To Paradise (34 page)

How could I have remained there, after that? I packed a bag and took a bus south, to Manhattan, where I checked in to the Plaza, the only hotel whose name I knew. I sent a telegram to my uncle William, who managed my father’s estate, asking him to wire me money and not tell my mother; he sent one back saying he would, but he wouldn’t be able to keep this from her forever, and he hoped I was being smart.

I spent the days walking. Every morning, I went to a diner near Carnegie Hall for breakfast, where I could have fried eggs and potatoes and bacon and coffee for far less than I’d have to pay at the hotel, and then I walked north or south or east or west. I had a tweed coat, expensive and handsome but not quite warm enough, and as I walked, I breathed on my hands, and when I could bear the cold no longer, I would find a diner or coffee shop and go inside to have a hot chocolate and get warm.

My identity changed with the neighborhood I found myself in. In midtown, they thought I might be black, but in Harlem, they knew I wasn’t. I was spoken to in Spanish and Portuguese and Italian and even Hindi, and when I answered, “I’m Hawaiian,” I would invariably be told that they or their brother or cousin had been there after the war, and asked what I was doing up here, so far from home, when I could be on the beach with a pretty little hula girl. I never had an answer to these questions, but they didn’t expect one—it was all they knew to ask, but no one wanted to hear what I had to say.

On my eighth day, though—Uncle William had sent me a telegram that morning saying that my mother had been alerted by the bursar’s office that I had left school, and was instructing him to send me a ticket home, which would be waiting for me that evening—I was walking back to the hotel from Washington Square Park, where
I’d gone to see the arch. It was very cold that afternoon, whipping wind, and the city seemed to mirror my mood, which was gray and bleak.

I had walked north on Broadway, and as I turned east on Central Park South, I almost stumbled into a beggar. I had seen him before; he was a squat, dark, beaten man, always on this corner, in a much too long black coat—he held before him with both hands an old-fashioned felt bowler, the kind that had been fashionable thirty years ago, and which he shook as people passed. “Spare a dime, sir?” he would call. “Spare a nickel?”

I was passing him, about to murmur my regrets, when he saw me, and as he did, he suddenly snapped, soldierlike, to his full height, before bowing at the waist. I heard him gasp. “Your Highness,” he said, to the pavement.

My first reaction was shame. I looked around me, but no one was staring at us; no one had seen.

He gazed up at me, his eyes wet. I could see now that he was one of mine, one of us: His face was one I knew in shape and color and form, if not in its specifics. “Prince Kawika,” he said, his voice slurry with emotion and alcohol; I could smell it on him. “I knew your father,” he said, “I knew your father.” And then he shook his hat at me. “Please, Your Highness,” he said, “please give something to one of your subjects, so far from home.”

There was nothing sly in his voice, only beseechment. Only later, back in my room, would I wonder
why
he was so far from home, how he had ended up begging on a street corner in New York, and if he had really known my father—it was possible, after all. For true royalists, which this man seemed to be, statehood was an insult, a loss of hope. “Please, Your Highness, I’m very hungry.” His hat was dark, and I could see only a few coins inside, sliding around in the bowl of shiny felt.

I took out my wallet and hurriedly gave him everything I had—about forty dollars, I thought—and then I hurried on, moving away from his cries of thanks. I was Prince Woogawooga of the Ooga-ooga, except, instead of running after someone, I was running from him, as if he would pursue me, this man who called himself my
subject. He was hungry, and he would open his mouth, and when he closed his jaws, I would be within them, my head being chewed to bits, waiting for the play to be over.

I went home; I enrolled in the University of Hawai
‘
i, which the graduates of my school only attended if they were poor or had poor grades. Upon graduating, I was given a job at what had been my father’s company, except it wasn’t actually a company, insofar as it produced nothing, sold nothing, and bought nothing—it was a collection of my family’s remaining real-estate holdings and investments, and aside from Uncle William, who was a lawyer, and an accountant, there was a clerk and a secretary.

Initially, I showed up every day at eight. But within a few months, it became clear that my presence was superfluous. My title was “estate manager,” but there was nothing to manage. The trust was conservative, and a few times a year, some stocks would be bought or sold and the dividends reinvested. A rabbity Chinese man was contracted to gather rents from the various residential properties and, if the renters refused to or were unable to pay, a Samoan, enormous and terrifying, was sent on a follow-up visit. The trust’s goals were deliberately unambitious, because ambition entailed risk, and after the resolution of my father’s debts, the focus was on maintenance, on providing enough for my mother and me to live on, and, if they planned correctly, my great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren as well.

Once it became clear that the firm would totter on whether I was there or not, I began taking long breaks. The offices were downtown in a beautiful old Spanish-style building, and I would leave at eleven, before the lunch crowds, and walk the few blocks to Chinatown. I drew a salary, but I lived modestly—I would go to a restaurant that served a bowl of pork-and-shrimp wonton min for a quarter, and after paying I would wander the streets, past the hawkers arranging their pyramids of starfruit and rambutan, past the apothecaries with their bins of shriveled roots and dried seeds, their rows of glass jars filled with a cloudy liquid and curls of herbs and different
unidentifiable animal paws, shorn of their fur. Nothing ever changed in Hawai
‘
i; it was as if every day I walked onto a stage set, and every morning, long before I woke, it was unfurled, swept clean, and readied for me to pass through it again.

Of course I was lonely. Some of the boys who I had been able to pretend were my friends in high school came back to town as well, but they were busy with graduate school or their new jobs, and much of my time was spent as it had been when I was a child: in my bedroom at my mother’s house, or in the sunroom watching television on the little black-and-white set I had bought with some of my salary. On weekends, I went to watch the fishermen at Waim
ā
nalo or Kaimana; I went to the movies. I turned twenty-two, and then twenty-three.

One day when I was twenty-four, I was driving back to town. It was late in the evening. By this time, I had stopped going to work entirely, phasing myself out of the life of the office until I simply never returned. No one seemed upset or even surprised by this; it was my money, after all, and it continued to come to me in the form of a paycheck, every two weeks.

I was driving through Kailua, which was at the time a very small town, with none of the stores and restaurants it would have a decade later, when I passed a bus stop. Two times a month, I drove around the entire island, one week going east, the next, west. It was a way to pass the time, and I would sit on the beach near the stone church in L
ā
‘
ie, where my father had once handed out money, and look at the sea. The bus stop was beneath a streetlamp, one of the few on the road, and seated at its bench was a young woman. I was driving slow enough so that I could see she had dark hair pulled back from her face, and wore a printed-orange cotton skirt—in the light, she appeared to be glowing. She sat very straight, her legs together, her hands folded in her lap, her purse strap looped over one wrist.

I don’t know why I didn’t just drive on, but I didn’t. I turned around in the road, which was deserted, and returned to her.

“Hello,” I said, when I was close to her, and she looked back at me.

“Hello,” she said.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“I’m waiting for the bus to town,” she said.

“The bus doesn’t run this late,” I said, and for the first time, she looked worried.

“Oh, no,” she said. “I have to get back to the dorm or they’ll lock the doors.”

“I can drop you off,” I offered, and she hesitated, looking up and down the dark, empty road. “You can sit in the back seat,” I added.

At this she nodded, and smiled. “Thank you,” she said, “I’d be very grateful.”

She sat the same way as she had at the bus stop: erect and poised, her eyes straight ahead. I studied her in the rearview mirror. “I’m a student at the university,” she finally said, as if by way of an offering.

“What year are you?” I asked.

“A junior,” she said, “but I’m only here for the year.”

She was on an exchange program, she said; the next year she would return to Minneapolis, and graduate from her college there. Her name was Alice.

I began seeing her. She lived in one of the girls’ dormitories, Frear Hall, and I would wait in the lobby until she came down. Every Wednesday, she took weaving lessons in Kailua with an old Hawaiian lady, for which she always wore a modest, knee-length skirt and her hair pulled back. Otherwise, she wore jeans and let her hair loose. I could tell from its texture and the shape of her nose that she wasn’t entirely haole, but I didn’t understand what she actually was. “I’m Spanish,” she said, but I knew from my time on the mainland that “Spanish” could sometimes mean Mexican, or Puerto Rican, or something else altogether. She talked about her studies, and how she had come here because she wanted to be somewhere warm for once in her life, but had grown to love it, about how she wanted to go back home and become a teacher, and about how she missed her mother (her father was dead) and little brother. She talked about how she wanted a life full of adventure, about how living in Hawai
‘
i was a little like living abroad, and someday, she would live in China, and India, and, when the war was over, Thailand, too. We talked about what was happening in Vietnam, and about the election, and
about music; in each case, she had more to say than I did. Sometimes she asked about my life, but there wasn’t much to tell. And yet she seemed to like me well enough; she was very gentle with me, and when I made mistakes, fumbling for too long with her clothes, she placed my hands on her shoulders and unbuttoned her dress herself.

We had sex in her room one night when her roommate was out. She had to tell me what to do, and how, and at first I was embarrassed, and then I felt nothing at all. Afterward, I thought about the experience: It had been neither pleasant nor unpleasant, but I was glad I had done it and glad it was over. I felt I had crossed some important threshold, one that marked me as an adult even as my daily life belied it. If it had been less enjoyable than I had assumed it would be, it had also been easier, and we met for a few times more, and it made me feel like my life was moving forward.

Now comes the part you know, Kawika, which is also the hard part.

Of course Alice knew who my family was, but it seemed she hadn’t realized its full implications until she had returned home. By the time the letter arrived at the firm, I had had the first of my seizures. Initially, I assumed they were headaches: The world would quiet and flatten, and shifting fields of color—of the kind we used to see together after we stared at the sun and then shut our eyes—would float across my field of vision. When I came to, it might be a minute later or an hour, and then I would be woozy and disoriented. After I was diagnosed, I lost my driver’s license; from there on, Matthew would have to drive me, and if Matthew was unavailable, my mother.

So I cannot quite remember the exact sequence of events that brought you home to me. I know your grandmother told you that your mother had effectively abandoned you, writing to Uncle William and telling him that someone had to come retrieve you because she was leaving Minneapolis again, this time to study in Japan, and her own mother was in no position to take care of a baby. Later, Uncle William told me that, while Alice had contacted the firm,
it was your grandmother who, upon receiving evidence that you were in fact a Bingham, offered your mother money. Alice, your mother, countered with a different sum, one that Uncle William warned your grandmother would necessitate selling the house in H
ā
na. “Do it,” she told him, and she didn’t need to explain why: You would be the heir of the family, and there was no guarantee that I would ever produce another. She had to take the opportunity she was presented. A month later, Uncle William flew to Minnesota and had the papers countersigned; when he returned, it was with you. It was an echo of my mother’s own alleged origins, though neither of us ever acknowledged that.

I cannot say which version was true. I
can
say she had never told me—not that she was pregnant, not that she had given birth. She disappeared from my life after the end of the 1967 school year. I do know that she is indeed dead—she married at some point in the early seventies, to a man she met while a student in Kobe; they were killed in a boating accident in ’74. But as for why neither she nor her family ever made contact with you—I can only imagine it was because the terms of arrangement she made with your grandmother prohibited it.

You cannot be bitter about this, Kawika—not bitter toward your grandmother, or toward Alice. One wanted you very badly, and the other hadn’t planned on becoming a mother.

I can also say that you are and always were the joy of my life, that having you made me feel I might have something to contribute after all. You were still a baby when I got you, and in those years when you were learning to roll over, and sit, and walk, and talk, my mother and I were in harmony—because of you. Sometimes we would sit on the floor in the sunroom, watching you kick your legs and babble, and as we laughed or clapped at your efforts, we would sometimes catch each other’s eye, and it was as if we were not mother and son but husband and wife, and you were our child.