House of Many Gods

by Kiana Davenport

  There is her dark beauty, and her youth, and the subtext of vitality—an undercurrent of electricity with which she charges even trivial exchanges. There is also her devotion to Max, which suggests a certain gravity and maturity. But then there are the blanks—her past, her origins, which she avoids speaking of to his friends or colleagues.

  She is a woman who seems to change form and definition, which gives her an air of inauthenticity. And so, in spite of him, she feels peripheral, a minor character at their events. She will feel this way for years …

  SHE HAD COME TO UNDERSTAND THAT MAX HER LOVER, AND MAX the scientist were different people. He was something of a brooder, so that large chunks of his life were closed to her. He could even seem aloof, the way a distracted child can seem aloof. He didn’t know how often he was watched by her, how his silences gave him a glow, a puzzling and solitary loveliness. Anahola thought that if she could grasp the secret there, if she could know one or two things more, she might more fully understand him.

  Some days she felt he was simply not there, that she was looking at empty space through which Max was the foreground. Then, unaccountably, what seemed certain shifted. He left her in the lab for entire afternoons, but when they met over dinner he was anxious. To hear her opinions, to confess his apprehension that she might be growing bored with their life together. Some nights when she stood behind him, he asked her to move closer and put her hand on his shoulder.

  When they made love, he exausted her, as if he were trying to press through her, to get beyond her, beyond the present and the past, his eyes seeming to look into another dimension. At such times Anahola felt unreal, felt their world was unreal, that Max could snap his fingers and it would disappear.

  Yet he was fiercely protective of her. When they entered a room together, she felt the tension in his arm, the muscles shift, alert to her slightest discomfort or lack of ease. He was quick to assume a courtly, almost soldierly aspect, as if ready to defend her position against aggressors, overwhelming odds. But some utterances were so sly, he missed them.

  During dinner at the home of a wealthy industrialist who funded scientific research, Anahola fell silent as a Chinese servant unfolded her napkin and placed it on her lap, a drift of stiff linen that startled like a cat’s tongue. While he poured her champagne, she sat transfixed by the fragile beauty of the tulip-shaped glass.

  The hostess was a tiny, impeccable woman with irises so pale they seemed to defy the focus of one’s eyes. In her blue-veined hands, knives and forks looked like giant weaponry wielded by an agile child. Throughout the meal she observed with darting glances, Anahola’s hair, her brown skin, while weaving curiosity and disdain into a delicate cross-examination.

  The house was huge, the dining room cavernous. Anahola watched Chinese servants drift in and out of endless rooms, then vanish down winding marble halls. The champagne made her feel momentarily elated and forthcoming, and leaning forward she half jokingly asked.

  “Your help … don’t they ever get lost?”

  The old woman stared at her, then spoke with a downward finality. “They built railroads. They’ll find their way.”

  With a fussy exactitude, she folded her napkin and, in hushed tones, explained to her guests why Chinese made the best servants.

  “That superb silence, which makes them virtually … invisible. They know their place.”

  The words like a knife chime on a tulip glass. Ana felt herself step back.

  SHE TRAVELED EVERYWHERE WITH MAX WHEN HE ADDRESSED CONFERENCES on immunology and on the direction of America’s Energy Program, and how those fields were related, since much of his research dealt with people exposed to radiation. Sometimes at receptions in smoke-filled rooms, Anahola saw Max’s colleagues eyeing her, winking back and forth over her shoulder.

  A man said to be brilliant in particle physics seemed to bark at her in octaves. Was she Italian? Hispanic? Lebanese? But no, he said, her features were too broad. How did she meet Max, he asked, and did she enjoy all the travel? Pretending to be amused by her to conceal the fact that he was. In time she understood that to these men she would only ever be Max McCormick’s “woman.” And so she navigated the slights, the subtle insults, and stood in crowds smiling brilliantly, refusing to feel reduced at having so little to offer.

  ONE DAY MAX SAT ON THE TERRACE SIPPING SCOTCH, WATCHING ice cubes shimmer, little arctic explosions inside his glass. It was early evening, the kind of dusk that closed all wounds. Air going blue, the smell of mown clover bringing a reverie of wistful, boyish dreams. Anahola sat beside him bent over a textbook, her hair swept up in a twist.

  In that moment the back of her neck glowed, the color of a summer tint. He saw how she could withdrew from the world, her utter, trancelike concentration. He saw how finely made she was, how dowered with the dignity of grace, how hard she was trying to be equal to this life. And how her presence erased his sense of loneliness, reminding him he once loved life, and that he loved it now.

  For a while he was aware of very little, only the hard chair he sat in, his dry mouth. “Ana … I want very much to marry you.”

  She looked up, shocked. “Why would you want to do that?”

  Max shook his head and smiled. “You like your ambiguity, don’t you? The sultry young woman at my side. Probably my mistress, no one is sure. Marriage would tell the world you’re not my toy. And it would give you security.”

  “I don’t care what the world thinks. And I don’t want more from you than we already have.”

  “Perhaps you feel not marrying me gives you the moral advantage. Then you’ll never be a failure as my wife.”

  She frowned, groping for words. “Max, I’m not that complicated. It’s just … my life has already been a series of mistakes.”

  He fell silent for a while. “Look, you have no idea how life can strike you down. If something should happen to me, you’d hardly have enough if someone needs you, an emergency back home. A child … its education …”

  “.… I never said there was a child.”

  He folded his hands together and his voice turned soft. “Ana, do you think I’m blind? I see how you stare at children in the street. I’ve been with women through the years, and know the physical tautness of a woman who has never had a child. Their bodies are almost angular and sharp, not really sensuous. Yours has the softness at the breasts and hips of a woman who has given birth, those tiny phosphorescent marks below your belly. Stretch marks, which I find beautiful.”

  She felt momentarily chilled, a pricklish hollow in her stomach. She lit a cigarette.

  “The child was a mistake. I was already planning to leave the islands. Anyway, the father died, a young policeman. She’s well taken care of. She’s fine. What else do you want to know?”

  “Do you miss her?”

  “To miss her would imply that I would like to be with her. No, I don’t miss her. But do I think of her? Yes, now and then. It’s natural.”

  “You never wanted …”

  “No. I never wanted motherhood. Some women don’t feel that urge. It’s a biological function, not a holy calling.”

  She stared at the glowing eye of her cigarette, then took a thoughtful puff. “Now you know all my secrets, Max. It’s your turn.”

  And so he told her of his past. His father a physicist, his uncle, a Nobel Prize laureate, something to do with nuclear fission. Together they had founded McCormick Labs north of San Francisco, a huge complex involved in research and in the production of military defense weapons. Following in their footsteps, Max became a physicist and worked in the desert at Los Alamos. But there had been an accident, the reason he never married.

  “We were working on a new bomb, testing for criticality—trying to find the precise amount of plutonium needed in the bomb device. A potentially deadly experiment. They call it ‘tickling the dragon’s tail’ because you’re observing a split-second chain reaction, and have to stop at the critical point just before the thing explodes.”

  “One da
y in the lab, the head physicist, Pelevini, brought together two halves of a beryllium sphere that would convert plutonium to a critical state. The point was to bring them as flush as possible without blowing up the lab. He went too far. The two halves met, the assembly went supercritical. Pelevini stopped the chain reaction by knocking them apart, but in less than a second, deadly gamma and neutron radiation had burst from the assembly. I remember how a blue glow lit the room as the air was momentarily ionized. We were all exposed. Pelevini died within four days, totally out of his mind.”

  Max clasped his hands, remembering.

  “At Los Alamos Hospital, they monitored our blood counts and bone counts while we lost our hair and vomited. On the ninth day another colleague died. I had been farthest from Pelevini and thought I might be spared. How terribly naïve. Fearing gold inlays in my teeth were sending damaging rays into my jawbone, doctors tried to shield my teeth with a mouthpiece made of solid gold. I wore that thing for weeks until the radiation in my inlays subsided. A hole in the mouthpiece allowed for a straw through which I was kept alive on liquids. It was hideous. I still have nightmares—the bottom of my face muzzled, locked shut like a dog’s. I wake up trying to rip that mouthpiece off.”

  Ana looked down, shocked.

  “I’d already seen what bombs could do at Hiroshima, Nagasaki. I was horrified. And I knew what we were going to do at Bikini, the mother of all bombs, the one called BRAVO. I had told my uncle I wanted out, but he appealed to my sense of morality. ‘You can help us beat the Russians,’ he said. ‘Or you can let them vaporize half the United States.’ So I had stayed.”

  “But after the accident, I got hold of my medical records … depression of lymphocytes, abnormally low number of leukocytes, patient’s exposure significant. Radiation sickness. My passport out of Los Alamos. That’s when I switched my field to immunology. A lot of Los Alamites were exposed, a lot of them dropped out. You just don’t hear about us. We live quietly, rotting on the hoof.”

  His voice grew soft like the faint edge of a curl of smoke. “I’m sorry to tell you these things, Ana.”

  She sat quiet for a while; anything she said would sound like charity. And maybe she was quiet because she could not quite grasp his point.

  In years to come, when she finally understood the import of Max’s words, she would marvel at her narrowness of vision. The signs she missed, the silences that fell mid-conversation. The way Max muffled his snores when they began to sound like something else. She would gaze at snapshots of him, searching for an expression, some giveaway that he knew what was coming. The pictures would tell her nothing.

  HA ‘I MO ‘OLELO

  The Telling Wind

  THE NIGHT BEFORE HER FIRST DAY OF UNIVERSITY, ANA FELL INTO a terrified half sleep. I’ll study like a maniac. I won’t pick up my eyes. I’ll do the hardest thing on earth for me. Suppose I fail? Suppose I don’t have what it takes?

  In the dark, something ancient answered. “Aia no I ke ko a ke au.” Time will tell.

  All night aunties had banged round the house, afraid Ana would disappear in Honolulu, “Sin City,” where sailors took girls in alleys. Rosie tried to reassure them, reminding them that the university was miles from all those military men.

  But Aunty Mapuana argued. “What need for books? Books only good for termites. Look all the termite holes in Pua’s Bible.”

  Pua leaned forward, the world of her eyes so floaty the irises seemed to be melting into white.

  “Not from termites! From missionary gods. All they tell is holes. Lies. I prayed for our sister, Emma, they let her die. They let Anahola run away. Now we going lose Ana. Why she need to go so far? Good nurses’ training school right here in Wai‘anae.”

  Ana had talked of wanting to heal, of maybe becoming a nurse. Now Rosie got to her feet, looking somewhat formidable.

  “Ana’s going to be more than a nurse. That’s what university’s for, find out what she wants to do. She could even become a doctor …”

  She saw she was over their heads and slowed down. “Aunty Pua, you talk about Emma. She had the healing gift. Have you forgotten what happened when she died? She gave that girl all of her mana in the Ritual of Hā.”

  They fell silent, remembering. In her last moments, their sister Emma had called young Ana to her bedside. With great effort she had put her hand against the back of Ana’s head, pressing the girl’s face to hers. Whispering hoarsely, she had forced Ana’s mouth to her mouth and, inhaling deeply, had expulsed all the air inside her body into Ana’s. The girl seemed to swoon on the verge of collapse. The family had rushed forward, holding her.

  Through wracking pain and morphine, Emma had whispered, “Child. This is my last will and testament. Through this Hā, you have received my mana.”

  In the moment of her passing, Ana had touched her great-aunt’s face and seemed to wipe it clean. All pain dispelled, she had reflected peace.

  “Emma gave that girl special gifts,” Rosie said. “She’s got to go out in the world and use them. You stop her from getting education, Emma’s going come back and scoop out your eyes.”

  Pua hobbled out to the yard and gathered ti leaves. “Let her go then. Let her educate. No more drippings from my bitter mouth.”

  All night she walked through the house slapping ti leaves for protection, draping several leaves over the sleeping form of Ana.

  And she prayed to her dead sister. “Emma, Ē ‘olu ‘olu!” Please. “Don’t let those gripping cuttlefish of Honolulu get our girl.”

  Next morning, Ana started down Keola Road. Their house sat on a rise half a mile up from the highway, in the distance, the leaping morning sea. As she descended, she passed a yellow house that looked blown sideways, socks stuck in rusty window screens. Outside the house, a heavily tattooed man in a purple sarong sat polishing his rifle, then tilted the barrels up to the light so that they glittered blue and became an extension of his tattooed arms. Seeing Ana, he jumped up, aimed his rifle at the sky and shot off a round, giving her the Shaka sign. “Ey, Ana! … Geev’um at dat university!”

  She smiled and waved. Just past the blue’s man yellow house, from atop a Quonset hut, a goat magisterially surveyed his domain, observing her passage from her old life.

  At the bottom of the road, even the intersection looked condemned—abandoned cars, a malfunctioning stoplight that seemed to hang by a single thread. Tow trucks screeched to a stop as ragged kids shot into traffic on skateboards. Then life, the highway, waiting to consume her. Near the shopping strip, surfers and druggers crawled half-awake from their pickups, draping themselves across the fenders. The young muscled turks of Nanakuli.

  They called out as she passed by. “Ey, Ana! Hear you going university. Going hang out wit all dem … homolectuals.”

  “What you trying prove wit all dem books? No fo’get, you one Nanakuli girl. Only good fo’ do one t’ing.”

  She turned and lashed out with a country mouth. “Suck rocks, you mokes! Don’t fuck wit’ me. My uncles going broke yo’ ugly faces.”

  Yet they were not ugly; most of them were beautiful, with the beauty of mixed “chop suey” blood. Hawaiian, Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, Scotch, Irish, Filipino. Half a dozen other bloods. Their skin tones ran the gamut from sun-tinted white to gold to deep dark brown, their almond-shaped eyes sometimes blue, or green. They were muscular and fit from surfing, but their hair hung long and greasy. Some heads were garishly shaved with only topknots. Their arms and legs a grid of scars and tribal tattoos. She saw their drug-shot eyes and shook her head, their future written all over them.

  Shifting her heavy book bag and lunch bag, she walked on. Five mornings a week she would make the two-hour bus trip to the university up in Manoa Valley, and in the evenings, the two-hour trip back to Nanakuli. Stepping into the bus, Ana glanced at faces heading into the city, folks looking anxious and alert. It was not her first trip off the Wai‘anae Coast, but apprehension made her feel it was.

  Her dress was homemade. Her shoes were new
and pinched. She was not beautiful, nor was she brilliant or accomplished. But she carried herself as if she were. Crossing her legs, she opened a textbook and thoughtfully smoothed down a page, ignoring the sea paralleling the highway. Now and then she looked up at the ruby-strung necklace of taillights bound for Honolulu.

  KNOWLEDGE DID NOT ENTER HER WITH UNWAVERING LIGHT. AT first it glanced over her. She could not keep up, even in basic chemistry, in which she had excelled. Called upon in class, she stood dumb and shy. Sometimes she thought of killing herself. Nights at the kitchen table, she pressed her forehead to the pages of a book, trying to literally absorb convoluted equations. Comprehension did not come.

  “The problem,” Rosie said, “is that right now you’re stuck in that place where you know too much and not enough. Why not just pretend you know? Memorize, keep repeating it, and see what happens next.”

  Slowly, miraculously, things began to coalesce. Ana memorized every lesson, every assignment, repeating and repeating it, until comprehension approached like a buzzing in her brain, and then a midnight Eureka. Once deciphered, certain equations became brilliant in their simplicity. Thereafter, each time she was mired in confusion, she remembered Rosie’s words: Sometimes life was just about holding on, waiting to see what happened next.

  She also learned that an honor student from Nanakuli High was not held in the same regard as a student from an elite private school in Honolulu. Each night she scrubbed red dust from her clothes and shoes, and from her book bag. Still, on campus, people knew. They knew from the giveaway pink of her cuticles and nails, and sometimes a faint pink tinge to her hair, that she was from the Wai‘anae Coast. Students walking behind her rolled their eyes, even their bookmarks stuck out at her like tongues. She hid her hands between her knees in class. She dropped behind and fell into depressions. Then she snapped out of it, running to catch up. The rest of life fell by the wayside.