The Whiteness of Bones (33 page)

BOOK: The Whiteness of Bones

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The plantation house was unchanged, the old tin roof still flashing secret messages in the sun, the long beach still muddy with the stain of rich river silt. The ancient palms in the grove still shed with a sudden groan their long, dry branches onto the sandy path below, and the banyan tree, its trunk like elephants’ legs, was as dank and as dusty as ever.

In the first weeks, Mamie was grateful for Mary’s ability, mystifying as it had always been, to see everything on the surface. Perhaps it is a gift, after all, Mamie thought, and not a weakness. It was very comforting not to be asked questions, or to be gazed at in too sympathetic, too curious, a way. Mary did ask about Claire and when Mamie said that she had gone to Portugal with Alice, Mary simply wondered aloud what
it was that travelers sought so far from home. She was not patronizing, but sincerely bewildered. She was very content at home, she said, and uneasy whenever she was obliged to leave it.

Mamie worked with her every day in the garden. She liked to watch the young boys running long snakes of canvas hose across the big lawn, and the pretty, chattering Filipino housemaids gaily throwing bed sheets over the stiff hedges to bleach them white in the sun, and the tremendously strong Hawaiian who could lift an entire tree out of the red earth by encircling the trunk with his big brown arms, like an awkward lover, and pulling the startled tree straight up out of the tumbled ground.

Mary had trained a young Japanese man, Frank, to watch over the gardens, and it was his responsibility to keep healthy the endangered plants entrusted to Mary’s care. Mamie saw that Mary was respected and admired by her workers, and by the botanists and scientists who came to consult her. She asked Mary, one hot morning as they kneeled side by side in the mud, how she had learned so much about the garden.

“I don’t really know,” Mary said modestly. She sounded a little perplexed. “I knew nothing when I came here. Everyone was so busy, you see. It’s different in the country. There is always something to be done. And I had nothing to do. The garden had not been neglected by McCully’s family, but no imagination had ever really been shown in planting it. You know what I mean, I’m sure. There was the monkey pod tree by the front drive. Shower trees. Croton bushes. Some people love the croton, but there are plants I prefer to them. There were very few fragrant flowers. I had never smelled anything in my life, until then, and I certainly have never smelled anything since, like my first white ginger.”

Mamie worked busily with her fingers, feeling through the
mud for the tiny lily bulbs, so that Mary would not see the tears that suddenly came to her eyes. She kept silent, as she did not want Mary to stop talking. It was the most intimate thing that her mother had ever said to her.

“I suppose it changed my life,” Mary said, “that first smell of
‘awapuhi
. I had just married McCully.”

Mamie smiled to hear her mother use the Hawaiian name of the flower. She is under the spell, Mamie thought. At last.

“I used to dream about it,” Mary said. “You know how hard it is to describe a smell? Well, it is just as hard to describe it to yourself, to summon it again. After a few sleepless nights, I went up to Koke‘e and I brought down ginger and everything else I could find that had a fragrance, not necessarily a sweet scent, but any kind of scent at all, anything that would survive down here in the lowland. Hiroshi sometimes drove me up and down that terrible road three times a day in the truck and I would get so carsick, I’d have to sit in the middle, right next to him, and I heard later that people, seeing us driving like that, thought we were, you know, a little too friendly. I always imagined this would be paradise on earth, if you could go to San Francisco on the weekends.”

She put down her bucket and watched as Mamie deftly divided bulbs with her little knife. “Do you think you’d be good at this?”

Mamie looked at her. “I dreamed about the small of ginger for years. I still do.”

Mary shrugged and stood up stiffly. Her knees were painful with bursitis from the years of kneeling in the dirt. “I don’t so much anymore,” she said. “But I’m happier.” She crossed the garden to a little shed where she kept her tools.

Mamie finished her work slowly. Sometimes she felt as if she were enchanted and had been set an impossible task by
her mother, separating the millions of fragile, webbed ferns one from the other, or counting the transparent scales on the pink fishes the boys excitedly brought up from the dock at dusk. It was soothing for Mamie. It required her concentration and her dexterity, and she was tranquil. She worked in the dirt with the formality and calm of a young novitiate preparing the sacraments.

Before she left New York, she’d gone to see Courtney to ask if she would like to come with her to Waimea. Edwin was at Iowa giving a seminar. He had had some nasty letters after his talk on D. H. Lawrence for suggesting that women, lacking the life force called a penis, would never be able to write as vitally as men, and he had gone to Iowa in the hope of clarifying his position. He does believe it’s true, Courtney had said to Mamie, about the life force. She had sounded embarrassed.

Mamie tried to convince her to go with her, if only for a few days.

“I promise, I swear, I’ll let you come back,” Mamie said.

Courtney smiled, a little sadly. “I mustn’t. I can’t.” She had promised Edwin that she would type his monograph while he was away. This is sexual aggression, too, Mamie thought.

Mamie had also received an extremely angry letter from Vivi Crawford, who had returned early to New York. She included a precisely itemized bill for twelve thousand dollars for damages to the apartment. Mamie would hear from her lawyer.

Alder wrote to her, and sometimes telephoned, and she described to him the run of young yellow-striped goatfish at Hanalei and the
koli‘i
plant which took ten years to mature only to produce one showy burst of flowers before it died. He
wrote that he was ready to come whenever she wanted him. He’d ordered a very beautiful red snorkel and mask and fins from the catalogue of the Museum of Modern Art and she laughed when he described them to her.

“Mr. de Beaupré is sorry that you are away and asks to be remembered to you. He is not sure just who you are, exactly, but he is very fond of you,” Alder said. “As am I. Not sure who you are, but very fond of you.”

She slept in the screened room where she and Claire had slept as children, screened so that someone—McCully? Gertrude?—would hear them if they coughed or had a nightmare. She listened to the intoxicated fruit flies singing in the mango trees. The room was full of the smell of the white flowers that Mary had planted years ago beneath the windows, the plants fuller now and heavy, dragging with wet blossoms.

One evening, Mamie struggled across the lawn in the rain with a heavy wheelbarrow piled high with the brown seaweed she had gathered on the beach. Frank ran out from the bamboo grove to help her. He took the long wooden handles from her wet hands and pushed the wheelbarrow over the sodden grass.

She walked beside him. He was tall and slender. He did not speak Pidgin as did Mamie and the others, and he kept himself a little apart, even from her mother. His aloofness did not come from a defensive feeling of superiority or the ambiguity of his position, but from a rather matter-of-fact sense of his own equality. Mamie had watched him quietly during the long, light days. It is dangerous to mind all change, she had thought.

“Look,” he said. “There’s something in the
limu
.” The seaweed,
limu kohu
, was called “the long-haired fish of the sea.” It had a sharp smell of iodine and salt. He put down the
barrow and gently parted the pink
limu
with his smooth hands and Mamie leaned over the cold, reeking seaplant and saw a white bone, perhaps a thigh bone, hidden in its soft, dense branches.

They were both wet through with the rain and Mamie’s hair was black and shiny, close to her head. Frank smiled and lifted the wheelbarrow and pushed it to the greenhouse. Mamie stood in the rain and watched him until he was lost again in the chafing, cricketing bamboo.

When she came into the house through the back, Mary was waiting for her and Mamie realized that her mother had been watching her and Frank from the kitchen window.

“He’s Yumiko’s boy. Do you remember her? She used to work at the mill.”

Yumiko’s boy, Mamie thought. Yumiko was Hiroshi’s sister.

“He’s Hiroshi’s nephew,” Mary said, looking out the window. The sun was sliding into the dark and troubled sea and the palm grove behind them rattled with the heavy fall of rain.

“I’m so sorry for what happened, Mamie.”

Mamie looked down at the soaked chamois gardening gloves in her hands. When she was a girl, she had thought her mother very strange for wearing gloves to touch flowers, and now she used them herself. They were very helpful, and allowed her to get a good grip where her bare hands could not hold.

Mary went to her and bent her head to Mamie’s shoulder. It was as if she could not look at her. “In the banyan that day. Can you forgive me?”

Mamie looked down at her. She saw that Mary accepted her own part in the trouble and the death that began that day, and Mamie saw that her mother regretted it.

“You’re shivering,” Mary said, standing back and looking at Mamie.

“Yes,” Mamie said. “The rain in the garden.”

She smiled and leaned toward her mother, a little stiffly, but not without love, and not without pity, and she closed her eyes and bowed her head and allowed her mother to reach toward her, after all those years, to kiss her gently on the forehead.

There were many things that Mamie was eager to do. It seemed as though she had been away from home for years and years, but it was not so. It had only been eleven months. She had just missed Lily, who was on her way to Cambodia with Tosi to look for Lily’s father. She wanted to see Gertrude again, and Mrs. Kaona. She wanted to take Alder snorkeling at Na Pali. She would not be embarrassed by his red fins as she had once been embarrassed by the boy in the terry-cloth beach jacket. She wanted to teach him the old secret of luring fish with frozen green peas. She wanted a root beer float from the Dairy Queen. She had asked Orval Nalag to go body-surfing with her at Kekaha someday soon. The waves were good, she’d heard; something about a storm in Japan. She wanted to sleep alone up on the fragrant mountain. The nights had been cold. She would pick yellow ginger and she would make a fire with the peeling, gray eucalyptus. It was odd, but she could already smell the wet ginger and the curling, aromatic eucalyptus, steaming and hissing as the pale bark caught fire.
Potnaika‘i au
, she thought: blessed am I.

From the acclaimed author of
In the Cut
(“A remarkable novel … violent … intelligent … daring … destined to be discussed.”—
Vanity Fair
), a novel set in mid-nineteenth century India in the years leading up to the First Afghan War—a story of simmering Victorian sexuality, imperialism, and the darkness of human desires.

ONE LAST LOOK

SUSANNA MOORE