Frances Itani - Requiem

“I took piano lessons for a while,” Lena said, and Miss Carrie and Greg and I looked at her in surprise. Lena shook her head. “Oh, not that many years. I insisted on playing everything by ear, and that did not please my teacher. I studied as far as grade eight in my conservatory exams, so I have the piece of paper. I played to amuse myself, mostly. I miss it, I suppose. But I haven’t given piano playing much thought, because I’m so busy teaching all the time. And we have so much recorded music to keep us company at home.”

After we returned home, Greg went straight to bed— Did Miss Carrie really know Billy Bishop? he asked. Didn’t he fight the Red Baron? And we assured him, Oh, yes, if Miss Carrie says so, it’s true . Lena and I were preparing for bed, undressing, talking about the evening.

“Every emotion you’ve ever learned,” she said, as we got into bed, “has been turned inside. Locked in. But it will come out, even the anger. It has to. How can it not?”

I knew she was talking about the reference to my fists over dinner. But I was past anger—I thought. And the old anger I had carried around for so many years had not been about school. Not really. It had been about—and I had to face it—it had been about everything. Removal, exile, dispersal, being on the outside. Being given away—now there was a reason to be angry. Perhaps none of those things had been dealt with. Not in the way Lena meant. And what would be the point, anyway?

“You’ve told me some things that happened in your past,” Lena said. “And I know I haven’t heard them all. You have a right to be angry. The anger is part of your story.” As far as she was concerned, everything that happened to a person was added on to the cumulative story.

She continued. “All of those things that happened, they’ve also made you different from everyone else. They’ve made you the fine artist you are. But there are times when your dark side hangs over you like a mantle, a heavy cloth. We hardly ever talk about this, but there have been days when I’ve wanted to yank off that mantle, drag it away and shout, ‘Move over! We all have pasts, we all have backgrounds!’ Sometimes, when I’m trying to understand all of this, I get angry myself,” she said. “So figure that out.”

Silence.

But she wasn’t going to stop there. “If the moods always trace back to your first father,” she said, “remember that you’ve also had choice. Two role models. One who seethed with anger—with good reason. Another who had the same reasons to be angry but managed to create peace around himself and everyone else. Maybe, just maybe, you ended up being a better father yourself because you were able to choose. You are a father, a good one.”

To love a child. Yes. I understood what it was to love a child.

But to give one away?

Having two fathers had always created a complex double measure. And if all I had to do to be a father myself was to love Greg, then I had been doing that. But my intent was also to keep our family of three, now four—three plus Miss Carrie—safe and close, and I did worry about that. I knew there was no reason to worry, but I did. I was always trying to protect everyone. It was part of the fates. There could be sudden losses—every Japanese Canadian knew that.

And then there was Lena’s family, unlike mine in every way. Her family had come from one place, Montreal or close by. Too close, she sometimes complained, only a two-hour drive away. Whereas my family was scattered forever: uncles, aunts, cousins, brother, sister, nieces, nephews, anywhere and everywhere in the country, unseen and no longer really known. Except through Kay. She was the one who had the information; she was the one who tried to round everyone up, if only in her head. She was the one who informed me that Uncle Kenji’s son, a cousin younger than I, had finally moved back to Vancouver Island’s west coast and now fished for a living. That Uncle Kenji, who still lived near First Father in Kamloops, drove to the coast every spring—a full day’s journey by truck—to visit his family and to go out on the boat with his son.

Auntie Aya now lived in a long-term residence for psychiatric patients in Vancouver, and Mother’s brother, our Uncle Aki, lived in an apartment nearby so that he could visit her every day. Sometimes, she came out on a pass for two or three weeks, but she always had to go back to receive the care she needed. I wondered if, for Auntie Aya, Baby Taro’s bones had ever fallen silent, or if they still rattled in the baking powder tin. There had been something fragile about Auntie Aya from the beginning, but after Baby Taro’s death, whatever broke inside her was never put right again.

My brother, Henry, had moved from job to job for many years until the mid-eighties, when he’d found something he was good at. He bought a small truck stop, expanded the diner and turned it into an excellent business. He couldn’t wait to retire and had told me over the phone that he’d earned his retirement. I wasn’t sure how he would spend his extra time. Travelling a bit, perhaps. Or driving back and forth between Alberta and B.C. Most of my relatives kept their heads down, stayed below the radar, as far as I could figure. Whole lives spent with their heads down.

As for Mother, we’d had visits with her at Kay’s home several times, because Kay had arranged for her to be there whenever we’d visited Edmonton. But now, Mother was gone. I did not attend her funeral. Kay sent the ritual photo, Japanese funereal style, of family members standing around Mother’s coffin. First Father, taller than the others, stared grimly into the camera eye. I couldn’t bear to look at that photo. It disappeared, and is probably mixed in with other family photos and papers.

But even though I had seen Mother from time to time, for me she had always remained as she was during the last evening we spent in the camp in 1946. The image I carried around had scarcely altered with time, both before and after Mother’s death. It was always Mother with black hair and bangs, a curl on each side of her forehead, wearing her yellow cotton dress and taking me by the hand to walk back and forth on the path at the edge of the cliff that looked down over the Fraser River. I could still call up the sensation of her hand pressing down on my shoulder when we paused so that she could shake out the grit from her homemade sandals.

The truth was, I had never really said goodbye, not even when we were all still living in the camp. She was the one I had missed the most, ever since the day of the picnic, when I was given away. The memories of her were the ones buried deepest, but that had happened while she was alive, not after her death, when I was an adult. I had hunkered down, buried the connection—perhaps to protect it—and I rarely brought it to the surface.

But I had done what artists do. I had painted. There was one canvas I had never put in a show or offered for sale. I used acrylics and mixed my own colours to create deep indigos and browns. It was an abstract that contained a heaviness of feeling but with a single fine edge running along one side, an edge of the palest yellow. And a mass of white that took up a third of the canvas, and that I could hardly define. Lena loved the painting when she saw it, but I did not tell her how it had come about. I could scarcely articulate the genesis to myself.

And First Father, well, apart from the photograph that Kay sent after Mother’s funeral, I had not actually seen him since the day in 1946 when he left in the back of Ying’s truck. Lena and Greg had never met him and I did not consider him to be Greg’s grandfather. He was never at Kay’s in Alberta because he refused to leave British Columbia, the province that had once tried so hard to remove him. Perhaps he still held the suspicion that if he were to leave, even this long after the war, he would not be allowed back in. As for me, I was the only one in the family who had not re-entered B.C.