‘I thought I might enlist,’ she said. ‘Or work in the war effort.’ The idea had just come to her.
He raised a glass. ‘It is what all the young people are doing, I suppose,’ he said doubtfully. ‘This war –’ he left the sentence unfinished, with a question mark at the end. Was the war really worth it, he seemed to mean. ‘You’d have to fight your friends the Japanese.’
‘They’re not my friends.’
‘No?’ He looked thoughtful.
She set her chin out: no one was to see into her heart.
‘I can’t help but think there are fortunes to be made.’
He told her all about his scheme to harvest pig-toe mussels and sell the shell to Mikimoto. ‘Remember that the war in China disrupted the supply of mother-of-pearl for the nucleus of his pearls? And he had to get shell from the United States?’
In the big window a man with greying temples leaned forward over the table speaking earnestly to the young woman with long arms and thin hands. She, Vera, stiffened. She could see the vertebrae in her back. She wondered what her mother would have said to her on this day, when she was at last no longer a child, and not only in her own but in the world’s eyes a woman. Hamilton never talked about Belle. She might have died twenty years before, not five.
The trouble with the pig-toe mussels was that there didn’t seem to be any in the rivers of Canada. But that didn’t matter. He could grow them.
‘If the Americans can do it so can I. My father-in-law knew Mikimoto.’
‘I knew him too, Dad,’ said Vera.
‘Of course, of course you did. That’s why you are so important. Thanks to you, I know Mikimoto myself!’
He had an eye on an old fishing camp on a tributary of the Fraser River. He had drawn plans and set prices. He had looked at trawlers and dredgers that would get the mussels up off the bottom. He needed investors, though.
‘You know, Vera, in Arkansas when they found pearls in the Black River they just waded out to the mussel beds and grabbed the shells. But when the shallow beds were gone they had to go deeper. They developed long-handled tongs that could reach down fourteen feet.’
‘Arkansas? When were you there?’
He never answered when she asked where he had been. She didn’t want to talk business. She thought they might dance. There was a band with trombones. ‘Will you dance with me, Dad?’ she asked. ‘I’ve never danced with a man.’
‘I would be delighted.’
In the open ring of his arms she swayed on the floor. She kept her arms a little stiff, feeling awkward about being too close to her father. Hamilton hummed in her ear. Sometimes, she thought, he forgot which girl she was. He chortled in her ear and hummed, and every few bars, tightened his grip on her.
‘You are a wonderful girl,’ he said, his lips loosened by the fizzy drink. ‘I think we can be partners.’
It was in the pursuit of investors that Hamilton took Vera to a meeting in a big hotel in Chicago. A banner was strung across the lobby: International Association of Pearl Producing and Trading Nations. There were scientists and jewellers showing charts of weights and values, and delegations from the South Seas of men with tattooed cheekbones wearing gowns. The Europeans were not there, nor the Japanese. An American politician stood up and said that the pearl industry must not be shut down. Beautiful women must be served, even in war. Especially in war. To keep the spirits up. The symbol of the pearl was more potent than ever:
purity; the sacred; innocence. He was booed by one loud voice from the back.
Hamilton had a booth for his Fraser Valley Pearl Shell Operations. He held Vera’s elbow and introduced her as his daughter who had lived in Japan and become a pearl diver. Men stared and stopped to talk. Hamilton kept a close eye on her. But he wasn’t looking when a man strolled up with his hands in his pockets, with an Italian hat and a trench coat caught back behind his elbows.
‘Well I’ll be darned. I’ve just remembered where I met you before,’ the man said, as if they’d already been talking for half an hour.
‘You did? You do?’ Vera said. The crowd was confusing.
‘You gave tours in English to Mikimoto’s Pearl Museum in Toba.’
He gave her his hand, and there was a card in it. She pulled the card out of his palm. It was familiar. She had kept one just like it near her bed at Keiko’s house, and sometimes looked at it. His name was Horace Calder.
‘Remember me? I’m the guy who told you to get out of Japan. I see you followed my advice.’
‘That was you!’ Once he’d been a link to home. Now he was a link to there. She grasped it. ‘He came for me,’ she said, lifting her chin in the direction of her father.
‘Your father tells me you dove for pearls?’
‘I didn’t,’ she said. ‘I dove for shellfish.’
‘You must be very brave,’ he continued.
She thought he was making fun of her.
‘Not so brave as I had to be,’ she said. Talking to him made her lonely for Japan. She missed Tamio. Her body ached at night. She missed Hana, and could not cry.
‘It was sure strange to see you there! At the time I thought maybe you’d been kidnapped and hustled off to Japan.’
‘Maybe I was kidnapped and hustled off home,’ she said.
‘You don’t mean that,’ Horace said. He adjusted the glasses on his nose.
She wanted to tell him things she told no one. How strange it was. ‘Maybe I do.’
He was a large man, with puffy hands. Under the long, loose coat his big chest looked soft, and kind. He was bigger, and more solid than Hamilton, whose eyes were so quick to judge, and whose mind spun dreams faster than he drew breath.
‘Catch you later!’ he said. She watched him move off through the crowd. He was quick on his feet. But he paid attention to everything he looked at.
For the evening parties, Hamilton bought her a long, narrow black dress that clung to her hip bones and her thighs and she was self-conscious, more so than when she was naked; it felt obscene. She wrapped her arms across her breasts and stood with her head hanging down. Horace Calder was there again. Hamilton tried to introduce them.
‘Have you met my daughter, who apprenticed to the
ama?
They go down forty-five feet.’
‘I know all about it,’ said Horace, easily extending his large paw. He had lovely eyes and he chose his words with care, spoke them with elegance.
‘In winter they work for Mikimoto,’ said Hamilton to the men who clustered around. ‘The divers stand on bamboo rafts that ride on the waves. Their job is to pull up the oyster shells and scrub off the parasites.’
‘I didn’t do that, Dad, I worked indoors.’
After the men moved on, Hamilton turned on Vera. ‘You didn’t have to say that. Let him think you worked on the rafts, OK? I had that man, I had him; don’t you see how good it looks to have you as my partner?’
Horace Calder had been listening. He waggled his fingers at her and moved on.
‘I’ve got a deadline,’ he said. ‘I’ll catch you later,’ he said again, over his shoulder.
‘You said that before,’ she said, mostly to keep him there. ‘I’m not a fish.’
‘And I mean much later, when you’ve grown big enough to keep.’
Vera kept her mouth shut for the rest of the night. There were more people interested in Hamilton’s Fraser River project. One wanted to know how he got his contract with Mikimoto. ‘Personal contact,’ said Hamilton. Another said that Vera looked young to be a spy.
The next day they were back in the booth. The journalist returned.
‘It’s not much later and I’m still under the legal limit,’ said Vera.
He asked her if she would like to go for a drink.
They sat in the hotel lobby outside the bar. He twirled his hat on his lap. Without his hat he looked like an old man. He said he was thirty-five. She ordered two Cokes. He said he was a columnist for the
Chicago Sun-Times.
‘May I have an interview, Miss Drew?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know why,’ she said.
‘You’re a curiosity. Diving for pearls. I mean it,’ he said. ‘You are going to become a sensation.’ And then he whispered, ‘Give me your whereabouts in Vancouver.’ Then he pulled up his camera from a leather strap over his shoulder and snapped her picture. ‘I’m a two-way man,’ he said.
His article appeared under the cut-line ‘Canadian girl dove for Japanese Pearl King’, with a picture of her in her black dress. It had its sensational bits too. The women dove naked, he had written. She was humiliated. Now, she saw his name in print and thought she would never forget it.
When she came back to Vancouver, she bumped into Mr Kemp.
‘How are you doing, our Vera?’ he said, using her grandfather’s phrase. He seemed a friendly face and she tagged along with him. ‘So you are going to harvest shell, are you?’
‘I don’t know anything about it,’ complained Vera.
‘That never stopped Hamilton.’
Vera smiled uncertainly. Since her dad had come back into her life she had tried very hard to forget everything her grandfather and his friends had said about him.
That was how, in 1940, Vera and Hamilton Drew came to live at the camp on the Blind River in the Fraser Valley. Theirs was a primitive operation. They devised a drag based on the one used in Arkansas; it had wire hooks below to cause the molluscs to clamp on as it passed over their bed. The trouble was there weren’t many mussels, and the pigtoe had to be brought in. And she was not diving for pearls but planting mussels. It might have worked. But it was a long, wet winter.
She wrote to Horace and he wrote back, sending the funny pages from the Chicago paper. He also sent her pictures of Hitler and Oshima when the Japanese and Germans signed the Axis pact.
They were at Blind River on December 7, 1941. The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Japan was officially the enemy now. She knew because Horace Calder wrote to her. She went into town for supplies and there in the post box was one of his bulging envelopes. It had press clippings in it. He had not forgotten to send the funnies too. Was she expected to laugh over them?
She went home and had the first of her fights with her father. He wanted her to get into the water and dive twelve feet to inspect the mussel beds. She said the water was still too cold. He stood in the doorway and threatened her: ‘I’ll walk out. You’ll never see me again!’
‘What am I supposed to do in this place without you?’ she asked.
The
Vancouver Sun
said that Japantown was closed down and boarded up. The Americans had done the same thing, Horace wrote. She had the draining, fainting experience again, that she’d had when her father appeared on the summer island. This time she thought about Keiko’s friend, the dressmaker, and the fishmonger. What would become of them?
There were a dozen other fights with her father before she packed her bag and called the local taxi from Blind River. She left Hamilton to his mussel shells and went to Vancouver. Horace convinced his paper to send him to see the evacuation of the Japanese Canadians. He said he was tired of gangsters anyway.
They went together to Japantown. She found the boarded-up front of the tailor’s shop. They went together and saw the trains boarding and the women crying, the silent, silent men. She searched for faces she knew but recognised no one. She stayed in his hotel room; together they went out to see the trains, the confiscated houses, the fishing boats tied up at the docks with large warning signs on them. She could not feel; they were not her friends, she repeated. She lay in the bathtub and moved the layer of water back and forth over her naked belly. Her nerves were awakening after the cold.
Horace was not Tamio of the perfect skin and wide apart eyes; he did not moan when he touched her. But he was kind. He was safe, somehow; his mostly amused, sometimes concerned expression seemed to say that he knew the world, and forgave it. His mind was full of bad news; it was the war. But when his eyes lit on hers they were full of delight. She could make him happy.
The newspaper let Horace stay in Vancouver. He and Vera got a little house to live in, in the West End. Horace brought her war dispatches. He was like a sieve, a strainer – the news ran all through him like a bloodstream. They went to the cinema at the Verity, her mother’s favourite theatre. He made her watch the newsreels: current events. That was the thing about living with a journalist. He knew everything. He had seen it all. He was not afraid to impute the littlest motives to the largest people. And he was never wrong.
She married him, the man in the fedora, the deadline man, byline man, Horace Calder. She had no friend to stand
with her at City Hall, amongst the men in uniform who’d come home to marry before going back overseas. They asked one of the other couples who were waiting to be witnesses. Horace held her hand tightly and quizzed all the soldiers on what they’d seen.
Waiters stopped saying she was too young to drink in bars. Vera and Horace went to one every night. It was a great way to find out what was happening, Vera didn’t have a job. Other women’s husbands were at war. Or they had babies. She was Horace’s baby. Hard-bitten to everyone else; the lost girl to him. He let her be; that was the good thing.
The war went on. At Lowinger and McBean the door was closed and locked. But Vera had a key; she opened the office, and dusted all the desks. There wasn’t much there, just a jumble of papers with her father’s names and numbers, written and crossed out, sideways and upside down, notes and reminders. Vera looked at an envelope on which he had scrawled and suddenly it was clear; her father was mad. Hamilton would never harvest pearl shell.
One day, she saw Mr Kemp on the staircase.
‘I understand that you are now a married woman.’
Vera told him she had left her father’s venture and was going to sort out some old pictures that her grandfather had had in the office.
‘That will be a welcome sign of life, my dear.’ He took a long time to get his wallet out of his inside suit pocket. It was there under the dog biscuits. ‘You haven’t signed anything, have you?’
‘Only the marriage licence.’
He laughed. ‘That’s not what I meant. You didn’t sign anything about the company?’
‘No one has asked me to sign anything.’
Well, that wasn’t quite true. Sometimes her father muttered about the holdings of Lowinger and McBean.