Garden of Stones - By Sophie Littlefield Page 0,36
grandmother and the dead man had known each other. Her heart raced as she flipped page after page. When she reached the end of the album, she took a long sip of her wine before turning back to the start.
In the first photo, Miyako’s face was pensive; she seemed to be staring at someone outside the photograph to the right, and her lips were slightly parted as though she were whispering a confidence. Meanwhile, Rickenbocker’s head was thrown back in what appeared to be raucous laughter.
In other photos, she posed with several other Japanese women, all of them young, all of them pretty. They wore bright lipstick smiles and cheap beads at their necks, their hair twisted and curled. The final photograph in the album was labeled Valentine’s Day 1943, and it showed a man identified as Benny Van Dorn with his arm slung around a short, plump girl’s shoulders, looking drunk and leering at the camera.
Benny Van Dorn. Something clicked in Patty’s mind, a stirring of familiarity, and then it came to her: Benny Van Dorn was a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. She was pretty sure he represented her mother’s district, in fact. Could it be the same man? The age was about right. She remembered the election because Van Dorn had narrowly beaten a candidate who was enmeshed in a high-profile bribery scandal.
Lucy had never mentioned the election, or Van Dorn, for that matter, but then again her mother had no interest in politics. Still, if it really was him, that was two people from Manzanar who lived nearby in San Francisco, and her mother had never spoken about either of them. Patty’s stomach twisted with anxiety. There was something here, some connection between all these people and Forrest’s death.
The background of many of the photos was a cramped office, the most arresting feature of which was the snow-topped mountain rising far in the distance outside the window. Young men, all of them white, and half a dozen pretty, young Japanese girls crowded onto a sofa and chairs. A Japanese boy of twelve or thirteen appeared in a couple of the photographs. Only he and Rickenbocker wore civilian clothes; the other men wore military-style uniforms.
Reginald Forrest was in only a couple of the photos, and Patty didn’t even spot his name among the captions until her second pass through the album. He was a pleasant-looking young man with a handsome if bland face. In one of the shots, he was caught in profile, almost as though he had been turning away from the photographer at the time of the snap. In the other, he posed between two other men holding bottles of beer.
The album seemed to chronicle a series of parties and get-togethers that had taken place over six months at Manzanar. Patty doubted that fraternizing between the staff and internees was sanctioned or even allowed, and she wondered who arranged and hosted these events. Most of the girls looked as though they were there by choice, their pouty smiles and provocative poses suggesting they enjoyed their role. Miyako was the exception. Compared to the younger girls, she seemed far more sophisticated; her clothes were elegant and fit her well. She eschewed their cheap baubles and low-cut blouses, but in every photograph of Rickenbocker, he had eyes only for her.
After going through the pages twice, Patty set the album aside and picked up the other one. It chronicled Forrest’s life leading up to the war. The last pages held his official War Relocation Authority staff portrait and a group photo, thirty or so men and a few women posing in front of half-built rows of barracks, with the spectacular mountains in the distance. The rest of the pages were filled with publicity photos and magazine clippings from before the war. Forrest had appeared as “Boy #2” in a film called Frontier Stagecoach, and what appeared to be a slightly bigger role—“Officer Timmons”—in The Last Princess. Small parts, evidence of a film career that never got off the ground before the war and didn’t continue afterward. Whatever Reg had done since 1943, it had ended here, with his gym, his small life, his shitty apartment. His volatile girlfriend and crabby landlady.
Patty went back to the first album, to the one photo where Reg posed with two other men, their arms slung casually around each other’s shoulders. The caption read, “Reg Forrest, George Rickenbocker, Benny Van Dorn and Jessie Kadonada.”