at that point appeared, at least on view from the street, to have been totally refurbished. “You know, I would have thought you were a doctor anyway.”
“Many doctors live in this neighborhood.”
“Yes, they do,” she answered ruefully. “Many, many doctors. I used to know most all of them. Since my children left home, I don’t know them anymore, especially the younger ones. My husband was a doctor. He’s dead now.”
“I’m sorry,” I replied. Then I said, “May I ask, was he at Deacon or County?”
“At Deacon. He was also consulting to County, just after it opened. That’s when he died. Dr. Bradley Burns. He was a cardiologist. Actually, he was chief of the unit.”
I told her, “I’m sorry I never met him. I don’t really meet the doctors through my business. There’s certainly no reason for them to concern themselves with people like me. He must have been very impressive, to be head of cardiology.”
“He certainly was,” she said plainly. And then: “You could say impressive was his middle name.”
I didn’t immediately reply, for I was somewhat surprised by her tone, which seemed without a hint of longing or pride.
“I was saying,” she went on, “that I would have thought you were a doctor, nickname or not. You do live in a doctor’s kind of house.”
“Perhaps, yes.”
“But I think it’s more that you have the movements and gestures of one. I haven’t been spying on you, but I have noticed that you work like someone assured, confident, even as you put in your ground cover. You have that doctor’s way, beyond any further questioning.”
“Lately I’ve had much practice in this field,” I said to her, toeing at the dirt.
She liked this and laughed. “I never see people here working in their yards. It would be nice if they did. But I often see that you do, at least whenever I’m walking by.”
“I enjoy it,” I told her, which was mostly the truth. I did find the work pleasing, basic and honest, but I didn’t have any extra money for gardeners and groundskeepers back then, and so there were compelling reasons to find myself in the yard, kneeling and digging and rooting.
“My late husband would never do anything,” she said, her arms crossed in front of her now. “He hated both the fact and the idea of working outside. That was fine, of course. But he always tried to argue about people having a certain expertise. He was a heart doctor, and he was good at that. Others did bookkeeping well, or they made a good doughnut or French bread, or they knew how to dig a ditch. It was when you tried doing someone else’s specialty, in his opinion, that you courted real trouble. But I must admit I always thought he was just being lazy.”
She smiled deeply, if not fondly, and she touched my arm as if to make a last, silent point. The contact surprised me. And then I realized at that moment how unusual it was that we were standing there at the head of the driveway, talking and joking and going on. In this area of expansive two- and three-acre lots, there is no such thing as gabbing over a hedge. There is too much buffer of fine landscaping and natural vegetation, of whitewashed horse fence and antiqued stone walls, that it’s rare to see anyone outside, much less two people on the perimeter of a property, talking or socializing. But you could have driven by and seen us, these two neighborhood folks on a late spring day, a man and a woman conversing with leisure and calm, and it didn’t seem that Mary Burns held any cares of being sighted, pointing down the street to her house and asking me for a tour of my front garden, doing nothing to camouflage herself or otherwise hide. Of course, why should she have? She was a widow, I a bachelor (if a father), both of us well into our middle years, and to step together among the drooping peonies was as innocent as any Sunday excursion in a botanical park. And yet I felt the burden of justification, of having a necessary reason for being with her, besides simply enjoying the newfound company.
Which I was. As she examined the foliage and flowers on either side of the front entrance, I found myself regarding her. She was quite easy to look at, her coloring pale and soft and falling in a certain range, her light hair and her light skin and the milky, faded color of her eyes. While moving steadily through my plants, inspecting, commenting, she described her own garden and the troubles she was having with caterpillars and leaf-eating beetles, wishing aloud that her plants were as vigorous, and I suddenly realized I was trailing quite closely behind her, as if drawn in by the air of her wake. It wasn’t so much that I found her so pretty or attractive, which I would often come to hear about her from acquaintances like Renny Banerjee or the fellows at Murasan’s, for at the time I didn’t fully know how to look at a Western woman and immediately appreciate what should be beautiful and prized. They all seemed generally tall, and with narrow faces, sharp and high about the nose, which seemed to lead them all about. I know that I had my own conceptions of female comeliness, those naturally developed in the years of my young manhood. But ever since my decision to leave Japan for good, I hadn’t wished to think at length about women and intimate relations and companionship, for I knew there would be myriad difficulties ahead of me, in setting up my small bit of commerce, and other things in life. This may sound like an excuse, and perhaps even a little sad, but it’s hard for others to know how consuming one’s arrival in a new land can be, how it will take up every last resource of spirit, which too often can lead to the detriment of most everything else.