East is East

She wasn’t afraid, not a bit. He was just a boy, scared and dirty, his eyes feverish, clothes torn, a scrap of frayed red cloth knotted round his head. He didn’t even look Japanese, with his tan irises and dull reddish hair, or did he? There were the epicanthic folds she remembered from anthropology, the round face and stutter nose, the bow legs and the too-deep tan of his scraped and bitten limbs. Blink once and he was Toshiro Mifune; blink again, and he was something else.

He stirred something in her, he did. It all happened so fast that first day, so adventitiously, she didn’t have time to think it out: she just saw him there, hungry and scared, and she wanted to fold him in her arms. He was the motherless fawn she’d found as a girl out back of the cabin at Lake Arrowhead, the squirrel the cat had got, the sunken-eyed orphan in a nameless village crying out to her from the black and white ad in the glossy magazine. She had no other motive but sympathy, no other desire but to help—or if she did have, it was buried deep, in the deep soil of the unconscious where plots and schemes and counterschemes have their first quiescent life. And if he was a fawn, and if he was pitiable, and if the lunch bucket was his salvation, she didn’t want to scare him off.

The rain lashed him. His hair was knotted with burrs, his nostrils crusted over, his lips cracked. He cradled the lunch bucket and took a step back. What could she do to convince him, what could she say? Take it, and welcome to it, I’m on a diet anyway, my bed is dry and warm, there’s plenty more where that came from, I want to help you, I want to keep you, I want to make you my own. She said nothing. He said nothing. But her expression must have told him all that and more, and as he backed off and the rain sobbed from his face and fed the green of the world around him till it threatened to swallow him up, she slowly, gradually, breathlessly lifted her hands to the level of her waist and spread her palms. And then he was gone.

The next morning Ruth was awake and washed and dressed by the time Owen made his rounds. “Bonjour, mademoiselle,” he whispered, tapping at her door. She answered him before the words were out of his mouth—

“Merci, je suis réveillée”—and in the next moment she pulled open the door and regaled him with a dizzy wide-lipped parody of a vamp’s smile. Humbled, he could only gape as she flipped her bag over one shoulder and sashayed down the hall to breakfast. She was excited, so excited she’d barely been able to sleep. Not only over the Japanese sailor and the expectation that he’d be back again and that she’d aid and abet him, hide and nurture him, her own breathing secret, but over the new factor—or rather, factors—in the equation: Detlef Abercorn, the tall young square-jawed agent from the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and his comical little henchman, Turco.

They’d arrived the previous evening, bedraggled and wet, at the height of the storm’s second assault. The rain had tapered to a drizzle through the long festering afternoon, and fell off altogether as Ruth made her way back to the big house for cocktails. The colonists were all gathered in the parlor—even Septima, in her shimmering silver chemise and antediluvian pearls—when the storm broke loose again with a gush of rain that rattled the windows and for a long scintillating moment cut the electricity. “Oh, we must have the candles lit,” Septima cried, clapping her hands together like a child. Her voice floated over the sudden crepuscular hush of the room, warbling and authentic, the stately breathless voice of refinement and Southern breeding. If the colonists, immersed in the generic gabble of the convivial room and cocktail parlor, ever forgot for a moment where they were, Septima’s caressing and unimpeachable accent brought them back.

Saxby had left that morning for Savannah to collect the equipment for a new fish study he was contemplating—Ruth didn’t know any more about it than that: it was a fish study, plain and simple—and it was Bob or maybe Owen who appeared a moment later with a candelabrum in full festive blaze. A cheer went up, another round of cocktails was drunk, and when the lights were restored it was unanimously decided to forgo them in favor of candlelight and the romance of the storm, which beat now at the darkening windows with all the fury of the Atlantic in turmoil.