XXVI
Days would go by at the White House; Charlie would look back at them and try to remember what he’d done, only to discover he had no idea. Sometimes his head would come up after what he thought were a couple of days, and he would look at the calendar and see three weeks had passed. Where did they escape to? What had he been dealing with while they slipped through his fingers?
He noticed Christmas of 1951-he spent that time with his family. But the only way he really noticed it was 1952 was by peeling the cellophane off the calendar a White House clerk left on his desk. Another year! Not just another year, but another election year. Joe Steele had already had five terms. It was like talking about five drinks. Once you’d had that many, what was one more?
“He is going to run again, then?” Esther asked when Charlie came home with the astonishing news that 1952 had arrived after all.
“I sure don’t see any signs that he won’t,” Charlie said. “But you know, going in these days is the strangest thing I’ve ever done.”
“How do you mean?”
“It feels like riding on a merry-go-round,” Charlie answered. His wife gave him a quizzical look, or maybe just one that meant he was full of hops. “It does,” he insisted. “That’s the best way I know how to put it. You climb on, and it starts to go, and pretty soon it’s up to speed. You spin round and round, and round and round, and round and round some more.”
Esther’s finger spun round and round, by her right ear. Charlie stuck out his tongue at her. “Sorry,” she said-a lie if he’d ever heard one. “But you aren’t making any sense.”
“You didn’t let me finish. So the merry-go-round turns at that one speed for most of the ride. But when it’s heading toward time for your bunch to get off and the next bunch to get on, the merry-go-round doesn’t stop all at once. It slows down a little bit at a time. And when you’re on it, at first you don’t even notice, ’cause you’re still moving. But then you see things going around in slow motion instead of regular speed, and you know what’s going on. And that’s what the White House feels like these days.”
“Oh. Okay, now I see what you mean,” Esther said. “Well, we’ve had twenty years of King Stork. A term or two of King Log might not be so bad.” Aesop’s fables had been a hit with Sarah and then again with Pat. Reading the stories over and over lodged them in Esther’s head and Charlie’s, too.
“Maybe,” Charlie said. “Or maybe he’ll go on another kick instead. For a while, I thought who-lost-China? would be it, but he seems to have lost interest in that.”
“I’ll tell you the one that scared me,” Esther said. “Einstein. . died, and then some of the other physicists who Joe Steele thought didn’t speak up, they. . died, too.”
“I remember,” Charlie said unhappily. That discreet pause conveyed a world of meaning.
“But I don’t know if you were paying attention to the names. Oppenheimer-a Jew. Van Neumann-a Jew. Szilard-a Jew. A Hungarian Jew, in fact, poor man.”
“Enrico Fermi wasn’t Jewish,” Charlie said.
“No, but he had a Jewish wife,” Esther returned. Charlie hadn’t known that. She went on, “For a while there, I thought Joe Steele would decide Hitler’d had a good idea about what to do with the Jews. To the Jews, I should say.”
“He got rid of those guys because he was sore at them, not because they were Jewish.” Before coming to the White House, Charlie’d never dreamt he could sound so calm about murder, but here he was. And here those physicists weren’t. He added, “Besides, Captain Rickover-well, he’s Admiral Rickover now-he’s a Jew, too. And so were some of the guys he grabbed from the labor encampments. Teller, Feynman, Cohen, I don’t know how many other wreckers.”
“I know that now. I didn’t know it then,” Esther said. “And they made the bomb work, and fried all the Japs in that city. Suppose it didn’t, though. Suppose Trotsky made his first. What would Joe Steele have done to the wreckers then? Or to all the Jews?”
That was a good question, wasn’t it? Charlie decided he was better off not knowing the answer-and so was Esther. Much better. “It didn’t happen,” he said. “That’s what you have to remember. It’s just something you worried about. It’s not anything that came true.”
“I know. But my folks came to America so they wouldn’t have to be afraid of pogroms any more, and so I wouldn’t, either,” Esther said. “That was what America stood for-being able to get along no matter who you were. But it didn’t exactly work out that way, did it?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Not too long ago, I heard a shoeshine man talking with a janitor when they didn’t know I was listening.” Charlie didn’t say the men he was talking about were colored-with those jobs, what else would they be? He continued, “One of them said, ‘That Joe Steele, he done more for equality than any other four Presidents you can think of.’ ‘What you talkin’ about?’ the other fellow said. And the first guy told him, ‘He treats everybody jus’ the same way-like a nigger.’”
Esther laughed and looked horrified at the same time. “That’s terrible!”
“It sure is,” Charlie agreed. “What’s for dinner tonight?”
* * *
Mike walked into the classroom with his usual mix of excitement and dread. He supposed actors felt the same way as the curtain rose. He got a better reception than actors commonly did. All the kids in the room jumped to their feet, bowed, and chorused, “Konichiwa, Sensei-san!” Then they said the same thing in English: “Good morning, teacher!”
When Mike returned the bow, he didn’t go as low as they had. They were just middle-school students, and he was a grown man. He didn’t grasp all the details of how Japanese bowed to one another; he wondered if any foreigner did. But he got the broad outlines, and they forgave his blunders because he was a foreigner and couldn’t be expected to know any better. As with a three-legged dancing bear, the wonder was that he did it at all, not that he did it well.
“Konichiwa!” he said, and “Good morning!” Then he bowed to Midori Yanai as one equal to another and told her, “Konichiwa, Sensei-san!”
Her bow was slightly lower than his: the bow of woman to man. The Constitutional Monarchy wrote women’s equality into its laws. Mike had no trouble playing along. For someone like her, who’d been raised in the old ways, change came harder.
“Good morning, Sergeant Sullivan,” she said in English. Hanging around with him the past couple of years had made her better at distinguishing the r sound in his title and the l sound in his name. She went back to Japanese to talk to the class: “Sergeant Sullivan has come here today to help you learn his language.”
“Thank you, Sergeant Sullivan!” the boys and girls sang out in English. Most of them said Surrivan; Japanese didn’t use the l sound, and they had trouble hearing it, let alone saying it. Quite a few of them said Sank you, too; the th sound was another one their language didn’t own.
“I am honored to be here,” Mike said in Japanese. He used that phrase whenever he visited a classroom. They took honor seriously here. Because he used it a lot, he said it well. When he went on, he didn’t sound so smooth. He knew his Japanese was bad. He didn’t worry about it. Because he’d hung around with Midori for a while, he had enough to do what he needed to do here-and she’d help him if he stumbled. “When I speak your language I am ichiban baka gaijin.” They giggled-the A-number-one stupid foreigner was admitting what he was. He continued through the giggles: “But when you speak my language, you are ichiban baka gaijin.”