V.N. Ebert

            Ira Landon brought Machiko home from his tour in Japan. She’d been Machiko Wasaka when he’d met her in Kyoto. Performing at a club, a place that sold watered down champagne and hungry women for American dollars. The owner was a short Japanese in a Western-style suit who had picked up enough English to draw up a sign and aggressively promote the services on offer.

            Had pulled Ira by the lapels down the stairs to the establishment that was partially below ground. Ira had let himself be led because he was on leave and Kyoto was old temples and old gardens and old vices in the Gion, with the latter having undergone a seedy modernization for the benefit of Americans with uncomplicated tastes. There were still old-style houses for the Japanese and the Americans didn’t give a damn, the first gaijin to arrive had found that geisha girls were wearing far too many clothes and trying to make tea and sing out-of-key. The owner knew the current tastes well enough that he told Ira girl were stripper, geisha know strip. A new and direct establishment, simplified by hunger and market demands.

            Machiko had been his star attraction. Spoke English like a California native and had a soft voice like she spoke without disturbing the air. She’d been pretty even for having lost weight, pale before the makeup from anemia. Had painted on eyebrows and it reminded Ira of his grandmother who had done the same, and the similarity was endearing.

            After she finished singing a torch song that was a few years out of date, Ira asked for her and handed a folded bill to the proprietor. Proprietor palmed the bill like a stage magician and said she would happily see him.

            “After change. She come out. Glad sit.”

            The owner was ready to embrace the future with a bright and artificial smile.  

The owner had introduced her to the crowd as Madame Cherry Brossom, and she told Ira her name when he introduced himself. She addressed him as Mr. Landon, and he said that was too formal.

            “How about, I’ll call you Machiko, and you can call me Ira.”

            She asked if he’d like champagne and they went through the formality of the purchase, and the owner took the order and brought a bottle of something that could have been champagne and dirty glasses. They started talking without needing the pimp to translate and Ira hardly touched the drink.

            She asked if he was an officer and Ira said that he was, and then where he was from and he said Georgia, America, a town called Milledgeville.

            “It used to be the capital of the whole state, but it isn’t much now. Everything’s gone to Atlanta, that’s the new capital.”

            “Like Kyoto,” she said.

            “What do you mean?”

            “This is the old capital. Tokyo is the new capital and has become much bigger.”

            “You ever been to Tokyo?”

            “I lived there, for a time.”

            “You stay in Kyoto during the war, stay away from the bombing?”

            “Had I known Kyoto was safe and Tokyo wasn’t,” Machiko said and drifted off. “But, there was no way for me to have known.”

            Ira knew Tokyo had been firebombed to hell and decided this wasn’t a topic that needed to be explored.

            “Well,” Ira said, “the advantage of a place which isn’t growing much is being able to afford to buy yourself a piece of it.”

            “Do you own land,” she asked.

            “I got a piece of property. Used to have the big house of a plantation on it.”

            “Big house?”

            “Mansion, was a fine home for rich people before the war.”

            “Our war?”

            “Not this one, the other one. The one between the states.”

            “The North-South War?”

            “That’s what you call it here?”

            “We do.”

            “Not a bad name for it, even if it lets the Yankees off. But, this was a piece of land had a mansion on it. Mansion ain’t there anymore, got burnt out during the war, and the land’s gotten overgrown. My momma’s family used to live there before they lost the war.”

            “My family used to have many koku of land,” Michiko said. “We were a samurai family. My great-great grandfather sided with the Shogun, after the Westerners came. He lost everything after the Imperial side won the war.”

            “Sounds like we got the same kind of family history,” Ira said. “Mine were cavaliers.”

            Couple more visits and Ira proposed. Machiko came with him to Georgia. He had her wear a kimono because he thought that would impress his folks, exotic fabric and brightly colored instead of the worn and drab clothes he was used to women wearing. Introduced her to his family as Mrs. Landon, and when they said it was an illegal marriage he said that the Army had signed off on it. She was legally a war bride and as of 1950 that meant she could immigrate, and if the state wanted to argue that she wasn’t white he’d tell them that she wasn’t Negro either.

            His momma eventually said that her English was pretty good.

            “How’d you learn it?”

            “I learned in school,” Machiko said, “and in America before the war.”

            “You lived here?”

            “In Hawaii.”

            There was a certain awkward silence and his folks looked like they were wondering if she had masterminded the attack herself. Ira said he would show her the old mansion before it got too dark.

            “Show her what she married into.”

            She changed into something more conventional and took her out of the one-story home of solid though unimpressive construction. There was an unpaved path like a trail that ran into the woods, dogwoods and other softwoods. The trail ended and Ira led her through the underbrush.

            “Used to be the road went right up to the door, but the woods ate the road.”

            Went deeper into the woods and the ruins of the mansion were the stone foundations of its walls like a chalk outline around a body in a detective movie. If he had taken a tape measure and measured, he could give the square footage, but otherwise was nothing left.

            Growing within the foundations, among the brush and the weeds, was a cherry-blossom tree in full bloom. Pink delicate blossoms, and some fallen among the ruins, distinct in the dying light as the sun began to set. Cherry-blossoms had been introduced to Georgia, but Ira had never seen one in the wild.

            “Didn’t think this was the time of year for them,” Ira said, “but don’t it remind you of your home?”

            Machiko was pale like she was back in her makeup, and hungry.

            “This looks like the firebombed home of a wealthy family, many years after the incendiaries fell.”

            Ira regretted taking her there like he’d dragged up memories of the war. Walked with her back to the house and put her in his childhood bedroom and put himself on the couch. Closed his eyes and saw the cherry-blossom tree like he was standing under it, and sleep took him.

            The sound of cannon fire woke Ira. The noise was as obvious as standing by a crater that the second before impact had been undisturbed earth. Ira reached for his service weapon and after searching for it recognized that he wasn’t in the service and didn’t still have the weapon by him. Didn’t understand what the noise was and stumbled into Michiko’s room because she must’ve been off her head. She wasn’t in her bed and the clock was just shy of midnight.

            Then he was in his parents’ bedroom, and they had slept through the noise. Said that Michiko was gone and been a sound like they were under attack and that he needed to go out to look for Michiko and left his parents behind him.

            Crossed the threshold of his parent’s home barefoot and without an overcoat, and the world was dim pale under a full moon.

            Outside was a white fox that was the same dim pale as the moonlight, and with too many tails. The strangeness of the creature caught him, and he stood dumb looking at it, and he counted nine tails. Creature met his gaze and turned and flicked all its tails at once like an animal kind of semaphore, and started away, and Ira followed.

            Fox took him down the path he’d led Michiko, through the woods and the path ended. The fox walked lightly, and the only sound was the underbrush snapping under Ira’s feet. The fox gained distance and disappeared between trees and Ira knew had about reached the old plantation. Wondered if Michiko had come to this house, like she might have run out and gone to the only other place she knew. 

            Ira stepped onto a path and the trees cleared out, and the big house was in front of him. The windows were drawn but light was coming through them and could make out the dimensions and the whitewash of the columns, like in a drawing he had seen of the property in its ante bellum prime. For the noise coming from the interior, violins and piano and the rest of a full band, and the sounds of many bodies moving and conversing, sounded like a party was on.

            Ira came to the front door flanked by small columns supporting a veranda accessible from the second story. Knocked and on hearing no answer besides the continuous noise of the party, tried the knob and found the door unlocked. He entered and left footprints on the oriental carpet in the entranceway. Fox prints were next to his, disturbing the dust.

            The ballroom was ahead, and the party was in full swing. The women were in hoop skirts and lace. Men dressed like cavalry officers and gentlemen. Dancing waltzes that had been fashionable a long time ago, skirts dragging across the floor. All lit by gauzy candlelight through frosted glass lanterns, like a bleared film being played back to him. The chandelier hanging over the ballroom was dusty and had cobwebs between the arms, and there was a musty smell like stale clothes forgotten in a trunk. 

            Intermittent over the sounds of band, sounds like cannons in the distance.

            Ira’s wife was dancing among them, dressed out of place. Bright kimono and elaborate wig, in addition to the matter of her race, though the others took no notice of her strangeness, and she waltzed with practiced ease. Ira tried to cut in and she snubbed him, preferring the company of an officer in the Confederate cavalry. He was left standing without a partner and poorly dressed, stranger than Michiko for the simplicity of his outfit among the aristocratic guests.

            Curtains were drawn on all the windows, and sheets were draped over the mirrors hanging on the walls. Were tall mirrors in the grand fashion of Louis XIV, affections of continental grandeur with chipped gilt, slivers of green showing through where the sheet didn’t cover the frame.

            Standing outside of the circle of dancers, a woman considered Ira. She was an older woman though not so old as to be without charms. Grand and well-dressed, with a heavy necklace of pearls. She fanned herself and her fan was Japonaiserie, gold with a design of a cherry blossom, pink blossoms against gold paper. She used the fan to signal to Ira, who made his way to her.

            “Are you a pair,” she said, gesturing with her fan towards Michiko who was now dancing with another well-dressed partner.

“I believed that we were.”

“She seems to prefer the company of officers.”

            “I’m an officer as well, though I’m not so well bred as these men.”

            She pointed him to the top of the double staircase and said that he should outfit himself better.

            “My husband is absent, and I believe you wear clothes of the same cut.”

            “He won’t mind my taking his duds?”

            “He has been gone for a time, and I have given up the expectation of his return.”

            Ira followed the double staircase, and to the left of the staircase was an open door to a bedroom with a four-poster covered bed and faded portraits of aristocratic men on the walls, some bearing a resemblance to Ira’s mother, and another covered mirror. Opened a wardrobe and had the same smell as the ballroom and put himself in a suit as fine as the men who were cavalry officers. Considering admiring himself in the mirror and he was deterred by a sensation like a tribesman must face upon trying to violate a taboo.

            Was back among the dance and now suitably outfitted he was in demand as a partner and followed the steps of the waltz. The women were dark eyed and brunette and wore their hair long. They gave the impression with the practiced and measured rhythm of their motions as having danced for a great period of time, and of having wearied of dancing, and being unwilling to break off the dance. He seemed a novel and welcome addition, his wife serving something of the same function among the men.

            The sound of cannons interrupted Ira’s step, and his partner of the moment corrected him and continued the dance as though she refused to acknowledge a bombardment happening at some remove.

            Ira turned and saw another man, dressed in plain clothes, dirty and muddied, seated in a corner in a stained and torn silk upholstered chair. The sound of cannons had begun to wear on Ira and distracted him from the dance despite his partner’s efforts, and his curiosity at this man who was now the only individual in modest dress.

            “You aren’t dancing,” Ira asked him after breaking away from the circle.

            The man spat tobacco juice on the rug. He had a mean sort-of face, like an overseer who was used to breaking men for his living.

            “Didn’t dance before the war and wouldn’t now even if I have finally been invited in.”

            “What war?”

            “What war do you think?”

            “Why have you been invited in,” Ira asked.

            “Because I loved my way of living how these well-bred folks loved their way of living.”

            “What did you do?”

            Man showed he was missing teeth.

            “I drove fieldhands, and I broke in fresh chattel, and I prepared whelps for auction, and all for my pay and the benefit of the master and missus. Raised the funds for this party.”

             There were no Negroes at the party, even as servants.

            “Where did the Negroes go,” Ira asked.

            “They’re somewhere else,” the overseer said. “Didn’t receive an invitation to come into the big house. Maybe they have moved off the estate and maybe they have remained outside. Not gone out to check and ain’t my concern to deal with them any longer.”

            The cannons fired again.

            “Is the war still on,” Ira asked.

            “Sound like it is,” overseer said.

            “It ended for me,” Ira said, “and for the rest of the world.”

            “World moves on of its own accord,” overseer said. “People ain’t always able to do that.”

            “Are you the people who couldn’t move on,” Ira asked.

            “They were attached to all this. This way of living. And they loved it, and love and attachment can reduce us to hungry ghosts.”

            Ira looked again at his wife and now she was in hoopskirts and had her hair in curls. But for her race, she would have been any of the other women.

            “You can keep on dancing, or you can pull that curtain down.”

            Overseer pointed to the largest of the mirrors, extending from the floor to the ceiling and commanding the room, and Michiko was again in her kimono and wig. Was as though she had never changed. Ira knew that if he took down the curtain, the dance would end, and his marriage.

            “Sometimes you got to see things reflected back at you for you to see what’s right in front of your face,” overseer said.

            Michiko was dancing an alien kind of dance now, slow and measured, and the crowd was around her watching. The band was playing something that might have been on the Gion, something put on for aristocratic Japanese and samurai before the Westerners came, and it was atonal and piercing. Her makeup was lead white and her eyebrows were painted high on her forehead, and when she smiled her teeth were blackened.

            Ira didn’t know the woman he had married, and the overseer had told him how he might know her.

            Ira crossed the room while his wife continued her dance and pulled the curtain down from the mirror. He saw himself and the scene in the mirror without turning around. His clothes in the mirror were tattered and bloody.

           The old woman had screamed as the curtain came down. Her dress was strips of fabric along a rusted frame. Her pearls were loose around her feet, having outlasted their string. The guests around her were rotten and dressed no better, reduced to the frames of dresses and the bare remnants of suits. Some had wisps of hair clinging to their scalps and others had rats living in their wigs.

            Ira found his wife in the scene and Michiko was in a tattered silk kimono, its colors pale and frayed, silk eaten away by worms. Her wig was whisps against her scalp, and the paint of her eyebrows had long faded. She had continued her dance, and the band with its rotted instruments continued, and the sounds of cannon fire were louder now like Sherman was upon them. She looked in the mirror, and saw him, and smiled with her blackened and rotted teeth.

            Ira turned around to face her, and he was standing in the ruined foundations of the big house in the woods, with the first rays of sunrise touching the tops of the trees. The cherry blossom tree was bare, and there were no trace of pink blossoms on the ground.

            Ira never did find a trace of his wife. Some folks thought he had killed her, and others thought that she had made her way back to Japan. He thought that she was still dancing.

©V.N. Ebert 2024