Daughter of Moloka'i

by Alan Brennert

  “I’m honored, Ralph,” Rachel said, genuinely touched. But she couldn’t resist adding, “And when do you and Carol plan on getting married?”

  Everyone laughed, no one harder than Ralph.

  Rachel later told Ruth it had been one of the grandest days of her life.

  On the day of Rachel’s departure, Ruth helped her makuahine aboard the S.S. Lurline, tipping the porters and making sure Rachel was properly settled in her tiny cabin. They walked the length of the ship together, Hawaiian music playing over the loudspeaker system, until fifteen minutes before the scheduled departure time of four o’clock, when the ship’s horn sounded two blasts—final call for all visitors. Ruth hugged Rachel, kissed her, and said, “Thank you. For giving me life, and health, and freedom.”

  “Thank you. Meeting you has been a gift I could never have imagined five years ago.”

  “Neither could I. Well, I did think about it when I was fourteen.”

  “You did?”

  Ruth grinned. “I used to fantasize about meeting you and demanding to know, Why did you have to make me so damn tall?”

  They shared a laugh, but Ruth added soberly, “But now I know why.”

  “Yes? And why is that?”

  Ruth said, “Because I had some pretty tall shoes to fill.”

  Speechless, Rachel could only smile happily as Ruth kissed her again, then turned and walked down the gangway to the pier. Rachel watched her go and silently gave thanks—to God, to her 'aumākua, to whoever had allowed her to live long enough to be in this place today. Even if she never saw Ruth again, she could someday tell Kenji that his little akachan had grown up to be a woman to make them both proud.

  Chapter 16

  1951

  As the twin-engine Beechcraft C-45 approached the eighteen-hundred-foot airstrip on the tip of the Kalaupapa peninsula, the pilot, Happy Cockett, turned to his only passenger, Rachel Utagawa, and advised, “Might be a little bumpy on landing. Slight crosswind, and this strip is still sod on sand. The territory keeps saying they’ll pave it someday, but for now, hang on to your teeth.”

  “It’s not my teeth I’m worried about,” Rachel joked. This was her first trip back to Kalaupapa since her “parole” four years ago. The chartered Cessna that had taken off from this same airport, bound for her new life in Honolulu, had been smooth and exhilarating; today she watched as the grassy airstrip loomed larger in the cockpit window while also appearing alarmingly short. Crosswinds buffeted the plane like a Hawaiian musician pounding an ipu drum, but the landing gear touched down with only a small bounce.

  Happy helped Rachel out onto the low-set wing of the aircraft, steadying her as she walked nervously across the wing and onto a stepstool that deposited her on familiar ground. “I hope your friend feels better,” he said, returning to the plane to gather his main cargo: one of two daily airmail deliveries to Kalaupapa that had been inaugurated the previous year.

  Rachel felt the sea spray on her face as the surf crashed against the rocky coastline, and like that, she was a child again, body-surfing the swells rolling into the white sands of Papaloa Beach; then a teenager, standing strong on a surfboard riding the surging crest of a wave; and years later, sitting on the sand with Kenji, his arm around her, as they watched Hōku and Setsu playfully dart in between fingers of foam lapping up the beach.

  “Mrs. Utagawa? I’m Dr. Kam, we spoke on the phone?”

  She turned to face the settlement’s young, sober-looking resident physician. “Yes, of course, mahalo for calling me. How is she?”

  “Not well. I’m afraid her condition continues to deteriorate.”

  They walked toward a makeshift parking lot. In the distance, white-tailed tropicbirds soared high atop the pali, their cries lost to the wind.

  “You said on the phone she fell about six weeks ago?” Rachel asked as they got into a car.

  “Coming down the front steps of the convent. Fractured her left hip. That limp of hers didn’t help. How did she get it?”

  “It was … an accident,” Rachel said. “A long time ago.”

  They drove onto the narrow road that followed the coastline into town. “When I examined Sister Catherine after her fall,” Dr. Kam said, “I suspected that she had a fairly advanced case of osteoporosis. I prescribed three to four months’ bed rest, to allow the hip to heal.”

  “I don’t think Catherine has had more than three days’ rest since she arrived at Kalaupapa,” Rachel said.

  “She’s not the most docile patient in the world. After one month she tried to get out of bed when no one was looking. She fell again, worsening the fracture. She’s been on a slow decline ever since.”

  “What does that mean, exactly?”

  “At seventy-nine, her body doesn’t have the reserves of strength to cope with two traumatic injuries. She picked up an infection, and her immune system is so weak that even penicillin hasn’t been able to knock it out.”

  Rachel felt herself trembling. Quietly she asked, “Is she dying?”

  Dr. Kam hesitated before replying, “I’m sorry, but yes.”

  “How much longer?”

  “Not that long.”

  Rachel blinked back tears. “Is she awake? Lucid?”

  “Both, on and off. I wouldn’t have arranged for the air transport if I didn’t think there was some purpose in your coming.” He glanced at Rachel. “The other sisters say you two were very close when you were here.”

  “She’s … my best friend,” Rachel said, and her voice broke as she steeled herself for what lay ahead.

  * * *

  Sister Catherine lay in bed, eyes shut, the pain in her hip having abated for the moment—she had received a morphine shot that morning. She had resisted taking the morphine at first, a reflexive reaction borne out of her mother’s addiction to the opioid laudanum. But then her years of nursing told her that her sisters would not be offering her morphine unless her prognosis was terminal—and with that, a weight was lifted from her. She finally allowed herself to think of her own pain first, because there was no longer anything she could do to ease anyone else’s.

  But letting go of life was not the same as embracing death. Though she still wondered what might be awaiting her on the other side, she told herself that whatever fate God had chosen for her would be her just due.

  “Catherine?”

  Catherine opened her eyes. She knew that voice as well as her own.

  Rachel was standing next to her bed, and suddenly all of Catherine’s fatigue, the drowsiness from the morphine, faded in a rush of joy.

  “Oh, Rachel!” She reached out her hands to clasp her friend’s.

  Rachel took them, trying to hide her shock at how thin Catherine had become. Once her arms had lifted children and scrubbed floors at the Bishop Home for Girls, where Rachel had spent her childhood; now they felt as light, as fragile, as crepe paper stretched over bone. But the sister’s eyes were bright and happy.

  “It’s good to see you, Catherine.”

  “I’m so glad you’re here, Rachel. And I can’t thank you enough for sending me those photographs of Ruth and her family, all so happy and healthy. I remember my last night with her at Kapi'olani Home—I wanted that night to never end, but I knew it had to, because the next day was the start of Ruth’s life of freedom.”

  Rachel slid a chair closer to the bed and sat down. “She’s everything I could have hoped for in a daughter, Catherine. Everything we could have hoped for. And her children—I still can’t believe I’m a tūtū, a grandmother!”

  “We were both so young when we came here.” With a resurgence of her youthful excitement she added, “Oh, Rachel, you should see Bishop Home today! There are no more children there, only young women. There are so few children being sent to Kalaupapa at all these days, thanks to the sulfa drugs. What would Mother Marianne say if she could see this?”

  “Amen,” Rachel answered, and Catherine laughed.

  The laughter turned into a cough, and the cough became a struggle to
catch her breath. Rachel was on the verge of calling a nurse when the sister found her voice: “Are you—going back to California this year?”

  Rachel nodded. “Next month.” Her friend’s erratic breathing continued to alarm her. “Catherine, are you all right?”

  “Yes, I’m just … tired,” she said. “I tire very easily.” Indeed, the rush of happiness that had buoyed her upon seeing Rachel now was ebbing as quickly as the years had ebbed away. “How long will you be here, Rachel?”

  “As long as you need me to be.”

  Catherine smiled faintly. “Thank you.” Her eyes closed.

  Rachel remained by her side. When a nursing sister came later with Catherine’s dinner—little of which she ate—she brought food for Rachel as well. Catherine chatted as she picked at her meal, reminiscing about Rachel’s auntie, Haleola, and her father, Henry. “Such good people. Such good souls.”

  Catherine soon nodded off again. When Dr. Kam made his rounds, Rachel asked if she could spend the night in the empty bed beside Catherine’s. “Of course,” he said. “From what the sisters tell me, you’re 'ohana.”

  She thanked him and, exhausted by the trip and the strain of seeing Catherine in this state, fell into a dead sleep by ten o’clock.

  In the middle of the night she was awakened by:

  “Rachel?”

  She opened her eyes and saw Catherine gazing at her.

  “Thank you,” the sister said softly. “For being here.”

  “Where else would I be?”

  “Do you remember the last time we were together like this?”

  “Yes.” Rachel didn’t elaborate.

  But Catherine did. “That night we spent in the dispensary,” she said. “The day I … jumped into the sea. Tried to … kill myself.”

  She had not spoken these words aloud for many years, and hearing them now, they did not seem as frightening as she imagined they would.

  “You told me God would understand my pain and forgive me, as He forgave my parents their own pain and … sins.”

  “I still believe that,” Rachel said.

  Catherine hesitated, then confided, “Two nights ago I saw my father. Sitting in that chair you were sitting in today.”

  “Were you happy to see him?”

  Meekly Catherine admitted, “Honestly? It scared the hell out of me.”

  Rachel laughed. “Well—did he seem happy?”

  “Yes. Oddly enough, he did. He was smiling at me. Happy to see me.”

  Rachel asked, “Do unforgiven souls smile, Sister?”

  A thin crescent of a smile lit Catherine’s face.

  “No,” she conceded, “I suppose they don’t.”

  As her eyes shut, she said tenderly, “I love you, Rachel.”

  “I love you too, Catherine.”

  Rachel lay there for an hour, listening to Catherine’s shallow breaths like sighs in the darkness, before she finally drifted into a restless sleep.

  The next morning Catherine continued to recall bygone days at Kalaupapa, but she was awake and alert for a shorter period of time. Her pain increased, and the sisters upped the dosage of her morphine. The following day she spoke even less, before falling into a deep slumber.

  The day after that she did not awaken at all.

  Rachel kept vigil for another three days, holding Catherine’s hand, talking to her in hopes that she could hear; but Catherine never regained consciousness. A priest administered the last rites. Dr. Kam or the nurses checked her vitals frequently, but other than this brief activity, there was a calm surrounding Catherine that was like a mouo, one of those lulls on the ocean when Rachel would float in the water without a wave in sight. Rachel prayed Catherine was feeling that kind of peace. When she finally stopped breathing it was almost unnoticeable, the passage between life and death barely a flutter; all that separated them was the single beat of a heart.

  Rachel held Catherine’s lifeless hand and stayed there for some time, weeping for her friend, her last connection to her youth at Kalaupapa.

  Two days later, the Sisters of St. Francis held a Requiem Mass in St. Elizabeth’s Convent for their cherished colleague:

  May Christ receive thee who has called thee, and may the Angels lead thee into Abraham’s bosom … Eternal rest grant unto her, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon her.

  Sister Mary Catherine Voorhies’s casket was taken to the Catholic cemetery, where according to her wishes she was laid to rest alongside the scores of girls and young women who had blossomed under her care only to die after a few short seasons. In a long life marked by grace, compassion, dedication, grief, and courage, Catherine had loved them all.

  * * *

  A month later, as Rachel’s plane landed in San Francisco, she resolved to keep her mood sunny and make no mention of the death of her old friend. She wanted to enjoy this trip, not have people feeling sorry for her. And in fact Ruth greeted her in such high spirits that Rachel couldn’t help having her own uplifted. In the car, Ruth revealed why she was in such a good mood:

  “I have a job!”

  Rachel was startled. “I didn’t know you were thinking of getting one.”

  “I hadn’t, not for a while,” Ruth said. “After the war I was just so relieved that life was normal again, I was content to be a mother and a homemaker—content to have a home, and a normal life.”

  “And now?”

  “I got over it.” Ruth laughed. “I woke up one day realizing my entire life consisted of cooking, cleaning, packing lunches, doing laundry, getting the kids up in the morning, and getting them to bed at night.”

  Rachel would have given anything to have lived a life like that, but she heard Ruth’s frustration and nodded her understanding.

  “I’d see ads on TV—all these happy white women wearing pearls and pleated skirts as they scrubbed down the kitchen—and I’d think, well damn it, if these hajukin hausfraus can do it, so can I. Except whenever I’d go to see Helen Russell, she was as bored and restless as I was and we’d sit drinking vodka gimlets at eleven A.M., wondering why we weren’t happy too.

  “Then I’d think about how it was before the war, when I was helping Frank run the diner, and I realized: I was happy then. I had the kids, I had Frank, but I also had something new to challenge me each day. Normal, I decided, is highly overrated. Is it normal to drink vodka gimlets at eleven A.M.?”

  “No,” Rachel agreed. “So where are you working?”

  “Bill’s Shanghai Restaurant. I have Okāsan to thank for it. She’s friends with Mr. Dobashi of Dobashi Market, who was putting up a new building on Jackson Street. He told her he’d asked Bill Dair, a leader in the Chinese community and the owner of a Chinese grocery, if he’d be interested in opening up a restaurant in the building.”

  “I was wondering who the ‘Bill’ in ‘Bill’s Shanghai Restaurant’ was.”

  “A very nice man—he even gave me time off while you’re in town. So before anyone else could submit a résumé, I applied for a job. I’m doing what I did at Frank’s Diner—bookkeeping, managing inventory. I work from nine A.M. to three P.M. and have time to get home and cook dinner too.”

  “I take it Frank approved?”

  “His exact words were ‘Good, we can use the extra money.’” She laughed. “Always practical.”

  When they arrived home, Donnie and Peggy—now thirteen and eleven, respectively—came rocketing out the front door and into Rachel’s arms, filling her with renewed wonder that she was holding mo'opuna—grandchildren—of her very own.

  “I’m happy to see you too,” she said. “Look how tall you are! Peggy, you’re almost as tall as your brother!”

  “She gets that from me—you and me,” Ruth said. “But unlike me, she’s very coordinated and athletic. She plays point guard in girls’ basketball.”

  Donnie was not to be outdone: “I won the class swim meet this year!”

  “Really? Well, you’re going to be another Duke Kahanamoku!”

  “Who’s that?�
�

  “He’s an Olympic swimming champion, and he’s Hawaiian, like me.”

  Frank and Etsuko greeted Rachel with more hugs. Frank carried her bags upstairs and as soon as she was settled sharing Etsuko’s room, Rachel was shanghaied into a game of Parcheesi with the keiki. Throughout the game they chattered away nonstop—Peggy about sports, Donnie about his favorite TV program, Space Patrol—and Rachel happily listened to every word.

  For dinner the family was joined by Ralph—now a cub reporter for the Oakland Tribune—his wife, Carol, and their two-year-old son, John Taizo Watanabe, or “John T.” as his father sometimes called him. Even Rachel was touched by this quiet tribute to a man she had never met.

  Frank cooked a delicious dinner of chicken and dumplings and Ruth baked, in honor of Rachel’s visit, a pineapple upside-down cake.

  “So you don’t live in Honolulu anymore?” Ralph asked Rachel.

  “No, I’m living with my sister, Sarah, on Maui now,” Rachel said. “I would never have imagined this happening—Sarah and I were always at each other’s throats as children. When I tracked her down in Lahaina, she fainted dead away because she thought I’d died long ago. But she welcomed me into her home and invited me to share it with her.”

  “That was lovely of her,” Carol said, smiling.

  “Yes. And my brother Ben also lives on Maui, in Hana. When I left Kalaupapa I was afraid my 'ohana—my family—was either gone or wouldn’t want to see me because I had leprosy. I never dreamed I’d be reunited with my sister and brother, or get to meet my nieces and nephews.” She looked around the table and smiled. “Or all of you. My California 'ohana.”

  Her eyes misted over, as did those of a few others at the table.

  After dinner the adults shared coffee in the living room, chatted about John T. and Ralph’s new job with the Tribune. “I read your story about the Korean peace talks,” Frank said. “You think they’re going anywhere?”