Three Views of Crystal Water

One day, while visiting her friend in the tailor’s shop, Keiko heard about the drowning of a fisherman. Although he was no one Keiko knew, and from a village many miles from her own, she was struck with dire premonitions and went home silent. While she was washing the dishes after dinner she told Vera about the sea near her home.

‘It can be dangerous if you don’t know. Every child is made to swim. The father throws—’ here she demonstrated with her hands cupped at the level of her knees, as if she were pushing a large bag of laundry over a wall ‘—throws the child over the boat into the sea. And watches. The child will go down and breathe in the water. The child will nearly drown—’ she mimed choking, dying, ‘then the father will dive in and bring the child back. But as soon as the child has’—she acted out spitting out the water ‘—the father again—’ she made the scooping motion with her arms ‘—into the sea. Second time, the child knows how to swim. Anyone who learn to swim that way – while going down to drown – is safe for ever.’

She did not bother James with her worries. He was very busy in his half-conscious world. At times he needed her care, calling out weakly, but good-naturedly, for tea. Sometimes he was sick on himself, and she came with a basin and towels to clean him. But he was often asleep. In his sleep he expended a great deal of energy. He thrashed and sometimes spoke, and even laughed, or scoffed, at imaginary companions in his dreams.

‘He simply must eat more,’ said the doctor.

‘He eat what he want,’ said Keiko.

But to Vera she explained. ‘He is fighting demons. Meeting old friends. It is very much work. That’s why he is so thin. He dreams away his food.’ She backed away from the bedside when the doctor came to look at James but she did not take her eyes off him.

The doctor did not push further. ‘He is old,’ he said. ‘He has come home to die, like an animal does.’

Keiko bowed and did not contradict the doctor. But when she and Vera were alone she spoke. ‘An animal does not come home to die,’ said Keiko. ‘An animal crawls away by himself. He come home for other thing.’

‘What other thing?’ Vera hung by her grandfather’s bedside and when he spoke she listened. Open, his eyes burned red at the rims and bright blue in the centre; his collarbones under the pyjama top stood up higher. Often she watched him sleep. Even then his eyes were busy under the lids.

‘Are you going to the office today?’ Vera asked, tearful, at the bedroom door.

‘I don’t think so, my dear. You’ll have to go for me.’

She went, crying.

As James Lowinger lay dying, he knew he’d been wrong about what was important. He’d been wrong about pearls, and even wrong about the stories. They were in the past. Soon he too would be in the past, and join his stories there. They were on record and official; in them he was clearly in command. They were of the mind and, in the life of his body, they were utterly worthless.

He sank into his body.

He sang, he wrestled, he suckled, he grappled and he danced with the love of his life in those last few hours. He lived to the full reach of his senses without fear or guilt, because what was to be regretted, now? He knew that Keiko came and went from the room with her basin and her cool cloth; he knew that she knelt beside him. He supposed, even, that she understood he had descended into a realm of pure delight, or rather that the world had risen away from him. He no longer felt the pain of Belle’s death, a pain he had tried hard to hide. He was loosed to his own flesh and every bliss it had to offer. That day, he lived one night, over and over. When it finally eased away he was ready, this time, to let go.

When Vera came home he was gone.

Keiko was quietly washing his body.

‘He works so hard,’ she said, ‘to die. He—’ and she acted out the thrashings and groans that had mysteriously accompanied his last hours. ‘And he—’ she closed her eyes and allowed a wide smile to cover her face.

Vera slapped her across the cheek.

Keiko stood with the red marks of Vera’s fingers spreading sideways over her cheekbone, and a well of deeper crimson, rage perhaps, climbing from her chest to suffuse her face. She said nothing. Vera burst into tears and ran from the room.

* * *

What can happen after a girl has fallen in love with her grandfather and with the storied life of her grandfather and his father too? Only one thing. The grandfather can die.

And that is what he did.

He died.

Not very original of him.

He couldn’t be blamed; he was old. All Vera knew was that here was the same thing all over again. Her mother, her grandfather. Her loved one, the one who took care of her, suddenly gone from his frame, leaving behind the waxy white flesh.

How did he die? She can’t tell you. She forgot about his warnings, his readiness for it. It seemed to her that at one moment he was there, entertaining the regulars in the coffee shop, and the next – when he had tricked her, by asking her to go on without him, leaving him with Keiko – he let go of his life.

It was as if Vera had just come through a sickness herself; she had been asleep and now she was awake.

The neighbours came out of their houses to help. He had to have a Christian burial, they said to each other. There was just Keiko and Vera, and Keiko had no idea what to do. Besides, none of the officials they dealt with would give her any standing, would allow her to be in charge. It had to be Vera. But Vera was fifteen. They spoke of the embalming, the funeral home, the grave site, and the cost of it all. Hinchcliffe took the bills out of Vera’s hands.

Keiko inclined her head at all these conversations, taking note of what was said although no one was sure she understood it. Her young face was unlined and patient and endlessly correct. Vera hated that. She gave herself licence to be awful to the woman, by behaving either with exquisite iciness or appalling rudeness, to keep her guessing.

A crowd of neighbours and Gastown merchants came to the funeral. How sad, they said, and wonderful man, as they came up to shake Vera’s hand. She stood between Miss Hinchcliffe and Keiko at the door to the visiting room in the funeral parlour. She did not like the way Hinchcliffe had taken over, but then who was to do it? Her mind spun with the nursery rhymes her mother had read to her. Parlour, she thought, come into my parlour said the spider to the fly. Hark, hark, the dogs do bark. Wednesday’s child is full of woe. The parlour was all burgundy and varnished wood and there was no air in it. There was no smell of the sea, not even in Grandfather’s clothes, because Keiko had cleaned everything so well.

The minister came; he hugged Vera and said that it was very hard, so soon after her mother’s death. The Captain did not go to the church the way her mother had. But he had lived a good life.

‘A good life?’ protested Vera. What could the insipid word ‘good’ mean in the days of James Lowinger? Did they mean he should have been content to die, as if he’d taken a large helping of life and ought not to be greedy? In fact his life was huge and sometimes horrible, but marvellous, and not to be taken away from her. She had asked for his stories but she could not piece it all together, or make a wholeness out of it.

‘He saw a great deal of the world, I suppose,’ said the minister dubiously.

Keiko knelt beside the coffin. Although they tried, no one could displace her. She sat on her heels and her face was on her hands, which were flat on the floor, folded up like a fan. She raised her body from time to time, and bowed, and then went back down, with no expression on her face. Like the women in the prints, Vera thought.

Vera’s schoolteacher got down on his knees beside her, trying to shake her hand.

‘Miss Tanaka?’ he said. He alone had troubled to discover her name.

When she wouldn’t raise her head he put his down on the floor beside hers and said loudly, as if to wake a sleeper, ‘Thank you so much for taking good care of Vera.’

He was the only one.

But it was because he thought that it was over, Keiko’s taking care of Vera.

‘I suppose her father will come,’ said the neighbours.

No one had thought of Hamilton Drew.

‘And your father? Will he be coming home?’ asked the minister.

Vera looked at Hinchcliffe.

‘We are attempting to locate him,’ the secretary said with a firm smile. ‘I have wired. I have also sent a letter. I am not certain where he is…’

And then they all went home.

And it was silent.

James Lowinger did not wake up and shake the house with his morning sneezes. And there was no bustle to get his morning tea or his shoes and no secret laughter coming from that room and no secret tears either, which was what Vera hoped for. She wanted Keiko to suffer. She wanted Keiko to show on her face the desolation of Vera’s insides. Since she had the temerity to love the old man, she might as well pay the price. What did she expect, taking up with a man so much older? She had to know he would die, didn’t she?

Vera’s pathetic hymns of grief, her English nursery rhymes, swirled in her head. London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down. The North wind doth blow and we shall have snow, what shall we do then? He had died; old men do that, that was what they did. Maybe it was even Keiko’s fault. There were many cruel things she planned to say to Keiko, but when she saw her, head bent over the little iron grill on the back step to cook fish, something moved inside of Vera and she could not.

She went to Lowinger and McBean after school. There was, temporarily, a sense of urgency in the warehouse. The captains came in their blue caps and Hinchcliffe talked to them tersely; they left again. There was no word from Hamilton Drew. Vera was curious, but not heartbroken. She did not remember the man, anyway. The business would have to keep on running, said Hinchcliffe; it could not close because they were always in the middle of a shipment, or an order, and there was no right time to stop. Vera nonetheless hoped that every day would be Miss Hinchcliffe’s last. That she would stand up from her desk and put on her coat and hand over the key to Vera. But no. Hinchcliffe showed no signs of going away.

The flurry of visits soon ended. Vera planned to ransack her grandfather’s office. But Hinchcliffe was there, letting nothing out in the open. She appeared to be very busy with filing and typing letters with two sheets of blue carbon paper behind them. Vera walked slowly across in front of her desk.

Was Miss Hinchcliffe sad?

Hadn’t she too been in love with her grandfather?

Vera used to think that. But now she did not.

She wanted to ask her if she’d seen any signs of the book he was writing, or was going to write, the book that put him in the famous conflict between truth and loyalty, but on entering the door once more after school she thought better of it. She did not want to alert Miss Hinchcliffe. She thought of her grandfather’s impish face, his long chin with the permanent dimple, his finger laid alongside his nose, and she wanted to cry, but she did not.

She wondered if the mythical Mr McBean would appear. She wondered if her father would come. Miss Hinchcliffe divulged nothing. Vera sped past her and disappeared into the back. The pictures lay where she’d left them.

Three Views of Crystal Water. She ran her fingers over the paper, the way he had the day she and her grandfather had looked at the pictures together. She told herself the story again. A stranger surprised the beautiful diving women taking their ease on the beach. A man and a woman crossed paths under cover of midnight on the arch of a bridge, and a letter changed hands. And then the third, conflagration: the pagoda in flames, the samurai at the gate, the women fleeing.

* * *

One day Keiko came to the warehouse with Vera. She presented herself to Hinchcliffe, bowing. Hinchcliffe barely looked up.

‘Honourable Miss Hinchcliffe,’ Keiko began. She was still bowing.

There was no response. Hinchcliffe’s neck tendons showed more definitely under her chin, that was all.

Keiko looked to Vera for guidance. ‘We come to you,’ she began.

Vera nudged her to stand up straight. Hinchcliffe was gazing intently at a letter she was typing.

‘Hinchcliffe!’ said Vera, like someone prompting a rude child.

Hinchcliffe blushed red.

‘She’s pretending we’re not here,’ said Vera to Keiko by way of explanation. Keiko understood Vera’s English, but then so too did Hinchcliffe. This riled the secretary. She looked up.

‘Yes, Miss Tanaka, what can I do for you?’ she asked.

‘We must talk about what James left for us,’ said Keiko. ‘He told me—’

‘I have my instructions.’ Hinchcliffe’s face was elaborately innocent. Vera examined it closely enough however to be certain that the woman was struggling against tears.

‘Instructions from who?’ said Vera innocently.

‘I really cannot discuss it.’

‘What work are you doing now?’ asked Vera with equal innocence, nodding at the typewriter.

Hinchcliffe whipped her head around. She let her jaw drop in imitation – conscious? Or not? – of the insolent way Vera had previously let her jaw drop in their altercations. The pink of her face powder stood out like crayon on her cheeks, as her complexion took on the chalky pallor of anger.

‘How can you ask that? I have been keeping this business going for years, while the Captain…’ She raised her eyebrows in the general direction of Keiko. ‘Don’t you know it would all be nothing if it weren’t for me?’

Keiko was not giving up. She stood very firmly in front of the desk.

‘We have come to you.’

‘Yes?’

‘We have come.’

Keiko stood smiling, intermittently nodding, pulling Vera into her orbit, willing Vera to copy her. Somehow all three adopted her manner.

‘I see that you have come. But why?’ asked Hinchcliffe. Vera could have sworn she bobbed her head, in an inadvertent bow. She had lost the struggle now, but she did not know it.

‘I have to go shopping,’ Keiko said. ‘But—’ she pulled out the cloth bag she kept tied to a band around her waist. ‘Money is none.’

‘He had it in his desk,’ said Vera. She went into his office and tried to slide open the wide, shallow drawer under her grandfather’s desk, but it was locked.

‘Money is none?’ said Hinchcliffe.

‘He always kept the coffee money there.’

Hinchcliffe reached into her desk and pulled out ten dollars. ‘Coffee money I have. There’s coffee money.’

‘Coffee money is good,’ said Keiko, bowing again graciously. ‘And now we like to have fish money. Rice money. Coal money.’

Hinchcliffe produced several hundred dollars. It was a small fortune. And Keiko rolled it carefully and placed it in her cloth bag. Enough for two more months.

Vera watched carefully where it came from. And she recognised in the quick, practised gesture a habit, and she understood with a cold feeling around her heart, that it was the same gesture with which Hinchcliffe had given money to her grandfather.

‘Of course, I understand,’ said Keiko, bowing.

‘Maybe Mr McBean will come,’ Vera said.

There was something there under all of this but she didn’t understand it, not yet. Someday she would; it was a knot to untangle.

‘McBean?’ said Miss Hinchcliffe. ‘What do you know of McBean? There is no Mr McBean, I have told you many times.’

And Vera thought perhaps this was true. There was no Mr McBean.

Hinchcliffe dusted her hands in a gesture that clearly meant, ‘I am through with you’. Once, twice, three times, the palms together, passing each other, as if she were removing traces of a noxious substance.

Hinchcliffe was the picture of the fierce loyal retainer behind the desk, a figure all too familiar in the lore of Japan. Keiko stood up to her full five feet in height now; the bowing was over. And while Hinchcliffe was still sputtering, now Keiko the humble widow was fully in control of the situation.

‘Understood. Understood. Thank you very much,’ she said. ‘Thank you. We are grateful. Vera and I so grateful.’ She bowed again.

Watching Miss Hinchcliffe dispense with Keiko gave Vera her first inklings of a sorrow that was not entirely selfish. She saw the hands, dusted together; she saw the firm little knot of Hinchcliffe’s lips, that oh so wasp Canadian, ‘Well what did you expect? You had it coming’, and she felt sorry for Keiko. She was her grandfather’s wife, sort of, Vera supposed. Which made her a sort of grandmother. Except that she was younger than her mother had been. Vera hadn’t thought much about Keiko’s age before.

‘How old are you, Keiko?’ she asked.

‘Two times as you,’ said Keiko, smiling shyly.

Thirty.

That night she watched Keiko slowly, carefully cooking the dried fish that she had soaked all day. And she ate it, to please her. Keiko did not smile too broadly. But she looked into Vera’s eyes and nodded, and gave a little bow. Then she got a haughty look on her face and dusted her hands. There was the soft sound of her palms brushing against each other, once, twice, three times. It was her first joke.

Vera burst out laughing. They laughed until tears got the better of them, and put their arms awkwardly over each other’s shoulders and sat, heads down, over the kitchen table. They were stuck with each other.

‘What we will do?’ asked Keiko.

‘I won’t leave you,’ Vera said. Her grandfather would want her to stay with Keiko. ‘All my life,’ he had said. ‘I wanted a deep diver.’ That was a very long time to want.

‘I won’t leave you,’ repeated Keiko.

Vera knew it was true.

The days crawled by, the weeks crawled by; she watched the size of Keiko’s cloth bag shrink. She returned by herself to Hinchcliffe.

‘We need to buy food. And pay for the bills,’ Vera said. ‘Where is the money for that?’

Hinchcliffe had not recovered from the fact that Keiko had got the better of her. ‘She is not his wife.’

Aisho.

‘He must have left money for her. And for me,’ said Vera.

‘It is better to wait until your father comes back,’ said Hinchcliffe.

‘And what if he doesn’t?’ asked Vera.

Miss Hinchcliffe said that since she first wrote about Captain Lowinger’s death, her father had not answered the telegrams.

In retrospect, it seems preposterous that they did not press her more. That they did not ask for a will. That no adult other than Keiko inquired about provisions. That no one questioned the ownership of the company. That the unknown person who had given Miss Hinchcliffe instructions did not appear, or at least give more instructions. That Hamilton Drew did not answer the telegrams.

But many things were mysteries and they were not to be solved because James Lowinger had died. And no matter what the neighbours called her, Keiko was not Mrs Lowinger. She did not speak good English and she was Japanese.

And Vera was no longer a child, but not quite an adult.

‘How will you live? Who will you live with?’ her teacher asked her. ‘Did Captain Lowinger provide for your schooling?’

‘I will get a job,’ said Vera.

The teacher mentioned the Depression. Men out of work everywhere.

‘I do know it’s a depression,’ said Vera. I’m not an idiot.’

You couldn’t tell her anything, the teacher remarked to his colleagues.

The doors of the neighbouring houses remained closed and few people expressed curiosity about how they were managing.

By mutual agreement, Vera and Keiko had arrived at the conclusion that it was beneath their dignity to go in front of Hindicliffe again.

‘I will find a job,’ said Keiko. Her eyes were round and bright. Vera read the newspapers to see what was available. But there were no jobs. And men came to the door almost every day asking for work, asking for food.

Keiko went to the dry cleaners and offered her services: they were Chinese. No no no, they said. Chinese workers were dying of starvation. And China was the enemy of Japan.

In Japantown her friends told her to go to the fishing boats. So Vera and Keiko took a long bus ride to Horseshoe Bay. They stood on the docks there and sniffed the air. It smelled of gasoline and kelp. But it also smelled of ocean and timber and wilder places farther north and they were excited. Keiko waited for the boats to arrive and spoke to the men in Japanese. She said she could dive. She said she could clean fish, scrub boats, anything. She said she was ama. But the men who ran the ships laughed. If they had jobs they had to give them to a man, with a family.

By then even the kindliest neighbours said, ‘But surely the girl’s father will come?’

But Hamilton Drew did not come.

Vera went again to the warehouse, which now was like a tomb; entering the door there was like entering a place of pain. ‘Where is my father?’ she asked.

This time Miss Hinchcliffe said she had heard from him. The letter was postmarked in Kobe, Japan, she said, emphasising the capitals. He wished to return and settle matters. But he was unable to do so at this time. She had confidence that he would. In the meantime he had asked her to carry on.

‘You are lying,’ said Vera. She was certain of it; she could tell by the spots of red on the secretary’s cheeks. She backed away from the desk. ‘I will write to him myself.’ Then she ran out of the door into the evening gloom, so that the secretary could not see her crying.

‘What did she do before, in Japan?’ the kindliest neighbour asked Vera, about Keiko, encountering the two on the street.

‘I am a diver,’ Keiko said, understanding.

‘Oh,’ said the neighbour, her eyes jumping from Vera to Keiko. A furrow developed in her brow. Perhaps she thought that Keiko was a performing diver, like in a circus. ‘I don’t suppose there is much call for a diver here.’

Vera’s teacher advised Keiko to go to the aquarium; maybe Keiko could find a job cleaning tanks. This was a good idea, and they both went, but once again Keiko was refused. Men did that job.

They returned to Horseshoe Bay. ‘I am a good diver,’ said Keiko. ‘What I love to do. Go to shore I do it. Pick up shellfish under the water,’ she said.

They tried a strip of beach on Bowen Island. But even Keiko could not work underwater, not in Canada. It was too cold. One man told her to go to Australia, but she did not know how to get there. There was only one place she could dive. Japan.

And suddenly, more than anything, that was what Vera wanted. To go with Keiko to Japan. She was angry at Hamilton Drew. She did write to him, but all she could put for an address was Kobe, Japan. If her father came, if he at long last materialised, she wanted to be gone. To have disappeared somewhere, so that he would look for her, and mourn. Even better to have disappeared in the Far East, where he had disappeared himself.

She felt that she was a failure, a useless, unlovable girl. She had been insufficient to keep her mother alive, and no better at keeping her grandfather alive. Whatever it was they were fighting her father about, whatever it was the men were looking for, it was more important than she was: that was the message. She might as well go off to Japan, wherever that was: she was no good for anything else.

It happened quickly, after that.

Keiko’s fishmonger in Japantown would let her work to earn the money to get home to Japan. Only for three months, he said, she could clean fish. But you cannot take that girl with you, he said. She is white, and she will not be safe.

‘He must be crazy,’ said Keiko to Vera. ‘It is not so.’

‘Japan will have war with all the white people of the world,’ said the fishmonger. ‘It is you who are crazy.’

Because they knew it would be for the last time, they returned to Homer Street. Hinchcliffe was positively rigid, Keiko strangely poised.

‘Honourable Miss Hinchcliffe,’ she said, bowing deeply. Hinchcliffe could not see the little smile around her mouth because Keiko’s face was directed toward the green linoleum floor. ‘We have much use of money you before given. And now we come to say that we like to go shopping more.’

‘It is for me,’ said Vera. ‘Grandfather would not have wanted me to be hungry.’

‘No,’ said Miss Hinchcliffe. ‘He would not. Whatever he left, it is for you. But he left nothing. I have looked.’

Vera felt as if she had lost him all over again.

‘I don’t believe it,’ she whispered.

Perhaps that was why Hinchcliffe opened the desk drawer and pulled out another two hundred dollars.