Mas traced the back of his dentures with his tongue. This Lloyd Jensen was an amateur. For the length of his body, it seemed that his brain should be much bigger. Obviously, Mari wanted to make sure that her father got a big dose of bachi, retribution, for all those times he had left the house with no word.
“Sure she come back,” Mas said.
Lloyd didn’t seem comforted by Mas’s words. “Takeo needs his light treatments. What the hell is she thinking?”
Mas stayed silent.
“You don’t know what’s been going on, do you? Not any of it.”
Mas shook his head, not knowing if he wanted to.
They went into the tiny kitchen, where Lloyd boiled water for tea and Mas sat at a small wooden table. Lloyd removed a flowered canister from the refrigerator-a cylindrical tin that reminded Mas of one that Chizuko once had. He poured loose green tea, which looked like dried grass cuttings, into a small teapot. Mas was surprised. He thought for sure the son-in-law would have thrown a couple of tea bags in boiling water.
“Jaundice,” Lloyd finally said. He put two large ceramic cups, the kind that sushi bars use, steaming with hot tea on the table.
“Huh?”
“Takeo was born jaundiced.” Lloyd sat back on a wooden chair that creaked from his weight. “His liver was unable to break down his bilirubin, so we’ve had to use an ultraviolet lamp.”
Mas couldn’t figure out what his son-in-law was telling him.
Lloyd tried again. “It’s a disorder where the skin, eye whites, are all yellow.”
Mas nodded. “Sure, Mari had that.”
“But this was a serious case. He may even need a blood transfusion.”
Blood transfusion? A little baby? Mas took a sip of the green tea. The heat burned his tongue, and he was happy for it. Mas couldn’t help but wonder if his being a hibakusha, an atomic bomb survivor, had anything to do with his grandson’s health problems. Two generations removed from the Bomb-could there still be a connection? Impossible, thought Mas.
“So dat why Mari call me in the first place?”
“No, it was the garden. It’s all about the garden.”
Lloyd went to the overloaded desk, shuffled some papers, and finally drew out a skinny book and a stack of photographs looped together by a rubber band. He leafed through the book and held two pages open toward Mas, who pulled down his glasses from the top of his head. It was a drawing of a curved light-blue pond surrounded by green and pink trees, most likely cherry blossoms.
In the center of the pond was an orange torii, a giant gate that reminded Mas of the one at Miyajima, an island not far from his family’s house in Hiroshima.
“ Brooklyn Botanic Garden,” Lloyd said.
“Your garden?”
Lloyd laughed. “No, I wish. It was built a long time ago. One of the first Japanese gardens in the U.S., around 1915. It’s only about five blocks from here.”
Mas traced the outline of the pond with his left index finger, a week’s worth of dirt still left underneath his fingernail. “ Kokoro, ” he said without thinking.
“Yes, yes.” Lloyd almost dropped his tea mug. “The shape of the pond.”
“Dis kokoro shape famous.” At least that’s what Mas learned from a few classes attended at the gardeners’ federation in L.A.
“ Kokoro, the Chinese character for heart, right?”
Heart? Mas didn’t put kokoro in the same category as heart. Kokoro didn’t live in the chest, but in the gut, and from there, it burned throughout one’s body. “You knowsu Japanese?”
“Never really studied in school, but I’m going to have to take at least two years’ worth for my doctorate-that is, when I can go back to school again. I’m planning to do my dissertation on Takeo Shiota, this garden’s designer. That’s his photo up there.” Lloyd pointed to the image of the Japanese man in the straw hat.
Mas couldn’t follow all of Lloyd’s words, but recognized the name. “Takeo?”
Lloyd smiled. “Yes,” he said, “like our Takeo.” He then paused and narrowed his eyes. “Damn, it’s one thing for her to have a meltdown, but why take Takeo with her?”
Mas didn’t know whether to defend Mari or add his two cents about his daughter’s mood swings. He chose instead to play it safe and keep his mouth shut.
“She doesn’t sleep well, you know,” the son-in-law continued. “Has nightmares but can’t remember any of them. She says it runs in the family.”
That it did, with both Mas and Chizuko. Chizuko would periodically wail and cry in her sleep, but wouldn’t recall anything the next morning. It was as if she exorcised all her demons from her life in Japan in the other world behind closed eyes. Lately Mas was remembering more and more of his own nightmares, which he considered more of a curse than any kind of illumination.
“Garden, youzu talk about garden.” Mas attempted to change the subject.
“Oh, the garden.” Lloyd removed the rubber band from the stack of photographs. “This is my garden.”
The first shots were of a dirt hole, a residential excavation next to an odd mansion with a pagoda-style roof above a frame like the Craftsman houses in Pasadena. In later photographs, the cement bottom of a koi pond had surfaced, and cherry blossom trees, their roots bundled in burlap, had been brought in. A pile of rocks was stacked in a corner. Where had they gotten their rocks? wondered Mas. These days even rocks were worth a premium.
“This Japanese garden had been covered over during World War Two,” Lloyd said. “It’s part of an estate that was once owned by a shipping magnate, Henry Waxley.”
Apparently Henry Waxley was one of those men who owned companies that owned more companies. Lloyd even had a book about Waxley’s life. It didn’t matter that Mas had never heard of him. Men that powerful chose to rule in the shadows-that way they could move around and make their deals without much public fanfare. By the time regular people figured out what had happened, it was too late.
To be closer to his business empire, Waxley, his wife, and their newborn daughter had left the estate to move to Manhattan in the thirties, Lloyd explained. Distant relatives moved in and bought the house, but lost the property after a particularly nasty divorce.
Happened all the time, thought Mas. He had heard about farmers losing their acreage after these family breakups.
“So new owners took over in the forties.” Lloyd took another sip of his tea. “After one of their cherry blossom trees was cut down in the middle of the night, they decided that it might be better to get rid of the entire garden, during the war at least. Too many people against anything Japanese.”
The next photo showed a tall, Asian-looking elderly man in a tasteful gray suit, the brim of a felt hat darkening the left side of his face. “This is the man who took over the house last year. My boss, Kazzy.”
“Kazzy?” That was a nickname only an American-born Nisei would own.
“Short for Kazuhiko. Kazuhiko Ouchi. They also call him K- san. The Waxley estate is where his parents had worked. His mother was a maid; his father, the gardener.”
Mas looked closely at the man’s face. “Don’t look Japanese.”
“He’s hapa.”
“ Hapa, ” Mas repeated. He was surprised that Lloyd knew the term, which meant half Japanese, half something else. There were tons of hapa today (Takeo, for example), but from Mas’s generation? He didn’t know of any in L.A., but then hadn’t there been laws in California against Japanese marrying hakujin before World War II?
“Even has blue eyes,” added Lloyd.
A blue-eyed Japanese? Mas took a second look at the man’s face. Sure enough, the right eye seemed to have a glint of silver metal in it.
“His mother was Irish. His father was from Nagano Prefecture, Japanese Alps. Kazzy was born in the Waxley House. His mother died when he was young, and then his father shortly thereafter. He was on his own at age twelve. Became a multimillionaire in textiles, mostly silk. All after the war.”