Short Fiction

This series of first-person short stories that take place in Hawaii is part of an ongoing project called PIECES OF THE ROAD. Each story can stand alone, but it’s beneficial to read the series in the order of the date each speaker is revealing a “piece of the road.” The speakers or the characters are somehow related to each other through some 200 years. The first few stories are inspired by scraps of disconnected information leftover from a huge genealogy project -- such as a single name, a death certificate, a location, a marriage date. Some of the rest are inspired by family stories I overheard as a kid. Others are based on events I witnessed. You could say each story is a nugget of fact wrapped like a mummy in yards and yards of imagination.

1819: Hope‘ole

The temples are burning. Never have I heard of this, destroying the heiau and their ki‘i, their carven images of gods. And even the anu‘u tower in the heiau luakini. Even the heiau ho‘ōla, where the sick are treated.

In the very old, old times sometimes a heiau dedicated to one god was reconsecrated by kahuna, so a temple of Kū became a temple of Lono. But never have I heard of this complete destruction, when armies coming by order of our new King, to make war not upon a foe, but upon the ways of old.

It is said that this new young mo’i, this Liholiho, has eaten with women! Ka’ahumanu, kuhina nui, his father’s favorite wife. And Keopuolani, his sacred wife. They say these two made him drink the haole’s rum. And then he ate with the women! Broke the ‘ai kapu, the law for men and women to eat separately.

Now the ‘ai kapu is gone, and also all the laws that came from the priests at the temples. The temples themselves are being destroyed! All because of free eating!

Our air is full of smoke, and the countryside is full of the crazed men who burn. Yet even at this moment my husband, ‘Ehu, goes among those who say this is not pono, not right. They say that the wrath of Kū and the torrents of Kāne shall come upon those who wreak this abomination.

‘Ehu says he hears that the armies come too fast, too strong, too full of the darkness and poison brought by the breaking of the ‘ai kapu. Better, ‘Ehu says, that we move the ki‘i, the carven images, treat them as the sacred bones, hide them in caves where the crazed ones would not think to look.

I say, if he would but listen, ‘Ehu, even I, a woman whose business is not war, know those burners of ki‘i will not destroy only the temples. No, my husband, they will torch whatever is near, and march into the gentle flowing waters of the lo‘i, the taro terraces,caring not that the kalo is nearly ready for harvest. They will trample the dikes, the beautiful heart-shaped leaves. Nearby, they will stomp the twining ‘uala vines, even dig the tubers, thinking perhaps a ki‘i lies hidden in the soil. Who knows, they might even desecrate Waiakea fish pond.

O my husband, finding nothing, they will lose the last shred of their sanity and throw their burning brands into our family hale pili, our family house. They will burn your men’s hale mua, even the hale moe, the sleeping houses.

And what if they come marching with their torches while we sleep? What then? What of our children? Even Na‘ope‘ope is only just nine. And the girls, oh the girls! Pu‘uomoeawa only just lost her first tooth. Kuakea began talking well not even a year ago, in the last months of Ka Mo‘i Kamehameha The Great. Shall I now give them the futile command to run ma uka, to the highlands? Toward the sacred Kīlauea where Pele decides each day whether she gives or destroys? To a land we do not know?

We are people of the shore. We do not know the rainforest, where the hapu‘u fern’s fallen stumps lie rotting, ready to collapse with even a child’s weight, ready to break your leg with only a single false step. We would fare poorly in those forests flanking Pele’s sacred home.

These burning men are not Pele, burning as she does with fires from within, sending the flows upon a village and only she knows why. No, these men defy Pele, take her power into their human hands, defy the great gods, break all the kapu.

O Ehu. Husband. Come back. They have already burned Waha‘ula, the great temple of Puna. Within my own lifetime Kamehameha dedicated that ancient temple to his war god Kūkailimoku, the Snatcher of Land. And now it is said the burners have committed desecration, and all without consequence. Even from Kū, the god of war.
O Ehu, husband, you say there are those who resist, those kahuna who protect the temples. You say they shall prevail, that you and the others from your hale mua are bound to go to their aid. You say the gods shall speak, they shall strike down the new King himself, even his own sacred mother. Strike down those women who led the new King to break the ‘ai kapu, the one law that symbolizes all the kapu.

I say, O husband, this bodes ill no matter what we do. I hear your voice to save the ki‘i, to rebuild the heiau when the fires are nothing but cold ashes. I know you follow the kahuna who believe they can prevail in time.

O yes, I am but a woman. But I hear all this in our village. The children hear things too. Na‘ope‘ope wants to know if he can go with you. He says he is very good at climbing to high hiding places. Ka‘iwi says he shall follow, though we know he has a hard time keeping up with the older boys. I keep the girls with me as we tend the ipu on their vines, shaping them for their intended use. But the children feel my fear in the dark when we lie on our sleeping mats. One night little Pu’uomoeawa whispered a question: Will the pili grass covering our house be set afire while we sleep?

O Ehu, come home. I know it is the season of Makahiki, that the marchers of Lono should come soon, bearing the Lonomākua standard and bringing festive times, with games and hula. But the time of peace is not to be this year, my husband. The time of peace is no more.

The burners are coming instead, and it is the season when the gods all die forever.

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1873: Heanu

Māhinahina, they call it, the silver night-time rainbow. Never did I know this until that night some years back when Palea came calling, not so long after Kaililau had died.

This Kaililau was my cousin, Kaililau, Snatcher-of-Leaves. I myself was named for her mother, the elder Heanu. A cool place. I leave it to you to puzzle the true meanings of our names.

Kaililau cared for me when I was very young, her parents and mine living side by side in our village near the sea in Puna.

When she died she left four young children with their father, Palea, and we women came wailing. It was my first time to come to the dead this way as an adult woman. I thought Iehova would smite us for falling back to a pagan way. I was glad they were quick to bury her in the Christian way, ashes to ashes and dust to dust in the graveyard behind the church.

Our families lived not far from Pele’s Warm Springs. O, I hope the mention of Pele is not another affront to Iehova. But I do think those Warm Springs were indeed the work of Pele, the Goddess of Fire. Who else poured lava down the land? Who else keeps the steam beneath even the old, cold flows? Who else but Pele?

Kaililau would take us little ones to Warm Springs and teach us to look carefully before we jumped into the deep pools of warm water below. Perhaps there would be a mo‘o waiting. It would be a lizard lady, one of those most clever of shape shifters. Also, Kaililau said, do not think you can avoid the mo‘o by jumping into shallow water. You will die for sure of a broken neck and your father will banish me from all of Puna.

So we watched for mo‘o. Although we never saw any, of course they could have been just out of sight. I wondered if maybe the deep water, where I could see only a hint that there might be a bottom, hid a mo‘o. But when we perched on a rock above and looked carefully below, Kaililau called “Lele!” When we had safely jumped, Kaililau did too.

And then one day she married Palea at that same church where, some five years later, we buried her. By then I was 16, the same age she had been when she took us to Warm Springs.

Her babies had come one right after another, as most babies did, the last one in 1866. And then Palea, poor Palea, was left alone with the four of them.

What must be done, everyone knew. But I didn’t think it would have a thing to do with me. For all his years with Kaililau, from the day he came courting at my uncle’s house, Palea had been as an older brother to the rest of us. My own older brothers fished with him in the summer when they went to sea with line and net to catch opelu, aku, a‘ahi and ulua. They mended nets with him, taught him our family’s way of making the mother-of-pearl lure for the he‘e, the octopus and squid. And I too, the only girl of our family, being like a little sister to Kaililau, saw him as an older brother.

Yes, Palea courted Kaililau when I was about 16, and I wished then for a handsome man to someday soon come courting me. Never did I think that man would be my “brother” Palea.

But, a few months after Kaililau’s passing, all the family went to Warm Springs for a few days. One afternoon, when I was sitting on a rock watching after Palea’s children as they played with cousins, he came to my side and sat.

“I told them about the mo‘o,” I said. “See how careful they are about looking below.”

“The mo‘o do not concern me,” Palea said. “Truly this is what I wish to say, Heanu.” He cleared his throat and settled himself, uneasily I thought. Nervously. “Twilight approaches,” he said. “With the setting of the sun to the west Māhea-lani, the full moon, will rise from the east. Will you come with me to the canoe launch? Your mother is here so the children are in safe care.”

It did not occur to me that I could say no. Palea was a well grown man, a father, a widower. I was by then about twenty-one, yet still a girl. One who does not say no. Not that I wish I had, but really, Palea did not neatly fit the picture in my mind’s eye of a handsome young man come courting.

I said yes. My mother made not one noise or gesture to prevent me going, though surely she knew exactly what Palea had in mind and what would happen.

The sea was calm with just the smallest breeze in the air and we launched the outrigger easily. On the outgoing tide we paddled into the deep blue. The full moon rose over us, yellow at first, soft and round, but then too on a purer, colder glow as she rose, like a young woman growing wiser.

Palea paddled and paddled, so far out I began to wonder if those mo‘o might be in the ocean as well as in the springs. Maybe they were ready to rise and capsize our wa‘a, our canoe, which seemed to shrink smaller and smaller as Palea stroked farther and farther from shore. I thought a slight mist drifted in the air. Yet perhaps I was only thinking of the wisping breath of a mo‘o lady, a breath that might be delicate rain one moment and a fiery whip the next. I thought so much about it, that several times Palea had to call out, “Heanu! Paddle!”

I wished I’d thought to invite my oldest brother, Ha‘alipo. Or even my baby brother, Kalauhala. Either of them would have turned this canoe to shore by now. Yet Palea paddled on.

The sea seemed by this time a foreign land. I could scarcely believe I’d ever loved it, though my father and brothers fished it in every fish’s season. Sometimes, when I was small and the swells were gentle, they would take me for a ride. Now it was a sea so mysterious and full of strange beings that I could not love it as I did by day.

“Look, Heanu!” Palea called to me, holding his paddle with one hand and pointing upward with the other.

I looked overhead to see a double silvery rainbow surrounding the full moon, more magical than any mo‘o could ever be. The rainbow shimmered above. Its faint and lovely colors glowed, reflecting on the dark water rocking our canoe. I thought I could feel the rainbow on my cheeks. Somehow my heart filled with the idea that Palea was indeed a handsome man.

“Māhinahina,” Palea said quietly. “The moon and its rainbow, they are for you.”

We lingered a long while until the moon slipped, and with it the silver rainbow. Palea remarked that the tide had turned so we would have easy paddling back.

Not long after that Palea requested my hand in marriage, using the protocol that still seemed odd to us even though we’d been Christians now for two generations. Nearly a year later Alice was born, Alice Kanoeka‘apuniokalani.

Alice was just two years younger than Kaililau’s youngest son. My children are half-brother and half-sisters of their second cousins, those children whose mother was the dead Kaililau. But that is the haole way of thinking. To us it is of no importance to speak of “half” brother or “second” cousin. Family is family.

Palea and I are blessed with all these children by māhinahina and I trust now in the dark waters. Somehow I know that the mo‘o are not there. I do not say a thing about mo‘o anymore, merely telling the children to look carefully before they jump, whether at Warm Springs or into the ocean.

And sometimes, when they want a story at bedtime, I tell them of the handsome man who launched his canoe one night and took a maid to the darkness of the deep blue sea. I tell how he showed her the silvery moonbow that may be seen only once in a long, long time.

I say to the little ones, “Sleep now, and dream well, for you are the blessings of Māhinahina.”

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1902: Makana

Oh dearest Mother, I have some news for you. I am standing here under Father’s black umbrella, the same one he bought the day we buried you two years ago. My feet are wet, and the hem of my dress. It has been raining this whole month, and February is nearly over. It is as dark as coming evening though I have just finished the forenoon chores.

But it feels like sunshine to me. It feels like orchids, and pikake. It feels like the rainforest when the sun finally comes out and the birds all sing because they cannot help it, they are so happy.

Yesterday in the evening Father received a caller. This morning at breakfast, when he had excused Makaio and Ho‘omaka to go off to work and I was clearing the dishes while he finished his coffee, he spoke, in Hawaiian of course. We hardly have spoken English since you died.

“Makana,” he said. “Please sit down.”

Oh my, what had I done? So seldom does he get angry, and if he does, his words are still quiet. I looked in his eyes for that shadow of darkness and displeasure. You know what I am talking about. But I didn’t see it. Yet, what had I done? Or not done? Maybe his coffee wasn’t hot enough. Maybe he doesn’t like the laundry strung around the kitchen, trying to dry inside in the constant rain. Maybe I shouldn’t have given Makaio ten cents from the kitchen coin jar. All of these seemed so trivial, but I couldn’t think of anything big.

I must have hesitated, standing there with plates in my hands, because he said, “Take off your apron and sit down.”

I set the dishes on the sideboard, pulled out Makaio’s chair and sat, laying the apron over the back. Still I was thinking, I should not have bought those cakes at the bakery. I should not have spent so much time finishing my quilt. I should not have borrowed all that milk from Uncle Nahinu next door. I could feel my hands twisting in my lap.

“Makana,” Father said. “Dearest Daughter. My only daughter, Makana Nahinu. I wish your Mother was here.” He took a sip of his coffee. By now it must be completely cold. “She would have liked this news.”

He set his cup down, leaned his arms on the table and looked straight at me. “Mr. Fletcher has asked for you in marriage.”

I gasped. Mr. Fletcher! I think I made a noise. Maybe my eyes got big. Maybe I held my breath. Father said, “Are you all right?”

“Yes,” I said, breathing as if I never had before. “Yes. I am very all right. Mr. Fletcher!”

“So this is what you want?”

“Oh, yes. Yes.”

“I thought so. He’s been courting now for some time. I’ve been watching him. And you. I know so few Hawaiians who have married haole. I hope it will be all right.”

“Yes,” I said again. “It will be.”

He stood, raised me up with his hand, and drew me to him in the old way we used to do every night just after prayers. He took my face in his two hands for honi. Our noses and foreheads touched, for so long a time it seemed that his breathing became the same as mine. It was somehow as if you were there too, my Mother. In that sweet breath of honi, I remembered all those nights we did that, when Makaio and I were children, and all the way until you died, the day after Christmas. I could feel your aloha, today, right with Father’s.

Oh, I hope I am doing right. That Mr. Fletcher, he came from Kaliponi not long after you died. He is the brother of the other Mr. Fletcher, the one who went in with James Butler. That’s the Mr. Fletcher who came to start the pharmacy next to Mr. Butler’s hardware store in his building on Front Street.

You remember this first Mr. Fletcher, I’m sure. He came with his wife from Kaliponi, and then they had their baby girl, right here in Hilo. That Mr. Fletcher, he hired me to help the wife, because they had no relatives to come when the baby was born. For a few months after you died I did their cleaning, and sometimes took the baby out, when it wasn’t raining. Her name was Pearl, I remember. Her mother was the tiniest little woman you ever saw. Small like a child.

Only months after Pearl started walking the three of them sailed back to Kaliponi on that big ship Falls of Clyde, you know the one. They say it takes seventeen days to go from here to San Francisco. Imagine! I wonder what it is like, sailing. I could find out sometime. I could sail to Maui to visit Blind Aunty. Makaio says he is going to sail away. Merchant seaman, that’s what he says. Remember when he first said that word, “merchant seaman?” You told him to forget about it and stay home. Hilo was good enough.

Well, Mr. and Mrs. Fletcher and baby Pearl sailed away. But before they did, Mr. Fletcher’s brother came to stay with them, came on that very same Falls of Clyde. He was not a merchant seaman, but a proper passenger. When Mr. and Mrs. Fletcher took a hack to the bay front to meet him, I stayed with Baby Pearl at the house.

When they all arrived in the hack and came through the front door, I had Pearl up to my shoulder, patting her little back. Mr. Fletcher said, “Makana, may I present my brother, Charles Fletcher?”

Mr. Charles Fletcher set his valise down and was going to take my hand, but both my arms were full of Pearl. Mrs. Fletcher stepped up and took the baby, and Mr. Fletcher, the new Mr. Fletcher, I mean, took my hand. And he kissed it.

“I am enchanted,” he said.

Such a thing to say! No man had ever kissed my hand. Oh yes, people shake hands every Sunday at church, but no men kiss the ladies’ hands.

Young Mr. Fletcher lingered with my hand so long I pulled it back. He gazed right at me, so long I had to look away. His eyes were so very blue they scared me. I had seen blue eyes, of course, with so many haole in Hilo now. In fact, the older Mr. Fletcher and his wife both have blue eyes. But they seem like regular eyes. Not the eyes like the young Mr. Fletcher, not the eyes of elegance.

I saw him a few times more at the Fletchers’ house, and once or twice when I was taking Pearl for an outing and he was arriving from some stroll or errand. Each time he took my hand. “Hello, my dear,” he would say. “I’m so very pleased to see you again.”

After his brother and family left on the ship, young Mr. Fletcher came calling one day at the house. He said his brother told him where we live, on School Street, near the corner.

“My, what a nice place you have,” he said. “May I?” He took a seat on the front lānai.

I told him I lived here with you and Father my whole life, that Grandfather had built the original house and Father had added to it. And now I was here with Father and my brother Makaio and your brother Uncle Ho‘omaka. I told him you had died some two years ago and I shouldn’t be talking to him because I felt like I was still in mourning. But I couldn’t stop talking .

I told how Makaio and Ho‘omaka and Father work at different things, and I keep the house. I told about Uncle Nahinu and Aunty Hope next door, and their little ones, Thomas and Elizabeth and Phoebe and Sarah, and the baby Annabelle, those Hawaiian children with the haole names. I even told how Hope's father was the baker from Scotland and I sometimes bought a sweet from that very same bakery even though Mr. McLeod died when I was a little girl.

I told how Father owns part of Uncle Nahinu's land next door, but we live here, on my land. I told how your father bought this land from Mr. Pitman and then gave it to you and Aunty Paha’oha’o when you were children. And then you and Aunty gave it to Makaio and me when we were children.

“So whose children will get it next?” Mr. Fletcher's blue eyes were making a sort of joke, I think. “Yours or Makaio’s? Maybe whose ever children are born first!”

About then Makaio came walking home from work.

“I’d like you to meet Mr. Fletcher,” I said.

Makaio wiped his own hand on his pants and offered it to Mr. Fletcher. “You are my sister’s friend?”

“Yes,” Mr. Fletcher said. “Yes indeed.” Makaio looked him up and down, looked at Mr. Fletcher’s hat on the lānai railing. “Excuse me. I will go wash.”

Mr. Fletcher took up his hat, took up my hand, and bowed. “Farewell,” he said. “Until we meet again.” Then he kissed my hand, like he did the day we met.

“A hui hou,” I said.

“What is that, my dear?”

“Until we meet again.”

“A hui hou,” he said. It sounded a little stiff, and I was sure he’d never said it before.

After that he came to call each week, sometimes when Father was home from the police department. He and father, and sometimes Makaio and Ho‘omaka, talked of Hilo, of ships, of the businesses in Hilo Town. They talked of sugar, of plantations, and of the mill at Waiākea just down the road from us, where Makaio works. Mr. Fletcher talked of his new job, with the new Territorial Board of Health.

With me he talked of Kaliponi, California, and other places he had been, places called Cuba and Arizona. He talked about trains, and how his parents died when he was just a boy, and about his oldest brother who took care of the younger five until their grandparents moved them to their big house on a corner. He told me about the town, in a place called Ohio, where it is very cold in winter and it snows. He said the town was like Hilo, only not nearly so interesting.

After about a year, Mr. Fletcher came to call one day in a motorcar. Imagine, a motorcar! Who has a motorcar? Only Mr. Shipman up on his hill on Reid’s Island, and that boss man at the train station, Mr. Fuller, and Mr. Adams at the mill. Oh yes, and Mr. Robbins, the merchant. So imagine! Mr. Fletcher with a motorcar!

Father came to the door when he knocked. Mr. Fletcher asked Father if he would like to see it, and go for a ride.“Come see it,” he said. “Bring Makana.”

Father went out to the street, where Mr. Fletcher had parked it. I stayed on the porch and watched Father walk all the way around the car, touch the shiny black paint, and poke his head inside to see the seats and steering wheel. Oh yes, I liked that motorcar, but I thought my Father should see it first. He pointed to the back, and Mr. Fletcher opened a door that was hinged like a flour bin. I could see Mr. Fletcher offer Father the crank, but Father shook his head and put his hands behind his back. So Mr. Fletcher started the machine, opened the door, and must have asked Father if he would get in. Again Father shook his head, and this time he backed away. Mr. Fletcher turned off the motorcar.

For some weeks Father would not let me ride in the motorcar. But after Makaio had gone riding around Hilo a few times with Mr. Fletcher, he relented. One Sunday after church Mr. Fletcher drove Makaio and me up to Pi‘ihonua. Makaio thought he could find the place where your mother had lived long ago, but it was so wet and the forest had grown so much, we could not even see where a wagon might have gone, not even a path for those on horseback. We got out and walked around some, but that didn’t help. Mr. Fletcher thought it amusing, the way I held my skirts up, trying not to get muddy. He picked a blossom of yellow ginger, held it long to his nose, and gave it to me.

“Beautiful fragrance, beautiful blossom, just as you are, my dear.” Truly, that is what he said. I looked at him directly as I tucked it into my hair. His eyes were shining so that I thought I could see through them into his insides.

When we turned around, we could see all of Hilo Bay laid out before us, stretching from Ale‘ale‘a Point on the left to Moku Ola on the right. The town stretched as far, the stores and such nearest the bay, the houses marching gently upward behind them, toward us, with a few on Reid’s Island and across the river, where Mr. Butler lives. I think I could see our place in Ponahawai among the trees along Alanai‘o Stream.

After that, every Saturday Mr. Fletcher came to call and we would go riding here and there. I would bring a basket of food, and a blanket to spread for a picnic. We went to Onomea once, and to Kea‘au, where you came from. Or further into Puna, even to ‘Opihikao, and to the Warm Springs. We sat on the rocks there and he took one of my feet in his hands and said, “May I?” And then he unlaced my shoes, both of them, and gently put my feet over the edge into that lovely warm water.

“Next time we come we shall bathe in these waters of purity,” he said. “Soon.”

Oh Mother, I so wish you were here, to see this elegant haole man, this man with the blue eyes deeper than the Warm Springs pools. This man who wants to marry me. We shall go back to Warm Springs and bathe in that pool.

Oh, my Mother, I wish you were still here with us. But perhaps when I come back to your stone in a year’s time, I will come with your mo‘opuna, a little one like Pearl, a little one called Fletcher.

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1911: Elsie

Mrs. Connor, she send me Hilo. I no like go.

My mother, she tell, “Elsie, you go, make more kālā, you take care all da keiki. You take care Retta too, come home nex’ year when Mr. Fletcher he hire one noddah servant girl. But I tell you, I hear the hauwala‘au, da kine gossip. You might hear too. But you one good girl, you no listen. You go. Be proud you get one big job.”

But you know, even before I go, I hilahila, I shame, because I already hear the hauwala’au. I shame for Retta, shame for Mr. Fletcher.

My whole life I work by my mother in Kona, cook, wash clothes, scrub. Only go school little bit. I stay 24, only one year more old than Retta. But my school room was wash house, the cookstove was black board. Miss Retta go Catholic School, learn catechism and music lesson.

But when Mrs. Connor tell me I going Hilo for help Retta, she say, “Elsie, you were born wise. You know how to do everything. Retta is so very young to have married a poor widower with seven children. You must go to help.”

But I not wise I think. I don’t know not’ing about Hilo. I no like go. Too far from Kona, too far. When I going see Mama nex’ time?

Mrs. Connor, she say my mother can do all the work for her and I can go Hilo. Do all the work there.

So I go Hilo. I cry all the way, all day riding from Kona. Mr. Fletcher, he come get me from the jitney in Hilo. It almost coming dark already. He take me the house, give me one small room behind, like one shed. Get one bed, one wood chair and one small little table with one kerosene lamp. I put my small paiki on the floor. Inside it get two dresses and my Bible.

In the big house I meet all Mr. Fletcher’s keiki. He line them up. Tallest two boys, two girls, two more boys. The baby crawl on the floor, try for stand up. Mr. Fletcher he tell all their names but he have hard time remembah who da middle boy.

They all hapa, half Hawaiian. Retta, she look Hawaiian but little bit more fair. Her mother hapa, her daddy haole, like Mr. Fletcher. Me, I hapa too, but I get plenny Chinese, only little bit Hawaiian. My daddy name Chang.

I say, “Mr. Fletcher, where Miss Retta?”

“She has not been feeling well and is lying down. Please make her some tea.”

I make tea in one Chinese dragon pot, take to her lying on her bed. I make one cold wet cloth, put on her head. She say, “Oh Elsie, I’m so glad you’re here.” She sip half the tea and say, “Would you bring me that coverlet? Please?”

Hilo stay raining, winter almost. Stay cold. I touch her forehead. No stay hot. What kind sick this? From the rain? I cover Miss Retta. I say, “You rest, you come better.”

I cooking, cleaning, washing, ironing starched shirts for Mr. Fletcher and ruffled dresses for the small girls. Sometime Mr. Fletcher he give me money go buy grocery down the store. So I meet girls like me, servants, only they Japanee. They tell me all kind things.

They say the first Mrs. Fletcher, she die September. Now November. Miss Retta married one month. They say when Mrs. Fletcher lie ma-ke – dead -- in the parlor, all kind Hawaiian ladies come wailing, making the ūwē. Mr. Fletcher try make them go away, they only wail more loud.

The Japanee servants say the Hawaiian uncle and aunty from next door, they come inside the parlor, they go inside the kitchen, they say, “That woman is there. She is the one.”

I say to the Japanee girl who is those neighbor’s servant, “Who the woman, the one they talk stink?”

She look at me, no say nothing, just look, like I stay lōlō.

“Oh,” I say, real soft. “Miss Retta.” And she nod.

I thinking so hard, I leave one bag flour at the store, grocery man he come running down the street calling, “Elsie! Elsie!”

Mrs. Connor, she say I smart. Now I adding in my head, counting on my fingers from September.

Mr. Fletcher first came in June. All summer he come. It take all day in his Model T, the car they call Tin Lizzie. He one mucka-muck in Hilo, get business in Kona. Every week he take Mrs.Connor’s hand and kiss the back of it, and say, “I so appreciate your kind hospitality.”

But now come September. Mr. Connor and Mrs. Connor, they both go Honolulu, then up the place called San Francisco. They going stay long time. Mr. Leverett Connor, Miss Retta’s brother, he in charge now. He live inside the big house too, with Mr., Mrs. Connor and Retta. Us servants, we stay in the small house in the back.

Mr. Leverett say, “Elsie, tomorrow Mr. Fletcher will be here. Please clean the guest room again and put out fresh linens. And you and your mother have company dinner ready for three at six o’clock.”

Mr. Fletcher look more handsome than usual in one white linen suit with one blue silk handkerchief stick up from the high coat pocket. It match his blue eyes. I not too busy cooking and serving for notice these things. Mr. Everett tell, “Elsie, please bring Mr. Fletcher and me cigars. We shall be on the lānai.”

They go outside. The sunset stay red in the clouds, make Miss Retta’s big eyes glow like they get candle inside the brown. She sit on the lānai with them until Mr. Leverett say, “Retta, go to bed. Mr. Fletcher and I have business to discuss.”

Miss Retta, she fold her skirt so can see little bit her leg above her shoe buttons when she get up from the chair. Her hair all pile up on top her head and she puff it with her both hands, pull out one hairpin, and put it back in.

Mr. Fletcher, he get up too, take her one hand like it so palupalu, so weak it maybe going break, so he need both hands to hold it. He look her face and he say, “Miss Retta.” And he kiss her hand and say more. “I hope I have the pleasure again soon. Goodnight, my dear.”

I tell Mama that Retta making moon eyes, swish her skirt, run up the stairs.

Mama tell, “Elsie, no look. No look even da feet. Not your kuleana. Not your business. No make humbug.”

The next time Mr. Fletcher come, Mr. Everett he gone Honolulu on the Humu‘ula boat from Kawaihae. Mr. Mrs. Connor still gone too. Get only Retta and Mr. Fletcher at the dinner table.

After we pau clean up from dinner Retta and Mrs. Fletcher, they go walking. I tell Mama I going pick mangoes for breakfast tomorrow. Mr. Fletcher and Miss Retta they come back. He kiss her hand at the bottom of the outside stairsway. She swish her skirt and lift it little bit, then run up the steps. He wait on minute and run up too.

When stay almost dark already I leave the mango bucket under the tree, go up the back stairs. I creep around the corner of the back lānai. Retta’s curtain pulled, but Mama make those curtains out of lace. Last month I wash and iron those curtains, and the canopy of Retta’s bed. Now I stand myself slanty to the window, in one shadow. Through those curtains can see Retta on top the bed, her coverlet slide off by the foot post. Mr. Fletcher he sit on the side of the bed, he lean over Retta and he kiss her so long I think, Ho, when they going breathe? He pull Retta’s hairpins one by one and put them on top the bedside table.

Her hair fall down. He lift her hair in the both of his hands like the first time he say goodnight to her, and he wipe his face with it. Now I no can see Retta, only his back. I hear shoes drop on the floor. I see Retta’s white skirt slide off the bed. Mr. Fletcher he lay her hair over the pillow like he arranging flowers. He kiss her some more and I hear her like she humming. I no can tell the tune.

Mr. Fletcher he lie himself beside her. He put one arm under Retta neck. His other hand pull up her petticoat. Slow he go, real slow, and Retta, she hum.

Auwe, I feel like I going sneeze. I try leave quick, but I bump the rocking chair that stay on the lānai. I stop. I pinch my nose. I hold my breath.

Inside I hear Mr. Fletcher say, “It’s nothing, my dear. Maybe the cat on the lānai.”

I stay still. I try breathe. When my nose feel good, I listen. I thinking, Ho, maybe one cat inside Retta bedroom. But I know cats no make bed creak noise, no make one sound like Retta gasping.

So now I in Hilo, I thinking back to summer and the time I went outside Retta window, and the time little bit later when Mama said, “Elsie, I told you before, no make humbug. No need. Mr. Fletcher went ask Retta for marry him.”

Now I thinking, Retta the one making humbug. Retta she stay hāpai from times she make humbug with Mr. Fletcher when his wife she stay ready for die. Now Mrs. Fletcher she really make-die-dead, Retta still no care she going get one keiki before Mrs. Fletcher she stay in the grave not even half one year.

I thinking too, Elsie, what you going do? Cannot tell Retta she humbug. Cannot tell Mr. Fletcher he stay waia, disgraced. I thinking, if all the Japanee servant know this, then everybody, they know already.

So I stay the Fletcher house, do the cleaning, the washing, the cooking. I take care the baby, he try walk. I take care the next boys, they all the time scrape their knees, get one cut on their fingers. I make bandage, I kiss their knee, make better. I take care the girls, wash their hair, put big hair ribbon on top, same hair ribbon they get when all the kids take picture under the coconut tree the day their mama, she get buried.

I take care. These children, they Elsie kuleana. I no tell Retta nothing.

TOP

1912: ’ELEMAKULE

My wife. Ho. Long time she stay ma-ke. Dead. You know. Stay inside the graveyard. Can still find the grave, but all inside the cane grass, get mongoose inside. I no like take care the grave. Get ghosts inside the cemetery. Ghosts no scared mongoose.

I like tell you my story, but you no speak Hawaiian. I do my best use English.

My wife, she stay so young for ma-ke. I think, when was it? So much time ago, so much time. I think, hard, hard. When? When dis? When dat? I remembah when she die. I remembah before we be married inside da haole church.

Hilo one small kine village then. Small kine. Now come big. New kine steamer come now, from Honolulu. Before time, get sailing ships inside the harbor. Was before I come one ship's carpenter. Before I went on top one ship.

I think back. Who the King then? One time he come Hilo. I go down the wharf for see him. Oh yes, now I remembah. Lunalilo.

Plenny people like see the King too. The all so close they bump each other. They like see better. I stand on one rock and I see one girl. One beautiful girl. So big, the eyes. But plenny people there, you know. I see her only from far, inside the crowds. I look and look, watch her moving to the side. She stay with her mother, I think. Can see her good, she wearing one white kine haole dress. How come? What kind Hawaiian this, wear one haole dress? Not even one mu’umu’u. One gown, I t’ink. I like know how come, but I no like be pushy, you know, maha‘oi. Cannot go to her and just say, Eh, how you? Must have introduction.

I look her mother.” Who that?” I ask one old man, who that? He never know, tell me ask one ‘nodda old man. Hoo, the next old man say,” Why you like know? “

“The girl, she so beautiful,” I say.

“Beautiful going make you come crazy,” he say.” Pupule. You watch out, boy. You see the mother? The mother look like the girl, yeah?”

“Nah,” I say. “The girl look like the mother.”

“More worse,” he say. “More worse. That mother, she no live Hilo. The girl, she no live here. Bad, bad, they come see the King. The King, he going ma-ke. You watch. Ma-ke for sure.”

“You no look like one kahuna,” I say. “So how you know this kine stuffs?”

“I know,” the old man say. “I know. You just believe, keep away from kapu. Forbidden.”

“But I like meet the girl,” I say.

“You go meet the girl, maybe you ma-ke like the King. Maybe you die sooner, pau before you twenny-five. Then you say in your coffin, Hoo, one kahuna told you.”

The old man, he try go. The King, he leaving too. But I shake the old man's shoulder. His bones, they rattle inside his skin.

“Tell me where she live!” I say. Plenny people crowding around. I lose hold on him and he walk feet fast. Sideways he so skinny I no can see him good.

I call out, loud: “Where she live? Tell me! Where she live????”

He turn around. The crowd making plenny noise, but I can hear him good.

“Kīlauea,” he say. “The small pit, Halema‘uma‘u. Deep inside.”

TOP

1930: Elsie

This place, it remind me of Hilo rain, rain pound the windows, sometime come through the window frame, wind blow open the door, rain come on the floor. And cold. Cold as Hilo. Colder than Hilo.

The nuns, they wrap shawls around us, seem like we stay inside shawls all winter. The nuns, they say the sea stay wild, pound the lava reefs like the rain pound the windows. I never go see the ocean, even though some people walk out past the lighthouse, tell me about the old canoe slide, and the old lady’s cave. I too sick go over there. I only look mauka,at the cliffs, like walls of dark moss all the way to the roof of sky.

I no work here anymore. At first, last year, I help with laundry, help with the young girls when the nuns they find out I take care all those twelve Fletcher children so many years. Now I too sick, the nuns take care me, change the bandage, put ointment, put powders, give me oil to drink more worse than castor oil when you get the ‘ōpū trouble. And this kind, chaulmoogra oil, have to take every day. Funny kine name it get. I ask, What this? Nobody knows.

All women here in Bishop Home. The men they stay Baldwin Home. Soon everybody going move from the other side, the colder windward side, to this Kalaupapa side. But this side get wind too, and rain. The building people, they starting now make new Baldwin Home. Maybe by time they pau I be ma-ke, stiff and dead, like Retta in Honolulu before I came over here.

Nobody who get this leprosy ever go back from here. Everybody ma-ke, then buried. Where they going bury me? In the Chinese cemetery? The big long Hawaiian cemetery? The Catholic one? Maybe get room inside the small little haole one. Maybe I one haole now, work so long for Mr. Fletcher, that coast haole.

I try think of the Fletchers. More better than look at my body and think of leprosy. Now the Fletcher kids all stay big, only get one small kid left, one little boy still a baby. His mother Mr. Fletcher’s new wife. One coast haole, like him. The three biggest boys, they all gone Mainland. Gartley he still go Kamehameha. Hoyt, he come one big shot football star on mainland.

One time last year I get one letter here at Kalaupapa from Spencer. He the oldest. Now must be maybe 27. He say, “My Dear Elsie, I am so sorry to hear about you going to Kalaupapa. What a misfortune, to contract such a disease. I want you to know that I appreciate all you did for me and all my brothers and sisters. You were really the only mother person we had. Thank you. Mahalo nui loa. With much aloha, Spencer.”

Sometimes I read his letter again. His handwriting big and round, fancy kine signature. My name on the envelope look good in his handwriting, Elsie Chang. The E and the C big, with swirling. The stamp so pretty. The postmark say “Paris.” I ask the nuns where is Paris? They say, “In France.” I no like say, “Where is France?” Must be far away. I wonder, is France one island too?

Spencer, I think he know where France even when he was small kid, all the time reading books at the old house in Hilo. By then Retta get two kids of her own and she stay tired of nine kids all inside the house. Retta make the buddy system. Not for her two kids, only the old kids, the first kids. Her own girl and boy, they no need buddy system. They got their Mama.

So in First Family, the two girls, they take the youngest two boys, and Spencer, he take the next boy down from him, C.C. – Charles Compton Fletcher Jr. Only one small boy in the middle, Granville, no get buddy. Too bad never get eight kids. Retta, she line up the buddies. She tell, “Elsie, you listen now. And you kids, listen.” My head get stuff up with all the rules. No let your small kid run inside Uncle Nahinu's cow pasture. No let ‘em by Alanai‘o Stream, bumbye they slip on the round moss rocks, fall in and drown. No let ‘em run with scissors. No let ‘em play with matches. I no can remember all the things. How kids going remember? But the buddy system work, because after long time no kid went die. The only problem was the kids all still there.

So Mr. Fletcher, he put oldest five on the boat, send them Honolulu for board at Kamehameha Schools. Was 1914. They come back little while at Christmas, and the whole summer. Only the two small boys stay home, Hoyt and Gartley. Oh, and Retta’s two kids. Ho, the quiet.

Five years this work fine for Mr. Fletcher and Retta. Maybe work fine for the kids in boarding school. Not so fine with Hoyt and Gart. The big kids gone, they no more buddy, they run all over Hilo, only six-seven years old.

One time I smell smoke when the stove not lit. I look under the house, I see Gartley. He see me, he scramble out the other side where get one puka in the boards. One nodda time Hoyt, he come running, say, “Elsie! Elsie! Bring bandage! Gartley stay bleeding!”

Retta hear them talk like that, she grab one bar soap, grab the kid, say, “Open your mouth!” And she stick the soap inside. “You don’t talk like that! You speak good English! You know perfectly well how to speak good English!”

And to me she say in Hawaiian, “I am going to have to do something drastic about these boys. I just don’t know what. But next year another one can go to Honolulu.”

Retta, she have one more baby. Auwe, this baby girl stay dark. The big kids come home in the summer, they see the baby, they pick her up, they call her “Chocolate Drop.” Retta say, “Don’t call that child by that horrid name!” The two First Family girls say Chocolate Drop looks just like them. Retta says, “She does not!” But Retta tell me, “Elsie, keep the baby out of the sun. She is already too dark.”

The war came. I know for real because Mr. Fletcher, he in the National Guard and he get called to Honolulu, active duty. He stay commander at Fort Shafter. We supposed to call him Colonel. Retta, she stay home with Chocolate Drop and her other two kids. And me. The others, the dark First Family, the ones stay half Hawaiian, they all go school in Honolulu now. Gartley is finally seven, can board at Kamehameha.

Mr. Fletcher, he come home on the boat after one month, after two months, after four more months and one more time after that. When he come the last time, Retta she hāpai for sure. Then the war stay over, pau. He come again and tell Retta he offered one new big shot job, promotion kind with the Territorial Health Department. No more just chief health officer for Island of Hawaii. Only thing, they have to move Honolulu.

Retta, she say to me, “Elsie! You come with us to Honolulu! You’ll love it. It is so much bigger than Hilo. When I was a student there, we used to take the streetcar all over. I’ll teach you how to do that. You can go to the moving picture show on your day off.”

All my life I never do nothing but work for Retta or her mother. Retta, she tell people I like one sister to her, tell we grew up small kid times together on the ranch in Ka’u before her family move to Kona and she go Convent School in Honolulu. Mrs. Connor, she part Hawaiian, but she talk like Mr. Connor. She tell, “Elsie dear, you are just like family. You and your mother must come to Kona with us.” They make nice like that. They give us place to stay, and food, and clothes. And even money.

I go Hilo after Retta marry Mr. Fletcher. I was 23 then, now come past 40. All my life I no work nobody, only Retta or her mother. So I go Honolulu with all the Fletchers.

Retta right, Honolulu big. Mr. Fletcher, he have his new Model A shipped from Hilo, then he get Retta one car for herself. She already know how for drive. The dark kids, they all still boarding at school even though the school right in Honolulu. Retta’s own two older ones, the girl, Charlotte, and the boy, Walden, they go public school.

Sometime she put Chocolate Drop in the back seat of her car, and tell, “Elsie, come with me please.” And we go holoholo, drive here, drive there, fish market, meat market, bakery, even downtown to McInerny where Retta buy one new maternity outfit for her and one new dress for me, the kind dress for go church or fancy place.

Every Thursday I get day off. The first and second Thursday Retta and Chocolate Drop teach me how to ride streetcar. Ho, good fun! I never thought would be so much fun. The third Thursday, I go by myself. I just get on, ride to the end, come back. The maid for one family on Mānoa Road, she get Thursday off too, we take streetcar and go moving picture at Hawai‘i Theater, Princess Theater.

Except cannot go when Retta have one more baby. One girl. Marguerite. No more Thursdays off. Now I get Chocolate Drop all day every day, and Retta’s other two kids after school.

And ho, in the summer! All the kids come home! The house get only three bedrooms inside. Mr. Fletcher he make the lanai by the kitchen enclose with wall so I can stay there. Mr. Fletcher and Retta they get one bedroom at the end of the hallway. Their three kids get the middle bedroom. The two big Fletcher girls get the third. All the boys they stuff inside one tent in the yard.

Those boys, they all learn carpentry at school so Mr. Fletcher he say, “I will get you boys boards and nails. You make two rooms upstairs above the garage.” Spencer by now is 17, and he take charge. Pretty soon they get two rooms, with new stairs on the outside of the garage. Pretty soon Mr. Fletcher he get five beds delivered and the boys take them up the new stairs. Even Gartley. He only nine and he carry.

So sleeping not so bad. But feeding all them, auwe. The dining room only so big, so Retta say, “We’ll eat in shifts.”

First call is Mr. Fletcher and her, and their four kids. For breakfast I make them bacon, eggs, like that. When they pau, Mr. Fletcher go work, Retta take her kids to wash. I supposed to serve mush to the dark kids. I ring the bell, they come. They fill the table, all except where Mr. Fletcher’s armchair stay. No kid going sit there, not even kolohe Gartley. The naughty one. They eat their mush. And they know the kitchen sink full of five dirty plates that had eggs and bacon.

Evening time Mr. Fletcher come in the front door. The kids, they all disappear. He kiss Retta, and say “My dear,” and Retta disappear. He say, “Elsie, my coat.” And I take his white linen suit jacket and hang it on his special hanger on the coat tree near the door. “My pipe, please.” And he sit down in his easy chair. “The paper.” And I give him the newspaper.

The house stay quiet. I can smell his tobacco while I cooking. The big girls set the table for the first shift. Retta, she get Marguerite on her hip and she peek in the parlor. When Mr. Fletcher put the paper down, she send in the bad boys, one by one. Gartley always last. Ma‘i lōlō, she tell Mr. Fletcher, like it is Gartley’s name. Sick in the head. He is last because after Retta tell Mr. Fletcher all Gartley went do that day, Mr. Fletcher going take Gartley out behind the garage and give dirty lickings.

Mr. Fletcher love his two First Family girls, though. The girls, Genevieve and Nora, tell me how their father come their school dances in his dress uniform, kiss their hands and dance with them. Nobody else fathers kiss their daughters' hands. Hardly any fathers even came school, ever.

Those two girls, they never cause trouble. And the two older boys too, Spencer and C.C. Pretty soon they be grown up anyway. Right now they in ROTC at school, go California the whole month August to national ROTC training, live in tents, shoot their guns, I guess. They come home, Mr. Fletcher he tell them, “Good work, men. The military discipline is essential to life and career.”

But Gartley and Hoyt, when they home, they making humbug. Christmas time come, Mr. Fletcher and Retta they give the First Family youngest three boys paper kites. Retta’s son, Walden. they give him one brand new red wagon.

Walden, he six. He tell the First Family brothers they can push him in the wagon. They go down the sidewalk, pushing. Walden steer but he go inside the hedge. The brothers laugh. Walden cry. But he wipe his face and tell the brothers they can ride the wagon for a nickel.

One time the next summer, the big boys gone ROTC camp again and Retta tell the three First Family small boys walk down the market, buy ten pounds poi. “And,” she say, “Take Walden with you.” Those dark boys, they come home with the poi but no more Walden. At the market door they tell him, “Wait here. We going inside buy poi.” And they buy poi, go out the back and walk home.

Ho, Retta hūhū. She tell me watch Marguerite and Chocolate Drop and she jump on her car. She find Walden sitting by the telephone pole outside the market, crying.

That day, when Mr. Fletcher come home, she no wait for him finish his pipe and paper. She no even wait for him to kiss her. She just steam and she say, “Do you know what they did? They left Walden! On purpose! You take all three of them to the garage right now!” When he came back in he said, “Elsie, you may set three fewer places tonight. With Spencer and C.C. gone too, all of us can eat at the same time.”

Later, in the dark, after the girls went dry the dishes, I put leftover stew on the garage stairway and threw a small stone at the window upstairs. The door opened. “Hui!” I called in a whisper. I pointed at the stew.

Sometime Retta she have to save the whippings because Mr. Fletcher, he stay late at work, miss dinner, miss the little ones’ bedtime, even the dark ones’ bedtime. Only Retta wait up for him. From my lanai room I see the light on in the parlor and Retta in her chair. Next time he come home before dinner, Retta have a long list of sins for each dark boy and then Mr. Fletcher and those boys stay behind the garage long time.

But sometime Mr. Fletcher come home early enough so Retta get hāpai again. She not so happy. She sit in the kitchen when only Chocolate Drop and Marguerite stay home and she drink tea. She watch me scrub the mush pot and she say, “Seems like I just finished nursing Marguerite. Now look at me. Again,” Retta said. “I’ll get so fat.”

Retta always came fat, really momona. Usually she was slim, even though after the first three babies her bosoms always sag, big like watermelons in her shirtwaist. Hāpai, she came so fat people not sure was her. Afterward, though, two-three months, she was herself again.

The baby came September 1923, second baby born in hospital. Mr. Fletcher, I don’t know where he stay, the day the baby born. The neighbor, he take Retta Queen’s Hospital. Mr. Fletcher, he show up later, call the baby Grant, after his own mother maiden name.

The next summer, one day we leave the baby and Marguerite with the two grown up dark girls and we go fish market, meat market, and like that. We dress up, because nobody go shopping they not all dress up. Coming back on Nehoa Street the car go patunk patunk and wobble all funny kind.

Retta she pull over and get out, walk around the car. We get one flat tire in the front. Plenny times before, I saw her change tire. She learn long time ago, when we kids on the ranch in Ka`u. She change tire on trucks. She still know how. But now she see a man coming along the sidewalk. She stand there in her yellow dress, her light blue hat and high heel pumps, looking at the tire.

The haole man, he walk along the sidewalk in his linen suit swinging his walking stick and he stop and say, “Good day, Miss. I see you have a difficulty. May I be of assistance?” And he bow a little, like Mr. Fletcher.

Retta point to the tire with one finger, and she looks a little sideways at the man, because she know her brown eyes appear biggest from that angle. Her Hawaiian blood stay all in her brown eyes and her hair.

“Allow me,” the man says, and he get the wrench and the spare tire and he change the tire. Retta, she thank him and he say, “My pleasure,” even though his white trouser get dirt on top and his hands all covered with grease.

Retta start the car. I laugh little bit and she laugh too and say, “Better him than me.”

But things not so funny later that year. Marguerite, she almost five. She play in the yard, she come inside, eat one banana. Little while, she get sick. Vomit, get blood diarrhea, fall asleep. Then she get convulsions. Retta she ask, “Did she eat something?” I say, “Only one banana.”

Retta she tell Chocolate Drop watch the baby. She tell me pick up Marguerite, get in the car. She drive to the hospital, only take ten minutes, but when we get there, Marguerite unconscious. The doctor he take Marguerite inside. We wait on the bench, long time, seem like. Doctor come out, say, “I’m sorry Mrs. Fletcher, your little girl is gone.”

Retta she scream, “She’s only five!” And she grab the doctor’s white coat and her eyes, her beautiful eyes, look wild. “We’ll call your husband,” the doctor says. “Sit here.”

She sit back down next to me. She pick up the hem of her skirt and wipe at the tears running down her face. I put my arms around her and she fold into my lap, and she sob.

Later we find out Marguerite get oleander poisoning. The yard get oleander hedge. Elsie, she must have pick oleander flower, then eat banana. Auwe.

We went to the Cathedral for funeral Mass. Even Gartley went and was a good boy. The funeral for one little girl is so sad. The coffin so small.

Retta, she come like a ghost. She stop nursing the baby, say, “Elsie, would you give the baby a bottle?” She no care even when Gartley make humbug.

Mr. Fletcher, he hire Japanee yard man come dig up the oleander hedge, plant hibiscus instead. Mr. Fletcher, he no come home for dinner plenny times, say so much work at the office.

Chocolate Drop, she try sit on Retta’s lap, but Retta no like. Sometime Retta, she tell, “Elsie, watch the baby, please. I am going out.” And she dress up, she get in the car, and she go. But she still look like one ghost. She come back when I baking, or taking laundry off the line. Plenny days she do this.

Christmas come and go. Mr. Fletcher, he meet one Russian Baron. The Baron he need one secretary. Mr. Fletcher say, “My son Spencer would be ideal.” Spencer go away for years. The two dark girls and C.C., the brother down from Spencer, they graduate Punahou. The girls go to teachers’ school. C.C. and the next brother, Granville, go mainland to school. So now only get Hoyt and Gartley from First Family, but they only home Christmas and summertime.

They just came home for summer when something more worse happen. The boys staying in the upstairs of the garage because only Retta’s kids can stay inside the big house. Chocolate Drop and Charlotte in one bedroom, Walden and the baby brother in the other one. That day I finish scrubbing the kitchen floor and I eating lunch on the back step while the floor dry. The kids all playing in the back yard. They pau their lunch already. Retta come out the door, sit beside me on the step. I say, “You like some lunch? You never eat with the kids.”

She sigh. She keep on sighing. Finally she say, real soft. “I am hāpai again.”

Retta not happy for sure, but I say anyway, “When the baby coming? Maybe be one girl. One beautiful Fletcher girl.”

Retta pull her knees up under her skirt and hug her arms around them. She look straight ahead and she say, so soft I think maybe I not supposed to hear, “It’s not a Fletcher baby.”

Ho, I think, this no good. Then I think of all the times Mr. Fletcher come home late, all the times Retta go out in the afternoon. I think I better stop thinking.

“Oh,” I say. “I get you one glass water.”

When I come back outside, Retta stay in the yard playing a game with the kids. I set the water on the step and I go back in the house. The kitchen floor stay dry.

When coming time for dinner Chocolate Drop and her sister set the table for eight, even though Mr. Fletcher maybe he not come home in time to eat. I stay washing rice at the sink when Chocolate Drop come in and say, “Elsie, Mama needs you.”

“Where she stay?” I ask.

“In the bathroom.”

Retta never call me to the bathroom before. I thinking, this no good. I knock.

“Elsie?” Her voice sound funny kind.

“Yes.”

“Come in.”

Retta stay sitting on the chair by the bathtub. By her feet I see bloody towels. I see blood on the hem of her skirt. She look scared, and her face stay sweating. I take her shoulders and shake her little bit.

“What happen?” I ask.

“I’m bleeding.” Her voice sound so small.

“Can see that,” I take a clean towel from the pile I folded that morning. “Where the cut? Hold it up and I stop the bleeding, put bandage.”

“I can’t,” she say. “I tried to end the baby. I am bleeding like birthing.”

“I take you inside the bedroom.”

I thinking more, Ho, this no good. I feel all funny kine inside my heart. I pull her up off the chair and she lean on me to walk down the hallway. I lie her on her bed and give her the clean towel.

“You put this on you,” I say and I go in the parlor to the phone. Not so easy to hold it because my hands shake.

Little while the ambulance come. The kids all asking, “What’s happening?”

I tell, “Your Mama very sick. We going hospital. Hoyt and Gartley, you in charge. You small kids mind them.”

I help Retta get in the ambulance and we go Queen’s Hospital. Just like when Elsie died, I have to sit on the bench in the hall. When stay dark outside already, Mr. Fletcher come. He see me and say, “What happened? The children told me you took Retta to the hospital.”

I thinking, what I going say? She get hāpai by one noddah man and make home abortion and now she bleeding? Cannot say that. So I say, “The doctor never come out yet.”

Just then the doctor come out and say, “Mr. Fletcher?”

The doctor say he went operate and now Retta stay inside one hospital room. Can have visitors tomorrow.

Next day Mr. Fletcher take Walden and his big sister. They visit. They come home. Mr. Fletcher, he go back hospital. In the evening the phone ring, Mr. Fletcher answer. He listen, then he say, “Thank you.”

Retta, she dead. Mr. Fletcher, he make arrangement.

I thinking, what these kids going wear to their mother’s funeral at the Cathedral? But Mr. Fletcher no make funeral. The Cathedral no can say Mass if he no tell. Instead, he have Retta’s body cremated. I know he know Catholics no do that. He no even bury the ashes next by little Marguerite. Even now I don’t know what he went do with the ashes.

Hoyt and Gartley they no say nothing. The younger kids, they not sure if they should cry. Mr. Fletcher, he only take that one day off from work, next day he go back the office.

In two weeks he say, “Elsie, I wish you would stay on and look after the children. I will be glad to increase your stipend as well as continue your room and board.”

What I going do? Leave all the kids? Gart and Hoyt, they 15 and 16 already, but Chocolate Drop she only eight and the baby boy only two. I stay.

The next year Mr. Fletcher go Mainland, visit all over. Coming back on the boat he meet one haole lady coming Honolulu for vacation.

He take the kids Halekulani Hotel cottage where she stay, they all go swimming. Walden, now he 15, he like try shock me. He tell they change their clothes her place, his father just stand there in front the lady only wearing his under drawers.

But I say, “So what?”

Mr. Fletcher he marry the lady at Christmastime. Her name Marja Schuyler. Now it stay Fletcher. She give me a present, a necklace of pearls. And she give each kid a present. A good present. Even Gartley and Hoyt.

The next year I say, “Mr. Fletcher, I think I sick.” He take me doctor. I go three-four times, then the doctor say, “Leprosy.” Everybody know what that mean.

It mean pretty soon I pau, I ma-ke. But the nuns will bury me, and light the candles and say the Mass. I going ask them put Spencer’s letter in the pocket of my coffin dress.

TOP

1932: Miss Gibbs

Whoever can I tell? But if I don’t tell, what will become of me? Already I can feel my insides turning the color of sin.

It would be one thing if I were young and foolish. At least there would be some forgiveness. Someone I could write to on Matson Lines stationery as we hit the rollers off the coast and all the passengers but me are standing at the rail heaving.

The thing is, at the time it did seem wicked. And rather delicious, the staying late to work, the evening “meetings” requiring me to take the minutes. Or the hours. And then the rest.

But now. Oh God, now. Young and foolish, no. I cannot claim it, with 35 looming. Maybe old maid foolish. In any case, all I have is my stomach the color of sin and I am writing a letter to no one.

It was those blue eyes, the white linen suit, his air, his elegant touch, at first so light upon my right shoulder as he peered over me to read a letter in the Underwood. At other times he’d pace deliberately, dictating, using a poor word only now and then, and he’d stop to turn a better phrase and I’d line out a bit of shorthand to replace it with his refined choice.

Those finished business letters looked as pressed as his suit when he arrived each morning. I typed the letters without flaw, centered perfectly below the Department of Heatlh letterhead, copies done on onion skin with new carbon. I even made perfect check marks showing which person was to receive a particular cc.

And now! Now all I have from him is a single letter he typed himself. Dear Miss Gibbs. Oh Lord, I hope he typed it himself. He certainly signed it himself. Charles C. Fletcher. And cc’ed four of his grown children, including Gart.

He still writes with uncommon clarity and logic.Until I came to work for him three years ago I had assumed my services included correcting embarrassing grammatical errors and even rewriting poor sentences. Not needed with him. Not even with this last letter delivered to my boarding house.

Well, yes, I did have an abortion. What else was I to do? If I had told him of pregnancy, he might have divorced to marry me, but he would see soon enough he couldn’t be the father, for the baby would undoubtedly have big, round, dark Hawaiian eyes and dark wavy hair, with skin the color of coffee with cream in it.

Still, it could have been a secret. Aren’t doctors supposed to act in confidence? But oh, this island is so small, and Charles works for the Department of Health. My mistake was forgoing some Oriental quack on Maunakea Street and instead choosing what I thought was a discreet doctor. I found out all too late that he sat on the Board of Directors that oversees Charles’ department.

How is it that he could write such a hateful letter, as if he instantly froze those stunning eyes that had beguiled me so. With those cold eyes and colder words he aborted what parts of me remained after the doctor did his deed.

I must tell you what happened, although neither Charles nor Gart would tell the same story. In his letter addressed to “Dear Miss Gibbs” Charles said he gave Gartley a choice between telling the truth and leaving home. Gart left home. Or so I assume, for I never heard from Gart himself. Now I even wonder what I saw in him, hardly out of school, working as a rodman for a surveyor.

He came to his father’s office now and then when he wasn’t on a survey crew, to pick up or drop off some family thing when Charles was “going to be late.” Gart was a charming, a dark-eyed half-blood version of a certain magnetism I should have recognized. After all, Gart must have learned it somewhere.

I’d been staying late at the office and “taking minutes” at evening “meetings” for more than a year when Gartley suggested Lau Yee Chai on a Saturday. What harm could that do? Classy Chinese restaurant on a weekend. Of course Charles was never available on Saturday or Sunday, and believe me, my boarding house was nowhere to be, with all those younger office girls and telephone operators chattering about what they were going to wear to the Princess Theater and how they would place their hands on their laps so their dates would have easy access. Those girls were cheap flirts. Boring, stupid, cheap flirts who shut up the minute our housemother’s footsteps clicked in the hall.

So Lau Yee Chai it was, a few drinks afterward, a walk down a lane to Waikīkī Beach. I’d lived in Honolulu more than four years but Waikīkī still equaled romance in my mind.

Charles had never taken me there, because, well, where could he take me? Except to the Blaisdell Hotel on Fort Street, where he’d order room service dinner. Oh, the lamp was low, the sheets were crisp, and he removed my blouse and skirt and underthings so very slowly, as if I were made of fine China. As he whispered, I felt his graying mustache on my ear, and his breath was faint with cherry pipe tobacco. He would lay me on the bed with my stockings fallen to my calves, cover me to the waist with the sheet. Then he began with his linen jacket, hanging it in the closet. Then his shirt, on the back of the side chair. Trousers. Under garments. And then he lay with me.

He’d leave when the “meeting” was over. I’d leave later, after bathing and recomposing myself, and walk to the boarding house, as if I coming from the streetcar stop.

I always felt lonely. Not just alone. I told myself Charles loved me, believed he loved me, that the hotel was along the road to marriage that had started when the big report we were working on required just the two of us to stay late. That first time, I heard him telephone to say he’d not be home for dinner. “Yes, you tell your mother, please,” he’d said.

All this was in my mind on Waikīkī Beach with Gart. I can’t believe it, there really was a full moon. Some Hawaiians were singing and playing, and Gartley sang along, a fishing song he said, and he winked and placed an arm around my shoulders.

His older sister, Nora, lived on Lemon Street. “Let’s drop in,” Gartley said. Of course – now I say ‘of course,’ but I didn’t think it then – Nora and her husband were out. Of course they had a bar stocked with bourbon. Of course they had a second bedroom with a rattan-frame bed. There was a drink, maybe two or three for Gart. There were two quick piles of clothes on the floor, and a driving hunger. I felt like a starving person rescued months after a shipwreck. We rested, but starved again. When I heard the front gate open, Gartley stretched his leg from the side of the bed to push the door shut with his bare foot. I thought for a moment of the boarding house rules for single ladies, but there was a cool night breeze coming through the window and I snuggled my back against Gart and it all began again.

For a time I’d see Charles at the hotel every week. On Saturday and Sunday I’d go places with Gart. He had friends everywhere, in places I’d never been in my four years on O‘ahu. He’d bum us a ride to Kahana, where a classmate’s family lived back in the valley and didn’t care if he brought a haole girl to their sleeping lānai. Or we’d pile in another friend’s jalopy – all Hawaiians except me – and go sleep on the beach by the Blow Hole. Once he borrowed his sister’s car and drove me past the family home in Mānoa. His four-year-old brother, the son of Charles’ third and present wife, was playing in the yard with his wagon. The half-sister called Chocolate Drop was watching him. She must have been about 16.

The house looked as elegant as Charles. I thought “I could live in a house like that.” Just then Charles came toward the house from the garage at the back of the lot. I ducked down in my seat and Gartley floored the gas pedal.

And so it went for some time, until I was so tired I missed work twice in hardly more than a week. And then, at a “meeting,” Charles whispered with his cherry breath, “You don’t seem quite yourself, my dear.”

“I think I picked up a bug somewhere,” I said. “Some stomach thing has been going around the boarding house.”

Oh yes, stomach. Queasy every morning. And the missing monthly. It wasn’t long before I searched for a doctor. And found one with a big mouth.

So now Charles hates me. Gartley moved out to who-knows-where. I’ll dock in San Francisco in the morning, and who there will know all that’s happened? No one except me: Dear Miss Gibbs.

TOP

1936: Gartley

Laurent had just poured high balls when one of his kids roared in hollering, “Your radio! Your radio! I want my nickel!” Hot on the boy’s heels were three more kids screaming, “A nickel! A nickel! We heard it too!”

I had stationed them out on the street next to my patrol car to listen for Five-Three-Seven. Unless the dispatcher called my number, I could sit and drink with Laurent for at least a couple hours of my shift.

The call was the usual, a traffic accident. When I got there, a blonde had lightly sideswiped some old tūtū man in his jakalaka. She was a gorgeous dame but I wrote her a ticket. When the old man drove off satisfied, I ripped up the ticket, winked at her, and headed back to Laurent’s.

Laurent knew our family well enough to see the irony of me as an officer of the law when I had spent all my life breaking rules. Boarding school rules, yeah, but especially the rules laid down by my father. And Laurent knew the resulting punishments, starting with the time the old man locked me in the trunk of the car on our way to Kona because I had punched my kid brother Walden. There also were the lickings behind the garage for going AWOL from school. The extra yard work for gambling on campus. Sending me to boarding school in the first place because I lipped off one too many times to Retta, the witch stepmother. And he knew about the time the old man and Retta going to the mainland for four or five months. They took the two oldest of his kids with them and parked them with their grand-uncle in Ohio. Elsie stayed with another four. And me? I was maybe two years old. They popped me in the Queen’s Hospital orphanage unit in Honolulu.

But today Laurent was on to another topic. He had just asked whatever happened to that secretary when the dispatcher called my number before we barely had the bourbon in our hands.

I really liked Laurent. He had married one of my mother’s younger cousins, who promptly died a few months after baby number six was born. So now here he was, a good man who had talked his sister into coming from France to help with the ku ka paila kids. I couldn’t always understand his accent, but he did OK understanding me, and he loved a good laugh. And bourbon. So we could talk story. And drink.

We settled into chairs on the lanai and I sent the kids back to sit with my patrol car radio. The oldest two of the six were gone somewhere. They had decided they didn’t want to be monitors anymore because somehow they had got the idea that a policeman wasn’t supposed to drink. And their father wasn’t supposed to drink with the policeman. Aah, smart aleck kids.

So. The secretary. I thought I better warm up before I told him that one. So I started with yesterday, about Ermadean.

She lived in my family’s neighborhood. When we were teenagers she had spent a summer babysitting with Laurent’s kids. She had the reputation for being such a goody-goody that my father approved of her. So of course I ignored her. Besides, during most of the year I had my hands full with couple dames at my boarding school, not to mention the sister of one of the guys.

By the time I bumped into Ermadean last year at a football game we both had been out of school for quite awhile. I had been hired by HPD and she was a stenographer downtown for Castle and Cook. At that game – it was Kam vs. Farrington – she was really dolled up. I don’t know why, really, but I asked her for a date. It was slow going.

I told Laurent I’d met her yesterday at the Waikīkī Natatorium for a swim. We both loved that salt-water pool, where the tide surges through the rectangular pukas that open it to the sea. She could dive, and she could beat me every time in a 100-yard sprint, even if some kid got in her way. After the swim, we sat on the bleachers. I was squinting into the sun, but even so, I suddenly noticed that she had that look. And sure enough, she brought up an ugly subject.

For a minute or two I felt like I was dancing around the ring like Jack Dempsey in his last big heavyweight fight. You know the one, in 1927? When he lost again to Gene Tunney on the Long Count? Suddenly I realized that Ermadean had matrimony in one eye and alimony in the other. She phrased it differently, but that’s what she meant.

“Hoo, Ermadean!” I said, leaning away from her. “I’m not the type.”

She started to sniffle and I knew full-out sobbing could be only a minute away. So I said, “You’re much too good for me. You need a nice guy. Not one playboy cop. Now blow your nose and say goodbye.”

She sat there for a minute. Then she wiped her nose on her towel, put her towel around her neck, and got up. I think she was going to say something, to have the last word, you know? But then she raced down the bleachers and out the door.

I sat there thinking, “Ho! Close one!”

Laurent lifted his glass. “To you,” he said.

*****

The story Laurent liked best and even requested now and then was the one that stumped my father. I caught hell at school for it, but that wasn’t enough for him. He tried mightily to think up a bigger punishment of his own.

The story starts right before our last game of football season in my last year in school. I loved that high school, the uniforms, the marching, the flash of the manual-of-arms. Even the demerit system. The school had clear rules and punishments. Not like the old man, who changed both all the time.

More than the school, I also loved those twenty guys in my class, as much as I loved my older brothers who had boarded before me. The guys I loved the most were teammates. They lived for track and football. And for the coaches, especially our football coach. His name was Frederick, but everyone called him Horse. It was leftover from when he was an all-around football great himself at the University of Hawaii. One of his younger brothers was on our team.

That last game was Kam vs. Punahou on a Saturday night, us kanakas against the haole sonsabitching snobs.

So for this game I put together the biggest football pool ever. There was100 simoleons in the pot, buck a ticket. I’d sold every square in the 10 by 10 grid, and it was winner-take-all. Whichever team won would play the Thanksgiving Day game against McKinley. It needed to be Kam. Or we would all be shame.

The score was tied 6-6 at halftime. Talk about defensive game. It was all tackling, on both sides. Hardly any yardage made, and certainly no long, spectacular TD passes. But in the third quarter we scored again, and made the conversion. So for a while it was 13-6 in our favor. Then Punahou did the same. Fourth quarter, ho! We made two TDs right in a row. One with a conversion. Then we made one more TD, but no extra point. So in the last few minutes of the fourth quarter we were ahead 28-13.

We lost the ball on downs. But then, with Punahou on the 48, our right tackle, Tapu Taligata, hit Punahou’s quarterback so hard the bastard was hauled off the field on a stretcher. The ref called clipping on us and we moved back 15 yards. Punahou tried a kick on their fourth down, but the ball hit the left goal post and bounced loose into the end zone.

So it was our ball, with less than a minute to play. The score was still 28-13. We would win, of course. Turkey Day, here we come!

We moved the ball on the first three downs, and then were in range for a field goal. We could rub Punahou’s high-hat nose it in with three more points. Bulls Chun, our first-string quarterback, called the play.

I had my hands on the ball already when the pool grid popped into my mind. I could plainly see the square that Maile Kahale chose. I tell you, that girl is some dame. Sneaked out of the dorm the time Bulls got his father’s car and we went holoholo down the Ala Wai. Had a bottle of hooch in the back seat. Hoo! I tell you!

Well, Maile’s square in the pool was for Punahou 3, Kam 8. You know how, in a pool, you use only the last digits of the numbers? If we scored again, it would be the frosting on our season cake. But I was thinking we could win the game with the score we already had and Maile could win the pool.

The clock started running at nine seconds. I called, “Hut!” and I snapped that ball six feet over Bulls’ head. It landed about twelve yards behind him, and the clock ran out.

People in the stands were cheering and screaming and crying, and women ran onto the field with leis for us. But before they got to us Bulls landed a punch in my ‘ōpū and screamed, “Whassa matta you? Snap the ball ovah my head? You nevah, even in scrimmage. Whassa matta you? You did ‘em on purpose! You making A for all us!”

Finally, of course, after we got back to the dorms, they remembered the pool. And when they found out who won, they ganged up. I had to give ‘em all my booze and promise to shine their brass until Christmas vacation.

After chapel the next morning I saw Maile out on the lawn. “I got the hundred smackers for you,” I said.

“Yeah,” she had a distinctly icy tone in her voice and I suddenly smelled trouble. “But look how I won it. Because of a jerk with no pride or loyalty.” She started to walk away.

“Maile, wait,” I called. “I did ‘em for you.”

“Huh!” she said. “You hiked that ball over Bulls’ head on purpose. You are disgusting. If you think I want your filthy money, think again.”

By now several of her girlfriends had gathered around her. I knew them all, of course. After all, the whole senior class, counting the Boys’ School and the Girls’ School, was only forty-four. I heard one of her friends say, “C’mon, Maile. He’s not worth talking to.” And they all hustled across the grass toward the Girls’ School.

It was another seven months to graduation. Of course I got a dressing down from Horse, and I might have got sidelined if the season hadn’t been over. But once Horse had his say, he was pau. It took the guys longer. It was three weeks before all of them would speak to me, even though I was shining all that brass and polishing shoes too.

Bulls grabbed my arm one day when we finished a scrimmage with the JV team. “So what you going do wit’ da pool kālā? Give ‘em to da widows and orphans?”

“Nah, I going make refund to all the girls. Then I going sell squares to only guys. We going have pool on the Thanksgiving Day game.”

“Das a good one,” Bulls said. “No dames.”

*****

I swore off dames until Christmas, but we had some good fun anyway. Tapu had won the Turkey Day pool and the guys were joking about how some doodoo head center hiked the ball over the quarterback’s head in the Punahou game just so he could make points with a girl instead of on the scoreboard. They made it sound like a dope from Punahou had done it.

In the spring, our final track season came around, but track is no good for a pool, so I laid low and concentrated on poker in the dorm. And of course we went holoholo a few more times. Tapu always seemed able to get his old man’s car. Something about that Samoan-Hawaiian family made it easy. And ho, those Samoan-Hawaiian buggahs. They killer handsome, with the white-teeth smiles. So it’s easy to get dames to go with us.

Sometimes we went up the Pali Road, six of us squeezed in the Model A. This particular time it was really cold up there at the top, the wind blowing so hard the car rocked and the girls got all scared and grabbed onto us. The girls were both from Roosevelt, friends of friends of Bulls. Tapu stopped the car under some ironwood trees and said, “No worry. You got us.” And he put his arm around the wahine in the middle of the front seat. “Here, this make your warmer.” And he twisted the top off a hair tonic bottle.

“This is Wildroot,” the girl said. “My father uses it. I know this bottle even without a label.”

“Smell,” Tapu said.

She sniffed, and wrinkled her nose.

“Just take one little sip,” Tapu said.

She did. We all did. I brought out two more hair tonic bottles from under the seat. Ho! Get tight!

We would have got back to the dorm just fine, except for the dog at Judd Street. We were singing the Roosevelt School song as loud as we could, rocking the car side to side as Tapu drove down Nu‘uanu Avenue. Almost to Judd Street he suddenly swerved to avoid a dog crossing the road and drove into the corner of the wall of the cemetery.

All of us got out of the car. Both the girls started to cry immediately. Bulls and Tapu put their hands in their pockets, watching clouds of steam rise from the radiator.

Enough to say, it took so long walking the girls home and them walking back to our campus in Kalihi that we missed first period classes. We figured no sense climbing back through my second-story dorm window where we’d left from, so we just walked in the front door. There was Mr. Chase, the dorm master, sitting at the check-in desk reading a book. Next to him was a pad of demerit slips.

We each got about six, or maybe it was more.

“Fletcher,” he said. “You’re the ring leader. Report to the principal’s office. Put your uniform on first. The rest of you, change too and then go to your next class. When afternoon drill is over, report to the kitchen.”

The principal’s office hadn’t changed at all since I was last in it, a kahili in a stand in one corner behind Mr. Appleton’s barricade of a desk, and a huge American flag in the other. He didn’t get up, but I saluted anyway. He gave me stink eye.

“Fletcher,” he sighed. “It’s not like this is the first time. Sit down.”

I sat on the edge of the chair and folded my hands in what I thought was a penitent attitude. We’d just had that word, penitent, a couple weeks ago, in English class. Now I thought of a sentence I could use it in. “I assumed a penitent attitude, although I didn’t really mean it.”

Actually, I’d had a great night, even the part about Tapu’s father’s Model A and the busted radiator. I looked down at my hands in my lap in case my thoughts were on my face.

“You didn’t learn much from the last time, did you?” Appleton’s voice had a nasty edge to it. His next words were very quiet. And very few.

“You’re expelled.”

“Sir,” I said. “It’s …”

He interrupted me immediately. “Go to your dorm. Change your clothes. Turn in your uniforms and your books to Mr. Chase. Come back here and use the phone to call your father.”

When I got back to the dorm, Tapu was there.

“I thought you went class,” I said, as casually as I could.

“I going now,” he said. “What Appleton said?”

“Expelled,” I said, in a cavalier tone. “Cavalier” was another of our new words.

“Ho!” Tapu said. “Only t’ree weeks to graduation. Your old man going come more mad than my old man.”

“I going graduate,” I said, but I knew I was hanging on the ropes. “But only if you go call Nora.”

“Ho,” he said, “Nora going make big noise.”

“I give you her number at school, you go find one phone while I take my time going back to Appleton. I like make sure it’s coming noontime, so when he tell me call my father, my old man stay out to lunch with his secretary. Just tell Nora we got back to school late and could she please make little bit nice again.

Nora would come flash her red-lipstick smile at Appleton, just like she had with the previous principal, what was his name? Herman? Hermanson? I forget. She’d say, oh, they are just boys, they didn’t really harm a thing, and besides they’ll be gone so soon anyway, with graduation hardly two weeks away. And she’d say, you know, this is the best school. All of us Fletchers are graduates of either the Boys’ School or the Girls’ School and now we’re all holding up the good name of Kamehameha. I’m sure you know that both my sister and I are teachers, and my brothers are engineers or in college. And we all support the schools in the public eye. It would be such a shame for the youngest of us not to graduate. And then she’d smile again, and teeth would flash, and her black eyes would flash even more. She might even mention the obvious, that even though she worked at a public school, her husband, Frederick, was the Kam football coach.

When I got back to Appleton’s office I stood in the hallway for a moment composing my penitent look. Then I opened the door, told his secretary he was expecting me, and she said, “Go right in, Gartley.”

Appleton was on the phone. I stood in front of his desk, hoping my penitent face was holding up.

He set the receiver back in the cradle and looked at me with the same old stink eye.

“Your sister came by a little while ago,” he said. “Go back to your dorm. Get rid of those civvies and put on your work uniform. From now until graduation, you will be one of these places: Class, Dorm, Drill Field, and especially the kitchen. No off-campus pass for any reason. If you go AWOL, that’s it. You have used up any sisterly interventions. Not even a bolt from heaven could save you again. Dismissed.”

*****

I got to thinking that Nora might need a little ho‘omalimali. You know, flattery. That was another of our words, flattery. It means “butter up.”

So after graduation I went over to her place, cleaned up some rubbish outside the door, and said, “Eh, t’anks, Nora. Nevah would graduate wit’out you.”

“Don’t speak Pidgin, Gart,” she said. “Good thing I don’t have to grovel for you again. I’m out of tricks. Come visit whenever you want.”

I moved home. It had been about ten years since I had actually lived with the old man. That was back in the worst days of Retta the Witch. She died the same year Dempsey lost the title, the year before the Long Count rematch with Gene Tunney.

And now there was Laurent’s new question. Whatever happened to that secretary?

That was about four years ago now. I was twenty and just out of high school, thanks to Kamehameha’s work and study system that prolonged the years in school. Well, maybe thanks to Nora too.

Part of my work had been on a survey crew, and now I had a paying job as a rodman. A few months into it we were surveying near the old man’s office. One day he asked me to stop in after work to pick up a package to take home. That’s when I noticed the dame up front, behind the typewriter. She had her hair in a bun but around her face she made these little spit curls. And she had freckles. No Hawaiian girls had freckles.

After that, I’d stop in sometimes if I got off work early, especially if I knew the old man was away that day on one of the plantations, inspecting something or other.

Her name was Josephine Gibbs. I don’t think anyone had ever just come around to shoot the bull with her. After all, everybody knew she was an old maid. The first couple times she would say snooty old maid things, like, “Your father’s not in. He wasn’t expecting you.”

As time went on she was more inclined to take of her glasses and say, “Hi Gart. What’s new?”

Meanwhile, at home, besides me, only the kids from the old man’s Second Family were still in the house in Mānoa, Charlotte, Walden, Chocolate Drop and that brat Grant. Oh, and Marja’s little kid, Maarten. Marja was wife No. 3. Wife No. 2, that damn Retta, had died in 1925. Then Hoyt came home from college for the summer and we shared the rooms above the garage, like we had for years. We were grown men now, though, and still the old man tried to lay down the law. No drinking. No staying out overnight. No using the car. No ladies upstairs, it’s not good for the young ones. No this, no that. And if I need you to do something, you jump. Ho! I thought. Lose fight!

*****

Tapu and Bulls and them all had got jobs but I saw them about every week when we’d get a bunch together for a scrimmage. Afterward we’d get tight in somebody’s old man’s back yard. Except not my old man’s.

Usually two or three guys would bring a guitar and a couple of ukes and we’d sing. The later it got, the better we sounded. Tapu’s old man finally got to thinking that the Model A radiator incident was bus’ up funny, so we often drank in his yard, right beyond where he parked the car, and he’d sing and get as loaded as anyone.

Every now and then I’d stop at the old man’s office. Josie seemed to look prettier each time. First I thought it was new clothes or new glasses. But then I started to think about two and two. I was home in the evenings enough to know that the old man was working late some night every week.

I took to playing cribbage with Marja on those nights. She was wife No. 3, definitely an improvement on No. 2, the Wicked Retta. Marja’s kid, Maarten, was always hanging over my shoulder and asking for a piggyback ride. He was about three and a royal pest.

I’d been driving Marja around town for years – fish market, beauty parlor, bank -- and I knew her pretty well. A tough dame, I’d say. She did all the housewife stuff, cooking and scrubbing and taking care of Maarten and Retta’s last kid, Grant. But anyone could see that wasn’t really up her alley. She must have been nuts about the old man to give up her independent life. Now, I was thinking, the old man was making her nuts in another way. She never said a word, at least to me, but some cribbage nights I could tell things were getting to her because she would sometimes miss a 15-2, or count a double run of four as eight instead of 10. Once she even missed noticing she’d turned up a jack for the starting card and didn’t collect two points for “nibs.”

The old man laid down a few new rules for Hoyt and me, and also took to asking me to run errands for him, like take his suits to the cleaners, or pick them up. By then I’d had it with his rules, and certain stray and delicate soiling on the suit lapels and shirt collars gave me a grand idea.

Next time I stopped at his office, on a Friday when he was away, I asked Josie out.

Dames are suckers for the nine-course dinner at Lau Yee Chai, haole dames especially. I think it’s the Peking duck and the hundred-year-old eggs. “Exotic,” they say, in a breathy voice.

Well, after the dinner, we came out under a full moon only a few blocks from Waikīkī beach and I bought a bottle of hooch at a corner store. Nora and Horse were on a waiting list for a campus apartment but meanwhile they had rented a place in Waikīkī. Not only did it happen to be two blocks from the beach ma uka from the Moana Hotel, but I knew they were out for the evening.

We made it from Lau Yee Chai to the beach and the moon and then to Nora’s place in less than an hour. In the kitchen I got us two glasses so we wouldn’t have to keep drinking from the bottle. Josie was a little tipsy and she kept saying, “Tell me again whose house this is? You sure it’s all right?”

It took me maybe 20 minutes to work her into the spare bedroom. But then there came a point with her that was like the starting gun for the quarter-mile sprint. She acted like she’d been in training for months and was finally in her first meet. Ho! Go for broke!

Of course Nora and Horse came back after their night out. Not that it surprised them to find me in the spare room with a dame, but it rattled Josie. She insisted on dressing. By then I had sobered up some, and I felt like I really should take her home.

But then I called a cab for her, thinking oh what the hell, payday is next week.

My plan was working. It was simple. Scoop the old man. I took Josie more places on weekends, sometimes even to beach parties down windward, where Tapu and Bulls and them would bring dames and guitars and ukes, and of course a case of hooch, and I don’t mean in Wildroot bottles. Josie loved it. Especially sleeping on the beach. Nobody cared if she was old.

But after about three months the old man cornered me at home, mentioned the name “Josephine Gibbs,” and said I had the choice of telling him “the truth” or moving out of the house.

I had nothing to gain by saying anything. Because the “truth” he wanted was certainly not all that had really happened. I packed my clothes in one box and my football pictures in another and carried them down the stairs from the apartment over the garage. Then I went in the kitchen and called Tapu. An hour later he parked his father’s car by the sidewalk and honked. I carried my boxes from the garage and loaded them in the back seat. Then I went up the front steps of the house.

Through the window I could see the old man sitting alone in the parlor smoking his pipe and reading the paper like nothing unusual was going on.

I opened the door, and without going in I said, “You should have taken your own suits to the cleaners.”

A few days after I moved in with Tapu and the boys I suddenly received in the mail a copy of a letter from the old man to Josie. It started out: “Dear Miss Gibbs.”

Among other things, it said, “I had no idea you had more than a motherly interest in Gartley.”

I had scored.

As I said, Laurent liked a good laugh.

TOP

1957: Marja

Twenty years it’s been since The Bastard ran me off and took up with Elaine. That was early July 1937.

Ever the gentleman, he told me he’d found a nice apartment for me in Waikīkī and had taken the liberty of paying three months’ rent in advance. And filled the extra car with miscellaneous furniture he’d rummaged from the cottage. All this generosity to be in addition to alimony, of course.

Maarten was only seven, just a little boy on an adventure. But oh, oh I was quite past forty and should have smelled the royal rat a long time earlier.

The “generosity” lasted less than three days. His Second Family daughter, Charlotte– still living at home at the age of twenty-four – came by the apartment while Maarten and I had walked to Waikīkī Beach to take a swim. She just took the car and drove it home. Of course I didn’t know this when Maarten and I returned and discovered the car gone, so I called the police. When I gave my name, Mrs. Marja Fletcher, the duty sergeant said, “Fletcher? You related to Gartley?”

“He’s my stepson.” Maybe I should have added “First Family.”

“He’s on traffic. I’ll send him over.”

So Gart came, glad to be investigating my auto theft instead of writing a traffic ticket. He found out right away that the car was at the house, where it usually was. Then he had to face the fact that he couldn’t pull a string because, legally speaking, I was the thief. The car title was in Charles' name only. Charlotte had merely “repossessed” her father’s car.

That did it. I’d been reeling from being blind-sided and was wallowing in my own embarrassed juices, when this car business really got my goat. I made my plan.

I called a lawyer, got a neighbor to look after Maarten for a morning, and took the streetcar downtown. I’d had a funny feeling in the last few years that not quite all was well between Charles and me. When I gave the lawyer details, including the peculiar letter from Miss Gibbs, he said I had every justification to ask for the works. He was sure I would get it from the court, especially if he could drum up evidence of adultery. I signed permission authorizing him to do whatever it would take, and walked to the Matson Navigation office to book passage on the next sailing to San Francisco. The ship was the Lurline, a sister to the very vessel aboard which I had met The Bastard. At the time I thought he was the most elegant gentleman I’d ever met. His graying hair only enhanced his charm.

I didn’t tell Maarten about the lawyer, just that we would be moving back to where I had come from, San Francisco. He could ride the cable cars every day. On a trip there a year and a half earlier with The Bastard, Maarten’s favorites were the cable car and special chocolate ice cream at a shop on Fisherman’s Wharf.

Now Maarten thought the plan to return was grand. He already loved living in the Waikīkī apartment because he had me all to himself. I read to him a lot, and he read to me. When we ran out of books about every third day, we took the streetcar to the library and got more. Other days we walked to the end of the beach and then across the lawn under the ironwood pines to the zoo. Maarten was most fond of the giraffes and the monkeys. Often we sat on a bench while he drew them in his notebook. One of his drawings was of several monkeys in some tree branches.

“Those are happy monkeys in your picture,” I said.

“Yeah,” he pointed to a monkey wearing a beanie. “This one is me. These others are my cousins I will meet on the cable car.”

He pointed again, to the one monkey who was bigger than the rest and who was clearly smiling. “This monkey is the mama. We are all going to have fun fun fun.” He did a funny little monkey dance and made a monkey face. “The mama is a good monkey. The daddy monkey is so bad he doesn’t get a drawing.”

I had explained why we moved to the apartment -- his father wanted a different wife, so Maarten and I would be on our own. Whatever he might have been reading into my explanation was no doubt closer to the truth than what little I told him.

“Why does he need so many wives? He’s already had three.”

From then on, Maarten never said a word about his father, devoting himself entirely to swimming and monkeys and books. I watched him closely for signs of troubling thoughts, but he seemed happy in every respect. Actually I think the kid was watching me for the same reason. Every now and then he would repeat his monkey face to make me laugh.

A few days after I booked our passage, I took him with me to pick up our Lurline tickets. He said, “Can we play shuffleboard on the game deck?”

The day we sailed, Gart came to see us off. He was in uniform. He let Maarten wear his hat and I took a picture of the two of them, Gart with one arm around Maarten and the other draped over a life preserver. At first Gart chose a pose with one leg up on the second step of a ship’s ladder, but I recalled a snapshot in which the Duplicitous Bastard struck that very pose. I told Gart to move over to the rail because the light would be better.

I could have said the real reason, but I still had the idea I should whitewash things for Maarten. And anyway, Gart knew that snapshot perfectly well because his Bastard father had it on display on the mantel at the house in Mānoa.

That was the house Gart had left without a backward glance when the Miss Gibbs business came up in 1932. At the time, Gart was out of school, but still living at home. The Bastard didn’t think I knew the tawdry details about Miss Gibbs and the letter he wrote to her, but Gart let it slip about a year after it had happened. The Bastard had told me only that Gart was old enough now to be on his own so he would be moving out to live with friends. A year later Gart himself told me his version of both the letter and the story. Mainly his father wrote the letter to cover his tracks but he, Gartley, nemesis of his father, had had the last word. At least I knew then that Gart’s moving out of the family home was not entirely of his own volition.

When I first came to the family it was plain that Gartley had already been the biggest thorn in his father’s side for years. When I arrived in Honolulu Gart was just sixteen, boarding at Kamehameha School for Boys, where the Bastard stashed all the First Family kids while he fawned over the younger children he’d had with his second wife, Retta -- Charlotte, Walden, and the rest of the spoiled brats. Gart was the youngest of the first bunch, and, I admit, seemed like a tiresome rascal I was sure I would have to endure but never would like. But I also could see that he had got the brunt of impatience, rage and neglect from both the Bastard and Retta simply because the older First Family kids were boarding at that school for Hawaiian children and Gart was the only one left at home. Eventually they sent Gart there too.

I didn’t meet any of the kids until a month or so before The Bastard and I were married in December 1926. Gart was sixteen. I’d been told that, in the five years Gart had been at boarding school, his father had been called by the headmaster at least a dozen times. Fighting. Getting drunk. Leaving campus without permission. One night went joy-riding in a car he snitched from the faculty parking area.

When he came home from school for the holidays he went straight to his room in the cottage above the garage. He shared it only with his next oldest brother, Hoyt, now that their three older brothers were grown and gone.

In the following couple of summers, before I got a driving license, his father ordered Gart to chauffeur me around to do various errands. I could see mischief in Gart’s eyes, but also hurt, and wariness. He acted like the driving duty was punishment. He didn’t speak, except for “Yes, ma’am,” when I told him to wait for me outside a store. One day I dropped my purse in the gutter getting into the car. He picked it up and jokingly handed it to me, saying, “Madame! I believe this is yours? This satchel of wealth?” I broke out laughing, it was so out of character. It also broke the ice, and I grew fonder of him from then on, even wisecracking myself when we went on our forays. Eventually it came to me that Gart was actually lovable. Even without him as the contrast, it was plain that Charlotte, Walden and Retta’s other two children were way worse than naughty -- sly and arrogant schemers and whiners.

When we’d been married a couple of years, The Bastard and I planned a trip to California on the Malolo. Charlotte whined so much about it Charles decided to take her with us. I didn’t know until the day before we were to leave and was looking over the itinerary that he had bought her a child’s half-fare ticket. Admittedly she was small for sixteen, but I almost couldn’t hold my tongue when he coached her on what to say if any ship personnel asked her how old she was. She thought it was great fun to put one over on the Matson Navigation Company and so did her father. I guess it should have been no surprise that Charlotte would be the one to take the car from me.

Of course I didn’t know any of this when I first met Charles. Nothing about Gartley, nothing about Charlotte. We’d met aboard that same ship that summer of 1926, aSan Francisco to Honolulu. The crossing took the better part of a week, the perfect amount of time for a shipboard romance.

The dining salon tables are assigned randomly, so I suppose I could blithely blame all this on the Matson Lines’ stewards who put me at a table that included Charles and two couples. Immediately Charles pulled out my chair, and called the waiter when he noticed a speck of something on my dessert fork.

After a salad, main course, coffee and petits fours he asked if I cared to stroll on deck for a breath of air before dancing commenced in the ballroom. Yes. Of course. I was single, past thirty by almost two years, and on vacation alone. I hadn’t had a date in years. Why would I say no?

It turned out that he could dance to any rhythm the band played. He was so easy to follow we must have looked like we’d been dancing together for years. When the band took a break, he gallantly kissed the back of my hand and led me to a cocktail table, where he ordered crème de menthe for me and a brandy for himself.

Afterward we walked on the deck. It was chilly in the night breeze and he removed his jacket and put it over my shoulders. Later we sat in deck chairs wrapped in steamer robes, watching the moon dance on the high sea.

The nights grew noticeably warmer as we steamed west and south, sitting side by side in the dining salon, or in the deck chairs or around the pool with its salt water sloshing mightily from one end of it to the other with each pitch of the ship. He was most interested in all that I did, and all that I knew about San Francisco.

“Ah,” he said, “If only I’d known you sooner. I was in San Francisco for this whole last month. You could have shown me the city.” He took my hand in an apologetic way. “Next time we’ll dance at the Top of the Mark. That’s what we’ll do.”

And then, of course, there were the times we didn’t talk at all, in his private stateroom in the wee hours after dancing or a walk on deck. In the daytime it was his eyes that drew me most, blue but with a hint of turquoise. In the dark it was his smooth, long, gentle fingers. When it was time for me to leave, he always dressed, and then discreetly opened his door to see who might be about. By then I would be dressed, and I slipped along the passageway and down the ladders to the steerage cabin I had booked so I could afford the cottage I’d rented in Waikīkī for a month.

I saw later that he kept me talking an awful lot about myself, my work as an executive secretary, my friends, my apartment, my travels here and there, about my parents coming from Holland not long before I was born. He told me that he’d been widowed a year ago. I hardly wanted to bring up a painful topic in the middle of romance, so I didn’t ask him anything more about himself. I should have.

When we docked in Honolulu, the wharf was crowded with lei sellers and people coming to greet passengers. The street was jammed with taxis and private cars. When the disembarkment was announced, Charles fetched me at my cabin door and made sure my wardrobe trunk and suitcases were tagged correctly for delivery to the Halekulani Cottages. He even tipped my room steward before I could do it myself. He kissed me roundly in the passageway, twice, then escorted me to the promenade deck where the gangway was. There he bade me “Goodbye, my dear,” taking my hand and kissing it, lingering over it for just a moment, a storybook end to a shipboard romance.

At the bottom of the gangway was assembled a group of children and young adults dressed in their finest, arranged oldest to youngest and all facing the ship. Behind them a band played, tunes not familiar but entirely pleasing.

When Charles stepped onto the pier, the children greeted him, the boys shaking his hand and the girls curtseying. The band played on. How very sweet, I thought. He didn’t tell me he was headmaster of a school. He must be a lot more important than I thought, to have a uniformed band greet him.

By the time I came down the gangway, he and the children were gone. Next thing I knew, a driver from my hotel hustled me into his cab. He’d already found my luggage, so off we went. The route was through what appeared to be the downtown of Honolulu, with a number of beautiful new buildings that reminded me a bit of the architecture in Southern California. Several more large buildings were under construction. The driver pointed out the royal palace, which had become the governor’s office and the seat of the legislature when the monarchy became obsolete.

We drove along the shoreline to a lovely cottage that would be all mine until the middle of October.

Two days later I answered a knock on my door. Not expecting a visitor, I thought it would be a hotel steward. But it was Charles, with a very large bouquet of cut flowers, none of which I could identify except for the startling bird of paradise.

“What a surprise,” I said. “Won’t you come in? I’ll get a vase for these.”

I put the flowers on the rattan coffee table. “I didn’t think we’d meet again,” I said. “I watched you on the dock, with all those children. I didn’t know you were headmaster of a school.”

He made a small choking noise and I offered him a glass of water.

“Shall we sit on the veranda while the sun is setting?” I walked outside and took one of the chairs.

Instead of sitting in the other, he suddenly went down before me on one knee, taking both my hands in his and holding them to his lips.

“Oh, Marja,” he said, muffling my name in my hands. “I want to tell you something.”

“Please do,” I said. “But get up off your knee and sit down.”

He sat on the edge of the other chair. The sun was sinking fast but he wasn’t watching it. He was looking directly at me.

“Those children,” he said, and suddenly he did look toward the sun while he spoke. “Those children are all mine, and I have three others who are grown and gone. Both my wives died.” He turned toward me again. “I didn’t think I would see you again, but when I went home I found I could not stop thinking of you. Please, my dear, please. Will you marry me?”

At this point he slipped off his chair back onto bended knee. At the time it seemed most sincere and enchantingly old fashioned. I thought, Oh yes, yes, yes, but I said, “May I call you tomorrow?”

“Indeed,” he said. “Let me take leave now. I shall expect your call. Here is my card. Call me at the office or at home.”

I did, with my foolish answer. He asked for time to get the children accustomed to the idea of a new mother, so I arranged to stay on at the cottage for two more months. I wrote to both my landlord and my employer in San Francisco about this turn in my life, and hired movers to pack up my apartment and have my things shipped.

Charles took to visiting on his way home from work, or sometimes in the evenings after the dinner hour. On weekends, he brought the younger children, Charlotte, Walden and the two smaller ones. He introduced me as his friend Miss Schuyler from the ship.

They all would change their clothes in my cottage and we would troop to the beach. I thought Charles seemed a little cavalier about parading through the cottage in front of me in his undershorts, and I think I was not the only one who noticed. Walden in particular kept a close eye on Charles and me, sometimes whispering to Charlotte on the beach. He was twelve, and full of suspicion.

After about three weeks of this, Charles invited me to their home in Mānoa. We were served a nice dinner by Elsie. Charles seated the four younger children along one side of the table in order of age. The four from the First Family who were not abroad sat facing them -- Gart and Hoyt, the two youngest, now 15 and 17, and the two grown girls, Nora and Genevieve, who shared one of the bedrooms in the house while they attended Normal School studying to become teachers.

When we had finished eating, Walden, a Second Family kid, asked to be excused.

“Not yet,” his father said.

“But I like go outside,” Walden whined. “I going meet Pukey, go work on da soapbox car.”

“I said, ‘Not yet.’ You may meet Euclid later. I have something to tell you all.”

The air grew oppressive and I tried not to squirm in my seat at the foot of the table.

“Children,” Charles said. “What I wish to tell you is that Miss Schuyler and I will be married at Christmas time.”

Walden punched Charlotte next to him and exclaimed, “See! I wen’ tell you!”

“That will do, young man,” Charles said. “And no more speaking Pidgin. You know good English perfectly well.” Walden said no more, but smirked in that way that is peculiar to boys on the verge of the teen years. “Miss Schuyler will be your new mother.”

Walden had nearly unnerved me, and now the “new mother” remark put me in a state. My god, the First Family children had met me for the first time less than two hours earlier. There were so many of them to answer my questions about their schools and their summer jobs that I hardly had to talk about myself much at all.

And now I was cast as “new mother.” I tried getting by with just a smile, but it felt all wrong and I said, “I’m sure we’ll get along just fine.”

“We like Elsie,” Walden said. “She’s been our maid forever.”

“You will be quiet, young man,” Charles told him.

But Walden continued, “Our mother died last year and Elsie takes care of us just fine. I bet you can’t make lemon pie.”

“That will do,” Charles said. “Or I will see you out behind the garage.”

“Yes, sir,” said Walden. “May I be excused?”

“You all may be excused. Say goodnight to Miss Schuyler. I will be taking her back to her cottage and you can all wash the dishes with Elsie.”

When he drove me back, I unlocked the cottage door and he opened it. But I did not invite him in, although he clearly was waiting for the invitation.

“I enjoyed meeting the children,” I said. “I think you’d better get back to them. They are going to have questions about me.”

“So they may,” he said. “But they will discover their own answers in due time.”

We were married in Central Union Church in December about two weeks before Christmas with only two witnesses, neighbors of Charles he’d known since he bought the Mānoa house in 1919.

I moved into the house, along with a Christmas tree imported from the West Coast. Gart and Hoyt came home from school for vacation and took up their rooms above the garage.

The girls found the Christmas ornaments in the attic and called the younger children to help decorate the tree. It was Elsie’s evening off, so I went out to the garage and up the outside stairs to get Gart and Hoyt from the cottage.

I knocked on the door. Gart answered. Behind him, Hoyt was moving something off the table and a glass crashed to the floor, breaking.

“I clean ‘um up,” he said, and seized a broom. Gart just stared at me.

“Would you like to come help decorate the Christmas tree?” Before it was out of my mouth, I knew this was a ridiculous question. So I asked one that was equally stupid. “What are you boys drinking?”

“Hooch,” Gart said. “The old man doesn’t know.” He stared at me until I had to look away, and I knew that I could tell their father if I wished, but my life would become an instant misery so long as these boys were home.

“Shall that be a secret among the three of us?” I said.

Gart turned to Hoyt. “What you t’ink?”

“Sure.”

“And now would you care to help with the tree?” I asked.

The three of us went back to the house, where I told them that my family always had hot chocolate when we finished decorating our tree and would they like some.

“Oh yes,” said Gart, winking. “For me and Hoyt. And my sisters and brothers.”

In the ensuing years the girls finished Normal School. Genevieve took a position teaching fifth grade in a plantation town. The next year she married the plantation’s office manager, and the following year they had a baby girl. Nora took a job teaching in town, and still kept her boyfriend on the string. Hoyt graduated from Punahou and was offered a football scholarship by Oregon State College. Kamehameha had a work-study program that prolonged high school a year, and Gart had more than a year to go. But, boarding, he was as good as gone from home. And then, in the spring of 1930, I had a baby.

Just before the end of the school year and shortly before Walden turned 15 he came to me and said, “I visited Gart at his dorm.” I had finally succeeded in getting him to forego Pidgin English for proper grammar. Because of it he’d been accepted by Punahou School.

“I visit him there now and then myself,” I said.

“But,” he went on. “I visited him and he showed me something.”

“Do say, Walden.”

“He’s gonna get a licking if dad finds out.”

“Oh yes?” I said, but thinking this is nothing new.

“Gart has hooch right on his dresser. In in hair tonic bottles.”

“Tell me something I don’t already know,” I said. I could have mopped the floor with Walden’s face, it fell so far.

“Maybe I’ll tell dad,” he said. And that was the last of it.

Somehow the incident burned itself into the templates of my relationships with both Walden and Gartley in a strangely perverse way. I reviled the tattle-tale and adored the renegade. Little did I know I would come to hate the father of them both.

In a way, I suppose it’s no surprise that I kept in touch with Gart after he saw Maarten and me off on the Lurline that summer of 1937. He’d been straight with me from the moment of that first dumb joke. And we still had our secret about the whiskey in the cottage over the garage.

“Hooch,” he’d said. And that was the “honest truth,” as the saying went. He never told me otherwise. “No bull squeak,” as he would put it.

Walden, on the other hand, emulated his father. Once he even told me his dad was coaching him as he practiced his “lines for ladies.” Toward the end of his student years at the University of Hawaii he claimed he was a Waikīkī beach boy during the summers, but mostly he just hung out at the Outrigger Canoe Club, where his father had bought him a membership.

“Good contacts,” Charles had said. Oh yes, good contacts with young California women coming to Hawaii on vacation. Walden mentioned the Royal Hawaiian Hotel a little too often and came home in the wee hours of the morning a few too many times for me not to guess what was up. I should have thought “chip off the old block.” But I didn’t.

I must have been too busy looking the wrong way, having learned how to do it with the Miss Gibbs incident. I told myself Charles was working late. I told myself he was an important man, whose new position with the Hawaii Sugar Planters’ Association took him to the other islands sometimes, even to the Mainland.

Why did I not smell a rat?

I even kept looking the other way a year or two later when Walden, working as a summer errand boy downtown and riding to work with his father, told me casually in the kitchen one day, “Good fun, riding with dad.”

“Oh yes?” This had the ring of his story about Gart’s hair tonic.

“He shows me how to look for girls.”

“Do say, Walden.”

“I asked dad how come we always take the back streets. He said, ‘You never noticed the girl who is always walking to work?’”

My stomach knotted, but Walden barreled on. “Dad said, ‘Her name is Elaine.’”

I think Walden knew he had me.

Elaine. Later I found out Elaine was younger than half of Charles' children, younger than I by more than ten years. By the time he married her a few months after the divorce, he was almost sixty.

And I? I decided to put him out of my mind.

The Lurline docked in San Francisco and Maarten and I took a lovely second-floor two-bedroom apartment on Geary Street. Maarten loved taking the cable car to school. The dirty alimony gave me time to be picky about taking a job, so it was some months before I signed a contract as executive secretary for the vice-president of a shipping firm. Then I paid our expenses with my salary and used the alimony to fill our place with fine furnishings.

About ten years later Gart and his family came to see me. He’d married in 1940, and now had the wife and two kids in tow. By then, 1948, Maarten had gone off to college, so I was able to put them up for two nights.

Gart’s two kids, Eleanor and Andrew, thought living upstairs was grand. They made a game of running up the carpeted stairs and then bumping themselves down a full flight on their behinds. When they got brave and tried sliding down the banister, their mother put a stop to it.

Gart had greeted me with a warm Hawaiian hug. It was clear to me that he was still drinking. But he still had the rascally twinkle in his brown eyes that I remembered from when I met him that first Christmas some twenty years earlier.

The twinkle, unfortunately, also jerked up a memory of his father’s eyes. Yes, Gart’s eyes were brown, not blue. But they did have the spark.

And now, another decade later, Gart has told me The Bastard has finally died. Scottish Rite funeral. All costume and mumbo jumbo. Perfect.

The devil is in the details.

TOP

1982: Eleanor

My stomach didn’t feel so good that day, Labor Day 1952. I was not quite twelve.

In those times so long ago girls still wore dresses to school and boys in second grade pulled up their skirts from behind and shouted “Puka pants! Puka pants!”

During recess we jumped double-eye rope, and the boys played marbles. After school at home we played outside all the time, because there was nothing to do indoors. We went to bed before 9 p.m., because there was nothing to do indoors or outdoors.

On Saturday mornings we each got a quarter, if we’d been good during the week. It would cover admission to the Bugs Bunny Club at the theater, with a dime left over to buy popcorn so we had something to keep our hands occupied while watching Bugs himself, a chapter in the serial, and a Tom Mix western.

In July, when I was still eleven, my parents deviated from the usual routine and dumped me at Girl Scout camp at Paumalū for a week. I spent the first two days being homesick and the next several hobbling around after slicing the inside of one ankle with a hatchet while sitting on a step husking a coconut I held between my feet.

Then, on Labor Day, a new wave of homesickness came over me. My parents had dumped me again, for a lot longer. They tried to sooth me by saying I was growing up and it was time. Everyone else in the family for two generations had gone to this school. I could come home at Thanksgiving. And maybe I’d see Brother at some all-schools event that included both boys and girls.

After they left me in my dorm room, I fingered my dresses hanging in the closet and my sheets and blanket folded in a stack on the bottom bunk. I wandered to the bureau. In the wavy glass mirror I seemed as small as a first grader.

The longer I stood in front of the mirror, the more I felt I would throw up. Just as I was wondering where the bathroom was, a voice broke through from the doorway.

“Eh! Blondie! You no like da top bunk?”

The big voice boomed from a small, compact body. Oh no. This must be Gerald Ann Fitzpatrick. That was the name on the roommate notice. How could a person with such a haole name speak such Pidgin? How come a Fitzpatrick looked so dark? Was she calling me Blondie because I had brown hair instead of black like hers?

“Where you from, kua‘aina? Da sticks?” She carried two suitcases into the room. One had a rope for a handle. “You evah come Honolulu befo’?” She moved into the middle of the room and eyeballed the twin bureaus and the side-by-side desks.

“Sometimes. My aunty lives in Kalihi.” I backed part way into the closet as she advanced. “I guess you’re Gerald Ann.”

“Ha!” She stretched her left arm out stiff until the elbow bent backwards, made a fist and rotated her arm. Her elbow cracked.
“Gerald Ann! You call me dat one mo’ time, you sleep da top bunk forevah.” In case I might not understand, she made stink eye.

My roommate had been in Honolulu once before, but not by herself. This time her parents had put her on the plane in Hilo all alone, hoping the school would have a bus at the airport. It hadn’t bothered her a bit.

She opened her two suitcases and began stuffing things in drawers. She hung her school dresses on the wooden hangers she’d brought – they were on the list: twelve wooden hangers with name in indelible ink – but the dresses were so crumpled the hems hung cockeyed.

“Girls!” Another doorway voice. This one was tougher than Gerald Ann’s. No bluff.

“Girls. I’m Mrs. Chu. The assistant housemother. I believe Mrs. Van Dyke checked you in. I am here to inspect your bureaus.”

Gerald Ann’s bureau drawers all were open, towels and socks and pajamas cascading from them.

“Is this yours?” Mrs. Chu stared at me.

“No.”

“No, MA’AM.”

“No, ma’am.”

Mrs. Chu faced Gerald Ann.

“Remove your things from this bureau. Then put them back in. Towels in the bottom drawer. Sweaters and pajamas in the middle. Underwear, top right. Handkerchiefs and socks, top left. Every name tag must be showing. And in that closet: Every dress and blouse facing to the right, name on each dress and each hanger visible. Church dresses at the extreme right, outing dresses next, school dresses last. Shoes lined up in pairs on the floor. Laundry bag on the hook. And closet door closed at all times, except at night to air out.” She turned in a way I’d seen at an Army parade.

“And these beds. Girls. These beds are to be made tight, with hospital corners. Top bunk spread tucked, bottom bunk spread left loose but not touching the floor. No wrinkles. Don’t ever sit on the bed. It makes wrinkles.”

Mrs. Chu clumped out of the room. We could hear her next door saying “Girls” to some other misfortunates.

“Gerald Ann,” I said. “What’s a hospital corner?”

“I give. And no call me Gerald Ann, I wen’ tell you already. Can call me Fitzie, like at home.”

“So what about Mrs. Chu?”
“Fut on Choo Choo,” Fitzie said. “Come.”

She led me to the library on the first floor, where there was a very dark, very tall piano.
“Sit,” she said, pointing at the bench. She sat next to me and taught me the bottom part of

“Heart and Soul.”

Mrs. Chu, it turned out, had given us just the tip of the iceberg of regulations that froze our lives for the next six years. And Mrs. Chu, we saw shortly, was the only faculty member who wasn’t haole. She might as well have been. They were all alike. Maybe it was the proximity to the military program for the boys’ school. Or old maidism, or widowhood. Whatever it was, they had the attitude of fundamentalist missionaries and the power of drill instructors.

Something was even wrong with the one married faculty couple. They were young, but the wife was pale and puffy, and the husband was so, you know. Ete. One day he backed the school bus up against a mango tree, branches and leaves flopping through the open windows. All of us tittered, and the girls in the window seats picked little green mangoes.

Fitzie was one of them. The pickers all got extra detention, fifteen minutes for arms out the window. Everybody got fifteen minutes for tittering. That was a Tuesday. When Mrs. Van Dyke posted the detention list on Friday after school, Fitzie’s name, as usual, was at the top, since it was arranged numerically by length of detention. Her sins were numerous. Late to breakfast. White shoe polish on black part of saddle shoe. Wrinkles in bedspread. Wrinkles in skirt. Food left on plate. No name tag on pink sock. Wad of paper in wastebasket. Wearing cardigan sweater without blouse under. Water spot on sink faucet. I got fifteen minutes for that too. We shared the sink.

But with fifteen minutes for the mango tittering and fifteen for the water spot, I was still free on Saturday by 9. Fitzie’s sentence put her past the last bus down the hill.

“Fut,” she said. “But I can go home Thanksgiving.”

Detained girls did penance only until noon on Saturdays. I guess the school didn’t have the old maid power to ride herd on them all day. Fitzie spent almost all Saturdays on campus, the mornings scrubbing and raking and the afternoons roaming the ridges behind the school, in the forest where the Ko‘olau mountain winds rustled the saber leaves of koa and eucalyptus. We heard the winds at night on the sleeping porch. Once, when we were all up in our pajamas pushing the beds around so we could all be in the moonlight and become beautiful, Fitzie told us there were baby kangaroos way back in the mountains. She shut up when we heard Van Dyke tiptoeing in the hall.

“What are you girls doing? It’s past lights out.” The dark housemother silhouette stood for a moment adjusting its eyes. When it saw our beds ferried to the one window like barges in the harbor, it spoke: “Fifteen minutes. All of you. Now get those beds back.”

We rolled them back into hospital ward layout. When Van Dyke’s form retreated, Fitzie whispered. “Fut on Van Dyke.” The rest of us tittered.

“Fifteen more minutes.” Van Dyke must not have heard “fut.”

By our second year, Fitzie quit calling me kua‘aina, except on rare occasions. I was no longer a country yokel in her eyes, but the alternative name was worse. Blondie. I was as much Hawaiian as most of the girls, but with my straight brown hair I was as conspicuous in the sea of dark heads as a white cap on a calm sea. Fitzie’s hair was coarse and black, the result of a little Chinese and a lot of Hawaiian. Irish from her dad’s side could hardly affect it. She had me cut the unruly hair into a V that reached between her shoulder blades. Every night she wound it into big pin curls along the neckline and slicked her bangs down on her forehead with water. She even got detention because of her hair. One Thursday, hair washing day, she checked her wet head in with a new housemother, but had forgotten to wash her brush and comb. Fifteen minutes.

None of us really expected Fitzie to ever get out on a Saturday. She herself took to stocking the high shelf of her closet when she returned from vacations, like a Mormon preparing for Doomsday. She usually had Spam, assorted crack seed and preserved lemon or plum, and once she had stewed prunes in a jar. Those she forgot at the back of the shelf, and when she found them weeks later, we decided they were fermented.

“Eh, Blondie,” she said. “We do like da boys, how dey put hooch inside hair tonic bottles.”

“How do you know that?”

“I heard from Rags,” she said.

Rags. Beads of congealed hair oil always dangled from the pokey ends of Rags McIntyre’s haircut. Fitzie thought it made him cute. I’d heard about Rags from my brother. They were a year older than us. The first time Brother met Rags was in the boys’ dorm bathroom. Rags was sitting in a stall practicing “The Stars and Stripes Forever” on his Martin. Good acoustics, he said. You need an echo for a really good effect with a ‘uke. Later Rags discovered the acoustics also were great for magnifying farts, and he tried to wait until the gang shower was full of guys so he’d have the biggest possible audience.

“You da champ,” the boys told him. “Da Fut King. Gotta be.”

Rags enjoyed being the informal champion, but he wanted undisputed status. So he engineered a contest for study hall, the other place with reasonable acoustics, with it smooth cement floors and walls in the dorm basement. Three nights a week Mullageek presided over its library-like stillness.

Mr. Mulligan taught English literature at the boys’ school and directed the mixed choir that practiced Thursday nights. Choir membership was always at a maximum because rehearsal was the only weekday chance of boys seeing girls and vice-versa. Fitzie and Rags had met because she was a last-row alto and he was a first-row tenor.

Mr. Mulligan was blue-eyed and pointy-nosed, ruddy-faced by nature, more than middle aged and fond of recounting his service to the King in British India. The boys knew him best for his perfectly monotonous poetry reading, but the girls fixed on his music director style: He looked like a Thanksgiving turkey trying to escape slaughter. He danced up and down on the balls of his feet, his arms flapping like distressed, desperate wings. It didn’t take Fitzie long to convert his name to a squawk: Mullageek! Mullageek! On “geek” she rose on her own toes and flapped her elbows.

So she became particularly fond of Rags when she heard what he did to Mullageek in study hall.

The fart contest had only one rule: Whoever got the biggest reaction out of Mullageek would win. About 40 boys were in the hall. Hard to say how many planned to enter the contest. The first two or three explosions were minor enough to escape much notice, except for those immediately around. About eight o’clock two sophomores in the back row detonated respectable volleys, and Mullageek looked up from his desk on the platform. Ten dull minutes went by. One or two other boys made random efforts. Then a salvo. Mullageek was turning his head as if watching a tennis match. When Rags fired what turned out to be the finale, Mullageek turned redder than they’d ever seen him, and wormy blue veins writhed in his temples.

“Boys! Boys!”

By now the boys were laughing out loud, and punching each other in the shoulder. They could barely hear the turkey voice above themselves.

“Boys! Boys! This is a quiet study hall! There is no place here for this kind of unseemly behavior! Dismissed! But you! McIntyre! I want you! Up here! Now!”

The next Saturday the whole bunch spent the whole day breaking down their M-1s and polishing their brass. And Rags got busted back to private.

After that, Fitzie loved him.

We girls never were so brave or brazen, but we had our ways. The best part of each new year was coming back to school to new teachers.

“FOB,” Fitzie said.

“Hah?”

“Fresh Off da Boat, kua‘aina.”

We took our places and waited for roll call, faces impassive. Over several years we’d come to the theory about teachers that the paler the skin, the more the embarassment.

At the beginning and end of the alphabet were the English, Irish, Scottish, German, Chinese, Japanese, Filipino and Portuguese names of those of us whose mothers or grandmothers had married foreigners. The Hawaiian names were in the middle, because almost all of them started with K. The first part of roll call lulled a new teacher into thinking it was going to be a good first day. Nothing to it. Ah Nee. Chun. Dawson. Fitzpatrick. Fong. Hughes.

About then Fitzie cracked her elbow. It was a signal.

Next up was Ka‘ana‘ana. After that came Kane‘ai‘akalā and Keli‘iaua. We laid in wait behind those treacherous multi-syllable, multi-vowel names like a guerilla gang. Every year we let the initiate stumble to full blush before the girl in question pronounced her name, soft and fast.

At the end of the first day of every school year Fitzie said, “Eh, Blondie! Too good, ah?”

In reality, the teachers were unaffected by this or anything else we did. They gave us information they thought proper, and when it pertained to individual girls, that meant none at all. After Christmas in tenth grade, Claire Ka‘ana‘ana didn’t come back. We never heard why.

The next year, Christine Manuel didn’t return after spring vacation. The subject came up one afternoon after school. Those of us who weren’t washing or ironing were in Fitzie’s room eating Spam and saloon pilots.

“I heard she wen’ get hāpai,” Fitzie said.

“How do you know?” I always seemed to ask that.

“Just heard.”

“How could she get pregnant?”

“No be one doodoo head, ah.”

“I just don’t see how people do it,” I said.

“You lie down, put your legs up,” Fitzie said. “Li’ dis.” She rolled back on the bottom bunk and hoisted her legs. Her feet touched the flat springs of the top bunk and she bounced the two girls up there until they begged her to stop.

“Not!” I couldn’t believe it.

“Yeah,” Fitzie said. “And den da guy get on top you…”

“Not!” I was nearly screaming. “It’s supposed to be nice!”

“Awright awreddy,” Fitzie said. “You going see. Someday.”

“Not me,” I said. “I’m not doing that.”

After that day the subject surfaced only now and then. The whole idea was pretty remote, as we seldom even saw boys. Yet even the school acknowledged that we were growing older. In eleventh grade we were permitted to wear lipstick to dances, and nylons for special functions. We began to worry about straight seams and runs, and garter belts. The deal on the lipstick was that every trace must be removed by Sunday breakfast. Of course Fitzie got detention for lipstick outline.

The teachers laid more and more work on us, and we constantly factored equations, memorized speeches from Shakespeare and read fairy tales aloud in Spanish. All that came out of our efforts at a foreign language was that, when you called to her, Fitzie twisted Spanish into “Una pimento.”

The biology teacher, Mr. Ware, decided a field trip to collect specimens would make his specialty more interesting to us, and he took us to a rocky tide pool area at the far end of Waikīkī. All of us immediately swam out so far that Mr. Ware looked like a dwarf ete on the sand, waving his stubby dwarf arms wildly, trying to get us to come back. He waded knee-deep, cutting his feet on the coral. He waved and waved, and eventually we swam in.

“Back to the bus,” he ordered.

“But we don’t have our specimens. We can go back out and get wana.”

“I’m cancelling the assignment. You disobeyed.”

So all of us got a whole Saturday morning of detention. Some of us were assigned to scrub the laundry on hands and knees with stiff-bristled brushes and Bon Ami. Others were to Bon Ami all the dorm windows, then wipe the chalky powder off with old newspaper. The last few were on the grounds, picking up dead plumeria leaves.

In the afternoon Fitzie rounded up some of the group for a trip up the ridge. “Come,” she said. “Going be good fun.”

It had been raining the last couple of days, and the path was red and wet, the mud curling between our toes in a satisfying way. The spiny ridge grew narrower and steeper. One of the girls stopped and picked a lehua.

“Eh!” Fitzie barked. “No pick! You make rain.”

In an hour we reached the top, where our ridge came to a T with the backbone of the Ko‘olau range. Fog swirled, and we all got chicken skin in the damp. In moments the tradewinds blew the fog behind us, and we could see Kailua and Kane‘ohe bays sparkling green in the afternoon sun. Two thousand feet below were wet forests we knew smelled of rotting guava. It gave me the creeps, being so high and so exposed.

“Let’s go back,” I said.

“You scared, Blondie?” Fitzie said.

“Well.”

“You gotta say ‘nah.’ She made it sound like a bleat. “Then you come brave.”

On the grade down it was lots easier to slip. My toes spread wider than usual, trying to gain a hold. At a curve in the trail Fitzie pointed to the right, back toward the summit. “’Ass where da small kine kangaroo live.”

“Who said?”

“Rags. They saw one when they wen’ pick ti leaves.”

Just as she said it, both my feet lost their muddy grip, and I shot over the side of the ridge. I shrieked.

About twenty feet down I lit in the forky feet of a hala tree. One of my legs tangled in the roots, and I hugged the trunk tighter than any Catholic has ever hugged a cross.

“Eh! Blondie!” Fitzie called. “Come!”

I looked up, expecting to see her on the trail sweeping her arm in an arc in case I hadn’t understood the word “come.”

But her right hand was within inches of me, and with her left arm she gripped a guava bush. I grabbed her hand and she jerked me out of the hala roots. I stumbled up the tangled bank back to the trail and collapsed, crying and gasping. Fitzie held me until I stopped. She spit on her hand and tried to wipe the mud from a welt on my bare thigh.

“Eh, Blondie, no fall no more.”

We went back to the dorm, cleaned up, and ate Fitzie’s entire supply of crack seed.

For once, no one found out about the misadventure. But even at that, Fitzie still had so much detention, she’d given up on ever getting a citizenship award. In the last week or two of eleventh grade sewing she and Nani Souza were sharing a machine, gossiping while Nani ripped out the section where she’d caught the collar in the sleeve seam.

“Girls.” Miss Smythe rapped her ruler on the machine cabinet. Fitzie and Nani both looked up.

“Would you like to share your gossip with the rest of the class?”

Fitzie said, “You mean wala’au? No.”

“All right. Both of you go to the office. Miss Marsden will want to speak with you.”

This might have been the spark for the way Fitzie started our senior year the next September. The first day of school – the day of the ritual roll call – Fitzie appeared in black and white. Stripes ran around her horizontally, both blouse and skirt. We weren’t permitted to wear pants to school, or she would have made pants. On her head was a straight-brimmed striped hat about the height of an angel food cake pan. She’d spent most of August sewing.

By lunchtime she got sent to the office. Before meting out detention, Miss Marsden asked why Fitzie had made the prison suit.

“That’s what I think we should wear at this school,” Fitzie said.

Later, to us, she said, “Fut on Mars.”

But she didn’t really do a thing to Marsden. Yet, for all her failure at citizenship, such as the school defined it, she was a huge success at school work. In fact, she was by far the smartest girl in the school. The minute she hit class she would switch from dorm Pidgin to the King’s English. It was easy for her to remember rhymes of the Ancient Mariner and theorems for geometry. She could recite the periodic table. She even thought medieval France was interesting.

She and I dreamed we’d go to New York after we graduated. I’d go to art school and she would enroll at Columbia. We would share an apartment, maybe find a couple of other girls to join us. Of course we would have barely any money, so in the middle of the year we started gathering provisions. In the back of her closet, Fitzie stashed the toilet paper she swiped when she was on bathroom duty. By March she had enough that I could see we were going to have a shipping problem. When school let out for spring vacation, she stuffed the toilet paper in her suitcase and took it home to Hilo.

When she came back ten days later, she was sick. Her brown skin had a yellow look to it, and her eyes didn’t flash. She hardly got detention. One afternoon I offered her Oreos.

“Nah,” she said.

“Sushi? Cone kind?”

“Nah.”

“What’s the matter with you? That’s your favorite.”

She made a little swallowing motion, like she was trying not to throw up. Then she whispered, “I think I’m going to have a baby.”
“Fitzie!” Then I said her name again. And again.

After the third time, she said, feebly, “Fitzie. That’s me. Christmas time Rags told me it would be okay.”

The middle of the next week Fitzie disappeared. So many girls had the Asian flu, the infirmary was completely full. Everyone but me thought she had gone there, but the girls on junior nurse duty confirmed she wasn’t among them.

By the weekend she still wasn’t back. As usual, the teachers told us nothing. The memories of Claire and Christine attacked my mind like wild pigs slashing dogs. I sat on the bed, wrinkles or no. Fut on this school, I thought. Fut on this goddamn school.

But a week later Fitzie was back, with a scar to show for it. Appendicitis. The kind that brews for awhile and then blows up. She’d been in Queen’s Hospital.

The year before, Fitzie had invented a huge bubble machine for the prom, so she was a natural to work on the senior skit. Usually the few girls interested in drama devised some inane act in which they played both male and female roles. Fitzie decided that every girl in the class should have a part, and she wrote a talent show/travelogue script that incorporated an astounding miscellany of things we’d learned in six years: archery, modern dance, typing, tumbling, piano. She herself did a pantomime to a recording of “What’s Behind the Green Door?” Her muscular, acrobatic body gyrated in front of a stage-prop green door, her black hair flying wildly. The top part of her costume looked stripedly familiar. The song was jazzy, and the underclass girls began to clap in rhythm as Fitzie did a back bend, holding one arm out and the other one in front of her mouth, as if guzzling from a bottle.

The guzzling did it. Detention on the very last Saturday, the day before graduation.

On Sunday she gave the valedictory speech. But when Marsden announced the school scholarship, the name she called was mine. I never expected it.

I only saw Fitzie from a distance after the ceremony. Her long wavy hair was tangled in a pile of lei that almost covered her eyes, and her family surrounded her, holding stacked boxes of gifts and food in their arms.

In the mob scene I lost her, and before long everyone had disappeared not just from the auditorium but from campus entirely.

Two days later she called me from Hilo.

“Fitzie!” I shouted through the crackling connection. Something must be on her mind. Long distance phone calls were only for tragedies.

“Congratulations,” she said.

“About the scholarship?” I said. “It should have been yours. You’re the smartest person I ever met.”

“I knew I wouldn’t get it,” she said, choosing the King’s English. “Remember when we had college counseling at the beginning of the year? Marsden told me I’d never make it. I wasn’t college material.”

   “What!” This time I shrieked. We’d long since given up the New York plan but she’d been talking about colleges in California. I’d been accepted at a public university in the Midwest that had low out-of-state tuition.

“Yeah,” she said. She didn’t sound like Fitzie at all.

   “Fitzie, will you write to me?”

   Yeah, Blondie. Okay. I gotta go.”

   “Fitzie?”

“What you like?” She slipped into Pidgin, but she sounded strange.

“You’re the one who taught me ‘Heart and Soul.’”

She never did write to me. While I was in college I heard from another classmate that Rags had joined the army and got killed in a car accident on a highway outside of Fort Ord. Later I heard that Mullageek married the sewing teacher and moved to Kansas. Marsden retired but was named “administrative adviser.” Fitzie worked her way through a small college and later enrolled in Hawaii’s new law school. I finished a B.A., moved to the west coast, and then home. I got her phone number from a mutual friend and called her shortly after I heard about her passing the bar. I hadn’t seen her since our graduation day. We met at Ciro’s downtown.

“Eh, Fitzie!” I said.

We hugged. “Blondie! You still look like one haole.”

T’anks, ah,” I said.

“Ho, nevah know you can talk da kine.” She smiled.

“You’re a lawyer,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said. “I finally found out I was smart.”

“I knew that,” I said.

“I didn’t. Marsden told me I wasn’t good enough for college. She really meant I wasn’t haole enough.”

   “I never thought of that. But you’re right, that’s what she meant.”

   “Kua‘aina.” She reached over the table and punched my jaw gently. She stretched out her arm and cracked her elbow. Then she picked up her drink.

   “‘Okōle maluna,” she said. “Bottoms up.” We clinked our glasses and she added, “Fut on Mars.”

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2009: Honey Boy

Da Second Wife sit in da first pew on da right wit’ her two Japanee-Pākē-Portogee-Hawaiian-Haole sons. Da cousins and niece and nephew of da ma-ke Uncle Boney, dey sit in da second pew behind all these peoples. Dey hoping da First Wife and all her kids and da mo‘opuna no going show afta all. But dey hire one off-duty cop, stan’ by da door jus’in case get trouble.

Da Mass wen’ start awready when here come da First Wife and her four kids and da mo’opuna from Wai‘anae side, from Waimanalo, wherevah. Dey bus’ in, at da back of da church, make big noise, ne’mine da priest stay talking. Everybody, dey turn around and look. Da cop, he make stink eye and tell, “You folks sit ovah dere, in da back.”

When the priest pau, da First Wife and da four first kids dey march down da aisle an’ look da urn wit’ da ashes. Da oldest son of da deceased, he turn around so everybody can see good, whack his chest like one moke King Kong. Den he look at da Second Wife’s sons in da first pew, whack his chest two mo’ time, and he say, “My faddah da junyah, I da t’ird.” He nevah say, “You like beef?” But everybody, dey t’ink maybe going get rough right dere in front da urn, and da ashes going fly all ovah.

Da T’ird’s sistah, she just make stink eye. Some people tell she da one wen’ t’row da makule tūtū lady down da stairs and take da antique poi poundahs and all kine kapa sheet and da Hawaiian quilt and da lau hala mats, sell ‘em on e-bay so can buy ice li’dat.

Da priest he stay smart, say “Everyone is now welcome to share the meal in the meeting hall next door.”

Da T’ird and his sistah and two more braddas and all da kids, dey go inside da meeting hall, cut in da buffet line, scoop all da poke and da chicken long rice.

Da second row cousins tell “Hoo!” But dey not all so perfec’. Ho! Bazook he wearing puka shorts, stink aloha shirt and rubbah slippah, right inside Saint Da Kine Church. Ho! He still da pakalolo cousin even he made sixty years old awready.

But at least one noddah cousin live down Kahuku side wen’ butchah one cow for make fifty laulau even though he no going get cow when time for fill da freezah, and no more ti leaf or banana stump too.

But auwe, no more laulau by the chicken long rice. No more by da poke. Where all da laulau stay, da First Wife like know. Nobody answer. But dDa Second Wife, she going wait one month to bring out dat laulau afta private burial inside da big new veteran cemetery in Kane‘ohe. Dat way Da T’ird and all da kine cannot come. She get one mo’ reason too for make stink. Da First Wife, she awready bury her boyfren in da family plot in da old graveyard, and she planning for bury herself there too, in da las’ space lef’ in dat row. She no going get laulau.

But da T’ird and his sistah and da kine kids, they cockaroach everyt’ing else from da buffet except da punch in da bowl. After that, they no make more humbug.

But not pau yet. Now humbug come from da pakalolo cousin, Bazook, who wen’ one noddah fun’ral las’ year.

Jus’ like at dat fun’ral, ladies stay sitting by da calabash where peoples put cards say “So sorry for your loss” wit’ money inside to help pay for all da poke and long rice some buggahs wen’ cockaroach. If you no get card, they give you, wit’ Uncle Boney’s name and pikcha on top. Under da pikcha say “In memory of John “Boney” Kealoha.” Dose ladies, dey tell you write you own name an’ address on top da envelope so da Second Wife can send t’ank-you card.

Latah dey open all da envelope. Ho, get beautiful cards and plenny money. But one card stay printed “In memory of Alfred Kalei.” No mo’ signing, no mo’ kālā. And who dis Alfred Kalei? Dis fun’ral for John Kealoha, Uncle Boney.

Den one lady, she look on top the envelope. Ho! Dat doodoo head Bazook wen’ put his name and address. Hah! Now everybody goin’ know exac’ly who da manini one, ah, so da kine, stingy. And now everybody know why pakalolo mean “crazy smoke.”

Between da mokes and da manini doodoo head, who knows, maybe dis’ fun’ral not pau yet.

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2014: Eleanor

My dad always suspected our next door neighbor Henry Chan, a small and silent pākē. Or, much more likely, his Portagee wife Rosey, who was even smaller except for her Portagee mouth that was as big as the entire rest of her. Henry would do about anything to get her to shut up. He even made a mechanic shop out of their carport so he could rev an engine anytime for a good excuse to hear not a single word.

As for Darlene, the across-the-lane neighbor, her main sin in his book was being a Coast Haole, but in his guts he was sure there was also something mysteriously off about her and so avoided her on that double cosmic principle.

Regardless of Henry and Rosey and Darlene, the story begins before any suspicions or revelations, back in a time when our lane was a neighborhood of kids and dogs and two empty house lots overgrown with haole koa we kids believed was wilderness.

My dad rolled home one morning under the guidance of whichever saint watches out for common drunks.

This was not unusual, but it was one of the times someone had foisted off a baby animal on him. He brought it home cuddled under his aloha shirt. Four times these had been puppies.

Only Freckles the Cocker lasted in our household into old age. The others all stirred up a neighborhood fuss chasing cats and digging holes in unfortunate locations.

I think Skippy the Poi Dog may have taken a small bite out of a small girl. He was unable to redeem himself with the blue ribbon he won when my little brother took him to the

all-comers dog show on Saturday at the school yard. Despite Skippy’s First Prize for Longest Tail he was banished to a new and likely short life as a pig hunter. Dopey and Champ likewise ran afoul of social mores and had to be farmed out, but not before my mother captured some of their moments with a Brownie reflex camera.

Anyway, this time my well practiced animal rescue father brought home a duck. Why he named her Chalma is lost to obscurity but I'm sure it formed her personality. Or maybe she just imprinted on him, instinctively knowing that, in his case, regarding animals, drunkenness is irrelevant. And besides, it was long past the time that he had soberly served us our pet rabbit Bunny Boppa in a stew, with poi on the side.

In the even more distant past was his brief career as an aspiring taxidermist during which he learned, by stuffing a road-kill mynah bird into an apoplectic pose, that there is more to taxidermy than he ever had imagined.

Had she known, maybe Chalma would have cared, but then again, she was only a fluffy duckling of the classic sort, white with yellow lips and feet. All she cared about was snuggling in the aloha shirt, never mind murdering the mynah.

Ostensibly Chalma was my brother's duck, but time proved otherwise. She arrived via the shirt at the end of August and my brother went back to boarding school on Labor Day. So much for boy and duck.

Instead, my father fed her leftover Chef Boyardee spaghetti that trailed an orange stain on her white bib. He bought her a blow-up kiddie pool because he thought, perhaps wisely, it would be a mistake to take her body surfing at the beach. The pool was yellow with red flowers painted on the bottom that Chalma mistook for tomatoes, her favorite next to Chef Boyardee. Good thing her beak was rounded or the pool would have sprung a leak sooner than it did. Even then, Chalma was not the culprit.

Freckles wasn’t either, although he was dishonorably interested in Chalma until the day she turned on him and drilled his nose with her beak so heartily she might as well have been a woodpecker.

When Freckles was scarcely more than a puppy, the Chans got a spotted Cocker of their own. Instead of considering himself a neighborhood trend-setter, my father huffed, “Copy cats.”

Now, before Chalma was even fully feathered, they got their own duck.

The new duck grew uncommonly fast and became uncommonly ugly, savagely sharpish in the beak and unattractive in the face. It had a turkey-like wattle and motley bed-head feathers, gangly neck and strangely long legs. Before long, it waddled through the hedge into our yard, answering Chalma's charming quack with an ominous hiss and putting her to the chase. My father came running with a broom, sweeping The Hisser back through the hedge, whap whap whap.

Rosey began to squall. “Gartley! What you doing to my duck? You like I call da cops?”

“Duck!” My father roared through the hedge. “That murderous bird is a goose!”

“You no call Georgie names!” Rosey shrieked. “He is one duck! My sweet duck. You hit him one more time, I call da cops for sure.”

“He is The Hisser,” my father said. “A goose! And ugly too!” And he turned his back to Rosey, whapping the hedge with a flourish.

My father caught The Hisser in our yard almost every day, and every day he defended his animals with his weapon of choice. After some weeks, the curtain went up on the final act.

One morning he put Chalma in her pool for a swim, watching her from the kitchen window while breakfasting on his usual peanut butter bread and coffee with canned cream. From the corner of his eye he caught a flickering of hedge leaves. Before he could get out the door, Chalma was quacking and flapping and The Hisser’s beak was full of white feathers. My father chased The Hisser through the hedge. When he turned back, his dark eyes narrowed dangerously. In his very own yard Chalma's swimming pool lay in a spreading puddle on the lawn, a goose-punctured limp lump of plastic.

Rosey Chan came to the door the next day, inquiring whether my father had seen Georgie. It seemed he was missing.

“Really? No! I was just thinking he would be popping through the hedge about now.”

About a week later, Chalma came up missing too.

Years before, my father had been a police officer in a temporary career that lasted somewhat longer than his brush with taxidermy. Now his old cop vocabulary came into play. “Justifiable homicide” in the one case and “malice aforethought” in the other.

He searched our little lane afoot, more than once sniffing like a private eye soup connoisseur outside the Chan's kitchen window, but he never found so much as a whiff of evidence, let alone a feather. So he turned his attention to his surviving animal, although he was a mere dog, and turned his brooding thoughts to another front.

For some time he’d been sprouting coconuts from his Sāmoan tree, the dwarf kind whose fronds reach no higher than the eaves and whose nuts you can harvest without even a stepladder. You would never have to hire one of those swivel-ankled Hawaiian kids to climb the trunk monkey-style and throw nuts to the ground one-handed from forty feet up in the crown.

His cosmic nemesis Darlene had long admired his midget tree and begged politely each time she saw him in the yard, telling him how she would so love such a tree of her own.

After the unsettling avian disappearance, my father inventoried the four nuts he had sprouting in a tray of water. Then he smiled at Darlene. He even exchanged a pleasantry or two, although he certainly retained his long-held impression that she was somehow ill-suited to the human race and, without a doubt, to his neighborhood.

In a day or so he said he would soon have a coconut sprout ready for her to plant. She could think about where to plant it. In a week he knocked on her door and held out a nut. Through the split husk rose a delicate and beautiful pale green sprout, its first two infant fronds still furled. He helped her settle it into its sandy hole, even bringing some of his special red dirt imported from cane fields to pack around the tailing root. With water and a few days' time the sprout took off.

Darlene was pleased. My father smiled. The fronds unfurled and began to look like spines sporting fingers. The young trunk put on girth and height and within months reached as high as the bedroom window. Darlene asked my father to inspect.

“Healthy tree,” my father said.

The top fronds touched her eaves. Darlene expressed concern.

“Oh my, look there,” my father said. “That is the bud. Soon it will flower.”

“But Gartley,” said Darlene, “It's almost to the roof. “

“Oh! I hadn't noticed! It is a bit tall, but it should stop growing any minute. All the others I gave away at the same time are no taller than you. Hm.”

In time Darlene’s tree grew to three times the height of her house and dropped nuts on her roof, bonk, bonk, bonk.

In time, my father died in his seaside bedroom, in sight of his own Sāmoan coconut tree, within earshot of Rosey Chan, and only feet from the fingering shadow of Darlene’s tree.

And in time, I am finally telling this story, from sixty-year-old memories so vivid I can hear quacking and hissing and broom-whapping. I can see the top of Darlene's tree high over her roof against the moonlit sky. On on the night breeze I can almost catch

the smell of soup in someone’s pot.

TOP

Short Fiction

Table of Contents

1819: Hope’ole

1873: Heanu

1902: Makana

1911: Elsie

1912: ‘Elemakule (Bamboo Ridge 2013)

1930: Elsie

1932: Miss Gibbs

1936: Gartley

1957: Marja

1982: Eleanor (Bamboo Ridge 2018 -- titled “Fitzie”)

2009: Honey Boy

2014: Eleanor (Bamboo Ridge 2014 – titled “Duck Soup”)

1819: Hope‘ole

1873: Heanu

1902: Makana

1911: Elsie

1912: ’ELEMAKULE

1930: Elsie

1932: Miss Gibbs

1936: Gartley

1957: Marja

1982: Eleanor

2009: Honey Boy

2014: Eleanor

Sally-Jo Keala-o-Ānuenue Bowman

Short Fiction

Table of Contents

1819: Hope‘ole

1873: Heanu

1902: Makana

1911: Elsie

1912: ’ELEMAKULE

1930: Elsie

1932: Miss Gibbs

1936: Gartley

1957: Marja

1982: Eleanor

2009: Honey Boy

2014: Eleanor

Personal Essays

Magazine Articles

Sally-Jo Keala-o-Ānuenue Bowman