But the World’s Fair has been eclipsed in our household. Sofia gave birth to a lovely daughter on April 27. We named her Dolores. She is a delight! I hope you can visit soon to see your namesake. I’ll even put her in that little hula skirt you promised.
Her jaw opened wide. They’d named the baby after her? Clearly that was Paul’s idea. Dolores tried to picture Paul telling his wife to put the baby in a hula skirt. How was it possible that sour old Sofia had a new baby and she did not? What was God thinking?
“That be a letter from the mainland?” Alberto came in the front door. He was there in time to greet Manolo if he came home from work.
Dolores nodded. “Their baby was born. A girl. They named her Dolores.”
He sat next to her on the couch and pulled her close. “I so sorry, querida.”
His concern and the endearment flooded her with emotion. Alberto always knew how she felt.
“Let’s take the girls to Pearl ta watch the ships. Or we go to the airport and see airplanes,” he suggested.
“They’d love the airplanes,” Dolores said.
“Airplanes it is. We pick up Carmen at the school and go from dere, ya?” He called to Betty, who played in her room, and grabbed his car keys.
“Let me brush my hair and get my purse.” Dolores smiled at him. The smile chipped away at the block of grief inside her.
Both girls were excited to be on another adventure with their cousin Alberto. Betty loved the mighty roar of the Pan American Airways’ big clippers that brought the mail from the mainland so much faster than ships. Carmen clamped her hands over her ears and scrunched up her face.
“You do dat, Carmen?” Alberto asked her. “Fly in an airplane over the ocean?”
“A ship is much safer,” Dolores said.
“I do it!” Betty announced. She ran with her arms outstretched to each side and roared.
“You don’t have to be the plane,” Carmen chastised her in a superior tone. “You just have to ride in it.”
Betty ignored her. Running was her lifeblood, and she took to it like the awa fish to water.
“They’re for dreamers,” Dolores said, her eyes on the sky. “The airplane will take you wherever your dreams want to go.”
“Den we go together, ya?” Alberto said. They looked into the sky together. “We take the girls to Pearl when the fleet arrives,” he said before she could respond.
On the day that the US fleet arrived at Pearl Harbor, however, Alberto was at work. Dolores took the girls to watch the 130 ships slowly move into the harbor. Carmen had trouble seeing the gray ships against the sea, and the ponderous movement of the big ships bored Betty. Dolores found the show of military might troubling, a reminder of conflicts far away in other countries.
The nagging feeling that might become fear worsened when the entire territory practiced a blackout drill. It seemed an omen of unpleasantness to come. Ruth and Dolores tried to make it fun for the younger children by making a tent with blankets over chairs. Ruth’s older children rolled their eyes.
“The war is far, far away,” Dolores told the girls. Rosa and Carmen nodded but looked confused. Betty just stared. “Italy and Germany are fighting Britain in Europe, way on the other side of the mainland, across another ocean.” They had no concept of the distance. Neither did Dolores, really, but the words settled them all.
The next day, to banish all fears, Alberto took them all to Kapi‘olani Park to see the first crane hatched in captivity at the zoo. It seemed appropriate since the new mayor was named Mr. Crane. Rosa and Carmen brought paper cranes they’d folded in school using origami. Carmen’s looked better, Dolores noticed proudly. Her fingers felt details her eyes couldn’t see.
Rosa locked elbows with Carmen. Heads together, the sighted girl described the crane and its enclosure to her blind cousin as she always had. Dolores wasn’t sure Carmen could imagine the colors, but she loved that Rosa took the time to describe it all. Hours later, Carmen talked about the crane using Rosa’s words as if she’d seen it.
In the evening, after dinner, they all loved to listen to musicals on the radio. Carmen memorized all the words and sang along. She begged for a record player, but they just couldn’t afford it. Manolo dropped by often enough to keep the bills paid. His family would never let them wallow in need, but a record player was a luxury. Dolores had no money for luxuries.
“Mama, all my friends at school have them,” her eldest daughter said. She sat on a chair and swung her feet.
They were at Grandma Jessie’s, where they were preparing lunch for the hungry family as usual. Ruth, Helen, and Dolores washed and peeled vegetables, and Grandma Jessie stirred the pot as she had every day for decades. There was a sense of security in the tradition.
“I’m sorry, Carmen, but I cannot afford it. You know this,” Dolores said.
“What’s the problem?” Antonio, Alberto’s father, came into the kitchen. Alberto’s family still lived with Grandma Jessie. Antonio worked in an office as Manolo did, but he didn’t drink. Carmen was a favorite of his.
“I want a record player, Tito,” Carmen said.
“A record player sounds like just the right thing for a girl who loves music like you do.” He grinned at her and tousled her hair. She beamed at him.
“I can’t afford to get her one,” Dolores said.
He looked from Dolores to her daughter. “Don’t you worry,” he said.
The next day, Antonio brought a record player to their house, along with three records. Carmen was ecstatic. She and Rosa immediately set it up. “Look, Carmen,” Rosa said, “Tommy Dorsey! He’s wonderful!”
“Frank Sinatra sings with his band now, doesn’t he?” Dolores asked Antonio.
“You girls are more up on the latest music than I am,” he protested, but his eyes sparkled as much as the girls’.
Dolores knew he didn’t want or need her thanks. He was part of the family network. It was all about hard work, love and support—the aloha spirit. Familia es todo, and everyone is ‘ohana.
NINETEEN
Alberto 1941
Dolores turned twenty-six years old in January of 1941. Twenty-six. It seemed such a big number. She’d been married now for ten years and didn’t see her husband ten days out of a month. Alberto stayed so often that Manolo didn’t dare come by drunk. Apparently, he was drunk a lot. On a positive note, he hadn’t beaten her recently.
One day Dolores was helping Grandma Jessie clean her house. Helen and Ruth were in the kitchen. Antonio wasn’t home from work yet, and the family lunch crowd had dispersed. Alberto rushed into the house like he was being chased by Pele herself. He slammed the door behind him and collapsed into a seat at the kitchen table, panting.
“Alberto? Now what?” Grandma Jessie asked, one hand on a hip and a frown on her face.
“My car need gas. I don’ got no money so Noa and I siphon some off a car parked on the next street, ya?”
“And where is Noa?” Helen asked. Her motherly frustration with Alberto’s antics sharpened her tone.
Alberto waved a hand. “His faddah get him out.”
“They arrested him?” Dolores said in horror.
“A‘ole pilikia,” Alberto insisted. “Not a problem.”
Grandma Jessie waved her ladle at him. “Talking to you is like water through a sieve.”
They went back to cleaning the kitchen. Dolores shot a glance at Alberto now and then, but he seemed content to sit at the kitchen table and watch them. Carmen served him a late lunch with a smile of adoration. She turned nine in June. Dolores remembered how significant nine had been to her, how she had felt useful and hoped it would impress Papa. Carmen was capable around the house. She helped cook and clean along with her cousins. The family followed Dolores’s lead, and no one coddled Carmen. Well no one except Vovô, now in his eighties, but what else was a great-grandfather for?
“Noa won’t say you helped him.” It wasn’t a question. Dolores knew it was a fact.
Alberto flashed his angel
ic smile, the one that went with the wicked gleam in his eye. “We bruddahs,” he said with a shrug.
“When did Noa get back from the mainland?” Ruth asked. She put a glass of guava-pineapple juice in front of him.
“Ah, Auntie, you really want ta know if he finish school, ya?” Alberto leaned forward, elbows on the table to build suspense.
Dolores smiled. Alberto’s pranks were legendary. No one wanted to encourage him, but none of them could stop asking about them. Dolores remembered when Alberto and Noa climbed up the statue of King Kamehameha that stood outside the Ali‘iōlani Hale, the Iolani Palace. It had once been home to Hawai‘i’s kings, but now housed the territorial government. The bronze statue was a noble one, all tall and regal, the king’s hand outstretched. Alberto and Noa, under cover of darkness, had put a roll of toilet paper in the king’s hand. Great hilarity had ensued on the part of young people, and embarrassment on the part of officials. Dolores hid her laughs behind her hand when Alberto related these adventures. A married woman with two children required decorum, but she enjoyed a good joke.
“Noa, he miss me so much,” Alberto continued. Carmen laughed and leaned against him. His tanned, muscled arm reached out to encircle her. “And we had a hole, ya? In our gang? Only Noa an’ his Harley could fill it.” He picked up a fork and feigned innocence as he ate.
Grandma Jessie shook her head, but Dolores saw a flash of the smile she tried to hide. “Those boys of mine,” she murmured.
Those words came out of her mouth often. Alberto, as part of the next generation, continued his uncles’ tradition. He rode all over Honolulu with his motorcycle gang but never got into any serious legal trouble. He heard everything that went on in Honolulu.
The war news reached them like fairy tales from another place and time. It seemed unreal, far away, but Alberto and his cousins dug an air raid shelter in the space between Grandma Jessie’s houses. Ruth and Dolores covered it with a vegetable garden and hoped they never had to use it. “Crazy nephews,” they scolded the boys.
Dolores and her girls loved to window shop at the Fort Street Mall. Alberto sometimes walked with them. Bob Hope’s “Thanks for the Memory” wafted out of a store, and Alberto sang along with Carmen. Dolores laughed when Alberto pointed to absurd outfits for the girls. One window showed a young girl in a wool sweater and cashmere scarf with hat and gloves. “That’s the same outfit they put out every winter,” Dolores told Alberto. “They can’t sell many of those in Honolulu!”
The girls adored Alberto and joined in his game. “Look, Cousin Alberto! See the pretty bottles.”
“Chantilly is in a round bottle with sun’s rays,” Betty told Carmen.
“Do they have Blue Grass?” she asked.
“Horsey!” Betty confirmed, spotting the oval bottle with the blue horse head. The girls each had their favorites, having sampled them often. How nice it would be to have money to spend on perfume for small girls.
They looked in the window of the jewelry store but didn’t go inside. The diamonds glittering in the window took Dolores’s breath away.
“You don’ need sparklies, Dolores,” Alberto told her. “You sparkle enough by yo’self, like the sun on the sea, ya?”
“Oh, Alberto,” was all she could say when he complimented her like this. It made her uncomfortable because she responded to it like a wilting flower drinks in water. She responded to it, yet she was a married woman.
Later that day, after dinner and baths and bedtime, Dolores sat on the back lana‘i with Alberto and pretended he belonged there. The palm trees rustled in the trade winds, which smelled of saltwater, plumeria flowers, and the neighbor’s adobo chicken dinner. Tonight, her nephew-friend was serious, which was unusual for him.
“Today remind me of seeing the spinner dolphins off my surfboard, ya?” he said, eyes on her.
Dolores remembered how awed Alberto had been by the dolphins. She looked up to the height of Punch Bowl. In the other direction, Honolulu stretched down to the sea. Downtown’s usual lights were dark, and the buildings’ windows covered with blackout curtains. Further out, Pearl Harbor let dusk turn to dark illuminated only by the setting sun. She turned to Alberto. “Me, too.”
His eyes captured hers. For a long minute, Dolores was lost there. Then he closed them and moved in to kiss her. He’d never done this before. It felt so right in her heart, so wrong in her head. Dolores kissed him back, harder than she intended. When they pulled apart, she was shaking.
“I not sorry,” he said, his tone almost belligerent.
“Me either,” she said. “But you’d better go.”
He nodded. Dolores stared up at Punch Bowl as the last bits of sunset lit the mountain. Alberto rose and left the lana‘i. He picked his way through the yard. She heard a chair creak as he sat on Grandma Jessie’s lana‘i. He would watch from there tonight. Dolores sat on the lana‘i until well after full dark, tears wet on her face. She couldn’t afford pleasure for herself, and that made her sad. Feeling sorry for herself, though, was something she’d given up long ago. Dolores angrily wiped away the tears. Despite her rational mind, she had enjoyed Alberto’s kiss, and she was afraid that if she went inside it would turn cold on her lips.
LATER that year, Boy Scouts in Honolulu had a drive to collect metal. School children throughout the city helped.
“Do you have any tin cans, Tito?” Carmen said over and over to her uncles. “It’s for a good cause.”
“That it is,” João told her. “I’ll ask the guys at work for their cans.”
Carmen beamed. She continued to pester her uncles until Dolores imagined them deconstructing every machine in the neighborhood to get her some of the precious metal.
One evening they were just sitting down to dinner when Manolo came home. He tossed his hat on the rack by the door and sat at the table like he did it every night instead of once every couple of weeks.
“Welcome home, Papa!” Carmen said. “Did you bring any cans home for me?” Her hopeful smile warmed Dolores’s heart.
“Carmen, stop.” His sharp words killed his daughter’s smile. “You shouldn’t pester me right when I get home from work. Hasn’t your mother taught you that? Eat your dinner and we’ll speak later.”
Dolores put her hand on Carmen’s shoulder. Both girls kept their eyes on their plates as they ate rice and teriyaki chicken and sliced mangoes. No one talked or laughed about their day, so the girls finished quickly.
“May we be excused, Mama?” Carmen asked. Her mouth was full of her last bit of rice, swallowed only after she finished her request.
“Do you have any schoolwork?” Manolo asked.
“I finished it right after school, Papa.”
“Then you may be excused,” Manolo decreed.
Carmen looked to her mother for confirmation. “You may go,” Dolores said.
Manolo set his knife and fork on the table. When the girls disappeared into their bedroom, he got up and went to the refrigerator. “Dolores, where’s my beer?”
“I poured it out.”
He glared at her and went to his liquor cabinet. “Poured this out, too?”
“Yes.”
“You realize I can get whatever I want to drink?”
“Of course, I do. But I won’t have it in my house. You drink whatever you want wherever you want. Come home after the girls are in bed or come home sober. You’re not always pleasant when you’re sober, but you frighten them when you’re drunk.”
“Is this what you tell them? That their father is frightening?”
“I don’t have to tell them. You show them.”
“When have I ever hurt those girls?”
“When you hurt me, you hurt them.”
“So you cry to them? To those babies? Or do you pour it all out to Ruth while they are in the room?” His tone dripped with sarcasm.
“Carmen is nine. She’s very perceptive, and she’s not stupid.”
“She’s nine? That makes Betty what? Six?”
“Five.
”
“Why doesn’t she go to school, then?”
“I thought it best to keep her home with me another year.”
“And why was that your decision?”
“You weren’t here.”
He’d come back to the table during their clipped exchange and stood next to the table. She stood up to face him.
“Did Alberto advise you?” he snarled.
“I spoke to Alberto about it. I also talked to Ruth and Grandma Jessie. They all agreed.” Dolores rapidly ran through possible directions for this conversation. He could fixate on why Betty wasn’t ready, and maybe accuse Dolores of babying her. He could fixate on Ruth and Grandma Jessie making decisions for his daughter. Or he could fixate on Alberto, and she didn’t want to discuss that with him.
“Alberto is here too often. The neighbors probably think you are having an affair.”
Dolores took a deep breath. “Alberto is family, just like Ruth and Helen, just like your brothers. Families are there for support.”
“And poor Dolores needs support because her husband is never home?”
“Goodnight, Manolo.” She walked out of the kitchen, the dirty dinner dishes left in the sink. In the girls’ room, she read a bedtime story and cuddled. Their love was a warm blanket over raw emotions. Carmen promised to turn off the lights and go to bed at eight thirty sharp. Dolores kissed them goodnight and went into her room. Manolo had moved into the front room and sat in front of the radio. Dolores said nothing as she went into their bedroom and locked the door behind her.
IN November, Alberto’s friend Hiro, who lived next door, roared up to Grandma Jessie’s on his Harley. They sat in the kitchen to talk as Dolores stirred the day’s stew. Hiro said he had enlisted in the army and was off to the language school at the San Francisco Presidio. Alberto teased him about learning Japanese.
“A third of Hawai‘i’s population is Japanese,” Hiro said, “and seventy-five percent of them are nisei, born here. Like me, they know more English and Hawaiian than Japanese.”
The Aloha Spirit Page 19