by Tod Davies
My mother was born in Kobe, in Japan, in the Portuguese Catholic settlement there. She spent most of her childhood between Hong Kong and the lesser known island of Macao, across the bay, where her Portuguese/Chinese ancestors had lived since the 16th century: merchants, accountants, and pirates.
When it was time for her to go to school, she was sent, as were all the daughters of the Portuguese Catholic merchant class on that island, to an Anglo-French convent in Tokyo. This was where Catholic girls were taught, even then somewhat anachronistically, to be the good wives and mothers of the Catholic haute bourgeoisie. They learned English and French and read Chesterton and Pascal. They learned how to curtsey and how to pour tea. They learned how to wear pearls under their nightdresses to keep their sheen. When World War II broke out, many of the boarding school girls were trapped there, in Japan. My grandmother, who had a British passport and could still travel freely, went to Tokyo to try to get my mother and her older sister, who didn't, away. But then the borders closed, and they settled down uneasily, I have always imagined (for my mother won't talk about those days, and what I know I have put together carefully from crumbs of information scooped up and hoarded over the years), for the duration of the war.
She was twelve years old.
That year, she had a cat — a black cat. I don't remember who told me about this cat, whether it was my aunt, or my grandmother, or whether my mother let fall something about it herself, in some unguarded moment of remembering. I don't know the cat's name. I know that my mother had charge of the cat, along with the care of a small suitcase packed with family jewelry: trinkets inherited mother to daughter, mother to daughter, down the years in her family in Macao. It was her job, my mother's at twelve, to watch over them. And in one night, she lost them both.
Bombs fell. I imagined this as a child in peaceful San Francisco, cautiously, even fearfully. None of the adults would talk about it. In my mind, it was always night in Tokyo, with red and yellow lights flickering from a permanent fire on the horizon, and crackling noises and screams and shouts, as if coming from the old loudspeakers of a history exhibit in some children's museum: "We Bomb Japan." Because of course it was us dropping those incendiary bombs on my mother and my aunt and my grandmother. We bombed Tokyo. I was confused by this, and touched it gingerly in my thoughts, as if probing for a sore spot in my mouth. When I was a teenager, a friend of my father's, who had been a bomber pilot in the war, realized he must have been one of the planes over Tokyo the night my mother lost her jewelry and her cat. I remember the grown ups laughing about it at dinner.
I thought about this often as a child: about my mother and my aunt and my grandmother, all alone, unprotected in a strange land, their foreignness and their sex impossible to hide. They were very brave. My mother's bravery took this form: that when she told me about that night, the one where she lost both the jewelry and her cat, she told it in the form of an apology.
"I was asleep and the bombs started to fall. I had all our jewelry in a little suitcase under the bed. But I got scared and I ran away, and the house was bombed, and the jewelry all gone. And I'm so sorry I lost it, Tod! It should have been yours. And I lost it all."
I would try to comfort her by saying, quite honestly, that I didn't care about the jewelry at all: all that mattered was that she was safe. We'd laugh about it, the same as she and my father's friend had laughed.
She told me that story over and over. The way I remember is that she told it at least once a year. But it was always very short — she didn't linger on it. And it was always as an apology — always.
We would be going through her jewelry drawer, which was also where she kept her lingerie and our school report cards. Whenever we opened that drawer, it seemed, she would tell me the same story. I always felt badly for her and tried to tell her that everything was okay now; she was an adult and in America and her daughter didn't mind at all that the jewels that should have been hers had disappeared. "After all," I would say. "If you'd gone back for them, I probably wouldn't be here at all." And we'd laugh again.
I did mind, though. Not about the jewels. But something else. That was the only story she told me. It was the only one from her childhood that she would tell. I wanted those stories. Never mind the jewelry: it was the stories that mattered.
We never talked at all about the cat who died the same night the jewelry burned. I tried not to think about it: the little cat terrified in the dark house, the loud noises, the smell of fire. I couldn't bear to imagine it, all by myself, when I was a child. I tried not to think about that.
When I was four or five, I had a cat myself, a tiny but definite kitten, who would sleep, safe and purring and warm, curled up against me under the covers of my bed. She was too small, much too small, to be on her own, but one day my mother let her out of the garage onto the street. I remember watching this in paralyzed horror from the top of the basement stairs and screaming, "Don't let her out! Don't let her out! Don't let her out!" And I remember my mother giving me that superior, slightly contemptuous look that I had already learned to identify as a sign of adult fear, and saying, "Don't be silly. She'll be fine. She's a cat."
There was another look on her face, one I couldn't identify until much time and experience later. She was looking intently at my little cat with an exploratory frown. I can see her face as I write this, her beautiful young unlined face, round and smooth like the full moon. It looks down at that creature and it wonders: "Can you survive? If I let you out, will you find a way to live?"
But the kitten didn't survive, not that one, not that time. She was too small, and I never saw her again. My mother and I didn't speak of her till years later, when I was twelve, and I pretended to myself and the world that an old stray a friend of mine had found was that kitten now grown up and safe. Both my parents got that same superior, slightly contemptuous look on their faces and tried to explain to me how this wasn't possible, until, faced with my increasingly hysterical insistence, they fell back into silence.
I still remember standing on those stairs as my mother let the kitten go. I can still remember knowing that there was no way to stop her, even though it meant the kitten would be alone, cold, lost, wandering forever. I knew what would happen. But of course there was nothing I could do.
I had another cat after that kitten, when I was about seven years old. This was a distant, difficult cat, more to be admired than loved. Still, when the doctor found my brother allergic and ordered her removal, I braced myself for a fight. I could see his point, of course, but I felt my honor somehow depended on ignoring it — as if what I had failed at when I was younger could be repeated now, a success. I didn't even really like that cat, but somehow I felt I should try.
I was both a strong-willed and a dramatic child, and my mother, being the same, knew what to expect. So to forestall the tragic scene she and I knew I was sure to enact, she sent me to the corner store with instructions to buy myself as much candy as I liked. When I'd come home, the cat would be gone.
How could I resist? I knew I was being bought off, but the cat, I decided philosophically, was going no matter what I did: I might as well get something out of it. (I was always a practical, as well as a dramatic, child.) I went to the market and pushed the cart through the aisles. I can still remember the candy: Bonamo Turkish Taffy — vanilla, chocolate, strawberry and banana. Silver wrapped Uno bars. Strips of white paper with little sugar dots lined up in rows, all pretty pastels: pink and lilac and yellow and green. Like jewels, those were; they'd always been my favorites. But they made me queasy now, proof as they were that I had been disgracefully bought off, and in the end, all they were that day was so much trash. The sight of the candy, all of it, nauseated me. I think I only ate a piece or two, though I don't remember of what, and I'm pretty sure I gave the rest to my brothers.
What I do remember is what I did eat tasted like dust.
There was another time, later, when the food I had so looked forward to tasted like that. This was on the rather grand occasion of my first marriage. I shouldn't have had this wedding, of course. That I lost twenty pounds in the months before should have warned me, if not everyone else (who all commented on how well I looked, how much weight I had lost, leaving me to puzzle over where exactly in a picture the truth might lie). I didn't want the big wedding, but my parents pointed out I was their only daughter, so there was clearly an obligation. To make it up to myself, the having to wear a long dress instead of the suit I had picked out, the having to greet innumerable guests I didn't know and innumerable relatives I didn't much like, the having to have my hair curled and my face painted in a way that made me alien to myself — the way I made it up to myself was by ordering the best possible food for the reception. I remember trying to eat the food. I remember picking up the smoked salmon and trying it. Twice. Dust. All dust. But familiar dust. It was the same dust I had tasted that day, in the store, the day we gave away my cat.
I hated that wedding. Oh, this wasn't my poor first husband's fault — it wasn't about him at all. All through that wedding, I thought: this is wrong. this is false. this is not the way it's supposed to be.
Because a wedding, so I reasoned, is about the tying together of what has gone before and what will come after. I thought of it as a ceremony tying me into a string of ancestors, and ancestors' stories, going back and back and back. Only I didn't have any of those stories. They had been lost forever, the same night as the jewelry was lost. Gone forever with that first lost cat.
Lost to me forever. Or so I thought.
But now I know that this is not so. I know now that you can have the past back again, restored. Because to think about what something means, and to understand it, is to be able to imagine it and to have it back — and to have it back so that no one can take it from you, ever again.
So I think about the lovely string of pearls that Mother searched for to give me on the occasion of that first failed marriage, and about her own lovelier strand that she gave me proudly before my happy second. I think about the jade and gold brooch my father and I spent hours one Christmas choosing for her, on one of the rare days he was at home. I think about the lapis lazuli necklace I'll never wear, the one she had made specially for herself and then gave to me, the one that I take out of its case now and then and look at, without a single thought in my head, but with a sadness at the beauty of the thing, and how far away that beauty is from me. Hidden. Disguised. Lost. Gone. I think about what this means. And as I think about it, stories appear to me. I mean to tell them so they're true.
I think about what it could mean that Mother was always careless with her jewels. And that I'm the same about mine. We both store them in odd places, forget where they're hidden, forget to wear them when the occasion comes, take them out and wear them at the oddest times. We both of us — Mother and I — think of them mainly as something to pass on rather than to enjoy. We both of us think about our own small store as something to be hoarded and passed on down to some female descendant living in a safer time, perhaps when curtseys come back into style, and women wearing white gloves once again decorously pour out the afternoon tea.
Why is this, I wonder to myself? Is this because she and I both lost her past in that one night she lost that first cat? And because in losing that past, we somehow lost something in the present, too, which can't be held onto but only passed down, we hope, to some safer, luckier girl? I have no children, no daughters, of my own. Instead I sit at the edge of the River of Time watching it flow through the generations, and my job — so it seems to me, confused though determined as I am — is to understand what it means and to write that down and to throw that writing back into the River to float, with the children swimming there, downstream to the Sea.
I thought that was the end of this story. But I find that, in it, there is one more cat. This was a tiny kitten named Max who came to my mother long after I was out of the house and gone. Only the last of my brothers was at home, now, and he was about to go away to college, too. Soon my mother would be alone in that big suburban house they lived in — my father was gone all too often in those days, as in the days when I was growing up.
My parents at that time had an eager German shepherd bitch inherited from one of my brothers. She was a nice dog, but always seemed to me to be missing something — a wistful dog, as if what she'd wanted had somehow passed her by.
My mother walked her one evening around the grounds of a nearby school. As my mother told me later, the dog suddenly dove into the ivy that lined the school buildings there and pulled out something tiny by the scruff of its neck.
"I thought it was a rat, at first! It was so small and ugly!"
But it was a kitten. The dog clutched that kitten by the neck fur and refused to let go until she got it home, where she licked it carefully and adopted it for her own. My mother later learned that a litter had been born in the school's air conditioning ducts, and the janitor found it and had them all put to sleep. But this kitten, which my mother named Max, was luckier — he must have tumbled out of the ducts before the discovery of his brothers and sisters, and so been saved.
My mother loved that cat. She loved that cat openly, exuberantly, wholeheartedly, in a way I had never seen her love anything or anyone before. And the cat loved her. He was positively vicious to everyone else — I had some good scratch marks to prove it after one weekend I spent at home — but kept sternly by my mother's side, guarding her against fate. And when my mother was alone, which she hated, but which she had had to put up with for too many years, first when we were children and my father went away over and over, then, later, when we were all gone, Max was always there, attentive, alert, making sure that she was safe.
He lived many, many cantankerous, scruffy years, and then he died.
I came home one weekend after Max had died, when my father still traveled away, and my mother, after a day or two of getting used to me again (she is always wary around me, as wary as a cat), in an unguarded moment said, "You know, Max is still here as a ghost. I can feel him, and sometimes I can hear him meow. And when I'm alone, he takes care of me, just the way he did when I was alive."
I looked at her. I could feel, just forming on my face, that same superior, slightly contemptuous look that I get when I consider the various follies of my parents. I could feel it come, and then I could feel it go away. I said, "You know, Mother, I'm sure he does." And I said it without my fingers crossed and without pity and without shame. Because you know what? I was quite sure that he did, and if he didn't, he should, and all the jewelry in the world could have been restored to me just then, and it wouldn't mean a thing next to the wonderful feeling that my mother sleeps with the ghost of her little cat curled up under the bedclothes beside her, another night safe, another night saved in the nick of time from the grip of a world always on the verge of being taken away for good. Before we've had time to really love it. And to see it clear. Because we have to do that: really love it, and see it clear. And pass down what we see, saving it from the war, for the little girls who come after. Those little girls, I have reason to know, are longing to hear what we saw. And they would rather have that — I have reason to know — than any other treasure we could save.