A Student of History, page 2
I must have stood there for two or three minutes, but there was no further greeting. This was very strange—no Lourdes, no butler, no person of any kind. I had a feeling that Mrs. W— was hidden somewhere, watching—a feeling that turned out to be true. My eyes followed the staircase; I expected her to descend dramatically like some movie star of old, but this was not—I learned quickly—her style. When the voice came again, it startled me so much that I jumped. She’d come in silently through a door on the left.
“A magnificent house, is it not?”
I turned to the source of the voice, a slender, silver-haired woman standing fifteen feet away. It took me a moment to gather my wits. “Yes ma’am,” I finally managed.
“My grandfather had it built in the 1940s. We used to own this entire hill.”
My heart was racing as I considered the woman in front of me. Janet had said she was in her midseventies, but she looked like no other seventy-something woman I’d ever seen. She stood about 5'4"—six inches shorter than me—and had perfect posture, as erect as a young girl who’d just left her manners lessons. Her shoulder-length silver hair was combed back perfectly off of her face, the edges slightly curled. There were wrinkles at her eyes and mouth, but also a tremendous liveliness to her face and expression. Her clothes—gray slacks, white blouse, and a long blue sweater with gray accents—were expensive-looking and elegant. The diamond earrings she wore were probably worth more than I lived on in a year. As she gestured with her hands to speak of the house, I saw the fineness of her bones. I had never known a woman of this age could be so beautiful.
“It looks . . .” I began, not knowing the proper thing to say. “It looks like you still own a lot of it.”
She turned toward me now, her eyes passing over my face, my body, my clothes. I felt as exposed and scrutinized as I did when I stood naked at the doctor’s. “You’re a friend of Janet’s?” she asked.
“Yes, we’re in graduate school together,” I replied, glad for a question I could answer.
“You’re not her boyfriend, are you?”
“N-no,” I said. Apparently the conversations between Janet and Mrs. W— had not been very personal. “She and I are just friends.”
“That’s good. You’re too handsome for her. And she’s probably too much of a handful for you. You look like an earnest young man.”
I didn’t know how to reply to this, so I awkwardly shrugged my shoulders.
Mrs. W— didn’t seem to notice. “Janet’s a smart girl,” she continued. “She surpassed my expectations. But she told me that she thinks you’re even smarter.”
I blushed. Janet couldn’t have meant this; she was the one who was almost done with her dissertation! Maybe she was just trying to put Mrs. W— at ease. “I don’t know about that,” I said.
“What is your name again?”
“Rick.”
“Rick what?”
“Nagano.”
“Nagano,” she repeated. “Japanese?”
“Yes.”
“Well, that’s all right,” she said. Then, looking at me more closely: “Funny, you don’t look Japanese.”
“My father’s Japanese,” I said, launching into the familiar explanation. “And my mother’s Polish.”
“I wouldn’t have been able to tell.” I was never sure what people expected me to say to this. Thank you? Really? What exactly did you think? But Mrs. W— considered me more closely, and surprised me. “Yes, I would have. I know quite a few mixed-race Japanese, actually. I spent a lot of time in Japan. The bustle and energy of Tokyo are interesting, but I prefer the history and culture of Kyoto. The art there, and the buildings, have been very well preserved. Of course, the countryside is beautiful too. Especially Nagano Prefecture, where your people are probably from.”
Actually, my family roots were in Okayama Prefecture—not that I’d know the difference. “I’ve never been,” I said.
“Never? How old are you?”
“Thirty-two.”
“Thirty-two,” she said. “And still a student.”
I tried not to feel defensive, but I couldn’t help myself. There were plenty of grad students over thirty, I wanted to say. And some who were even further behind than me.
“Married?” Mrs. W— asked me now.
“Excuse me?”
“Are you married?”
“Um, no.”
“Well. That’s good. People shouldn’t tie themselves up too young. Married is married forever.”
I didn’t point out that she thought me too young for marriage after suggesting I was lagging in other areas. Either way, I didn’t want to talk about my own romantic affairs. Instead, I just stood silently until my new employer said, “Well, come on then. Let’s get you to work.”
With that, she turned and led me through the door at the back of the entrance hall, which opened into a large, dark room. It was filled with a mishmash of heavy furniture, antiques that looked more suitable for display than for use. On the tables and walls were various pieces, presumably from Asia and Africa—porcelain and ivory carvings, block-print paintings, a mournful oblong mask. A huge wardrobe of sorts—or something like it—stood in one corner, an ominous presence looming over the rest of the room. There seemed to be no design or theme to the room, other than as a receptacle for someone’s expensive souvenirs from their far-ranging, adventurous travels.
And in a way I was right, for when Mrs. W— saw me looking, she said, “Useless, isn’t it? All of it. These are from my grandfather’s trips abroad. I never even sit in this room.”
“It’s all beautiful,” I said.
“It is not. Some of it is. That bureau over there—” she pointed to a massive wooden piece, as big as a mantle in a hunting lodge, with carved heads of hawks and wolves, “that bureau is from England, the mid-1600s. That mask is from Nigeria, 1872. And that—” she pointed toward a strange upholstered piece, which looked like a chair bent backward, its arms pointed up in the air, “that’s a siège d’amour, from France, the 1700s. So heavy men—like Prince Edward VIII—could make love without crushing their lovers.”
Now I noticed the two sets of gold or brass stirrups, one for the person lying back, one, presumably, for the person bending over. I must have laughed in surprise, because Mrs. W— chuckled. “Oh, so you do have a sense of humor. That’s good. I was starting to worry.”
From there we passed into a kind of open throughway, with a sliding glass door that led to a garden. At the door, two Lhasa apsos were barking to be let inside.
“That’s Pinot and Chardonnay,” she said. “They’re ten years old and a pain in my behind. Hello, you little monsters!” she called out in a singsongy voice. “I’ll be right there! Hold your horses!”
“Pinot grigio or pinot noir?” I asked.
“Pinot noir. We are in California.”
“They’re cute,” I said, although I wasn’t fond of small dogs.
“They’re all right for lap dogs,” Mrs. W— said, as if she’d read my mind. “I prefer sporting dogs myself. My father used to breed Brittany spaniels, and we’d take them up north to hunt pheasants and grouse. I loved those dogs, but they need so much exercise. They wouldn’t be practical for me anymore.”
“You hunted?”
“Yes, I was a very good shot!” she said, as if offended I hadn’t known. “I was better than the boys my age, which was sometimes a problem. Men don’t like to be bettered by women.” She looked back at me, and turned into a hallway, where we passed what appeared to be another living room, and then another. “I rode horses too, competitively, but also sometimes to help my father out on his ranch in Santa Barbara. I wasn’t one of those useless rich girls, you see, staying at home with my dolls. I liked to be outdoors doing things. And I spent as much time as I could with my father. I was the apple of his eye, you see. Everybody said so.”
“I’m sure you were.” I would have liked to say that I was the apple of my father’s eye too, and I had been once. My father was an electrician, as his father had been before him. I was “the smart one,” the son who got a scholarship to Stanford; the one expected to do great things with my fancy degrees. Except he’d been asking for several years now when I was going to get a job; when all the hard-earned money he’d put toward making me the first in my family to go to college (the scholarship, it turned out, didn’t pay for housing or incidentals) was finally going to start paying off. It’s the blue-collar parents’ nightmare, I suppose, to work so hard to give their children opportunities, only to have their kids fall backward financially. My older brother, who’d become an electrician like our father and would someday take over the business, already had a house, a wife, and two kids.
“You’ll read all about that, and all about him too,” said Mrs. W—. She stopped outside a doorway. “Well, here we are.”
The room we entered had once been a bedroom; there was still a daybed against one wall. A large wooden desk was set up by the window, which had a nice view of the back garden. There were four bookcases along the wall, opposite the daybed, but otherwise the room was quite bare. I wondered what had been here before, and if Mrs. W— had set it up as an office specifically for her project.
“My notebooks are in that bookcase,” she said, pointing to a lower shelf of the bookcase closest to the desk. “Janet got through two of them, so you can start fresh with the third. You may use the computer—it is in the top drawer there. She left a folder, she said, with what she’d transcribed already. I don’t know how those things work, but I trust that you do.” She considered me again, and nodded. “Well, that will be all. You may begin.”
“I may . . . what? I’m sorry, but . . . I have to go in a bit. I didn’t realize I was starting today.”
“Didn’t Lourdes instruct you to be here at two o’clock?”
“Well, yes, ma’am.” I couldn’t believe I was calling this woman ma’am. “But I thought it was just to meet you.”
“You could have done all of that and started your work too. You need to think ahead, young man.”
I resisted the urge to defend myself. Who the hell did this woman think she was? And yet part of me felt properly chastised. She was right, I should have thought ahead. Again, I was too slow, too untuned to nuance to respond correctly to the situation at hand. And there was nowhere else I really needed to be.
Mrs. W— furrowed her brow. “Well, perhaps you can stay long enough to get a sense of the project. You can start looking through my journals—they can’t leave the premises, of course. And you shouldn’t have a problem reading them—my handwriting is impeccable—but if you have any questions, Lourdes can help. The terms of employment are the same for you as they were for Janet: ten hours a week, twenty-five dollars an hour, on days you arrange with Lourdes. She will pay you by check every two weeks. If anything changes in your schedule, we will need a week’s notice. And I need you to sign the agreement.”
“The agreement?”
“Yes, the confidentiality agreement. Any material information about my family you might find in the journals must remain private. Many people are curious about us, Mr. Nagano. And my enemies are always looking for information.”
I couldn’t imagine who her enemies might be, nor what they could possibly want to know. But scanning the one-page contract she put in front of me, I didn’t see a problem with agreeing. I leaned over the desk and signed, then gave her back the document.
“Very good,” she said. And then she was gone.
The sudden silence, after Mrs. W—’s stream of talk, was startling. For a moment I stood near the middle of the room, not moving. I felt strange, almost criminal, left alone in this house, in this room where her memories were housed. And now, looking around, I realized it wasn’t as empty as I’d thought. There were several paintings on the walls, portraits of three blond people—two young men and a woman—in their late teens or early twenties. On another wall the three figures appeared again, this time in two group portraits. The paintings were oil, heavy, old-fashioned. Was this Mrs. W— in her youth? Were the two young men her brothers? If so, they all seemed flat and lifeless, and I wasn’t sure if the effect was the result of an unskilled hand, or some essential dullness in the subjects themselves.
I pulled out the chair and sat down at the desk. When I took the laptop out of the drawer, I found a sticky note from Janet. There’s a folder on the desktop with the first two notebooks, saved as separate files. It totals about two hundred pages. Have fun!
The bookcases were just to my left. They were empty except for an old printer wrapped in its cords and three stacks of Mrs. W—’s notebooks. Notebook, though, is a misleading term. These were books for writing, yes, but clearly handmade, with hardbound leather covers and heavy cream-colored paper, beautiful as objects in themselves. Peabody & Dutton, 1922, said the nameplate on the inside cover of one of them. Stationers, Boston. I wondered how much each of these books had cost, where they had originally come from, and how old they were. I was almost afraid that what I’d find inside would disturb their beauty.
There were two brown books on the right of one of the lower shelves, and I assumed these were the ones Janet had finished, but I had no way to know until I could check against the files on the laptop. It occurred to me that I should read through what Janet had already transcribed, but that would take time, and already it felt like I’d fallen behind. I needed to start from wherever Janet had left off. So I picked up the top notebook from the left-hand pile, laid it flat on the desk, and carefully opened the cover.
Inside was writing—printed writing, which was medium-sized and exact, blue ink from a fountain pen, as legible as Mrs. W— had promised. Her lines were perfectly straight even though the paper itself was not lined. There were also sketches, clippings, photographs pasted in—this was an album of her life. Flipping through, I saw pictures of an orange grove in what was now the San Fernando Valley, framed by the San Gabriel Mountains. There was a picture of the coastline of Malibu with just a few scattered shacks, not the glut of oversized modern houses there today. There was a photo of four young women at some kind of party; one of them looked vaguely like the girl in the oil painting. Each of the pictures had arrows pointing out certain features, with written explanations on the page. One of Father’s orange groves. The oranges were sour that year, was one. 1952, before the riffraff took over Malibu, said another.
I turned back to the front of the notebook, where the writing on the first page picked up in midscene. Just like I told Clara, John was already there, making cow eyes at that hussy, Evie Johnson. This was her account of a night at the Cocoanut Grove, where John—who had apparently broken off an engagement with Clara—was visibly courting the new hussy, and our heroine, young Marion, approached him on the dance floor and called him a horse’s ass right in front of all their friends.
That this minor social escapade should be recorded in a journal seemed trivial to me, but as I went on, there was more of the same. For an hour I read accounts of other nights on the town—and once, of a wedding shower where Elizabeth Taylor had apparently had too much to drink. Mrs. W—’s accounts were documentary in tone, with little flashes of wit, but she seemed largely absent from them herself. What I mean is, she was in them, usually causing some sort of trouble, but the entries themselves were rather mundane.
At four o’clock, I closed the notebook and replaced it on the shelf. I shut down the laptop and pushed it to the back of the desk. This would be tedious work, but easy, and I was looking forward to the money. Silently I thanked Janet for hooking me up. Then I wandered out to the hallway and into one of the living rooms, calling out to Mrs. W—. She didn’t appear, but another woman did. This woman was pretty, Latina, probably in her thirties, wearing a crisp black dress.
“Mrs. W— is taking her afternoon rest,” said the woman. “Was everything all right? I’m Lourdes.”
I wanted to ask her a thousand questions—how long had she been there? What was it like? Was she afraid to touch things, as I was? How did she keep from getting lost in the vast expanses of this house? But I held my tongue and said that I had everything I needed. In a friendly but no-nonsense way, Lourdes led me to the door. Then I stepped outside, and heard the door shut behind me. I was alone. I tried to reflect on what had happened in the last few hours, but it was all too much, too new. Instead, I just stood there for a minute. The entire city was laid out before me—Hollywood below, Downtown to the east, Santa Monica and Venice to the west, Palos Verdes and Catalina far off in the distance. The sun was gleaming off the ocean and the traffic was already clogging the freeways. But up here, Mrs. W— was above it all. I sighed, took one last look at the house, walked out to my car, and drove back down into the city.
CHAPTER TWO
That night I treated myself to dinner at my favorite Cuban restaurant—a big, noisy place on Venice Boulevard that served huge plates of pork, black beans, rice, and plantains. The food was cheap—ten dollars a plate—but I still wouldn’t have sprung for it if I hadn’t known a check was coming, and as it was I just drank water to save money. But I was feeling celebratory, the best I’d felt in weeks—not only at the prospect of making some money, but also because a door had opened to a new experience. Sitting there by myself, eating pork so tender and savory it almost brought tears to my eyes, hearing laughter and conversation all around me, I realized how narrow my life had become. For several years it had revolved around only two places—the apartment I shared with Chloe, and campus. But now that I was done with classes and didn’t teach anymore, I had no reason to go to campus except the occasional torturous meeting with Professor Rose; and my place, without Chloe, was depressing and claustrophobic. I’d been treading water, trapped in a holding pattern. Days followed days that were so indistinguishable I lost track of what month it was.
Working on the dissertation more or less full-time had only made things worse. It wasn’t just that I’d lost interest in my topic. I was starting to question the study of history itself. Mine was not the usual complaint of the underrepresented: that history is written by the victors, stories of everyday people are lost, etc. No, my problem was different. It was more that I didn’t know where the past ended and the present began. I didn’t know when something was over enough to isolate, capture, make statements about. If events of the 1800s affected the early twentieth century, and the results of that, in turn, led to changes fifty years down the road, then who’s to say that it was ever really done? That we weren’t, even today, simply playing out another chapter in a story that was nowhere near complete? And how could I, from some undefined middle part of the narrative, step back and make any kind of declaration? Especially when I didn’t know how the events I was studying had any relevance to the present? History was taking shape all around us, in ways big and small, and it seemed fruitless, even arrogant, to try to capture it. It would be like pinning a butterfly into a specimen box while it was still alive and wriggling.
