Happy New Year, everyone! Today marks the beginning of what I promised in my final essay of 2022; an experiment in episodic, annotated, fiction. As a reminder, what I am posting today (and in coming weeks) follows the life of Cornelius MacLeish some fifty years before he turns up as the protagonist (at 75 years old!) of my recent novel, “The Grievers’ Group”. I hope that you enjoy it and become engaged.
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I was nine years old and in bed with my grandmother in the rundown house where my parents often parked me when I first got the feeling that I had been there before, also at nine years old, but something like a decade earlier.
Grandma’s dentures were in a glass on the edge of her sink in the bathroom. I could see them through a partially open door. We were together in her bed. The other bed was empty because Grandpa was in the hospital. When he was home I slept in the living room, but I’d begged Grandma to let me sleep with her that night, not only because I was afraid in the living room, but because I loved her as much as it was possible to love another person, and she, though she had other grandchildren, loved me in that same way… that is to say, she loved me best. My mother’s theory on it was that Grandma lost her youngest son, Cornelius, four months before my birth, and therefore transferred her love for him to me. Uncle Cornelius was in the Marines and was killed on Guam during World War II. I heard stories about him, but I didn’t begin to think I might actually be my dead uncle, until that night. It wasn’t the greatest feeling for a kid to have, but I let it stick around.
“All I ask of God is that He let me live until Grandpa passes,” said Grandma. “Then I think my work on earth, this time around, at least, will be done.”
When she said “this time around,” I looked at her teeth again, grinning at me through the side of that glass, and through the door, and also through a slice of moonlight. According to Grandma, the life she was living now wasn’t her first by a long shot. She’d been a Union soldier during the Civil War, a cook at Buckingham Palace, and a concubine in Kyoto, Japan - a life she said exhausted her. There were other lives, too, but they had mostly been marked by early death, so she didn’t talk about them very much.
“I hope God hears you,” I said, about wanting Grandpa to die first.
“I do, too, but He’s fooled me before,” said Grandma. “You have to be careful when you ask Him for something. He has a plan, a blueprint for the house He wants each person to build, and He doesn’t like us asking for too many changes.”
Grandma had taught me that if “He” or “Him” referred to God, you had to use a capital “H”, even in the middle of a sentence. Later I discovered that that was only true when writing, but I often see a capital “H” anyway, even after all these years, whenever I hear someone say it.
“Well, if He doesn’t kill Grandpa first, I’ll stop believing in Him,” I said.
I didn’t know whether that was true or not but it made Grandma happy to hear it, even while she told me not to say “kill”, but to use some other word, like “take.”
“You know, I once asked Him to take this fool who’d been bothering me during my concubine life, and the man got hit by a falling tree the very next day,” she said. “So sometimes He chooses to answer a person’s prayers and sometimes He doesn’t. But don’t say you’ll lose faith in Him, Cornelius. You have to have faith. If I hadn’t had faith when your uncle died…”
Cornelius… see? I was named after my uncle, so that was another thing that made me think I might be him. Grandma didn’t call me it often, though. Mostly she called me Corny or Cornelia, which would’ve been my name if I’d been a girl.
“Okay, but I still hope he listens to you,” I said.
Grandma looked at me sharply, knowing right away that I hadn’t used a capital “H.”
*****
Grandma died first. The night I just described was the last one I spent with her, for not long after that my mother moved her and Grandpa into a small apartment and then to a nursing home. I visited her apartment twice, but by the time she got to the nursing home my mother was afraid that the excitement of seeing me - the very effort it would take for her to call me “Cornelia” - would give her a heart attack. I wanted to see her, but the solitary time I was allowed to go to the nursing home she actually did have a heart attack, so I didn’t go again. At her funeral there were memorial cards with a picture of Grandma on the front and a verse about eternal life on the back. I wanted to ask the minister if eternal life was the same thing as having a lot of different lives strung together, but since everyone else in my family hated Grandma’s other-life stories, especially the one about the concubine, I kept my mouth shut.
Grandma was in her casket at the front of the chapel. Grandpa sat next to us in his wheelchair. I could see his gnarled and yellow ‘smoker’s fingers’ gripping the wheelchair’s arms. A gaggle of Grandma’s friends from the Daughters of Rebekah Lodge took up one side of the chapel. I knew them because I used to go to lodge meetings with her.
People were encouraged to go up to Grandma in order to whisper their personal farewells, not only before the service started, but during it. My mother called that ‘during-the-service’ part an unfortunate quirk of the minister. The Daughters of Rebekah stood around her casket singing “Will the Circle be Unbroken by and by Lord, by and by.” I liked the song when they sang it at their meetings, but they formed an unbroken circle around Grandma’s casket, so it was hard for the rest of us to see her.
After the ladies sat down and the minister started talking about Grandma’s big heart, I went up to her coffin to say my own farewell. Grandma wore her favorite hydrangea-patterned dress with her best purple brooch pinned to it, and her hands were folded across her abdomen. Her eyes were closed, of course, and her face looked both slack and hard at the same time. When I stared at her hands and whispered, “If you’re in there, Grandma, flick your thumb,” her thumb flicked right away. Or maybe it didn’t, since my eyes were full of tears and they might have flicked instead.
I reached down to touch the thumb I thought had flicked, but when I shifted my eyes back up to the minister I could tell he wished I’d go back and sit with my parents, so that was what I did.
*****
I grew up, went to a famous college, graduated cum laude in history, worked for a summer as a landscape gardener, and then - though I’d given up thinking I might be him except in the smallest hours of the night - I enlisted in the Marine Corps just like my namesake uncle, and just ahead of the draft.
For some good reason - luck or Grandma’s influence with Mr. Capital H - I wasn’t sent to Vietnam, but spent two tours of duty as a U.S. Embassy guard, first in England where she’d been a cook at Buckingham Palace, next in Japan.
Instead of going home to do it, I petitioned the Marine Corps for discharge in Tokyo, saying I wanted to remain there for graduate school, though that wasn’t my plan. Rather, I made my way to Kyoto, where Grandma’s concubine life exhausted her. My idea was to stay a few months before deciding what I truly wanted to do with my life. I’d found work, through an ad in the Japan times, teaching English in a Kyoto night school, so I’d have my daylight hours free to visit the city’s famous temples and to wander its ancient bar streets, on the lookout for Grandma’s old haunts.
The area I chose to visit on my first morning in Kyoto was one of those haunts; a place called Pontocho. Grandma hadn’t told me about it - I was only ten when she died - but I found the name in her diary a few years later, her pencil pressed down hard upon the letters and with two exclamation points - Pontocho!! - as if she were letting me know where to go. It was the summer of 1972, Grandma had been dead for seventeen years, and I was twenty-seven years old, but those exclamation points were like a second flicked thumb. I may not have believed I was my dead uncle any longer, but memories of Grandma were as alive in me as those of my Marine Corps friends, whom I’d left just two days earlier.
And indeed, Pontocho, that morning, had the exhausted beauty of a woman resting after a night of casual debauchery. Its bars and restaurants were closed, but saké bottles and whiskey bottles and beer bottles, evidence of the previous evening’s revelry, were stacked on the cobblestones for pickup, while cats and rats went about their business with an unbothered calmness. There were bicycles parked without restraint and vending machines offering saké and beer for a couple of hundred yen. I bought a beer and put it in my pocket. There was a small refrigerator in the room I’d rented, where I would stash the beer later on.
When I was halfway into Pontocho a woman darted out from a pathway that cut behind one of the bars, said “Oh!” when she saw me, then fled back the way she’d come. Her bar had a second story - well, it no doubt had a lot of stories, but it had a second floor - the windows of which were shuttered against the daylight as if against a storm. The image of a piano keyboard graced a sign halfway up its outer wall with ‘karaoke’ written in katakana and roman letters.
As I was sounding out the katakana when one of the shutters opened and the “Oh!” woman appeared again. “Do you happen to know English?” she asked. “I was just now wishing for an English speaker and there you were. That is what startled me. If you were to ask why I needed an English speaker, I would tell you it’s the Mahler, with its troublesome Friedrich Rückert poem. I can’t decide whether or not it makes sense in English, which isn’t its original language, as I’m sure you know. Can you listen a minute? Give me your opinion on the matter?”
I was about as ready to hear those words coming from the second floor of a bar in Pontocho, as I would have been to see flocks of orange canaries fly out of her mouth, but the moment I admitted that I did know English, a piano started somewhere and she was joined in the window by a second, wan and younger woman, whose hair cascaded down around her face in waterfalls. The two of them stood as close together as possible and as straight as Marine guards until the piano found its place, whereupon they sang in a minor key: “I often think they have only just gone out, and now they will be coming back home. The day is fine, don't be dismayed, They have just gone for a long walk.”
They sang the verse twice, their enunciation soulful, their harmony as close as their bodies. It was as if the meaning of the words were imbedded in the sound itself, giving me a double unfolding of the sadness of lives gone by, my grandmother’s or anyone else’s.
When they stopped the younger woman disappeared while the “Oh!” woman waited for my response. “Does it make any sense?” she asked, when I didn’t reply. “I must sing it tonight for a European guest and I mustn’t get it wrong.”
“It makes sense but it’s very sorrowful,” I said. “Did your European guest request it?”
“It contains the sorrow of all the world, and yes he did request it. He’s in mourning for two of his children. He wants to try to exorcise his grief with a night of lugubrious song.”
She then invited me to join them at nine o’clock, so I could meet the European guest. My teaching hours were from six to nine, and since it was my first night at the school - called, I thought intriguingly, A Cut Above the Rest - I declined the invitation, then waited while she closed the shutters and the street fell silent again.
I spent the rest of that morning shopping for what I thought I’d need for my room, and most of the afternoon sleeping in it. I hadn’t slept well on my last night as a Marine, nor on the Shinkansen down from Tokyo.
I forgot about the beer I bought, not putting it in my fridge until I woke up.
Endnotes…
My own grandmother’s dentures, laughing at me from within a glass at the side of her sink, is an essential strangeness for me from my childhood. I therefore gave my character, Cornelius, the existential pleasure of those teeth. Also his “I loved her as much as it was possible for a person to love another person,” was true of me, as some will remember from my Substack essay, ‘Two Uncles and a Grandmother” (May 1, 2022). The only living entity I loved as much as my grandmother during those years, was my Springer Spaniel, Freckles.
My grandmother’s youngest son, Jack Morgan, died on Guam in July of 1944, less than four months before I was born. It is an article of faith with me that my grandmother’s love for him was transferred to me. It was a great gift come from an even greater loss, so I bequeathed it to Cornelius.
All talk of ‘past lives’ is pure fiction, an element of Cornelius’s grandmother, not my own. I feel that I have to make that clear in order to keep my own from rolling over in her grave. She did tell me she prayed to outlive my grandfather. My first loss of faith began when her prayer went unanswered.
My grandmother was a member of the Daughters of Rebekah. I did go to meetings with her, but they didn’t come to her funeral to sing and block my view of her.
“If you’re in there, Grandma, flick your thumb at me,” is a real-life quote from my twelve-year-old self.
I was compelled to make Cornelius a Marine guard in Japan not only because I lived there during the early 1970s, but because I believe in the rule of three, as in the Three Musketeers, Goldilocks and her three bears, even the three blind mice… In 1986 I published my first novel, “Soldiers in Hiding”, in 2007 my sixth, “Commodore Perry’s Minstrel Show”, both set in Japan. So my urge for a completion, a cycle, if you like, was foremost in my decision. That my uncle was killed by the Japanese during WWII, also played a part.
The “Oh!” woman’s European guest requested the Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children), written by Friedrich Rückert in 1833–34, in an outpouring of grief following the death of Rückert’s own two children, and set to music by Gustav Mahler seventy years later. I gave the European guest that same awful burden because I was listening to the lieder (sung by Dame Janet Baker in a 1999 recording) as I was writing the scene. Had I not been listening to that particular piece, the European guest might have escaped his horrible grief. I think this is a good example of music’s serendipitous intrusion into literature.
Some thirty years ago my son played on a little league basketball team in Las Vegas. His team’s name was Q-45 Bulls, their slogan, ‘A cut above the rest.’ I gave Cornelius’s school that name as a remembrance of those good days.
My impulse, during the writing of this scene, to give the “Oh!” woman perfect English, means that sooner or later I will have to come up with an explanation for it.
Richard, thank you for the piece, especially the notes at the end that let us into your process. The sentence "I was about as ready to hear those words coming from the second floor of a bar in Pontocho, as I would have been to see flocks of orange canaries fly out of her mouth," resonated on a personal level for me as I am on the receiving end of that all the time. I joke that any time I open my mouth to speak Japanese to a Japanese person for the first time, there is a full 20 seconds of shock and recovery that happens on the part of the Japanese person before we can move on, conversing in a common language.
Very interesting.