Hawaii (159 page)

"Florsheim? In New York?" Mrs. Henderson reflected, studying the huge beachboy with the long hair and the wreath of maile leaves. "I'll bet the city'll never be the same."

"He married a society girl," Kelly explained. "Stayed with her three months and came back. He got a Chewy convertible out of it. In fact, we're riding back to the hotel in it."

At this point Florsheim's girl from Kansas City hustled up, heavy with leis and mascara, and giggled: "My God! Aren't these men positively divine?" She grabbed Florsheim's darkjbrown arm, felt the muscles admiringly and asked, "You ever hit a man with that fist, Florsheim?"

"Nevah," the beachboy replied. "Only wimmin."

His girl laughed outrageously, and when the various bits of luggage were ptted into the Chewy, the two couples headed for the Lagoon, but when Florsheim drove up King Street and past the old mission houses, Elinor Henderson abruptly asked him to stop, and she studied the historic buildings carefully, explaining at last, "My great-great-grandmother was born in that house. Originally I was a Quigley."

"Never heard of them," Kelly said honestly.

"They didn't stay long. But I'm doing a biography of them . . . for my thesis. I teach at Smith, you know."

"You da kine wahine bimeby gonna write a book?" Florsheim asked, as he resumed the trip.

"Tell him he doesn't have to talk pidgin," Elinor suggested.

"He can't talk anything else," Kelly laughed.

"I think pidgin's just adorable," the girl in front said, and Kelly thought: "Looks like I've got a four-nighter at best, and maybe not at all, but good old Florsheim better watch out or he's going to be layin' that babe in the lobby."

Kelly's suspicion about Elinor Henderson proved correct, for she

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was not a four-nighter or even a six. She loved surfing and felt secure in Kelly's arms, but that was all. Yet one night when Kelly borrowed Florsheim's convertible�for the Kansas City girl had said flatly, "Why go riding in a Chewy when you can have so much fun in bed?"�he drove Elinor out to Koko Head, where they sat in darkness talking.

"In the islands we call this kind of date, 'Watching the midnight submarine races,'" he explained.

"Very witty," she laughed.

"How's the biography coming along?" he asked.

"I'm quite perplexed," she confessed.

"No good, eh?"

"I have been sorely tempted to put it aside, Kelly."

"Why?"

There was a long pause in the darkness as the late moon climbed out of the sea in the perpetual mystery of the tropics. Along the shore a coconut palm dipped out to meet it, and the night was heavy, bearing down on the woiild. Suddenly Elinor turned to Kelly and took his hands. "I have been driven mad by the desire to write about you, Kelly," she said.

The beachboy was astonished. "Mel" he cried. "What's there to write about me?"

She explained in clear, swift sentences, without allowing him to interrupt: "I have been haunted by Hawaii ever since I read my great-great-greatgrandfather's secret journal. He stayed here only seven years. Couldn't take any more. And when he got back to Boston he wrote a completely frank account of his apprehensions. I can see his dear old handwriting still: 'I shall write as if God were looking over my shoulder, for since He ordained these things He must understand them.'"

"What did he write?" Kelly inquired.

"He said that we Christians had invaded the islands with the proper God but with an improper set of supporting values. It was his conviction that our God saved the islands, but our ideas killed them. Particularly the Hawaiians. And at one point, Kelly, he wrote a prophetic passage about the Hawaiian of the future. I copied it down, and last night I read it again, and he was describing you."

"Gloomy prophecy?" Kelly asked.

" The Hawaiian is destined to diminish year by year, dispossessed, distraught and confused.' That's what the old man wrote. He must have had you in mind, Kelly."

Kelly was twenty-three years old that night, and he realized that in Elinor Henderson he was mixed up with an entirely different kind of woman. She was thirty-one, he guessed, clean, honest and very appealing. He hair was crisply drawn back, and her white chin was both determined and inviting. He put his left hand under it and slowly brought it up to his. There was enough moonlight for him to see the visitor's eyes, and he was captivated by their calm assurance, so that for some moments the missionaries' descendant and the dis—

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possessed Hawaiian studied each other, and finally his hand relaxed and her chin was released, whereupon she took his powerful face in her soft white hands and brought it to hers, kissing him and confessing, "I have forgotten old missionaries, Kelly. When I start to write I see only you. Do you know what I wish to call my new biography? The Dispossessed."

They talked for a long time, while other cars came to observe the midnight submarine races and depart. Elinor asked directly, "Do you call this a life, Kelly? Making love to one neurotic divorcee after another?"

"Who told you?"

"I can see Florsheim, can't I?"

"Florsheim's not me."

"That isn't what Rennie Blackwell told me."

"What did she tell you?" Kelly asked.

"She said it was the one good week of her life."

"Which one was she?" he asked directly.

"I knew you didn't remember. She was the one who told her roommate on the Moana Loa . . ."

"Of coursel Look, I don't have to be ashamed of loving a girl like that," Kelly insisted.

"Do you suppose Florsheim's going to marry the Kansas City girl?" Elinor asked.

"She's doing her damnedest to make him," Kelly laughed. "He'll stay with her four or five months and come home with a Buick."

"Why haven't you ever tried it?" Elinor probed.

"I don't need the money. I sing a little, play a little slack-key, get a little money teaching girls like you. And if I need a convertible, somebody always has one."

"Is it a life?" Elinor asked.

Kelly thought a long time, then asked, "What makes you think you can write a book?"

"I can do anything I set my mind on," Elinor replied.

"How come you're divorced?"

"I'm not."

"Your husband dead?"

"One of the best, Kelly. One of the men God puts his special finger on."

"He die in the war?"

"Covered with medals. Jack would have liked you, Kelly. You'd have understood each other. He had a thing about happiness. God, if the world knew what that man knew about being happy."

They sat in silence for some time, and Kelly asked, "Why would you call your book The Dispossessed? I got everything I want."

"You don't have your islands. The Japanese have them. You don't have the money. The Chinese have that. You don't have the land. The Fort has that. And you don't have your gods. My ancestors took care of that. What do you have?"

Kelly laughed nervously and began to say something but fought

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back the impulse, for he knew it would lead to peril. Instead he wagged his finger in Elinor's face and said, "You'd be surprised at what we Hawaiians have. Truly, you'd be astounded."

"All right. Take the four pretty girls who do the hula at the Lagoon ... in those fake cellophane skirts. What are their names? Tell me the truth."

"Well, the one with the beautiful legs is Gloria Ching."

"Chinese?"

"Plus maybe a little Hawaiian. The girl with the real big bosom, that's Rachel Fernandez. And the real beauty there ... I sort of like her, except she's Japanese . . . that's Helen Fukuda, and the one on the end is Norma Swenson."

"Swedish?"

"Plus maybe a little Hawaiian."

"So what we call Hawaiian culture is really a girl from the Philippines, wearing a cellophane skirt from Tahiti, playing a ukulele from Portugal, backed up by a loud-speaker guitar from New York, singing a phony ballad from Hollywood."

"I'm not a phony Hawaiian," he said carefully. "In the library there's a book about me. More than a hundred generations, and when I sing a Hawaiian song it comes right up from my toes. There's lots you don't know, Elinor."

"Tell me," she persisted.

"No," he refused. Then abruptly he made the surrender which only a few minutes earlier he had recognized as perilous. "I'll do better . . . something I've never done before."

"What?" she asked.

"You'll see. Wear something cool and I'll pick you up about three tomorrow."

"Will it be exciting?"

"Something you'll never forget."

At three next day he drove a borrowed car up to the Lagoon and waited idly in the driveway till she appeared. When she got into the Pontiac, crisp and cool in a white dress, he turned toward the mountains and drove inland from the reef until he came to a high board fence, behind which coconut palms rose in awkward majesty. He continued around the fence until he came to a battered gate which he opened by nosing the car against it. When he had entered the grounds, he adroitly backed the car into the gate and closed it. Then he raced the engine, spun the tires in gravel, and brought the car up to a shadowy, palm-protected, weather-stained old wooden house built in three stories, with gables, wide verandas, fretwork and stained-glass windows.

"This is my home," he said simply. "No girl's ever been here before." He banged the horn, and at the rickety screen door appeared a marvelous woman, six feet two inches tall, almost as wide as the door itself, silver-haired and stately, and with a great brown smile

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that filled her plastic face. "Is that you, Kelolo?" she asked in a perfectly modulated voice that contained a touch of New England accent.

"Hi, Mom. Prepare for a shock! I'm bringin' home a haole wahine." Lest his mother be aware of the changes he had undergone for this girl, Kelly lapsed into his worst pidgin.

His mother left the doorway, walked in stately fashion to the edge of the porch, and extended her hand: "We are truly delighted to welcome you to the Swamp."

"Muddah, dis wahine Elinor Henderson, Smith. Muddah's Vassar." The trim Bostonian and the huge Hawaiian shook hands, each respectful.of the other, and the latter said in her soft voice, "I am Malama Kanakoa, and you are the first of Kelolo's haole friends he has ever brought here. You must be special."

"Eh, Muddah, watch outl" Kelly warned. "We not in love. Dis wahine mo eight years older dan me. She all fixed mo bettah in Boston."

"But she is special," Malama insisted.

"Special too muchl She gotta brain da kine, akamai too good."

The trio laughed and each instinctively felt at ease with the other. Kelly helped by explaining, "Muddah, dis wahine she come from long-time mission pamily Quigley. I not speak dis pamily, but maybe you do."

"Immanuel Quigley!" Malama cried, taking her visitor's two hands. "He was the best of the missionaries. Only one who loved the Hawaiians. But he stayed only a short time."

"I think he transmuted all his love for Hawaii into his children, and I inherited it," Elinor said. She saw that she had entered a nineteenth-century drawing room, complete with chandelier, tiered crystal cases, an organ, a Steinway piano and a brown mezzotint of Raphael's "Ascent of the Virgin" in a massive carved frame. The ceiling was enormously high, which made the room unexpectedly cool, but Elinor was distracted from this fact by an object which hung inside an inverted glass bowl set in a mahogany base. "Whatever is it?" she cried.

"It's a whale's tooth," Malama explained. "Formed into a hook."

"But what's it hung on?" she asked.

"Human hair," Kelly assured her.

Malama interrupted, removing the glass cover and handing her visitor the precious relic. "My ancestor, the King of Kona, wore this when he fought as Kamehameha's general. Later he wore it when the first mission ship touched at Lahaina. I suppose that every hair in this enormous chain came from the head of someone my family cherished." She replaced the glass cover. Then she said, "Kelly, while you show Mrs. Henderson why we call this the Swamp, I'll be getting tea. Some of the ladies are coming in."

So Kelly took Elinor to the rear of the house, through a kitchen that had once prepared two hundred dinners for King Kalakaua, and

soon they were in a fairyland of trees and flowers bordering a rash-lined swamp whose surface was covered with lilies. With some irony Kelly said, dropping his pidgin now that he was again alone with Elinor, "This was the only land the haoles didn't take. Now it's worth two million dollars. But of course Mom takes care of a hundred poor Hawaiians, and she's in hock up to her neck."

To Elinor, the scene of old decay was poignant, and as red-tufted birds darted through the swamp and perched on the tips of dancing reeds, she saw the complete motif for her biography. "You really are The Dispossessed," she mused, fusing reality with her vision of it.

"No, I think you have it wrong, Kelly protested. "This is the walled-in garden that every Hawaiian knows, for he tends one in his own heart. Here no one intrudes."

"Then you're contemptuous of the haole girls you sleep with?" she asked.

"Oh, nol Sleeping is fun, Elinor. That*s outside what we're talking about."

"You're right, and I apologize. What I meant was, insofar as they're haoles, you're contemptuous of them?"

Kelly thought about this for a long time, tossed a pebble at a swaying bird, and said, "I don't believe I would admit that. I'm not as intolerant as the missionaries were."

"Immanuel Quigley said almost the same thing."

"I think I would have liked old Quigley," Kelly admitted.

"He was young when he served here. He became old in Ohio. What a profound man he was."

"Mom s probably ready," Kelly suggested, and he led Elinor away from the swamp and back into the spacious drawing room, where four gigantic Hawaiian women, gray-haired and gracious, waited.

"This is Mrs. Leon Choy," Malama said softly. "And this is Mrs. Hideo Fukuda."

"Did I see your very pretty daughter dancing at the Lagoon?" Elinor inquired.