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Chapter 3

Yokohama, Japan

August 1941

The freighter’s cranes whirred and creaked, the second mate roared commands, the stevedores shouted at each other, and the August afternoon sun peeled more paint off the ship’s strakes. If the 7,800-ton vessel was to clear the bay’s crowded entrance before dark, the master would have to push all hands to their limits.

Reclining against a stanchion on the main deck, Bill Macneil hoped they made it. His schedule was flexible, but the sooner he left this country he had come to dislike so intensely the better. In fact, if the Macneil Lines’ City of Glasgow could cast off its mooring lines from the dock bollards and stand out to sea this instant, it would not be too soon for Bill Macneil. Then he could have avoided what was sure to be a painfully awkward parting with Helma Graf.

“Excuse me, Mister Macneil.” The stubby, white-haired captain stood beside Bill, touching the enameled visor of his white hat with two fingers. “I regret we don’t have an owner’s cabin aboard these freighters, sir, but I don’t think we’ve ever had the pleasure of having a Macneil aboard. Is your cabin satisfactory? I’d be glad to let you have mine, but it would be tomorrow before I could have it cleaned and ready for you.”

Bill Macneil smiled. “The accommodations are quite all right, Captain. Tell me, when do you expect to slip lines?”

Captain Davis cast a judicious eye at the heaps of cargo still on the dock, then at his pocket watch. “Not for at least three or four hours.”

“In that case, I believe I’ll take a quick ride up to the Bluff.”

“Your family once had homes up there, didn’t they?”

Bill nodded. “And if a Miss Helma Graf comes looking for me, ask her to wait in my cabin, will you? And turn the fans on in there, please.”

The captain saluted. “I’ll tell the steward to place a block of ice in front of one of the fans, sir.”

Bill Macneil felt in his pants pocket for his passport and wallet, then strode down the gangplank. Taxicabs would be waiting along the Bund only 75 yards away. He lengthened his stride.

At twenty-two, Bill Macneil was an easy-moving natural athlete with not the slightest interest in competitive sports. He could do twenty-five one-armed push-ups, twist around and catch an oncoming baseball behind his back, and pass a football as well with his left as his right arm, but he did such feats only when begged to do so by children.

His sister, Chankoro, called him “sports-deaf.” Perhaps he was. He did not know the name of the lead pitcher for the New York Yankees or remember which football teams had played in the January 1941 Rose Bowl.

Bill’s only sport was mountain climbing, which he did not consider competitive. After learning to fly at fields around San Francisco, he had taken up mountain climbing in northern California and Oregon, where he joined a team that rescued amateur mountaineers stranded in the high peaks. When Bill’s team failed to climb up to one couple in time, the four members decided to add parachuting to their skills.

Over the past two years of Bill’s attendance at the University of San Francisco, he had answered eleven distress calls from the northern mountains.

Despite a break in his right ankle bone on his sixth jump, Bill had persevered, and now nothing gave him more satisfaction than flying his own plane to a field near the origin of the distress call, joining the rescue team, and parachuting in when necessary to save endangered and sometimes injured climbers.

That was the extent of his athletic activity.

The ankle fracture still sent occasional twinges up his right leg—it did now as he climbed the slope from the Foreigners’ Cemetery on the Bluff to the site of the two homes built long ago by Macneils as their Yokohama residences.

This pilgrimage had no particular objective. Probably no member of his family had bothered to come up here in years, although they still owned the land. Perhaps, he thought, someone should come up now and then to pay respects to the past.

His grandfather had built a house right over there on the left of the narrow road in the 1870s, and his grandmother had built another next door the following year. Neither had really been permanent. What was considered the main family residence still stood empty in Nagasaki, while Grandmother Anne had possessed two in Tokyo. From all he had heard, she must have been quite a woman. Imagine, a Scotswoman long imprisoned by the Japanese becoming first the teacher of the emperor, then his occasional mistress.

The Yokohama homes were destroyed in the Great Kanto Earthquake of September 1923 and never rebuilt. By then almost all Macneil affairs, especially the arms business, were conducted from the Tokyo main office. The rest, certain commodities like ships, steel, and tea, were exported from Nagasaki.

After standing in front of the property for several minutes, Bill Macneil shook his head and grinned wryly. Face it, he thought, the real reason for coming up here on this hot and muggy late summer afternoon was the urgent desire to avoid Helma Graf. He hoped she would come aboard the City of Glasgow while he was on the Bluff, get tired of waiting, and return to her missionary parents’ home in Shizuoka, on the south flank of Mount Fuji. A good hour and a half by train.

Turning, he started down the slope where he had left the taxi. One of the few things he still liked about Japan was these vehicles for hire. A person could rent one of them for an entire day for the equivalent of two or three American dollars.

He really shouldn’t treat Helma so cavalierly. She deserved better than he could bring himself to provide. After all, her only sin, if it was one, was to have set her cap for him.

The driver dozed at the wheel of the black made-in-Japan Ford. Macneil touched the man’s shoulder to rouse him, then climbed in back. “Return to the dock,” Bill said, ignoring the driver’s surly glare.

He let his mind review Helma’s good qualities, of which she surely had a share. She was mentally acute, shy, pensive, and modest. Modest to a fault, in fact, befitting a daughter of Quaker missionaries from the German-speaking region of Switzerland. She had a trim figure, kept well-concealed in chaste outfits. Despite her education at Bryn Mawr College in the United States, so far she had avoided some of the independent, willful ways that were making American women the envy and despair of other women. Only in support of the tenets of her religion—peace, nonviolence, brotherly love—did Helma’s alpine blue eyes flash and her gentle, normally subdued voice take on dangerous undertones.

Bill Macneil had no way to judge the quality of her spoken French or her German, but he knew her English was nearly perfect, as it should be, he thought, since Helma had received much of her earlier education in the United States as well as college. Her fluency in Japanese, however, was another matter. Since joining her parents in Japan, Helma had expended massive efforts to learn Japanese. But it was not a language to be learned in one or two years. Having grown up speaking Japanese, Bill Macneil had little concept of what was actually involved in learning the language in school, but he had known more than a few Americans who had lived in this country for ten years or longer who had finally thrown up their hands in frustrated despair at ever coming to grips with the language. One early missionary had reported to Rome in despair that Japanese must have been devised by Satan to thwart the dissemination of God’s holy word.

In fact, Bill had met the then, twenty-year-old Helma Graf for the first time early that summer in the town of Manazuru on the Izu Peninsula. On a side street, she had been trying to tell a group of some two dozen casually interested Japanese about her religious beliefs. Preaching in rural towns like Manazuru was part of her training to follow in her parents’ footsteps as missionaries.

The problem, Bill Macneil quickly realized, was that her audience did not comprehend what she was trying to get across to them. Helma had the vocabulary, but her grammatical structures were shaky and her pronunciation execrable.

At first he was amused, but then pity for the charming and determined young woman began to take over. She was trying valiantly, but her Japanese listeners were beginning to giggle as Japanese often do when confronted with foreigners who mangle their language.

Pushing through the small crowd to Helma’s side, Bill smiled at the puzzled, tittering audience and began speaking to them in calm, persuasive Japanese, the native fluency of which fetched gasps from some. Probably none had ever heard an American speak Japanese that was little different, though possibly better, than their own.

“Please forgive my sister. She has only recently come to your beautiful country and needs a few more months of language study.

“What she wants to say to you is that all the world’s people should love one another. They should open their hearts and be understanding and sympathetic.” Macneil was interpreting Helma’s words pretty much as she had tried to express them. “Brotherly love and nonviolence are the keys of our religion. We call ourselves the ‘Friends’ because that is what we truly want to be: your friends.” Macneil went on with his understanding of Helma’s message. Later, she would expound those principles to him often.

The small audience accepted readily enough Bill’s claim to be Helma’s brother. There was, in fact, a strong resemblance between the two. Bill knew the saying: Opposites attract. Maybe that was their trouble. They were too much alike. The same blond hair and light blue eyes. Mobile lips. Oval faces. Where they differed most was inside: in philosophy, beliefs, attitudes. And in how they viewed the Japanese. Helma loved them, as she professed to love all people. However, despite the affection Bill felt for his Japanese relatives and friends, he despised the people of Japan en bloc, especially the arrogant, cruel men. This was not a casual difference of opinion between him and Helma. It was a chasm deep as the Grand Canyon, into which Bill had actually parachuted in March 1941.

After their reasonably successful, albeit impromptu, revival meeting, Bill Macneil had taken Helma Graf aside and introduced himself. She thanked him courteously and agreed to have tea with him in a shop near Manazuru Station. In her quiet, insistent way, she overwhelmed him with questions about himself: his ability in Japanese, his inspiration to come to her aid, why he was in Manazuru. Bill wondered if she considered him a possible convert to the peaceable persuasions of the Friends.

After her torrent of questions, Helma retreated into the stillness Bill was to find so characteristic of her. Quiet, watchful, contemplative, always peering into the souls of others. That contagious serenity made the most lasting impression on him.

Helma’s waters ran deep indeed, and he was only beginning to discover their depths.

Yet her passions were surprising for a daughter of missionaries. Her favorite song was “I’m in the Mood for Love,” which she hummed and whistled to his distraction. She was addicted to the tango and had twice prevailed on Bill to take her to a Tokyo nightclub called the Florida, known in Japan as the ‘home of the tango’. Her dance steps had been so smooth and skillful that Bill soon quit the floor to let one of the instructors employed by the club dance three tangos with her. One, Helma’s favorite, was “Ein Spanischer Tango.” Bill led the applause after her performance.

The taxicab stopped on the Bund and was dismissed by Macneil.

On this miserably hot afternoon, Bill Macneil did not relish what he would have to say to Helma.