They were naturally drawn back to the subject of O-Hide.
“I don’t suppose that Hideko-san could be a Christian?”
“Why?”
“I was just wondering.”
“Because she left the money?”
“Not just that.”
“Because of her sermon?”
“That’s partly it. That was the first time for me. I’ve never heard Hideko-san sound so complex.”
“She thinks she’s a logician. She has to take everything apart and put it back together the way she thinks it ought to fit.”
“I’ve never heard her be that way before.”
“You haven’t, maybe — I can’t tell you how many times I’ve listened to her run on. She has a habit of making sturgeon out of a mudfish. She’s been influenced by Uncle Fujii, and that turns into poison.”
“What makes you say so?”
“She spent all those years at his side listening to him arguing about everything, and eventually she became as fluent a sophist as he is.”
Tsuda shook his head dismissively. O-Nobu forced a smile.
[112]
BUT SHE felt that she and her husband were facing each other directly for the first time in a long while, and how happy that made her! It was a refreshing feeling, as though the thin curtain that had been hung between them at some point along the way had suddenly been cut and allowed to fall.
She must labor tirelessly to make him love her by loving him — such was her resolve. Her determination had spurred her to immense effort. Happily she had not labored in vain. In the end she would be rewarded. To the extent at least that she was able to divine the future, she would be rewarded. In her view, the current upheaval, an entirely unexpected incident it would have to be called, was in and of itself the dawning of her recovery. Above the distant horizon she was able to gaze at the pale brightening of a roseate sky. And in the warmth of the hope it conveyed, she forgot the unpleasantness the encounter had caused her to feel. But Kobayashi’s cruel remarks remained as a blot on her heart of an obscure nature. And the disquieting words spoken by O-Hide had become a star of doubt pulsing in her brain with a dull light. But these feelings had already receded to a vast distance. At the very least they were no longer so very painful. And she felt no need of recalling the memory of her agitation in the instant the words had assailed her ears.
Even in the event the unthinkable happened, I should be all right.
In the moment, O-Nobu was that confident in her husband. When the time came, she felt equipped to take whatever steps might be required to handle the situation. If that should entail moving an opponent out of the way, so be it, she would be more than up to the challenge.
What sort of opponent? What would she have answered if she were asked? This was an opponent sketched nebulously in pale ink. And it was a woman. A woman who wanted to steal away Tsuda’s love for her. That was all she knew. But she sensed that such an opponent was lurking somewhere. Had the confrontation between O-Hide and themselves not ended so badly, her next step in the course of things would have been to probe Tsuda for the identity of her opponent.
If anything, she felt happy about her intention not to proceed according to this strategy. Postponing her concern until later was something she could easily endure. For the moment it occurred to her that taking advantage of this opportunity to inscribe as deeply as possible in her husband’s mind the kindness she was feeling toward him now would be the strategic thing to do.
No sooner had she resolved to proceed this way than she told a lie. It was a trivial lie. To O-Nobu, however, firmly believing that the check she had brought had rescued her husband from a dire situation that was not only material but also spiritual, it was immensely significant.
Tsuda had reached for the check and was staring at it again. It was written for an amount that was actually greater than he had required. Before he addressed this, however, he spoke to O-Nobu.
“O-Nobu, thanks. This is a life-saver.”
O-Nobu’s lie escaped her lips immediately following his words of gratitude.
“The reason I went to the Okamotos yesterday was to get this from Uncle.”
Tsuda looked surprised. It was after all this same O-Nobu who had flatly refused when he had asked her to speak to her uncle about a loan. Wondering what can have accounted for this change in less than a week’s time, he felt in the presence of an unsolvable riddle. O-Nobu explained in the following way.
“I hated doing it, troubling Uncle for money. But, Yoshio, what choice did I have? How can I fulfill my duty as a wife to you if I can’t find the courage I need at a time like this?”
“Did you explain to Okamoto-san?”
“Of course, and it was painful.”
It was her uncle who had handled the lion’s share of the expenses for her wedding.
“Especially since I’ve behaved until now as if money were the last thing in the world we were worried about. That made it all the more awkward, I declare.”
Judging by his own disposition, Tsuda could easily understand the degree of awkwardness O-Nobu would have felt in such a situation.
“I’m impressed.”
“The hard part was bringing it up. It’s not as if they don’t have money.”
“But the world is full of difficult people like Father and O-Hide.”
The look on Tsuda’s face suggested his self-esteem had been damaged. O-Nobu spoke as if to reassure him.
“It’s not as if they’re the only reason I took the money. I have a promise from Uncle that he’ll buy me a ring. He’s been saying for a while that he’ll get me one now in return for not having given me anything when we got married. I expect that’s what he was thinking when he gave me the money. So you needn’t worry about it.”
Tsuda looked at O-Nobu’s finger and confirmed that the stone he had purchased for her was splendidly there.
[113]
TO A rare degree they moved closely together. Tsuda’s heart, armored until now in order to maintain appearances in front of O-Nobu, softened. The care he had taken to obscure the situation in Kyoto behind a curtain of vagueness, a precaution motivated by his fear that O-Nobu might perceive his father as parsimonious, or that her estimation of his father’s wealth might fall below the affluence he wanted her to assume, relaxed. He didn’t notice this. With no effort or even conscious volition, he had arrived here as if swept along by the force of nature. It was very much as if the incident had lifted him gently despite his cautiousness and carried him to this place for O-Nobu’s sake. This made O-Nobu uncommonly happy. She sensed something natural about her husband’s attitude, reformed without any effort at reform.
Tsuda for his part observed in O-Nobu a similar change in feeling. Ever since their marriage, other issues aside for the moment, they had been engaged covertly in a strange battle over money. There were specific reasons for this. To appear to O-Nobu in the best possible light, Tsuda, who tended to make wealth an object of pride no less than any man, had assessed his father’s holdings at an amount that far exceeded the reality and bragged about it to his wife to be. But that wasn’t all; in his weakness he had taken a step further. The picture of himself he had conjured for O-Nobu suggested that he was, more than now, a young gentleman of considerable means. He had hinted that in the case of an emergency he would be able to request financial aid from his father in whatever amount was needed. Even without such help, monthly expenses would be met without difficulty. By the time they were married, he was already burdened by the responsibility of making good on his intimations. In his clever way he understood full well that, when it came to placing importance on wealth, he had met his match in O-Nobu. Believing as he did, to put it extremely, that love itself was born from the glitter of gold, he felt uneasily the necessity of maintaining appearances somehow or other in front of his wife. In especial he was deeply afraid of being exposed to her contempt. It was partly the lurking presence of his determination to maintain this front, quite apart from actual need, that underlay the arrangement for monthly help from his father that had been brokered by his brother-in-law, Hori. In any case, there was a place in him that was concealed and inaccessible. At the very least there was a considerable discrepancy between his feelings toward his wife and what he allowed to reach the surface. O-Nobu, quick as lightning, felt this distance as palpably as if she held it in her hands. This was inevitably a source of dissatisfaction. But instead of arraigning her husband’s falsehood, she resented his inability to be frank. She explained this to herself as a kind of stand-offishness. It hurt her that he couldn’t expose his weaknesses in front of his wife like a man. In the end she resolved that if this were a man who kept his distance, unwilling to risk exposure, she would prepare for the worst in her own way. This resolution reached her husband faintly like an echo in the woods. Facing each other directly became impossible no matter the lengths they went to. Moreover, in their deference to each other, they were careful never to touch on the problem. However, their quarrel with O-Hide had accidentally battered to the ground at one blow this door to O-Nobu’s heart, though she was unaware that it had fallen. Without any effort or determination to release herself in front of her husband, she quite naturally opened. Thus it was that Tsuda beheld in her something so pleasing she might have been a different person.