The Whiteness of Bones (3 page)

Mamie paused dramatically and they slowly sipped their cool drinks, eating the vanilla ice cream with long plastic spoons. Jimmy had already eaten his cheese dog in two snapping bites.

While Mamie completed the day’s episode, the hundreds of curving palm trees were silhouetted blackly against the streaked rose sky. Mamie stopped when there was no longer enough light to read. The girls and the mongoose looked as if they had been set on fire.

“Orval likes you,” Claire said.

“No, he doesn’t.”

Jimmy whined and nervously wound himself around them. He was still hungry. McCully said that Claire had unbalanced the poor animal by forcing him to change his nocturnal habits. Claire didn’t care. She was not troubled by things like the sleeping habits of small animals.

“He has
cho-cho
lips, anyway,” Claire said.

“Who?”

“Orval. What is wrong with you? You’ve been weird all week.”

Claire seemed to be made more delicately than Mamie. It was a deception. Her hair, cut short like Mamie’s, was a lighter brown and her small, quick eyes were green. She was not as brown-skinned as Mamie. She stayed out of the sun because it gave her freckles. She had small, plump hands and feet.

“I saw you walking through the camp this afternoon. You know what Mother said last time,” Claire said.

“She doesn’t understand. It’s because she’s not an island girl. Father doesn’t mind.”

“He grew up in the camp practically.”

“Well, that’s what I mean,” Mamie said irritably. “He knows it’s safe there.”

“Not with Orval around.” Claire stroked Jimmy with growing passion. “Oh, Mamie, Mamie, Mamie …” she moaned. Jimmy watched her fearfully as she twisted and massaged his little peaked ears.

Mamie stood in the now gloomy, dark grove. “You don’t know anything,” she said.

Claire writhed provocatively against a palm trunk as a terrified Jimmy twisted to get away. He scratched her.

“No mice for a week!” Mamie heard her sister say furiously to the confused, frightened animal.

Mamie found her way home through the maze of black trees.

In the living room, open to the verandas, Gertrude was turning on the lamps. There were no shutters or curtains, as the deep veranda eaves provided all of the shade needed during the hot day, and at night, the house was isolated between the dark ocean and the dark grove. Mamie could see Gertrude moving indolently from room to room. Gertrude’s coarse black hair, hanging to her waist, swayed back and forth as she moved.

In the kitchen, Mitsuya, the cook, was grating coconut for the icing of a warm yellow cake, and her helper, Sharlagne, whose father worked at the mill store in town, was washing rice. Mary had told Mitsuya many times that rice no longer
needed to be washed, but Mitsuya, who was seventy-eight years old, liked to do things the old way. Sharlagne counted aloud as she swished the rice in the cold, cloudy water. It made a pretty sound, like the tumbling rush of small rocks and shells left behind by a wave.

“That’s eight washings,” Sharlagne said, wiping her hands on her
muumuu
. “I like go now.” Sharlagne’s brother had returned the day before from Vietnam and there was a party that night at the Fire Station.

Mitsuya smiled. She had no teeth. “No need,” she said. “You
pau
now. See you bumbye.”

Everyone on the plantation spoke Pidgin English. Mamie and Claire could speak Pidgin, and McCully, of course, spoke Pidgin most of the time. Mary did not, out of principle, and she wondered aloud what the girls would do when they were in the “real world” and had to speak in complete sentences. “As if this is not real enough,” Mamie said to Claire in astonishment. “As if I am ever going to leave Waimea!”

Claire seemed to take her mother as she found her, with ironic calm, but Mamie was baffled by her. The puzzling thing to Mamie, as well as to McCully, was that Mary was not affected by the island itself in that passionate way that so moved them. Mary admired her island flowers, but Mamie could imagine her mother loving flowers in Eugene, Oregon, or Cuernavaca, Mexico. McCully’s pious great-great-grandfather had made the long, dangerous journey of one hundred and sixty-four days around the Horn in order to convert the natives in Hilo. He had stayed on, less pious, but far happier, to buy up all of the land and to plant coffee and sugar, and to bring more heathens from Japan and China to work in his fields and to pray in his churches. McCully was as much a part of the island as the trees in the grove
or the coconut on Mitsuya’s cake. But Mary never came under the spell.

Perhaps she was a bit frightened of it, the spell, and could not have succumbed to it even had she wanted to. Perhaps it had to do with the air, the unusual feel of the air, so thick with fragrance and moisture that it was almost tangible. It was the same temperature as the body, so there seemed to be no difference, no separation, between body and atmosphere. You were the air. That is what Mamie and McCully felt, and Orval and Sharlagne and Hiroshi and Claire. But Mary wore gloves when she gardened and, strangest of all, shoes. In fact, she wore shoes all of the time. Mary clearly did not feel that she and the air were one.

Mamie knew that something had happened to her mother many years before, and she was willing to take into consideration the unhappy circumstances of her mother’s early life, but, try as she might, what information she did possess was not ever enough to justify her mother’s apartness, or as she would have put it, that Mary was not that finest thing, “an island girl.”

She knew that as a child in Oklahoma, Mary and her younger sister, Alice, had been left orphans when their mother died of pneumonia and their father ran off to Alaska to work on a fishing boat. They were adopted by a Miss Henrietta, a kindly, elderly spinster and Christian Scientist, who lived in the biggest house in town. She had raised the two girls, sent them to school, and accompanied them on holidays to Santa Fe and Pasadena. When she died unexpectedly, leaving her estate to the Christian Science church, Mary was stranded once again, this time at Stanford University. Alice, who was still in high school, took the first train east to New York City and a job as a hat model.

It was at Stanford that Mary met McCully. He was studying
agriculture in preparation for the time when he would manage the plantation at Waimea as his father had done before him. To the surprise of his family, who did not ever imagine that he would return with a dry, quiet mainland girl to an island where there were as many beautiful, riotous girls as beautiful, riotous flowers, he brought Mary home as his bride. As far as Mamie could discover, she went right to work in the garden.

Mamie did not blame Mary for her resistance to the tropics, but she was depressed by it. It seemed so much against her mother’s best interests. She talked these things over with her friend, Lily Shields, who lived at Koloa in the Big House. Like Mamie, Lily was under the spell. As she was also extremely interested in her own mother, the two girls had formed The Mothers Club. They held secret meetings at the Big House. These meetings would have seemed dangerously morbid to the casual observer, especially as Lily’s mother had died mysteriously a few years before. The girls locked themselves in the dead woman’s perfumed, humid rooms for days and talked to each other in a big seventeenth-century gilt mirror propped against a lacquer screen looted from the Forbidden City. They innocently adorned themselves in the most priceless Chinese bridal robes, once belonging to the Dowager Empress, Tsu Hsi; wrapped Fortuny silks and brocades around their thin necks and waists; flung strands of Burmese cabochon rubies over their soft shoulders; and pretended to smoke the black, oily pellets of opium they found in the toe of one of Lily’s mother’s handmade satin shoes.

They held these meetings regularly, and all in all, it was probably a very good thing for both girls. Once, Lily’s father, Dr. Shields, had come into the room looking for a Japanese sword and found the girls side by side on the bed in crepe negligées and big black pearls. He politely apologized for
disturbing them and excused himself. He, too, was under the spell.

Mamie went into the kitchen through the back screen door. Mitsuya was icing the cake and looked up when Mamie idly opened the door of the refrigerator. Mamie seemed sad, and Mitsuya looked at her again, squinting.

“You going to da pahty bumbye? For Lyle?”

Mamie nodded. She could hear McCully and Mary arguing on the ocean veranda. McCully’s voice was calm and low, but her mother sounded very angry. Mamie could only remember their having argued once before. It was the summer when Mary’s sister, Alice, arrived from New York City with a house party of eight people in the hope of spending the month of July with them. McCully, who was not a rich man by their city standards, had offered them employment cutting cane after the second week, and the glamorous Alice had furiously called him a feudal dictator, mixing it all up historically. Hadn’t there been a Constitution for just this thing? She’d thought the camp cunning and sweet at first, but now, she was very sorry to say, she saw the advantages of Communism, a statement that thrilled her with its boldness. To McCully’s astonishment, she even stamped her foot. They left on a yacht that very afternoon to visit Dick Stratton at the Parker Ranch. Mary had been embarrassed. Mamie had been fascinated. One of Alice’s guests, an interior decorator from London, left Mamie two books,
South Wind
and
My Dog Tulip
. They were certainly not to be found at the Waimea Library and she had been very flattered to be given them. She read both books the night they sailed.

Mary was shouting at McCully, “Are you sure? Are you sure of this?”

Before Mamie had time to close the refrigerator door, Mary ran into the kitchen and shouted angrily, “Do you know what you are talking about?”—mindless of Mitsuya, gaping, with the cake balanced precariously on the palm of one trembling hand; mindless of Claire who had wandered into the kitchen with Jimmy slung around her neck; mindless of Mamie’s terror.

Mamie’s face flushed bright red. She could not open her mouth. Of course, she thought, it is not my mouth to open.

Mary forced herself to speak more calmly. “Do you understand the consequences of your accusation? He is gone, you know. Why would he want to come back now?”

McCully came into the kitchen. He stood behind his wife. Mary reached around Mamie and it seemed as if she were going to strike her, but she only closed the refrigerator door with great force. Claire’s eyes dilated with fascination. Mamie was unable to look at her mother, which made her seem guilty and ashamed.

“Why would you want him back now?” McCully asked quietly.

“Why? Why?” Mary turned to him.

Mamie burst into tears. She covered her face with her hands.

“I don’t think you quite understand what has happened. You can’t have, Mary,” said McCully.

“What did happen?” asked Claire. Jimmy was hypnotized by the coconut cake, still held in Mitsuya’s weakening, outstretched hand.

“Did you ever—” Mary began to say.

Luckily for all of them, something in McCully’s face warned Mary that it would be dangerous for her to continue, that
she could not win this contest. “Oh!” she said and left the kitchen.

McCully awkwardly put his arm around Mamie. She was sobbing. Mitsuya, gums bobbing, edged the cake shakily onto the counter. His prey lost from view, Jimmy’s eyes flickered sleepily with the kitchen heat. He yawned with a high, sliding whine.

“So what happened?” Claire asked plaintively, but no one could tell her.

The grief that overcame Mamie that night smothered her and soaked into her. She never spoke of it to anyone, and she bore the loss of her friend, Hiroshi, and, it might be said, the loss of her mother, without complaint. It was her nature to be fair. But she suffered greatly nonetheless, perhaps even because of her fair-mindedness, and it was days before she could speak to her mother without shaking, so strong was her sense of the injustice done her, and it was years before she ever even approached the banyan tree. The pain held a certain interest for her because it was, to her surprise, an actual physical pain in her heart. She had read about such things, maidens who felt sharp pangs in their hearts, but she had not, until then, understood that hearts really could break.

Mamie did not blame her mother for not believing her. Mamie did not even blame Hiroshi. She had not been frightened by his putting his hand once on her vagina. She had known that she had to tell her father because she had known that what Hiroshi had done to her was wrong and dangerous. What she had not known was that the almost unbearable weight of grief and regret brought on by her assumption of responsibility would nearly crush her.

Surprisingly, Claire was kind to her, and that first night and for many nights after, Claire and Jimmy slept in Mamie’s bed with her. They would lie back together on the small pillow and gaze out the big screened window into the palm grove to watch the stars drift through the dipping branches. Offshore, the small, dry island of Ni‘ihau floated like an abandoned war junk. One yellow moonlit night, Claire enticed Mamie into the grove, and they read Archie and Veronica comic books by the light of the moon while Jimmy ecstatically killed toads. He did not eat them, perhaps knowing that they were poisonous, and the girls let him wander off in his sinuous, stealthy way. Now and then they would hear the pop of an exploding toad as he tossed it up like a ball and caught it in his little dry teeth. They were not squeamish or sentimental girls.

Toward the end of the summer, when Mamie was sleeping calmly enough for Claire to remain in her own bed, there suddenly arrived at the plantation the two stepchildren of their Aunt Alice. They were Courtney, who was twelve, and Brooke, who was eight, and they had been sent straight from camp in New England to the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It is possible that they did not even stop one night at home in New York, so eager was their stepmother to have nothing to do with them.

They were, understandably, in a daze. McCully was in the fields all day, and Mary, as she pointed out, had more than enough to do now that she was without a head gardener, so the stepcousins were left to Mamie and Claire. They were sweet-tempered and malleable. Claire and Mamie were amazed at the girls’ timidity and their fear of adventure, such as stealing and eating the grave-offerings from the Chinese cemetery. Claire and Mamie realized that the girls had been ordered
and shunted about all of their lives. They were astonished when they made this discovery, and felt sorry for them and did not take advantage of them.