Silversword

by Phyllis A. Whitney

  It was all very much as I remembered—and yet different. To a six-year-old the room had seemed enormous—a room filled with treasures to be endlessly explored. I’d been allowed to touch all I liked, and I’d been very careful. I had made the room my own special delight as it fed my imagination. Quite unlike Grandmother Elizabeth’s hotel drawing room, where I must never touch anything.

  This room had the same warm ambience that I’d reveled in as a child. I’d loved it not only for the books that I hadn’t been ready to read, though I’d paged through them eagerly for their pictures, but because so many exotic treasures had been collected here. Some came from the Hawaiian Islands, and others from faraway places. The grandfather I’d never known had been a naval officer, and Grandma Joanna had sometimes traveled abroad with him. He had died much too young at Pearl Harbor.

  Now I noticed two lovely Hitchcock paintings that struck a chord of memory. One was of dawn on Haleakala, with clouds filling the crater, and peaks piercing through. The other I’d been especially fond of because it showed a rainbow over Manaolana, arching down through the trees—just as I’d seen it—with mountain slopes toward Olinda rising behind. Hitchcock’s Maui paintings of another time must be treasured today.

  Along the front of the house were tall windows framed by draperies in a green and brown Hawaiian print of ti leaves. In their center a French door opened onto the lanai, and I walked to it and stood looking outside. The brightness in the sky was fading—the sun ready to disappear in a little while behind the distant West Maui mountains. I thought of a place I might still visit before it grew dark. There’s been a rose garden that my mother had loved, and I wondered if it was still there. It would take only a moment to find out.

  I went outdoors and crossed the drive to a path that wound into a tangle of rioting growth. The way that I recalled was still there. Once, all this had been kept clear of vines and shrubbery. Nevertheless, a narrow path remained. Sleepy birds were twittering—there was always the sound of birds in Hawaii—and I could catch the scent of roses as I pressed through. The rose was Maui’s flower, and on special occasions my mother had loved to wear roses in her hair, or in leis around her neck. Though this still wasn’t the flower scent I connected with her. I wished I could remember.

  A turn in the path brought me to a cleared space of grass, where a white trellis stood, though its wood was rotting, and paint had peeled away. Rose bushes grew all around, wild and untamed. Perhaps I’d known that I would find her here—that lovely, magical lady of my childhood. Noelle. I stopped at the edge of the clearing and tried to prepare myself for whatever shocking change I might find in her now. The light was dimming in quick tropical twilight, and I couldn’t see her in clear detail.

  She sat on a bench of black lava rock, her long white dress filled with remaining light in the shadowy ruin of a garden. Her head was turned away form me, and a rose had been tucked into hair that seemed as fair as I remembered, though it was boyishly short now, and trimmed above her ears. She heard me and turned, and as I came closer there seemed no awful change—no disfigurement of any sort in face or body. In fact, she seemed not to have aged or changed at all, and perhaps that was what frightened me most.

  “Hello?” She spoke softly, questioning. “You’re our visitor, aren’t you? Mother said someone was coming. Welcome to Maui.”

  She still hadn’t been told who I was, I thought in dismay. Why on earth hadn’t Grandma Joanna prepared her?

  Before I could speak, she stood up, her long dress flowing gracefully as she moved. I wanted to rush toward her, to fling my arms around her and recover this mother whom I’d lost so long ago, and so cruelly. I didn’t dare. Though she smiled at me, her look was a little vague, and I suspected that she hadn’t really focused on me. Of course, she couldn’t have been expected to recognize me, or have the faintest idea of who I was. This wasn’t the meeting I’d dreamed of, and I hated my own hesitancy.

  She moved past me, anxious now. “Have you seen Linny anywhere? My little girl? I seem to have lost her. She’s only six and she shouldn’t be outdoors alone at this hour. I wonder if she’s gone inside?”

  I felt as though someone had struck me in the midriff with a clenched fist. All the breath went out of me, and for a moment I couldn’t speak. She ran anxiously along the path toward the house and I pulled myself together and followed.

  At the edge of the lanai she seemed to remember me, and turned to wait, courteously. “Won’t you come inside? I’m sorry, I don’t know your name.”

  Grandma Joanna spoke from the doorway. “This is Caroline, dear.”

  Noelle stood in the light from the front door, and she seemed almost as young as I remembered her—as if something had arrested her, frozen her in time long past, so that she would never age.

  She smiled at me again. “Caroline? That’s my little daughter’s name—though of course I always call her Linny. Mother, have you seen her? Did she come inside?”

  “I think she’s gone to bed,” Grandma Joanna said, and gave me a warning look. “Noelle, will you join us for dinner tonight, since we have company? David will be here too, and you like David.”

  “That will be fun. I’ll just go up to tuck Linny in, and then I’ll come down.”

  Grandma Joanna put out a gentle hand to stop her. “I’ve already done that—and kissed her good night. So stay with us now, Noelle.”

  “All right.” She continued to smile a bit vaguely and drifted ahead of us into the living room, where she sat down in an armchair at some distance from the fire that had been lighted against a cooling evening. When she picked up a bit of sewing from a basket, I saw that she was hemming a small blue dress.

  I leaned upon the back of a chair and closed my eyes, feeling completely disoriented—lost. Empty.

  Grandma Joanna put an arm around me. “Steady now. This wasn’t something I could tell you over the phone, or announce the moment you arrived. I’d hoped we’d have some time together to talk before Noelle came inside. Come and sit down by the fire. She’ll stop searching for a while, though the moment something reminds her, she’ll start again. Don’t worry—she’s not listening to us. She’s off in her own world and she’s not unhappy, Caro.”

  “Won’t she believe in me?”

  “I’ve wondered about that. But she doesn’t know that time has passed. She’s stopped her private clock, and she’s way back there in the years—a young wife with a small daughter, and a husband who has always just gone out. She’s never understood that Keith died at the tone when she was hurt. She doesn’t look for him, or seem aware that he never returns. Perhaps she’s better off this way.”

  I shook my head, clearing my thoughts, trying to find a way to relate to the new picture of my mother.

  “I’m sorry you found out like this,” Grandma Joanna went on, “though you’d have been shocked and hurt however you learned the truth. It was best for Elizabeth to take you away. I thought at the time that you might return when your mother improved. But that never happened. And when my letters were never answered, and Elizabeth didn’t write, it seemed wiser to let you go. Perhaps better for you.”

  “I wish you hadn’t,” I said. “So much that was unfinished has been left floating around in my life.”

  She sighed deeply. “I loved you very much, Caro, and I missed you. But in the beginning Marla was injured, your mother had chosen her own escape, and your father was gone. Our life here was confused and unhappy. It would have been wrong for a child.”

  “Was it the shock of my father’s death that caused this in my mother?”

  “Caro, we don’t know.”

  “You’ll tell me about it—about my father’s death? Grandmother Elizabeth would never talk about it, even though I understood she was here at the time.”

  “Yes, we’ll talk, but not right away. Of course you must know as much as we can tell you.”

  I felt faintly relieved. No matter how much I wanted to thrust Grandmother Elizabeth’s terrible suspicion from my mind,
it lingered, waiting for any nuance of feeling I might pick up to corroborate or deny. Grandma Joanna’s manner was not that of a woman who had helped to conceal a murder.

  Nevertheless, she looked weary and sad, and I recognized the burden she must have carried all these years. There seemed a double loss for me, since this vital, energetic grandmother of my early years only emerged now and then. Much of the time this was a woman I didn’t know. But I wanted to know her. I wanted to catch up on all those years that I’d missed here on Maui.

  I leaned nearer to the fire’s warmth, still chilled and shaken. Grandma Joanna sat nearby, while my mother worked serenely some distance away down the long room, her needle moving. She paid no attention to either of us.

  “I don’t want to wait,” I said. “Please tell me now what happened that day in the crater. What made her like this?”

  “I don’t suppose we’ll ever know. Tom O’Neill and I had gone on ahead to make camp, and when the others didn’t join us, we rode back. Your father was dead from terrible head wounds caused by his fall. His horse had run away. Marla lay on the ground unconscious. Her mare, Pilikia, had kicked her. That horse always lived up to her name—Trouble. Tom had to shoot her because she’d broken a leg in two places. At first Noelle seemed unhurt. Tom found her sitting a little way off from the other two at the base of a cinder cone.”

  Grandma Joanna’s voice broke for an instant, and then she steadied herself and went on.

  “A silversword plant grew beside her, and Noelle was plucking its leaves one by one, and tearing them into bits. Caro, honey, she was completely off in her own strange world. If she knows what happened, she’s never been able to tell me anything about it.”

  Her words made me see the horror and I couldn’t speak.

  Again she continued. “Tom gave what little first aid he could manage to Marla, and then rode for help from Park headquarters. I stayed with my daughters until a helicopter came to lift us out. Noelle seemed unhurt physically, but she had no memory of what had happened, and she’s stayed fixed in that point of time ever since. Like a butterfly in amber. She recalls her life only up to the accident in the crater. Of course you were still here, but it didn’t seem wise to take you to the hospital to visit Marla or Noelle. We thought it best at that time for Elizabeth to take you home with her when she flew her son’s body to San Francisco. The idea, as I’ve told you, was that you would return when your mother was better.”

  “And that never happened,” I said softly.

  “No. And she’s been looking for her—her little girl—ever since. All these years!”

  My hands felt numb with cold and I held them out to the fire. The room wasn’t cold—it was me.

  “Marla was the only one to recover,” Grandma Joanna said. “She had a severe wound on her head and she was unconscious for nearly twenty-four hours. Though she recovered completely, she had no memory of what happened to any of them. No one ever knew what frightened the horses. They were all good riders, and the horses were used to the crater. They should never have fallen down that steep place, even though it was a treacherous spot. So that’s it, Caroline, and we won’t talk about it again.”

  I sat up and stared at her. “Why not? I’m sure there will be questions I’ll want to ask, once I’ve absorbed all this.”

  “I haven’t discussed it in years, and I shan’t again. Just remember that we can only be happy during your visit if we leave all that tragedy in the past, and make what we can of the present. The subject is kapu around here.”

  This I wouldn’t accept. I couldn’t even begin to accept the way my mother was. But the word “kapu” stopped me. It was the old word from the days of the chiefs, and it meant forbidden. As a little girl I’d thought it was a scary word, heavy with a threat I didn’t understand. In those “old” days before Hawaii was opened to the world by Captain Cook—really only two hundred years or so ago—kapu had been the terrible law that ruled common people. There were arbitrary rules on every hand, set by the chiefs and the kahuna, the priests, who were all-powerful. Men and women couldn’t eat together; pork was not to be eaten by women; privilege was for the ruling alii class—the royalty. The laws went on and on, and many of them discriminated against women. To break one of the laws of kapu was to invite instant punishment. It was a woman, the mother of the young king Liholiho, who, with others, had advised her son to end all this. So the kapu laws were abolished before the missionaries came.

  I simply wouldn’t accept my grandmother’s “kapu.” She might be used to my mother’s state and accustomed to this dreadful status quo. I was not, and I meant to do anything I could to break through the mists that surrounded my mother. How my father had died was far less important to me than my mother’s life.

  Grandma Joanna was watching me, and perhaps she sensed inner rebellion and didn’t want an open confrontation, for she stood up, ending our talk.

  “It’s nearly dinnertime. Suppose you run up to your room, Caro, and settle in a bit, while I have a look in the kitchen.”

  I glanced at Noelle, rapt in her sewing, paying no attention to anything else, and followed my grandmother into the long hallway that ran parallel with the front of the house, dividing the main floor into two rows of rooms. The stairway rose steeply nearby, and I followed it up to rooms tucked under the eaves.

  We’d called this the “attic” when I was little, though it was rather grand for that. I’d always loved the way the ceilings slanted up here, and that one of these rooms had been mine whenever I stayed overnight at Manaolana. I knew my way, and the open door invited me.

  The room was comfortably familiar. A wide four-poster bed of koa wood was big enough for several little girls, and I’d loved to bounce around on it. The quilt was new from my day and its colors were the red on yellow that one saw often in Hawaii. The dark frame of the dresing-table mirror had been carved by some fanciful hand, and I remembered searching out strange little faces and queer animals in the wood.

  On the wall hung a framed color photograph that I recognized—a statue of King Kamehameha the Great. At the foot of the statue were several Hawaiian women in long black dresses, with leis of yellow ilima flowers around their necks. Yellow was the color of royalty. The king wore the helmet of the chiefs, with its distinctive forward curve, and his outstretched arms were heavy with leis of pink and white plumeria that hung in great ropes almost to the ground. The women, of course, were descendants of the alii, and this must be the celebration of the king’s birthday that I’d read about, and which was still remembered by Hawaiians. I had always been fascinated by Hawaiian history, which was like that of no other Polynesian island.

  I sat for too long staring at the picture, letting it hypnotize me so that I could postpone thinking about the problem of my mother. It wasn’t possible to deal with that now anyway, and I must hurry and get ready for dinner, get ready for whatever else awaited me downstairs.

  The adjoining bathroom was one I remembered. I’d needed to stand on a stool to reach the pedestaled marble basin. And I’d had to be lifted into the huge tub that stood on lion’s feet. Small cakes of English soap with the scent of lavender carried me back to those happy years when this house had been my favorite place to visit.

  Everything I did now was in a desperate effort to keep from being submerged in despair. I had to swim against the current—lest my mother be lost forever.

  I dressed carefully and deliberately—putting on my armor! My cream silk dress was patterned with tiny brown buds, and I clasped long amber beads about my neck—a gift from my father long ago. I must try to find him again too. When I’d changed to cream leather sandals, I went slowly downstairs, ready to face whatever must still be faced in this house.

  “You look exactly right,” Grandma Joanna approved. She’d never cared much about how she looked, but she wanted the women around her to be pretty and neat. “And you’re nicely on time. I’ve just heard the car arrive. That will be Marla and David returning from Wailuku. Do you remember David Reed, Ca
ro. You must remember David.”

  3

  My mother sat quietly with her sewing and didn’t look up when I came in. I couldn’t shut away my pain completely, since each new sight of her was a stab.

  “Of course I remember David,” I told my grandmother.

  I hadn’t thought of him in years, though when I’d been six and he twelve, he’d been my hero. I remembered him as a headstrong, exciting boy who could ride a horse as well as any paniolo, and who had developed, even at that young age, a passion for everything to do with the Islands. He’d told me wonderful stories of the old chiefs, and of Kamehameha the Great, who had made himself the first king. They’d been pretty bloody sometimes, but I’d listened eagerly, even while I shivered in all the right places. There had been a real Hawaiian princess way back on David’s family tree, and that had made him seem all the more a romantic figure in my eyes.

  “David used to visit here at Manaolana sometimes, didn’t he?” I said.

  “Yes—I’m his godmother. Helena Reed, his mother, is still my good friend. His parents live in Hana, and David’s son Peter lives with them now. His wife died a few years ago—she was a psychotherapist. For a while David worked for the Park Service, but now he freelances as a photographer and shares a cabin on the Olinda Road with a ranger friend, Koma Olivero, who is part Hawaiian. Koma’s father came from Manila. There are a lot of Filipinos and Japanese on Maui, and we still use those racial labels, even though we’re all really Hawaiian Islanders. And we say haole for white person, kamaaina for native-born, and malihini for stranger. I suppose you are all three.”

  She seemed to be talking nervously—almost chattering—uneasy with me now, unlike the assured grandmother I remembered.

  I watched as David and Marla came in from the lanai, and I looked at him first, seeking an old friend. He met my eyes gravely, but with a question in his that I didn’t understand—almost a challenge. I remembered his dark brown eyes as being filled with light—the light of the sun. And I remembered the inner excitement that had always seemed to drive him. Quenched now? Life had touched him too with a heavy hand. He’d grown tall in maturity, and he was good-looking in a rugged sort of way, with black hair that still fell over one temple. The boy’s mouth that I remembered had firmed above a strong cleft chin. He would not, I thought, be a man to cross, and somehow I found myself missing the young friend who had seemed so remarkable when I was small. I’d tried to write to David a few times too, but gave up when he never answered. Those letters had probably gone the way of all the others that would have tied me to Maui.