Dolores’s first duty was to get both of her girls into life vests. The sailor who brought them called them Mae West vests, but blushed and stammered when Dolores asked why. Later, seeing one inflated across the chest, she understood and laughed. Dolores struggled with getting the rubberized vest over each girl’s head and fastening the strap around them. She took Carmen’s hand and showed her the knotted cords that would inflate the vest when pulled. Even uninflated, the vests were bulky. At night, Dolores used extra blankets to secure the girls in the bunk because the vest made rolling out of bed easy.
Every morning at five o’clock, they got up and participated in a lifeboat drill. The captain required they sleep in their day clothes and vests, so dressing wasn’t an issue. They learned where their lifeboat was and how to launch it. Dolores wasn’t sure if the knowledge relieved her or made her more fearful.
The Republic zigzagged across the Pacific in a convoy of seven ships that were transporting men and supplies and God knew what else. When the ship conducted gunnery practice, the light fixtures fell out of the ceiling in their cabin. If they stayed on deck, the boom of the guns frightened the girls. The guns added to the constant fear of being torpedoed.
The captain noticed them during the first morning drill. “Who have we here?” he asked, looking at Carmen. His tone told Dolores he was a father with a daughter about Carmen’s age.
“I’m Carmen,” she told him.
“Carmen? What a pretty name. Would you like to walk around the ship with me?” his eyes found Dolores.
“Mama?” Carmen asked.
“Go with the captain, sweetheart,” Dolores said. She placed Carmen’s hand in his. At the very least, if Carmen was friends with the captain, they wouldn’t try to separate her from her mother.
They walked away. The man looked down at the little girl, and she looked up toward his face. Dolores noticed that he encouraged Carmen to hold on to the railing to steady herself and hoped this would alleviate her dizziness. She waited by the railing, surrounded by blue-gray sea and blue-gray sky, and held the hand of her younger daughter. She peered into the distance, locating the convoy ships, all painted wartime gray.
“Mama, look!” Carmen returned with a smile and a doll. “It’s Charlie McCarthy, Mama! The captain says I can keep it.”
“She says she just turned ten years old,” he said. “My daughter is about her age. She left this doll on board, but she’ll be happy for Carmen to have it.”
Dolores smiled and thanked him. Carmen’s birthday hadn’t been much of an affair this year, with their preparations to sail. Dolores had spent most of the day in line to register for evacuation. Carmen showed her doll to her sister. She promised to share if Betty took care of it.
The three of them stood at the railing. Dolores was the only one tall enough to see over the railing. The hull created a solid wall between the deck and the railing, with frequent spaces for chains and drainage that opened to the sea far below. She positioned her body between the closest hole and her girls.
“Come back here!” A mother’s shout rang out, angry and afraid.
Dolores turned to see a little boy racing across the deck toward them. The ship rolled, and he lost his balance. He slid on his side, out of control, the boy’s gleeful grin slipped to fear. He headed for the hole just beside Dolores. There was no time to think or plan or consider the consequences of her actions. She threw herself toward the boy and grasped his ankle. His forward progress halted, and he broke into lusty wailing. His mother covered him with kisses. “Oh, thank you! You are an angel,” she told Dolores.
“Mothers must stick together,” Dolores said.
She nodded and clutched her son. Their eyes spoke of maternal fear and strength, but neither of them found more words. The boy’s mother nodded and turned away.
Not every day was so rewarding. Despite zigzagging and the convoy’s protection, one day the alarm klaxons ripped through the ship like bombs over Pearl Harbor. Sailors rushed for battle stations, and confined civilians to their bunks. Dolores huddled on their bottom bunk with arms clasped around her daughters, her heart hammering so hard she couldn’t utter reassurances. The all-clear sounded. A sailor came to tell them the danger was over. “What was it?” she asked him.
“Torpedo, ma’am, from a submarine.” He grinned. “They missed.”
They missed. But next time they might not. Her fear for their safety, never far from the surface, welled up again. The family spent that afternoon on Dolores’s bunk, telling stories. Dolores loved the tale of the ancient chief Maui and how he created the Hawaiian islands. The familiar story provided a distraction for all three of them.
One day the ship’s engines ground into reverse, churning the ocean and slowing the great ship. Rumor flew through the civilian passengers.
“A prisoner has escaped! He’s gone overboard!”
The only safe place was their bunk. Once again Dolores held her daughters close and told Hawaiian stories.
The ship’s engines once again moved the ship forward, but Dolores waited. The mother of the boy she’d saved came to find them.
“A prisoner went overboard,” she told Dolores, “but they recovered him right away. He said the water was too cold!” They laughed together in giddy relief.
The air, too, was cold. Wind slashed their faces and left salt spray on their skin. As they neared San Francisco, the family spent most of their time huddled in their bunks. As a result, they were cross with each other.
“Stop it!” Carmen snapped at her sister. “Mama, she’s pulling on my doll.”
“Her precious doll,” Betty sniped.
“Betty,” Dolores said, “you’re six years old. Be nice to your sister.”
Betty climbed to the top bunk to sulk.
It took eleven days to zigzag across the ocean, almost double the voyage of the Matsonia a year earlier. A great energy pulsed through the passengers as the ship crossed under the Golden Gate Bridge. Relief and hope surged in every heart. Dolores hurried the girls up to the deck for their first sight of the bridge and its marvelous city.
“I’m cold, Mama,” Betty complained. Carmen put her arm around her sister, but she, too, was shivering.
Fog rolled across the orange towers of the bridge and hid the tops. The cold gray obscured San Francisco, too. Ship, sky, water, and city were all gray. Dolores refused to let hope wither.
By the time the ship docked and they disembarked, the girls’ cheeks and noses were red with cold. They each gripped a rabbit’s foot but kept their hands in their pockets. Ladies from the Red Cross had been first on board and given each of them a coat. Warmth from both the coat and the ladies’ smiles enveloped Dolores. One step at a time. Dolores must focus on this minute and the next. She snuggled into the wool and picked up their suitcases as Carmen took her sister’s hand. She hoped Paul’s car had a heater.
PART THREE
1942–1950
TWENTY-THREE
Sunnyvale 1942
In California, the air smelled of fruit ripening on trees instead of Honolulu’s gardenias. Solitary and ramrod straight palm trees dotted the San Francisco Bay Area, with no trade winds to beguile them into swaying. Mountains ringed the Santa Clara Valley where Paul lived, but they were green and gold with oak trees and dried grass instead of overflowing with colorful tropical foliage. Mindful of her daughters watching from the back seat of Paul’s Buick, Dolores enthused over their new circumstances, hoping the fervent words would win her own heart over, too. “Look, Betty! Did you see the pretty birdie? And a palm tree, just like Honolulu! Carmen, I wish you could see how tall the mountains are!”
“It’s not like Honolulu at all, Mama.” Betty shook a finger at her, mimicking Ruth correcting Rosa.
“The air smells funny.” Carmen wrinkled her nose.
Dolores’s best efforts exhausted her. “We must adjust to California, girls. Just think how proud Papa will be when he arrives to find us all settled in.” Dolores’s words sounded insincere even t
o her.
“California’s not so bad,” Paul said. “Look, girls, there’s Moffett Field. See the big hangar?”
“Hanger?” Betty asked, frowning. “For clothes?”
“No, silly,” Paul said. “The navy put a blimp in that big rounded building. It was called the Macon. The blimp crashed, but the hangar is still there. The army runs the base now, and the Ames Aeronautical Laboratory is there.”
In Honolulu, the American Navy ships filled Pearl Harbor, and air force planes occupied Hickam Field. In California, no signs of war existed anywhere, even at Moffett Field. At home, she and the girls walked along Waikiki Beach with its barbed wire. Behind Paul’s house, the water tower from Libby’s cannery towered over the town. It was the largest cannery in the world, a testament to Sunnyvale like the ships and planes were to Honolulu.
Paul’s house in Sunnyvale had small windows, closed against the summer heat instead of open to catch trade winds. He parked the car in a full garage instead of a carport. Lush green grass covered the yard, with bordering bushes trimmed to a respectable uniform round shape. Dolores searched in vain for a single flower. Beside the front steps, shoved behind a healthy bush, she saw the jade plant she’d brought to Sofia on her last visit. It had crisped to a brown hulk. Her sister-in-law had never watered it once.
The strangeness of the world around them didn’t end with the landscape. Dolores and her daughters crossed the threshold of Paul’s house and automatically slipped off their shoes.
“What are you doing?” Sofia was even sterner than Dolores recalled, her black hair twisted into a tight bun at the back of her head. Dolores wore her hair in stylish short curls like the movie stars.
“In California, we wear shoes in the house,” Paul explained.
Carmen turned to her mother. “Isn’t that bad luck, Mama?”
Dolores said, “That’s only true in Honolulu, sweetheart. This is your auntie’s home so let’s put our shoes back on.” They did so, but Sofia still didn’t smile. “Thank you, Sofia, for welcoming us into your home.” Dolores thought she heard Paul stifle a snort of laughter at her jibe.
Sofia’s dark Spanish eyes glowered. Compared to her, Dolores wasn’t Spanish at all. Sofia went to church every day, so Dolores wasn’t Catholic in her eyes, either. Dolores had traveled across the Pacific Ocean without her husband and didn’t want to know what kind of wife Sofia thought she was.
Dolores’s two-year-old niece hovered behind her mother’s skirt. She was a miniature of her mother, dark hair tied back and dark dress. Dolores’s heart skipped a beat at the anguish that swept over her. She remembered being pregnant during their visit to the World’s Fair. She should have a little one this same age. Another daughter … or a son. She inhaled slowly and smiled. “Come out, little Dolores,” Dolores implored. “Come meet your auntie.”
“She doesn’t like strangers,” Sofia said.
“I’m not a stranger. She needs to learn that.” Dolores understood there was more missing than flowers and sunsets. There was no aloha spirit in Paul’s house. He was ‘ohana in name only. Paul never had Maria to teach him to love family first, and Sofia never had Grandma Jessie to show her how to see the good in everyone.
Sofia glared at Dolores, no doubt for daring to tell her how to raise her little angel. Meanwhile, Dolores’s girls laughed and played with the Charlie McCarthy doll given to Carmen by the captain on the ship. They tried to lure Dolores to them, but their cousin was too shy.
“She’ll get used to all of you,” Paul promised. Dolores wasn’t sure if he meant his wife or his daughter. “When can we expect Manolo?”
“They’re evacuating women and children first. He’ll sell our furniture. It’s impossible to ship it all here—we were lucky to get passage for the three of us. What news do you have of the war here?”
Paul glanced at his wife, who scowled. “No need to talk about the war right now. Let’s get you all settled.” He herded them into the back of the house where Dolores had a bedroom to herself. The girls would share with their little cousin.
“This will be nice, Paul. Thank you for taking us in. It can’t be easy.”
He looked a little sheepish. “She’s a good wife, Dolores, a good mother. I know she’s not what you’re used to.”
“I’ll make it work, don’t worry.”
He returned to his wife and daughter, and Dolores opened the first of their two small suitcases. She clicked the latch and the contents sprung forth like a child’s jack-in-the-box toy. With so little room to pack, it was amazing how much dirty laundry they’d accumulated in eleven days at sea. It smelled as if every sailor on board had sent his uniform home with the girls.
Leaving the girls playing in their room, Dolores went to find Sofia.
She was in the kitchen, putting a small chicken into the oven. Dolores missed Grandma Jessie’s stew pot. “Sofia? May I use your washing machine? We have more dirty clothes than clean at the moment.”
Sofia wiped her hands on a kitchen towel, managing without words to convey her complete and total disgust at Dolores’s request. She pointed to a small service porch off the kitchen. “Do you need assistance with the machine?”
Her tone was so imperious that Dolores refused help. She’d figure it out. Once the load started, she was at a loss. She had no chores to do, and it felt odd. Reluctantly she returned to the kitchen.
“Laundry started,” she said with a cheerful smile. “Can I help with dinner?”
Sofia put a small pot of potatoes on the stove and turned on the gas burner. “It’s better if I do it myself.”
“I’m thankful you and Paul let us come stay with you. I know it’s more work, and I want to help you.”
“You are a guest.” She waved Dolores away.
Dolores had never sat idle while dinner was cooking. “I’m family.”
Sofia didn’t respond. It made no sense to stand and stare at her back, so Dolores went into the living room. Little Dolores sat on the floor with a rag doll, but she ran into the kitchen when she saw her aunt. “Please, Lord,” Dolores muttered, making a sign of the cross, “give me the means to make this a short stay.”
Later, standing on Paul’s porch as daylight faded, Dolores turned to watch the sunset. In Hawai‘i, spectacular shades of gold marked day to night, a healing balm to the spirit. Here the gray light extended the dusk so there was no clear beginning or end to the day. The houses across the street became silhouettes, charcoal against the ash of the sky. Very soon it was all dark. Another California day had slipped away without fanfare. In the distance, a dog howled. The sound sent a shiver up Dolores’s spine as she wondered what death it foretold. Shaking superstition out of her head, she turned her back on the night and entered the house.
Nothing in her life had prepared Dolores to be a lady of leisure in someone else’s home. She managed it for almost a week before she followed Paul out onto the porch as he left for work one morning. The sun topped the mountains, promising another ninety-five-degree day. Nights were thirty degrees cooler! In Honolulu, temperatures stayed between seventy-five and eighty-five degrees. While the morning was still cool here, sparrows chirped in the big olive tree that attempted to shade the house. “I can’t live like this for much longer.”
He frowned. “Is Sofia working you too hard?”
Dolores laughed aloud. “No, no, not at all. I’ve worked hard my whole life, Paul. Now I sit around and do nothing. Do you think I can get a job? Maybe rent a small place?”
Paul nodded. “Del Monte always needs women on the packing line. I’ll inquire. And I can help you and the girls find a place to live.”
Their eyes met. He must understand Dolores couldn’t live in the same house with his wife. In fact, he probably got an earful from Sofia every night about Dolores.
“Have you thought about leaving her, Paul?” Dolores asked.
He looked at her sharply. “Never. Sofia is a good wife and a good mother even if she is prickly with others. Besides, marriage is a sacrament,
a union blessed by God. I promised to remain married until death parts us.”
“And you need to make it work. I understand, Paul, I do.” Dolores didn’t want to go into the details of her own marriage. It would sound like complaining. Paul understood that a promise to God was sacred.
THE next day Paul loaded the girls and Dolores into the Buick. “Do you like movies, girls?” he said, looking over his shoulder into the back seat.
Carmen perked up like a puppy with a bone. “Movies? I love them!”
“Well, your Uncle Paul owns the movie theater. You can watch all the movies you want for free.”
“Free? We watch for free?” Betty’s mouth dropped open as she and Carmen bounced.
“Have you seen Dumbo yet?” he asked.
They’d all seen it in Honolulu, but not for free. The girls giggled.
“It’ll be fun to go out as a family.” Paul smiled at Dolores.
Evidently Sofia and little Dolores didn’t go out much. Carmen obsessed over movies. She listened to every radio show that talked about actresses and movies, and she adored musical shows. At six, Betty mimicked her big sister.
At the theater, Paul nodded to the counter clerk who brought each girl a bag of popcorn. Carmen told Betty not to spill hers. The four of them watched the movie, but Dolores watched her girls, too. Despite leaving their cousins and friends, their home and toys, they were happy with each other. They were ‘ohana. Dolores’s job now was to teach them to spread that love. She vowed the aloha spirit of Hawai‘i would live in her children no matter what happened to them here.
The Aloha Spirit Page 23