“Practiced by a few eccentric devotees,” he agreed. “Like swordplay.”
“I could keep the boy,” she heard herself cry.
“No,” he said, perhaps sparing her, perhaps turning the remainder of her life to ash.
RELIC AND TYPE
JAY’S GRANDSON — his only child’s only child — married a young woman born in Kyoto. Mika had an enchanting chin, like a little teaspoon. She wore sweet pastel suits with bits of lace creeping out of their Vs. Who would believe that she spent her days making money from money? The young couple occupied an apartment in Tokyo where appliances folded up to fit inside other appliances. Woody, too, was an investment analyst.
“I think I’ll take up Japanese,” Jay told his daughter on the flight home from the wedding. She looked at him. At your age! — but she didn’t say that. She was as tactful as his late wife, Jay thought, his eyes briefly stinging: Wellesley girls both. His daughter also didn’t point out that there was no need for so heroic an effort — the young couple was fluently bilingual, and if they had children the hybrids would be brought up bilingual, too; and anyway, how often would Jay lay eyes on those children? She and her husband were hale enough to make the exhausting trip from Godolphin to Tokyo and back two or three times a year. Not Jay. Nor did his daughter mention that language study required an unimpaired memory. At seventy-five, Jay had difficulty recalling the names of traded Red Sox players, and it was a good thing that name tags had been provided to the members of his Class for their fiftieth reunion. At the Night at Pops the lyrics to “Fair Harvard” had also been handed out, another aid to recollection. The Class stood and sang:
O Relic and Type of our ancestors’ worth,
That hast long kept their memory warm,
First flow’r of their wilderness! Star of their night!
Calm rising thro’ change and thro’ storm.
Jay still had a respectable baritone. Sonny Fessel, his old roommate, who had made a fortune in rhinoplasty, could barely manage a croak. But Jay, despite his strong voice, wasn’t altogether well. He suffered from a blood disorder. The disease was indolent now, but who knew what it had in mind. And his pressure was high.
The ivory hands of the stewardess removed his tray. “I’m looking for something to do,” he explained to his daughter. He was retired from a career as an actuary that had ended with an honorable stint as state insurance commissioner (Woody had inherited Jay’s skill with numbers; “numeracy,” they called it these days). He’d given up his weekly squash game when the club adopted the new, soft ball and enlarged the old courts. His town, Godolphin, a leafy wedge of Boston, was governed by a town meeting — a glorious circus — but its week-long sessions occurred only twice a year. The rituals of Judaism left him cold. His immigrant grandfather wrapped in a tallith was a sentimental memory, not a model. His father’s religious involvement had begun and ended with Brotherhood breakfasts, and Jay himself had quit Sunday school the day after his bar mitzvah. But now … he was dawdling through his days, his appetite flat, his blood thin. The study of anything might be a tonic.
Once back home he investigated workshops for elders at Godolphin High School. Bookbinding? Stained glass? He considered the nonsectarian courses given at the temple: Is Zionism Dead? maybe, or Great Jewish Women, taught by the rabbi herself, a blonde with an old-fashioned pageboy haircut. But Japanese I, offered at the Godolphin Language Center, trumped Theodor Herzl and Rosa Luxemburg. When Jay read the course description he breathed again the scent and heard the sounds of his recent week in Japan — blossoming, rustling trees; glowing incense sticks at noisy city shrines; a soupy smell at a particular noodle shop where “The Girl From Impanema” had been playing on a radio next to the register. He remembered fabrics, too. On the Philosopher’s Walk, in Kyoto, he had encountered a group of uniformed children who did not separate to let him pass but instead surrounded him, engulfed him in their soft navy serge. His new granddaughter’s grandmother, a handsome woman with hair dyed deep brown, had come to the wedding in a traditional garment — crimson silk, with a cream sash. He almost hadn’t recognized her when the family met in a restaurant a few days later — she was wearing her everyday pants and turtleneck then. Her English was serviceable. “Hoody is gentle and kind,” she said to Jay. We are so pleased, she implied.
“Mika is a shaineh maideleh,” he said, dredging up two of his fifty Yiddish words. He grinned — an air of mischief had always endeared him to women. “A lovely girl,” he said, though he failed to tell her he was translating. She would think her hard-won English defective; oh well.
THE AUSTERE BEAUTY of the teacher of Japanese I eclipsed Mika’s prettiness as the sun the moon. Nakabuta-sensei remained standing for the entire ninety minutes of the first weekly class. Twelve pupils around a table stared up at her. The classroom in this converted hilltop mansion looked out across the river at Cambridge, at the brick Houses of Harvard, with their bell towers. The leftmost House had sheltered Jay and Sonny Fessel.
“Japanese grammar,” Nakabuta told them in her rich, unaccented English, “will seem at first incomprehensible. Please forget your attachment to plurals. Please divorce yourself from pronouns. Try to float like a lotus on our pond of suggestion and indirectness.”
A few cowed pupils dropped out early in the semester. Those who hung on were businessmen or scientists or programmers whose work took them frequently to Japan, or they were young people who had lived for a while in the country and could conduct a slangy conversation. Jay was a category unto himself: the tall old man with a few streaks of red in his white hair, stains refusing to fade; the codger who hoped to converse with descendants as yet unconceived.
In July the young couple came to Godolphin to visit Jay’s daughter and son-in-law. And Jay, too, of course. Jay told Mika, in Japanese, that warm weather had arrived early in Massachusetts next spring; no, last spring; no, this spring. The tomatoes were delicious, weren’t they. He inquired after her father and mother and grandmother, chichi and haha and baba, remembering too late that these appellations were overfamiliar. She replied that her family’s health was good, thanks, and she was sorry to see he was using a cane. She spoke in considerately slow Japanese. Ah, just his arthritis attacking, he explained; flaring up was the phrase he would have preferred, but you said the words you knew, which were not always the ones you meant.
THE SECOND YEAR, Sugiyama-sensei, small and plain, introduced the class to the passive mood, which sometimes implied reluctance and sometimes even exploitation. She gave vocabulary quizzes every week, and taught the students to count strokes when they were learning to write kanji — like slaves counting lashes, Jay thought. She counseled them to practice the ideograms without paper and pencil, to limn the things with their fingertips on any convenient surface.
During that summer’s visit Jay took the pregnant Mika for several walks around Godolphin. His arthritis was better and he didn’t need the cane. He showed her the apartment building he’d grown up in, the park he’d played ball in, the high school he’d graduated from — all outwardly unchanged through the years. The deli even is still doing business, he reported, his syntax correct in Japanese and faithful to Yiddish, too. The population was not so diverse when I was a boy, he managed to say, though the adjective he used really meant “various.” We were then only Jews and Irish and … he didn’t know how to say Protestants, so he killed them off. Now we are Russian, and also Vietnamese, and also South American, and many others there is no necessity to mention, the entire final phrase contained in a one-syllable word that he unfortunately mispositioned. Mika nodded anyway, and Jay felt proud of himself, proud of all he’d learned from Sugiyama-sensei. Sugiyama’s devotion to teaching Japanese had made up for her own rather awkward English: burn, barn, and bun, on her tongue, were all the same word.