When the Pinkertons — dashing naval officer Lt. Benjamin Franklin; his wife, Kate; and his son, Benji, the child “with a Japanese face and light hair” — arrive in a farming community in Illinois during the spring of 1895, the only obstacle in the way of their happiness is a dead woman.
She was once called Madame Butterfly, and Benji is her son.
Within the first few pages of Angela Davis-Gardner’s sensuous, evocative “sequel” to Puccini’s classic opera, a world unfolds that is as exotic, in its own way, as the one left behind in Japan. It even has a Japanese name: Plum River, just one of the many echoes of the opera and its distant culture in a novel that builds on the author’s own childhood — growing up in segregated Greenville, N.C. — and centers on themes of belonging, identity and prejudice.
In the opera, a geisha “married” to Pinkerton discovers, upon his return to Japan, that he has a new American wife. She kills herself, leaving behind her 3-year-old boy after asking that Pinkerton raise him in America. “Butterfly’s Child” takes up where the curtain came down, assigning complex roles to the three characters — Benji, his father, mother — in a story that, on the surface, casts the child as the displaced person.
Uprooted from a graceful culture and at the mercy of people whose language he can’t understand, Benji clings to his otherness. His mother has gone to the Land of the Spirits, and all that’s left of his former life is a colorful string ball she made for him, a pair of chopsticks he’s forbidden to use and a kimono he’s no longer allowed to wear. At night, he curls up on the floor, pretending he’s still at home.
Worse, because of Kate Pinkerton’s shame at his origins, family and friends are told that he’s an “orphan boy rescued from the lowly society of Nagasaki, Japan.” When he calls his father Papa-san as Butterfly taught him, his new mother washes his mouth out with soap.
Davis-Gardner, whose most recent novel, “Plum Wine,” was set in Japan, portrays Benji’s reactions to his unfamiliar environment with authority, humor and sensitivity. He hates the heavy food, is taunted by other children, and has no one to talk to. He at first imagines that his new family may be river spirits who have killed his mother and “brought him to this place. That’s why this strange talking sounded like voices through water.”
But Benji isn’t the only foreigner in “Butterfly’s Child.” Neither Pinkerton nor his wife “belong” to the life they’ve chosen.
Frank, as he’s known in Plum River, trades his opera role of coward and seafaring cad for the troubled life of a farmer who hates farming. Kate, a devout Christian who, unlike her opera counterpart, never wanted to bring the geisha’s child home, lacks the confidence and thick skin for the bargain she’s struck — especially the drudgery of a Midwestern farmwife.
Though wracked with guilt over Butterfly’s suicide, Frank is irresistibly drawn to fantasize about their once-passionate sexual relationship. Sensing his obsession, Kate withdraws, haunted by jealousy and guilt, fear of discovery and loss of face. None of her attempts to win Frank back take her where she wants to be; instead, she slowly comes unmoored: “Somewhere in life she had taken the wrong turn and had not entered the portal into the world where she was meant to be.”
Both parents share a fatal tendency to internalize their discomfort: In trying to express themselves, they seem to be speaking a foreign language. These parallels to Benji’s alienation allow Davis-Gardner to explore the dangerous gap between who we are and who we wish we were, and the way our choices can define us — or imprison us.
With such lost souls to guide him, Benji learns to fight his own battles and mostly keep his own counsel. As resilient as his mother, who once survived by submitting to the attentions of “vulgar men who made her tie the cherry stem with her tongue,” Benji possesses a shrewd intelligence, a scrappy sense of self-preservation, and two allies: a sympathetic schoolteacher and a local veterinarian, who takes the boy under his wing.
But when a visiting lecturer arrives in town who speaks Japanese, Benji seizes his chance and brings her an old photograph of his mother and Pinkerton that no one else has seen, setting in motion a series of encounters that will gradually expose the lies shrouding his adopted family — and also take him on another journey, this time across America during the time of the Great San Francisco Earthquake and the Russo-Japanese War.
An absorbing what if? that stands on its own merits, “Butterfly’s Child” is more soap opera than opera, and has the same addictive appeal: It’s a novel that demands to be read in one sitting. The characters hate and love with murderous intensity whether plowing a field, quietly embroidering a sampler, or canning beets. And their drama, played out with no less passion in cornfields and general stores, sparsely furnished bedrooms and musty parlors, moves toward an ending as unexpected as it is revealing.
“Butterfly’s Child”
Fiction
By Angela Davis-Gardner;
The Dial Press,352 pages; $26.
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