The Whiteness of Bones (8 page)

He rode Claire’s small rusty bike through the camp. The bridge was on the other side of Waimea, near the old Russian fort. The Waimea River, wide and deep at its mouth, was the natural harbor where Captain Cook had dropped anchor and stepped ashore for the first time to greet the curious, unsuspecting Hawaiians.

In the camp, dirt was swirling in circles, and loose pieces of tin and palm branches flew in the air. Through the siren sound, there was the groaning and snapping sound of trees splitting and roofs and fences ripping away. A fishing net was blown across his path, and damp laundry fell heavily on the flattened hibiscus bushes and broke the blossoms from their stems. The animals left behind, chickens and goats and cats
and dogs, herded together in terror and raced in a pack through the abandoned camp.

Then McCully heard another sound through the siren and the baying trees and the baying animals. It was the water, in its first surge backward to the edge of the planet, leaving in its perverse wake thousands of flapping, startled fish; banks of red coral suddenly burdened with wiggling, gasping eels; old outriggers encrusted with barnacles like Sherry’s mother’s shell casket; and one white enamel washing machine.

McCully stopped the bike by the seawall. He could see the cement bridge. He could see, for the first time, the deep clay bottom of the river. He turned away from the land, to the roaring horizon. He could see his destruction.

Although the garden was badly uprooted, the house and the banyan tree stood firm. The ocean veranda was washed out to sea. The inside of the house was damaged, but there was nothing that could not be repaired or replaced. Mary set to work at once, and McCully’s relatives were impressed by her strength. What had once seemed to some of them as cold detachment now stood her in good stead, and some even understood that it had stood her in good stead all of her life.

Mamie, who insisted on remaining with Daldo and Benjie for the three days and nights that the search parties looked for survivors, was with them when they found Hiroshi’s body. It was entangled in a net of seaweed and driftwood trapped under the bridge. McCully’s body was never found.

With the one ancient calabash that had somehow escaped the deadly pull of the ocean, and with Claire, whom Mamie convinced Mary to let go one year early, Mamie left Waimea for school in Honolulu. Both girls were very happy there.

II

Aunt Alice, or Alysse (accent on the second syllable) as she now preferred to be called, decided to give a small dinner party the night of Mamie’s arrival in New York. She always did things on the spur of the moment. It was one of her own favorite character traits. She thought it made her seem headstrong and that this made her seem young.

It didn’t occur to her that Mamie might be tired after her trip from Los Angeles. The truth was, Alysse was regretting just a tiny bit her invitation to her niece. After all, she had not seen her in nine years, since McCully’s funeral. Because of her mild regret, she could think of no reason to delay Mamie’s debut. The dinner was, in fact, a little test.

She had the idea from her second husband, who had once said, “I don’t know if I should, but I judge people by their picnics.” It was a trial that worked well for Alysse. You might have ordered the saturation bombing of small, neutral countries or made your fortune selling missiles to an African government or, on a less dramatic level, you might enjoy having sexual intercourse with persons no longer living, but if you could hold your own at one of Alysse’s dinners, and by that is not
meant anything so elementary as knowing which fork to use, you became a dear friend.

Mamie, a little pale, was shown into the red library. Alysse was on the telephone. At first glance, she seemed like an alert, blond bunny. She was wearing a pink angora sweatsuit. A big pink ribbon held back her pale curls. She had not as much hair as she might have liked to have, and the loops of the ribbons stood up on her head like rabbit ears. She gestured excitedly to Mamie and pantomimed her boredom and impatience with the speaker, but she did not end her conversation. There was a strong smell of orange peel and clove in the lacquered room.

The maid, Lydia, stood impatiently in the doorway, holding Mamie’s bag. Alysse, pointing and waving exaggeratedly, finally made them understand that Lydia was to take Mamie to the guest room.

She said, with a sudden shriek, “He’s the most eligible married man in New York,” and Mamie turned back because she thought that Alysse was speaking to her, but Alysse was standing at the window with the telephone, looking down at Park Avenue, laughing.

Mamie followed Lydia. Her room was at the end of a narrow, winding hall. The curtains were drawn even though the sky was still blue and full of light. Mamie sat on one of the beds. Lydia began to unpack her bag. The curtains and chair material and bed coverings were a blue hydrangea-printed chintz. There were horticultural watercolors on the chintz-papered walls, each gilt frame hanging from a moiré ribbon attached to the ceiling molding with a big bow. There were Chinese pots of pale blue hyacinths in the empty fireplace and their thin smell, too sweet, hurt Mamie’s head.

“I’ll do that,” she said to Lydia. Lydia looked at her in satisfaction, as if Mamie had committed her first mistake. “I
prefer to,” Mamie said, smiling with embarrassment, and Lydia shrugged.

There was a bottle of mineral water, for aware French women, it said on the label, on a silver tray on a table. There were little hard pillows in the shape of cats and pug dogs in the corners of the chintz-covered chairs. There was a blue-and-white plaid mohair blanket on the arm of a chair.

“Do you need anything, miss?” Lydia asked.

“No. No, thank you.”

Lydia refolded the mohair blanket and turned around one of the cat pillows. Mamie wondered nervously whether she was supposed to tip her, but before she could reach for her handbag, Lydia was gone.

She looked more closely at the watercolors. They were very beautiful—grapes and yellow pears, signed Withers. Mamie was bending close to the watercolors, studying them, when Alysse rushed into the room and took Mamie forcefully into her arms.

“I am
so
glad to see you at last. So happy. So pleased.” She was not so tall as Mamie so their sudden hug was awkward.

Mamie was aware that she was being studied very carefully, quite in the same way she had been examining Mrs. Withers’s
Duchesse d’Angoulême
pear. I’m not as good as the pear, she thought.

“You’re seated next to Mr. Zimmerman tonight,” Alysse said. She beamed. “
Lucky
Mr. Zimmerman.” She thinks me good enough, at least, for Mr. Zimmerman, Mamie thought.

Alysse whirled around and around, looking for something. She stopped when she saw Mamie’s suitcase.

“I have all the clothes in the world, all of them, although I’m not quite so tall as you, even without those shoes,” Alysse said. She was looking at Mamie’s feet.

Mamie looked down at her zebra-skin high heels. Her mind
seemed not to be working with any speed. It had not really been working in its accustomed way for the past few months. Her aunt was moving too fast for her. Even the maid had been moving too fast. “My shoes?”

“You can, and must, borrow anything of mine you need. Coming straight from college, you must have nothing but kilts and cashmeres.” Alysse was pulling clothes out of Mamie’s open suitcase.

“They wear jeans now.”

“Of course they do.” Alysse said. “I wear jeans.”

She threw Mamie’s clothes across the bed.

“There are two other bags downstairs. The doorman said he’d send them up. I’d feel much better if you went through those, too.”

Alysse turned slowly to take another look at her niece. Mamie was smiling. Her face, which had looked tired when she arrived, was a little flushed and her eyes were clearer.

“Well,” Alysse said, shutting the suitcase. “I can see you’ll do just fine.” She came closer to Mamie and she, too, smiled. She had a big, beautiful smile. “You’re not at all like Mary, are you?”

“Mother is smaller than I am.”

“Yes,” said Alysse, looking at her through shrewd blue eyes. She snapped on a pink-shaded lamp on a little table. “My guests arrive at eight-thirty and we dine at nine-thirty. The way they do in Europe.”

“I like the pears so much and the grapes,” Mamie said quickly.

“The pears?” Alysse looked around.

“The watercolors. On the wall. They are very beautiful.”

“Are they? Willy Russell-Davis gave me those years ago.”

“Uncle Bill?”

“You can’t remember him.”

“He was with you on that big boat when you came to Waimea. None of us had ever seen a yacht before. Claire still tells the story of Uncle Bill and the moray eel.”

“He wasn’t your uncle. Your mother made that up.” Alysse, clearly not interested in any tall tales about old lovers and eels, went to the wall to look closely at the lovely watercolors, possibly for the first time. “He always did have wonderful taste. His awful wife gave everything to the Museum when he died. Just to spite me, I’m sure. These
are
good, aren’t they?”

She took one of the paintings from its moiré ribbon and tilted it to catch the light. Distracted by this find in her very own guest room, she wandered out, leaving Mamie standing there. She took the watercolors with her.

Mamie had to fight up to the last minute to wear her own dress, a pale lime green voile of Hungarian embroidery, rather than the dress that Alysse wanted her to wear, a fire engine red taffeta with big black pom-poms that made Mamie look like a rather intimidated Carmen. Of Mamie’s own dress, Alysse said dismissively, “at least it’s
eau de Nil
.”

During dinner, Mamie won a wide smile from her aunt when she made Mr. Zimmerman, an investment banker, laugh out loud during the first course, a
Roulade au Fromage
. Mr. Zimmerman was very interested in what he called the “real Hawai‘i,” his experience being limited to the Kahala Hilton and the nightly Korean call girl. He had an idea that anyone whose family had lived there for generations was rich and aristocratic, and Mamie, who had never thought her family to be either, amused him with a description of going to see her Aunt Emma.

As a McDougal on her mother’s side, Aunt Emma was the
possessor of as revered a local name as it was possible to inherit. Aunt Emma lived in an enormous, wood Victorian house in such disrepair that it was considered dangerous to walk on the second-story floorboards in 1920. She refused to leave the house and downtown Honolulu had been built around her six filthy, entangled acres. She told Mamie and Claire that when she died the land would belong to them. Mamie and Claire were not fond of visiting Aunt Emma.

“She is very boring and she smells bad,” Mamie said to Mr. Zimmerman. “We’re given weak tea and stale Ritz crackers.”

Aunt Emma confined herself to one crowded room, and it was not unusual to see a large black wharf rat (the docks were at the end of Ward Avenue) trot boldly past on tiptoe, hugging the moldings more out of custom than fear.

“Aunt Emma always watches the rat calmly and says, ‘Those rats first landed here with the ancient Tahitians who sailed due north in their huge double-outrigger canoes, as big as longhouses, searching for new islands …’ Once she begins one of her lessons in Hawaiiana, it is awfully hard to stop her. Claire once said that the rats in Aunt Emma’s room must have been very, very old.”

After dinner, Mamie was left on the sofa with a beautiful red-haired woman. Alysse whispered to Mamie that the woman, Dodo Hennessey de Santiago, had been the most famous model of her day and Mamie was surprised to learn that “of her day” meant only a year earlier. She had not realized that Dodo was six months pregnant until Dodo said, “I’ve never had tits before and it’s the only thing that makes this bearable.” Even though she was wearing a tightly cut dress, Mamie could barely make out a swelling stomach through the Lycra sheath.

Mamie asked Dodo all of the polite questions as she passed her a demitasse and cream and English rock sugar.

“Is this your first child?”