Three Views of Crystal Water

1

Mei

Attacking from in front

So this is how it began.

Vera, bereaved, a slip of a girl, stood in a slanting rainfall on the quay. The year was 1934 and she was thirteen. It was a romantic moment in what she hoped would be a romantic life. This little girl, who was me, but has now become, with the perspective of twenty-five years, a stranger called Vera, was waiting for her grandfather. She had loved him for her whole life, a love renewed on his infrequent stops from the sea to dry land, and now she would be his. He was an elusive man, James Lowinger, the pearl merchant, a wild, imposing man whose portrait, a painting of a white-whiskered Poseidon braced against the mast in a tearing wind, dominated the parlour Vera shared with her mother, Belle. But he was coming home.

The Empress of Japan slid into its berth, high-bowed and with attendant pomp. With a great rumble and sigh the engines stopped, and the porters began to run up the long ramps pulling their wheeled carts. The passengers leaning over the rails waved to loved ones below and then began to walk unsteadily down the hypotenuse to terra firma.

No waves for Vera.

On she stood in the cold, under her umbrella. She looked and looked, clutching her skirt with her free hand, waiting for the White-Moustached God to make his appearance. At length he did so at the top of the ramp. There he was, just like his portrait, ruddy and bewhiskered. He waved. She looked over her shoulder. To whom was he waving? She looked back. He was waving to her. She was amazed he recognised her. Then he turned his head to speak to the tiny person who stood beside him.

A woman. In a kimono.

Vera was not entirely surprised. Her mother had made reference to James Lowinger’s travelling companions, biting her lip. Her grandfather and the small Japanese woman came down the hypotenuse. Vera didn’t give him a chance to speak first. She stepped forward.

‘Grandfather,’ she said.

‘It is really you, my dear?’

‘Yes it is. It’s Vera.’

He appeared astonished, and delighted. ‘Vera. My darling.’ He opened his arms.

‘Grandfather,’ she said warningly, ‘I have to tell you.’

He opened his arms more widely.

He wasn’t listening. She had to stop him. ‘Grandfather, Mother died.’

He started, but did not lose his composure. The wind-roughened cheeks twitched; neck sinews stood out over his starched collar; hands clutched, probably involuntarily, at his trouser legs in a gesture eerily like her own; the ruddy colour drained from his face.

‘She did what?’ He said this in a thin voice of incredulity.

Vera could see that he wasn’t comprehending. He had trouble with the verb, the ‘action word’, they called it at school. It was throwing him off.

‘She died. She’s dead,’ Vera amended.

The hand went to pull his moustache. ‘I see,’ he said.

He saw, but what did he see? Did he see Vera, child of his child, bereft and soaked to the skin and all but transparent with grief?

Or did he visualise, in that instant when he knew she was gone, his beloved daughter Belle? Did Belle’s shortened life from the moment of her birth inscribe itself in his mind? How he held her in his arms, in Yokohama, when his wife handed the baby over without a word? How he tried, but not hard enough, to keep her with him in Japan? Did he think of the first time he lost the girl to his wife? Or the second to marriage? Or the third to Vancouver, Canada, a beautiful city with a view to the Orient?

Or did his mind trip, as his foot tripped – over the grief struck grandchild, and his dead daughter – and stumble on the wife who’d given them to him? Did he think of Sophia, whom he had replaced with this young, Japanese woman?

Vera did not know. James Lowinger recovered his balance and put his foot down on dry land.

He was not at ease there. His life was water. One bit of land or another was much the same; it was not-sea. The news had caught him at the moment of landing, of crossing over from water to earth. All of his life, crossings had marked him – going from island to boat, from boat to mainland. Ramps and bridges were the same. He tripped, he lost his footing. All went into flux, his language, his understanding, his memory.

The Japanese woman caught his arm.

He turned to her. She stood there not getting a word of it. He was unsteady; her arm was holding him up. He hardly knew this little girl, though he recognised her, could not miss her, with that white hair. She was strangely personable, for a child, and too much like his wife for comfort.

‘This is my granddaughter, Vera,’ he said. ‘Vera,’ he said, ‘this is Miss Tanaka. Keiko.’

Miss Tanaka, Keiko, was younger than Belle. Younger than Belle had been, rather, because now it is clear that Belle was never to grow old. Vera was as much a surprise to Keiko as Keiko was to Vera. A surprise and yet not a surprise: James Lowinger was a man who had secrets. He gave nothing away, until he had to. The day before, carelessly, as land came into view, he had told her: ‘Oh Keiko, by the way. A long time ago I was married in Yokohama. My wife was English. She left me and took our child to England. Belle married a bounder; he’s left her I imagine. She has a child, my granddaughter. I wired them, that we were coming.’

But he hadn’t wired we. Only I.

As her grandfather and Keiko stepped off the gangplank, Vera was conscious of herself as a girl needing to be rescued. She had been brave for long enough. She hoped to let down for a bit. When their feet touched terra firma and she had delivered her news she offered up both arms in her grandfather’s general direction, for an embrace. She made the same undiscriminating gesture to the unknown Japanese woman. Then, turning toward home, she worked her hand into her grandfather’s, the one that was not carrying the valise, and allowed a few tears to fall.

They found a taxi that would carry their trunks and she gave the address of the little house on Ivy Street that had been Belle’s, that still was Belle’s. When they arrived, the three of them climbed slowly out of the cab and the driver helped unload the baggage, very little, really; the rest would come later. They made their way up the narrow pavement. And all the while Vera was taking the measure of this man, who was pretty well her only chance for being looked after in the world.

The main event was his moustache, which was waxed and hence pointed at its extreme ends. Or should we say moustaches? A plural will give more a sense of the presence of this accessory. They started under his nose and stood out thickly over his upper lip. When the lip ended (although you couldn’t see the corner of his lips, but you knew there was one) the moustaches swooped down, then up and curled back upon themselves, spiralling into smaller curls. This stiff upcurl happened well beyond his cheeks and reminded Vera of the things on the ends of the curtain rods that her mother called finials.

The finials were not white, not like his beard, and not like his hair, but rather an orangey brown. Moving inward, from the tip, the moustache hairs were a dried auburn and tobacco colour, then a dark brown turning to slate grey, and finally at the root, white. He’d been young when he grew the curls, she supposed. One day, she supposed, his moustache hair turned white. One particularly tempestuous day on the high seas.

The swag of the moustaches also left to the imagination the shape of her grandfather’s upper lip. It might be a villainous thin, hard lip, or it might be, and she suspected it was, a soft, full, sweet-shaped upper lip. Vera would never know. The face was blustery, and had high red cheekbones. His eyes were a beautiful blue, but one of them had a white cast over it. His chin was long and came to a thoughtful point; there was impishness to the lines around his mouth, which showed they’d been made from smiling. He wasn’t as big as Vera had expected: the chest inside his double-breasted navy jacket must have shrunk since the jacket was purchased, and his long sea legs, that Vera imagined would have bestraddled the deck of the bucking frigates the way a cowboy bestrode a horse, did not seem steady. His knuckles stood up, his fingers were as long as a pianist’s, and they waved, sensing things. But his voice, now that he had regained it after the shock of her announcement, was powerful and commanding. Keiko circled in its gusts trying to go respectfully behind him while he tried to herd her in front as if he needed assurance that she was truly there.

Vera produced her key and opened the door, and her grandfather and Keiko were impressed with her competence. They gave each other a look: see how she manages!

And then they entered the door of the house, and disappeared.

And silence descended. For days.

The neighbours who had helped Vera bury her mother poked their heads out of their doors and conferred over the rhododendrons. The trio had been seen. What could it mean? Was the curious little kimono-clad woman a housekeeper? They watched the house. But for some reason, maybe because the Lowinger-Drews kept strange hours, or maybe because each of the three exited singly and deliberately tried to pass unnoticed, the other inhabitants of Ivy Street rarely caught a glimpse of the girl, her grandfather, or the mistress. Because that was what had been determined: the little woman was more than a servant. At night when the lights were on in the house and the curtains unpulled, the pair had been seen, nuzzling. Kissing over the kitchen sink. It was shocking for such an old man. And such a young woman; hardly more than a child herself, much more like a companion for Vera.

‘Well that’s nice isn’t it?’ said a kinder soul. ‘She needs a playmate.’

‘Of course, you can never tell with Orientals, they don’t seem to age.’

They liked Lowinger and they called him Captain. He walked down the street, and his eye was caught by every dog or squirrel that crossed his path. He chuckled and was entirely lost in the creature, until it was out of sight.

‘He’s very charming.’

‘And there is money.’ He was thought to have accumulated a fortune as a pearl merchant, on top of the one he inherited from his father from the same business. But some doubted the veracity of this. Inquisitive housewives smiled on James Lowinger and opened their mouths to speak, but words failed and they faded behind their front doors. Were they scandalised by this Japanese woman in her kimonos? Or just shy, as shy as Keiko herself? There was little censure spoken in the corner grocery store; James Lowinger excited no real disapproval for his flagrantly irregular life. Perhaps a little envy, was all. If he hadn’t come home with an oriental woman, who took tiny steps because the folds of her kimono draw together at the knee, they’d have been disappointed.

What they didn’t know was that Keiko, despite her demure and inarticulate manner, her lowered eyes, was no timid Japanese mistress. She was an ama, a diving woman.

For a while life changed little on Ivy Street. Vera still walked to school in the mornings, but the housewives did not call out to her, or if they did it was with a kind of pity. It was not only Keiko who was strange but she, Vera, who became strange by her association with the Japanese woman. And the bravery she affected when her mother died stuck to her. She wanted to lay it down but she could not. She still had her friends in the schoolyard. Sometimes after school they all went to buy a soda pop. She was held in a certain awe because of the tragedy of her mother’s death, and its odd denouement. She didn’t talk about it, but one day the minister stepped out of the manse and said: ‘Is Captain Lowinger in town then for a few months? Will he be stopping here, with you?’

Vera said she didn’t know.

In front of her grandfather’s mistress, Vera was polite and excessively well behaved. This nuance was lost on Keiko, as Japanese children are usually well behaved, but Vera meant it as a hostile gesture. It was to show Keiko that she was a guest and not part of their household at all.

There was another change: instead of going home after school, Vera went to her grandfather’s place of business. It was on Homer Street, down by the water. She took the streetcar to Granville, and over the bridge to the Gastown, on the waterfront. Gastown was the oldest part of town, the port, where the old light standards had once been gas lamps. The lights were left on all day, but they were far apart, and small; often the fog and rain made the street very dark. You could smell the kelp and the oil that mingled at the dirty edge of the water.

That November Vera walked through late afternoon gloom in delight. When her mother was alive she was never allowed to come down here alone. There were fish and chip shops and bars. And there were sailors from all over the world, in their white clothes, sometimes their blue clothes, with weathered faces and strange tongues. At any time of day they might spill noisily through the doors of a bar; they might be asleep standing up at a bus stop. They lived on another timetable, they’d crossed the date line, the equator, the Tropics. They’d be looking for sex, her mother had told her. Vera knew not to catch their eyes, never to look at them directly. As she walked quickly down the street they might look at her, but she was too young and too thin to be of interest.

Out of range of roving sailors, Vera slowed to look into the dark entrances of hotels. The sexy women limping in high heels, were in there often. Farther along the street were women who looked tired, handing out tracts about God and Jesus Christ. There were shops selling seashells, plastic flowers and postcards of the Lion’s Gate bridge. There was a hat shop that belonged to her grandfather’s friend. A furrier with buffalo coats, a hardware shop, a shop selling steel-toed work boots and checked shirts. There were jewellers, traders, importers, exporters. And then there was Lowinger and McBean.

Vera had never seen Mr McBean; his only appearance was in the firm’s name. He might be fictitious, a title only, like the ‘Captain’ in James Lowinger. Her grandfather was no sailor, but a trader in gems, pearls in particular. He and his father before him travelled all over the world, hiring luggers and diving men to search for pearls. But the pearls were gone now. The company had bales of fabric and crates of dishes packed in wooden cases, goods, as they were called.

There were a few steps up from the street. There was a door with a top half of frosted glass. She opened this door and right in front of her, so she couldn’t slip past unseen, was a little office with shipping schedules pasted all over the walls, presided over by Miss Hinchcliffe. Hinchcliffe was at all times erect and mannerly, as if her respectability were at issue. Why she was not Mrs Hinchcliffe, Vera did not know. She was certainly old enough to be married, and there was an inviting vigour in her form that was more like the sexy women than the missionaries. Still, she imagined that no man was polite enough to meet Hinchcliffe’s high standards.