Three Views of Crystal Water

‘Hang up your coat! Wipe your shoes! Put that wet umbrella in the hall!’ were her usual first words, followed by, ‘So, we are to be favoured with your presence again today are we?’

‘Hello, Miss Hinchcliffe.’

There were maps on one wall and a black telephone and metal filing cabinets. ‘Captain’ Lowinger’s office was beyond, in a room with a window of pleated glass through which Miss Hinchcliffe could keep an eye on his shadowy form. When Vera opened the door she would see him seated, smiling, behind a perfectly clear desk. There were no piles of paper and no calendars with dates circled, no complex timetables. His wooden desk had a green leather top and he had a lamp with an emerald shade. To one side was a set of brass scales that was used to weigh pearls, and the corn tongs to pick up the gems. There was nothing else except, in the corner on the floor, a typewriter. She could only assume that in this office, unhampered by physical records, Captain Lowinger conjured magical fundamentals that were then subject to mental administration.

The action was all on the walls, which were decorated with woodcut prints on rough yellowed paper. The pictures were of tall women with fleshy faces and chopsticks in their hair. There was a Japanese name for them: ukiyo-e. But Captain James called them his Beauties. His Beauties stood around like a picket fence, to keep out the world. Each one existed on a blank background as if she were completely alone in the world. She might have been a model on a ramp. Each one had a slouch, an over-the-shoulder glance, and dainty hands and feet which appeared as afterthoughts from under great swirls of decorated fabric. Each sumptuous kimono was patterned with mountains and rocky streams, shells and flowers and leaves. Each Beauty’s body cut a figure like one of those giant letters on the first page of an old book, a decorated L or S or F. They were a veritable alphabet of women.

But they were unreadable. They had their backs to the room, and their eyes cast down, thoughts lost in the folds of their wraps. Everything about them was secretive, held in, padded, even their faces, which appeared to have no bones. They were white and soft and disturbed only by the thinnest fine painted lines to suggest eyebrows, nose, cheeks. Only the lips, red and rounded, were defined. But they were closed.

Her grandfather was not always alone amongst his Beauties. When Vera arrived, he might be talking to an urgent man in a blue serge cap who he called Skipper. Or he might be listening to a visitor who took pulls on a pungent-smelling pipe, sending clouds of smoke into the room, behind which the Beauties faded perceptibly. This visitor might be telling a tale, complete with grand gestures and occasional whispers, and sidelong glances through the door to where Miss Hinchcliffe would type with renewed energy. On these occasions Vera would go back to the warehouse and walk up and down the rows of bales of fabric, feeling them with her fingers. Or she’d peer into the fragile crates filled with dry grass and wonder if there were pearls inside. She might look at the life-sized kimono doll and take all her clothing apart. There were little spikes that went into her hair, and tight wrappings around her middle. Her feet had one split instead of toes, dividing the white cotton foot in two, so that it was like a dainty hoof. They’d been specially designed to fit into the thongs of the platform slippers she stood in.

If his visitor were a persistent one, Vera repaired to the big cutting table meant for fabric with its low-hanging light in a metal shade. She was allowed to open certain wooden boxes and take out the prints one by one and look at them.

She stared and stared at the ukiyo-e. The people were so very, very strange. Most of them looked like women, but only a few of them were, according to Vera’s grandfather. Everyone wore a robe, often with a skirt too. The ones with swords were men. The ones with make-up and hair piled in knots and smirky smiles, who looked very much like women, were also men: they were actors who played women’s parts. It was hard to find the real women. But Vera grew skilled at it. They were softer, and smaller, and less obvious about it.

They were usually shown among other women, fixing hair or serving tea. It was peaceful as they went about their lives inside squared timbered rooms. Sometimes they travelled with their companions, poled along in a banana-shaped boat by a man in a loincloth. If the weather was good and the current was with them, the boatman leaned on his pole, lazily. They glided through such scenery! Mountains and hillsides were cut by a slanted path, where trees attended in stylish attitudes, with clumps of branch here and there like soft clouds.

But there were days when rain came down aslant like a torrent of nails. There was snow too. The women were never dressed for it. For one thing they had bare feet, with a thong between their first and second toes, and square sandals like little benches, to prop the foot up high off the ground. The snow fell heavily, loading their pretty, papery umbrellas with inches of white. It covered the slated tile roofs and stayed in a thick layer on the branches and even stopped, mid-fall, in the air, a white dot carved in the print and coloured in. The snowfall was a kind of burial, but the figures were bright and graceful, as if for them to withstand this final curtain was effortless.

The snow in the pictures was so sad, cold and exquisite. The difficulties were borne lightly, gaily, as if everyone knew it would melt tomorrow. As if everyone knew that the tea house was around the next bend. The cherry blossoms would soon be out. The people would be flying their kites, which they did all together, an entire street of people. Or standing on a shore with a picnic basket looking expectantly to a nearby island.

There was snow sometimes in Vancouver, but it rarely stayed more than overnight. Vera’s mother had had the same delighted attitude to snow, an attitude that was also a denial. She could just as easily have said, ‘Let’s go for a walk with our bare-toed shoes and our thin umbrellas and the little white split-toed socks!’ That would have been on her gay days. Other days she was a sleepwalker.

And the pasty faces, the swollen cheeks, the lost features of these women were her mother’s.

But this was a thought Vera did not like to have, and she pushed it away.

The devils – or men – in the ukiyo-e world simpered and hunched their shoulders and curled their toes. Their eyes were black marbles in wild open Os. They had huge dog faces with curled-back snarling lips and mad, crossed eyes, and eyebrows that make an angry V in the middle of their foreheads. Their hair was tied up in knots on the top of their head, and they often had a rope over one shoulder. One had a blue bow at his waist, the tassels dancing at his knees. His five fat fingers spread out in astonishment as he looked down and off to the right: something was there. He too had bare feet and carried two curved swords.

Once, her grandfather came out of his office and stood beside her. He smiled as she looked from one print to the other.

‘Why do you have so many?’ Vera asked.

‘They used to be easy to find. No one put any value on them,’ he said. ‘I sent them home over the years. I don’t know if your mother ever looked at them. And now – I look. There’s always something new to see.’

‘Do people buy them?’

‘Oh they’re not for sale, not for sale, Vera,’ he said. And he laid his finger alongside his nose making a joke of the secret. ‘If anyone knew they were worth money, my creditors would have them in a flash. We’ll just keep them here, where only you and I can look.’

This day, when she got past Hinchcliffe, her grandfather was tapping on his typewriter. He asked her to wait in the hallway. She knew that when he let her in, the typewriter would be back on the floor and any evidence of paper would have vanished. Once in a while he spoke of a book. Vera hoped he would write it. She wanted to know all about his adventures. Sometimes at night in the house on Ivy Street he told stories. But, he said, any book would put him in a conflict between truth and loyalty. ‘That be very interesting,’ said Keiko, who was learning English.

Vera went to the measuring table and stared for a long time at a print where a child with a net was out in the darkness with a woman, her mother or a nanny. There appeared to be an official nature to the relationship, but then this was true of nearly all the pictures and nearly all the relationships. The little girl reached with her net trying to catch the little lights that were in the air, like stars come down to dance over the tips of the grasses.

‘Fireflies,’ said James Lowinger. He placed his hand on her shoulder. It was heavy but it was gentle. ‘They’re catching fireflies. The Japanese love fireflies. Do you see how the artist has tried to make them shine? It is a very fine print.’

She saw that there was a round hole in the darkness and then little sparks of yellow that radiated from this white spot. She leaned back against her chair and the back of her head rested somewhere in the middle of his chest.

‘Did you ever see them catching fireflies?’ she asked.

‘No,’ he said. He laughed. She loved the way he laughed. It was uncomplicated, amused. ‘Even I’m not that old. This was a long time ago. Before I ever went to Japan.’

Her grandfather shifted the paper, and found another. His fingers touched the dry, stiff yellowed paper with care.

‘Look,’ he said.

Water was everywhere, everywhere in this land of extremes, of cloud-like blossoms floating in the dry arms of trees, of shores littered with shells and crabs, of people standing on a shore looking out to an island, carrying what she took to be picnic baskets. She grimaced over the working men, their loincloths high over knotted thighs, who poled the boats upstream in a gale.

Tiny, almost comic figures engaged in Herculean tasks amongst giant waves, in deep gorges among mountains with white and black gashes down their pyramidal sides. Small, determined, they fought on.

‘Is Japan still like that?’ Vera asked.

‘I don’t think so,’ he chuckled. ‘Not the last time I checked.’

But he didn’t sound very convinced.

The world of these pictures, which Vera took to be the world of her grandfather’s business, and of his romance, was far away in the distance, but at an unspecified place in time. Perhaps it still existed. It was like the world of fairy tales. It was like a performance. Vera wondered who had made the pictures, which were like records of all that went on. She thought the picture world was his secret world, the one he might be writing about.

Someone was always watching this world. The artists who made these pictures peered through timbers, branches, and windows to frame a view; they hid behind fence poles and horses’ back ends. They stood in corners so that they could encompass a whole line of warehouse roofs descending a hill, or let the bent branch of a tree swirl over and under the scene to frame it. And the people knew they were being watched. They were like actors in a play. They knew they were exquisite. They made processions and fought battles. They toyed with the idea of removing their costumes, but they never actually did. There were a few pictures where the women let the kimono slip off one shoulder or even off both. They raised their hems in certain cases to do unspeakable things. She liked them even more for that. Those prints she looked at furtively, blushing.

Of course she knew her grandfather had been a pearl merchant. But as closely as she scanned the pictures, Vera could see nothing to do with pearls. Water pictures she examined carefully for clues. But then – in a special bottom drawer – she found the seashore prints. The diving girls in their fire circle by the beach. Bare-breasted, with fabric looped over their hips, long-haired and long-bodied. Like sloops, an easy curve from chin to hip.

Then one day, Vera stumbled across the octopus. Good grief, what an idea, what they might do with those tentacles. She was horrified, put down the pictures and leaped out of the room with her face blazing.

More often than not, when Vera arrived after school, her grandfather was waiting for her. He stood up in his courtly way and they went out, telling Miss Hinchcliffe they’d only be a few minutes. He took his umbrella from the stand and opened the wooden door with the frosted top half, paused on the top step to see if it was raining (it was), took Vera’s arm and descended to the street. On the pavement, they turned right. The flatiron building filled the end of a block where two streets angled together, which was why it was called a flatiron: it was triangular. At the bottom of it, just below street level, was a triangular coffee shop. There were windows on either side, one looking on to Homer Street and the other on to Water Street: the café was only ten feet wide at its widest. At the narrow end it came to a point in two windows. At the wide end was a curtain.

As soon as they stepped in from the rain, Roberta appeared from behind the curtain.

‘Captain Lowinger,’ she said, gravely, as if he’d come to church, ‘and Miss Vera.’

‘Hello, love,’ Captain Lowinger said. ‘We’ll have coffee and a Danish, sliced flat and toasted and then buttered.’

They sat. Their faces looked out on to the pavement just at the level of people’s feet. Now Vera had the tall, rumbling figure all to herself.

Vera’s mother had raised her on tales of James Lowinger’s adventures. It was as if Belle had been planning all along to abdicate and leave the girl in his hands, as if she had guessed that the fact, and possibly only the fact, of Vera’s existence would be powerful enough to draw in James Lowinger from his perennial sailings around the South Seas, to rein him in just as his great strength was waning, so that he would be safe at last and seated, facing her, pouring milk in his coffee and muttering that he needed a spoon.

‘My grandfather needs a spoon,’ Vera said, raising her voice to hail the waitress. Roberta was a capable woman past thirty with a dreamy streak, often discovered, as now, with her gaze out of the window into the ankles of the passersby.

‘Where’s my Danish and where’s my sweetheart?’ he said, looking up plaintively for Roberta, his hand on the tabletop, his neck curling forward from rounded shoulders. ‘I might die waiting.’

‘We can’t have that, can we?’ said Roberta, plunking the plate down in front of him.

‘Cut or pick!’ he said to Vera.

It was his game. The first time they played it she’d been small enough to sit on his lap, and he was visiting the house on Ivy Street. Belle had cooked an uneven number of breakfast sausages.

‘We’ll divide them.’

Hamilton was travelling but that wasn’t unusual. In fact it was preferable. Her grandfather wanted to pass on tricks of the trade, and he never wanted to pass them on to Vera’s father. ‘That’s what the pearl traders do.’

‘What do you mean?’ Vera had asked that first time.

‘Cut means you divide them, and let me pick which portion. Pick means you pick, so I cut.’

Vera couldn’t decide. She had gnawed at her pyjama sleeve. She had quivered. He had watched her and smiled as she stared at the prized sausages. If she cut, she could make sure the halves were exactly even. But if she let him cut, he’d have to try to make them even too. But he might make a mistake. Then one half would be bigger, and she could have it.

‘Pick!’ she had said.

‘Smart girl!’ he had roared, and laughed so that his moustache ends wobbled, which made her laugh. ‘The picking price is always higher than cutting price.’ He had divided the sausages meticulously, leaving one end of the extra longer than the other. ‘Now which do you want?’

Vera had giggled and giggled, picking the bigger portion.

He had set her back down on her own chair.

‘Last time I did that I was sitting on the ground in Bombay in one of those low little shops the Indians have. There was some oily meat involved as I recall, that I sopped up with a piece of delicious bread hot from a stove. The merchant laid out his pearls on the back of his hand.’

‘Did you cut or pick, Grandpa?’

‘I picked. I always picked. And then you know what I did? To bargain with him on the price, I covered my hand with a handkerchief and put out my fingers to say how many hundred rupees I’d pay. Five fingers, five hundred. Whole hand, one thousand. Half a finger—’ he made as if to chop off the end of his finger ‘—What do you think?’

‘She doesn’t like arithmetic, Father,’ Belle had said. She was formal with him.

‘Well I do!’ he had said, spearing his sausages and wolfing them down whole. ‘I like arithmetic these days because I’m making money.’

Today, Vera looked at the four quarters of the Danish.

‘It’s cut already,’ she said.

‘You’re right. I’ll have to let you pick then.’

He smiled. His ruddy skin was growing whiter, and beginning to shine like the inside of a shell. His face was clearing of the weather burns and tobacco stains of decades; he was being tamed. Was it his nearness to an end that made him flirt with girls and waitresses? A growing lightness in his life, that was really an acceptance of death that made him so attractive? They were all in love with him – Hinchcliffe, Vera, Roberta. He was powerful but childlike, immense, and visibly incompetent: he trembled and knocked over the cream pitcher. His body leaked and crumpled. He burped and gagged, laughed gently at himself.

‘And by the way,’ Vera said. ‘You won’t die. Not if I can help it.’ She did not think it would happen, ever. Perhaps because her mother had fretted about it so much: he’ll be lost at sea, he’ll catch beriberi, and he’ll come home to die. But he had proven very durable.

‘Today in school we talked about pearls, Grandfather.’

‘I don’t know why you would. There are no more pearls in the sea. They’ve all been snapped up, every last one of them. Every self-respecting wild oyster has cashed in his chips,’ said Lowinger.

‘I don’t believe that there are no more pearls,’ she teased.

‘You have to believe me, I’m your grandfather.’

She pouted. ‘Then tell me about them.’

‘Pearls are not my favourite topic, Vera dear.’

‘But they are mine.’

‘Are they, my dear?’ Busy with his Danish. ‘Are you catching the disease then?’

Vera crossed her narrow feet and took a strand of her white-blonde hair to curl around a fingertip; her stubborn adolescent expression gave way to the blank, childish look of she who expects a story.

‘Is it catching?’

‘Oh, highly contagious, my dear. You want to stay away.’

‘But don’t you think I’ve already been exposed?’ Her mother had sent her around to the neighbours to sit in the rooms of the children who had scarlet fever and rubella, so that she would catch them and get them over with. So that if she got them later in life they would not kill her.

‘Is that your excuse? Well, it was mine too.’

There was silence for a few minutes while he tore off ragged pieces of his Danish, piece by piece, unrolling it, and popped them in his mouth.

Then, ‘Do you even know what a pearl is?’

‘I do.’

‘You don’t.’

‘I do.’

‘Then tell me.’

‘Pearls are formed inside the shell of an oyster when it is irritated by a grain of sand. That’s what they told me at school.’

‘It is not that simple. There are as many explanations put forth for that, my girl, as would take me all day to tell.’

‘Then tell me.’

‘A pearl is nothing but the tomb of a parasitic worm.’ He declaimed with a half smile that made the handlebars of his moustache twitch:

Know you, perchance how that poor formless wretch

The oyster gems his shallow moonlit chalice?

Where the shell irks him or the sea sand frets

He sheds this lovely lustre

On his grief.

‘Who wrote that?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What do they teach you at school? No proper poetry either I see. It was Sir Edwin Arnold. And do they tell you that a pearl is the result of a morbid condition?’

‘No.’ She knew she had got him going.

‘They don’t. All right. Do they tell you then what Pliny said about the pearl?’

‘No, Grandfather.’

‘Well, they should then. Pliny thought, you see, that pearls were the eggs of the shellfish. That when it came time for these oysters to bring forth young, that their two shells, which are normally closed up tight, only a little gap there for the eyes to look out, you know, that the shells would part and open wide and a little dew would come in. And that this dew was a seed that would swell and grow big and become a pearl, and that the oyster would then labour to deliver this pearl, at which time it would be born, as another oyster.’

He chuckled, and his whitened eye lost a little of its haze. ‘People believed all sorts of things of the pearl. That it was born as a result of a flash of lightning. I rather like that one. And in years when there were very few pearls, that was because there were not very many storms.’

‘That’s stupid,’ she pronounced.

‘Stupid?’ he said, his breath whistling through his moustache. ‘You don’t say that about people’s beliefs. You say that it is magic. That’s what we’re talking about. I suppose because it is difficult to explain, isn’t it, how a small, perfect, beautiful thing can be found in the slime at the bottom of the sea. The Persians believed that pearls came from the sun. The Indians believed they came from clouds. If you listened to the poets, you’d think that pearls were tears cried by the gods, or by angels.

‘The natives in the Malay Archipelago and on the coast of Borneo are convinced that pearls themselves breed. They say—’ and here he leaned toward Vera and adopted a stage whisper as if he were imparting a secret of the greatest importance ‘—if a few pearls are locked in a small box with some grains of rice and a little cotton wool for several months, that when the box is opened – abracadabra!’ His eyes widened and his great furtrimmed mouth gaped ‘—that there are several new pearls in the box! And,’ he added, ‘the ends have been nibbled off the grains of rice! Do you believe it?’

She did not know whether to answer yes or no, so she kept quiet.

Captain James Lowinger flat out laughed here, heartily and in a way not exactly mirthful. And as he laughed, water spurted from the corners of his eyes and he picked up the thin paper napkin that Roberta had dispensed with the Danish pastry, and wiped the water from his cheeks.

‘And there are a lot of men who wished that was true!’

He laughed down into his chest, and picked at the remaining bits of Danish on his plate.

‘Mind you,’ he said again, settling back, ‘these breeder pearls are just as tiny as a pinhead. So—’ His hands fell flat on the tabletop ‘—what’s the use of that? The Chinese grind them for medicine.’

They drank their coffee then. Roberta leaned on her cash register and stared gloomily out of the window into the Vancouver rain. But she was only pretending to stare; Vera could tell she was actually listening.

‘Well, do you believe it?’ he asked.

‘No,’ she said.

‘So, you don’t believe it?’ He peered at her.

‘Well,’ she began to doubt herself. ‘Maybe a little—’

‘When Columbus came to America, you know, he found that the natives on this continent believed it too. They had pearls galore, so many pearls, do you know? Pearls were not just in the Orient. No, not at all. When Fernando de Soto got to Florida he found the dead embalmed in wooden coffins with baskets of pearls beside them. In Montezuma’s temple, the walls were all laden with pearls. The Temple of Tolomecco had walls and roof of mother-of-pearl and strings of pearls hung from the walls.’

‘Where did they come from?’

‘Quite literally, they grew on trees. You didn’t know that, did you, Vera?’

‘No,’ she said.

‘Yes. In the Gulf of Paria, Columbus found oysters clinging to the branches of trees, their shells gaping open. Do you believe that?’

‘No,’ she breathed. This time she had to have guessed right.

‘Wrong!’ he roared. Roberta looked back at them, her reverie interrupted, and grinned to see the old man teasing his granddaughter, and Vera’s pale face heating up again to the roots of her nearly white hair.

‘Oysters really did grow on trees.’ He went all scientific on her then. ‘The oyster in question is Dendrostrea, or Tree Oyster, a mollusc that is to be found upon roots or branches of mangrove trees overhanging the water.’