Quicksand Page 7

  Somehow that made tears well up in my eyes, and I burst out: “I’ve been so humiliated!” Then, racked with sobbing, I turned and clung to him, repeating “Humiliated! Humiliated!” over and over, and I rocked his body fiercely in my arms.

  “What is it?” he asked gently. “Who humiliated you? Please, tell me what’s wrong—I can’t understand you if you’re crying, can I? What happened?”

  As he spoke, he stroked my tears away, soothing and calming me, but that only made me even more wretched. I was overwhelmed by remorse. Ah, how good he is! I thought. I deserved my punishment. . . . I’ll cling to his love from now on, all the rest of my life, and have nothing more to do with her.

  “I’ll tell you about tonight,” I said, “but please do forgive me.”

  In the end, I told my husband everything.

  12

  I FELT I HAD had a complete change of heart. The next morning I got up two hours earlier than my husband and went out to the kitchen to prepare his breakfast, after which I carefully laid out his clothes. . . All those tasks that I’d been in the habit of leaving to the maid I now bustled about taking care of myself.

  “Aren’t you going to school today?” he asked, while he was tying his necktie at the mirror before leaving for the office.

  “I don’t think I’ll go there anymore,” I said, as I stood behind him helping him into his coat. Then I sat down and began folding up the kimono he had just taken off.

  “Why not? There’s no reason to stop entirely, is there?”

  “It’s no use going to a school like that . . . and I’d hate to come across somebody I don’t want to see again either.”

  “Hmm. Well, in that case, maybe you ought to stop.” My husband seemed grateful but also a little anxious, as if he felt sorry for me. “That isn’t the only school around, you know,” he went on sympathetically. “If you want to study painting, why not look for a real art school? I like going to the city together in the mornings too.”

  But I refused. “From now on, I don’t want to leave the house. I’m sure I wouldn’t get anything out of it, wherever I went.”

  Beginning that very day, I stayed home working hard from morning till night, determined to be a model housewife. As for my husband’s feelings, he seemed delighted by the change in me. Willful as I had been, now I was like a new person. And yet he clearly wanted to return to our old life of going happily back and forth to Osaka together. I, too, wanted to be with him all the time. Apart, I might be subject to wicked fantasies, I thought, but as long as I could see him there beside me, I’d be able to forget Mitsuko. . . . But no, much as I wanted to go out with him, what if I happened to come across her in the street? If I did, I was sure I wouldn’t say a word to her, but still, what would I do if we suddenly came face-to-face? I’d go pale, and tremble, and be rooted to the spot. I might faint, even at my own doorstep.

  So I was afraid to go outside, let alone to Osaka, and one day when I ventured as far as the streetcar line, the mere sight of someone who reminded me of her made me flee back to the house, as if I’d come under a surprise attack. Trying to calm my pounding heart, I told myself: This will never do, I must never go out. For the time being I’ll shut myself up at home like a person dead to the world and throw myself into housework—washing, dusting, anything. Every day the thought came to me that I ought to burn those letters stored in the cabinet drawer. Above all, I had to get rid of that Kannon portrait. But whenever I came to the cabinet—Today I’ll burn up every scrap! I said to myself—it occurred to me that if I had the letters in my hand I’d surely want to read them. In the end, I was afraid to open the drawer. That was how it went all day long, and when my husband came home in the evening I thought how glad I was and felt that a weight had been taken off my shoulders.

  “Nowadays I think about you from morning till night—you’re always in my mind. You feel the same way about me, don’t you?” I’d say, and hug him tight around the neck. “Always, always go on loving me, and caring for me, so there’s no room for anyone else in my heart!” By now his love was all I had to rely on. Over and over I kept saying: “Love me more, more. . . .”

  One evening I was so overwrought I must have seemed out of my wits. “You still don’t love me enough!” I cried.

  My husband tried to soothe me. “You go from one extreme to the other,” he said, evidently bewildered by the way I had lost my head.

  My worst fear was that Mitsuko might suddenly turn up at my house one day and I would find myself forced to talk to her, whether I wanted to or not. But fortunately, brazen as she was, she didn’t seem to have the nerve to come. In my heart I prayed thankfully to the gods and Buddha, grateful that things had turned out the way they did. Really, except for what had happened that dreadful night, I would never have been able to make such a clean break with her—even that seemed to be the will of the gods.

  At last I had become more composed, telling myself that all the pain and wretchedness was over, I should just think of it as a bad dream. . . . It was mid-June, about two weeks after that night, and people were beginning to come to the beach in front of our house to swim— the summer rains had held off the year before, and there was sunshine day after day. My husband usually had nothing to do, but for once he had been asked to take a case, and he kept saying that it would soon be finished, and we ought to think about going off on a vacation. Then one day, while I was in the kitchen making cherry jelly, the maid came in to say there was a telephone call for me from the SK Hospital in Osaka.

  Something or other made me suspicious, and I said: “I wonder who could be in the hospital. Please go back and ask who is calling.”

  “It’s not a patient,” Kiyo said. “It’s a man from the hospital, I think, and he wants to talk to you himself.”

  “Oh? That’s strange.” I felt uneasy when I went to the telephone, and my hand trembled as I held the receiver.

  “Is this Mrs. Kakiuchi?” the man on the line inquired two or three times, and then, after making sure, abruptly dropped to a low voice and asked a curious question. “I’m sorry to have to bother you about this, but did you happen to lend a book in English on birth control to a Mrs. Nakagawa?”

  “Well, yes, I did lend someone a book like that, but I don’t really know Mrs. Nakagawa. Maybe the person who borrowed it from me lent it to her.”

  “I see,” the low voice replied immediately. “Wasn’t the person you lent it to Miss Tokumitsu Mitsuko?”

  Actually, I had been expecting that question, but the moment I heard her name, it was as if an electric current surged through my body. Yes, I had lent the book to Mitsuko about a month before, after she told me her friend Mrs. Nakagawa was determined not to have a baby.

  “Sister, you must be practicing some good method of birth control, aren’t you?” she asked me.

  “To tell the truth, I have an excellent book about it,” I told her. “It was published in the United States, and you’ll find it describes any number of methods.” I lent the book to her there and then, and forgot all about Mrs. Nakagawa.

  Somehow, though, that book had caused serious trouble at the hospital. He couldn’t tell me any more over the phone, but young Miss Tokumitsu was involved in the matter and was so worried that she felt she had to come to ask my confidential advice. She was especially distressed because I had never replied to the many letters she sent me. So wouldn’t I please meet with Miss Tokumitsu as soon as possible. For certain reasons, it would be improper for a member of the hospital staff to call on me directly. The best thing would be to talk to Miss Tokumitsu myself and let the hospital remain officially uninvolved. If I didn’t agree to that, he said, the hospital couldn’t take responsibility for whatever difficulties it might cause me.

  I had a suspicion that Mitsuko and Watanuki might have hatched up another plot. Still, it was true that the papers were full of stories about abortion incidents at that time, stories about a doctor being arrested, or a hospital coming under fire. As I said, my book described all kinds of me
thods—illegal medicines or various mechanical means—and I could easily imagine that Mrs. Nakagawa might have committed some blunder an untrained person couldn’t cope with and had had to be taken to a hospital. And because I had told my maid never to show me any letters from Mitsuko, just destroy them all, I wouldn’t have known anything about the situation. The man at the hospital sounded very urgent and said that it was imperative I see her that same day.

  I phoned my husband about it, and he advised me: “The way things are, you really can’t refuse.”

  So I let them know I was willing to talk to her, and I was told that the hospital would have Mitsuko come to see me right away.

  13

  IT WAS AROUND two o’clock when I received their phone call, and only half an hour later Mitsuko arrived. Even if the hospital wanted her to come immediately, I knew Mitsuko always took an hour or two to get ready to go out, and I certainly didn’t expect her so early that afternoon. But there was the shrill of the gate bell and the clatter of sandals on the concrete entranceway. . . . All the doors in the house were wide open, and down the corridor, wafted in from the front door on a puff of breeze, came a familiar fragrance. Unfortunately my husband wasn’t yet home, and I stood there motionless, confused, wondering how I could possibly escape.

  Kiyo had answered the door, and now I heard her call my name as she came running in. She looked pale.

  “I know, I know, it’s Mitsuko, isn’t it?” I said, and I was about to go to meet her. But then I hesitated, not quite knowing what to do, and went on distractedly: “Just a moment . . . well, ask her to wait in the parlor.”

  After that I hurried upstairs to lie on the bed for a while to calm my pounding heart. At last I got up, daubed on a coat of rouge to hide my pallor, drank a glass of white wine, and resolutely went downstairs.

  My heart began beating wildly again when I saw the glint of her boldly patterned kimono through the bamboo shade in the doorway. She seemed to be sitting there drying the perspiration from her face with her handkerchief. Mitsuko glimpsed me through the shade too, and called out “Hello!” with a bright smile, as if she could hardly wait to see me.

  “I’ve hated to let all this time go by without getting in touch, Sister,” she said diffidently, watching for my reaction, “but all sorts of things have happened since then. . . . And when I imagined what you must have thought that night, and how angry you must be, I couldn’t help feeling awkward about coming.” Then she lapsed into her old familiar tone. “Really, Sister, are you still mad at me?” she asked, looking straight into my eyes.

  “Miss Tokumitsu,” I said, deliberately formal, “I’m not seeing you today on that account.”

  “But, Sister, if you won’t say you forgive me, I can’t talk to you at all.”

  “No, I had a request from the SK Hospital about Mrs. Nakagawa’s case, and that’s the only thing my husband will permit me to discuss. So please don’t bring up anything else. As for what happened that night, it was all because of my own stupidity, and I have no one to blame or be angry with but myself. Only, from now on please don’t call me ‘Sister.’ Otherwise I simply can’t have anything to do with you.”

  At that, Mitsuko suddenly seemed dejected and began twisting her handkerchief into a cord and winding it around her finger. She sat there with downcast eyes, looking almost ready to cry.

  “Well, isn’t that why you’ve barged in here to talk to me?” I asked. “Tell me what you have to say.”

  “If that’s how you feel, Sister . . .” She was back to that intimate tone again. “I’ll be all choked up—I’m afraid the words just won’t come out. But to be honest with you, the phone call you had a while ago—really, it wasn’t about Mrs. Nakagawa.”

  “Oh? Then who was it about?”

  Mitsuko frowned slightly and gave a little snicker. “It was about me.”

  Just imagine—how incredibly shameless! To come here looking for my help because Watanuki had made her pregnant! Was there no end to the bitterness she’d have me swallow? I began trembling all over, but I suppressed my feelings and quietly said: “So you’re the one who’s been hospitalized?”

  Mitsuko nodded. “Yes, that’s right. At least, I wanted to go into the hospital, but they’ve told me they can’t admit me.”

  What she said didn’t seem to make sense. As she went on with her story, though, little by little, it appeared that she had tried various methods from the book I’d lent her, but none of them worked. If she let it go any longer, people would begin to notice, Mitsuko said, and that had worried her so much that she finally managed to get some medicine from a pharmacist Watanuki knew in Doshomachi, medicine that fulfilled one of the book’s prescriptions. And she took it. Of course they didn’t tell the pharmacist their secret—they just got the necessary drugs from him and mixed them up as best they could, so perhaps there was some mistake.

  Last night she suddenly began to have stomach pains, and by the time the doctor arrived she had already had an awful hemorrhage. He was their family doctor, but when she and Ume explained the circumstances and asked him to take care of her without letting her parents know, he sighed and said: “That’s too bad. I really don’t see what I can do about it. You definitely ought to have an operation—if you’re acquainted with any special clinic, go and ask them for help. All I can offer you is emergency treatment.” After that he politely excused himself.

  Since Mitsuko happened to know the director of the SK Hospital, she had gone there this morning to ask if they would help her out. But when she was examined she got the same answer: They could do absolutely nothing. It seems the director had had some financial assistance from Mitsuko’s father to build this hospital, but when she said what she’d done and pleaded with him to intervene, he simply kept saying how sorry he was.

  “A while ago any doctor would take care of a difficulty like this for you,” he told her, “but lately we have to be very careful, as I’m sure you’re aware. If anything went wrong, it wouldn’t only be my problem; your family might be drawn into the scandal, and I could never justify my actions to your father. But why did you let it go so long? If it hadn’t come to this stage—if it was at least a month earlier—I might have been able to do something.”

  Even while he was talking, Mitsuko was having stomach pains and probably bleeding a little now and then, she said, and he must have felt that whatever happened while she was there might cast suspicion on his hospital—so much the worse if he was just looking on passively at her suffering. “Who on earth gave you that advice?” he asked. “Tell me who it was and the kind of medicine you took. If I have to, I’ll perform the operation—and I’ll do my utmost to keep it private—as long as the person who advised you is willing to be a witness, in case the whole thing gets out.”

  That’s why she told him about borrowing the book from me and all the rest of it, Mitsuko said, and she had mentioned that I’d always been successful following its methods, so she thought it would turn out well for her too. The director pondered for a moment and then said that in a situation like this a doctor wasn’t necessary; an experienced amateur could easily see it through. It was commonplace for women in other countries to attend to such matters entirely by themselves, without asking anyone else’s assistance. And so if I was all that experienced, it might be best for her to call on me. Anyway, he would be willing to operate, as long as I agreed to take responsibility; if I objected, shouldn’t I acknowledge that lending her the book had started all the trouble and it was up to me to help her somehow? Unlike a doctor, I could do it with very little danger of being found out; in any event, it wasn’t likely to cause a serious problem for me.

  . . . Well, that’s what Mitsuko told me he said.

  “Please, Sister,” she begged me, “I hate to ask you to do it, but the longer I let this go, the worse the pains are. It’s too much for me, I may get horribly sick, so if you just say you’ll take responsibility, I can go ahead and have that operation.”

  “If I’m to be responsible, wha
t am I supposed to do?” I asked. Either go to the hospital and make a statement witnessed by the director and a third party, Mitsuko said, or else be willing to write something down to be used later, if necessary. But I couldn’t do that sort of thing lightly—and how far could I trust Mitsuko? For a person who had had a hemorrhage the night before, she didn’t look a bit sick, and it seemed strange that she would be out walking too. Also, she said she’d had a staff member at the hospital call me, but why would anyone like that take part in a scheme to use Mrs. Nakagawa’s name? I felt there must be more to it and hesitated to speak out, one way or the other. . . .

  But just then Mitsuko cried: “Oh, it hurts! . . . It’s hurting again!” And she began rubbing her stomach.

  14

  “WHAT’S WRONG?”

  As I spoke, Mitsuko seemed to turn ashen and sank down, writhing with pain, on the tatami floor. “Sister, Sister! Take me to the bathroom!” she begged. I was anxious and upset and put my arms around her to help her up. Finally she began staggering forward, leaning against my shoulder and gasping for breath.