Hawaii

by James A. Michener

  “Gloomy prophecy?” Kelly asked.

  “ ‘The Hawaiian is destined to diminish year by year, dispossessed, distraught and confused.’ That’s what the old man wrote. He must have had you in mind, Kelly.”

  Kelly was twenty-three years old that night, and he realized that in Elinor Henderson he was mixed up with an entirely different kind of woman. She was thirty-one, he guessed, clean, honest and very appealing. Her hair was crisply drawn back, and her white chin was both determined and inviting. He put his left hand under it and slowly brought it up to his. There was enough moonlight for him to see the visitor’s eyes, and he was captivated by their calm assurance, so that for some moments the missionaries’ descendant and the dispossessed Hawaiian studied each other, and finally his hand relaxed and her chin was released, whereupon she took his powerful face in her soft white hands and brought it to hers, kissing him and confessing, “I have forgotten old missionaries, Kelly. When I start to write I see only you. Do you know what I wish to call my new biography? The Dispossessed.”

  They talked for a long time, while other cars came to observe the midnight submarine races and depart. Elinor asked directly, “Do you call this a life, Kelly? Making love to one neurotic divorcee after another?”

  “Who told you?”

  “I can see Florsheim, can’t I?”

  “Florsheim’s not me.”

  “That isn’t what Rennie Blackwell told me.”

  “What did she tell you?” Kelly asked.

  “She said it was the one good week of her life.”

  “Which one was she?” he asked directly.

  “I knew you didn’t remember. She was the one who told her roommate on the Moana Loa …”

  “Of course! Look, I don’t need to be ashamed of loving a girl like that,” Kelly insisted.

  “Do you suppose Florsheim’s going to marry the Kansas City girl?” Elinor asked.

  “She’s doing her damnedest to make him,” Kelly laughed. “He’ll stay with her four or five months and come home with a Buick.”

  “Why haven’t you ever tried it?” Elinor probed.

  “I don’t need the money. I sing a little, play a little slack-key, get a little money teaching girls like you. And if I need a convertible, somebody always has one.”

  “Is it a life?” Elinor asked.

  Kelly thought a long time, then asked, “What makes you think you can write a book?”

  “I can do anything I set my mind on,” Elinor replied.

  “How come you’re divorced?”

  “I’m not.”

  “Your husband dead?”

  “One of the best, Kelly. One of the men God puts his special finger on.”

  “He die in the war?”

  “Covered with medals. Jack would have liked you, Kelly. You’d have understood each other. He had a thing about happiness. God, if the world knew what that man knew about being happy.”

  They sat in silence for some time, and Kelly asked, “Why would you call your book The Dispossessed? I got everything I want.”

  “You don’t have your islands. The Japanese have them. You don’t have the money. The Chinese have that. You don’t have the land. The Fort has that. And you don’t have your gods. My ancestors took care of that. What do you have?”

  Kelly laughed nervously and began to say something but fought back the impulse, for he knew it would lead to peril. Instead he wagged his finger in Elinor’s face and said, “You’d be surprised at what we Hawaiians have. Truly, you’d be astounded.”

  “All right. Take the four pretty girls who do the hula at the Lagoon … in those fake cellophane skirts. What are their names? Tell me the truth.”

  “Well, the one with the beautiful legs is Gloria Ching.”

  “Chinese?”

  “Plus maybe a little Hawaiian. The girl with the real big bosom, that’s Rachel Fernandez. And the real beauty there … I sort of like her, except she’s Japanese … that’s Helen Fukuda, and the one on the end is Norma Swenson.”

  “Swedish?”

  “Plus maybe a little Hawaiian.”

  “So what we call Hawaiian culture is really a girl from the Philippines, wearing a cellophane skirt from Tahiti, playing a ukulele from Portugal, backed up by a loud-speaker guitar from New York, singing a phony ballad from Hollywood.”

  “I’m not a phony Hawaiian,” he said carefully. “In the library there’s a book about me. More than a hundred generations, and when I sing a Hawaiian song it comes right up from my toes. There’s lots you don’t know, Elinor.”

  “Tell me,” she persisted.

  “No,” he refused. Then abruptly he made the surrender which only a few minutes earlier he had recognized as perilous. “I’ll do better … something I’ve never done before.”

  “What?” she asked.

  “You’ll see. Wear something cool and I’ll pick you up about three tomorrow.”

  “Will it be exciting?”

  “Something you’ll never forget.”

  At three next day he drove a borrowed car up to the Lagoon and waited idly in the driveway till she appeared. When she got into the Pontiac, crisp and cool in a white dress, he turned toward the mountains and drove inland from the reef until he came to a high board fence, behind which coconut palms rose in awkward majesty. He continued around the fence until he came to a battered gate which he opened by nosing the car against it. When he had entered the grounds, he adroitly backed the car into the gate and closed it. Then he raced the engine, spun the tires in gravel, and brought the car up to a shadowy, palm-protected, weather-stained old wooden house built in three stories, with gables, wide verandas, fretwork and stained-glass windows.

  “This is my home,” he said simply. “No girl’s ever been here before.” He banged the horn, and at the rickety screen door appeared a marvelous woman, six feet two inches tall, almost as wide as the door itself, silver-haired and stately, and with a great brown smile that filled her plastic face. “Is that you, Kelolo?” she asked in a perfectly modulated voice that contained a touch of New England accent.

  “Hi, Mom. Prepare for a shock! I’m bringin’ home a haole wahine.” Lest his mother be aware of the changes he had undergone for this girl, Kelly lapsed into his worst pidgin.

  His mother left the doorway, walked in stately fashion to the edge of the porch, and extended her hand: “We are truly delighted to welcome you to the Swamp.”

  “Muddah, dis wahine Elinor Henderson, Smith. Muddah’s Vassar.” The trim Bostonian and the huge Hawaiian shook hands, each respectful of the other, and the latter said in her soft voice, “I am Malama Kanakoa, and you are the first of Kelolo’s haole friends he has ever brought here. You must be special.”

  “Eh, Muddah, watch out!” Kelly warned. “We not in love. Dis wahine mo eight years older dan me. She all fixed mo bettah in Boston.”

  “But she is special,” Malama insisted.

  “Special too much! She gotta brain da kine, akamai too good.”

  The trio laughed and each instinctively felt at ease with the other. Kelly helped by explaining, “Muddah, dis wahine she come from long-time mission pamily Quigley. I not speak dis pamily, but maybe you do.”

  “Immanuel Quigley!” Malama cried, taking her visitor’s two hands. “He was the best of the missionaries. Only one who loved the Hawaiians. But he stayed only a short time.”

  “I think he transmuted all his love for Hawaii into his children, and I inherited it,” Elinor said. She saw that she had entered a nineteenth-century drawing room, complete with chandelier, tiered crystal cases, an organ, a Steinway piano and a brown mezzotint of Raphael’s “Ascent of the Virgin” in a massive carved frame. The ceiling was enormously high, which made the room unexpectedly cool, but Elinor was distracted from this fact by an object which hung inside an inverted glass bowl set in a mahogany base. “Whatever is it?” she cried.

  “It’s a whale’s tooth,” Malama explained. “Formed into a hook.”

  “But what’s it hung on?�
�� she asked.

  “Human hair,” Kelly assured her.

  Malama interrupted, removing the glass cover and handing her visitor the precious relic. “My ancestor, the King of Kona, wore this when he fought as Kamehameha’s general. Later he wore it when the first mission ship touched at Lahaina. I suppose that every hair in this enormous chain came from the head of someone my family cherished.” She replaced the glass cover. Then she said, “Kelly, while you show Mrs. Henderson why we call this the Swamp, I’ll be getting tea. Some of the ladies are coming in.”

  So Kelly took Elinor to the rear of the house, through a kitchen that had once prepared two hundred dinners for King Kalakaua, and soon they were in a fairyland of trees and flowers bordering a rush-lined swamp whose surface was covered with lilies. With some irony Kelly said, dropping his pidgin now that he was again alone with Elinor, “This was the only land the haoles didn’t take. Now it’s worth two million dollars. But of course Mom takes care of a hundred poor Hawaiians, and she’s in hock up to her neck.”

  To Elinor, the scene of old decay was poignant, and as red-tufted birds darted through the swamp and perched on the tips of dancing reeds, she saw the complete motif for her biography. “You really are The Dispossessed,” she mused, fusing reality with her vision of it.

  “No, I think you have it wrong,” Kelly protested. “This is the walled-in garden that every Hawaiian knows, for he tends one in his own heart. Here no one intrudes.”

  “Then you’re contemptuous of the haole girls you sleep with?” she asked.

  “Oh, no! Sleeping is fun, Elinor. That’s outside what we’re talking about.”

  “You’re right, and I apologize. What I meant was, insofar as they’re haoles, you’re contemptuous of them?”

  Kelly thought about this for a long time, tossed a pebble at a swaying bird, and said, “I don’t believe I would admit that. I’m not as intolerant as the missionaries were.”

  “Immanuel Quigley said almost the same thing.”

  “I think I would have liked old Quigley,” Kelly admitted.

  “He was young when he served here. He became old in Ohio. What a profound man he was.”

  “Mom’s probably ready,” Kelly suggested, and he led Elinor away from the swamp and back into the spacious drawing room, where four gigantic Hawaiian women, gray-haired and gracious, waited.

  “This is Mrs. Leon Choy,” Malama said softly. “And this is Mrs. Hideo Fukuda.”

  “Did I see your very pretty daughter dancing at the Lagoon?” Elinor inquired.

  “Yes,” the huge woman replied, bowing slightly and beaming with pleasure. “Helen loves to dance, as I did when I was younger.”

  “And this is Mrs. Liliha Mendonca,” Malama continued. “Her husband owned the taxi company. And this poor little dwarf over here is Mrs. Jesus Rodriques,” Malama laughed. Mrs. Rodriques was only five feet nine and weighed less than 190. “I’ve told the ladies that Mrs. Henderson is a descendant of dear old Immanuel Quigley. We hold him very warmly in our hearts, Elinor.”

  “I’m surprised you’re not staying with the Hales or the Whipples,” Mrs. Mendonca said. “They came over on the same ship with your grandfather, or whatever he was.”

  “Our families were never close,” Elinor explained. Each of the five Hawaiian women wanted desperately to explore this admission, but they were too well-bred to do so, and after a while Malama suggested, “I’m sure Mrs. Henderson would like to hear some of the old songs,” and soon she had scraped together a couple of ukuleles and two guitars. The stately Hawaiian women preferred standing while they sang, and now along one edge of the room they formed a frieze of giants, and after a few preliminary plunks on their instruments, launched into a series of the most cherished Hawaiian melodies. They seemed like a professional chorus, so easily did their voices blend. Mrs. Choy, with marvelous darting eyes and gamin manner, sang the high parts, while Mrs. Rodriques and Mrs. Mendonca boomed massive chords that paved the musical structure. Each song contained dozens of verses, and as the last chords of one verse lingered in the air, Mrs. Fukuda in a singsong falsetto enunciated the first words of the next. She owned a prodigious memory, and the other ladies did not enjoy singing unless she was along, for her monotonous setting of the next theme gave them much pleasure.

  Dusk came over the Swamp and lamps were lit. The huge women, reminiscent of bygone splendors, stayed on, and Elinor listened enraptured to their soft conversation until Kelly interrupted brusquely and said, “I speak one kanaka play a little sleek-key tinnight. Da wahine ’n’ me be goin’.”

  But when the women saw him about to leave, Mrs. Choy began casually humming the first bars of the “Hawaiian Wedding Song,” so that Kelly stopped in the shadows by the door, and while light from the chandelier reflected upon him in variegated colors, he started softly into the great flowing passage of love. His voice was in excellent form, and he allowed it to expand to its fullest. When the time came for him to halt, Elinor wondered which of the five women would pick up the girl’s part, and it was Malama. Standing vast like a monument with silvery hair, she soared into the sweeping lyric portion of the song, and after a while mother and son combined in the final haunting duet. It was an unusually fortunate rendition, and as the lingering chords died away, Mrs. Choy banged her ukulele several times and cried, “I could sing this way all night.”

  When Kelly and Elinor were back in the borrowed car he said, “They will, too.”

  Elinor asked, “When your mother came back from Vassar, what did she do?”

  “In the hot afternoons she sang, and was good to the Hawaiians, and wasted her money. What else?”

  Elinor began sniffling, and after a while said, “I’m bitterly tangled up, Kelly. I can’t go back to the hotel.”

  “I have to sing,” he said stubbornly.

  “Do you get paid for it?” she asked between sniffles.

  “Not tonight. For a friend.”

  “You lousy, defeated, wonderful people,” she said. “Okay, take me back. For a friend you must do everything.” She slumped against the door, then quickly jumped back beside Kelly. “Tell me, has this friend, as you call him, ever done anything for you?”

  “Mmmmmm, well, no.”

  “So you sing your life away? For nothing?”

  “Who’s happier?” he countered. “Mom or the women you know back home?”

  Early next morning Elinor Henderson reported at the library and asked Miss Lucinda Whipple for “that book which gives the genealogy of the Kanakoas.” At this request Miss Whipple masked her contempt and studied Kelly’s latest sleeping partner, for she had found that over the course of a year at least half a dozen awe-struck haole women, who by their ignorance of card catalogues proved they rarely saw a library, could be counted upon to ask for “that book about Kelly Kanakoa.” Miss Whipple guessed that one girl probably told the next, for they appeared at regular intervals, and when they reverently returned the book, some gasped, “Gosh, his grandfather was a real king!” Miss Whipple never commented, but she did observe that with such women apparently the farthest back they could imagine was grandfather. Beyond that all was obscurity.

  But this girl proved to be different. When she completed studying the long tables in the Missionary Museum publication, she asked Miss Whipple, “What authority substantiates this?”

  Miss Whipple replied, “My great-grandfather, Abner Hale, transcribed this remarkable document from verbal traditions recited by a kahuna nui on Maui. A great deal of research has been done in both Tahiti and Hawaii, and the account seems to check out at most points.”

  “How many years do you accord each generation?” Mrs. Henderson asked.

  “I suppose we ought to follow the dictionary and allot each one thirty years, but we feel that in a tropical climate, and judging from what we know to be true, twenty-two years is a safer estimate. Then, too, you will detect that what the genealogy calls two successive generations is often really one, for it was a case of brother succeeding brother rather
than son succeeding father. By the way, you seem to have a substantial knowledge of Hawaii. May I ask what your interest is?”

  “I am the great-great-great-granddaughter of Immanuel Quigley,” Elinor explained.

  “Oh, my goodness!” Miss Whipple said in a flurry. “We’ve never had a Quigley here before.”

  “No,” Elinor said evenly. “As you know, my father had difficulties.”

  Recollection of old and bitter events did not diminish Lucinda Whipple’s ardor, for her genealogical interests transcended unpleasantness, and she asked excitedly, “Shall you be in Honolulu on Saturday?”

  “Yes,” Elinor replied.

  “Goodness, how wonderful!” Miss Whipple said. “It’s the yearly anniversary of the missionaries’ arrival, and I would be truly honored if you would accompany me. Imagine! A Quigley!” She went on to explain that each spring throughout her life she had attended the yearly meeting of the Mission Children’s Society, and as the roll was called she had dutifully, and proudly, stood up for John Whipple, Abner Hale and Abraham Hewlett, each of whom had figured in her ancestry, as well as for the collateral line of Retire Janders, who, while not a missionary, had served with them.

  “But we have never had anyone rise to honor the name of Quigley. Please, do come!”

  So on a hot Saturday in April, Elinor Henderson sat among the mission offspring and sang the opening hymn, “From Greenland’s icy mountains.” When the exciting moment came to call the roll of those long-dead and honorable men and women who had served God in the islands, she felt a mounting excitement as the descendants of each couple rose. “Abner Hale and his wife Jerusha, brig Thetis, 1822,” read the clerk, and there was a flurry of chairs pushing back, after which a varied crew of Hales stood at attention while the rest applauded.

  “Dr. John Whipple and his wife Amanda, brig Thetis, 1822,” the clerk intoned, and from the scraping, Elinor concluded that Dr. John must have been an unusually potent young medico, for many rose to honor him.