Although I considered telling him more, I shrugged and looked at my feet as if they were fascinating, as if I might break into a dance at any moment.
Mr. Yoshioka sighed. “I keep my head down, Jonah Kirk. I do not make a great noise as I pass through the years. I do not allow myself curiosity about women … like Miss Eve Adams. Head down. Head down. I do not wish to shine. I prefer shadows, quiet, periods of solitude. I do not wish to be noticed. If one is all but invisible to others, one cannot be envied, inspire anger or suspicion. Near invisibility is a way of life that I recommend.”
“You think Eve Adams might really kill you?”
Although his hands hardly trembled now that he’d put away the pieces of the photograph, he remained disquieted—and too embarrassed to look at me. “There are worse things than death. I do not think the threat was to me. It is, as it appears, to the tiger screen. I cannot risk the screen. It is too valuable.”
“Valuable? But didn’t you say it was just some kind of copy, not the original?”
“It is more valuable than the original.”
“How can that be? I mean, if it’s not an antique.”
Raising his head, he met my eyes. He seemed to want to reveal something of importance, but then he said, “I only came to warn you.”
He stepped into the hallway and quietly pulled the door shut between us.
I heard no receding footsteps.
After a beat, through the door, Mr. Yoshioka said, “Jonah Kirk?”
“Yes?”
“Lock the deadbolts.”
“All right.” I did as he asked.
With one ear to the door, as I listened to the tailor walk away, I thought perhaps his embarrassment arose from his lack of courage, from his determination to keep his head down, to be nearly invisible. That possibility made me sad. And worse than sad.
In those days, when you were, like Mr. Yoshioka, an American of an ethnic group whose former homeland had in the not-too-distant past waged and lost a world war, or if you were of a people who had only recently begun to emerge from a century of segregation following generations of slavery, the heroes in books and movies tended not to be like you. We could believe in the characters John Wayne inhabited and admire the grace and humility with which he played heroic men; we could agree that the honor and integrity and
courage that were the essence of his image should be values we, too, embraced, but we couldn’t see ourselves as John Wayne or imagine he was us. Sure, there was Sidney Poitier, but in those days he played mostly in self-consciously liberal films, raising awareness of injustice rather than taking down bad guys. Taking down bad guys is fundamentally what you want in your model of a hero. Bill Cosby, on TV in I Spy, had the physicality and attitude to make bad guys wish they’d been good, but he mostly did so with humor, wit, and smarts, and you never felt he was at risk, therefore didn’t need courage. My generation of blacks had two main sources of heroes—sports stars who broke through race barriers and famous musicians—who neither beat up nor shot down villains as part of their job description. When it came to inspiring ethnic icons of heroism in pop culture, Mr. Yoshioka had fewer men to emulate than I did. Japanese American sports stars were unknown in those days, and the only Japanese singer to make the charts was Kyu Sakamoto, whose “Sukiyaki” went to number one in 1963, even though the lyrics were entirely in Japanese.
Back then, I had a narrow definition of heroism. My conclusion that Mr. Yoshioka lacked courage arose from ignorance, as later I would learn. After you have suffered great losses and known much pain, it is not cowardice to wish to live henceforth with a minimum of suffering. And one form of heroism, about which few if any films will be made, is having the courage to live without bitterness when bitterness is justified, having the strength to persevere even when perseverance seems unlikely to be rewarded, having the resolution to find profound meaning in life when it seems the most meaningless.
27
When I called to tell her that I was home, Mrs. Lorenzo came up to the fourth floor with what she said was a “special secret dessert” on a covered plate. Earlier, she’d left a pan of saltimbocca in our refrigerator, prepared but uncooked, as well as the fixings for two side dishes.
As she made potato croquettes and peas with walnuts, I set the table and told her about my day. There wasn’t much to tell, because I left out Fiona Cassidy, aka Eve Adams, and Mr. Yoshioka. I was leading a life more secret than the dessert on the covered plate.
As she cooked, she gave me other small tasks, and I assisted as best I could while she told me all about what the three kids in her little day-care business did and said. “I’m afraid I can’t keep up with them quite like before I got so fat.”
Mr. Lorenzo had been dead only a couple of months, but already Mrs. Lorenzo was gaining weight. She wasn’t yet fat, however, only a little plump, and I didn’t like to hear her dissing herself.
“Mrs. Lorenzo, has anybody ever told you how you look like Anna Maria Alberghetti?”
“You’re sweet, Jonah, but that’s all behind me now.” With one hand, she patted her backside and laughed softly. “All behind me.”
Somehow I knew she didn’t mean the new pounds, which were distributed evenly over her, and so I said, “Behind you? What is?”
“Caring about how I look. Men. Marriage. Tony was the best of men. Trying to have all that again will only lead to disappointment … or worse.”
Her resignation made me sad. I couldn’t think of any words that might change her mind about the future. The longer I was silent, the more awkward I felt, until I had to escape the kitchen for a few minutes. Maybe when I came back, we’d be able to talk about a new subject as if what had just been said had never been said.
I lied: “I’m going to turn down my bed so I won’t have to do it later, open a window and get some fresh air in there.”
When I went to my bedroom, the window was up, as I had left it, and the bed was turned down, also as I had left it, but on the smooth cotton blanket, as if keeping watch on the doorway, lay the fabric eyeball with its blue-plastic iris.