“Yes. I decided to ask my father, and he remembers Ichimei.”
Larry Belasco was twelve years old in 1970, when his parents renovated the Sea Cliff mansion and bought an adjacent plot to add to their garden, which was already vast but had never completely recovered from the spring frost that had destroyed it when Isaac Belasco died, or its subsequent neglect. According to Larry, one day an Asian-looking man turned up, wearing work clothes and a baseball cap, and refused to enter the house because of his muddy boots. This was Ichimei Fukuda, the owner of the flower and plant nursery that he had once shared with Isaac Belasco but that now belonged to him alone. Larry sensed that his mother and this man knew each other. His father had told Fukuda that he didn’t understand the first thing about gardens and so it would be Alma who made the decisions, which seemed odd at the time to Larry, since his father, Nathaniel, was the Belasco Foundation’s director and, at least in theory, was very knowledgeable about gardens. Given the extent of the property and Alma’s grandiose plans, the project took several months to complete. Ichimei measured the land, and tested the soil quality, the temperature, and the prevailing wind direction; he drew lines and wrote numbers on a sketch pad, closely pursued by an intrigued Larry. Soon afterward he returned with a team of six workmen, all of them of the same race as him, and the first truckload of materials. Ichimei was a calm man with restrained gestures who observed his surroundings carefully and never seemed to be in a hurry. He never spoke much, and when he did his voice was so low that Larry had to get close to hear him. He rarely initiated a conversation or answered questions about himself, but when he noticed the young boy’s interest, he talked to him about nature.
“My father told me something very odd, Irina. He assured me that Ichimei has an aura,” Seth added.
“A what?”
“An aura, an invisible halo. It’s a circle of light around the head, like the saints have in religious pictures. But Ichimei’s is visible. My father said you couldn’t always see it, only occasionally, depending on the light.”
“You’re joking, Seth . . .”
“My father never jokes, Irina. Ah, and something else: he must be some kind of fakir, because he can control his pulse rate and his temperature. He can heat one hand as if he were burning with fever, and freeze the other one. Ichimei demonstrated this to my father more than once.”
“Your father told you all this, or are you making it up?”
“I promise it’s what he said. My father is a skeptic, Irina, he doesn’t believe in anything he can’t verify for himself.”
Ichimei Fukuda finished the project and as a bonus added a small Japanese garden, which he designed as a gift for Alma, and then left the work to the other gardeners. Larry only saw him at the start of each season when he came to supervise. He noticed that he never talked to Nathaniel, only Alma, with whom he had a formal relationship, at least when Larry was present. Ichimei would arrive at the tradesmen’s entrance carrying a bunch of flowers, take his shoes off, and enter with a slight bow of greeting. Alma, who was always waiting for him in the kitchen, would respond in the same way. She would arrange the flowers in a vase, and he would accept a cup of tea. For a while they would share that slow, silent ritual, a pause in both their lives. A few years later, when Ichimei did not reappear at Sea Cliff, his mother explained to Larry he had gone on a trip to Japan.
“Do you think they were lovers back then?” asked Irina.
“I couldn’t possibly ask my father that, Irina. Besides, he wouldn’t know. We know very little about our own parents. But let’s suppose they were lovers in 1955, as my grandmother told Lenny Beal; they separated when Alma married Nathaniel, met again in 1962, and have been together ever since.”
“Why 1962?” asked Irina.