by Leslie Ford
Her engagement to Swede hadn’t lasted very long. It was about three months, in fact, from the night they met at my house, that Mrs. Cather called on me and told me it was broken. She didn’t say why, except that Swede had acted very badly. She also said Mary was being very difficult. It had been too sudden to last, anyway, she thought, and she’d been opposed to it from the beginning—which I think was not quite correct. She was genuinely disturbed about Mary, there was no doubt of that, though why again she didn’t say. Chiefly what she said was she was determined their paths should not cross again. If I ever heard from Swede’s aunt next door that Swede was coming back, she wanted me to let her know so she could take Mary to New York until he left. She didn’t want them ever to meet again. Swede’s aunt, on the other hand, a very rigid Washington cave-dweller of the old and almost extinct species, maintained a tight-lipped silence about the whole thing, including Swede, even when I asked her how and where he was.
So it was a peculiarly ironic full turn of the wheel for Swede Ellicott to be here in Honolulu when Mary had just returned from the Mainland, their paths converging at the crossroads of the Pacific. Whether they were going to do more than converge and actually cross was in a sense in my hands just then . . . and I’d been thinking about it, not too happily, ever since I’d taken down the phone that afternoon and heard Swede’s voice at the other end. All three of them had avoided mentioning Mary Cather, but I wasn’t sure that now they’d got around to Washington and Swede’s aunt they wouldn’t get around to her.
“Washington’s fine,” I said. I went on for a moment about the ghastly winter and about Swede’s aunt. Then I stopped, aware that neither he nor either of the other two was hearing a word I was saying. None of them had moved, but their attention was fixed, intense and concentrated, out of the open window. There was a curious light in Swede’s eyes that neither of the others had. All three of them were staring at a girl coming quickly along, out there, through a barrage of quite uninhibited public admiration.
I glanced back at Tommy Dawson, expecting to hear a really heartfelt “Jeepers!” this time. The girl didn’t have a hibiscus in her hair, but she had a carnation lei around her neck and she was certainly the type. She had dark, almond-shaped eyes and high, full cheekbones and her lips were very red, and she came through the uniformed stag line that opened and formed again behind her with the smiling assurance of a veteran, slim and lithe and quite unabashed. But Tommy Dawson was silent, his lips tight. Dave Boyer’s eyes burned with a sharp antagonism that he looked down abruptly to conceal.
Swede Ellicott took one foot down slowly from the sofa, then the other, and got up, not looking at either of them.
“Well,” he said, “I’ve got to shove.” He put on his cap and pulled it down in back. “Nice seeing you, Mrs. Latham. I’ll give you a call. So long. So long, you guys.”
“So long,” Tommy said. It was clipped off so short that Swede hesitated an instant. He turned and made his way deliberately across the lounge and toward the main entrance and the girl with the carnation lei.
It wasn’t hard to see where she was. Being a woman in a practically womanless hotel lobby she was where everybody was looking. Even the men waiting with duffel bags and blue and khaki canvas gripsacks at the elevator brightened up and looked as long as she was alone. As she spotted Swede Ellicott all heads turned in unison to look at him. It was a curious pantomime, and so was her meeting with Swede. It was obviously prearranged and she was perfectly aware of Tommy Dawson and Dave Boyer in our corner. She glanced over and turned back, laughing up at Swede. He didn’t look around, not even when they got into a taxi outside and passed directly by the open window where we were sitting, the silence between the two men about as grim as silence can be.
I was silent too. Any idea I’d had of mentioning Mary Cather I decided to put quietly away until I knew what was going on. Where Swede Ellicott’s interest was at the moment was all too clear, and something I would never for an instant have thought of. The fact that Tommy and Dave were taking it as they did was a relief to me. I’d have hated to think I was shocked at anything they would take for granted.
When Dave Boyer spoke his voice was abrupt and bitter, and he had to make an effort to keep it steady.
“I told you to lay off.”
“Nuts,” Tommy said. “She’s got him hooked. He hasn’t got a prayer—not a whisper. I wish to——”
He turned to look at Dave and stopped.
“Steady!” he said quietly. “Come on—take it easy, boy. Come on, David—snap!”
Dave Boyer was quite white and his hands holding his pipe were shaking.
“She hasn’t got him,” he whispered. “It’s not going to happen—not again. She’s not going to marry Swede.”
His voice rose. “By God I’ll kill her first.”
“—Easy, boy.”
I don’t suppose I actually repeated the words “marry Swede,” but they were certainly framed on my lips. I couldn’t believe I’d heard them. It wasn’t possible. Swede Ellicott must be out of his mind to think of marrying a girl . . . I hesitated. I knew nothing about her, only that regardless of everything else she was of an alien race. I looked blankly at the two boys.
Tommy Dawson glanced around us. The strangled intensity of Dave Boyer’s voice had carrying power. Only the mynah birds and the traffic and the general din of too many people in too small a space had kept what he’d said from being a public declaration.
“—I wouldn’t,” he said quietly. “It isn’t Corinne’s fault. She’d never have got to first base by herself. It’s that she-buzzard in Washington.”
It hardly seemed to me the way to speak of my next door neighbor, though I did have a sneaking feeling there was something to be said for the point of view. But inasmuch as Swede had at least politely referred to her as the ancient and honorable his aunt, I couldn’t see what she had to do with the situation this far out in the Pacific. She would certainly be the last person in the world to approve of the girl with the carnation lei.
Dave Boyer looked at him. “You’re right,” he said slowly. “You’re right.”
Tommy Dawson pulled in his long legs and got up. “I guess I was right in more ways than one,” he said. “I guess it’s time for us to go home too. There’s a bus pretty soon. Come on, David.”
He put out a sunburned freckled hand.
“That’s the only thing we’ve ever held against you, lady,” he said. “We were four happy Joes—calabash brothers, they call ’em here—till you brought the little Cather into our lives. And the little Cather’s ma. It was a lousy deal, lady. Now one of us is dead on her account, and the big Swede . . .”
He tried to grin.
“Well, the big Swede wouldn’t have been a pushover for this babe you just saw if your friend Mrs. Cather hadn’t pulled a fast one the minute he got his back turned. That’s how she got poor old Ben. We’re damned if she’s going to marry the Swede too. So . . . the big Swede’s on your head—do what you can, will you?”
He dropped my hand and turned to pick up his cap. “Come on, David. Let’s shove. Let’s get the hell out. Let’s get the hell back to Saipan. . . .”
I sat there for several minutes simply staring after them, upset and shaken. Ben Farrell, the fourth of what they’d called the Organization when they came to batch next door to me, was dead, and he’d been married to the half-Japanese girl. And it wasn’t Swede’s aunt they were calling a she-buzzard. It was Alice Cather . . . the little Cather’s ma. The whole thing was incredible. Above all, how either Mary or her mother could be responsible for either Ben’s death or his marriage, was more than I could conceive. Or how they could call Alice Cather what they had, for that matter. If Alice was a she-buzzard she was also a genius at camouflage. I didn’t know her intimately, but I did know her well enough to know that much. Between her saying Swede had behaved very badly and Tommy’s obviously sincere conviction that both she and Mary had behaved worse, I was stranded on an unhappy and bewildering
middle ground. I was very glad indeed that I hadn’t told Tommy or Dave—or Swede—that the two of them, Mary and her mother, were there in Honolulu, or that as soon as they left I was going to the Cathers’ to have dinner and spend the night.
3
I KEPT TRYING TO FIGURE SOME SENSE OUT of it as I waited for the major who was to come and take me to the Cathers’ house. They lived up the Pali road. To any one who thinks, as I did, of the Hawaiian Islands as a vast semitropical beach with girls in grass skirts dotting sunlit pineapple and cane fields, it’s a shock to find mountains everywhere. Honolulu spills into the sea out of a broad lee-side valley below folding hills, like the end of a great cornucopia made by two wild volcanic ranges. The whole windward side of the Island is a vast precipice above a narrow seaside plain and is called the pali, which means precipice. What is called the Pali is a sheer staggering drop of twelve hundred feet where there’s a narrow pass over the Koolu Range up Nuuanu Avenue from the swarming city. Because it’s the most dramatic place on the Island and I hadn’t been up there yet and we were early, my escort and I passed the Cathers’ entrance on the winding tropical road and went on up to see it.
I don’t bring this in because I’m writing a guide for the post-war tourist, but for two other reasons. The first is that when we got back into the car out of the tearing wind and sat a moment looking out over the narrow plain below us, it seemed to me there was an awful lot of deserted beach and rock-piled lonely coastline that was very vulnerable from the sea. And I’d been wondering about that.
“What’s to keep a submarine from landing people along there at night?” I asked. I knew we’d landed people from submarines ourselves. It wasn’t even necessary to surface to do it—they could be launched up from a hundred feet below if necessary.
The major looked at me a little oddly for just an instant. It was the sort of look I recognized from Washington, that’s followed by a more or less polite evasion or some slightly sententious humor. But this was not being taken humorously, and I was aware suddenly that however far from the forward area the Islands might at present be, they were a lot farther forward than Washington.
“May I take that back?” I asked quickly.
“Not at all. We used to have barbed wire along the beaches. There’s not much point in the Japs sending people in now. We still have patrols.”
He switched the motor on and turned the car back toward the Cathers’, and we went down in a rather sober silence.
The second reason I mention the Pali is that if I hadn’t been lashed to bits by the trade wind whipping across the platform up there, I wouldn’t have heard the redbird from the lanai outside Alice Cather’s sitting room. I suppose the view of the windward side of the Island, with its rocky steeps and the narrow plain sloping down in the evening light to an indigo sea, was both magnificent and enchanting, but I was such a battered wreck trying to keep my skirt, my hair and the plumeria lei the major had bestowed on me in their proper places that I wasn’t very appreciative.
The Cathers’ courtyard as we drove in was full of cars, most of them bearing star-studded plates on the bumper. A Japanese house man in a starched white coat took my bags from the car, and Alice Cather at the door gave me one look.
“You’ve been up to the Pali. Come with me, dear—you look awful.”
We went to the right along a passage away from the main quarters of the rambling house.
“I’ll wait for you here.”
She opened the door of her bedroom off a small sitting room that opened onto a lanai extending all around the house except at the entrance courtyard. “Your room’s over there, but it isn’t ready yet. You can get settled later.”
Where we came in, the house was one long low story. Here it was high above the slope of the hill, with a swimming pool below and gardens that ended abruptly in what looked like a minor pali itself before it rose up farther along, steep and heavily wooded, into a mountain against the solid cobalt sky. It was wild, rugged and silent, totally unrelated to the seething madhouse that surrounded the beach of Waikiki, which could have been a thousand miles away and in another country.
“It’s extraordinary, isn’t it?” I said.
Alice Cather turned and looked at me as if she’d forgotten I was there and was surprised to see me.
“Oh,” she said. “Yes. It is, isn’t it?”
She was standing with her fingertips resting on the redwood rail, slight and straight as an arrow, with gray eyes and light graying hair, exquisitely groomed, with delicate and what I think are called patrician features. Her manner was patrician certainly, gracious and charming with so firmly lacquered a surface that it was impossible to know what kind of a woman was actually inside it. Up to then I’d never been interested in finding out. I was, now, seeing her against her own background for the first time. And still being concerned with what Tommy Dawson had said with too much sincerity to brush lightly aside, I decided if he was right it was time I knew it.
“It’s quite extraordinary,” she repeated.
We turned to go back. There was a fireplace in the wall in front of us, and over it the portrait of a man. It was fairly modern and strikingly done. The man who had sat was striking too. He had large luminous dark eyes in a fine, sensitive face. He was lean to the point of thinness, and the way his dark hair clung to his skull, and the line of his long hands resting on the arm of his chair, gave him a peculiarly gentle and patient expression.
“That’s very nice,” I said. “Is it your husband?”
I stopped to look at it, and Alice Cather stopped too.
“No,” she said. “No. That isn’t my husband. It’s his brother.”
She laughed lightly.
“I don’t know why I said that. We let it go as my husband. Even Mary thinks it is. It was done when she was quite small, of course.”
“Were they twins?”
She shook her head.
“Just a strong family resemblance. Completely unlike in every other respect, I may say. But he’s dead.”
I thought for an instant she was going to add, “Fortunately,” but she didn’t. She was looking at it as if she hadn’t really seen it for a long time.
“—A strange family,” she said then. “Oh, God, how strange they are!”
It came out so suddenly, and with a sharp break as she drew her breath quickly in, that I was more than startled, as I think she was herself. She turned abruptly and went out on the lanai.
“I wish to God I’d never come back, Grace,” she said. She made a sharp movement with her head as if trying to shake something out of it.
“Forgive me—I don’t know what’s got into me lately. I’ve been like this for . . . weeks, it seems to me. Even in Washington. I didn’t want to come back, but Mary was so set on it. I kept thinking it was going to be the plane, but up there I didn’t have it. I lost it till we landed. Now it’s back and it’s worse.”
Her eyes moved restlessly over the side of the hills beyond the garden.
“If I were Hawaiian I’d know. They always know what’s going to happen. But I don’t. All I know is I feel as if something ghastly is just over my head. I can’t stand it, Grace . . . I’ll go jump over the Pali if it doesn’t stop. I think I’m going mad. I——”
She broke off abruptly, listening, and her face went slowly the color of dead ashes. She put her hand out and touched my arm.
“Grace,” she whispered. “What was that? Do you hear it?”
All I could hear was the liquid sliding note of a bird somewhere in the pale green of the kukui trees in the ravine. At home I would have said it was a redbird calling. I didn’t know what it would be in these fantastic hills.
“What is it, Grace?” she whispered again.
“It sounds like a cardinal to me,” I said.
She turned her head slowly. “Of course.” She gave a sort of broken laugh. “How absurd of me. I’m really losing my mind.”
Inside the door she stopped and looked at herself in the gilded mirror o
ver a large mat-covered sofa. The color was seeping back into her face and her eyes weren’t so almost colorlessly gray.
“I meant to tell you, my dear,” she said casually. “You have to be awfully careful about makeup out here. The air is so clear rouge stands out horribly. It makes one look hard. Let’s go in, shall we?”
She rested her arm lightly in mine. “It’s so nice you’re here.”
I wondered. My doubts, grave from the moment I’d stepped out of the transport plane, five thousand miles from home, onto the blistering surface of Hickam Field, and trod a minute section of over eleven miles of continuous concrete runway where Army and Navy air stations merge into a vast maelstrom at this crossroads of the world, were really serious now. Maybe Alice Cather was more Hawaiian than she thought, the shadowy primeval wilderness around her more potent than she knew. It was silent, now, the redbird’s note stilled in the evening woods. Maybe it was the threatening emanations from Tommy Dawson and Dave Boyer that she was feeling, I thought, and the perilous proximity of the man she wanted her daughter never to meet again. And so far as I was concerned, none of them ever would meet—I was determined about that. Tommy and Dave could take their rest and go back to Saipan, Swede Ellicott could marry the glamorous Corinne and regret at leisure, for all of me, and neither Mary Cather nor her mother need ever know how close those paths had come to crossing again. It was all too involved and unhappy. I didn’t want to be any part of it.
We came into the long room that opened out onto the lanai looking over the treetops down to the city sprawling at the edge of the Pacific. Alice Cather was superbly herself again, cool and assured and liquidly charming.
“Harry, my dear, this is the Grace Latham, Mary and I have told you so much about.”
