too. I take them out when I have a minute to spare and look at them over a cup of tea. Endlessly fascinating. Why else would I have kept them these fifteen years?”
I felt a surge of I hardly know what—call it sympathy, call it pity. “A remarkably good way to entertain yourself,” I was able to say without affectation.
Yoshihidé’s brother came in with tea, apparently brewed in some haste. I pointed to a tennis racket on the veranda.
“You play tennis?”
“My brother does.” Embarrassed, the boy stood up to leave. He turned back from the door. “It’s time to heat the bath, Father,” he blurted out, and almost fled from the room.
“Tennis is a good game. You let the ball go, and you drive it cross-court like this. That’s when it’s really good.” X showed no sign of having heard his son. Gently raising his left hand with the elbow forward, he clenched his right hand and brought it diagonally down across his chest.
At this point a somewhat flustered Yoshihidé hurried in, apologizing for his tardiness. He had had business, and one interview had not been enough to finish it. X sat with the briefcase and several bundles of postcards before him, and remarked in the midst of the apology: “You let the ball go, and you drive it cross-court like this.” He served again. I tried not to notice. I said that I was surprised to see how near we lived. I said that the brother was the image of the Yoshihidé of our high-school days. X raised his left arm, brought his clenched right hand diagonally forward, and half rose from his seat.
“You let the ball go,” he said, “and you drive it cross-court like this.”
Acutely uncomfortable, I fell silent. Yoshihidé stood up and put his arm around his father’s shoulders.
“You let the ball go….” The left hand rose again.
“It’s time to heat the bath, Father. Suppose we go.”
The old man got up without a protest.
“Suppose I go and heat the bath,” he said.
