Michener, James

by Hawaii

  "People come, dey go," he said philosophically.

  "But when a good one comes, hold onto the memory. It's almost time for the whistle, and I wonder if I might do one thing before you go?"

  "Wha' dat?" Kelly asked suspiciously.

  "Could I kiss you good-bye? You've been so kind and understanding." She started to say something more, but broke into tears and pressed her beautiful white face to his. "You are such a goddamned decent human being," she whispered. "More than anything in the world I needed to meet someone like you."

  Biting her lip and sniffling away her tears, she pushed him back toward the door and said, "Kelly, do you understand even remotely how deeply a woman like me prays for the success of a strong young man like you? I wish the heavens could open and give you their glory. Kelly, make a good life for yourself. Don't be a bum. For you are one of the men whom Jesus loves." And she sent him away.

  Often when the surf was breaking he contemplated her words and wondered how a man went about building a good life for himself. He suspected that it consisted neither in being an old stud horse like Johnny Pupali, fun though that was, nor in wasting one's energies on a haole wife the way Florsheim had done. Yet all he knew how to do was lie in the sun, play slack-key and sakura, and teach wahines how to surf. So for the time being that had to be good enough.

  In late 1947 however a night-club singer from New York arrived in the islands�a two-night wahine, she turned out to be�and she took such a boisterous joy in Kelly that one night she cried, "God, they ought to build a monument to you, Beachboy!"

  She was outraged when she learned that the current popular song, "The Rolling Surf," was something that Kelly had composed on the beach and had given away to whoever wanted it. A mainland

  THE GOLDEN MEN797

  musician had glommed onto it, added a few professional twists, and made a pile of money from it.

  "You ought to sue the dirty bastard!" she yelled. Later she tested Kelly's voice and found it good. "Tomorrow night, Kelly Kanakoa, you're going to sing with me. In the dining room of the Lagoon."

  "I no like singin'," Kelly protested, but she asked, "What's that lovely thing you and the falsetto boy were doing with your ukuleles?" "You speak da kine 'Hawaiian Wedding Song'?" he asked. "The one where you start low, and he comes in high?" Casually, Kelly started singing "Ke Kali Ne Au," the greatest of all Hawaiian songs, a glorious, haunting evocation of the islands. At the moment he.was wearing a Lagoon towel as a sarong, with a hibiscus flower in his hair, and as he sang, the night-club girl sensed his full power and cried, "Kelly, nothing can stop you."

  After one day's rehearsal, for the girl was a real professional and learned quickly, Kelly Kanakoa, dressed in a red and white sarong, with one of his mother's whale-tooth hooks dangling from a silver chain about his neck, and with a flower in his hair, came onto the floor of the Lagoon and started singing with the voice that was to become famous throughout the islands. "The Wedding Song" was unusual in that it provided a powerful solo for a baritone voice and a high, soaring dreamlike melody for a soprano. It was a true art song, worthy of Schubert or Hugo Wolf, and although that nighf s audience had heard it often before, sung by blowzy baritones and worse sopranos, they had not really heard the full majesty of the lyric outcry. Kelly was a man in love, a muscular, bronzed god, and the slim blond girl from New York was in all ways his counterfoil. It was a memorable evening, and as it ended, the singer called to Kelly while he washed down in her shower, "How'd you like to come to New York with me?"

  "I doan' leave da rock," he called back.

  "You don't have to marry me," she assured him, aware before he was of his apprehensions. "Just sing."

  "Me 'n' da beach, we akamai," he said, and although she begged him several more times while they were in bed, he insisted that his place was in Hawaii. "See da kine wha' hoppen Florsheim!" he repeated.

  "Well, anyway," she said as she dressed for the plane. "We taught one another a lot in a few days." "You speak da trufe," Kelly agreed. "You gonna keep on singing?" she asked. "Skoshi singin', skoshi surfin'."

  "Don't give up the surfing," she said sardonically. "You got a real good thing working for you there."

  "Seestah, dis kanaka doan' aim to lose it," Kelly laughed. "I'm sure you don't," she cracked. She was brassy, and her hair was dark at the roots, but she was a good clean companion, and Kelly appreciated her.

  798HAWAII

  "I ain't able to come out to da airport," he said apologetically. "You took care of things here," she assured him, patting the bed, "and that's where it counts."

  Then, in early 1948, when the tourist business was beginning to boom, he received a cable from some wahine in Boston named Rennie, but he couldn't remember who she was, but anyway she said, "MEET MOANA LOA MRS. DALE HENDERSON." And when the ship came in, Florsheim, barefooted and staring up at the railing asked, "Which one you wahine, Kelly 'blalah?"

  "Maybe da kine," he indicated with a shrug of his shoulder.

  "You s'pose she gonna lay?" Florsheim asked, appraising the slim, handsomely groomed girl who appeared to be in her early thirties.

  "She look maybe two nights, maybe four," Kelly calculated, for he had found that women who spent unusual care on their appearance were ofteni more tardy in climbing into bed than their sisters who called to the world, "Here I am, wind-blown and happy!"

  Kelly, who like the other beachboys was privileged to climb aboard the Moana Loa before disembarkation started, elbowed his way along the crowded deck and touched Mrs. Henderson on the arm. She turned and smiled at him, a clean, unconfused greeting. When he shook hands with her he asked, "You name Dale or somethin' else? Seem like nobody can't speak man's name, woman's name no more."

  "My name is Mrs. Henderson. Elinor Henderson," she replied in the crisp and self-possessed voice of a New Englander. "I'm from Boston.

  Kelly very much wanted to ask, "Who dis Rennie wahine cable me? I no remember nobody in Boston." But he didn't speak. One rule he had learned in his beachboy business: never mention one woman to another, so that even though most of the customers he met had been referred to him by others, often intimate friends, he never mentioned that fact. Culling his brain furiously, he still failed to recall who Rennie was and he did not refer to her cable. But Mrs. Henderson did.

  "A college classmate of mine at Smith . . ."

  "Dat doan' sound like no wahine college, Smith."

  "Rennie Blackwell, she told me to be sure to look you up."

  Quickly Kelly composed his face as if he knew well who Rennie Blackwell was, and just as quickly Mrs. Henderson thought: "After all she told me, and he doesn't even remember her name." Wanting perversely to explore the situation further she added, "Rennie was the girl from Tulsa." Still Kelly could not place her among the nameless girls that populated his life, and now he was aware that Mrs. Henderson was playing a game with him, so he lapsed into his most barbarous pidgin and banged his head with his fist. "Sometime I no akamai da kine. Dis wahine Rennie I not collect."

  Mrs. Henderson smiled and said, "She collects you, Kelly."

  He was irritated with this secure woman and said, "S'pose one year, bimeby I say Florsheim, 'Cable here speak Elinor Henderson.

  THE GOLDEN MEN799

  Who dat one wahine?' Florsheim he doan' collect. I doan' collect."

  "Who's Florsheim?" Elinor asked.

  "Da kine beachboy yonder 'longside tall wahine," Kelly explained.

  Mrs. Henderson laughed merrily and said, "Rennie told me you were the best beachboy in the business, but you must promise me one thing."

  "Wha" dat?"

  "You aren't required to talk pidgin to me any longer. I'll bet you graduated with honors from Hewlett Hall. You can probably speak English better than I can." She smiled warmly and asked, "Aren't you going to give me the lei?"

  "I'm afraid to kiss you, Mrs. Henderson," he laughed and handed her the flowers, but Florsheim saw this and rushed up, protesting, "Jeezus Crisssl Kanaka handin' wahine flowers li
ke New York?" He grabbed the lei, plopped it around Elinor's head and kissed her powerfully.

  "Florsheim's been in New York," Kelly joked. "He knows how to act like a Hawaiian."

  "Florsheim? In New York?" Mrs. Henderson reflected, studying the huge beachboy with the long hair and the wreath of maile leaves. "I'll bet the city'll never be the same."

  "He married a society girl," Kelly explained. "Stayed with her three months and came back. He got a Chewy convertible out of it. In fact, we're riding back to the hotel in it."

  At this point Florsheim's girl from Kansas City hustled up, heavy with leis and mascara, and giggled: "My God! Aren't these men positively divine?" She grabbed Florsheim's darkjbrown arm, felt the muscles admiringly and asked, "You ever hit a man with that fist, Florsheim?"

  "Nevah," the beachboy replied. "Only wimmin."

  His girl laughed outrageously, and when the various bits of luggage were ptted into the Chewy, the two couples headed for the Lagoon, but when Florsheim drove up King Street and past the old mission houses, Elinor Henderson abruptly asked him to stop, and she studied the historic buildings carefully, explaining at last, "My great-great-grandmother was born in that house. Originally I was a Quigley."

  "Never heard of them," Kelly said honestly.

  "They didn't stay long. But I'm doing a biography of them . . . for my thesis. I teach at Smith, you know."

  "You da kine wahine bimeby gonna write a book?" Florsheim asked, as he resumed the trip.

  "Tell him he doesn't have to talk pidgin," Elinor suggested.

  "He can't talk anything else," Kelly laughed.

  "I think pidgin's just adorable," the girl in front said, and Kelly thought: "Looks like I've got a four-nighter at best, and maybe not at all, but good old Florsheim better watch out or he's going to be layin' that babe in the lobby."

  Kelly's suspicion about Elinor Henderson proved correct, for she

  L.

  800HAWAII

  was not a four-nighter or even a six. She loved surfing and felt secure in Kelly's arms, but that was all. Yet one night when Kelly borrowed Florsheim's convertible�for the Kansas City girl had said flatly, "Why go riding in a Chewy when you can have so much fun in bed?"�he drove Elinor out to Koko Head, where they sat in darkness talking.

  "In the islands we call this kind of date, 'Watching the midnight submarine races,'" he explained.

  "Very witty," she laughed.

  "How's the biography coming along?" he asked.

  "I'm quite perplexed," she confessed.

  "No good, eh?"

  "I have been sorely tempted to put it aside, Kelly."

  "Why?"

  There was a long pause in the darkness as the late moon climbed out of the sea in the perpetual mystery of the tropics. Along the shore a coconut palm dipped out to meet it, and the night was heavy, bearing down on the woiild. Suddenly Elinor turned to Kelly and took his hands. "I have been driven mad by the desire to write about you, Kelly," she said.

  The beachboy was astonished. "Mel" he cried. "What's there to write about me?"

  She explained in clear, swift sentences, without allowing him to interrupt: "I have been haunted by Hawaii ever since I read my great-great-great-grandfather's secret journal. He stayed here only seven years. Couldn't take any more. And when he got back to Boston he wrote a completely frank account of his apprehensions. I can see his dear old handwriting still: 'I shall write as if God were looking over my shoulder, for since He ordained these things He must understand them.'"

  "What did he write?" Kelly inquired.

  "He said that we Christians had invaded the islands with the proper God but with an improper set of supporting values. It was his conviction that our God saved the islands, but our ideas killed them. Particularly the Hawaiians. And at one point, Kelly, he wrote a prophetic passage about the Hawaiian of the future. I copied it down, and last night I read it again, and he was describing you."

  "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. He 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 dis-

  THE GOLDEN MEN801

  possessed 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 coursel Look, I don't have 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

  802

  HAWAII

  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 cultu
re 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

  THE GOLDEN MEN

  803

  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.