The Heat of the Sun

too. ‘You think of that girl as some meaningless dalliance of your husband’s youth.
Madam, I would not like to judge a woman harshly, but you know nothing of love.’
    ‘Am I incapable of the feelings of a mother?’
    ‘You are barren, I believe – barren all through! I saw it in you from the first. Did you not see yourself as the spirit of compassion, forgiving your husband the sins of his past,
taking in his bastard to bring up as your own? Yes, you would be the embodiment of all your Christian virtues! Some would praise you, but I saw a woman determined to control all around her. Can you
deny it? Your husband you work like a puppet master, tethered to you by strings of guilt; his son you keep captive in a web of lies. Is he to know nothing of the girl who bore him into the world,
the girl from whom you stole him?’
    ‘You don’t understand! The girl was a prostitute.’
    ‘And who made her one? Madam, you speak of the lady I would have married had your husband not intervened.’
    ‘Oh, Yamadori! I know all about your ridiculous wooing.’ Kate Pinkerton’s voice was pitying. ‘We all did. Even the girl’s servant used to laugh about you. You were
a joke, a buffoon.’
    ‘You think I don’t know it? I was barely more than a boy. But never can I flee from the sorrow that gripped me then. Listen, hear the music welling up the stairs! Gay, is it not? But
what light can it bring to the blackness I carry within me no matter where I go?’
    I might have been watching a scene onstage. Kate Pinkerton had met her match, a performer every bit as grandiloquent as she. Neither, I suspected, was really listening to the other. Their words
were arias they knew too well, honed by the resentments of decades. While Yamadori’s words spooled out, Kate Pinkerton shook her head as if to say no and no and no ; I
thought she would stop her ears, but she swung back to him. She went to him like a lover. She clutched his robes.
    ‘Then you understand! Then we’re alike! For hasn’t the blackness been in me too, since those days in Nagasaki? Call me a foolish woman, call me weak, for what did I see when
that girl proved her love in death, but a passion that would always be denied me? You say I thought her an inferior, a thing of no consequence. Never! From the moment I saw her stricken and
bloodied, I knew that any love I had ever felt had been a rattling empty shell. The girl triumphed in death. Call her cruel. With the cruelty of a passion that would not be appeased, she
left the rest of us ruined: you, me, my husband.’
    ‘Your husband?’ Yamadori flung her off. ‘You dare speak of that viper in my presence?’
    ‘Viper? No viper! What was he but a foolish young man, as you were?’
    ‘You go too far. Had he any goodness in his heart, could he ever have left that girl? Very well, dispute the word viper . I offer you another: murderer .’
    ‘Yes, a murderer, and I married him!’ cried Kate Pinkerton. ‘You say he made your beloved girl into a whore, but whores were what he wanted. And since then, all the time
pretending to love me, he has flitted from whore to whore. This, the man who would be President of the United States! Prince, I am sorry you have suffered, but can’t you see that I have
suffered too, and not for a matter of months, not for a few youthful years, but for a lifetime? He has abused me as deeply as a woman can be abused! I’ve withered inside! Pluck out this
heart, fling it to the floor, and what would you find but dust and ash? Yet you would take from me my son, the one glimmering of love that redeems my emptiness.’
    She broke off, sobbing. Yamadori’s next words were resolute.
    ‘Madam, I claim no virtue. In these empty years I have consoled myself with many a lady – seeking, always fruitlessly, the shadow of that perfection I could not value fully until it
was lost. Do you think I don’t understand the wiles of common women? If you have felt all you claim to feel, you could not dispute that you – in comparison to the girl I loved –
are of a piece with the most worthless of your sex. You plead with me for compassion. Your tears flow. But your heart is ruled by selfishness. It is you who are cruel. You have built a kingdom
based on lies, and now, when your kingdom must crumble, you beg me to let you keep on lying.’
    ‘What a fool I was to come here.’ Kate Pinkerton spun the globe of the world. ‘I thought I was speaking to a man of feeling, but I wasted