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The Emperor's Niece
Just the waitress’s quiet footsteps and the gurgle of the hot coffee as it tumbled into his cup, magnified by his crushing hangover, made Lew Hennisey’s head throb. The Sunday morning of V-J Day, September 2, 1945, was clear and far too bright for someone who had begun drinking Saturday afternoon. Even though he’d still been celebrating the victory as the sun rose from the Cascades, Lew was having trouble believing, deep down, that the war was really over. It didn’t help that there was now also a conflict, deep down, between the tequila, the salt, and the lime.
The bell on the door jangled and Kenny Dunker, the engineer at the small Seattle recording studio where Lew worked, tromped in and sang out to Abe, the morning cook at the Dawn Cafe, “A cuppa hot coffee and a piece-a peach pie!”
“Outta pie,” Abe replied gruffly.
“Maple doughnut, then,” Kenny said cheerfully.
Lew groaned and rubbed the wavy blonde hair over his pounding temples. Every inch of his sturdy frame ached, his stomach was doing loop-the-loops, and his blood-shot brown eyes refused to stay open. The sound of Kenny sliding across the plastic of the opposite booth nearly killed him.
“Holy simoleons!” Kenny said when he caught sight of Lew’s anguished face. “It’s a pity your relatives wouldn’t spring for a decent burial.”
Lew sneered weakly. “I’d have to get better to die.”
The waitress brought Kenny’s coffee and doughnut as he spread out the Sunday paper. Kenny, at 31 a few years older than Lew, was small and wiry with a bristly brown crew cut under his fedora and a pencil-thin mustache, and he immediately turned to the sports section, dunking his doughnut in the coffee.
Lew was nauseated by the sight of the crumbs floating in Kenny’s coffee. “Do you have to do that?”
“I’m a born dunker,” Kenny quipped.
Lew just scowled.
Kenny turned back to the front section. “Says here a retired cop shot a guy in the belly last night at McAllister’s. You weren’t part of that, were you?”
Lew, in an act of sheer will, took a sip of coffee which slid down his gullet like a crow-bar. “Feels like it.”
Even in this weakened state, Lew’s strong, well-modulated baritone voice was unforgettable. His contribution to the war effort had been to narrate a series of patriotic films with titles like Beware The Rising Sun. Now, with the end of hostilities, Lew’s was the voice of the news for the fishing fleet.
It had begun as a military project, a daily short-wave broadcast from Anchorage across the North Pacific and Bering Sea, informing the fleet of possible action by the Japanese navy and asking the far-flung fishing boats for any sightings or information that might aid U.S. naval intelligence. The service and transmitter had been sold recently to a civilian radio station in Anchorage, KALK, whose general manager had hired his old friend Jim Applebee at Puget Sound Recording Studio to provide recordings of the news for broadcast. Applebee in turn had hired Kenny and Lew to get the nine o’clock tear sheets from the wire ticker every morning to read and record the day’s news. Kenny then hustled the record over to the Matthew’s Beach airstrip, where Pan American Airways’ DC-3 took off for its newly instituted daily flight to Anchorage.
Thus Kenny and Lew met at the Dawn Cafe, a few doors down from the studio, every morning, seven days a week, at 8:30.
“That’s right,” Kenny remembered, “you were going to see if you could spot the next Barbara Stanwicke in Harry Reed’s All-Girl Orchestra at the Show Box, weren’t you?”
“Most of the girls weren’t girls any more,” Lew said, disappointed. “But Julia, ‘the Gay Senorita’! Ai, carumba! She was the one who talked me into the tequila.” The coffee was going down a little easier now.
“What you need,” Kenny said, pulling a small flask from his jacket pocket, “is some hair of the chihuahua.” He poured a slug into his own cup, and offered some to Lew.
“What is it?” Lew asked skeptically.
“Irish.”
Lew extended his cup gratefully.
“Well, I don’t know about your gay senorita, but I find Abe’s new waitress rather fetching,” Kenny said as he poured the whiskey into Lew’s cup.
Lew hadn’t noticed. Small and slender, she was Japanese, in her early twenties, her shoulder-length hair waved, her dark eyes sharp, and her smile pretty but rare. Maybe it was too early in the morning, too early in the recovery from the just-ended war with Japan, but he didn’t feel ready to entertain the notion just yet, and he didn’t comment.
“My mom’s old neighbor from eastern Washington made the papers again,” Kenny said, delving deeper into the front section.
“What are they saying about old Pap now?”
“‘Marine Major Gregory “Pappy” Boyington,’” Kenny read, “‘famed for shooting down 26 Zeros, has been found safe and sound, if somewhat worse for the wear, in a Japanese prison camp after disappearing over Rabaul 20 months ago.’”
“That means your brother Pete is next in line to be found,” Lew said.
“God willing.”
“A toast,” Lew said, raising his cup. “To victory!”
Kenny raised his as well and said, more soberly, “To peace.”
The cups clinked dully.
Lew’s father, Lt. Michael Hennisey, had been killed aboard the U.S.S. Arizona at Pearl Harbor. Kenny’s brother Pete was still officially listed as missing in action in Burma, having been shot down while flying relief supplies to China. It was part of the bond of their friendship.
A few more people had straggled into the small cafe on this sunny, warm Labor Day weekend. The waitress stopped at their table and asked if there would be anything else.
Kenny smiled and said, “Not for me. Nother cuppa joe, Lew?”
Lew shook his aching head.
“Just the check then,” Kenny said, but he noticed that the waitress was staring intently at the open newspaper. “What was that all about?” he wondered after she left, and he and Lew perused the page.
There were two pictures, the first published photos of Hiroshima and Nagasaki since the atomic bombs were dropped. The one of Hiroshima showed survivors clearing rubble from what seemed to be nothing but rubble. The one of Nagasaki was an aerial photo, showing just light-colored roads and dark-colored devastation.
“It must be one hell of a bomb to do all that,” Lew said. “It’s a damn good thing we got it first.”
“What if she…?” Kenny mused, watching as the waitress returned with the check.
She absent-mindedly set it on the table, trying to read the caption of the photos.
“Maybe this is none of my business,” Kenny said to her, “but do you mind my asking: Did you know someone there?”
Her eyes grew bright. “Most of my husband’s family lives in Nagasaki.”
“Were they?”
“We still don’t know,” she said, and suddenly there were tears running down her cheeks and she began to sob.
Kenny jumped up and said, “Oh, I’m so sorry! Here, you sit down.”
He took her quaking shoulders gently and guided her into the booth, then went and asked Abe to give her a few minutes to collect herself. Abe assented, another waitress having come in and the cafe still being fairly quiet.
Kenny pulled a chair over with its back to the table and he sat in it with his arms propped on the chair-back and his chin resting on them, glancing helplessly from the waitress to Lew and back to the waitress again.
Her head was resting on her crossed arms and her black hair spilled across the edge of the table.
Lew watched her subdued sobs impassively, thinking about his own bawling and weak-kneed grief not four years ago. The war had brought retribution but the victory hadn’t brought back his father and now, confronted with a Japanese who seemed so small and vulnerable and human, he felt petty for having demonized the whole race, and he resented feeling petty.
At last she gathered herself enough to sit up and use a napkin to wipe her eyes and face. “I’m awfully sorry,” she said, looking at each of them and then sighing. “I better get back to work or Abe will fire me.”
“Abe said you had your morning break coming anyway,” Kenny reassured her. “You just sit tight. If you want to talk about it, you just go right ahead.”
She smiled wanly. “Thank you, but it wouldn’t be right to talk to strangers about such personal things.”
“I’m Kenny Dunker,” he said, extending his hand.
“My name is Asako Mori,” she replied, letting him grasp only the ends of her delicate fingers.
“And this is Lew Hennisey, Mrs. Mori,” Kenny said. “So now we’re not strangers.”
“Lew Hennisey?” she asked, dabbing the last of her tears. “From the radio?”
Lew was gratified, but puzzled. “More or less,” he said. “I’m only on the radio in Alaska, though. How did you know?”
“My husband George talks about you. He’s fishing on the Eleanor and they listen to you every night. He says you bring them the world.”
“Just the news, actually,” Lew said.
“And the occasional editorial,” Kenny added, referring to the patriotic comments Lew had thrown in once in a while, which Jim Applebee threw back out whenever he caught them in time. Now that the war was over, the newspapers and radio were trying harder to separate fact from propaganda, and some of Lew’s commentary was so clearly biased that Applebee had threatened to fire him if he strayed from the news copy again.
“He’ll hear your voice every day for the next three months,” Asako went on. “My letters only reach him every few weeks.”
“It must be hard to be apart from each other for so long,” Kenny said. “How long have you and George been married?”
“Only a year, but we met at the beginning of the war, when we were evacuated.”
“Were you sent to that camp in California?”
“Actually, we met in the temporary barracks they built on the state fairgrounds near Tacoma.”
“I remember seeing pictures of them in the paper,” Kenny said.
“It was humiliating. Everything was taken from us, and then we had to live in the middle of a race track next to the roller coaster while they decided our fate. Many people were very angry, especially people like George, who are nisei.”
“Nisei?” Kenny asked.
“American-born children of Japanese parents. I’m nisei too. My mother lived here in Seattle most of her life. In fact, she owned this cafe before the war.”
“The authorities took it away from her?” Lew asked, surprised, becoming interested.
Asako seemed relieved to be able to unburden herself. “Not directly, but since she wasn’t here she couldn’t operate it any more. My father died when I was a child and my mother didn’t have any savings, so she thought it would be best to sell it.”
“I can see how you and your mother could be bitter,” Kenny said.
“Many people lost much more,” Asako said philosophically. “We were glad to do our part as Americans, to share in the sacrifice. What we lost can be replaced.”
“Probably your husband’s folks are okay,” Kenny offered hopefully.
Asako hesitated before she replied. “George’s father was a pacifist, a devout Buddhist who left Japan when the military leaders persuaded the Emperor to let them attack Korea. He came to America to publish a small Japanese-language newspaper in Seattle, to bring news from home to all the Japanese here. He thought what Japan was doing was foolish and wrong, but he still felt enough reverence for his native land not to disparage it in print. Maybe he should have. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the F.B.I. arrested him as a spy, with only rumors for evidence. When they sent him to a detention camp in Montana, he felt so humiliated about losing his reputation, about losing the business he had created, that he hung himself. The rest of his family was deported. They went to Canada and then back to Japan, to Nagasaki. George was twenty one, though, so they just sent him to the camp in Manzanar.”
“That’s rough,” Kenny said. “How did he take it?”
“He was ashamed of what his father did,” Asako said. “He was also ashamed of how his country was treating its own citizens. He was born in Seattle. He was named for George Washington. Now everything he knew before is gone. The only job he could find when we got back was on the fishing boat.”
“He’s got you,” Kenny pointed out.
“I’m afraid even that makes him unhappy,” Asako said, her lower lip trembling again. “He always thought I was too good for him, too pretty, too smart. He refers to me as the Emperor’s niece. He hates that he can’t support me, that I have to work. Three weeks ago, before he left, he went over his life insurance policy with me. In his last letter he said he thought I might be better off without him.” She fought off another sob. “But now I need him more than ever.”
“It seems to me he’s got a lot to live for,” Kenny said.
“More than he knows,” Asako said. “I just found out I’m going to have a baby.”
“Why, that’s swell!” Kenny said. “That’s bound to cheer him up.”
“It might be weeks before he gets my next letter though.”
Kenny looked at Lew significantly.
Lew looked at his watch. “Hey, we’re late!” he exclaimed, sliding out of the booth.
“Yeah, we gotta get going,” Kenny admitted reluctantly. “But listen, Asako, I’ve just got a feeling things will work out for you and George.”
She stood up, straightening her white uniform. “Thank you for listening,” she said shyly. “I’m sorry to talk so much.”
“Any time,” Kenny offered. “We’ll be in again tomorrow.”
Lew left four bits, and Kenny a silver dollar.
* * *
“Toy boat, toy boat, toy boat,” Lew was saying into the microphone in the studio, glancing over the news as Kenny adjusted the settings in the control booth
“I still say we ought to be able to do something,” Kenny said in Lew’s headphones.
“Drop it,” Lew said.
“But it’s not fair. My name is Dunker, but they didn’t round up me and all my relatives when we went to war with Germany.”
“Drop it,” Lew said again.
“But don’t you feel sorry for them?” Kenny asked.
“Papa Pedro put his pipe in a puckered pocket,” Lew said, trying to think only about the copy he had to read.
“Well, don’t you?” Kenny demanded.
“War is hell,” Lew said, sounding tougher than he felt.
“We’re only going to be winners and losers for a little while,” Kenny pointed out. “Then we’ve got to go back to getting along with one another.”
“Anyway, Applebee would can me if I strayed from the news.”
“Not if you were sneaky.”
“Let’s just get going,” Lew said. “He’ll can us both if we don’t get this onto the plane.”
* * *
That night the first blasts of the Arctic winter wind churned the Bering Sea. By nine o’clock the sky was already as black as obsidian, glinting with stars so bright they shone even through the green and orange aurora, slowly waving above like giant celestial kelp. Thirty-knot gusts of wind carried off the foamy tops of the 12-foot swells. The 48-foot trawler Eleanor, with just a few halibut in her hold, bobbed and shuddered as she pitched from peak to trough
George Mori lay silent on his dark bunk, oblivious to the murmur of conversation from the galley, aware only of the creaking of the wooden beams as the waves muscled past. The boat groaned and squealed from every joint. He wished it would fall to pieces.
Except for Garcia, he was the shortest man aboard, but his athletic body had been toughened by the hard work. He had strong cheekbones, narrow black eyes, and hair that, this short, stood straight out from his head. His jaw muscles flexed as he clenched his teeth. His fingers, which had been numb with cold all day, now were swollen and feverish. His hands were covered with a thousand nicks and callouses that would put runs in Asako’s silk stockings, if only he were there to lay his hand on her leg.
But she was part of a different world now. Here there was nothing but hard work, bad food, and crowded, noisy sleep. The smells of diesel fuel, hot lard, sweat, and fish deadened his appetite and numbed his senses. The crew’s chat, drifting drearily from work to women to bodily functions, was depressing. Thoughts of that other world were his only refuge.
Garcia came in to get his dog-eared cards, and he said quietly, “Lew comes on in a few.”
George didn’t respond. Garcia was the only other non-Caucasian aboard and he had tried hard to befriend George. George was all too aware, though, that Garcia was free to celebrate with the others the end of a war that had taken almost everything, almost everyone, from George.
Maybe his mother and sisters were still alive. It had been only three weeks, after all, and Japan must be chaotic. Nagasaki was heavily damaged, and the whole country was crippled and in the hands of a foreign army. There were reports that the Emperor himself wasn’t aware of the extent of the destruction for days after the blasts. Every day without word to the contrary was a day through which he could believe they were still alive. But every day made it less likely. And even if they had survived, what must their lives be like?
Worse than his, without a doubt, but it was small consolation. Whether they were still in this world or already reborn in the Pure Land, at least they were together. George felt completely alone.
Maybe his father had felt that way too, crowded with other aliens and suspected spies in a dirty, drafty barrack. Maybe he had known even then how much America would betray him, would turn its back on all of them. Suicide must have brought him a measure of peace, even though he might be atoning for the abandonment of his family for many lives to come.
But George felt as though he didn’t have even that option. Moral or religious issues didn’t hold him back: the noble sacrifice of oneself acceptable to a Buddhist (clearly not the case in his father’s death) repulsed him only slightly less than the Christian insistence that only God be allowed to terminate one’s suffering. But while his life wasn’t worth much to him any more, his accidental death would be worth $10,000 to Asako. The insurance policy was about the only thing he had been able to salvage from his father’s estate, and nullifying it with a suicide was sheer stupidity. Asako deserved better than that.
In fact, the thought of sacrificing himself for her seemed not so much noble as just practical and fair. He worried that the extraordinary conditions of their courtship had lead her to accept his proposal under duress. Now that life was returning to normal and she rapidly was becoming self-sufficient she surely wouldn’t make that same mistake again. They had barely consummated the marriage before he left, after all. She was beautiful and smart and independent, and his prospects were few.
“Hey, Mori!” Brady called to him. “Lew’s coming on!”
“Leave him alone,” Garcia said to Brady. “Maybe he don’t want to hear what Lew’s got to say today anyway.”
This wasn’t the only job he could have found, but it was the best paying and most dangerous. The boat’s owners provided a modest death benefit as well. He’d heard that someone had collected it last year when his glove was caught by the steel hook he was baiting and he was pulled overboard. There was also the story of a man who was crushed to death by a huge halibut that was still convulsing on the deck with three bullets in its brain. Every day as the hooks flew past and grabbed the square chunks of bait from his gloved hand, he thought about how easy it would be to catch the heavy glove on the hook, how soon his suffering would be over, how much better off Asako would be.
Seattle was getting to be a big city. She must be meeting single men every day. With him out of the way, she’d have plenty of money and wouldn’t have any trouble at all finding someone new, someone better.
Lew Hennisey’s rich baritone voice drifted in from the galley. At first George had enjoyed the broadcasts along with the rest of the crew, cheering on America’s troops and relishing the coming peace. But some of Lew’s remarks had a racist overtone, and anyway what was good news to all the others didn’t necessarily seem like good news to George. The last three weeks he had listened with just the remote speck of hope that there would be some word of his family, but Lew Hennisey never talked about anything like that.
He found himself listening anyway. McArthur had signed the formal peace accord with the representatives of Japan aboard the U.S.S. Missouri. President Truman hailed the coming era as “the golden age of democracy.” The new Roosevelt dime would be in circulation in a few months.
“We’re getting our first news reports out of Japan,” Lew went on, and George raised himself on his elbow to listen. “The Emperor has decreed that all his people lay down their arms and surrender to the Allied forces. Nevertheless there are reliable accounts of kamikaze pilots dropping leaflets on Japanese cities, urging the populace to fight on.”
Lew paused, and then went on. “Also, this human interest story. The Emperor’s niece is well and expecting her first child, and looking forward to the day she can be reunited with her husband.”
“And that’s the news of today,” he concluded hurriedly. “This is Lew Hennisey in Seattle for KALK, Anchorage, hoping I’ll be here tomorrow and that you’ll tune in again.”
George was dumfounded. He couldn’t have heard what he thought he heard.
The voices in the galley sounded bewildered as well. “Since when does Lew Hennisey bring us gossip about the Jap Emperor’s family?” Brady wondered aloud.
“What gives, George?” Garcia called out to him. “You ever heard anything about the Emperor’s niece before?”
George didn’t know if the Emperor even had a niece, but he was sure that even the press in Japan wouldn’t carry a news item like that on a day like this.
But the only other explanation was unbelievable. Admittedly, Asako lived in Seattle, as did Lew Hennisey. But she couldn’t have told Lew, a total stranger as far as he knew, that George’s pet name for her was the Emperor’s niece. Could she? She was so reserved. As upset as he’d seen her at times, he’d never seen her let her guard down like that.
But if she had! The realization that this might be a personal message to him alone gave him goosebumps. He was going to be a father! Asako was still his!
He felt as though a window had opened in his soul and the fresh air of hope was pouring in. This changed everything. True, he’d lost a lot, but he still had a loving wife, and now a family on the way too. And if Lew Hennisey, of all people, was willing to stick his neck out for a total stranger, Japanese at that, maybe George had been too hasty in assuming that he had nothing to live for, no home to go home to.
“Is it some sort of code, George?” Garcia asked.
“Leave him alone,” Brady said to Garcia. “He don’t know nothing.”
“Like hell I don’t!” George shouted, sitting up in his bunk so fast he cracked his head on the one above. He staggered into the galley, rubbing his head joyfully, and said, “Let me tell you about the Emperor’s niece!”
The End