in thin black curving lines—an everyday scene, two adults and a child making their way on a stormy day, but marvelously arresting.
Mr. Kimura said something in Japanese, and Mrs. Kimura said to her, “Is noble lady with son and servant. We have always honored Mr. Pete for discernment, but we never see picture before. Is very fine one.” She bowed as if the picture reflected well on her. Margaret bowed back.
They conversed some more; then Mrs. Kimura said, “Might be hundred years old, according to fashion of lady, and worth much money.”
Then again, “Mr. Kimura sorry that ignorance prohibits him from recognizing artist even though name here.” She pointed to an ideogram.
They looked at the picture for a few more minutes, and then carefully rolled it up again, wrapping it. Now that she knew what it was, Margaret was rather frightened at having brought it out. She glanced out the window at the sky. All of these Japanese pictures seemed too fragile—merely paper. But some of them were hundreds of years old.
When she had put her picture away in her bag, Mr. Kimura went to a cabinet and brought out a picture of his own and opened it on the table. It was entirely different from Pete’s, and yet also arresting and mysterious. Mrs. Kimura said, “Is not painting, but woodblock print. Is by Utagawa Hiroshige.” She pointed to a column of writing in the lower right corner.
It was a small picture, possibly a foot high or a little more, and not ten inches wide—the size of an illustration in a book—a moonlit scene. In the dim distance, to the right, a pine-tree-covered hill rose out of a flat plain. The whole upper half of the picture was made up of a sky, the tiny stars picked out in varying intensities (this was a picture she thought that Andrew would like). In the foreground, to the left, was a sizable leafless tree. Looking at the branches, Margaret realized that the ground was covered with moonlit snow. Mr. Kimura waved his hand over the figures bunched at the base of the tree, and Mrs. Kimura said, “Foxes under moon.” The foxes were pale yellow, their bodies merely outlined. There were fifteen or twenty of them, looking to the right, clearly on the alert for something. Though they did not look like any foxes she had ever seen, they had the demeanor of foxes.
What was remarkable to her about the print, like the painting, was the feel of the weather—so chill and still. Only the foxes, picked out by the light of the invisible moon, were animated. Mrs. Kimura said, “Utagawa Hiroshige very famous in Japan.”
Margaret regarded the picture. The odd thing was that, even though she wanted it, or something like it, and even though Andrew had plenty of money, and even though she had learned to drive the car, and even though she went to San Francisco every couple of weeks, she could not imagine how to get such a thing for her own, such a grand and comforting thing.
THE FRANKLIN was a soothing sage green with black fenders, a tan top, and a black leather interior seat—indeed, the seat was thickly padded and sewn with deep tucks, like a luxurious sofa. The steering wheel was some rich golden wood. The front end of the car swept downward, giving it a birdlike quality. The top folded forward or back, as one wished. The man they bought it from parked it on the street in front of their little house, and Margaret watched through the front window as Andrew promenaded out of the house, marched down to the street, and then stopped and put his hands in the pockets of his navy-blue captain’s jacket with the stripes on the sleeve. He pushed back his cap and lifted his chin and stared into the engine. Then he paraded around the car once or twice, opened up the hood, and stared at the air-cooled engine. If people stopped to look (and they did—navy men were always interested in machinery), he would tell them more about the air-cooled engine than they wanted to know—that it dispensed entirely with the problems of water-cooling, and that this famous person and that famous person would own only a Franklin. Margaret was ready to drive it—and she did drive it one time, over the causeway that now made Vallejo more accessible but had not replaced the ferry, and around the streets of Vallejo, to Mrs. Wareham’s and then