Edith Pearlman - Binocular Vision - New & Selected Stories

Once back home he investigated workshops for elders at Godolphin High School. Bookbinding? Stained glass? He considered the nonsectarian courses given at the temple: Is Zionism Dead? maybe, or Great Jewish Women, taught by the rabbi herself, a blonde with an old-fashioned pageboy haircut. But Japanese I, offered at the Godolphin Language Center, trumped Theodor Herzl and Rosa Luxemburg. When Jay read the course description he breathed again the scent and heard the sounds of his recent week in Japan — blossoming, rustling trees; glowing incense sticks at noisy city shrines; a soupy smell at a particular noodle shop where “The Girl From Impanema” had been playing on a radio next to the register. He remembered fabrics, too. On the Philosopher’s Walk, in Kyoto, he had encountered a group of uniformed children who did not separate to let him pass but instead surrounded him, engulfed him in their soft navy serge. His new granddaughter’s grandmother, a handsome woman with hair dyed deep brown, had come to the wedding in a traditional garment — crimson silk, with a cream sash. He almost hadn’t recognized her when the family met in a restaurant a few days later — she was wearing her everyday pants and turtleneck then. Her English was serviceable. “Hoody is gentle and kind,” she said to Jay. We are so pleased , she implied.

“Mika is a shaineh maideleh ,” he said, dredging up two of his fifty Yiddish words. He grinned — an air of mischief had always endeared him to women. “A lovely girl,” he said, though he failed to tell her he was translating. She would think her hard-won English defective; oh well.

THE AUSTERE BEAUTY of the teacher of Japanese I eclipsed Mika’s prettiness as the sun the moon. Nakabuta-sensei remained standing for the entire ninety minutes of the first weekly class. Twelve pupils around a table stared up at her. The classroom in this converted hilltop mansion looked out across the river at Cambridge, at the brick Houses of Harvard, with their bell towers. The leftmost House had sheltered Jay and Sonny Fessel.

“Japanese grammar,” Nakabuta told them in her rich, unaccented English, “will seem at first incomprehensible. Please forget your attachment to plurals. Please divorce yourself from pronouns. Try to float like a lotus on our pond of suggestion and indirectness.”

A few cowed pupils dropped out early in the semester. Those who hung on were businessmen or scientists or programmers whose work took them frequently to Japan, or they were young people who had lived for a while in the country and could conduct a slangy conversation. Jay was a category unto himself: the tall old man with a few streaks of red in his white hair, stains refusing to fade; the codger who hoped to converse with descendants as yet unconceived.

In July the young couple came to Godolphin to visit Jay’s daughter and son-in-law. And Jay, too, of course. Jay told Mika, in Japanese, that warm weather had arrived early in Massachusetts next spring; no, last spring; no, this spring. The tomatoes were delicious, weren’t they. He inquired after her father and mother and grandmother, chichi and haha and baba , remembering too late that these appellations were overfamiliar. She replied that her family’s health was good, thanks, and she was sorry to see he was using a cane. She spoke in considerately slow Japanese. Ah, just his arthritis attacking, he explained; flaring up was the phrase he would have preferred, but you said the words you knew, which were not always the ones you meant.

THE SECOND YEAR, Sugiyama-sensei, small and plain, introduced the class to the passive mood, which sometimes implied reluctance and sometimes even exploitation. She gave vocabulary quizzes every week, and taught the students to count strokes when they were learning to write kanji — like slaves counting lashes, Jay thought. She counseled them to practice the ideograms without paper and pencil, to limn the things with their fingertips on any convenient surface.

During that summer’s visit Jay took the pregnant Mika for several walks around Godolphin. His arthritis was better and he didn’t need the cane. He showed her the apartment building he’d grown up in, the park he’d played ball in, the high school he’d graduated from — all outwardly unchanged through the years. The deli even is still doing business, he reported, his syntax correct in Japanese and faithful to Yiddish, too. The population was not so diverse when I was a boy, he managed to say, though the adjective he used really meant “various.” We were then only Jews and Irish and … he didn’t know how to say Protestants , so he killed them off. Now we are Russian, and also Vietnamese, and also South American, and many others there is no necessity to mention, the entire final phrase contained in a one-syllable word that he unfortunately mispositioned. Mika nodded anyway, and Jay felt proud of himself, proud of all he’d learned from Sugiyama-sensei. Sugiyama’s devotion to teaching Japanese had made up for her own rather awkward English: burn, barn , and bun , on her tongue, were all the same word.

YAMAMOTO-SENSEI, the third-year teacher, pronounced English very well. His delivery, though, was alarming. His speech was interrupted by giggles, snorts, and the n-n of agreement, less extended than the n-n-n of disagreement. Jay recoiled from this gasping, spittled fellow. In Yamamoto-san’s sallowness, in the rosy wetness of his lips, in the short fatness of his nose with its exposed nostrils, in the black rims of his spectacles, he was a painful reminder of Feivel Ostroff, who had invaded Jay’s eighth-grade class more than six decades earlier. Feivel and his siblings exuded an old-world whiff that most Jewish families had vigorously sprayed away. Under ordinary circumstances the Ostroffs would not have achieved Godolphin — the father kept a little grocery in a deteriorating section of Boston, and the brood lived over the store. But the feckless father died, and the mother’s brother, made prosperous by the war, moved widow and orphans into a big apartment on Jefferson Avenue whose rent he undertook to pay. He bought them necessaries and even bikes.

If the Orloffs had been Chasidic they would have become part of a tribe wearing queer puppet costumes; they’d have attended the Chasidic day school. Or if the Orloffs had been Orthodox they’d have worn yarmulkes and attended the Orthodox school. But they were not Chasidic, not Orthodox, not even particularly observant; they were merely dark, scrawny, and embarrassing. Their lunch boxes were crammed with hard-boiled eggs and pickles. Feivel laughed at his own jokes. Some students made friends with him — he could be helpful with Latin homework, and in those days Harvard still required proficiency in an ancient tongue. Jay, all A’s anyway, ignored him.

But he couldn’t ignore Yamamoto. Jay meant to conquer the Japanese language; Yamamoto’s territory was in his battle plan. And there was a similar determination in Jay’s classmates — there were only four others now. It was as if they were attending not the decorous language center but the night school to which his grandfather had dragged himself a century earlier, even after ten hours of work, because on English his whole future depended.

Three of the others had been with Jay since the beginning — two businessmen and a programmer — and the fourth was a new pupil, a young woman who’d begun her Japanese studies in college. She was now living with a doctor from Kobe. Jay wondered what their offspring would look like — the young woman was pale and freckled, with parched hair and transparent eyelashes. Jay’s new great-grandchild, according to the pictures on the Web, was an untroubled blend of both families: he had, in charming miniature, his mother’s chin and hair and eyes, his father’s curly mouth, and Jay’s own father’s noble schnozz. In one of the pictures Mika’s grandmother held the baby on her lap. She was wearing glasses, her expression unreadable.