Hawaii (155 page)

VI

The Golden Men

IN 1946, when Nyuk Tsin was ninety-nine years old, a group of sociologists in Hawaii were perfecting a concept whose vague outlines had occupied them for some years, and quietly among themselves they suggested that in Hawaii a new type of man was being developed. He was a man influenced by both the west and the east, a man at home in either the business councils of New York or the philosophical retreats of Kyoto, a man wholly modern and American yet in tune with the ancient and the Oriental. The name they invented for him was the Golden Man.

At first I erroneously thought that both the concept and the name were derived from the fact that when races intermingled sexually, the result was apt to be a man neither all white nor all brown nor all yellow, but somewhere in between; and I thought that the Golden Man concept referred to the coloring of the new man�a blend of Chinese, Polynesian and Caucasian, for at this time Japanese rarely intermarried�and I went about the streets of Hawaii looking for the golden man of whom the sociologists spoke.

But in time I realized that this bright, hopeful man of the future, this unique contribution of Hawaii to the rest of the world, did not depend for his genesis upon racial intermarriage at all. He was a product of the mind. His was a way of thought, and not of

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birth, and one day I discovered, with some joy I may add, that for several years I had known the archetypes of the Golden Man, and if the reader has followed my story so far, he also knows three of them well and is about to meet the fourth, and it is interesting that none of these, in a direct sense, owed his golden quality to racial intermixtures. His awareness of the future and his rare ability to stand at the conflux of the world he owed to his understanding of the movements around him. I have known a good many golden men in the secondary, or unimportant, sense: fine Chinese-Hawaiians, excellent Portuguese-Chinese and able Caucasian-Hawaiians; but most of them had little concept of what was happening either in Hawaii or in the world. But the four men of whom I now wish to speak did know, and it is in reference to their knowledge that I wish to end my story of Hawaii, for they are indeed the Golden Men.

In 1946, when the war had ended and Hawaii was about to explode belatedly into the twentieth century, Hoxworth Hale was forty-eight years old; and one morning, when the trade winds had died away and the weather was unbearably sticky, he happened to look into his mirror while shaving, and the thought came to him: "This year I am as good a mani as I shall ever be in this life. I have most of my teeth, a good deal of my hair, I'm not too much overweight, and my eyes are good enough to see distances without glasses, though close up I have a little trouble, and I suppose I'll have to see an oculist. I can still concentrate on a problem, and I derive pleasure from control of business. I like to go to work, even on mornings like this." He pommeled his midriff to start perspiration before entering the shower, and as the hot, muggy day closed in upon him he was forced to inspect the two areas in which he was no longer so good a man as he once had been.

First, there was the gnawing, never-ending pain that started when his son Bromley was shot down during the great fire of Tokyo in 1945, when the air corps practically destroyed the city. More than 70,000 Japanese had died in the great raids, and a city too, so that in one sense Bromley's death had contributed positive results, and after his raids victory for our side was assured. But Bromley Hale was a special young man. Everyone said so, and his departure left a gap both in the Hale family and in Hawaii that would never be filled, for in his last letters home, when capricious death had become so routine in his B-29 squadron as to depress all the fliers, he had spoken intimately of what he hoped to accomplish when the war ended, as soon it must.

He had written, from a hut on Iwo Jima: "We had to ditch our monstrous plane in the waters near here, and by the grace of God we were all saved, but in the going down, as I worked with the wheel I was not so much concerned about a perfect water landing as I was with my determination to do what years ago I had sworn to do while a senior at Punahou. I am determined to write a novel about�and this may stagger you, but bear with me�Aunt Lucinda Whipple. I shall have her sitting in the late afternoons in her house

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in Nuuanu Valley, and each day as the afternoon rains sweep down from the Pali and the white mildew grows on all things, she entertains the straggling members of our family. It has always seemed to me that Aunt Lucinda was everybody's aunt, and everybody comes to her and listens to her monotonous chatter about the old days, and nothing I write will make any sense at all�only an old woman's ceaseless vanity�until it begins to weave a spell, the kind of spell in which you and I have always lived. I shall show Aunt Lucinda exactly as she is, religious, family-proud, unseeing, unknowing, garrulous and unbelievably kind. She has become to me a web, a fatal emanation, an encroaching dream, and as our plane struck the water, I was listening not to my co-ipilot, who was frantic as hell, but to dear old Aunt Lucinda. How she hated airplanes and fast automobiles and Japanese. As a matter of fact, if you took time to analyze it carefully, I guess she hated everybody but the Whipples, and the Janderses, and the Hales, and the Hewletts, and the Hoxworths. But even they gave her a lot of trouble, for she always took great pains to explain to visitors that she came from the branch of the Whipple family that had never had even a drop of Hawaiian blood, and she kept segregated in her mind those of her great family of whom this could not be said. She was suspicious of you and me, because we were not pure English stock; and of course all the Hoxworths and half the Hewletts were contaminated, and often when I spoke with her she would hesitate, and I knew she was thinking: 'I'd better not tell him that, because after all, he is one of the contaminated.'

"And from Aunt Lucinda's endless vagaries I want to construct an image of all Hawaii and the peoples who came to build it. I want to deal with the first volcano and the last sugar strike. You may not like my novel, but it will be accurate, and I think that counts for something. It is strange, I have been writing about Aunt Lucinda as if she were dead, but she is living and it may be I who shall be dead."

This dreadful hurt never left Hoxworth Hale's heart, and he started listening to Aunt Lucinda's meanderings, and he picked up the thoughts that his son had laid down: "We live in a web. Sugar cane, Hawaiian ghosts, pineapple, ships, streetcar lines, Japanese labor leaders, Aunt Lucinda's memories." The web became most tenuous, and at the same time most cruelly oppressive, when it involved the upstairs rooms where several of the great families kept the delicate women whose minds had begun to wander past even the accepted norm, and in one such room Hoxworth's own wife passed her days. In the 1920's, at Punahou, Malama Janders, as she was then, had been a laughing, poetic young lady, interested in music and boys, but as the years passed, and especially since the 1940's, her mind lost its focus and she preferred not to try understanding what had happened to her son Bromley or what her dashing daughter Noelani was doing. Her only joy came when someone drove her up Nuuanu Valley to Aunt Lucinda's, and there the two

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women would sit in the rainy afternoons talking of things that never quite got into sequence . . . and neither cared.

For generations the missionaries had railed against Hawaiians for having allowed brothers to marry sisters, and on no aspect of Hawaiian life was New England moral judgment sterner than on this. "It puts the Hawaiian outside the pale of civilized society," Lucinda Whipple's ancestors had stormed, particularly her great-grandfather Abner Hale, and yet the same curse had now overtaken her own great interlocking family. Whipples married Janderses, and fanderses married Hewletts, and if full brothers and sisters did not physically wed, intellectually and emotionally they did, so that a girl named Jerusha Hewlett Hoxworth was practically indistinguishable either in genes or ideas from a Malama Janders Hale, and each stayed mostly in an upstairs room.

In 1946, therefore, except for the death of his son, and the slow decline of his adored wife, Hoxworth Hale was truly as good a man as he would ever be, but those two bereavements oppressed him and prevented his enjoyment of the last powerful flowering of his talents. He therefore turned his whole attention to the government of the Hoxworth & Hale empire, and as the critical year started he relied more and more upon two stalwart resolves: "I will not give labor an inch, not another inch, especially when, it's led by Japanese who don't really understand American ways. And we have got to keep Hawaii as it is. I will not have mainland firms like Gregory's elbowing their way in here and disrupting our Hawawiian economy." Behind him, to back up these two mighty resolves, he had the entire resources of H & H, totaling some $260,000,000 and all the managerial strength of J & W, now worth more than $185,000,000. Lesser outfits like Hewlett and Son had to string along, for all saw in Hoxworth Hale the cool and able man, one above the passions of the moment, who could be depended upon to preserve their way of life.

Only in his understanding of what was happening should Hoxworth Hale be considered a Golden Man. Racially he was mostly haole. Emotionally he was all haole, and he thought of himself in that way. Actually, of course, he was one-sixteenth Hawaiian, inherited through the Alii Nui Noelani, who was his great-great-grandmother. He was also part-Arabian, for one of his European ancestors had married during the Crusades, part-African through an earlier Roman ancestor, part-Central Asian from an Austrian woman who had married a Hungarian in 1603, and part-American Indian through a cute trick that an early Hale's wife had pulled on him in remote Massachusetts. But he was known as pure haole, whatever that means.

In 1946 Hong Kong Kee was five years older than Hoxworth Hale, which made him exactly fifty-three, whereas his grandmother Nyuk Tsin was ninety-nine. This was not a particularly good year for Hong Kong, because in following his grandmother's urgent advice�

"Buy every piece of land that frightened haoles want to sell"�he had somewhat overextended himself and frankly did noK know where he was going to find tax money to protect the large parcels of land on which he was sitting. Real estate had not been doing well; the anticipated boom in tourists had not yet materialized; and there was a prospect of long strikes in both sugar and pineapple. He had seven children in school, five in mainland colleges and two at Punahou, and for a while he considered abruptly cutting off their allowances and telling the boys to get to work and help pay taxes, but Nyuk Tsin would not hear of this. Her counsel was simple: "Every child must have the very best education possible. Every piece of land must be held as long as possible. If this means no automobiles and no expensive food, good! We won't ride and we won't eatl" The Kee hui was therefore on very short rations, and Hong Kong sent a form letter to all the Kees studying on the mainland�his own and others: "I will be able to pay only your tuition and books. If you are running an automobile, sell it and go to work. If you are faced by the prospect of spending two or even three more years in college under this plan, spend it, but for the time being there can be no more money from Hawaii!" The decision that hurt him most involved his youngest daughter, Judy. "You have to cut out private singing lessons," he told her, and it was sad to see her obey.

And then, when things were already difficult, Hong Kong surreptitiously heard that a well-known firm of mainland private detectives was investigating him. He picked up a rumor of this from one of the Ching clan who had been asked a good many questions about real-estate deals, and the interrogation had made no sense until a few days later when Lew Ching suddenly thought: "My God! Every one of those deals involved Hong Kong Kee!" And he felt obligated to lay this circumstantial evidence before his friend.

Hong Kong's first reaction was, "The income tax people are after me!" But reflection assured him that this was ridiculous, for certainly the government never used private detective agencies when they had such good ones of their own. This conclusion, however, left him more bewildered than ever, and gradually he came to suspect that The Fort had deduced that he might be overextended and was collecting evidence which would enable them to squeeze him out, once and for all. He judged that the mastermind was probably Hoxworth Hale.

His first substantial bit of evidence came, curiously, not from the Chinese, who were adroit in piecing together fragments of puzzles, but from his friend Kamejiro Sakagawa, whom he had helped establish in the supermarket business. Squat little Kamejiro bustled in one afternoon to announce bluntly: "Hong Kong, you bettah watch out, I t'ink you in big trouble. Dick from da mainland come to dis rock, ast me about you, how I git my land. Bimeby latah he go into da building H & H."

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"This detective, he had no reason to bother you, Kamq'iro," Hong Kong assured him. "Our deal is perfectly good." "Whassarnatta, dey ketch you from taxes?" "Mine are okay. How about yours?" "Mine okay too," Kamejiro assured him.

"Then don't you worry, Kamejiro. Let me worry. This has to do only with me."

"You in special trouble?" the Japanese asked. "Everybody's always in trouble," Hong Kong assured him. But what precise trouble he himself was in, Hong Kong could not discover. In succeeding days he caught various reports of the detectives and their work; all aspects of his varied business life were under surveillance. He never spotted any of the detectives himself, and then suddenly they vanished, and he heard no more about them. All he knew was: "Somebody knows almost as much about my business as I do. And they're reporting to Hoxworth Hale." He did not sleep easily.

In another sense, these were exciting times, for unless everything that Hong Kong and his grandmother had concluded from their studies was false, Hawaii had to be on the verge of startling expansion. Airplanes, no longer required for warfare, were going to ferry thousands of tourists to Hawaii, and many new hotels would be required. On the day that the boom started, the builders would have to come to Hong Kong, for he had the land, and he felt like a superb runner on the eve of an Olympics which would test him against athletes whom he had not previously encountered: he was a good runner, he was in tense condition, and he was willing to trust the morrow's luck. Even so, he took the precaution of discussing the detective mystery with his grandmother, and she pointed out to Hong Kong: "These are the years when we must sit tight. Wait, wait. That's always very difficult to do. Any fool can engage in action, but only the wise men can wait. It seems to me that if someone is spending so much money to investigate you, either he fears you very much, which is good, or he is weighing the prospects of joining you, which could be better. Therefore what you must do is wait, wait. Let him make the first move. If he is going to fight you, each day that passes makes you stronger. If he is going to join you, each day that you survive makes the cost to him a little greater. Wait."