“Of course. And as you can see, it didn’t turn out so bad.”
The four years of secondary school would have been endless torment for Nathaniel without help from a wholly unexpected quarter. The weekend following the beating, when he saw Nathaniel covered in scratches and bruises, Ichimei took him to the garden pergola and gave him a useful demonstration of the martial arts, which he had practiced since he could stand upright. He handed Nathaniel a spade and told him to come at him as if he wanted to slice his head in two. Nathaniel assumed he was joking and raised the spade in the air like an umbrella. Ichimei had to insist before he finally understood and made to attack him for real. Nathaniel never knew how he lost control of the spade, flew through the air, and landed on his back on the pergola’s Italian tiles, all of this witnessed by an astonished Alma, who was looking on closely. This was how Nathaniel found out that the imperturbable Takao Fukuda taught a combination of judo and karate to his children as well as other youngsters from the Japanese community, in a rented garage on Pine Street. Nathaniel told his father, who had vaguely heard of these sports, which were gaining popularity in California at the time. And so Isaac visited Pine Street. He did not really think Fukuda could help his son, but the gardener explained that the beauty of the martial arts was that they did not require physical strength as much as concentration and the ability to use the adversary’s weight and thrust to topple him. Nathaniel began the classes. The chauffeur drove him to the garage three times a week, and there he first took on Ichimei and the younger boys, and later Charles, James, and other older opponents. For several months it felt as if his body were being crushed to pieces, until he finally learned to fall without hurting himself. He lost his fear of getting into a fight. He never got beyond the beginners’ level, but that was more than the school bullies knew. They soon stopped picking on him because if any of them came looking for a fight he would put them off with four guttural cries and an exaggerated choreography of martial poses. Just as he had never admitted he was aware of his son’s beatings, Isaac never inquired about the outcome of the classes, and yet he must have checked up, because one day he arrived at Pine Street in a truck with four workmen to lay a wooden floor in the garage. Takao Fukuda gave several formal bows but made no comment either.
Nathaniel’s entry into the boys’ school put an end to the performances in the attic theater. Together with his studies and the sustained effort to defend himself, his time was devoted to metaphysical anguish and a studied gloominess that his mother sought to remedy with spoonfuls of cod liver oil. There was barely time for a few games of Scrabble or chess, if Alma managed to catch him before he shut himself in his bedroom to hammer away at his guitar. He was discovering jazz and the blues but looked down on fashionable dances: he would have been paralyzed with embarrassment on a dance floor, where his inability to follow a rhythm, a long--standing Belasco family trait, would have immediately become evident. He looked on with a mixture of sarcasm and envy when Alma and Ichimei demonstrated the Lindy Hop to arouse his interest. The two of them had practiced with two scratched records and a broken phonograph Lillian had thrown away but Alma had rescued from the garbage. Ichimei had then used his nimble fingers and patient intuition to dismantle it and restore it to working order.
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