The Immigrants

by Howard Fast

  “Is it a Chablis?” Clair asked.

  “You cannot name it, because it’s all changed with growing here. It’s California wine, and there’s no other wine like it, and when it’s good it’s magnificent. You don’t taste the fruit and you don’t taste the sour; you taste an angelic brew. Ah, the hell with it! What am I talking about with what these bastards have done!”

  “We’d like to buy,” Clair said.

  “So if you’ll make a price,” Jake said, “we’ll talk about it.”

  “All right. There are nine hundred acres. Even in this rotten world of Prohibition, the land’s worth twenty dollars an acre, and that’s eighteen thousand dollars. With the two buildings, the barn, and the rest of it, I got to have fifty thousand dollars.”

  Clair and Jake looked at each other in silence.

  “How big is the mortgage?” Jake asked finally.

  “Nine thousand.”

  “Why didn’t you increase it if you needed money so badly?”

  “Because they won’t give me a nickel more, and that’s the truth like all else I told you.”

  “I’ll be equally frank with you,” Jake said. “We want this place. For days, we’ve talked about nothing else. My wife has about nine thousand dollars. That’s insurance money that came to her after her father’s death. I have almost four thousand, my army pay and some savings. If we can get a mortgage for the rest–”

  “Give it up, my lad. You’ll get no mortgage here or in San Francisco. The bastards have put a curse on us.”

  “You wouldn’t take a mortgage yourself?” Clair asked.

  “I like you both, kids, but I can’t play the fool. You can’t come into a place like this penniless. My trucks are tired, tired. If you want to raise cattle, you must buy the stock. I got a cow and a few chickens, that’s all. If you’re going to raise grapes for the market, you must crate them. That takes money.”

  “If I give you a check for five hundred dollars,” Jake said, “will you hold the place for thirty days?”

  “You been a soldier, eh?” said Gallagher. “You go through hell over there, but back here it makes for a kind of innocence. Who the hell is going to want this white elephant? You’re the first boarders we had and the first buyers. Keep your money, and if you can get the price, come back. We’ll be here.”

  Christopher Noel’s home on the island of Oahu in Hawaii was called by the people who inhabited it a bungalow, but its twenty-two rooms sprawled over half an acre of ground, and it was quite the most magnificent house May Ling had ever entered. The bamboo posts, the hardwood floors, the reed blinds gave her the feeling that at long last she had touched a part of the Orient. She and Dan were housed in a two-bedroom suite with a connecting sitting room and a private porch that overlooked the beach. There, through the palm trees, she could see the magnificent breakers rolling in and listen to the endless thunder of the surf. There was a swing seat on the porch, and sitting there with Dan’s huge arm around her, she experienced a degree of happiness and contentment that was almost terrifying. The first evening they were there, a wild black storm swept out of the Pacific. Silent, entranced with the spectacle, they watched it approach and then huddled together on the swing seat as the skies opened and a torrent of rain fell. In a few minutes, it was over, and the setting sun burst through a ragged tracery of clouds.

  “I think, Danny,” she said to him, “that as long as I live I will remember this as the most perfect moment.”

  But there had been many perfect moments. For five days on the ship, they had been together morning, noon, and night. Their isolation had been complete; for the only person on the ship, aside from themselves, who spoke more than a few words of English was the Captain, Caleb Winton, a crusty new Englander whom they saw only at mealtime. Dan taught May Ling to play Jack-o-diamonds, a favorite game on the wharf among the fishermen. They played for ten cents a point, and he carefully contrived to lose–with total transparency–so that at the end May Ling’s winnings amounted to over a hundred dollars. At other times, as they stretched out on deck chairs, she read to him–something he never had enough of. When she was employed at the public library, she had conducted Saturday afternoon story readings for children, and she realized now that Dan listened to her with the same rapt and total intensity that the children had displayed. She read well, allowing herself to be swept up into the story, and he loved to watch her, to see her dark eyes flash with emotion and passion.

  Knowing that there would be no books aboard ship, she had put together a small package, very carefully and thoughtfully. She had selected My Antonia, Willa Cather’s story of an immigrant girl’s experience on the frontier, Winesburg, Ohio, by Sherwood Anderson–a book that caused hours of discussion with Dan–and Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street, which had been a national best-seller for months and which was certainly the most talked about book of the year. Dan loved it, and demanded to know why other writers didn’t write the truth the same way. “It’s not the whole truth,” she countered, “and he writes rather awkwardly, I think.” “What difference does that make? It’s what he says.” There was more discussion, but always in the end he bent to her point of view. “You shouldn’t give in to me all the time,” she told him severely. “You have a fine mind. Stick to your opinions.” But at the same time, she realized that she was for him all that his own life lacked; she completed him; she took away his sense of emptiness, of ignorance, of blundering like a bull through a world he never really looked at or understood while in pursuit of the simple twin goals of money and power.

  She also selected and brought with her two books of poems, The Collected Poems of John Masefield and The Collected Poems of Algernon Charles Swinburne. Neither were to her own taste, but she felt that Dan would enjoy them. She was right about Masefield. He was enchanted by Dauber and by the Salt Water Poems and Ballads, and when he heard “Sea Fever” for the first time, he exploded with excitement. “That’s it, that’s it! How can he say it, and I’d never be able to say it myself in a hundred years?” But Swinburne simply annoyed and provoked him. “That poor bastard!” he exclaimed. “He needs a solid week in a cathouse with a couple of girls I knew in the Tenderloin, and maybe that would set him straight.” To which May Ling replied that it was certainly the most original criticism of Swinburne she had ever heard.

  For those five days, May Ling accepted the dream and the illusion. Dan was hers; it would never be otherwise; and now in Hawaii, she was being treated with courtesy, attention, and respect–and no one appeared to be in the slightest way disturbed by the fact that she was Chinese. This had never happened before.

  The first day after his arrival at the Noel estate, Dan had a long meeting with Christopher Noel, his cousin and business associate Ralph Noel, and the largest real-estate developer in the Islands, Jerry Kamilee, who was part Hawaiian, part American, and part Portuguese. The Hawaiian part of Kamilee predominated; he was a huge man, taller and heavier even than Dan, brown-skinned, an odd contrast to the slender and somewhat delicate Noels. Dan already knew that nothing large or important in the Islands happened without the consent or participation of the Noels. Now he learned that Kamilee was equally important to his project, and it was Kamilee who constantly brought the discussion back to the ships. Could he build the ships, and could he resist the lure of Atlantic passage? There’s where the money was. Californians went to Europe. How did he intend to bring them to Hawaii? If they were to put several million dollars of their own money into a hotel and golf links to go with it, how would they fill the rooms? The Islands were just that, islands. Who in his circle of friends had ever been here? Even Dan’s own wife–as he had explained–refused to make the trip.

  Dan argued and talked and persuaded, brought out his plans and projections, spelled out the wonders of the floating pleasure palaces he intended to create–and at the end felt that he had at least reached them, even if he was yet to convince them. Finally, Christopher Noel put an end to the discussion. “Enough for today, Dan. Tonight we’re having a l
uau in your honor. You’ll meet the people in the Islands who count, and you’ll eat some good food and drink some good booze. Your idiotic Volstead Act has not taken here yet, and we intend to see to it that it never does. So rest up, swim, enjoy, and for heaven’s sake, don’t blunt your appetite. And by the way,” he added, “you’ll bring your secretary–if you wish?”

  “I’d like to,” Dan replied, offhand. “She’s a good, hardworking girl.”

  “Fine. Let me mention that it’s a side of you I like, a Chinese secretary in San Francisco.”

  “Thanks,” Dan said. He was wise enough not to ask what a luau was.

  After he had left, Kamilee grinned and said, “Secretary my ass.”

  “Whatever she is, she’s a beauty.”

  May Ling was on the verandah. She had found Stevenson, Jack London, and Mark Twain in the Noel library, and now she was gleaning what she could find on Hawaii.

  “We’re both of us invited to a looway, looie, or something that they’re holding in our honor tonight.”

  “Your honor, my love.”

  “What in hell is it?”

  “Luau. It’s a feast. It began with the old Hawaiians, who worshiped their Gods and celebrated important things with food. Overeating. Very sensible, I think. In the olden days, they only allowed men to take part in the proceedings. Men cooked the food, and no woman was allowed to touch it. Taboo. The women feasted separately. But then one day in eighteen something or other, the king sashayed over to the women’s feast–I’m sure the food was better there–and that put an end to the separateness.”

  “How on earth do you know all that?”

  “It’s an old Chinese trick, knowing about things. And, Danny, while you were meeting with the big muckamucks, I went into the kitchen for a pot of tea. They have four cooks in the kitchen–would you believe it?–four cooks and five helpers, nine servants just in the kitchen, and one of them is an old Chinese gentleman from Shanghai, and when he found out that I speak Shanghainese, he practically wept, because it seems that all the Chinese in this place, or almost all anyway, are Cantonese, and the poor dear has to speak Pidgin–”

  “Take a breath.” He picked her up and kissed her.

  “No. Put me down and listen, because this is interesting. This whole luau thing revolves around roast pig. Do you remember when I read you Lamb’s ‘Dissertation on Roast Pig’? I kept thinking about it. They were dressing five enormous pigs there in the kitchen, not to mention fifty other mysterious things they were preparing and a great basin of mush they call poi, which tastes just hideous but it’s a great favorite with the Hawaiians and also with the haoles–”

  “What are haoles?”

  “You and me. No, just you. White folk who live here. Anyway, you’ll never believe how they cook the pigs. That’s why I thought of Charles Lamb. They dig a big hole in the ground. It’s called an imu. Then they fill it with rocks and burn a fire on it. The fire has been burning for hours now, and the rocks become red hot. Then they rub the pigs all over with salt and stuff them with hot rocks and put them in wire baskets and lay them on more hot rocks, and then cover the whole thing with leaves and dirt–can you imagine?–and this dear old Chinese cook invited us to come and watch. They begin the cooking in about fifteen minutes, so can we please go and watch, Danny, please?”

  “Sure we can go.”

  “Why are you laughing at me?”

  “Because I love you.”

  May Ling’s gown was a gift from her father, a black sheath of heavy Chinese silk, embroidered in gold thread with a twisting, descending line of royal dragons. She had gathered her hair at the top of her head, holding it in place with two gold combs Dan had given her, a great black pile that sat like a basalt crown. The gown was slit from knee to ankle. She wore black stockings, and satin slippers embroidered with the same dragon motif. She came out of her bedroom, stood in front of Dan, and asked him whether he approved.

  “Jesus Christ,” he whispered. “Why don’t you ever dress like that for me?”

  “Why don’t you take me to more luaus? On the other hand, this may be inappropriate for a secretary, and perhaps I should go back and let down my hair and change into a simple black cotton.”

  “Like hell. Come here.”

  “Gently. Don’t ruin my hair.”

  Cocktails were being served on the large verandah that covered the whole side of the Noel house that faced away from the sea. The verandah was thirty feet deep, covered with a thatched roof on bamboo posts, and lit brightly with Japanese lanterns. If Prohibition intended to implement itself in Hawaii, there was no evidence of it here. Champagne flowed like water, and two long bars for the dispensing of hard liquor and various fruit punches were set up on either end of the verandah. At least a hundred men and women in evening dress were already assembled when Dan and May Ling made their entrance from within the bungalow.

  Dan noticed with appreciation how conversation stopped and how men and women alike turned to stare at May Ling as they entered. Indeed, they made a striking couple, Dan in his white evening jacket, towering over most of the people, his curly black hair just touched with gray at the temples, and, at his side, the slender, exquisite Chinese woman, her face seemingly carved from ivory, the gold thread dragons on her gown glittering in the lantern light, as if they were alive. If Christopher Noel and his cousin had only given her a passing glance when they first met, they made up for it now, and Dan found himself in a circle of admiring men who had eyes only for May Ling and tight-lipped women who had suddenly become conscious of their weight. There were endless introductions that neither of them could remember, and then May Ling was borne away, Ralph Noel on one side of her and Jerry Kamilee on the other.

  Waiters were circulating with trays of hors d’oeuvres which Kamilee called pupu, urging May Ling to try the cho cho and the dim sum, saying, “You’ve never tasted food like this before.”

  “But I have.” She smiled. “Those dumplings you call dim sum are Chinese, you know.”

  “So they are. Of course. But I forget that you are Chinese.”

  “A beautiful woman has no nationality,” Ralph Noel said.

  “You see,” Kamilee told her, “there is something we taught the haoles–to rid themselves of their racism. Well, tried to teach them at any rate. They’re slow learners. But you know, Miss–what does one say?”

  “It would be so confusing. I’ll try to explain. In China, the family name comes first, but in America many families reverse it in the American way. My family name is Wo, which means nest. But my given name is May Ling. Oh, it’s so complicated. Call me May Ling.”

  “But Dan introduced you as May Ling,” Noel said. “I surely thought it was Miss Ling.”

  “Just May Ling. No Miss.”

  “Ah, then, May Ling,” Kamilee said, “I was pointing out that this is not the mainland. There is no place on earth where a Chinese can live with as much right and equality as here.”

  “But there is one place.”

  “Where?”

  “China,” May Ling said gently.

  “Touché,” said Noel. “Enough of such talk. Have some of these.”

  “Oh, won ton.”

  “We have no secrets from you.”

  “But so many,” May Ling assured him. “This is the loveliest, strangest place I have ever been. The only place. I was born in San Francisco. This is the first time I have ever been away.”

  “What a shame! And who keeps you prisoner? That ugly brute you work for?”

  “That ugly brute is a handsome and kind and good man.”

  “Is he now? And do you know that he spent most of today trying to talk us out of a million dollars and the best waterfront land on Oahu?”

  “Then you must give it to him,” she said primly.

  They burst into laughter and now the group around her increased. When it was time for the luau, Dan had to work his way through a crowd to reach her.

  Seated next to her at one of the tables on the lawn, the air full of
the smell of roasting pork, a great platter of roasted pork in front of them, so tender that it was crumbling, flanked with sweet potatoes and little bundles of meat in green ti leaves, Dan leaned over to her and whispered, “Do you know what Ralph Noel asked me?”

  “No.”

  “Could he take you to dinner in Honolulu tomorrow?”

  “And what did you tell him?”

  “To ask you. It’s your affair.”

  “And if I go with him?”

  “I’ll break every bone in your sweet body.”

  “Would you?” she replied, trying to keep herself from remembering all the nights he had spent with his wife, away from her. “Well, I’ll not have my bones broken by some ugly brute.”

  “Ugly brute?”

  “Some people think of you that way,” she said, smiling sweetly.

  On the third day, Noel’s lawyers drew up a letter of understanding that would guarantee Dan a million dollars of initial investment plus thirty-one acres of the best land on Waikiki Beach–the beginning of the process that would turn lovely Waikiki Beach into a sprawling vacation slumland. But that lay in the distant future, and Dan’s cables to Mark Levy and to Thomas Seldon spoke only of his immediate triumph.

  Dan rented a small sloop, and with May Ling set out to sail among the islands. For eight days, they lived on the boat, built fires on sandy, isolated beaches, cooked the fish they caught, wandered in paradise, watched sunsets of indescribable beauty, and swam naked in the warm tropical water. The world disappeared, and never for a moment did they regret its passing. Sprawled on his stomach on the hot sand, watching May Ling, her body as slender and lithe as the first time he had looked at her nakedness, he acknowledged himself as the most fortunate man on earth. Jean faded from his consciousness, and the memory of how easily he melted at the sight of her immaculate beauty became simply testimony of his own childishness. It was over, and on the way back, running before an easy wind in sight of Oahu, he said to May Ling, “It’s over, you know.”

  “I know, Danny,” she agreed sadly.