their front doors. Were they scandalised by this Japanese woman in her kimonos? Or just shy, as shy as Keiko herself? There was little censure spoken in the corner grocery store; James Lowinger excited no real disapproval for his flagrantly irregular life. Perhaps a little envy, was all. If he hadn’t come home with an oriental woman, who took tiny steps because the folds of her kimono draw together at the knee, they’d have been disappointed.
What they didn’t know was that Keiko, despite her demure and inarticulate manner, her lowered eyes, was no timid Japanese mistress. She was an ama, a diving woman.
For a while life changed little on Ivy Street. Vera still walked to school in the mornings, but the housewives did not call out to her, or if they did it was with a kind of pity. It was not only Keiko who was strange but she, Vera, who became strange by her association with the Japanese woman. And the bravery she affected when her mother died stuck to her. She wanted to lay it down but she could not. She still had her friends in the schoolyard. Sometimes after school they all went to buy a soda pop. She was held in a certain awe because of the tragedy of her mother’s death, and its odd denouement. She didn’t talk about it, but one day the minister stepped out of the manse and said: ‘Is Captain Lowinger in town then for a few months? Will he be stopping here, with you?’
Vera said she didn’t know.
In front of her grandfather’s mistress, Vera was polite and excessively well behaved. This nuance was lost on Keiko, as Japanese children are usually well behaved, but Vera meant it as a hostile gesture. It was to show Keiko that she was a guest and not part of their household at all.
There was another change: instead of going home after school, Vera went to her grandfather’s place of business. It was on Homer Street, down by the water. She took the streetcar to Granville, and over the bridge to the Gastown, on the waterfront. Gastown was the oldest part of town, the port, where the old light standards had once been gas lamps. The lights were left on all day, but they were far apart, and small; often the fog and rain made the street very dark. You could smell the kelp and the oil that mingled at the dirty edge of the water.
That November Vera walked through late afternoon gloom in delight. When her mother was alive she was never allowed to come down here alone. There were fish and chip shops and bars. And there were sailors from all over the world, in their white clothes, sometimes their blue clothes, with weathered faces and strange tongues. At any time of day they might spill noisily through the doors of a bar; they might be asleep standing up at a bus stop. They lived on another timetable, they’d crossed the date line, the equator, the Tropics. They’d be looking for sex, her mother had told her. Vera knew not to catch their eyes, never to look at them directly. As she walked quickly down the street they might look at her, but she was too young and too thin to be of interest.
Out of range of roving sailors, Vera slowed to look into the dark entrances of hotels. The sexy women limping in high heels, were in there often. Farther along the street were women who looked tired, handing out tracts about God and Jesus Christ. There were shops selling seashells, plastic flowers and postcards of the Lion’s Gate bridge. There was a hat shop that belonged to her grandfather’s friend. A furrier with buffalo coats, a hardware shop, a shop selling steel-toed work boots and checked shirts. There were jewellers, traders, importers, exporters. And then there was Lowinger and McBean.
Vera had never seen Mr McBean; his only appearance was in the firm’s name. He might be fictitious, a title only, like the ‘Captain’ in James Lowinger. Her grandfather was no sailor, but a trader in gems, pearls in particular. He and his father before him travelled all over the world, hiring luggers and diving men to search for pearls. But the pearls were gone now. The company had bales of fabric and crates of dishes packed in wooden cases, goods, as they were called.
There were a few steps up from the street. There was a door with a top half of frosted glass. She opened this door and right in front of her, so she couldn’t slip past unseen, was a little office with shipping schedules pasted all over the walls, presided over by Miss Hinchcliffe. Hinchcliffe was at all times erect and mannerly, as if her respectability were at issue. Why she was not Mrs Hinchcliffe, Vera did not know. She was certainly old enough to be married, and there was an inviting vigour in her form that was more like the sexy women than the missionaries. Still, she imagined that no man was polite enough to meet Hinchcliffe’s high standards.
‘Hang up your coat! Wipe your shoes! Put that wet umbrella in the hall!’ were her usual first words, followed by, ‘So, we are to be favoured with your presence again today are we?’
‘Hello, Miss Hinchcliffe.’
There were maps on one wall and a black telephone and metal filing cabinets. ‘Captain’ Lowinger’s office was beyond, in a room with a window of pleated glass through which Miss Hinchcliffe could keep an eye on his shadowy form. When Vera opened the door she would see him seated, smiling, behind a perfectly clear desk. There were no piles of paper and no calendars with dates circled, no complex timetables. His wooden desk had a green leather top and he had a lamp with an emerald shade. To one side was a set of brass scales that was used to weigh pearls, and the corn tongs to pick up the gems. There was nothing else except, in the corner on the floor, a typewriter. She could only assume that in this office, unhampered by physical records, Captain Lowinger conjured magical fundamentals that were then subject to mental administration.
The action was all on the walls, which were decorated with woodcut prints on rough yellowed paper. The pictures were of tall women with fleshy faces and chopsticks in their hair. There was a Japanese name for them: ukiyo-e. But Captain James called them his Beauties. His Beauties stood around like a picket fence, to keep out the world. Each one existed on a blank background as if she were completely alone in the world. She might have been a model on a ramp. Each one had a slouch, an over-the-shoulder glance, and dainty hands and feet which appeared as afterthoughts from under great swirls of decorated fabric. Each sumptuous kimono was patterned with mountains and rocky streams, shells and flowers and leaves. Each Beauty’s body cut a figure like one of those giant letters on the first page of an old book, a decorated L or S or F. They were a veritable alphabet of women.
But they were unreadable. They had their backs to the room, and their eyes cast down, thoughts lost in the folds of their wraps. Everything about them was secretive, held in, padded, even their faces, which appeared to have no bones. They were white and soft and disturbed only by the thinnest fine painted lines to suggest eyebrows, nose, cheeks. Only the lips, red and rounded, were defined. But they were closed.
Her grandfather was not always alone amongst his Beauties. When Vera arrived, he might be talking to an urgent man in a blue serge cap who he called Skipper. Or he might be listening to a visitor who took pulls on a pungent-smelling pipe, sending clouds of smoke into the room, behind which the Beauties faded perceptibly. This visitor might be telling a tale, complete with grand gestures and occasional whispers, and sidelong glances through the door to where Miss Hinchcliffe would type with renewed energy. On these occasions Vera would go back to the warehouse and walk up and down the rows of bales of fabric, feeling them with her fingers. Or she’d peer into the fragile crates filled with dry grass and wonder if there were pearls inside. She might look at the life-sized kimono doll and take all her clothing apart. There were little spikes that went into her hair, and tight wrappings around her middle. Her feet had one split instead of toes, dividing the white cotton foot in two, so that it was like a dainty hoof. They’d been specially designed to fit into the thongs of the platform slippers she stood in.
If his visitor were a persistent one, Vera repaired to the big cutting table meant for fabric with its low-hanging light in a metal shade. She was allowed to open certain wooden boxes and take out the prints one by one and look at them.
She stared and stared at the ukiyo-e. The people were so very, very strange. Most of them looked like women, but only a few of them were, according to Vera’s grandfather. Everyone
