Hawaii (126 page)

A photograph four inches by three fluttered to the bed, face down. For several moments Kamejiro allowed it to lie there, unable to comprehend that when he turned it over it would show not Yoko, whom he had kept enshrined in his memory, but some girl he had never known. Gingerly, and with two fingers, he lifted the edge of the picture and dropped his head sideways to peer at it. Suddenly he flipped it over and shouted, "Oh! Look at this beautiful girl! Look at her!"

A crowd gathered to study the photograph, and some protested: "That girl will never marry a clod like you, Kamejirol"

"Tell them what the letter says!" Kamejiro instructed Ishii-san, and the scribe read aloud the facts of the case. The girl's name was Sumiko, and she was willing to marry Kamejiro.

"Is she a Hiroshima girl?" a suspicious man inquired.

"She's from Hiroshima-ken," Kamejiro replied proudly, and a sigh of contentment rose from the long bunkhouse.

On one person the photograph of Kamejiro's good luck had a depressing effect, for in an earlier mail Ishii-san had received a picture of the bride his parents had picked for him. She was a girl called Mori Yoriko, which was a pleasing name, but her photograph showed her to be one of those square-faced, stolid, pinch-eyed peasant girls that Japan seemed to produce in unlimited numbers. Ishu-san's mother assured him that Mori Yoriko could work better than a man and saved money, but the scribe felt that there was more to marriage than that, especially when, as in his case, the husband could read and write. He was patently disappointed and asked to see Kamejiro's picture again. Sumiko, as he studied her, appeared tp have the classic type of beauty: gently slanted eyes, fine cheekbones, low forehead, pear-shaped face and delicate features. She looked like the girls whose pictures were painted on the sheets advertising Japanese historical movies, and Ishii^san said, "She's very pretty for a Hiroshima girl. Maybe she's from the city."

"No," Kamejiro assured him. "My mother would never send a city girl."

The next day the two would-be husbands borrowed Ishii Camp's publicly owned black suit, the tie that went with it, and the white shirt; they wrapped their treasure in a Sheet, hired a taxi and drove into Kapaa, where Hashimoto the photographer told them, "Take turns with the suit, and be sure to comb your hair."

When Kamejiro climbed into the strange clothes, Hashimoto had to show him how to tie the tie, after which the stocky field hand plastered his hair down with a special grease Hashimoto provided for that purpose. Kamejiro then moved into range of the camera,

posing rigidly and refusing to smile. The finished picture, even though it was properly styled and mounted, would have excited few prospective brides, and Hashimoto did not consider it one of his best. Nevertheless, Kamejiro mailed it with a fully paid ticket from Tokyo to Honolulu. Then he waited.

In late 1915 Ishii-san and Kamejiro received notice that their brides were arriving at Honolulu on the old Japanese freighter Kyoto-mani. The news did not occasion the joy that might have been expected, because it had been hoped at the camp that the two girls might arrive by separate ships, for then each husband, when he went to get his wife, could have worn the black suit, thus corresponding to the photographs sent to Japan. As things now stood, one man would wear the suit and not disappoint his bride, but the other would clearly have to wear his laboring clothes and stand before his bride as he really was. It was the character of Kamejiro to say quickly to his friend, "Since you can read and write, it is proper for you to wear the suit." And the camp agreed that this was the only logical solution.

The lovers, alternately ardent and afraid, left Lihue by the small ship Kilauea and went to Honolulu, where they took one room in a dingy Japanese inn on Hotel Street. Since they arrived on the evening before the Kyoto-maru was expected, they ate a meager supper of rice and fish, then hiked up Nuuanu and bowed low before the symbol of their emperor. As they were doing so an official in black cutaway hustled out on some important meeting and snapped: "Don't stand around here like peasants. Go about your work." Obediently the men left.

They were impressed by the big homes on Beretania Street but were shocked by the dirty alleys of Chinatown, where one miserable hovel leaned against the next. Ishii-san said, "They told me that fifteen years ago this whole neighborhood was burned down and the Chinese wanted to rebuild it like a proper city without alleys and mean houses, but the white people wanted it the way it was before, so it was built that way again." The two men, recalling the clean roads and immaculate homes of their childhood, shook their heads at the white man's ways.

Before they went to sleep that night Ishii-san spread before him the two photographs, and he spent a long time comparing them, and his disappointment at the tricks of fate became apparent in his features. "My mother didn't choose very well, I'm afraid," he said. "Isn't it strange, Kamejiro, to think that a great ship out there is bringing a woman with whom you will spend the rest of your life?"

"I'm nervous," Kamejiro confessed, but his nervousness that night was nothing to what he would experience during the next days; for when the Kyoto-maru docked, the seven Japanese men who had come to meet their picture brides were told, "We never let the women out of quarantine for three days."

"Can't we even see them?" Ishii-san implored.

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"No contact of any kind," the immigration man warned.

Later, the ardent grooms found that if they bribed one of the attendants, they could press their faces against a hole the size of a half-dollar that had been bored into the door behind which the incoming brides were imprisoned, and the third man in line was Kamejiro. Squinting so as to make his eye smaller, he peered through the miserable peephole and saw seven women idly sitting and standing in groups. He looked from one to the other and was unable to detect which was Sumiko, and he looked back beseechingly at the guard who spoke no Japanese. Applying his eye once more to the circle, he looked avidly at the seven women, but again he could not isolate his intended wife, and in some confusion he turned the peephole over to his successor.

"Is she beautiful?" Ishii-san asked.

"Very," Kamejiro assured him.

"Did you see Yoriko?"

"I think so."

"Does she look pretty good?"

"She looks very healthy," Kamejiro said.

When Ishii-san left the peephole he was trembling. "She's a lot bigger than I am," he mumbled. "Damn my mother!"

"Oh, Ishii-sanl" Kamejiro protested. "She's a Hiroshima girl. She's bound to make a good wife."

On the second and third days the men returned to spy upon their wives, and by a process of elimination Kamejiro discovered whom he was to marry. He had failed at first to find her because she was by all odds the loveliest of the girls and he had not been able to believe that she was intended for him. Commiserating with his friend Ishii-san's disappointment, he had the delicacy not to revel in the beauty of his own wife; but as the hours passed, leading up to the moment when the doors would be thrown open, he became frightfully nervous and excited.

"I am beginning to feel sick!" he told Ishii-san.

"I already am," the letter-writer confided.

"I think I may go away and come back later," Kamejiro whispered.

"Wait a minutel" one of the husbands snapped. "Look at the poor women!"

Kamejiro felt himself shoved to the peephole and for the last time he saw the seven brides. They knew that the hour of meeting was at hand, and the bravery that had marked their earlier behavior now fled. Without adequate water or combs, they made pathetic attempts to pretty themselves. They smoothed down one another's rumpled, sea-wom dresses, and tucked in ends of hair. One woman applied her fingertips to her forehead, as if she considered it ugly, and tried to spread its skin more smoothly over the heavy bones. In the corner one girl wept, and after a brief attempt at trying to console her, the others left her alone with her misery. But there was one thing that each girl in her final moments of panic did: she studied the photograph clutched in her hand and desperately tried to mem-

orize the features of the man she was about to meet. She was determined that she would know him and that she would walk up to him unerringly and bow before him. But now all were weeping and the photographs were blurred.

A gong rang and Katnejiro jumped back from the door. Slowly the hinges swung open and the brides came forth. No tears were visible. The placid faces under the mounds of black hair looked steadily, inquiringly forward, and the first sound heard was a muffled gasp of pain. "Oh!" one of the brides sighed. "You are so much older than the picture."

"It was taken a long time ago," the man explained. "But I wfll be a good husband." He held out his hand, and the girl, controlling herself, bowed until her head almost touched his knees. They formed the first pair.

The next girl, the one who had been weeping alone in the comer, walked straight to her man, smiled and bowed Tow. "I am Fumiko," she said. "Your mother sends a thousand blessings." And she formed up the second pair.

The third girl was Mori Yoriko, Ishii-san's bride, and as he had feared, she was much more robust than he. She was a true Hiroshima country girl, red-cheeked, square-faced, squint-eyed. Knowing that she was less beautiful than any of the others, she made up for her deficiencies in stalwart courage and a burning desire to make herself into a good wife. She found Ishii-san and bowed low, her big hands held close to her knees. "Mr. Ishii," she whispered, "I bring you the love of your mother." Then, as if She knew reassurance was necessary, she quickly added in a halting whisper, "I will be a good wife."

The last girl to find her husband was Sumiko, the prettiest of the lot, and her recalcitrance sprang not from any lack of wit but from the shock she had received when she first saw Kamejiro. He did not wear the black suit in which he had been photographed, nor was his hair pasted down. His clothes were those of a mean peasant and his arms were brutally awkward. He was grim-faced, like an angry, stupid man, and he was twice as old as she had expected. Last in line, and with only one man unattached, Sumiko obviously knew who her husband was, but she refused to accept the fact.

"No!" she cried imperiously. "That one is not my man!"

"Oh!" Kamejiro gasped. "I am Sakagawa Kamejiro. I have your picture."

She skpped it from his hand and then threw hers upon it, stamping upon them. "I will not marry this man. I have been deceived."

At this outburst the first bride, who had also found a husband she did not want, shook Sumiko and cried in rapid Japanese, "Control yourself, you selfish little fooll In such an affair who expects to find a champion?"

"I will not marry this animal!" Sumiko wailed, whereupon the first bride, who had gracefully accepted her disappointment, delivered a solid slap across the girl's face.

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"On the entire trip you were a mean, nasty child. You ought to be ashamed. Go to that good man and humble yourself before him." The first bride placed her hand in the middle of Sumiko's back and projected her across the hushed immigration room.

Sumiko would have stumbled except that from the astonished couples Ishii-san sprang forth to rescue her. He caught her by the waist and held her for a moment. Then, looking at Kamejiro and Jus own intended bride, he said with a frankness that startled even himself, "Kamejiro, you and Yoriko make a better pair. Gave me Sumiko." And the beautiful girl, finding herself in the presence of a cultured man who wore a black suit, suddenly cried, "Yes, Kamejiro, you are too old for me. Please, pleasel"

In stolid bewilderment, Kamejiro looked down at the picture and recalled how deeply over the past months he had grown to love it. Then he looked up at the square-faced chapped-cheeked Mori Yoriko and thought: "She is not the girl in the picture. What are they doing to me?"

He hesitated, the room whirling about him, and then he felt on his arm the hand of the first bride, who had slapped Sumiko, and this quiet-voiced girl was saying, "I do not know your name, but I have lived with Yoriko for three weeks, and of all the brides here, I assure you that she will make the best wife. Take her."

The humiliated country girl, who had been so painfully rejected by her intended husband, found tears welling into her unpretty eyes, and she wanted to run to some corner, but she stood firm luce the rock from which she had been hewn and bowed low before the stranger. "I will be a good wife," she mumbled, fighting to control her voice.

Kamejiro looked for the last time at the well-remembered picture on the floor, then picked it up and handed it to his friend Ishii-san. "It wiH be better this way," he said. Returning to the girl who still bowed, he said gently, "My name is Sakagawa Kamejiro. I am from Hiroshima-ken."

"My name is Mori Yoriko," the peasant girl answered. "I also am from Hiroshima."

"Then we will get married," he said, and the seven couples were completed.

DURING THE YEARS when Kamejiro Sakagawa and his bride Yoriko were discovering how lucky they were to have stumbled into their improvised marriage, the missionary families in Honolulu were experiencing a major shock, for one of their sons was proving to be a fiery radical, and reports of his behavior startled all Hawaii.

In these years Hawaii seemed filled with Hales and Whipples and Hewletts and Janderses and Hoxworths. In some classes at Punahou sixteen out of twenty-four students would bear these or related names. Only skilled genealogists tried to keep the blood lines straight, for Hales were Hoxworths and Hoxworths were Whipples, and fairly

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frequently a Hale would many a Hale and thus intensify the complications, so that in time no child really understood who his various cousins were, and an island euphemism gained popularity: "He is my calabash cousin," which meant that if one went back far enough, some kind of blood relationship could be established.

Hawaii came to consider this Hale-Whipple-Hewlett-Janders-Hoxworth m6nage simply as "the family" and to recognize its four salient characteristics: its children went to Punahou; its boys went to Yale; invariably it found some kind of good-paying job for every son and for the husband of every daughter; and members of the family tried to avoid scandal. Therefore, when one of the boys became a radical, the family was deeply jolted.