SEVENTEEN SYLLABLES
1133
vacillating, Rosie saw her father enter the house. Soon Mr. Kuroda
came out alone, putting on
his
coat. Mr. Kuroda got into his car
and backed out down the driveway, onto the highway. Next her
father emerged, also alone, something in his arms (it was the picture,
she realized), and, going over to the bathhouse woodpile, he threw
the picture on the ground and picked up the axe. Smashing the
picture, glass and all (she heard the explosion faintly ) , he reached
over for the kerosene that was used to encourage the bath fire and
poured it over the wreckage. I am dreaming, Rosie said to herself,
I am dreaming, but her father, having made sure that his act of
cremation was irrevocable, was even then returning to the fields.
Rosie ran past him and toward the house. What had become of
her mother? She burst into the parlor and found her mother at the
back window, watching the dying fire. They watched together until
there remained only a feeble smoke under the blazing sun. Her mother
was very calm.
"Do you know why I married your father?" she said, without
turning.
"No," said Rosie. It was the most frightening question she had
ever been called upon to answer. Don't tell me now, she wanted to
say, tell me tomorrow, tell me next week, don't tell me today. But
she knew she would be told now, that the telling would combine with
the other violence of the hot afternoon to level her life, her world
(so various, so beautiful, so new? ) to the very ground.
It
was like a story out of the magazines, illustrated in sepia, which
she had consumed so greedily for a period until the information had
somehow reached her that those wretchedly unhappy autobiographies,
offered to her as the testimonials of living men and women, were
largely inventions : Her mother, at nineteen, had come to America
and married her father as an alternative to suicide.
At eighteen, she had been in love with the first son of one of the
well-to-do families in her village. The two had met whenever and
wherever they could, secretly, because it would not have done for his
family to see him favor her- her father had no money; he was a
drunkard and a gambler besides. She had learned she was with child;
an excellent match had already been arranged for her lover. Despised
by her family, she had given premature birth to a stillborn son, who
would be seventeen now. Her family did not turn her out, but she could
