When it first started snowing in Chicago, it seemed so beautiful and quiet. It was different than the occasional flurries at Manzanar, which lasted only a day or so. Lately, though, the snow feels like a slippery prison.
Marge’s accusation—that Rose was a spy and that I was one as well—burned hot in my mind as I stood in the train, swaying as the car sped to the Clark and Division station. That such rumors would follow Rose to Chicago disturbed me, mostly because I had hoped that we could all start over from scratch. But the past dragged behind us, and deep down inside I knew that I had been overly optimistic, like my father had initially been.
Once the car arrived at my stop, I got off and headed southwest to our apartment. A familiar figure disappeared into our building. I only saw his profile, the thinning light-brown hair, the hunched shoulders from perhaps too much note-taking.
I went upstairs to Harriet’s unit. I put my ear on the door. Again, muffled talking. I could have sworn that I recognized the monotone rhythm of Douglas’s voice, the same tune played over and over.
I rapped on the door with my knuckle.
Whispers and then footsteps echoing away from the door. The hinges of an interior door squeaking.
Finally, Harriet’s voice, a bit breathless. “Who is it?”
“It’s Aki,” I announced. “I know that he’s in there, Harriet.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I need to talk to Douglas.”
A few moments of silence—probably only a few seconds, but it seemed like an interminable length of time. Harriet must have decided shikataganai, there was no use in trying to deflect me. She knew that I was stubborn, that I wouldn’t give it up so she might as well open the door.
The apartment was tiny, one room with a kitchenette and a bathtub that took more space than the twin bed. Yellow cotton curtains had been hung on a rod above the large open window, allowing the setting sun to pour in. Somehow Harriet had made her miserable living conditions bright and cheery. I had to admit that I was impressed.
The bathroom door squeaked open and Douglas Reilly stepped out. “I’ll let you two talk,” Harriet said, escaping into the small bathroom, which seemed only to have room for a toilet.
Douglas stood awkwardly, his veined hands at his sides. Now that I was standing so close to him in such cramped quarters, I recognized the smell of Douglas’s musky cologne. It was the same scent that had been on Rose’s dress with the cranes.
“Did you spend time with my sister?” I asked him outright.
He shook his head. “Not much. Only through my interviews with her as part of my WRA work. Shared anonymously, of course.”
Why would Rose do such a thing? Did she think that she was helping the war effort somehow?
“I’d like those stories.”
“I can’t give them to you. That would be a breach of ethics.”
“Why is your cologne all over one of Rose’s dresses? That doesn’t seem too ethical.”
“I gave her that dress. It was in appreciation. That’s all.” Dry flakes of skin were peeling off his top lip. I wondered if he had eczema or a related condition. I couldn’t help but to examine his ring finger. It wasn’t that well-defined, but I detected a slight indentation where a wedding ring might have been.
For a hakujin WRA staffer to give a Nisei female subject such an extravagant and personal gift was bad form. I feared that his relationship with Rose was much more intimate than he was letting on. I didn’t want to hear any more denials, so I decided to shock him to see what he actually knew.
“Are you the reason that she had an abortion?”
Something hard clattered to the floor in the bathroom.
Douglas’s legs seemed to buckle underneath him, because he staggered to sit down on Harriet’s bed. “I knew nothing about that. She wasn’t dating anyone, as far as I knew.”
I didn’t know why, but I felt anger rise to my throat. Someone had to be held accountable. Douglas was guilty of spying on us and giving Rose an inappropriate gift. Besides that, though, he seemed harmless. He was an easy target, someone I could overpower, at least emotionally.
I towered over him like that for a few moments. “You probably heard that a Nisei girl was attacked on the South Side.”
“I heard the rumors.” Douglas’s green eyes revealed no emotion. “It hasn’t been the only incident. There was a Peeping Tom, a flasher. Someone spoke about a sex maniac being on the loose.”
I was astonished at how casually he tossed out that last term. “Was he arrested?”
“It was just talk. No one could tell me specifics. I don’t know why you people don’t go to the police.”
“Why didn’t you go to the police?”
“It’s not my place. No one had firsthand information. It was more somebody who had heard it from somebody else.”
I had little patience for observers who did nothing. Maybe in that sense I was becoming more like Rose.
The bathroom door opened and Harriet went to her small sink and began washing dishes as if we weren’t even there. I figured this was a sign that my visit had come to an end. Douglas seemed even more defeated than I was, so I too decided that it was best that I go.
When I arrived at the apartment, my parents were fully dressed, a purse hanging from my mother’s arm.
“Nokorimono in refrigerator,” she said, referring to the leftovers from last night’s dinner of fried rice.
“Where are you two going?”
“English lesson,” my mother said, “over at YMCA.”
As my father had worked as the manager of the produce market, his English was serviceable, but Mom had always had trouble with the language. When I wished her well, she glared like I was making fun of her.
I relished this time to be in the quiet apartment by myself. I took out the fried rice from the refrigerator. Mom had diced up Spam in perfect mini-cubes and added green peas for color. I turned on our electric burner, and with our only skillet, I warmed up the fried rice, enjoying the smoky scent of cooked Spam as it filled the room.
The pay phone rang. I quickly turned off the burner, unlocked the front door, and ran out to the hallway.
“Hello,” I said, my voice breathless.
“Did I make you run?”
“No, I’m fine.” It was so good to hear this voice. I was glad that Art couldn’t see me because I was smiling so wide my cheeks were hurting.
“I’m looking forward to going to the lake,” he said.
“I am, too.”
“Pick you up at eleven.”
“I can make some sandwiches for a picnic.”
“Perfect. I’ll bring some water.”
The cord wasn’t long enough for me to sit on the ground and talk, so I told him to wait a minute. I brought one of the dining-room chairs out to the hallway and sat right next to the pay phone. Twilight was moving into night, and through a shallow window I could see the top of some skyscraper as the sky turned from a pink spread to a hushed darkness. For a moment, in spite of all the shock, sadness and anger these past few years had brought, I felt my heart expand. Was it possible to be happy? Was it wrong?
Art had to work on a paper for a summer-session class, so we ended our conversation, and I returned to the apartment to eat my fried rice. It had gotten cold, but I didn’t care. I sat with one of my legs up on my seat—a definite no-no if my mother was around—and brought spoonfuls of rice to my mouth.
I was washing my dish and the skillet when there was a knock on the door. What now?
I put my ear against the locked door. “Who is it?”
“Harriet Saito.”
She had changed from her work clothes into pedal pushers and a white T-shirt. She looked about a decade younger.
I invited her in and we sat across from each other at the dining-room table. Harriet turned down my offer to get her something to drink, which was just as well since we only had our terrible tap water.
“You don’t approve of me,” she said.
I was stumped by her statement and it must have been apparent on my face.
“You don’t approve that Douglas was in my room.”
“You don’t need my approval.” I hardly know you, I thought.
“Douglas has been working for the WRA ever since I came to Chicago. He’s a good man.”
“Is he married?”
Harriet shifted in her seat. “He’s separated. She’s in New York City.” She squeezed her hands together and extended her fingers. “Don’t you feel that you can breathe here?”
The faucet needed a new washer and the water was dripping incessantly. We heard it now. Kerplunk, kerplunk, kerplunk.
I looked at her, confused.
“No one is saying Japanese can’t act in a certain way. That we can’t date or marry white men. We can be whoever we are.”
I wasn’t sure where Harriet was from. Probably Modesto or some farm town in the middle of California where it was murderously hot in the summer and the tule fog was thick in the winter. Perhaps she felt that her life had been too stifling in farm country, but the truth was that we were all being watched and evaluated in big cities like Los Angeles or Chicago.
“I want you to know that Douglas is working on behalf of us, the Japanese, to make life better.”
“He’s tattling to the government. And he made Rose look bad. The other girls think she was a spy or something.”
Harriet pursed her lips. “Douglas gave me this to give to you.” She handed me a manila folder.
“What is it?”
“You’ll know,” she said.
Inside were two pages typewritten in blue, a carbon copy. One page was dated November 1943; the second one, March 1944.
I quickly closed the folder. I was going to wait until after Harriet had left the apartment to peruse it.
“I didn’t read it,” she said. I shrugged. “You know that he can get in trouble for releasing this report before turning it in to the government?”
I doubted that the repercussions were serious, especially in light of all that we had suffered. I fingered the edge of the folder. “Was he in love with Rose?”
Harriet’s face lost its tightness. Her eyes looked rounder and shinier.
“I think he was,” she said, as she got up from the table and headed for the door.
As soon as Harriet left, I opened up the manila folder and began to read.
November 1943
Subject is a twenty-three-year-old Nisei woman. She comes from an area in between Glendale and downtown Los Angeles and worked as a produce clerk before war. She had been in Manzanar War Relocation Center from March 1942 to September 1943.
She came to Chicago in advance of her family, her Issei father, a Los Angeles produce manager, Issei mother, and Nisei younger sister, who was in City College.
She didn’t have problems finding a place to live as she met another single woman her age from San Francisco at the WRA office. They were placed with another roommate from the Pasadena area who was in Gila River Relocation Center.
While other subjects have expressed that they’ve enjoyed the freedom of being on their own, this woman says that she has missed her family more than she imagined. She finds the social activities lacking and says there are not enough efforts to support the Nisei soldiers in the 100th/442nd Regimental Combat Team.
She feels many men specifically seem dispirited and that the WRA needs to make efforts to ensure that Japanese Americans are compensated as much as other people in the same position.
March 1944
It’s been difficult to conduct a follow-up interview with this subject. She seems hostile and unwilling to cooperate with government officials. When observed in social settings, she appears quite unchanged but when approached by the WRA, she pointedly expressed that she feels completely abandoned by her country.
I read Douglas’s report at least seven times in one sitting. I despised that he referred to Rose as a “subject,” like she was a mouse in a scientific experiment. But I was also grateful that he provided a few glimpses into how she was really feeling. It made sense that she was still seeking ways to support Nisei men in uniform and advocating for equal pay for equal work; she had always been a champion for such issues. I choked back tears when I read that she missed us “more than she imagined.” Most devastating was to learn that she had lost hope in America. Rose, more than any of us Itos, had been the most optimistic about the future. Now I feared that hope for our family was gone forever.