Honolulu Story

by Leslie Ford

  “I hope I didn’t disturb you when I pulled up the curtain?” she asked.

  “No, you didn’t,” I said. It was perfectly true, if truth mattered at a point when the knife could have cut my throat as easily and silently as it cut the curtain cord.

  “It was so close,” she said. “I thought we were getting Kona weather. They call it a sick wind, when it comes from the south. But it seems to have cleared.”

  She went out on the lanai and straightened a cushion in a long bamboo chair.

  “We usually breakfast just along outside the dining room, if you’d care to slip on something and join us. And listen, my dear—please don’t mention my prowler, will you? Harry’s so upright he’d be furious at me for not reporting the man to Colonel Saffron. I only mentioned it in case you woke up and were alarmed at all.”

  “I won’t say a word,” I said. “And I’ll take a shower and be with you in a minute.”

  When I got out there were floating veils of mist over the mountain clefts. Across the ravine a heavy rain was falling, but the Cathers’ terraced lawns and gardens were a pool of brilliant sunshine. As I came to the corner of the lanai where we’d stood last night, looking down on Honolulu and the sea and up to the dark ridges of the hills, I heard Alice’s voice.

  “—Insist, won’t you, Harry . . . really! I mean, I want her to stay here.”

  The three of them were there around a low breakfast table. Alice put down the silver coffee pot and smiled around at me.

  “We’re plotting against you, Grace darling. We’re not going to let you go back down to Waikiki. You’ve got to stay here with us. You’ll be so much more comfortable.”

  Prepared as I was, I still found it difficult to believe. I should have thought the one thing Alice Cather would want, as much as I wanted myself, was for me to get out and go down to Waikiki as fast as possible. I couldn’t imagine for the life of me why she’d want me to stay.

  “We’d be very pleased, indeed, if you would stay,” Harry Cather said. It was hardly insistent, but it was certainly very cordial.

  “It’s much better up here, Mrs. Latham,” Mary said. She was slathering half a Washington week’s ration of butter on a small golden corn muffin. “I can drive you any place you want to go. I don’t start my job with the Red Cross for a couple of weeks.”

  I shook my head.

  “Thanks, a lot,” I said. “But I’ve got to get back.”

  I was thinking about the man in my room, and the long gleaming knife. No fantastic tale Alice Cather could tell me made that any the less grim, remembering it. He might be gone for the moment, but I had no way of knowing whether he was gone for good or not.

  “No, darling—you’ve got to stay.”

  Harry Cather smiled and picked up his paper. “You might as well, Grace. When Alice makes up her mind . . .”

  He was interrupted by an abrupt bang and clatter from the inside of the house and a woman’s voice, high-pitched and decisive.

  “—Have they started leaving the house empty now?” it demanded. “Harry! Where are you?”

  The effect on the breakfast table on the lanai was extraordinary. Mary Cather’s spoon of orange-colored papaya stopped just in front of her open mouth, which stayed open. Alice’s coffee cup halted in mid-air, and the paper Harry Cather was opening remained stationary, for seconds. Then he closed it and laid it quietly down on the floor beside his chair, the expression on his face indescribable. I don’t think I’ve ever been conscious of three people’s hearts sinking so in unison. It wasn’t just dismay. It was a kind of hopelessness, nearly despair, that Alice Cather was the first to articulate.

  “Oh, no, Harry!”

  She put her coffee cup down, bent her head forward in her hand and closed her eyes.

  “Oh, Dad!” Mary looked across at her father. “Please!”

  Harry drew a deep breath, pushed back his chair and got up.

  “Just keep quiet, both of you. Don’t say anything at all.”

  He raised his voice. “We’re here, Norah!”

  As he started over to the door he turned back to me. “It’s my sister, Grace. She can be difficult at times.”

  I think I could have told both, seeing the woman coming through the dining room. She was tall and spare and rigid as a spinster in a primitive painting. She had her brother’s large dark eyes and high forehead but none of the mild kindliness that made him seem less gaunt and austere. Her hair was gray, her skin brown and weather-beaten and she had on a purple and white print dress that had seen far, far better days.

  “I hardly expect a welcome or what have you and what have you,” she said. There was a sharp overtone of martyrdom in her voice. “I always have to remind myself that I have a right in——”

  “We have a guest, Norah, if you don’t mind.” He stood aside as she came on out. “Mrs. Latham, my sister Mrs. Bronson.”

  Mrs. Bronson dismissed me with a curt nod.

  “So you’ve come back, Alice, now it’s safe and there’s no rationing over here to worry about.”

  She turned to her niece. “Well, Mary. You’ve certainly improved, in looks anyway. I thought you were going to get married. I thought that was what your mother took you to Washington for. What happened? You were engaged, weren’t you?”

  Mary had got to her feet, as awkward as an adolescent, and stood with her cheeks crimson. “I’m sorry, Aunt Norah. I was engaged, but I’m not now.”

  Mrs. Bronson dismissed that. “Well.—I’ll have Ku-mumato unpack my bags. I’m spending the night.”

  Alice Cather looked sharply at her husband, her face tense and quite pale.

  “I’m sorry, Norah.” Harry Cather’s voice was polite but very firm. “We’ve asked you to let us know when you’re coming over. It happens the guest room is occupied. Mrs. Latham here is staying with us. You’ll have to go to the hotel.”

  “My dear Harry,” his sister said sharply, “I assure you I’d prefer a hotel to staying where I’m not wanted. But there are no rooms. I phoned over——”

  “I’ll get you one, Norah—right now.”

  He strode into the house. His sister hesitated for a moment, and then, ignoring the three of us, began examining things with an air that must have been maddening.

  “I see you’ve put in a new rail and what have you.”

  “Termites,” Alice said.

  “We never used to have termites, and repairs are expensive.”

  Mother and daughter exchanged a quick glance. Two bright red spots burned in Mary’s cheeks, her eyes were hot and bright. Alice shook her head slightly.

  “If you have no objection, Alice, I’ll look around——”

  If I’ve ever seen living fear leap into anybody’s face it was in Alice Cather’s then. She was out of her chair in a flash.

  “I object intensely.”

  Mrs. Bronson stopped short, staring at her.

  “You looked it over less than a month ago. Nothing’s been done or changed since.”

  Alice Cather’s words came out as if she were biting them off in white-hot chunks.

  “We’re not going through that again. We’re not going to have another bill of complaints about the air-raid shelter—Harry paid for that out of his own pocket three years ago. The house may be part yours but it’s also part Harry’s, and he has a right to live here in peace. He doesn’t come and pry around yours because it’s part his, and you’re not going to pry around here.”

  Harry Cather, back on the lanai, looked a little startled, I thought, at her sudden vehemence.

  “—I have a room for you, Norah,” he said. “Kumumato’s put your bags in the car. He’ll take you down.”

  Mrs. Bronson, I saw, was not a woman easily put out.

  “I’m seeing the house before I go, Harry.”

  “That’s your privilege,” Harry Cather said shortly.

  Alice was on her feet again, her face white. “Norah is not going around the house this morning, Harry,” she said. “The beds aren’t made.
The kitchen isn’t in order. She can look it over tomorrow or the next day, but not this morning. Either this house is mine or it’s hers. If she goes around now, Harry, I’m leaving, and I’m not coming back. I mean what I’m saying. I’ve had all of this I’m going to take.”

  —He is still in the house, I thought. He is still in the house. The man in the jungle suit is still m the house. The man named Roy is still in the house. It was going around .and around in my head like a crazy jingle they’d sing in a kindergarten, over and over again. He was there, and Alice Cather was terrified for fear her husband and her sister would find him. Well, it was her business, I thought, not mine. I looked surreptitiously at my watch, very glad I was leaving. Nothing could have persuaded me to stay.

  Harry Cather stood looking blankly at his wife.

  “—I’m simply fed up, Harry.”

  “All right, if that’s the way you feel.”

  He turned to his sister. “You’ll have to come tomorrow, Norah. Alice is still tired from her trip.”

  If only men didn’t always bring that one out, I thought. Norah Bronson’s dark eyes appraised her sister-in-law for a long moment with a singular lack of sympathy.

  “I’ll be here tomorrow,” she said.

  Alice stood holding the back of the bamboo chair in front of her until the two of them had disappeared through the house. She moved then, not too steadily, and sat down. She rested her head on the back of the chair and closed her eyes.

  “Oh, that will! That stupid, stupid will!”

  She moved her head slowly from side to side.

  “—‘That my three children may live in peace and amity, each with the others.’ And all they’ve ever done is quarrel, quarrel, quarrel. It’s wicked.”

  We were silent for a moment.

  “Well,” Mary said practically, “she’s gone, now. Maybe she won’t come back. I wonder what on earth brought her so early in the——”

  For the third time Alice Cather started up from her chair. The color was draining out of her face. She took a quick step forward, hitting the side of the table. The dishes rattled sharply and a water goblet tipped over.

  “Norah!” she cried. “Norah!”

  She ran around the table into the house.

  Mary Cather looked at me wide-eyed.

  “For Heaven’s sake,” she said. She picked up the goblet and put a napkin down to sop up the water. “Everybody’s gone nuts, completely nuts. There must be a Kona wind.”

  She wrung the water out of the napkin and put it flat over the rail to dry.

  “What a family,” she said dismally. “That’s the trouble about the will. It left everything jointly to all three of them, Dad and Aunt Norah and Uncle Roy. Only we never mention Uncle Roy. He’s Kapu. He disgraced the family—married a Japanese house servant, I think it was. I don’t know all of it. He lives in Java, or somewhere out there. Mother was in love with him, once, they——”

  She broke off abruptly and looked at me with a sudden bewildered uneasiness.

  “What’s the matter? You . . . you don’t know my Uncle Roy, do you—by any chance?”

  She was staring at me, quite pale, and I suppose I’d been staring, blank-faced and open-mouthed, at her ever since she first spoke his name, only she’d been too preoccupied pressing the wrinkles out of the sodden napkin to notice. The name alone would have been enough, Heaven knew, with her mother’s frantic exclamation still in my ears from the night before. The rest of it was a piling up, coming so casually and innocently, and without any awareness of what it meant in terms of a situation right under the roof with us, that I was appalled.

  If her Uncle Roy lived in Java, just for one thing, he was to say the least an amazing distance from home. Her mother’s being in love with him once was as amazing, in a different way. It explained why she’d taken him in out of the jungle, and why, if he needed to be taken in in the middle of the night, he would appeal to her rather than to his own brother. It also explained, I supposed, why his portrait hung over the mantel in her sitting room. But it left even more, one way and another, that it did not explain, and in fact only confused a terrific lot.

  “—Do you know him?”

  Her eyes were wide and her face still quite pale.

  “Oh, no,” I said quickly, “Of course not. I’ve never been in Java. I was thinking about something else—something I’ve forgotten to do. It just struck me.”

  “Oh,” she said. She drew a deep breath of relief. “I just wondered. I . . . I’m awfully curious about him myself. He was . . . oh, lots of things—a famous swimmer for one, almost as famous as Duke Kahanamoku, I was going to warn you too, if you did happen to, for Heaven’s sake to keep quiet about him. Just his name makes Dad livid and gets Mother fearfully upset. They used to be scared to death he’d show up, but the war fixed that. He . . . he’s supposed to be dead, but that’s just a manner of speaking. They don’t know I know it.”

  She smiled. “It’s funny how parents expect children to be bright in school and blind, deaf and dumb around the house, isn’t it?”

  She looked away across the sunlit tree tops to the sparkling sea.

  “Of course, Aunt Norah’s right about Washington. I might as well tell you all of it. The reason Mother objected to Swede was he didn’t have any money. You see, according to this will she was talking about everything goes into a foundation. All I get if Dad should die is what he made himself, which isn’t much if anything. I’d have to go to work, and Mother can’t see that. She doesn’t see things that way. She has some funny ideas. But that’s because she’s had a rotten deal in lots of ways,” she added quickly. “She was a governess when Dad married her. I guess that can be pretty bad.”

  The color deepened in her cheeks. She took the napkin off the rail and folded it up with concentrated attention.

  “Look, Mrs. Latham,” she said. “Last night, after I went to bed I got the idea that you might have thought maybe Mother had something to do with . . . with my not hearing from Swede. But that isn’t true.”

  She laughed with a sudden quite spontaneous gaiety.

  “She can be an awful Jesuit . . . the ends justifying the means sort of thing. But we’d figured on that. Swede’s aunt—the one that lives next door to you—she was our post office. We thought of asking you first, but we didn’t quite dare so we asked her. If he’d written I’d have got the letters.”

  She looked at me and smiled.

  “Well, that’s that,” she said. “I just wanted to have the record straight. Now I’ll shut up. Have some coffee, will you, Mrs. Latham?”

  Her father and mother were coming along the lanai from the wing at the other end of the house as she handed me a cup.

  “Did you catch her, Mama dear?”

  Alice Cather shook her head silently.

  Harry looked at me with a slightly rueful and I thought somewhat apologetic smile. “I’m afraid you’re stuck, Grace,” he said. “You’re going to have to stay with us. I got my sister your room. There simply weren’t any others. You don’t really mind, do you . . . ?”

  7

  ATHURBER DRAWING OF A QUANDARY WOULD, I think, have been a very fair portrait of me as I got myself dressed to go down to Waikiki to get my things so Aunt Norah could have my room at the crowded hotel. Uppermost in my bewildered mind, and most completely inexplicable, was Uncle Roy. The simplest explanation of him, on the face of it, I thought, seemed to be that he had escaped from somewhere. People didn’t hide out in the mountains and creep in like a thief in the night. It was equally obvious that however famous a swimmer he might have been, he hadn’t swum from Java to Oahu, Territory of Hawaii. It was too far. Java could, however, have been what they wanted Mary to believe if he was in prison, say, for something horrible . . . or in an asylum. That made more sense than Java. It also made the long knife he carried a little more frightening.

  I suddenly thought of Alice Cather’s first intimation that he was there, when she heard the redbird’s call on the lanai outside her sitting
room—a signal, obviously, that she must have known very well. The terror she was in then did not seem to indicate she was very much in love with the signaller. Unless . . . I dismissed that quickly. Her emotions were clearly no problem of mine. My problem was more personal and immediate, and it was, quite simply, how I was going to stay there without getting my throat cut.

  And more puzzling than Harry Cather’s brother was why she wanted me to stay.

  I picked up my bag and stopped abruptly. One thing suddenly popped into my mind: the reason for her extraordinary volte face when she knocked over the water goblet, and why Aunt Norah was there and insisting on going over the house. Norah Bronson knew, some way, that the other brother was there, and Alice was aware that she knew . . . just too late.

  I was wondering about that when Alice appeared at my door.

  “Ready, darling? I’m going with you. I’ve got to stop at the Red Cross.”

  Mary was waiting with the car in the drive outside.

  “I want to stop a moment at the cottage,” Alice said as we got in.

  Coming in in the later afternoon, wind-blown from the Pali, I hadn’t realized the Cathers’ place was as extensive as it was. A wide band of trees and shrubs, almost tropical in density, hid the house from the road. Off to our left was a small cottage that I’d noticed vaguely and assumed was the gardener’s or a porter’s lodge. It had hibiscus, scarlet and yellow and pink, around it, and the same sloping roof and overhanging eaves that the main house had. I could see now it was closed and unoccupied.

  Mary drew up at the end of a path off the drive.

  “I’ll be just a minute,” her mother said.

  We watched her go up the path, Mary smiling a little.

  “I wonder what she’s got in her busy little mind now,” she said. “That was my Uncle Roy’s cottage. He built it when he and Dad had a terrific row just after their father died and left the three of them here to live in the big house together. Oh, dear, what a family. That was before he went to live in Java. My father went out after him, and that’s where he met Mother.”