Michener, James

by Hawaii

  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 outl" 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 muchl 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

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  soon they were in a fairyland of trees and flowers bordering a rash-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, nol 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,"

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  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 hi 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."

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  HAWAII

  "So you sing your life away? For nothing?" "Who's happier?" he countered. "Mom or the women you know back home?"

  Early next morning Eli
nor 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 awestruck 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 regukr 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 raid 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

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  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 Whip-pie, 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 cornel"

  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.

  "Immanuel Quigley and his wife Jeptha, brig Thetis, 1822," called the clerk, and with a heart bursting with passion and history and the confused love of God, Elinor Henderson rose, the first Quigley ever to have done so in that society. Her rising must have inflamed bitter memories in the hearts of the Hales and the Hewletts and the Whipples, for although intractable Imtnariuel Quigley had suppressed his secret memoirs, which Elinor had found so damning, he had allowed enough of his ideas to escape so that his name was not a happy one among the mission families. Defiantly, his great-great-great-granddaughter stared ahead, and then she heard from the assembly a hammering of palms and wild applause. Continuing to stare ahead, for she was no more forgiving than her difficult ancestor had been, she resumed her seat as the clerk cried mournfully, "Abraham and Urania Hewlett, brig Thetis, 1822." Again there was a loud scraping of chairs, with many Hawaiians standing, for Abraham's offspring by Malia, his second wife, were numerous. Many of the missionary descendants considered it inappropriate for such people to rise as if they were the true descendants of blessed Urania Hewlett, but the Hawaiians got up anyway and nothing could be done about it.

  That night Elinor Henderson told Kelly, "A visitor touches Hawaii at great risk. He never knows when the passions of the islands will engulf him."

  "You think you know enough now to write the biography?" Kelly asked idly.

  'Tes."

  "You determined to call it The Dispossessed?"

  m

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  "More than ever."

  "Who do you think the dispossessed are?" Kelly taunted.

  "You. Who else?"

  "I thought maybe at the mission society you discovered that they were the real dispossessed," he argued.

  "How do you mean?"

  "They came here to bring Congregationalism, but we despised their brand of Christianity. Now most of us are Catholics or Mormons. Today we have nearly as many Buddhists in the islands as Congrega-tionalists. Likewise, they came with a God they believed in. How many of them still have that God? And they had big ideas. Now all they have is money."

  "You sound very bitter, Kelly. And in a way I'm glad."

  "Do you know why the Mormons had so much success in these islands? They admit frankly. 'In heaven there are only white people.' I suppose you know that a nigger can't get a place to sleep in Salt Lake. So they tell us that if we are real good on earth and we love God, when we die God's going to make us white, and then we'll go to heaven and all will be hunky-dory."

  "I don't believe Mormons think that, Kelly," she protested.

  "It squares with the facts," he said carefully, but his anger was rising furiously and he was afraid of what he might say next. He tried to halt his words, but in spite of himself they rushed out: "Of course, the other Christians tell us that God loves all men, but we know that's bullshit."

  "Kelly!"

  "We know it! We know it!" he stormed. "It's as clear as the mountains at dawn. God loves first white men, then Chinese, then Japanese, and after a long pause He accepts Hawaiians."

  "Kelly, my darling boy, please!"

  "But do you know the one consolation we got? Can you guess? We know for goddamn certain that He loves us better than He loves niggers. God, I'd hate to be a nigger."

  Since Elinor Henderson had greater capacity for emotion than for logical control she was, of course, unable to write her book; in fact, she was prevented from even trying by one of those strange, wild occurrences that mark the tropics. At six-eighteen on the morning following her visit to the mission society she was still asleep, but in the deep waters of the Pacific, nearly three thousand miles to the north, an event of tremendous magnitude was taking place. The great shelf that lies off the Aleutian Chain was racked by a massive submarine earthquake, which in the space of a few minutes tumbled millions of tons of submerged ocean cliff down hidden moutainsides to a new resting place on the ocean floor. It was a titanic redisposal of the earth's crust, and the ocean in whose depths it occurred, was shaken so violently that a mighty rhythmic wave was launched southward at an incomprehensible speed; but even though something like seven per cent of the entire ocean was affected, the resulting

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  wave was physically inconspicuous, never more than four or five inches high.

  Actually, one shipload of sailors passed right over it without knowing, for at seven-eighteen that morning a slight swell
lifted a Japanese tanker some three inches higher than it had been a moment before, but no one noticed the event and it was not recorded in the log. But if the captain had been alert, and if he had known where the wave had originated only an hour before, he could have written: "Tsunami caused by an Alaskan submarine earthquake passed under our ship. Speed southward, 512 miles an hour." And if he had thought to flash a radio warning throughout the Pacific many lives would have been saved, but lie neither saw nor thought, so the epic tsunami sped on unheralded at a speed approaching that of sound. If it encountered no stationary objects like islands, it would ultimately dissipate itself in the far Antarctic, but if it did come upon an island, its kinetic energy might pile waters more than seventy feet deep upon the land and then suck them back out to sea with demonic force. The coming in of the waters would destroy little, but their awful retreat would carry away all things.

  While the tsunami was passing unnoticed under the Japanese tanker, Elinor Henderson was just rising to enjoy the last effects of dawn over the Pacific, and at nine she went down to the beach to �watch the beachboys playing sakura. She was amused to hear them swearing in pidgin when the run of the black cards went against them, but this morning had a special attraction in that Florsheim appeared among the boys dressed in store clothes: polished tan shoes, a suit that was not quite big enough for his huge frame, a shirt that bound a little at the collar, a knitted tie that hung awry and a tropical straw hat. Beside him stood the rich girl from Kansas City, hardly able to keep her hands off him and crying to one group after another, "God, ain't he a hunk of man? We're gettin' married in St. Louis."

  Florsheim grinned and handed his Chewy keys to Elinor: "You, seestah, tell blalah Kelly take care my jalopy." She said she would, and when she saw Kelly she asked, "How long do you think Flor-sheim'll stay married this time?"

  "Seem like blalah Flprsheim gonna look funny Kansas City da kine. So bimeby dis wahine gonna find he doan' talk so good and she gonna gi'e him lotta wahine pflikia. So come late October you gonna see blalah Florsheim back on de beach wid a Buick convertible."