Later that day, I woke from a nap and heard my mother’s voice and another that I needed a moment to identify. Mrs. Mary O’Toole. She had given me piano lessons at the community center. Something in the tone of their conversation encouraged me to close my eyes and pretend sleep.
“He would sometimes come to the back door of the center in the late afternoon,” Mrs. O’Toole said. “He’d step into the hallway and wait to hear the piano. The piano room is just across from my office. If there was music, he could always tell at once whether it was Jonah or someone else.”
“He doesn’t play an instrument himself,” my mother said.
“But I swear, Sylvia, he’s got an ear. At least he has an ear for that boy. If Jonah was playing, he’d go into the file room next to my office and sit behind the half-open door to listen.”
“And Jonah never knew he was there?”
“No. That’s how he wanted it. He either left before Jonah was done for the day or left only after Jonah had been gone five minutes. To tell you the truth, I thought at first it was a little creepy, but I didn’t feel that way for long.”
Faking sleep, I realized they must be talking about Tilton, that my father had secretly come to hear me play. I didn’t know what to make of that, desperately didn’t want to make anything of it.
Mary O’Toole said, “On only his second or maybe third visit, he stepped into my office afterward and said, ‘Do you feel as I do—that when he plays, God enters the room?’ I guess I misunderstood, because I said Jonah was a great kid but not a saint. So he said, ‘No, I mean to say God enters the room at the sound of Jonah’s playing. That’s how I feel.’ Then he said it was an honor to listen, and he left.”
“I never knew,” Mother said.
“There was a day last winter, I looked in on him in the file room, and he was sitting there so primly, still in his heavy topcoat, holding his hat in both hands, tears just streaming down his face. He apologized to me for his tears, of all things, and said that he’d made of his life an isolation. Those were his exact words. He never speaks so personally, he’s reserved. But he said he’d made of his life an isolation, it was too late for him to be a father to a child of his own. He said, ‘The world is full of beauty, isn’t it? There’s grace everywhere if we’ll just see it.’ He’s such a nice little man.”
Of course, she had not been talking about my father. Mr. Yoshioka had come to the center now and then to listen to me play, and I had never known.
The particular day to which Mary O’Toole referred must have been the snowy afternoon when I came out of the community center close behind him, when he had looked so dashing in his topcoat, neck scarf, and fedora. I had delighted him that day when he discovered that I’d memorized a haiku by Naito? Jo?so?.
Now, in the hospital room, I acted as if I just then came awake, and for a while I strove to be more my former self with Mrs. O’Toole. But as I pretended a lighter mood than the one in which I was still submerged, a worry grew in me: that Mr. Yoshioka might be in danger. Lucas Drackman, Fiona Cassidy, Mr. Smaller, and my father were still free, on the run or gone to ground. If they saw a police press conference on TV or read the newspapers, they might become aware that Mr. Yoshioka and the Manzanar posse had been instrumental in fingering them for the authorities. Most likely, my father would choose to run, to hide, to slip into another life, but I could too easily imagine the other three being driven by a thirst for revenge.
84
Friday began with news that I hadn’t realized Mom and Grandpa were hoping to receive. My doctors determined that incontinence would not be a condition of my disability. Although my legs were paralyzed, I should be able to pee and move my bowels unassisted. As a first test of this conclusion, a nurse removed my urinary catheter and the collection bottle attached to it, and I was encouraged for the next couple of hours to drink a goodly amount of water.
Finally I felt the urge. To spare me the embarrassment of being attended in this matter by a stranger, Grandpa Teddy carried me into the adjoining bathroom and put me on the toilet.
“Just us guys,” he said when my mother tried to follow, and he closed the door.
After sitting there for a moment, I said, “What now?”
“Now you give it a try.”
“A try?”
“Like always. You’ve been doing it more than ten years, haven’t you?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“You guess? I don’t think you’ve been faking it all this time.”
I strained a little but then stopped. “Well …”
He couldn’t conceal his worry. “Well what?”
“I don’t know.”
“What don’t you know, son?”
“It doesn’t feel right.”
“How does it feel?”