Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet
Old Henry Lee stood transfixed by all the commotion at the Panama Hotel. What had started as a crowd of curious onlookers eyeballing a television news crew had now swollen into a polite mob of shoppers, tourists, and a few punk-looking street kids, all wondering what the big deal was. In the middle of the crowd stood Henry, shopping bags hanging at his side. He felt as if he were waking from a long forgotten dream. A dream he'd once had as a little boy.
The old Seattle landmark was a place he'd visited twice in his lifetime. First when he was only twelve years old, way back in 1942 -- "the war years" he liked to call them. Even then the old bachelor hotel had stood as a gateway between Seattle's Chinatown and Nihonmachi, Japantown. Two outposts of an old-world conflict -- where Chinese and Japanese immigrants rarely spoke to one another, while their American-born children often played kick the can in the streets together. The hotel had always been a perfect landmark. A perfect meeting place -- where he'd once met the love of his life.
The second time was today. It was 1986, what, forty-plus years later? He'd stopped counting the years as they slipped into memory. After all, he'd spent a lifetime between these bookended visits. A marriage. The birth of an ungrateful son. Cancer, and a burial. He missed his wife, Ethel. She'd been gone six months now. But he didn't miss her as much as you'd think, as bad as that might sound. It was more like quiet relief really. Her health had been bad -- no, worse than bad. The cancer in her bones had been downright crippling, to both of us, he thought.
For the last seven years Henry had fed her, bathed her, helped her to the bathroom when she needed to go, and back again when she was all through. He took care of her night and day, 24/7 as they say these days. Marty, his son, thought his mother should have been put in a home, but Henry would have none of it. "Not in my lifetime," Henry said, resisting. Not just because he was Chinese (though that was a part of his resistance). The Confucian ideal of filial piety -- respect and reverence for one's parents -- was a cultural relic not easily discarded by Henry's generation. He'd been raised to care for loved ones, personally, and to put someone in a home was unacceptable. What his son, Marty, never fully understood was that deep down there was an Ethel-shaped hole in Henry's life, and without her, all he felt was the draft of loneliness, cold and sharp, the years slipping away like blood from a wound that never heals.
Now she was gone for good. She needed to be buried, Henry thought, the traditional Chinese way, with food offerings, longevity blankets, and prayer ceremonies lasting several days -- despite Marty's fit about cremating her. He was so modern. He'd been seeing a counselor and dealing with his mother's death through an online support group, whatever that was. Going online sounded like talking to no one, which Henry had some firsthand experience in -- in real life. It was lonely. Almost as lonely as Lake View Cemetery, where he'd buried Ethel. She now had a gorgeous view of Lake Washington, and was interred with Seattle's other Chinese notables, like Bruce Lee and his own son, Brandon. But in the end, each of them occupied a solitary grave. Alone forever. It didn't matter who your neighbors were. They didn't talk back.
When night fell, and it did, Henry chatted with his wife, asking her how her day was. She never replied, of course. "I'm not crazy or anything," Henry would say to no one, "just open-minded. You never know who's listening." Then he'd busy himself pruning his Chinese palm or evergreen -- houseplants whose brown leaves confessed his months of neglect. But now he had time once again. Time to care for something that would grow stronger for a change.
Occasionally, though, he'd wonder about statistics. Not the cancer mortality rates that had caught up with dear Ethel. Instead he thought about himself, and his time measured on some life insurance actuarial table. He was only fifty-six -- a young man by his own standards. But he'd read in Newsweek about the inevitable decline in the health of a surviving spouse his age.
Henry and Marty leaned against the hood of his son's Honda in the parking lot of the Uwajimaya grocery store. Samantha had gone inside to pick up a few things -- she insisted on making dinner for all of them, a Chinese dinner. Why, or what she might be trying to prove, Henry couldn't ascertain, and honestly, he didn't care. She could have made huevos rancheros or coq au vin and he'd have been fine with it. He had been so anxious about what might be found in the basement of the Panama Hotel that he'd skipped lunch completely. Now it was nearing dinnertime and he was excited, emotionally exhausted &hellip; and famished.
"I'm sorry you found your Holy Grail and it was all damaged like that." Marty tried his best to console his father, who was actually in terrific spirits, despite his son's perceptions of the day.
"I found it, that was all that mattered. I don't care what condition -- "
"Yeah, but you can't play it," Marty interrupted. "And in that condition it's not worth anything, the collectible value is nil."
Henry thought about it for a moment, casually looking at his watch as they waited for Samantha to return. "Worth is determined only by the market, and the market will never determine that -- because I would never sell it, even if it were in mint condition. This is something I've wanted to find off and on for years. Decades. Now I have it. I'd rather have found something broken than have it lost to me forever."
Marty screwed a smile on his face. "Sort of like, 'Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved -- '"
" 'At all,' " Henry finished. "Something like that. Not quite as much of a Hallmark moment as how you put it, but you're in the same zip code."
He and Marty had searched through the rest of the trunks and boxes near where they had found the sketchbooks and the old record, but none were clearly marked. He did find several loose name tags, including one that read "Okabe," but it had settled atop a pile of magazines. A mouse or rat had probably confiscated the twine from the hangtags long ago. Most of the nearby cases contained art supplies. Most likely Keiko's or her mother's. When he had more time, Henry planned to go back and see what else he could find. But for now, he had found exactly what he wanted.
"So are you going to explain that box in the backseat then?" Marty asked, pointing to the small wooden crate of sketchbooks in the back of his Honda Accord.
Ms. Pettison had let Henry take the collection of Keiko's sketchbooks and drawings, temporarily, after he showed her the illustrations with his name inside. She asked only that he bring them back later to be cataloged with the rest of the belongings and allow a historian to photograph them. Oscar Holden's old vinyl 78 managed to find its way into the box as well, somewhat unnoticed. But the old jazz record was broken and not worth anything anyway, right? Henry felt guilty nonetheless, though Marty convinced him that some rules were worth bending.
Henry leaned on the hood of the car, making sure it wouldn't dent or buckle, then got comfortable. "Those books belonged to my best friend -- when I was just a boy during the war years. "
"A Japanese friend, I take it?" Marty asked, but his question was more of a declarative.
Henry raised his eyebrows and nodded, noticing the knowing look on his son's face. Marty's eyes glimmered with a hint of sadness and regret. Henry was unsure why that was.
"Yay Yay must have flipped his lid when he found out," Marty said.
Henry always marveled at how his son stood with his feet planted firmly in two worlds. One, traditional Chinese; the other, contemporary American. Modern even. Running a computer bulletin board for the chemistry program at Seattle University but still calling his grandfather by the traditional Chinese honorific Yay Yay (and Yin Yin for his grandmother). Then again, his grandmother had always sent Marty letters in college addressed to "Master Martin Lee;" the formalities seemed to work both ways.
Henry had never been to New York City. Oh, sure, maybe once or twice in a dream. But in full, waking reality, it was a place he'd thought of often over the years but never allowed himself to visit. It seemed a world away. Not just across the country or on another coast, but someplace beyond the horizon, lost in another time.
In the forty-dollar cab ride from La Guardia Airport, Henry held the complete Oscar Holden record on his lap. It had been played at Sheldon's funeral. The same one he had hand-carried on the plane from Seattle -- his one piece of carry-on luggage, a conversation piece everywhere he went.
When he explained where the record came from, its unique history and the circumstances of life at the time, people always gushed their amazement. Even the young blond woman sitting next to him on the plane, who was flying to New York on business, couldn't believe he was hand-carrying the only remaining playable copy. She'd forgotten how horribly cruel the Japanese internment was. She was in awe of the Panama Hotel's survival. A place of personal belongings, cherished memories, forgotten treasures.
"First time to the city?" the cabdriver asked. He'd been eyeing Henry in the rearview mirror, but his passenger was lost in thought, staring out the window at the brick-and-mortar landscape that rolled by. A nonstop ebb and flow of yellow taxis, sleek limousines, and pedestrians who swarmed the sidewalks.
"First time" was all Henry could manage to say. Marty and Samantha had wanted him to call first. To call ahead. But he couldn't bring himself to pick up the phone. He was too nervous. Like now.
"This is it, twelve hundred block of Waverly Place," the driver called out; his arm, which hung out the open window, pointed to a small apartment building.
"This is Greenwich Village?"
"You're looking at it, pal."
Henry paid the driver an additional thirty dollars to take his bags one mile over to the Marriott, where he'd drop them off with the bellman. A strange thought, trusting someone in the big city, Henry noted to himself. But that was what this trip was really all about, wasn't it? Blind faith. And besides, he had nothing to lose. What were some luggage and a change of clothes compared with finding and fixing a broken heart?
The apartment building looked old and modest, but a flat there still probably cost a fortune compared with the simple home Henry had occupied in Seattle for the past forty years.
Looking at the address Marty had given to him, Henry went inside and found himself on the eighth floor, a Chinese lucky number. Standing in the hallway, he stared at the door of Kay Hatsune, a widow of three years. Henry didn't know what had happened to her husband. If Marty knew, he hadn't said.
Just that Kay was indeed &hellip; Keiko.
Henry looked at the record in his hand. When he took it partway out of the sleeve, the vinyl looked impossibly new. She must have taken impeccable care of it over the years.
Putting the record away, Henry straightened the line of the old two-piece suit his son had set out for him, checked his hair and the shine of his shoes.
He touched his face where he'd shaved on the plane.