The Whiteness of Bones (11 page)

She found it at the rivers. And one night at a cocktail party standing before a glass wall in a new, transparent building.
And she found it looking out through a snowstorm at the lighted city from Bones’s tower suite. Wherever she discovered it, it always made her feel calmer, a little less squared off and boxed in and, oddly enough, it made her feel very nostalgic for that possibility of glamour and sweet romance that the very name Manhattan had always held for her.

She bought a guide to literary sites and roamed through Mrs. Wharton’s Chelsea, and Gramercy Park. She stood outside Marianne Moore’s house in the Village and she remembered that at this time of year, the end of March, she once would have been imagining, as she walked to classes in Westwood, the lonely new shoots of
Sanicula sandwicensis
, the rare perennial in the parsley family, sending up its little yellow flowers in the high, cool mountains of east Maui. Once, the sound of California jays had reminded her of the
pueo
, the high-flying Hawaiian owl that made a sound like a woman lost in the forest. But she now found herself able to identify the more prosaic smells of this new city—urine, diesel fuel, warm pizza, dry-cleaning fluid and even the occasional blossoming pear tree on a side street—without immediately sinking into a daydream of the past. Things seemed to be just what they were and this was very soothing to Mamie. She learned some things about herself, as well as New York, on her long walks.

Heading north on Madison Avenue, she saw in the window of a flower shop a bouquet of wildflowers and grasses—goats-beard and meadow rue and jack-in-the-pulpit—tied with a length of twine. It is just the thing to keep me company tonight, she thought. At first, she saw the modest bouquet on the too small marquetry table by her bed, then she thought perhaps it would be rude to buy flowers for herself, even if they were the kind of roadside weeds one might absentmindedly
collect on a walk after Saturday lunch. Although they were not exactly Alysse’s style—she liked Georgian silver wine buckets jammed with
damascena
roses (Flowers must look as if you’ve just had them sent in from your garden in the country, she told Mamie)—Mamie thought that she would buy them as a present for her aunt.

The man in the shop told her that the flowers would be six hundred dollars.

“They’re native wildflowers,” he said when she looked at him in amazement.

All she could think of was her mother. Mary would have been furious. “They’re very eighteenth-century,” she said to the man.

“I know,” he said without interest.

On her return one evening, she found a special delivery letter waiting for her on the hall table. It was from Claire. It was short and quite to the point. She had left the University of Hawaii. She had not had her period for four months. Orval Nalag refused to give her money for an abortion and she was understandably unable to go to her mother. She needed Mamie to send her seven hundred and fifty dollars as soon as possible. She knew she could count on Mamie. “Help, help, help!”

Mamie immediately sent the money she had put aside to rent an apartment. She did not tell Alysse. She thought how strange it was that Orval, the boy Mary feared would attack them walking through the camp, was the father of Claire’s child. She wondered if they had made love many times. She convinced herself that it must have happened only once. It was hard to imagine them dating, given Mary’s prejudices.

Mamie did not hear again from Claire, and although she knew better than anyone Claire’s ability to take care of herself,
she did think of her often. She imagined Claire sitting in the huge waiting room at the mill clinic with the skinny, restless children of the laid-off sugar workers. She imagined the beautiful, fat Hawaiian women who waited gaily with all of their sisters and all of their cousins and all of their girlfriends. She even imagined what a child made by Claire and Orval Nalag would look like, brown and sturdy with black hair slicked back with Lilac Vegetol.

What she did not imagine, and could not have imagined, was that, a few weeks later, Lydia would grumpily call her from her room one night when Alysse was at the Kabuki to ask her if she knew anyone by the name of Claire. The doorman was on the intercom. There was someone in the lobby named Claire who wanted to come upstairs.

She stood in the paneled entrance hall, in baggy khakis and a pale pink sweater. She wore new white Keds. She had obviously said something funny, or fresh, to the porter, Mr. Rodriguez, because he was still laughing and shaking his head as he put down the good leather suitcase that had once been McCully’s and went back downstairs in the elevator.

Mamie was very happy to see her. Lydia stood peevishly to the side, fists clenched in her apron pockets. She watched the two girls suspiciously. Claire handed Mamie a shopping bag.

“Sweet and sour apricots.
Manapua
. A guava chiffon cake from Aloha Bakery. Two new Gabby tapes and your mail. I already read your letters.”

Mamie took the bag and kissed Claire on the cheek. “They do it on both cheeks here,” she said smiling, suddenly self-conscious.

“Where’s the bathroom?” Claire asked, pushing past her. “There’s blood running down my leg and fuck knows what else.
Who
else, actually.”

While Mamie helped her sponge the blood from her thighs, Claire told her that Gertrude had induced a miscarriage by
feeding her tea made from the bark of the mountain apple. They peeled it off the trees in the very grove where Mamie once waited with the sisters who would not go down the flumes. She used Mamie’s rent money to buy her ticket and some new clothes in Honolulu.

“You mean the tea really works?” Mamie asked in astonishment.

“Well,” Claire said, “the tea and several long workouts on the trampoline at McCully Clarke School.”

Mamie thought about Gertrude. She was not like a mother to them. She was a shaman.

“Aunt Emma sends you her love. She gave me an incredibly long message for you about how the
kolea
plover is a metaphor in old Hawaiian stories for independence and mystery. She said you’d understand. She also insisted that I put
ti
leaves in my suitcase for a safe journey.” Claire had taken off her soiled pants and thrown her bloody underpants onto the bathroom floor and was sitting half-dressed on the edge of one of the beds in Mamie’s room.

Mamie was relieved that Alysse was not at home. She worried that Claire would bleed on Alysse’s chintz bedspread. She brought a towel from the bathroom for Claire to sit on, but Claire pushed it aside.

“And Gertrude made me pack some of those placemats her mother brings her. I thought I could give them to Aunt Alice. ”

“I don’t think so,” Mamie said quickly. She tried once again to tuck the white towel under Claire’s legs. “And it’s A-lysse now. She has only very beautiful things. She and her friends spend quite a bit of time tracking down the best little places to buy things. The best place for gloves in Milan or a little shop in Paris for stationery. I don’t think she’d like coconut-husk placemats from the PX at Clark Air Force Base. She—”

Mamie stopped when she noticed the surprised expression on Claire’s face. She shook her head and smiled in embarrassment.

“This is what happens when you have no one to talk to. Except Miss Magda at work, of course.”

“You’ve got me now,” Claire said. She jumped up and opened the closet. Mamie anxiously looked to see if there was blood on the bed or on the back of Claire’s legs. She could see the tan line made high on Claire’s hip by her bathing suit. Claire bent over to open a drawer in the bureau. There was no blood.

“Everything is scented!” Claire said. She stuck her head in the drawer to have a good smell. “The hangers, the drawer paper, the toilet paper. It smells terrible.”

Mamie nodded. “I’ve had a headache for three months. Like Mrs. Nagata’s silkworms.” Mrs. Nagata’s silkworms, while indifferent to climate, were not particularly fond of noise and Mrs. Nagata had always hushed the children irritably whenever their play brought them too near her house. She needn’t have troubled, as it was odor that most offended them and she had lost all of them one humid afternoon to the smell of fried fish.

“Alysse has been very generous,” Mamie said. She sighed. “She sees me as an untapped resource—she’s not sure there’s anything there, but she’s willing to give me a chance.”

“You
are
an untapped resource. I’ve always said so.” Claire was going through the drawers in the bathroom. “Even the cotton balls are scented.”

“How is Mother?”

“Oh,” Claire said from the bathroom. She was sitting on the toilet.

“I’m glad she didn’t sell the land,” Mamie said.

“It was such a preposterous idea. How long has it been since you’ve been home? Eight months? Were you there when she
brought down a cabin from Koke‘e? On coconut logs. And there is a new bamboo grove, three acres with a hundred strains of rare bamboo and a little wooden ‘thunder house’ in the center where you sit in a storm to listen to the bamboo and the thunder. How could she possibly sell it? What would she do?”

“Alysse says we’d be rich.”

“I always thought we
were
rich. People always acted like we were rich.”

Mamie laughed. Claire came back into the bedroom. She had stuffed some of Alysse’s good linen hand towels into her clean underpants.

“You know, Mother is one of those people who justify themselves by saying that they’re just as hard on themselves as they are on others. Well, fuck that,” Claire said.

“Did she know about Orval?”

“No. Wait ’til you read your letters. Lily is in Italy with Tosi and she swears they’re never coming back. She says none of us are really Americans anyway. And Sherry Alden has left Berkeley and run off with a dancer from the San Francisco Ballet.”

“She has?” Mamie was surprised.

“A
ballerina
.”

It was only recently that Mamie had thought again about Sherry. The massages and arm wrestling of years ago had slowly begun to make sense, the truth working its way up through her memory.

Claire looked at her. “Didn’t you know?”

“I must have,” Mamie said, laughing at herself.

“The muff-diver who taught tennis in Koloa went down on her every afternoon last summer behind Court II.”

“How do you know?”

“Mamie. Please. You’re so dumb.”

“I mean about the details. How do you know it was Court II?” Mamie didn’t like that Claire made her feel stupid.

Claire just laughed. “Does Aunt Alice have a record player?” She was restless.

“I’m not sure we should use it when she isn’t here. Besides, you wouldn’t like her music. You know, Diana Ross and Lionel Richie.” She was trying to discourage her.

“You forget you’re talking to the first president of the James Brown ‘Funky President (People It’s Bad)’ Kaua‘i Fan Klub. Mamie,
I’ve
got the music.”

Claire had been there an hour and she was already commandeering the music system. She was wandering through the apartment in transparent underpants, Porthault hand towels wadded between her legs, handling carelessly the carnelian elephants and jade monkeys from Olga Tritt, sloppily pouring herself a big drink from the Russian gilt decanter on the silver tray in the library, reading the engraved invitations on heavy white paper that lay on Alysse’s chinoiserie desk.

Mamie sensed that Claire’s presence—an unpredictable, volatile, attractive presence—would change everything. Mamie recognized in Claire a Darwinian adaptation. She was a girl-helot in Claire’s service. She admired her and wished she could be like her, but she was afraid.

“When do you go back to school?”

“Never,” Claire said distractedly. She was reading a letter she had picked up from Alysse’s desk. She reminded Mamie of someone. Claire dropped the letter, bored. There were pictures of Alysse in silver frames on the red lacquered desk. “Is this Alice?” she asked and Mamie realized that Claire resembled Alysse—she was like her aunt.

“She’s good-looking,” Claire said.

“I wanted to ask you about Orval,” Mamie said.

Claire was behaving as if they had lived together uneventfully
in the scented apartment for years. Mamie wanted to talk about what had happened, but Claire was far ahead of her, settling easily into the future. Orval and the camp, and even the palm grove, were seeping away, held only in Mamie’s tireless imagination.

“Oh, I forgot to tell you! You’ll love this, Mamie. You remember Benjie’s cousin, Cecil, the one who was in Vietnam and used to play dominoes with you? You used to ask him about Vietnam. Well, there were reports of lost pigs and Mrs. Takaki’s
hibachi
was stolen, and the old people in town said it was the
menehune
or the displaced spirits from the lot where they built the new post office, but it was Cecil! He was living in the mountains in full camouflage with an automatic rifle. When they brought him down, Benjie and Clinton and Mike Fayé, he thought it was 1969 and he was in some place called An Khe. He thought Benjie was the Vietcong.”

“Will he be all right?”

“Mamie. Please.”