That brought them up short. They weren’t used to thinking of themselves as foreigners. That another language had its own native place was an idea they needed work on.
“I try to speak Japanese better each time I do it,” Mike said. “You should try to speak English better each time, too.”
He led them in touching their tongues to the backs of their front teeth to make l noises, and to putting their tongues between their top and bottom teeth for th. Because he’d been making those sounds since he was a baby, he was better at showing how to do it than Midori Yanai was. For her, they were as foreign as they were to the kids.
He went through conversation drills with them, letting them hear what a native speaker sounded like. Then he asked for questions in English. A boy raised his hand. Mike nodded to him. “Why English the verb not at the end puts?” he asked.
“Why does Japanese put it at the end?” Mike answered. The kid blinked; that was water to a fish to him. Mike went on, “I don’t know why. Why, I don’t know.” He grinned. The kid just frowned. He didn’t get wordplay in English yet. So Mike continued, “But Japanese is wrong with the verb in the middle. English is wrong with the verb at the end.” It wasn’t always, but they were still learning rules. They weren’t ready for exceptions.
They bowed him out of the classroom with a singsong “Arigato gozaimasu, Sensei-san!” He killed time in Wakamatsu till school let out. Then he went back there to meet Midori.
“Thank you,” she told him. “I think that went well today.”
“Good. I thought so, too, but you know better than I do.” Mike didn’t hug her or give her a kiss. Men didn’t show women affection in public here. Things like that were starting to catch on with youngsters who imitated the Americans they saw in person or in the movies, but Midori kept the ways she’d grown up with. Mike didn’t push it, which was one of the reasons they got along.
After they walked side by side, decorously not touching, for a while, they went to a restaurant. It was more than a greasy spoon, less than fancy. She had tonkatsu: breaded pork chop fried and cut into bite-sized slices, with a thick, spicy sauce. He ordered a bowl of ishikari nabe. It was a Japanese take on salmon stew that he’d learned to enjoy.
Once they’d eaten, they went to her little apartment. The building was new since the Japanese War. It was made of bricks and concrete, not wood and paper. “My only fear,” Midori had said, “is that it will not stay up in an earthquake.”
Mike had felt several since coming to Japan. He hadn’t been in one strong enough to knock down buildings, but he knew they had them. He’d said, “I hope it stays up, too.” What else could you say?
The apartment was bigger than a jail cell, but not much. It would have driven Mike crazy. Midori took it in stride. She made the most of the space she had by not putting a lot in it, and by making sure everything stayed in its proper place if she wasn’t using it.
She didn’t even have a bed. She had futons-floor mats. The Japs had been using them forever. Rooms here were so many futons long and so many wide. If you piled two or three together, well, that was pretty nice when you felt like fooling around.
Lazy and happy in the afterglow, Mike said, “You’re wonderful, you know that?” He tried to say the same thing in Japanese, too.
“I am also happy with you,” she said. “Sometimes I feel I should not be, but I am.”
“You shouldn’t be? How come? Because I’m American?”
“Hai.” She nodded. “I am sorry. I am so sorry, but it is true. You are a good man, but you are a gaijin. You cannot fit here for the rest of your life.”
She was bound to be right about that. Sooner or later-sooner, since he was well past fifty-they’d muster him out of the Army and ship him home. And then he’d have to face all the nasty choices he’d ducked in 1946 by leaving the uniform on. Montana? New Mexico? Wyoming? Colorado? Reporter? Tree feller? People feller? Go back East and risk the Jeebies jugging him again, this time for what would be a life stretch?
With Midori, there might be other possibilities. “Do you think you could fit in in the United States, in a country full of round-eyed barbarians?”
He said it as a joke, but he knew that was how she thought of Americans in general. After a moment, she asked, “How do you mean that?”
Mike took a deep breath. “Do you want to marry me?” he asked. When Stella, or her lawyers, told him she was cutting him loose, he’d never dreamt he would ask that of another woman. But that letter had come to the labor camp more than a dozen years ago now. Stella had long since found somebody else: a booking agent named Morris Cantor. Why shouldn’t he?
“I would like to do that, yes,” Midori said slowly, “but how hard will it be?”
“I don’t know. I’ll find out.” Mike did know they didn’t make it easy. But he thought he could manage it. He’d done everything the USA asked from him and then some the past ten years. The USA might manage a little something for him. And the rules about getting together with local women were easier now than they had been right after the big war. Fraternizing then might land you in the guardhouse.
“It is good to know you care about me for more than this.” Still naked in the warm night, Midori touched herself between the legs for a moment. “I thought so, but it is still good to know.”
“Good to know you care about me-you love me-too.” Mike’s voice sounded rough even to himself. Americans who took up with Japanese women often wondered if their lady friends cared or if they were only meal tickets.
“I did not expect you to propose to me tonight.” Midori laughed.
Hearing that laugh made Mike feel better. “It’s about time, you know?” he said. She nodded. He could have said It’s now or never, and that would have been every bit as true. It sounded better this way, though. He still had a bit of writer in him after all.
* * *
When the Republicans gathered in Chicago, they nominated Robert Taft. He aimed to be the first man since John Quincy Adams to follow his father into the White House. Before they nominated him, they talked about drafting Omar Bradley or Dwight Eisenhower.
The conqueror of Western Europe and the architect of victory in the Pacific both turned them down. “Politics is no place for soldiers,” Bradley said. George Washington, Ulysses S. Grant, and Zachary Taylor, among others, might have come out with a different view of things. But Washington, Grant, and Taylor hadn’t served under Joe Steele.
Casually, Charlie asked Vince Scriabin, “Do you know how the two generals happened to say no?”
“Yes,” the Hammer answered, and not another word. Charlie was left to his own imaginings. He hoped they were juicier than what really happened, but he had no guarantees.
Three weeks after the GOP cleared out of the International Amphitheatre, the Democrats came in to renominate Joe Steele and John Nance Garner. Charlie always felt funny about going back to the Windy City for a convention. This one, at least, was in a different building from the one they’d used to pick Joe Steele the first time. Banners hanging from the rafters shouted TWENTY YEARS OF PROGRESS!
In his acceptance speech, Joe Steele said, “When I first became the Democratic candidate in 1932, the United States suffered in the grip of the Depression. Many of you can remember that. Now we are the greatest, the strongest, the richest country in the world. Every one of you knows that. I am not braggart enough to claim I had everything to do with that. But I am not modest enough to claim I had nothing to do with it, either.”
Delegates laughed and applauded. So did Charlie, up on the podium. Most of the words were his. The delivery was the President’s, and he could have done better. He stumbled over a few phrases; it was almost as if he were sleepwalking through the speech.