American Woman (43 page)

So it happens, at last.

Part Four

1.

A
nne Casey is packing her books. They're books she won't need—now that something has finally happened she won't need books at all—but in the past year of inaction and boredom covering Pauline's story she's grown attached to them. All are startlingly overdue from the Mid-Manhattan Library. Most are picture books, of the estates Pauline's grandfather built. Pauline's grandfather, the family patriarch: the subject of those huge oil paintings in the Gilded Age style that he sought to apply to every part of his post-Gilded Age life. Like those earlier American titans on whom he patterned himself, he grew up poor, early-hardened, and shrewd, and made his fortune and name very young—in his case, in the newspaper business. Anne's business, and the business of all of her colleagues now packing their bags just like her, streaming toward California as if part of a latter-day gold rush.

And oh, those incredible homes—not mere homes, but kingdoms. There's Casa Mare, the coyly plain name for the tile-by-tile copy of Alhambra, a folly the size of a town that sprawls miles atop cliffs overlooking the sea. And Big Red, the faux cattle ranch at the confluence of three rare rivers whose huge weeping willows, an arboreal trophy of wealth, can be seen miles off on the almost-bald plains; imagine, sitting on all that water in the water-starved land just to pretend that you ranched. But McCloud is Anne's favorite, the Swiss village of delicate cottages and a huge-timbered lodge, somewhere in the wild Cascades. No one apart from its servants has ever known the location. In Pauline's grandfather's day, visitors were blindfolded on the last leg of the journey, setting out from beneath great, white, terrible, mystic Mount Shasta, which must have seemed like a Cerberus guarding the gates. McCloud is the one that stirs Anne, that gives rise to real envy. Not the secrecy of it, or the power it stands for—rumor has it that even the military is barred from its airspace. Not its comic-book unlikeliness, but its actual beauty. The vines tendriling around gingerbread shutters; the cold river speeding, caught at the edge of the frame. The few photographs of McCloud that Anne has are ancient, black-and-white, badly focused; McCloud isn't in the big picture books. Unlike Casa Mare and Big Red, which were family houses, McCloud was Pauline's grandfather's sacred retreat, where he lived with his mistress. It had been hers to rule like a queen, an open secret from the wife and the children. It must have been she who took the bad pictures; it was definitely she who pounced, exuberantly, on the friends who arrived in blindfolds; squealing, she thrust flutes of champagne in their hands before letting them regain their sight.

If any of those things is true. All Anne has been able to learn about life at McCloud comes from this girl's memoirs, and the memoirs were picked almost clean by the family's attorneys. The memoirs are silly; they make Pauline's grandfather out as a harmless old coot. References to the wife and the children are entirely absent. Also absent is any reference to the man's death and the girl's subsequent ejection from the house by the children, finally defying their father now that he is safely six feet underground. Perhaps McCloud is exterminated, or exorcised, before Pauline is taken there, as a very young girl. McCloud was apparently Pauline's favorite place too, in her childhood. Anne guesses Pauline doesn't know about her grandfather's mistress, let alone the memoirs. Though the memoirs were finally published, they still seem to have been sabotaged. In spite of its subject the book was ignored, was conspicuously not reviewed. The vivid authoress has since died, barely fifty, forgotten, from alcoholism.

Anne has dug the book up from her closet; Little Man, the small parrot she impulsively bought when her husband left her, gouges her books with his beak and splatters them with his odorless yet ubiquitous shit, and so she locks up the ones from the library to try to preserve them, and then forgets all about them for months. The memoir she checked out purely as a distraction, a queer novelty, but then she'd been mesmerized by the mistress's robust vulgarity and her casual racism. There are constant blithe mentions of “coloreds” and “cute pickaninnies” and “little Jew lawyers,” and daffy tirades about “Japs” while recalling the years of the war. “We had to make sure to black out the windows, even up at McCloud, so the Japs wouldn't come bomb the house! Oh, those dirty Japs hated the Boss. Back in his newspaper days, Boss was one of the first telling it like it was. California had gotten so careless, and let in all those Japs. Japs are like rats—now, they
are
: they eat garbage, and there's no way to kill them! Boss and I were so relieved when we heard from the President that he would put all the Japs into camps. Boss called to tell FDR it was high time already!”

B
UT THE MISTRESS
isn't part of the story; the stunning kingdoms aren't, either, although Anne keeps thinking, as she tries to scrape away all the trivial matter that sticks to this story like lint, that nothing much ever remains when you get to the bottom. There is only the girl, Pauline, who has always been a story, from the time of her birth, no matter what she has done. Pauline, snatched by the cadre for her totemic power; she's ended up looming over them all. They will all be forgotten, the dead and the two who've survived. No one will ever wonder what they were so angry about, what they hoped to achieve. Those things are too easily known, while Pauline is unknowable, although the promise of her upcoming trial has obscured that dull truth. Her trial will reveal everything, or so everyone hopes; the story will finally write itself. Anne, plying her beige rental car across the Great Plains with her parrot and her pile of books, is just another small striver in a great wagon train, hopeful and facing long odds.

Joe Smith isn't part of the story, either. But as with the mistress, Anne attached great hopes to him at the time—until she actually met him. It had been at the start of the summer that an old friend of hers from her very first job in New York called her out of the blue. “Is it true that you're doing a piece on Pauline?” her friend Michael asked. “I might have something for you, or at least someone to fob off on you. He may be completely insane, or he may be your Deep Throat.”

Michael told her that the previous summer, long before he had heard from the current “Joe Smith,” another man who declined even to provide an unconvincing pseudonym had phoned to claim that he “might have a way” to get a tell-all book penned by Pauline. “I told him, give it to me,” Michael said, “and don't you breathe a word to anybody else! I promised him all kinds of money our press doesn't have. I begged for a meeting but he wouldn't even give me a phone number. We'd meet once, he'd hand it over, I'd pay. I said sure; I figured I'd work out the details later, if it turned out to be even a little bit true. After the phone call, I thought I might have met him before. I mean, why me? His voice rang a bell, as if we'd met at a party a long time ago. A few weeks or a month after that he called again to ask was I still interested. I said I was, he said that he'd meet with me ‘soon,' and that's the last time I heard from the guy. I think.”

“What do you mean?”

“This ‘Joe Smith' guy rings a bell, too.”

“The same bell?”

“Honestly? Who the fuck knows. The phone calls were a whole year apart. I can't be sure that the voice was the same. I just can't believe it was two separate guys and their both calling me was a total coincidence. Sure, nowadays two hundred people a day claim Pauline's come and shopped at their store, that she ate at their diner, she played pool in their bar, she pumped gas at their station, she's pregnant, she's a lesbian, she's with the Black Panthers, whatever. Those two hundred people a day call the cops, they don't call Michael Levitz, Book Editor.”

“So this ‘Joe Smith' was a book agent, before he turned into Deep Throat?”

“It doesn't help his credibility much,” Michael joked.

“It sure doesn't,” she said.

“Joe Smith” had her meet him on the pigeon shit–spattered, exhaust-hazed, deafeningly loud traffic island park a few blocks south of Macy's. “Can we talk somewhere else?” she asked when he arrived, but he insisted on telling her everything there; he wouldn't even sit down on a bench. He was her age, early thirties; athletic and restless; he made her walk up and down on the cramped little island with him, as the midday traffic coursed around them. At some point within the past months, he told her, the FBI had discovered a farmhouse where Pauline had been hiding. They'd also linked Pauline to someone named Jenny Shimada. Joe had happened to drop by the farmhouse, because he'd once had a friend who lived there, and who he always hoped to track down again. Instead, FBI men ambushed him. They hadn't been able to keep him—he'd done nothing wrong—but they'd asked lots of questions, revealing much more of what they knew to Joe, than Joe revealed to them, in the end. This boastful remark oddly clashed with the tic Joe had going in one eyelid, like an insect trapped under his skin. “You write for
Time
,” he broke off suddenly.

“Well—not anymore.” She tried to explain the difference between freelancers and staff writers; she had worked for
Time
, but she'd been just a so-so reporter, she hadn't had the gene for it. She was better at features. Now she contributed to a few different general-interest weeklies—this was too esoteric for Joe. He convulsed with impatience.

“I've seen your byline in
Time
,” he insisted. “Listen: this is what you need to print. The FBI knows that Pauline is with Jenny Shimada. They never knew Jenny Shimada had ties to the cadre. But now they've found out, and they're not telling anyone else. You've been on this story a while. You've never heard Jenny's name, right?” When she agreed this was true he said, “See! You don't rustle the bushes when you've got the deer right in your sights!”

“Joe, the fact that no one at FBI headquarters has mentioned Jenny Shimada isn't
proof
that they're interested in her. Don't you think that's a little bit paranoid?”

He paused to let her know that he'd taken offense. “If you knew what I know, you would never have said that,” he said.

“I'm just trying to explain that I need more than you've told me so far. Please. I need a way to substantiate this.”

“Don't call the Feds with the stuff I've just told you,” he cried. “Then they'll move, right away! Michael said I could trust you.”

“You
can
trust me—”

“And you can trust me,” Joe cut in. He'd grabbed her notebook and written
SHIMADA
in an almost illegible scrawl. Then the light had changed on Broadway, and before she could stop him he was instantly gone in the crowd.

I
N
S
AN
F
RANCISCO
after five days of driving—she's traced the route the girls took, another bit of lint that won't be in the story; already this long past year of Pauline's invisibility and Anne's questing confusion has been termed by the fast-thinking TV newsmen as “the lost year,” which means no one need find it—Anne knows Jenny Shimada isn't part of the story, either. Even now that she knows that Joe Smith told the truth. She thinks of what her friend Michael had said: that two hundred people a day claim Pauline's in Tibet, that she's riding a Harley. That she's with someone named Jenny Shimada. The whole year before the arrests that was how it had been: the static so constant and loud, the sightings so scattered and varied. The FBI couldn't know if Juan really had broken a tooth and was likely to visit a dentist; if Pauline really had materialized on an old woman's crumbling estate outside Rhinebeck, New York. So that the FBI had, on the one hand, gone with the broken-tooth tip and wasted countless man hours briefing dentists all over the country. So that Anne had, on the other hand, checked that Jenny Shimada was a known fugitive, and left it at that. Now she knows the truth, but Jenny still isn't the story. Jenny's nobody's story. Although this might be why Anne pursues her, if only in her spare time. Because she knows no one else will; and that even she, in the end, will stash Jenny away with the mistress and the wonderful homes, and with whatever new lint—good, unusable stuff—she picks up.

The State of California turns out to have far more extensive records on J. Shimada, b. 1924—Jenny's father—than on Jenny herself, b. 1949. Anne feels the lint settling again. James Shimada is the only child of immigrants from Japan, a farmer and his wife who by the late 1930s have saved enough money after years of truck farming to open a small produce stand in L.A. James Shimada excels at baseball, is called “Jim” by his friends, wins a scholarship to UCLA; he professes an intention to go to film school and make Westerns. But in the fall of 1942, instead of entering UCLA on his scholarship, Jim, like all other Japanese and japanese-Americans who live in California, is interned in a “War Relocation Center” by the federal government. After Pearl Harbor, the previous winter, Jim had gone to enlist, as had some of his friends. He had not been allowed to, not because of his age—he'd been just seventeen—but because of his Japanese blood.

Jim and his parents are sent to Manzanar, in the Owens Valley desert northeast of L.A. Nothing in particular seems to happen to Jim in the first six months or so of his internment to set him apart from the rest of the camp. But in the spring of 1943, the government drafts a loyalty oath to administer to internees that consists of two questions. 1) Will you serve the U.S. in the army—if you are allowed? 2) Will you renounce loyalty to Japan? By the spring of 1943, a pro-Japan movement—very small and very violent, made up mostly of boys who were once sent to Japan by their parents for a few years of school—has given rise to gang violence throughout Manzanar. The loyalty oath causes panic. The second question particularly, about renouncing loyalty to Japan, is rumored to be a trick: if you answer yes, it will be used against you, as an admission you've
had
loyalty to Japan. The panic is exploited by the pro-Japan gangsters, and both the panic and the gangsters are exploited in turn by anti-Japanese opinion makers in the press, who point out that the Japanese in the U.S. are clearly a threat, their prior Americanness just a cunning façade. Pauline's grandfather, in a series of loud editorials, propagates this view in his newspapers.