The Teahouse Fire Read online

  “A memorable saga…Avery adroitly conveys the intricacies of the tea ceremony, ‘the language of diplomacy,’ and the subtle ways in which it was transformed as Japan moved from a Shogun society to one ruled by the emperor. At the same time, she illuminates vivid period details.”

  —Booklist

  “In 1865, nine-year-old Aurelia Caillard is taken from New York to Japan by her missionary uncle Charles while her ailing mother dies at home. Charles soon vanishes in a fire (not the one of the title), leaving Aurelia orphaned and alone in Kyoto. She is taken in by Yukako, the teenage daughter of the Shin family, master teachers of temae, or tea ceremony. Aurelia, narrating as an elderly woman, tells of living as Yukako’s servant and younger sister, and how what begins as grateful puppy love for Yukako matures over years into a deeply painful unrequited obsession. Against a backdrop of a convulsively Westernizing Japan, Avery brings the conflicts of modernization into the teahouse, and into Aurelia and Yukako’s beds, where jealousy over lovers threatens to tear them apart. In one memorable instance, Yukako, struggling to bring money in for the family, crosses class lines and gives temae lessons to a geisha in exchange for lessons on the shamisen, a seductive (and potentially profitable) string instrument. Eventually stuck in a painful marriage, Yukako labors to adapt the ancient tea ceremony to the changing needs of the modern world, resulting in a breathtaking confrontation. Avery, making her debut, has crafted a magisterial novel that is equal parts love story, imaginative history, and bildungsroman, a story as alluring as it is powerful.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “Avery writes with a self-assured lyricism…Quite arresting…confident [and] original.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Readers who enjoy historical fiction will be dazzled by Avery’s attention to detail, savoring her descriptions…. Those who like plot twists will relish the epic cast of characters…. An homage to Virginia Woolf’s Orlando in both style and theme, Avery’s ambitious endeavor is the perfect companion for a series of cold winter nights.”

  —Library Journal

  The Teahouse Fire

  The Teahouse Fire

  ELLIS AVERY

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  New York

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA •

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.) •Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © 2006 by Ellis Avery

  Cover design © 2006 Gabriele Wilson

  The author gratefully acknowledges permission to quote from The Diary of Lady Murasaki, by Murasaki Shikibu, translated by Richard Bowring (Penguin Books, 1996). Translation copyright © 1996 Richard Bowring. Reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd. Material quoted from pp. 7 (text altered: Bowring’s translation reads, “You remind me of a fairy-tale princess!”), 20, 54, 56.

  The author gratefully acknowledges permission to quote 74 words from The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, edited and translated by Ivan Morris. © 1967 Columbia University Press and Oxford University Press. Reprinted with permission of both Columbia University Press and Oxford University Press, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  RIVERHEAD is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  The RIVERHEAD logo is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  The Library of Congress has catalogued the Riverhead hardcover edition as follows:

  Avery, Ellis.

  The teahouse fire / Ellis Avery.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-1-1012-1752-8

  1. Americans—Japan—Kyoto—Fiction. 2. Kyoto (Japan)—Social life and customs—

  19th century—Fiction. 3. Japanese tea ceremony—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3601.V466T43 2006 2006024042

  813'.6—dc22

  Version_2

  FOR

  Sharon Marcus

  Amanda Atwood

  Elaine Solari Atwood

  The Teahouse Fire

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Epilogue

  1

  1856–1866

  WHEN I WAS NINE, in the city now called Kyoto, I changed my fate. I walked into the shrine through the red arch and struck the bell. I bowed twice. I clapped twice. I whispered to the foreign goddess and bowed again. And then I heard the shouts and the fire. What I asked for? Any life but this one.

  I WAS NAMED AURELIA for my grandmother, Aurélie Caillard, who worked in Paris as a laundress. She had two children, my uncle Charles and my mother, Claire. My uncle was clever with books and won scholarships to Jesuit schools, where they puffed him up, my mother said, with dreams of power and glory in faraway lands. When he was twenty, a priest already, the Order transferred him to New York to shuttle between Irish and Italian immigrants downtown, using the office of school principal as a base from which to consolidate the Catholic vote. The post was less than he had hoped for; he petitioned regularly for transfer. My mother stayed in Paris, working as a maid in a convent. Uncle Charles said she took up with a wicked man, but—I admit my bias—I think someone at the church forced himself on her: she was fourteen. My grandmother offered passage money to New York and closed her door.

  In 1856, when my mother arrived on Mott Street to wash her brother’s floors, my uncle Charles pronounced her a young widow and gave her dead husband the surname Bernard. Early that May she gave birth to me. Aurelia, Uncle Charles insisted, not Aurélie. An American
name.

  We lived at Prince and Mott, my mother and I, across from the churchyard, in an attic apartment above Saint Patrick’s School. My mother had black hair and black eyes like mine; her round face dimpled on one side in a private smile. Every morning, before even setting water to boil for Uncle Charles, she would lift me up to the sill of the garret window. I loved seeing the high sycamore leaves up close, and far below, the red brick wall around the churchyard, loved wrapping my arms and legs around her shoulders and waist. She was most my mother at the edges of the day; she was a radiant mantle folded around me. She would comb my hair back with her fingers and sing the jaunty song she loved: Auprès de ma blonde, il fait beau, fait beau, fait beau.

  “But my hair is black! Can I still be your blonde?”

  “You are my little blond crow,” she would assure me.

  “Your blond licorice?”

  “My blondest black plum.”

  And then she would set me down and change her song: Frère Charles, Frère Charles, Dormez-vous? Dormez-vous? And with that she would pack up her dimpled smile, fold up her radiant mantle, and become, not my mother, but her brother’s bonne.

  Uncle Charles had his office—which doubled as his apartment—on the fourth floor, just downstairs from us. He had arranged our quarters this way because he disliked the smells of cooking. He also disliked climbing stairs, but living any lower than the fourth floor would have forced him into more frequent contact with pupils than he preferred. Uncle Charles’s features were small and his hands were large; his skull tapered like a fez at the back of his head and he flushed easily. He spoke only in French to my mother and—for my own good—only in English to me, his voice an oboe to my mother’s cello. On Sunday afternoons when I was very small, after saying mass for the nuns and eating lunch with my mother and me, he would retreat with me from the spartan back half of his apartment (bedroom, dining room, untouched kitchen) to the nest of his office in front (hundreds of books, one enormous armchair). He would sit me on his lap in the burgundy velvet chair and teach me how to read the English Bible, just as he had taught my mother how to read the French one when they were children. He covered the bricks of tightly printed letters with blotting paper so that only the letter, only the word, only the line before me was visible: Heaven and earth. Le ciel et la terre.

  Aside from those Sunday afternoons, three times a day we laid out Uncle Charles’s meal on a tray, set it on a stand beside his armchair, and ate on our own upstairs. After breakfast, we would clear away the tray and do the shopping, me translating between rapid French and pushcart Italian-English, and then we would come home to make Uncle Charles’s noon meal, the richest of the day. If Uncle Charles planned to be home in the evening, we would serve a soup made up from the lunch ingredients, together with bread, cheese, and wine. If he dined out, we would clean his apartment (quickly in back, slowly in front) and borrow his books. At night my mother would read to me, le cigale et la fourmi; and when I was old enough, I would read to her as she sewed, If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.

  In the afternoons, once the dishes were washed and the soup assembled, my mother would rest until the schoolbell rang and the pupils clattered home, then go downstairs to mop the classroom floors. All I wanted was to follow her, so she made me a toy mop of my own from a broken broom handle and a tied-on rag, and together we danced with our obliging partners, noisy in the empty classrooms, quiet in the ones where the nuns lingered, bent over their students’ papers.

  My mother, though she hid it from them well, did not like nuns. I heard it in the lugubrious way she said the word nun, the way she sniffed at their wet wool habits drying on the roof next door. Les nonnes. I never learned what her life was like before I was born, when she cleaned for the convent in Paris. Though I was baptized, and sat in the back of the chapel on Sunday mornings when Uncle Charles said mass, and even took my First Communion with a holy shudder, my mother never joined me. She slept or sewed. The morning of my First Communion, when I asked her one last time to come, she said, “Aurelia Bernard. Who is this Bernard, tell me? The Church hates truth, and the nuns hate it most of all.”

  “Do you want me not to go?” I asked, confused.

  “My dear, you need the Church as much as I do. At least until you’re grown. You don’t have to bite the hand”—she said the phrase in English—“but you don’t have to lick it, either.” Lick is lécher in French; the word pooled out of her mouth like honey, obscene.

  I think she hated having no choice but to feel gratitude. We did need the Church; it fed us, it sheltered us. And in time, it educated me: my mother gave me a Saint Claire medal and my uncle gave me a tartan uniform; I put on both and joined the girls at Saint Patrick’s, helping my mother in the afternoons. Once I started school, French became for me, not half my spoken life, but a secret language shared only with my mother as we glided across the floors.

  All the girls in my class were Irish but me. Some of their fathers had been killed in the War between the States; some had killed policemen in the Draft Riots the summer I was seven. They were tough, those girls. I liked them: their games and the up-and-down way they talked, like horses and the sea, the way they laughed with each other in secret after the nuns beat them. She took the ruler to me hand, the cow.

  But one day when I was nine, one of the nuns from another classroom came to show us a book of etchings of the Vatican. She asked my name. “Aurelia Bernard? Oh, I didn’t recognize you without Claire,” she said, holding an imaginary mop in both hands, gesturing. “Please give my regards to your mother.”

  I don’t think she meant me harm, but at a desk nearby I saw one of the Irish girls take up the gesture and laugh. And after school a chorus of girls giggled behind me, their fists stacked one on the other in front of them, their arms circling as they cried, Mopper! Mopper! Our ballroom afternoons sounded grubby in their mouths. I walked stiffly upstairs, and a last girl called my name. I turned and saw piefaced Maggie Phelan laughing with her friends. “Please give my regards to your mopper!”

  “Leave me alone!” I said.

  “Leemie alone!” she mocked as I turned the corner, forcing myself not to run. I climbed upstairs and crawled into my mother’s bed to hide. I pressed my face against her warm back: it was a comfort, her smell of soap and lemons, the purring stutter of her breath. My mother’s afternoon naps were getting longer and longer, I noted, trying to be patient. I wanted so badly to tell her, to be reassured by her, defended. My mother stirred, coughed into a handkerchief, and petted me. “You look sick, ma petite, what’s wrong?”

  I opened my mouth to tell her, and couldn’t. Instead, I heard myself saying, “I don’t really help you so much, when we clean together downstairs. What if I did some of your morning work in the afternoon instead, like bringing in the water and the coal?”

  “Hm, then maybe we’d have time to shop together in the morning before school,” she mused. “I think Mrs. Baldini is cheating me.” I wanted to protect my mother from all the Phelans and Baldinis in the world; I wanted the coarse, chewy English words to be easy for her the way they were, miraculously, for me. She looked reluctant for a moment, and then embraced me tightly. “Ma petite,” she said, “carrying such heavy things. It isn’t right that a young girl should work so hard.”

  “I don’t mind,” I said. “I’ll make lots of little trips.” As she nodded slow assent, I felt as if I had gotten away with something: with not having to be embarrassed by her and not having to hurt her, either. My love and calculation formed a black wad in my throat. I held her close and said, “I’ll start today.”

  EXCHANGING MY SCHOOL UNIFORM for a smock, I made my mother’s bed after she went downstairs to the classrooms. I poured the stale water from the kettle into the dishpan and brought down the next day’s fresh water from the barrels upstairs: it had rained recently, and the roof was closer than the tap outside. I took the scuttle to the cellar and brought up all the coal I could carry. I took the chamberpots downstairs and emptied them
into the outhouse, washed them at the tap, and brought them back again, panting my way up to the fourth and fifth floors. When I returned Uncle Charles’s pot, he looked up from his armchair. “Tell your mother I’d like you both to join me at dinner tonight,” he said. His urine smelled worse than ours, I reflected on my way upstairs; I would have to ask my mother why. I explored our apartment when I was alone in it: brushing aside a handful of crumpled handkerchiefs, marked as if with rust, I dug out the basket my mother kept hidden under her bed. It held a pretty brown half-sewn dress, I discovered, just my size, with brown velvet ribbon at the waist and cuffs. Beneath it lay a rag doll wearing the same dress, made of white cotton with drawn-on features—brown eyes like mine—and a velvet kerchief in place of hair. Wriggling with delight, I returned the dress and doll to their hiding place, scattering the handkerchiefs again to cover my tracks.

  Just as I crawled out from under the bed, I heard slow feet up the stairs and then my mother returned, flushed from the work below. “You did so much, my sweet,” she said. “Shall we heat up your uncle’s dinner?”

  I told her of Uncle Charles’s strange request, and she pursed her lips, amused and quizzical. “Has Sunday come early this week?” She glanced at the pot on the stove. “Well, soup for all, quand même,” she decided. “He should have spoken up sooner if he wanted something else. Whatever does he expect us to wear?”