But it would turn out that Mrs. Wilson, in her way, was unknown as well. And yet that had not always been the case, the people of the town and the countryside, people with whom she had grown up, speaking of her as if of two separate women, a serious but not unsmiling teen who would become a young bride and young mother and then, almost as if a switch had been flipped, the severe, unforgiving woman whom I recalled from my own childhood. That there had been another—a woman whom people had liked and not merely feared and respected—seemed impossible to me, and yet the evidence was present in nearly every conversation I had with anyone old enough to remember who she had been in the days of her own youth. They recounted various versions of an event from which she seemed to have never fully recovered, an event that transpired one bleak, raining winter night in early 1933. Jimmy and Ray were both ten and Helen eight and Kimiko and Hiro’s second child, Mary, was just shy of her second birthday, and Evelyn Wilson was nearing the full term of her third pregnancy. The Takahashis would have been awaiting the news of the birth, so when the knocking came upon their door late that winter evening, they—Kimiko and Hiro and Raymond too—would have assumed that that news had finally come, that the baby was here, that it was a boy, or it was a girl, and that all was well. But the loud frantic knocking continued. Then came a shrill child’s voice from the darkness: “Help! Help!” and the door opened to reveal the boy, Jimmy, a boy who was so often at their home that the fact he had been standing outside banging on the boards instead of simply opening and entering as he had done countless times before only served, later, to underscore just how frightened he was, his panting breath steaming the air around his head. “My mama,” he said. “She’s dying.”

Chapter 4

4