Silversword

by Phyllis A. Whitney

  It was so sad that I had cried. I stood on my high balcony, looking down through the bars, since my head didn’t top the rail, and tears ran down my face. I ached with the beauty and sadness of the song and the Hawaiian night. The drum stopped, and the woman laughed, bowing to applause. Then she took the circlet of scarlet flowers from her head and tossed it into the audience. My father caught it and he was laughing too.

  That was when the night had turned suddenly ugly. My lovely gentle mother changed into someone I’d never seen before—someone who frightened me. I couldn’t understand her wild words, but the sound of them was terrifying, and I saw my father fling his arms about her, not lovingly but to hold her back from whatever she meant to do. The rest of the party scattered, hurrying toward the ballroom. The musicians faded away with their instruments, leaving only the singer standing very proud and still—unfrightened, though my mother seemed to threaten her.

  I had been so terrified by something I didn’t understand that I’d started to scream. Three faces, raised in the moonlight, had stared up at me as my nursemaid came to quiet me and bring me inside. I clung to the bars for a moment longer and saw the singer disappear around the end of the house, while my father pulled my mother into one of the rooms below. As he drew her inside, I could hear his words—and now I remembered them, though I hadn’t understood at the time.

  “Hysterical!” he’d shouted at her. “Disgraceful! You’re crazy—out of your head!”

  My nursemaid took me to my room, but I lay wide awake in my bed, sobbing, until my father came to soothe and hold and reassure me. I’d loved him so much, and he had loved me more than I would ever be loved again. He told me that something had upset my mother, but she would feel better in the morning, and it was nothing I should worry about.

  I went to sleep in his arms, and I couldn’t remember very much else, except that I was told my mother had a sick headache and must stay in bed for a few days. I wasn’t allowed to see her, and when she came out of her room something was different. Perhaps the seeds of change in her had started even then—because she really was fragile and couldn’t handle reality.

  All this had swept back to me in a flooding wave of memory, and when Noelle swayed against me now, I held her tenderly. She had remembered too—some of it at least.

  “It’s all right,” I said. “All that was a long time ago. You mustn’t grieve about it anymore.”

  She looked at me with tears filling her eyes. “He stopped loving me, you know—because of her. I can’t remember her name anymore, but it wasn’t her fault. She was very young. Younger than I was—and Keith was like that.”

  I didn’t want to believe any of this—not my own memory, nor what she was saying, though she sounded perfectly sensible now, and she was using the past tense. All I could do was hold her close.

  “It doesn’t matter. It’s all right now,” I whispered.

  With her own quiet dignity she stepped back from my arms, perhaps wondering why a stranger should try to comfort her so lovingly. “No,” she said, “it doesn’t matter. Keith is dead. He died a long time ago.”

  In this moment, when troubling memories had returned, she could face what was real, and I wondered if I dared take her a step farther toward recognizing me. But before I could speak, her expression changed to one of alarm—that wild, senseless alarm that could come upon her so easily.

  “We’ve frightened Linny!” she cried. “I heard her screaming. I must find her—she needs me now.”

  What she heard was an echo ringing far back in the years, but I couldn’t hold her, and again she ran away from me down the long hallway toward the stairs where we’d come up.

  David had just reached the top, the camera he’d been using slung around his neck. As Noelle ran past, he caught her by the arm.

  “We’ll go with you,” he said. “Slow down, Noelle.”

  She shook him off. “She’s gone outside. I know where she’ll be!”

  David let her go, watching me as I came toward him. “You’ve been seeing ghosts too, haven’t you?”

  I couldn’t tell him, and I only shook my head. We hurried down the winding stairway together, following my mother.

  Noelle found her way to an arched doorway that led to the rear grounds. There’d been no rain lately in this up-country area, but though the grass was brown, trees shook their green branches in trade winds that were still blowing. Shallow steps led to a lower level, covered now by that wild growth which waited everywhere to take back its own territory from human encroachment.

  “I must speak to the gardener,” Noelle said, and avoided steps no longer used by running down a sloping bank. Far across the brown lawn on the right stretched the overgrown tennis courts, and the sight of these seemed to disturb my mother all the more. I could remember her playing on those courts and being very good at the game. Friends often came over to play with my parents, and sometimes Noelle had played against my grandmother, who always beat her. I was too small to hold a racket, but my mother had promised to teach me when I was older.

  As she ran, a protruding root tripped her. She fell to her knees and I reached her before David to kneel on dry grass, trying once more to quiet her.

  “She’s hiding from me!” Noelle cried. “Sometimes she can be such a naughty little girl. Linny, where are you? Don’t frighten me like this!”

  I couldn’t bear what was happening, and I held her shoulders with firm hands and looked directly into those sea-gray eyes that broke my heart with their lack of comprehension.

  “Listen to me,” I said. “You must listen to me. A little while ago you remembered that Keith is dead—that he died a long time ago. Now you must try to remember more.”

  She grew quiet under my hands, as a child might when faced with adult authority.

  “Let her be,” David said, but it was too late for that.

  “I brought you here this morning to help you to remember,” I told her. “To really remember. Twenty-six years have gone by since you lived here with Keith and Linny. Everything has changed. When you find Linny again, she will be grown up—not a child anymore. I know it will hurt for you to understand this, but until you can accept what’s real and face it, you can’t return to your real life. You won’t ever find Linny again the way you remember her, but it could be very satisfying for you both to find your grownup daughter.”

  For a moment she seemed to look deep into my eyes, questioning, and for a moment there was sensibility in her own. She put out a searching hand and touched my hair lightly. “It’s very dark, almost like Keith’s.”

  I held my breath, but she took her hand away at once, and I knew I’d lost her again.

  “Why are we here?” she questioned. “What is this place?”

  There was no use pushing her further now. I helped her to her feet and we started back across the lawn with David.

  “I’ve finished my work, so let’s take her home,” he said to me. “I’m afraid this has been harder for you, Caro, than for Noelle. She has a safe place where she can hide from what’s real. You haven’t any such escape.”

  I fought back weakening tears. I wasn’t ready to cry—not yet. If the dam I’d built against grief ever broke, I was afraid I’d go tossing downstream and out of control. Luckily, I could still hang on to my emotions.

  David stopped to take one more outdoor shot as an afterthought, and Noelle watched him, her face bright and empty. She knew David and liked him. A few pineapple bugs zoomed in as we waited, and I batted them away—a familiar gesture.

  When we returned to the car and I got into the back seat beside Noelle, I didn’t put my arm about her this time, because she had gone far away. She didn’t need or want my touch and I was a stranger again. Perhaps I was the foolish one—needing her, trying to recover what was lost to me in the past. The scent of ginger blossoms seemed heavy and cloying.

  The moment we arrived at Manaolana, Marla came running to meet us, her anxiety clear as she pulled open the car door and helped Noelle out. When she
’d touched her sister’s face lightly with her fingers and peered into her eyes, she seemed reassured, finding no marks of change.

  “She’s perfectly all right,” I told Marla, sounding more caustic than I intended.

  My aunt stared at me. “But you aren’t, are you?”

  “She really came back for a few moments,” I told her. “She remembered what was real. She knows that my father is dead.”

  Marla sighed. “That’s nothing new—it never lasts. Why can’t you be sensible and give up, Caroline?”

  Noelle went with her sister toward the house, and I knew that for my mother nothing had happened. Why must I persist? What good would it possibly do to go on with this effort? Especially if remembering meant to her a returning realization of my father’s affair with the singer?

  David came around the car to where I stood staring at the house, not really seeing it, and he put a friendly arm around my shoulders. “Do you understand what’s happening to you, Caroline? You’ve had to accept in a few hours’ time everything the rest of them have grown accustomed to for years. That’s rough and it’s going to hurt a lot. Especially when you may be forced to give up in the end.”

  I almost wished he’d be angry with me for my foolish persistence, instead of sympathetic. Then I could have been angry with him, and that might have strengthened me. I didn’t want to listen to the voice in my mind that whispered the same words: Give up—run away! This time I must stand my ground, no matter who opposed me. Not only for my mother’s sake, but for my own as well. Everything in me told me that my instincts were right—and all the reasonable people around me were wrong.

  Unexpectedly, David was smiling at me. “I remember that look—stubborn. You used to be a great yeller, you know. Maybe it would help if you’d do some whooping right now.”

  “I wish I could. I’ve forgotten how.”

  “I know a good place to yell. I know just what you need. You need to have a look at something a lot older and bigger than you are. It improves perspective, and it’s a treatment I’ve used a few times myself.” The two women had reached the lanai and he called after them: “Wait a minute, Marla!” Marla stopped in the doorway, her arm about her sister. “Will you tell Joanna that Caro won’t be with you for lunch? We’re going to make a day of it. Up there.” He nodded toward the mountain.

  “Whatever you like,” Marla said, and took Noelle inside.

  “Get in the car,” David told me. It was the same tone he’d used with me when we were children on the way to the Needle. But I was no longer six, and I wanted to be angry about something—anything at all, except more futile anger about my mother.

  Before I could answer his peremptory words, however, Joanna hurried across the lawn. In spite of a knee that gave her trouble, she could move with a purposeful stride. She possessed none of the regal carriage of my Grandmother Elizabeth, but once more I sensed in her a power that was essential to her character. Joanna Docket was still in command.

  David said, “Oh-oh, you’re in for it now.”

  “You’re going up to the crater?” Joanna asked as she reached us.

  He nodded. “I told Caro she needed to have a look at something older and bigger than she is. She’s had a hard morning.”

  “Maybe that’s a good idea. But I wonder if you could wait until after lunch? That’ll be in an hour or so. You’re welcome to join us, David.”

  “Thanks,” he said, “but why should we postpone?”

  “Because I want to talk with Caroline now. Before she recovers from what she’s just engineered.” My grandmother read me all too clearly, penetrating past my guard. “Besides, isn’t it better if she sees the crater in the late afternoon?”

  “All right,” David said, but he sounded doubtful. “I just had a feeling that she needed the antidote right away.”

  “Not Caroline!” She threw a straight look in my direction. “She’s got a lot of me in her. But she asked for whatever happened this morning, so now she’ll take the result. Life’s full of consequences.”

  Head-on was the way Joanna had always dealt with life, though since I’d come here I’d begun to feel that she’d lost some of that old drive. But it was still there, and the years had only covered it thinly. Whether this reassured or threatened me, I wasn’t yet sure.

  “You’d better go with your grandmother,” David told me. “I have an errand in Makawao—some pictures to deliver, and this film to develop. I’ll be back for you around three or so.”

  I stayed beside the car, trying to make a last stand. “I wonder if anyone would mind asking me what I would like? You’re both busy making plans over my head, but I haven’t decided yet what I want to do.”

  David grinned at me, and for an instant I glimpsed the young boy’s cockiness coming through this older version of the David I remembered. “Consider yourself asked. What would you like to do, Caroline?”

  Having been consulted, I gave in with what dignity I could manage. “I’ll talk with my grandmother and see you later.”

  “Fine.” David got in the car and drove away. I walked into the house with Joanna, feeling that something was about to happen that I wasn’t going to like.

  Neither Marla nor Noelle was in sight, and Joanna seemed relieved. “Marla’s probably gone upstairs to work on her new book. Since she sometimes dictates to a tape, Noelle likes to listen, and she’ll be with her. What I want to talk to you about is private. Except for Tom O’Neill. I’ve asked him to join us. Let’s go back to my office.”

  So she’d been that sure of imposing her will—inviting Tom even before she talked to me. Both my grandmothers were alike in their tendency to make assured plans and expect others to fall in with them.

  Two rooms at the far side of the house from the kitchen and dining areas were Joanna’s personal domain. The one at the back was a big, airy bedroom that I glimpsed as we passed the open door. The second room, at the front, held more bookcases, and featured a handsome koa-wood desk covered with papers and books. Obviously a working desk. Several handcrafted bamboo chairs with flowered cushions invited visitors. Straw-colored lau hala mats on the floor seemed immediately familiar—woven from the leaves of the hala tree, the pandanus, which had given island peoples a hundred uses. I’d loved to sit on those cool mats as a child, playing with my toys.

  Joanna waited while I looked around, remembering much of what I saw. The tall pole in one corner was topped with a mass of red and yellow feathers—a kahili. In the old days a pair or more of such standards always accompanied the alii. When kahili bearers stood nearby, the populace knew that a member of the nobility was present. Now such kahili were museum pieces, though one saw imitations everywhere.

  On one wall hung a stunning photographic poster in color of a silversword plant in bloom against the dark crater.

  “That’s David’s work,” Joanna said, watching me.

  But now I was caught by a picture on another wall—one I remembered and had loved as a child—a painting of Iolani Palace in Honolulu. Grandma Joanna had told me stories about the days of the monarchy—sad, romantic stories that were real. The palace had been occupied for so short a time. Royalists and republicans had engaged in a bitter struggle, which ended with the last queen, Liliuokalani, being deposed in 1893 and imprisoned in a room of her own palace. By the time she was released, Hawaii was about to become an American territory and her reign had ended.

  Studying the room had calmed me a little, and I was ready to listen to whatever my grandmother wanted to say.

  Joanna switched on an overhead fan and motioned me to a chair. “You remember some of these things, don’t you, Caro? You’re on familiar ground, since you belonged to all this when you were little. No one wants to hurt or coerce you, but there are some things we need to talk about.”

  That meant my mother, and I braced myself.

  “I suspect that what happened at Ahinahina this morning, whatever it was, hurt you more than it did Noelle. The sooner you realize that you can’t bring her back to where
she used to be, the easier it will be for you. Maybe it’s just as well you gave this a try. You can go home more comfortably, once you’ve accepted what we’ve all known for so long. Perhaps the cruel thing was not that you’ve been allowed to think your mother was dead, but that when you learned she was alive I didn’t tell you quickly enough how she had changed. I’m sorry, Caroline.”

  She seemed gentler now, kinder, and more like my Grandma Joanna. But I knew there was more to come, and I was silent, waiting.

  She opened a bottom drawer in her desk and lifted out a long red box of Japanese lacquer with gold chrysanthemum emblems on the cover. She set it before her on the desk, but didn’t open it right away.

  “There’s something more that you don’t understand, or are refusing to recognize. Noelle must have seen whatever happened in the crater when she and Marla were hurt, and your father died. Something so shocked and frightened her that she had to hide it from herself. The mind can do that, as you know. It can shut out an event that’s too terrible to be accepted. Do you really want to force her to remember? How is she to live if she does? She might even choose to kill herself.”

  I listened, appalled, yet clinging to some shred of hope I couldn’t give up. “Isn’t she dead already, the way she is now?”

  “That’s not the way to look at it. She’s quite contented and we all love her and—”

  “What have her doctors told you?” I broke in.

  “She fell against a rock and bruised her head. There was only a slight concussion—no actual brain damage. She simply went away and never came back. Even though it may be psychological, there’s still very little chance of recovery.”

  This was what I found impossible to accept. “Perhaps you’ve all tried too hard to protect her. This morning she told me she knew that my father was dead.”

  Clearly, my grandmother had been holding back a growing irritation with me, and I knew she was capable of angry explosions that could make even a ranch hand tremble. Though she had never been that angry with me. Now a flush had risen in her cheeks, and I began to fear just such an explosion.