“How lucky you are, Uncle, not a care in the world.”
O-Nobu would have liked to laugh off her uncle’s remark as a casual jest on the spur of the moment that proceeded from his assumption that she and Tsuda were, if anything, an excessively intimate couple, but her heart was too undefended to allow this. Even so, her determination to conceal her wounds, presenting herself to others as the wife of a man with no deficiencies, prevented her from revealing any of the things she was feeling deeply. She blinked rapidly to camouflage the tears she could feel would shortly be welling in her eyes.
“Even if I am a perfect fit, it wouldn’t make any difference at my age. Right, O-Nobu?”
Seen as younger than she was wherever she went, her aunt turned her pure, lustrous eyes to O-Nobu, who said nothing. Neither did she neglect to avail herself of the first opportunity to conceal her feelings. As if amused, she laughed aloud.
[62]
O-NOBU’S REWARD for preferring her uncle, an in-law, to her aunt, a blood relative, was her certainty that he doted on her. She understood profoundly the mixture of easy affability and nervousness that constituted his temperament, and she comported herself in a manner that perfectly suited both aspects of his makeup; because her actions were enabled by the flexibility that comes with youth, she was able almost effortlessly to please her uncle and satisfy herself. Believing that he was observing her behavior at all times with an affirmative eye, she sometimes wondered how her immovable aunt could be so unbending.
What she knew about handling the opposite sex she had learned from her uncle exclusively, and she believed she would have only to apply his training to her husband to succeed in her marriage. When that man turned out to be Tsuda, she was aware in the beginning of slight differences in their approach to doing things, a new experience that she observed with a certain wonder. Frequently she encountered situations that required efforts either to train her new husband to be someone like her uncle or to reconstitute the person who was herself, already fully formed, to accommodate him. Her love was for Tsuda. But her sympathies were reserved for someone modeled on her uncle. Often at such times she found herself thinking, if only this were her uncle he would be pleased by what she had done. At such times her nature ordered her to tell her uncle everything. But she was willful enough to defy this command, and having managed until now to choke things down, she couldn’t bring herself to confess at this late date.
In that sense, O-Nobu had continually deceived her aunt and uncle, and she was confident that they had allowed themselves to be deceived for her benefit without misgivings. At the same time, she was sensitive enough to have perceived that her uncle on his side was keeping a secret with regard to Tsuda no less substantial than her own that he wanted to admit to her but was unable to reveal. What she had seen hidden inside his heart was that he had disliked Tsuda as her choice for a beloved husband. Without going to the trouble of an actual comparison, she surmised easily enough that his negative reaction was due to differences in sensibility that lay between them. O-Nobu had become aware of this soon after getting married. And she had additional evidence. Apparently coarse but refined in his own way, apparently unheeding and at the same time acute, his dispassionate words belying the kindness in his heart, O-Nobu’s uncle seemed to have conceived an intuitive dislike for Tsuda at their first meeting. Detecting behind his question “You like that sort of person?” what felt like the echo of other words, “That means you never liked someone like me,” O-Nobu had shuddered in spite of herself. However, by the time she had replied to his question with one of her own, “What do you think, Uncle?” he had moved beyond the awkward impediment he had placed between them.
“Go to him. If he’s the one, don’t worry about any of us,” he had replied with kindness in his voice.
Another bit of evidence remained. Though her uncle had said nothing to her directly, she had heard his most unsparing criticism from her aunt’s lips.
“He looks as though he thinks every woman in Japan should be in love with him.”
Curiously, O-Nobu wasn’t put off or even surprised by the remark. She was confident she could love Tsuda with all her heart. And she expected, and was reassured to feel certain, that she would be loved completely by him. Because her first thought had been, “Here he goes, criticizing as usual,” she had laughed aloud. In the next instant she interpreted his denigration as jealousy and felt secretly pleased with herself.
“He’s already forgotten how sweet he was on himself when he was a young man,” his aunt had said supportively.
Sitting in front of her uncle now, O-Nobu couldn’t help recalling this moment from the past. Whereupon she had the feeling that his frivolous jesting about Tsuda’s “severity” and her suitability or unsuitability as the wife of such a man might have been significant in a way she hadn’t recognized.
I have a feeling I was right about what I said. I hope not, but if something does come up, not now maybe but later on, I want you to come straight to me and tell me all about it.
In her uncle’s eyes, O-Nobu read these compassionate words.
[63]
HAVING COVERED her sentimental moment with a laugh and wishing to move away from the pain she was feeling, O-Nobu broached to her uncle and aunt the subject on her mind.
“What was that party all about?”
She had given her uncle notice that she would have something to ask him, and now she sought an explanation. But instead of providing an answer as he should have, he turned the question back on her.
“What did you think?”
Placing a particular emphasis on “you,” her uncle looked observantly into her face.
“How would I know? And what an odd question out of nowhere. Don’t you agree, Auntie?”
Her aunt grinned.
“Your uncle says a scatterbrain like me wouldn’t understand, but you certainly would. ‘She’s so much cleverer than you,’ he tells me.”
O-Nobu could only smile uncomfortably. She did have an idea, of course, a vague conjecture, but she wasn’t being pressed for it and she had been taught too well how to be a lady to reveal it as a display of her own cleverness.
“I haven’t the foggiest—”
“Take a guess. You must have a pretty good idea.”
Reading in his face his determination to have her venture something first, O-Nobu, after bantering back and forth, said what she supposed.
“It wasn’t a miai?”*
“What makes you think so? That’s how it looked to you?” Before validating her guess, O-Nobu’s uncle persisted in posing her questions in response to hers. Finally he laughed heartily in a loud voice.
“Bull’s-eye! So you are cleverer than Sumi after all.”
This attempt to place their cleverness on the scales of a balance the women dismissed with ridicule.
“It doesn’t take a genius to figure out a simple thing like that, right Auntie?”
“No, and I don’t imagine you were that thrilled to be complimented for it.”
“Goodness, no! — it’s almost an insult.”
O-Nobu was recalling how brilliantly Madam Yoshikawa had played the table in her role as go-between.
“I had a feeling that must be it. Otherwise why would Yoshikawa-san have been working so hard to draw out Tsugiko-san and that Mr. Miyoshi.”
“But our Tsugiko has a gift for resisting. One tug at her and she pulls into herself like a turtle. She’d fare much better if she were more like you — a girl with some moxie.”