Honolulu Story Read online

  There were many other people in the room—men in uniform with stars on their shoulders, women who were handsome—but Harry Cather in his rumpled white linen suit, and his daughter Mary, were as dominating as the great mass of torch ginger that was the only decoration against the silver-panelled wood walls, and as arresting as the two little Japanese maids, kimono-clad, slipping in and out among the guests with trays of cocktails and hors d’œuvres. They were standing together in front of the fireplace at the side of the room. It was easy to see how the portrait of his brother back in the sitting room could pass for Harry Cather, except that his hair was white now and he wasn’t so thin. I saw the same large luminous dark eyes, rather sad until he smiled, and the same patient, kindly droop of the shoulders. He was very tall. His mouth was not as full or sensuous as the portrait’s, and his hand taking mine was warm and very friendly.

  “How do you do, Grace,” he said smiling. “We call people by their first names, here in the Islands, and I’ve heard about you, from my daughter.”

  He turned to smile down at her.

  “I hope you’re going to love it here, Mrs. Latham,” Mary said.

  Standing there by her father, she was very different from the silent resentful child I’d first seen on the dock in San Francisco in February of ’42. And different from what she’d been in Washington. Seeing her now I could understand the magic she’d distilled, or the four young men on their way to war had divined in her, the night they fell as a man. She’d been attractive enough then so I wasn’t worried about getting her as a blind date for them. She was lovely, now, and the light in her violet eyes as she looked up at her father was lovely too. It must have been the way she looked at the four boys that night. Her hair was in short curls the color of shiny ripe wheatstraw that made her look younger than her twenty years and the long bob she wore in Washington had done. The sun tan she’d already got since she came home was a glowing and golden apricot against the slim whiteness of her long dress and the shower of white butterfly orchids on her shoulder. But it was the radiance in her eyes that made her different. They were clear as the dawn, and if any shadow had ever touched them it was gone, forgotten in the rapt enchantment of being home. Of guile or duplicity there was none. And I could hear Tommy Dawson’s voice again:

  “We were four happy Joes—now one of us is dead on her account. . . .”

  Her mother was at my side again, and I was meeting the other guests, with names I’d read in victorious communiqués from the South and Central Pacific, some of whom I’d already met around Washington. It was when Alice Cather led me to the lime-yellow cushioned hikiee in the corner that my heart gave a short power-dive and didn’t come up.

  “Well, bless me!” a voice said. “It sure is a small world, isn’t it? How do you do, Mrs. Latham—I bet you don’t remember me.”

  A young officer rose briskly. I bet I did remember him. He was one of those brash young men whose name never fully registers but whose face is as familiar at large cocktail parties as an established caterer’s number one old waiter. He was some sort of a friend of the four boys who had a brother in the State Department and landed in its sacred precincts himself for a brief stay before General Hershey’s large figure loomed ominously somewhat nearer than the horizon. And there must be some Hawaiian in me too. I knew what was coming as clearly as if he’d already said it.

  “Have you seen the old gang yet? They’ll all be here, all except Ben Farrell. . . .”

  Alice Cather’s hand on my elbow contracted sharply. I didn’t look at her, and I couldn’t see Mary without definitely turning. And I couldn’t stop the young man.

  “Poor old Ben got it, Saipan or some place.”

  It was as if he were announcing a winner in the bingo game.

  “You ought to use your influence, Mrs. Latham. Old Swede’s running around with that slant-eyed Mata Hari that Ben Farrell was married to. That babe is a smart operator . . . Corinne something or other, I forget——”

  “Farrell, I expect, isn’t it?”

  Alice Cather’s voice was as cool as a thin slice of cucumber in ice water.

  “—Why don’t you show Mrs. Latham the garden before it gets dark?” Alice Cather was going on pleasantly. “And I’m sure she’s anxious to hear about your friends.”

  She’d moved a little, as I had, so we both had a direct view of Mary through half a dozen generals, one of whom was producing a package of bobby pins for a delighted woman in gray chiffon with a pair of diamond ear clips that would have bought a shipload of bobby pins in other times. Mary was still by her father, her arm in his, talking to a naval officer whose white starched coattail was flipped out like the wing of a crinoline kite. Her face was still radiant. She hadn’t heard. I was sure of it, and so was her mother. There was a perceptible relaxation in the tiny crow’s-feet at the ends of her eyelids. And it couldn’t be plainer that she was determined to get the brash young man out of the room. I supposed in addition to everything she didn’t want him to go on talking about slant-eyed Mata Hari’s with the Japanese house man standing correct and politely unobtrusive less than three feet away.

  She took him firmly by the arm. “You know the way, Captain.”

  I was sure then she didn’t know his name either. That’s the nice thing about the uniform; all you have to do is tell silver from gold, eagles from leaves and stars from both.

  4

  SHE LED THE TWO OF US TO A STAIRWAY OFF the entrance hall. It wasn’t quite dark yet outside, but it was dusk and the grass was already silvered with dew. We went down winding stone steps at the side facing Ewa, as they say here—northeast as opposed to Waikiki. Around the terrace above us, facing the mountains, mauka as opposed to makai, toward the sea, was the lanai where Alice Cather had stood listening to the redbird’s evening call. The swimming pool was cut out of the rock, and I could hear the water splashing from it down into the ravine.

  All I could think of, however, was Ben Farrell, and Swede, and the half-caste girl that Ben had married and that Swede Ellicott was going to marry now. I wanted to ask the captain more about it, but I was afraid to start him again and not be able to shut him off when we got back to the house. And anyway he was not particularly sympathetic—in fact he was rather superior and irritating.

  “This must have cost plenty,” he remarked. “I guess Cather’s family were missionaries. They’re the ones who cleaned up out here. You’ve heard about the Big Five?”

  “The Cathers happened not to be,” I said. I didn’t know anything else about them, but Alice had told me that. “They were unsuccessful California Forty-niners and came on out here. And they aren’t Big Five either.”

  We were going around the terrace toward the mountain side. It was unbelievably lovely, with the bank spilling showers of orchids growing out of moist tree fern wired to the rock.

  “This is their air-raid shelter—it’s a honey. Absolutely complete from soup to nuts.”

  He pointed at a low redwood door set in the bank. It looked much more like the entrance to an enchanted cavern in a fairy tale, with its ornamental iron hinges and lock and the fern growing around it on the mossy rocks, and pale-green and lemon-yellow orchids hanging over it. I’d started to say so, when behind us, out of the brooding silence of the twilight against the hills, came the single note followed by the long sliding see-saw of the redbird’s call. It was so close and clear that remembering Alice Cather on the lanai I stopped and looked around, trying to locate it. And I stood, motionless at first and then rigid, just staring.

  A man’s face was there against the trees. It was nothing else, it was just a face . . . and it was not in the trees, it was against them. It stood out, plain and visible and perfectly motionless, as I stared, not really believing I was seeing it and yet unable to believe I wasn’t.

  In the curious visual quality of the dusk it was very white around the forehead under an indefinite hair-line, with cheeks that shaded into a dark stubble. I blinked my eyes quickly. It was still there, fixed and stati
onary in mid-air against the dense growth of green and dun-colored foliage. I couldn’t see any eyes, but I had the feeling that they were there, fixed on me, piercing and unwavering. And it was there. I could see it.

  “Look,” I said. “Over there, in the trees.”

  The captain turned from the air-raid shelter door. I started to point, and had an instant queer feeling that it might be wiser not to.

  “I don’t see anything,” he said.

  I didn’t either. There was nothing there. The face had gone. I was looking exactly where I’d been looking before. There was nothing there but the leaves.

  “—I saw a face,” I said. “A man’s face.”

  He looked around at me. “A spy,” he said gravely. Then he laughed. “Lady, don’t start that around here . . . everybody’ll just laugh at you. There’s nothing here the Japs are interested in—they’re too busy at home. Let’s go get a drink.”

  I was still looking for the face, or for the formation of leaves and light and shade that had looked so extraordinarily like one. If it had been an hallucination it was a very vivid and solid one, and I knew it hadn’t. It was a man’s face. I had seen it, and the image in my mind was as sharply positive as if I saw it still. If it had been any one else with me, or if the face had had a torso and arms and legs, I’d have insisted on waiting. But I gave up too and moved reluctantly along.

  There were more steps toward the house where it faced the mountains, and we went up them to the garden level. At the top I looked back. The face was there again, and this time I had no possible doubt about it. But it was there just an instant. It wasn’t against the leaves this time so much as in them, and it blotted out sharply, as if a leafy branch had been drawn across it. It was still nothing but a face, chalky-white and stubbly-dark. In the half-light of the exotic twilight it made my flesh creep.

  “What’s the matter now, Mrs. Latham?”

  “Nothing at all,” I said pleasantly. I followed the captain across the lawn to the downstairs room where the bar was. At the end of the terrace I stopped again, but there was nothing back there, or nothing that I could see. And maybe, I thought for a moment, there hadn’t been anything there at all, really; it could have been a trick of the light and my imagination. Or perhaps it was an Hawaiian custom for disembodied heads to float around against the trees. It was darker now, as if a curtain had been drawn down as the shafts of the dying sun made tangible plains of shadow slanting up to the top of the ridge, leaving it dark and sombre in the ravine.

  Yet all the time I knew that the face in the woods was still there. I knew it was hidden in the shadowy trees, a face without a body, rigid and poised, watching. It kept coming in and fading out of my mind, disturbing all the more because, I found myself giving it eyes, in my mind, and a kind of stealthy intentness.—And then there came into my mind again the sight of those two white searching planes, flying very low, circling, that Swede Ellicott had pointed out from the window of the Moana lobby—and the short conversation that the major and I had had on the Pali. And once when I heard the redbird’s call again, long after Stateside redbirds would have been asleep, I started so that my partner thought he’d trumped my trick. I looked over toward Alice, thinking again that it could have been the contagion of her panic on the lanai that was responsible. But she’d gone out of the room and they were settling accounts at her table.

  When the guests left I stood for a moment on the lanai looking over the dark rim of wilderness down onto the myriad lights of the city by the sea. Pearl Harbor was a vast white glow off to the right, beyond it the darkness of spreading cane fields and the ragged outlines of mountains against the sky. Behind me, moving noiselessly around the room, the Japanese house man was folding the bridge tables and clearing up for the night. The two little maids in their blue kimonos had disappeared. I suppose it was because Pearl Harbor glowed so brilliantly, itself and as a symbol, that I unconsciously turned and watched the man, intent on his job inside.

  He was short and stocky, with thick straight black hair and a broad flat face, with nothing about him to indicate his age to me. I suppose I must at some point or other have read in the papers that a large percentage of the population of the Hawaiian Islands was Japanese, either alien or native born, but I hadn’t really been prepared for the shock of seeing so many of them everywhere. It seemed to me I saw practically nothing else, but that was no doubt because I wasn’t used to them and was so conscious of them as a people we were fighting a few thousand miles forward over the Pacific.

  When a voice spoke beside me I started. Harry Cather and Mary had come back on the lanai from seeing their guests off. And what I was thinking must have been pretty evident in my face.

  “Now, now, Grace,” Harry said, laughing. “Don’t start a spy hunt, will you? Servants are hard to get. I assure you Kumumato’s all right. He’s been around for years.”

  Mary Cather laughed too.

  “You’re all right, aren’t you, Kumumato?” she called across the lanai.

  He had probably heard his name anyway. He stopped with his tray of glasses, grinned broadly and nodded, and went on.

  “It must be sort of tough, when they’re loyal,” Mary said, “being eyed by everybody. It’s crazy, really. Kumumato’s as much an American as we are. He was born here in Honolulu and he’s got two sons in the A. J. Battalion in Italy. And he had a daughter killed on the 7th. You know the bombs the Japs dropped on the city didn’t hit anything but Japanese property. Of course, people who don’t know them and aren’t used to them the way we are out here are always sort of shocked.”

  “Mainlanders don’t quite see the picture,” Harry Cather said. “It would be a little hard to put that many people in concentration camps, in the first place, and it would play hob with every kind of labor. Except in the defense plants. They’re not allowed on military jobs. I don’t say there aren’t some black sheep. It wouldn’t be human nature if there weren’t a few, out of the hundred and fifty thousand right here on Oahu. But they’re a practical people. Only forty families went back to their emperor, when they were all given the chance, at the beginning of the war. Not very many, was it?”

  “No, it wasn’t,” I agreed. “Not out of a hundred and fifty thousand.”

  “And we’re all pretty well tabbed here, by Internal Security. They’ve got us all fingerprinted and we carry civilian identification cards—every man, woman and child in the Islands. The curfew wasn’t anything anybody took lightly—blackout at sundown, at first, and after the war moved out, off the streets at ten.”

  “I wish I’d been here all the time,” Mary said. “Everything wouldn’t have been so different if I’d seen it gradually. You can’t imagine how different it looks now.”

  We’d moved along to the corner of the lanai where we could look down over the dark valley to the jewelled brilliance of the city, and up to the dark mountains, stretching in an endless chair against the sky.

  “It’s funny how an Islander feels strange when there’s nothing but flat land and buildings everywhere,” she said. “It smells different, here, and it feels different. Even if they have made a fortress out of it, it’s still Oahu, and I love it. Did you know, Mrs. Latham, that in the early days in California the wealthy people used to send their children here to school? It was shorter than sending them across the plains or around the Horn. It seems odd, doesn’t it, when you can get from here to Washington in thirty-six hours now. It’s going to be a funny world, isn’t it, when we’re all under each other’s feet and you can’t get away from anybody very far.”

  She laughed suddenly.

  “Remember how glad we were, Dad, when Aunt Norah moved just over to Maui, because it was eighty-eight miles away and it made her seasick to ride on boats? Now she can take a plane and be here in half an hour.—I hope she doesn’t, as soon as she sees in the papers we’re back home again.”

  “I believe we’re safe,” her father said, I thought rather dryly.

  Mary laughed again. “Do you have relative
s too, Mrs. Latham?”

  “A few,” I said.

  “Well, it’s wonderful to be back home, anyway,” she went on. “Are you turning in, Dad?”

  Harry Cather stopped a few steps off. “No, I’m going to get a book for Grace. Hawaii, Off Shore Territory, it’s called. I think it’s a very intelligent picture of the situation here.”

  Mary watched him until he disappeared around the angle of the living room . . . a little covertly, I thought at first. And in an instant I was sure of it.

  She turned to me quickly when he’d gone.

  “—Mrs. Latham,” she said, lowering her voice almost to a whisper. “Do you mind if I ask you something? Did . . . did I hear the captain talking to you about . . . Swede Ellicott?”

  My heart sank a little. If she’d heard that much I didn’t see how she could have helped hearing the rest of it, including the fact that the old gang was there in Honolulu and the bit about the slant-eyed Mata Hari. I didn’t know what to say to her, and I must have hesitated much longer than seemed natural under the circumstances, because she looked away.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have asked, should I? But I . . . I thought I heard his name. I wasn’t sure. I seem to hear it a lot even when the room’s empty and nobody could possibly be saying it.”

  She turned her head and gave me a quick smile.

  “Crazy, isn’t it? Maybe it’s the atmosphere. The Hawaiians hear things—music, and drums. . . . They see things too. Maybe it’s catching. I’ve seen Swede a dozen times since I got here—only it’s always somebody else when I get up to him.”

  She stood there, her body resting lightly against the rail behind us, poking at the lau-hala mat with the silver toe of her slipper.

  “I always thought I ought to explain to you what happened,” she said quietly. “About me and Swede, I mean. You were so sweet to us both, it seemed a little . . . abrupt, just to have Mother call and say it was over, without . . . without anything else.”