Hawaii (140 page)

"Whole town's laughing their belly off," he roared. "I thought that picture of you in the bunk was downright killing, Hoxworth. And what about that paragraph where he sums up: 'So by projection we can assume . . .' Where's your copy, Hoxworth?" He glimpsed the mimeographed publication under a davenport pillow, picked it up and thumbed through it. "By God, Hoxworth, that picture of you in the bunk is about ten thousand votes if you ever decide to run for office. Only thing you've ever done proves you're human. Here's the part I wanted. 'So by projection we can estimate that within an area less than six feet by five, during a voyage of 207 days, no less than 197 separate acts of sexual intercourse must have taken place under conditions which prevented any of the female participants from taking off their long flannel underwear or any of the men from stretching out full length in the bunks.' Now here's the part I like," Janders laughed robustly. " 'Against its will the mind is driven to haunting suspicions: What actually went on. in those crowded staterooms? What orgies must have transpired? Out of delicate regard for the proprieties I shall not pursue the probabilities, for they are too harrowing to discuss in public, but I recommend that each reader develop this matter logically to its inevitable conclusions: What did go on?'" Big Hewlett Janders slammed the essay against his leg and shouted, "Y'know, Hoxworth, I often used to ask myself that very question. How the hell do you think the old folks did it?"

"How should I know?" Hoxworth pleaded.

"Damn it all, man, it was you they photographed hunched up in one of the bunks!" Janders roared.

"Does anyone know where Bromley is?" Hale asked stiffly.

"Sure," Janders laughed. "But don't change the subject. Don't you agree that the bit I just read is hilarious? By God, I can see

prim Lucinda Whipple turning cartwheels when she reads that. One fellow at the club said your boy Brom must be a genius."

"Where is he?" Hale insisted.

"Whole gang of them are having chop sney at Asia Kee's. Every fifteen minutes somebody yells, 'Author! Author!' and Brom takes a bow. Then they all sing a dirge somebody made up, 'Farewell, Punahou!' I suppose you heard that my boy Whip also got expelled. For taking the pictures. Damned glad Mandy didn't too. Posing like that with your boy." But his raucous laughter proved that he wasn't too concerned.

"Did you see them ... at the chop suey place?" Hoxworth asked.

"Yeah, I stopped by ... Well, hell, I figured, it's their big night, so I dropped off a couple bottles of Scotch."

"You gave these outrageous children . . ."

"What I stopped by to see you about, Hoxworth, is that I just called that tutoring school near Lawrenceville, and they've agreed to take Whip and Brom ... if you want to send them . . . and guarantee to get them into Yale. That's the only problem, really, Hoxworth. Get the boys into Yale."

"What school are you talking about?"

"What's the name? It's right near Lawrenceville. Mark Hewlett sent his boy there when he got busted out of Punahou. They got him into Yale." Seeing the three novels on the low table, Janders picked one up in the way men do who never read books, and asked, "You drowning your sorrows in a good book?"

"Do you know an English master at Punahou named Kenderdine?"

"Yes. Crew-cut job."

"I had a fearful scene with him. He's at the root of this business, I'm convinced."

"He's a troublemaker. Some jerkwater college like Wisconsin or Wesleyan. I keep telling Larry, 'Get Yale men. They may not be so smart but in the long run they give you less trouble.' But Larry always drags in some genius . . . Yes, Kenderdine's Wisconsin."

"He's no longer Punahou."

"You fire him?"

"I certainly did. But you know, Hewlett, he said about the same thing you did. Said Bromley's essay would do us all a lot of good. Get people laughing. He said it was crystal-clear that Brom wrote the essay with love and affection . . . that he wasn't lampooning the missionaries."

"That's what one of the judges at the club thought," Janders recalled. "But I'll tell you what, Hoxworth. Seems it was my son who took the photo of you in the bunk, proving that sex was impossible. Well, if you can handle him, you're welcome to thrash hell out of him. I won't try because he can lick me."

The door banged and Hoxworth Hale was left alone in the big room overlooking Honolulu. For a while he studied the never tedious

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pattern of lights, as they came and went along the foreshores of the bay, and the bustling activity at Pearl Harbor, and the starry sky to the south: his city, the city of his people, the fruit of his family's energy. He leafed his son's startling essay and saw again the provocative last sentence: "We can therefore conclude, I think, that whereas our fathers often paced the deck of the Thetis, wrestling with their consciences, they usually wound up by hustling below to the cramped bunks, where they wrestled with their wives."

Idly he picked up the three books Kenderdine had left. Hefting the Irish novel, he found it too heavy and put it aside. He looked at Willa Cather's slim book, A Lost Lady, but its title seemed much too close to his own case, and he did not want to read about lovely ladies who become lost, for it seemed to be happening throughout his group. That left The Grandmothers, which was neither too heavy in bulk nor too close to home, although had he known when he started reading, it was really the most dangerous of the three, for it was a barbed shaft directed right at the heart of Honolulu and its wonderful matriarchies.

To his surprise, he was still reading the story of Wisconsin's rare old women, when the lights of Honolulu sadly surrendered their battle against the rising dawn. The door creaked open gingerly, and Bromley Whipple Hale, flushed with pride of authorship and Uncle Hewlett's good whiskey, stumbled into the room.

"Hi, Dad."

"Hello, Bromley."

The handsome young fellow, with indelible Whipple charm stamped on his bright features, slumped into a chair and groaned. "It's been quite a day, Dad."

Grudgingly, Hoxworth observed: "You seem to have cut quite a niche for yourself in the local mausoleum."

"Dad, I got thrown out of school."

"I know. Uncle Hewlett's already made plans for you and Whipple to get into one of the good cram schools. The one thing you have to safeguard is your Yale entrance."

"Dad, I was going to speak about this later, but I guess HOW'S ... I don't believe I want to go to Yale. Now wait a minute! I'd like to try either Alabama or Cornell."

"Alabama! Cornell!" Hoxworth exploded. "Those jerkwater . . . Good heavens, you might just as well go to the University of Hawaii."

"That's what I wanted to do ... seeing as how I want to write about Hawaii. But Mr. Kenderdine says that Alabama and Cornell have fine classes in creative writing."

"Bromley, where did you ever get the idea that you want to be a writer? This isn't a job for a man. I've been relying on you to . . ."

"You'll have to rely upon somebody else, Dad. There's lots of good bright young men from Harvard and Perm business schools who'd be glad . . ."

"What do you know about Harvard and Penn?"

"Mr. Kenderdine told us they were the best in the country . .. in business."

Hoxworth stiffened and growled, "I suppose your Mr. Kenderdine said that anyone who bothered to go into business . . ."

"Oh, no! He thinks business is the modern ocean for contemporary Francis Drakes and Jean Lafittes."

"Weren't they pirates?" Hoxworth asked suspiciously.

"They were adventurers. Mr. Kenderdine told Whip Janders he ought to try like the devil to get into Harvard Business School."

"But he didn't tell you that, did he?"

"No, Dad. He thinks I can write." There was a long pause in the big room as the pastel lights of morning spread across the city below, and one of those rare moments developed in which a son can talk to his father, and if Hoxworth Hale had growled in his customary manner, the moment would have passed, like the ghost of Pele ignoring one whom she considered not worth a warning, but Hoxworth's personal god sat heavily on his shoulder, and he said nothing, so that his son continued: "You and your father and all your generations used to sit up here, Dad, and look down at Honolulu and dream of controlling it. Every streetcar that ran, every boat that came to port did so at your command. I appreciate that. It's a noble drive, a civilizing one. Sometimes I've caught a glimpse of such a life for myself. But it's always passed, Dad. I just don't have that vision, and you've got to find someone who has, or you and I will both go broke."

"Don't you have any vision at all?" Hoxworth asked quietly, back in the shadows.

"Oh, yes!" The handsome young fellow pointed to Honolulu, lying tribute beneath them, and confided for the first time to anyone: "I want to control this city too, Dad. But I want to bore into its heart to see what makes it run. Why the Chinese buy land and the Japanese don't. Why the old families like ours intermarry and intermarry until damned near half of them have somebody locked away in upstairs rooms. I want to know who really owns the waterfront, and what indignities a man must suffer before he can become an admiral at Pearl Harbor. And when I know all these things, I'm going to write a book . . . maybe lots of them . . . and they won't be books like the ones you read. They'll be like The Grandmothers and Without My Cloak, books you never heard of. And when I know, and when I have written what I know, then I'll control Honolulu in a manner you never dreamed of. Because I'll control its imagination."

He was slightly drunk and fell back in his chair. His father watched him for some minutes, during which fragments of The Grandmothers repeated themselves in Hoxworth's agitated mind. Finally the father said, "I suppose you don't wont to bundle off to the cram school?"

"No, Dad."

"What will you do?"

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"There's no sweat getting into either Cornell or Alabama. Ill register Monday at McKinley High."

Hoxworth winced and asked, "Why McKinley?"

"The kids call it Manila Prep and I'd sort of like to know some Filipinos."

"You already know . . . Doesnt Consul Adujo's son go to Punahou?"

"I want to know real Filipinos, Dad."

Hoxworth Hale started to rear back, as if he were about to tell his son that he would tolerate no nonsense about McKinley High School, but as words began to formulate he saw his son etched against the pale morning light, and the silhouette was not of Bromley Hoxworth, the radical essayist who had outraged Hawaii, but of Hoxworth Hale, the radical art critic who had charged Yale University with thievery; and a bond of identity was established, and the father swallowed his words of reprimand.

'Tell me one thing, Bromley. This Mr. Kinderdine? Can his ideas be trusted?"

"The best, Dad. Unemotional, yet loaded with fire. You heard, I suppose, that we're losing him. Joining the navy. Says there's bound to be war."

There was a painful silence and the boy concluded: "Maybe thafs why I want to go to McKinley now, Dad. There mayn't be too much time." He started to bed but realized that he owed his father some kind of apology, for the mimeographed essay had created a storm which he, the author, had not anticipated. "About that photograph of you, Dad . . . What I mean is, if I do become a writer, I'll be a good one." And he stumbled off to bed.

IN 1941 the Thanksgiving Day football game was largely a replay of the 1938 classic, with Punahou pitted against McKinley, but this time two Sakagawa boys played for Punahou; for Hoxworth Hale and his committee of alumni had been so pleased with Tadao's performance that they had automatically extended scholarships to the younger boys, Minoru the tackle and Shigeo the halfback. Thus it was -that the former privy cleaner Kamejiro sat in the stadium along with his wife and his two older boys�Goro was in army uniform� cheering for Punahou. A newspaperman remarked: "It's a revolution in Hawaii when Sakagawa the barber and Hoxworth Hale support the same team."

Throughout Hawaii these minor miracles of accommodation were taking place. When a child felt pain he said, "Itai, itail" which was Japanese. When he finished work it was pauhana. He had aloha for his friends. He tned to avoid pilikia and when he flattered girls it was hoomalimali, all Hawaiian words. He rarely ate candy, but kept his pockets filled with seed, a delicious Chinese confection tasting like ice, sugar and salt all at once and made of dried cherries or s. After a dance he did not eat hot dogs; he ate a bowl of

saimin, Japanese noodles, with teriyaki barbecue. Or he had chop suey. For dessert he had a Portuguese malasada, a sweet, sticky fried doughnut, crackling with sugar. It was an island community and it had absorbed the best from many cultures. On this day, as Punahou battled McKinley in a game that was more thrilling to Honolulu than the Rose Bowl game was to California, Punahou, the haole heaven, fielded a team containing two Sakagawas, a Kee, two Kalanianaoles, a Rodriques and assorted Hales, Hewletts, Janderses and Hoxworths. That year Punahou won, 27-6, and Shigeo Sakagawa scored two of the touchdowns, so that as he went home through the streets of Kakaako the perpetual toughs taunted him contemptuously with being a haole-lover, but they no longer tried to assault the Sakagawa boys. They knew better.

Logically, the Sakagawas should have been able�what with the aid of scholarships for three of the boys�to retire Reiko-chan from the barbershop, allowing her to enroll in the university, but just as the family had enough money saved ahead for this, the consulate on Nuuanu Street convened the Japanese community and told them gravely, "The war in China grows more costly than ever. We have got to assist our homeland now. Please, please remember your vows to the emperor." And the fund had gone to help Japan resist the evil of China's aggression, though Goro asked his friends, "How can China be the aggressor when it's Japan that*s done the invading?" He wanted to ask his father about this, but Kamejiro, in these trying days of late 1941, had pressing problems which he could not share with his children, nor with anyone else for that matter, except Mr. Ishii.