From a Town on the Hudson Read online

  The earth shook as the house fell. The dust blew. The yellow-colored, iron machines assaulted the Paiges home. They pulled Williams trellis down and it broke into pieces. They smashed the window frames. Many glass jars that Hannah had kept in the kitchen were crushed crying for help. All day long I could hear the painful groans of the house being torn down. At sunset, the dust thinned out and vanished. Everything became quiet. That night, through the window I saw that only the concrete walls of the basement were left. They stood silently in the mist. In the pale moonlight, they looked like a small fort where Hannah and William had fought bravely, or a huge tomb that mourned the death of the house. I bit my lip and pressed my forehead against the cold glass. The tears rolled down my cheeks and the glass trembled.

  Two long years have turned Hannahs pickles amber color. In my refrigerator, a few pieces still remain in the bottom of the jar. My regret at having avoided confronting her situation settled at the bottom of my heart like dregs in the stagnant vinegar. She might have been limited financially, with too many difficulties for her to bear alone, and finally had to be taken away under the law of the United States. However, so far as I had seen, she had her own outlook on life and tried to continue her life at home as long as she could. Her independent way of life even contrasted with the modest one of many aged Japanese people who lived with their son or daughter in Japan. It also showed me that there are many limitations that people still needed to overcome in this free nation, too. She was a very American lady, and she was my friend.

  "FAIR" MIGHT be the word that I heard most frequently while I lived in the United States. My children learned that they must behave in a fair manner at school every day. The media carried pictures of angry Congressmen with clutched fists yelling, "Japan should be fair!" from Capitol Hill. Even in a checkout line at the supermarket, everyone would blame somebody who tried to cut in front of others! That the people had the courage to express their convictions was admirable. Americans' belief in being fair seemed to be firm at any time and in any place.

  However, I knew there were also exceptions. In the post office at Fort Lee, New Jersey, there was a middle-aged, earnest, and handsome-looking postal clerk. He seldom smiled but always was fair to the customers. He used to tell even a person who looked like he was in a hurry to stand in line, as he added firmly, "You're not the only one in a hurry. Everybody's waiting their turn." People in the line seemed satisfied. One warm day in May 1989, however, a glamorous woman rushed into the post office and went directly to the window of the clerk as he was saying, "Next, please."

  There were about six customers then. I happened to be taking my place at the end of the line. The woman, who had a mass of curly hair, was excessively perfumed and wore a tight, low-cut, leopard-print dress. One by one, a few old ladies in the line looked at her and gasped, "Oh, my God!" but said nothing more. The rest of the customers, old gentlemen, too, might have forgotten to blame the unfair woman at that time. Their attention was completely focused on her hips slowly swinging from side to side. Even the handsome window clerk didn't warn her. He blushed a little and, in fact, looked happy to be answering her. After she left, everybody stared at the clerk. The uncomfortable atmosphere of the place made him do his job in an exceedingly modest manner for a while.

  The world around us is filled with unfair things. Even though this is a world in which honesty doesn't often pay, we shouldn't permit unfair behavior. The reason why a dishonest act doesn't seem to be forgivable, especially to Americans, might be because their ancestors or they themselves had come to the country with the extraordinary expectation that all classes of people should be treated equally. Every time I heard the word, I was sensitive to the determination that Americans must have had to uphold the excellent virtue of fairness.

  THE FIRST picture to be televised via satellite from the United States to Japan was on the morning of November 23rd, 1963 (Japan time). It was the news clip of the assassination of the United States' thirty-fifth President, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. To Japan, which had long wanted to have a broadcast relay with the United States, this first-day linkup turned out to be much more than we had expected, due to the tragedy. The President was a young, celebrated American hero, whom many Japanese adored at the time. He seemed different from other Presidents of the United States; he held a special place in many peoples hearts. His attractive speeches, presence in public, and photographs with his family in newspapers fascinated my mother and older sisters. A high school student then, I didn't know why he was killed. A big bright star seemed to have disappeared from the world. The scene of his assassination in Dallas, Texas, at 12:30 P.M., November 22, 1963, was stamped on my memory.

  In 1974, our family lived in Philadelphia because my husband was a graduate student at the Wharton School. Our first son was three then. At the end of the summer we visited President Kennedys birthplace, at 83 Beals Street, Brookline, Massachusetts. It was five years after the house had become a national historic site. Many tourists of all generations came on sightseeing buses. The house had three stories and was painted blue with white window frames. It looked small for a standard American house but was clean and noble. The Stars and Stripes made the house look grand. A tall guard wearing a blue uniform with a shoulder strap stood on the porch and gave the place a dignified atmosphere. Before they entered, tourists mostly looked at the front of the house at first and then up at the roof, as if they expected to see a cross at the top of a church spire. The glorious air that filled the inside of the house seemed to overwhelm all the tourists.

  Another Kennedy tragedy, the assassination of the President's brother Robert in 1968, may have made the house seem more sacred. In front of each room some of the visitors stood straight, as if they still felt a sense of loyalty to the President, and some had tears in their eyes, feeling sad about the life of the great young President. I knew that he had been the leader of the United States as well as a beloved son of the United States. I was sure the image of the President I had had in Japan was close to the one that the Americans had, too. At that time I was more interested in the reactions of the people than the interior decoration of the house, which was hard to see because of the crowd. I felt close to the American tourists sharing each moment with them in the house. The taped, confident voice of the Presidents mother resounded in each room. As I stood among these tall people I listened to her voice as if it were a lecture on how to make a happy home.

  After returning to Japan for about ten years, my husband was assigned to the New York branch of a Japanese bank. We resumed our American life in Fort Lee, New Jersey, in 1985, and on April 4, 1988, we visited the Kennedy house again. It was a rainy Monday. This time we took our younger son, who had been born in 1976. My husband drove there because the sightseeing bus didn't take the same route as in 1974. Twenty-five years had already passed since President Kennedy had been assassinated in 1963. It had stopped raining by the time we arrived. It was spring. Beals Street was silent. The wet trunks of the bare trees stood in a milky fog. Only a few cars were parked far apart on the right side of the slightly curving street. When I saw that the color of the house had been changed to green, I was disappointed because it had lost its stately appearance. We didn't see a guard on the porch. The front door was closed and there was a sign that said the entrance was in the back. We went to the back and rang the doorbell as if we were visiting our neighbor. A young female guide welcomed us and showed us to the basement, where we waited for about fifteen minutes until the other visitors came down. The taped voice of Mrs. Rose Kennedy echoed throughout the house as it had in 1974. Another guide, a middle-aged man, took two elderly ladies downstairs as they finished touring inside. The tourists silently went out of the house and we were the only tourists left there. Then the young guide took us upstairs.

  We started the tour in the living room. There was the piano that I had remembered. Then in the dining room we saw the dining table and a small table with a couple of chairs by the window, which was for little children who couldn't behave w
ith good table manners. The huge black stove in the kitchen, the President's christening dress which had turned almost gray with age in the nursery room on the second floor, the pictures on the wall in the narrow hall, the index cards recording the Kennedy children's health conditions on the small desk in the sewing room— all these were where they had been before, but they had faded considerably. The taped voice of Mrs. Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, who was ninety-eight years old at the time of our visit, sounded unnaturally vivacious in the empty house. It was as if a mother who had lost her sons were making a speech forcing herself to appear strong, and the voice evoked sympathy rather than admiration. I listened to it as if it were a lecture on life. Trying to survive seemed to mean that we often had to admit that we were mortal. The house might have been dedicated to the mother of the President, not to the nation, after all. Years have passed and the world has been changing all along.

  Questions about President Kennedy's assassination and character remain unresolved in the minds of many people. Nevertheless, as far as I have seen, in the United States the Kennedy name has seemed to hold onto a certain status as time has passed and sometimes it even evokes the impression of a royal family. They said that the President's fame might have been made by the wealth and ambition of his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, not by his political ability; or that the President created his fame by the media-enhanced image of himself. What I would say is that the man who appeared in front of cameras was always himself until the very last moment of his life. In my mind, the President is still a symbol of a graceful America of that time, and serves as a reminder of my adolescence and Japan's growth in the 1960s.

  "WHY DOESN'T Barbara Bush get her hair dyed? She looks like the mother of the new President!" One after-noon in the fall of 1988, a middle-aged woman called in to a radio program to state her opinion of the new First Lady of the United States. How frankly the woman talked about such personal matters! I was surprised to hear it at first, but then realized that it was not only the woman on the radio but also other people who recommended that the new First Lady should dye her hair. It might have been because many American people felt a new closeness with Mrs. Bush. As I thought about it, however, I came to realize that coloring one's hair seemed to be so normal for American people.

  While I lived in Fort Lee, New Jersey, across the Hudson River from New York City, in the second half of the 1980s, I used to see many blondes everywhere I went. Especially in New York, businesswomen with blond hair looked dashing and sexy. They had a proud look as if they were the freest women in the whole world. They confidently walked the streets, their bright hair waving in the wind. Their hair color surely matched the image of Manhattan. I used to think that not only the skyscrapers but blondes seemed to embody Americans lust for wealth, power, and freedom. Most of those women, however, were artificial blondes. Their original hair color was obviously not blond. I could see their dark roots. In the beginning, I ridiculously assumed that the color of their hair turned blond as their hair got longer, because there were so many blondes. I soon came to know the truth, but it wasn't as easy to understand why they wanted to become blondes. The purpose couldn't only be so-called rejuvenation. They were in the prime of life. They looked independent, and I thought they would be beautiful even if they were not blond. Not all American gentlemen seemed to prefer blondes as the title of the old film says. It might have been something like a status symbol among some white people in the United States. If anything, in fact, I didn't like wom-en who turned into fake blondes. They were put on a pedestal in commercials, yet they seemed to hold themselves in contempt by pretending to be more beautiful than they really were.

  New York was filled with an exalted air in every corner of the streets. People, both good- and ill-natured, seemed absorbed in looking for chances to make money. In the city, they had a lot of self-confidence and always asserted themselves. Gradually, I came to think that dyeing their hair blond might have been one of the ways women survived in New York. They also seemed to be fighting against the male chauvinism of the nation. When women got angry with men as they insisted on their rights, their long blond hair seemed to be about to wave like a lions mane or their short blond hair seemed to be about to stand on end like a cat's. At the same time, however, such tough blondes could also act weak and coquettish according to time and circumstance. At night, in theaters and restaurants, they apparently liked men to caress their soft-as-down hair. Being blond seemed quite convenient. Everybody likes to be beautiful. I myself put on make-up and will color my hair dark when it turns gray. The blondes' straightforward way of living and their cheerful smiles won me over, as I was liberated from my way of thinking. Choosing a way of life depended on a woman's individual sense of values and aesthetic feeling. I got so that I took women dyeing their hair blond as a matter of course in Western countries. My view at the time was based on what I had seen in the United States.

  At the end of July 1990, our family spent two days in London on the way back to Japan after our five-year stay in the United States. When we took the subway trains and saw many commuters on the second evening, I knew that attitudes about women's hair color had not always been the same in Western countries. The British women hadn't dyed their hair. Their genuinely dark hair color seemed to modestly enhance London's grand, elaborate structures built in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The women's appearance was so quiet, and the self-possessed expressions on their faces made me wonder if the traditions of England might have brought some pressure to bear upon them.

  We got off the train near our hotel and walked along the hard, worn-away stone pavement. I thought of the America we had left a day ago. It was a country whose people had chosen to become Americans. They must have been ready to make something different of themselves from the beginning of their American life. They also may have been apt to change their hair color much more readily than I had expected. It was twilight. The big moon rose in the sky with a purple tint. My black hair was swinging in the wind.

  LIVING ABROAD with a family, generally speaking, is a wonderful experience. In the beginning, however, there are many problems to be overcome to fit into the new environment. One of them is the language problem.

  In April 1985, our family started a new life in Fort Lee, New Jersey, and our two sons were faced with this problem at their schools. In Fort Lee there were many foreign children whose fathers had transferred to companies in the New York metropolitan area. The language problem seemed to be serious for many of them.

  "When can I go to the bathroom? When can I get a drink of water? How can I say it in English? What are my American classmates talking about now? Why are they laughing? What do the letters mean on the blackboard?" For the new pupils who transferred from abroad, to be in a place where an unknown language was spoken seemed to be much harder than expected. They sat at their desks for six hours a day whether they liked it or not. Not all of them were from Japan. However, due to Japans expanding overseas business, many of them were Japanese children. In the 1985-86 school year when my sons transferred to the public schools, Fort Lee had 407 Japanese pupils out a total enrollment of 2,476 students from kindergarten to twelfth grade.* Some of them were newcomers.

  It was easy to imagine that most American homeroom teachers might have had mixed feelings toward the many pupils who weren't able to respond to the teachers' questions immediately. Our younger son's class usually had four Japanese children in a class of twenty every year. In Japan, however, few foreign families had lived outside of Tokyo before our family left there in 1985. If Japan's public schools had as many foreign pupils as the American schools did, it would throw the Japanese homeroom teachers into a flurry. So far as I saw in the American schools our sons went to, however, no teacher showed any sign of confusion, no classmate looked at the foreign children with curious eyes, and no school staff members discriminated against the shy children. I came to understand that this was because of the Fort Lee Board of Education's practical overall program for welcoming children from other co
untries. The E.S.L. class and the bilingual class were provided to help students fit into the American schools by teaching them English step by step. Until our sons passed the classes, the teachers eased their difficulties and always seemed to make an effort to fill the cultural gap between the United States and other countries. As a foreign mother, I couldn't thank them enough for their thoughtfulness.

  Until the language problem of the foreign children could be solved, many of their families must have struggled. I, too, was always anxious about our two sons and the stress they felt in their schools, so from the bottom of my heart I hoped and waited for the day they would be able to understand English. I am not a Christian, but what came readily to my mind then was a phrase from the Bible, "In the beginning was the Word."* For our family, The Day came first to our younger son, a fourth-grader then. One evening after he had spent a year and a half in School #3, he was hanging around me in the kitchen and suddenly loudly said, "I wondered why I was feeling happy all day today and I realized the reason now. Mother, I could understand everything that was said in English at school!" A few months later, our older son, a high school student then, said coolly, "It took a long time." Then they were finished with the E.S.L. and bilingual classes and could join the regular curriculum.