Mas stuffed his hands into his coat pockets on the corner of Twenty-fifth Street and Seventh Avenue in Manhattan. He had made it to church an hour early, proof that he was getting used to the underground train. He had been so relaxed, in fact, that he had managed to doze through most of the commute, dragging himself out at Penn Station. He bought a hot dog from a cart for breakfast and walked to the intersection across the street from the church, waiting for Tug to arrive.
Other than a worn-out cross next to the glass door, the church looked like any four-story office building in a neighborhood of discount clothing outlets and tropical juice bars. A homeless man slept outside the industrial metal gates, which had been unlocked and pushed open by a Nisei man at about nine-fifteen. They even seemed to know each other, since the Nisei gingerly walked over the homeless man’s body so as not to wake him.
Mas didn’t understand the concept of church. He figured religion ran in someone’s family like diabetes and thinning hair. So he was surprised when he learned that Tug was actually the first and only one among his brothers and sisters to become a Christian. His conversion had happened at the hands of a Christian Nisei soldier from Hawaii who had apparently saved Tug’s life on the war front in Italy. The soldier was wounded badly and later died, so it only made sense that Tug would pick up the Hawaiian man’s religion. That kind of gratitude Mas could appreciate.
Tug told Mas that converting to Christianity had not won him any popularity contests in the extended Yamada family. As the chonan, the oldest son, he was responsible for inheriting and taking care of the family Butsudan, the Buddhist altar. Any good son knew that every morning he must burn a stick of incense, put out a tangerine or a bowl of rice, and say a few chants in memory of the dead parents, whose framed portraits were usually placed on the arms of the altar. But Tug refused, saying that he wouldn’t participate in ancestor worship. His first allegiance was to his Kamisama, his God, Jesus. Tug’s brothers and sisters were aghast, calling him ungrateful and disrespectful behind his back. His younger sister took charge of the Butsudan, usually lighting two sticks of incense-the extra one to make up for the chonan ’s obvious deficiencies. Soon after Tug shared that story, Mas noticed how Tug’s parents’ photos were prominently displayed on a polished tansu, a Japanese chest of drawers, in the Yamada living room. More often than not, a bowl next to the photos was filled with fresh oranges or apples. Although Tug had sworn off ancestor worship, it was obvious that he had created an altar of his own, Nisei Christian style.
As Mas opened and closed his hands to better circulate his blood in the cold, Tug rounded the corner on the other side of the street. Tug was wearing a suit and tie, and Mas suddenly felt self-conscious about his appearance. The homeless man, in turn, was shuffling away in a pile of torn blankets. It was indeed time for church.
Mas followed Tug through the glass doors, down a dim corridor, and finally to a set of open double doors. The same Nisei man who had unlocked the metal gates earlier stood smiling, offering both Tug and Mas sheets of paper, a program of the morning’s events. It was too early for Mas to smile, so instead he bowed his head, surreptitiously brushing away a few grains of rice stuck to his sweater from the night before.
The main sanctuary was a narrow room with wooden pews, a stage, and a large cross in front. The unfamiliar room scared Mas. There were no windows-what would there be to look at, anyway? Most of the back pews were filled, black and gray heads everywhere. Most of them seemed to be Nisei old-timers like Tug, with a few younger Japanese foreign students, their hair misshapen from their pillows and sleep still in their eyes. Tug nodded to a few friends dressed in crisp suits and dresses, and Mas wondered which of them was the florist who might hold the key to the Mystery Gardenia.
Mas followed Tug in between a row of open pews. The hard seats were all set up to look forward and gaze at the cross. Mas imagined himself pinned down on that cross, his hands forced away from his body. He had only gone to church a couple of times with Chizuko, but that building was round with panels of windows. Mas didn’t know if it was the gardener in him, but he felt that anything holy had to have at least a speck of green in it.
Attached to the back of the pew in front of them was a compartment for big, thick books. At their feet was some kind of folded-up board covered with a thin cushion.
Holding open these thick books, the Nisei sang in English, the young ones in Japanese. Somehow the sounds merged together, comforting Mas’s ears, which hungered to hear the familiar rhythm of his two languages intertwined like crossed fishing lines. The rest of the service was downhill, with one suited speaker after another making announcements. At one point, Tug pulled down the cushioned contraption, which turned out to be a small padded bench. The whole line of worshipers then went down, kneeling on the bench. Mas didn’t want to seem rude, so he followed along, too. Everyone closed their eyes and recited a prayer, and Mas couldn’t help but think about Mari, Lloyd, and especially Takeo.
At the end of his speech, the Nisei minister, dressed in a heavy white gown, brought out a covered gold plate and a large cup. One by one, men and women, looking solemn and sad, went forward. They knelt down before the minister (your knees needed to be in good condition in Christianity, noted Mas), who picked up something from the now open plate and placed it in their mouths. They took turns sipping from the same cup-the minister wiped the rim each time with a white cloth. Mas doubted that was enough to kill the baikin that would make the whole lot of them sick. But Mas knew that it was important for them to share the same cup of germs and filth, because wasn’t that the way it worked with people and life, anyway?
When Tug returned to his seat, Mas noticed he was brushing away tears from the corners of his eyes. What did Tug have to mourn about? His life was perfect. A war hero with medals. Two healthy grandchildren. A son who made enough money to live in a 1970s ranch-style house near the ocean. This religion was a strange thing, thought Mas. Even the saints seemed to have regrets.
After the last prayer, the white-gowned minister walked down the aisle, breaking the silence among the people in the pews. Everyone got up, smiled, and talked. The real work was now ready to begin.
Mas followed Tug closely down the stairs to the basement. Tug had come to church before, so he seemed to quickly understand its practices, both during and after the service.
A number of old veterans and their wives stopped Tug on the steps and asked about his family.
“Oh, Joy didn’t make it again?” one person asked.
“Well, you know how it is.”
Another Nisei inquired about Joe.
“Joe and his wife have two kids,” Tug said, fiddling with the round “Go for Broke” pin attached to his tie. “He’s the manager of his department now.”
And then, to a question about why Lil wasn’t with him, Tug answered, “She wasn’t feeling well enough for this trip.”
Mas was surprised by Tug’s answers. Lil was supposed to be babysitting, right? And Tug himself had complained that Joe’s aerospace company was downsizing, and as a result, Joe had suffered a fifteen percent pay cut. Tug usually played it straight, so Mas was surprised his friend was blurring lines. But they were the lines of his life. None of Mas’s business.
Mas wandered to a table full of sweets and Styrofoam cups of steaming coffee and green tea. “Welcome, welcome. This is your first time here, right?” An old Nisei woman pressed down on the plastic top of a hot-water dispenser, releasing a stream of boiling water into a teakettle. She wore a bright pink and purple outfit, representing a young soul. But her skin, especially around her eyes and cheeks, was as flabby as the worn tread of a flat tire.
Ah, Mas thought, he was caught. Mas tried to ignore the woman, picking up a quartered chocolate glazed donut with a napkin and balancing a cup of hot tea in his other hand.
“Naughty, naughty. You should have stood up when the minister called out for new visitors. This is no place to be shy, you know.”
Mas bit into a donut. Even Tug knew well enough not to tell Mas to stand up in church, so he wasn’t going to heed the nagging of strangers.
Tug then arrived to save him. “Sorry about that, old man,” Tug said, grabbing a donut dusted in powdered sugar. Mas was happy that the basement was so crowded that he could take cover behind Tug’s massive body as if he were getting shade from a redwood tree.
His tactic worked, because the woman turned her attention to Tug. “Hey, you look familiar. Weren’t you at church on Sunday?”
“Yes, yes, I was.”
“Yes, and you actually stood up,” she said loudly, probably trying to make a point to the hidden Mas. “What’s your name?”
“Tug, Tug Yamada.”
“Yamada, Yamada.”
Mas squeezed his Styrofoam cup. Both he and Tug knew what was going to happen next. The woman was going to go through a whole list of Yamadas throughout New York, the East Coast, and then all of the U.S. Didn’t she realize that the Yamada name was pretty common, at least one of the top twenty back in Japan?
“No, no, no,” Tug replied each time to a reference to a certain Yamada she knew.
“You in camp?”
“ Heart Mountain, before I was drafted.”
“Oh, Wyoming, huh? I was in Rohwer, Arkansas.”
“My wife was in Arkansas,” said Tug. Mas noticed that Tug’s voice was becoming warmer, more interested. What was it about Nisei and camp? Sometimes it felt like an elite club to Mas, instead of a prison. But then, that was the way of the Nisei, especially the ones who had been able to reestablish their lives after World War II. In camp, they took discarded lumber and carved beautiful birds and assembled high-quality furniture. Now, years after camp, they made chrysanthemum flowers from clear plastic six-ring soda can holders. They had the knack of making beauty out of trash.
“Where were you before the war?” Tug asked.
“ Montebello. Flower growers.”
“ Montebello? I’m from San Dimas, just a few miles away.”
“We were neighbors, then. Haven’t gone back in twenty years.”
“You wouldn’t recognize it now. No more flower fields in Montebello, just malls and tract homes,” explained Tug.
“I need to get over there. I’ve been retired for a while now, and have been traveling throughout Europe. I do volunteer work at the New York Japanese American Social Service Center once a week.”
The Japanese American Social Service Center had been mentioned in the Post article, Mas remembered. He appeared from his hiding place behind Tug. “Mamiya?”
“Huh?”
“Sumptin’ Mamiya. Read it in the newspapa about Ouchi- san.”
“Oh, Elk Mamiya. He’s just an old coot. Don’t listen to what he says. Got a lot of head problems. He just happened to be at the Service Center when the reporter came by. The reporter interviewed a bunch of us, but of course he quoted Elk.” The woman poured the steeped tea into Styrofoam cups. “None of us said what we really thought of Kazzy’s death. I mean, it was shocking, but then again-”
“You knew Kazzy Ouchi?” asked Tug.
“Of course, we all did. I mean, I didn’t socialize with him. Different circles, you know. But I knew his first wife-you know that he was married three times?”
Three times? thought Mas. The man was an aho. What did he think he was, a Hollywood movie star?
“Yeah, the second’s in Hawaii, and I think the third went back to Japan. But the first one was the sweetest. Harriet. Shimamoto was her maiden name. Was the mother to the two kids, Phillip and Rebecca. Went to church. My kids were in the same Sunday school. After the divorce, she moved to Brooklyn Heights with them. Didn’t care to be in the middle of Manhattan anymore, I guess. Who could blame her? A few decades later, a couple of strokes did her in.
“That’s what usually happens to the wife after a divorce. She stays single, while the ex-husband finds another woman right away. When I heard Kazzy was trying to restore that garden, people were saying that he was doing it on behalf of the community, to preserve our history. But I knew the truth. He was just feeding his male ego, making a monument to himself.”
“But I thought he was doing it to honor his parents,” said Tug.
“He just wanted to show how he was connected to one of the most powerful families in New York. The Waxleys. Just a big show-off. Wanted everyone to know that he was a Japanese Horatio Alger story, from rags to riches.” The woman began to realize that she had said too much to complete strangers. “How come you want to know about Kazzy?”
To Mas’s relief, Tug stepped in as their official spokesman. “His son-in-law,” he said, gesturing to Mas, “works over at the Waxley House. We’re looking into who killed Kazzy.”
“Well, I wouldn’t know much. But you should talk to Jinx Watanabe. They were friends from the war.”
“I know Jinx,” Tug said.
“Well, I’ll find him for you.” The woman disappeared into the crowd, and Mas excused himself to go to the bathroom. The men’s room was underneath the stairs. The floor was made of tiny tiles, and the entire L-shaped bathroom was drafty like a meat locker. Mas could even feel the coldness of the tile floor through the thin soles of his shoes. In addition to a single urinal, there were two stalls. Mas went into the empty one, only to discover that the latch was broken. He had to resort to sitting on the edge of the toilet while he stretched out the tips of his fingers to keep the door closed.
The man in the neighboring stall flushed the toilet, and Mas could hear the jangle of the man’s metal belt buckle as he got ready to go. Meanwhile, another person had stepped into the bathroom. When the man next to Mas opened the door of his stall to wash his hands, he addressed the newcomer. “Hey, Elk.”
No reply, just the sound of water running in the sink. The door swung closed, but the running water continued. Mas looked through a crack by the hinges on the stall door. All he could see was the back of a balding man’s head, which was shaped like a dinner roll.
Mas stood up, flushed the toilet, and zipped up his pants. He opened his stall door, keeping his eyes on the tile floor as he neared one of the two sinks.
Elk was washing his hands vigorously with a large bar of soap the color of green tea ice cream. As the bathroom had its own powdered soap dispenser, this must be special soap that Elk had brought in. Its smell was stronger than any kind of average cleanser. Mas recognized it as the same kind used by his friend, a linotypist who had worked at one of the Japanese American newspapers in Little Tokyo.
Mas pushed down the metal lever for the powdered soap, trying to think of a clever line to start a conversation. Finally, all he could manage was “You Mamiya- san?”
“Huh, I dunno you.” The man peered into Mas’s face. His eyes were magnified by his thick glasses so they looked like giant black pearls in open oyster shells.
“Izu Mas Arai. From Los Angeles.”
“Los Angeles? What you doin’ here?”
“Gotsu a daughter. Sheezu connected with the Waxley House.”
Elk’s eyes snapped wide open.
“Waxley House? Where Ouchi died?”
“You knowsu anytin’ about Ouchi- san?”
“Only that he was one of the top dogs among us Japanese. He was goin’ make a museum for us. But then someone gets rid of him.”
“Anyone wish sumptin’ bad on Ouchi- san?”
“Well, they all do, don’t you know? They don’t want us to succeed, really. They’ll give us a few crumbs, but that’s all. Must’ve been that group, the ones who passed around that petition. That’s who I would be lookin’ at. I know their type. I lived in a hostel in Brooklyn during the end of the war. That sonafugun Mayor La Guardia didn’t want us. Even though I’m from Seattle, I told myself that I was going to stay in New York just to spite them.”
Them, Mas wondered. Was he talking about the mayor, the others who were against the Nisei, or perhaps someone else altogether?
Mas went to the paper dispenser, only to see that it was out of paper towels.
“You better watch yourself,” Elk said. His glasses had slipped a little down his nose so Mas saw four eyes peering at him. “They’ll do anything to get rid of us.”
Mas left the bathroom in search of Tug, who was with a short, graying man with a wide-open forehead. “This is my friend Mas Arai,” Tug said, introducing him to Jinx Watanabe. Mas didn’t want to ask what “Jinx” stood for; it seemed better for everyone if that information stayed unknown.
“Hallo,” he greeted Jinx.
“What camp were you in?” Jinx didn’t waste any time trying to figure out where to place Mas.
“Mas wasn’t in camp. He’s Kibei. Was in Japan during the war.”
“Oh, you one of those strandees.” Jinx nodded, biting into a crumb cake. Mas didn’t know if he had necessarily been stranded, since the only home he knew at the time was Japan. He’d had plenty of close friends, however, who’d been teenagers when they first set foot in Japan, and definitely felt more stranded there than in the States.
“Whereabouts were you? Wakayama? Kagoshima?”
“ Hiroshima,” Mas replied.
Jinx’s cheeks colored, while his wide forehead remained pale. “ Hiroshima. I went over there in 1947 during my leave. I was part of the Occupation in Tokyo, but I wanted to take a look-see at what happened down in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Awful stuff.”
“Mas was in the Hiroshima train station. Only a couple of miles from the epicenter, right?”
Mas swallowed some spit. The last thing he wanted to do was revisit Hiroshima. “So youzu in the Army?” he asked, trying to take the focus off himself.
“Yeah, actually, I was part of the Military Intelligence Service. You know, MIS?”
This MIS Mas had heard about at Tanaka’s Lawnmower Shop back home. A bunch of Nisei-most of them pretty good in Japanese-had been trained to break codes and interrogate Japanese POWs in the Pacific. It had been top secret; a lot of the MIS-ers, in fact, had carried that secret to their early graves. But more than fifty years later, the government finally seemed to give them a green light to talk. No wonder hakujin people seemed to not know anything about the Nisei-not only were the Nisei not the kind to flap their mouths, but they had sometimes been explicitly barred from speaking the truth.
“Actually, that’s how Jinx knows Kazzy Ouchi. They were at the language school together in Minnesota,” Tug explained.
“Yeah, that’s too bad about Kazzy. That’s no way that a man like him should have died. Buried underneath a pile of garbage. Kind of strange, about the vandalism. Asians don’t have that much trouble here. Must have been some kids. A prank that got out of hand.”
“So you knew Kazzy well?” asked Tug.
“My wife had been close to his first wife. Kids used to come over all the time. I kind of lost touch with him myself after language school at Camp Savage. He was a big shot, after all. Didn’t have time to go to church or hang out with us nobodies.
“He was actually my instructor at Camp Savage. If you excuse me saying this, he was a strict SOB. A real Mr. Chanto, you know, everything had to be just right.”
Mas nodded. Chanto had been Chizuko’s catchphrase. Everything had to be done according to the rules. They weren’t written in stone, but floated around every Issei and Nisei’s head.
“Kazzy was a stickler for grammar, proper usage of Japanese,” explained Jinx. “Was really into honorifics, you know, how you address people, kun, chan, san, sama, all that stuff. Got mad as hell if we made a mistake and spoke as if we were higher in status than we were. It was all BS to most of us. We were Americans, after all. We were going to be questioning POWs, not the Emperor of Japan.”
“Where heezu learn Japanese?”
“I guess his dad had been educated back in Japan. Although here the old man did mostly domestic work and gardening, he knew a lot of formal Japanese. Tutored Kazzy, I guess. Too bad the father died so suddenly when Kazzy was just a kid. Must’ve been rough to be orphaned like that, but that helped him later to be an independent sonafugun.”
“What happened to the mother, anyway? She was Irish, right?”
“I heard that she died in childbirth. Second kid. The baby didn’t make it, either. Kazzy’s father died soon after. Probably from a broken heart.”
Finishing up their conversation with Jinx, they searched for Tug’s florist friend, Happy Ikeda. Happy Ikeda, as it turns out, looked nothing like his nickname. He had heavy lips, the lower one more swollen than the upper, giving him the appearance of a permanent pout.
“Yeah, I know Danjo Kanda’s Mystery Gardenias,” Happy said. “Order them all the time. But trying to find who sent that particular gardenia, that’s a hard one, Tug. That’s like looking for a needle in a haystack.”
After Tug and Mas drained all the information they could from Happy, they left the church for the train station. “I guess you’re wondering what’s going on with Lil and Joy,” said Tug in front of the stairs to the platform for trains en route to Brooklyn. Mas could tell something had been weighing on his friend’s mind.
“I promised Lil that I wouldn’t tell you, so I can’t get into the details, Mas. But I’ll just say that we’re having a problem. A big one.”
“Gotsu to do with Joy leavin’ medicine?”
Tug laughed. “I wish it was just that. We could get through that.” He smiled weakly, and Mas was afraid for his friend and himself. Tug and Lil had been Mas’s rock. Life had enough uncertainty already; with the Yamadas teetering on the brink, Mas didn’t know what he could actually count on.
“It’s just like that childhood rhyme,” said Tug. “The one about Humpty-Dumpty sitting on the wall. Well, my daughter’s fallen, and I don’t know how to put her back together again.”
When Mas came home from church, there was a telephone message for him from Becca Ouchi. Kazzy’s body had finally been released from the coroner’s, so they were going to have a memorial service on Tuesday, with a reception at the Waxley House. Could Mas come over to clean up the garden and treat the sycamore on Monday? “Sylvester’s looking bad,” she said. Mas couldn’t tell whether the warbling in her voice was from emotion or just the worn-out phone message tape.
“They don’t want me going over there,” said Lloyd later that afternoon. “Both Mari and I were told not to come to Kazzy’s memorial service. I guess I’m still suspect number one. With Kazzy gone, I guess Phillip now is calling the shots.”
Mas and Lloyd hadn’t spoken about the bullet Mas had discovered on the dirt floor of the shed. Mas had left the bullet on the coffee table, only to have it disappear an hour later while he was taking a shower. It was now the son-in-law’s responsibility, not Mas’s.
“He fire youzu?” Mas asked, fearing that his grandson’s medical coverage would dry up.
“Not yet. But I’ve been asking around for work, just in case. Everywhere seems to have a hiring freeze.”
Mas wasn’t quite familiar with the term “hiring freeze,” but he could figure it out. It was a place that was cold and barren, a place where you had to stay outside. That night he dreamed of ice, Eskimos, and igloos. There was a hole in a frozen lake, where penguins, one after another, seemed to slip and fall right in.