Honolulu Story

by Leslie Ford

  But she didn’t. She waited, smiling and confident, looking at Alice, waiting for her to tell her where to put her bags.

  “You will have to discuss that with Mr. Cather, Mrs. Farrell,” Alice said calmly.

  Harry went across the room toward the girl.

  “I’m afraid we have no room at the moment, Corinne.”

  She glanced at him briefly and looked back at Alice Cather.

  “I think you can find room, Aunt Alice. I think so.”

  The veiling of the threat was gossamer soft and quite thick, and if I hadn’t known about Uncle Roy I wouldn’t have recognized it.

  Mary, who had been very still, her face expressionless, standing there where Mrs. Bronson had been talking about horses, stepped forward.

  “If Mrs. Farrell has a legal right to stay here, Dad, I’m sure she’s welcome. She can have my room. I’ll move in with Grace.”

  She turned to her mother inquiringly. As Alice was silent for a moment it occurred to me that her self-control had had a lot of strain on it the last few days. But it stayed intact under a powerful surface tension, and even under the blow that came next, a bomb from the blue.

  “You see, Mother,” Mary said quietly. “Mrs. Farrell and Swede are going to be married. They won’t have a great deal of time before he goes back forward. She probably wants to be here where he is as much as possible. I understand they applied for a license yesterday.”

  The momentary silence was so thick it could have been cut with a very dull knife. When Tommy Dawson cut it the knife was not dull.

  “—And that,” he said, “sure puts our hero in a lousy spot.”

  I don’t suppose there could have been a more accurate statement of what must have been in everybody’s mind. Swede’s jaw hardened. He looked over at Tommy, and then suddenly and quite unexpectedly there was a flicker of light in his eyes.

  “—Right,” he said.

  He started across the room and stopped in front of Mary. “Sorry,” he said. It was clipped off very short. He went on to Alice and Harry Cather. “I’m very sorry, Mrs. Cather . . . good-bye, sir, and thank you.” He went up the two steps to Corinne’s side.

  “We’re off,” he said shortly. “Where are your bags?”

  She stood motionless.

  “I’m not going. I’m staying. This house belongs to my father too. I have as much right here as they have. They can’t make me go.”

  “Okay, lady,” he said evenly. “Stay ahead. I’m getting out.”

  He started on.

  “No, Swede! You stay, as my guest . . .”

  A flush dyed his cheeks a dull angry red. I’d thought maybe Corinne was a really bright girl up to that point.

  “Hardly,” he said. “And you’d better come with me.”

  “I am staying. You may go if you like.”

  He started on just as Alice Cather spoke.

  “Swede . . . we hope you will stay.”

  She went over toward the steps, Corinne’s dark eyes moving with her.

  “Corinne has a right to be here. If she wants to use it, she can. Under the circumstances we’d prefer you’d stay too. We’d be much happier if you would.”

  “I agree, Ellicott,” Harry Cather said quietly. “It’ll be much simpler for everybody.”

  I suppose as Swede stood there what was going through his mind was that maybe it was simpler, for everybody but him. And he did a rather surprising thing. He looked steadily over at Mary. And Corinne Farrell was bright enough, or female enough, to be aware of it instantly, even without looking at him. Her dark glance flashed from Alice for the first time and rested on her daughter. There was no nonsense about oriental impassiveness there just then. It was a quick passionate hatred, burning with fire and brimstone, so revealing it was shocking.

  “I think you’d better stay,” Mary said. She turned to her mother. “Let’s have lunch. I’ll move my things out as soon as we’re through.”

  And then, in this incredible or at least to me utterly bewildering scene of cross currents and purposes and motives, so incomprehensible to my mind that I didn’t know why any one of them was acting as he was with the possible exception of Corinne, Aunt Norah came suddenly to articulate life. She was staring across at the half-Japanese girl, what I may call her termite expression at the highest pitch I’d seen it get to.

  “—Just a minute, Alice. Am I to understand that this young woman is Roy Cather’s daughter?”

  Harry Cather answered. He looked years older, and tired. “I’m afraid you are, Norah.”

  “Why have I never been told?”

  He shook his head. “Just easier not to,” he said patiently.

  “It was easier to pay her school bills and——”

  “Much easier. Roy . . . wasn’t here.”

  Mrs. Bronson’s eyes blazed. “That . . . scoundrel!”

  Alice Cather was across the room in a flash, her hand on her sister-in-law’s arm. “Please, Norah!”

  But Corinne came coolly down into the room. “And my mother,” she said. She looked around her. “To think that my mother was once a servant in this house. It is democracy. It couldn’t happen anywhere but in America . . .”

  “—Success story . . .” Tommy Dawson said. It was aside and sotto voce, but not enough so.

  “Not exactly,” Harry Cather said. “We might as well get the record straight. Her mother came from a good family. My father had business dealings with their firm. They wanted their daughter to learn American housekeeping methods—she was supposed to marry into the consular service and be sent to the United States. My mother agreed to take her. She was an apprentice rather than a servant. She was only here a year.”

  Corinne looked up at him starry-eyed. “And that was when my father married her?”

  “I’m afraid not,” he said quietly. “She happened to have married already—without my parents’ knowledge. She learned American ways quickly. The divorce from that marriage went through after she left.”

  “But she left with my father?”

  “I’m afraid she did. We’ve never been proud of it, Corinne.”

  “But I am,” she said quickly. “I am proud that he stayed——”

  “I think it’s a subject we can dispense with, Mrs. Farrell,” Alice Cather said quietly. “It’s time for lunch. We can talk about this later.” She motioned to Kumumato, who’d stood, impassive throughout, by the door to the service steps.

  I wouldn’t say that that lunch was a gay or lively party, or even surface-smooth. We got our food and sat in various places. I took one look at Dave Boyer and looked quickly away. He was the way he’d been at the hotel Sunday afternoon, his face dark. Tommy Dawson, hovering as near Mary as he could, was far from himself. Kumumato dropped the rolls he was bringing in, gathered them up hastily, took them out and brought in others, or maybe the same ones dusted off. Swede Ellicott sat or moved about in a large silent orbit of his own . . . with Corinne a worshipful satellite. I saw where those girls got their charm. When he took out a cigarette she was there with a lighted match, and when he sat down after he’d got his food she pulled a stool over and sat demurely at his feet, smiling and serene.

  Alice Cather was controlled still, but with a much greater and more apparent effort. It came to me with a little shock, looking at her once, that the matter with her was that she was simply frightened. Her voice was still liquid, but it was liquid flowing thinly over jagged rocks. Whether she’d been frightened all day, or whether Corinne’s abrupt arrival had brought some new menace she hadn’t counted on and was just now realizing, I didn’t dare to guess.

  Mary was very pale, and once when our eyes met I saw fear in hers too, fear and an appeal so poignant that it was more disturbing than the fear.

  And the smile stayed on Corinne’s red lips.

  Alice got up at last.

  “If you’ll come with me, Mrs. Farrell, we’ll get this straightened out,” she said steadily. “Grace . . . will you take the boys down to the game room? There’s
a cupboard with a backgammon board, and——”

  “Surely,” I said. I was afraid for a dreadful instant that I was going to have to show them the garden . . . like the young captain who was ordered to take me out at an awkward moment.

  17

  “I’LL SEE ABOUT MY THINGS NOW,” MARY SAID. She was gone at once along the lanai toward her room. Harry Cather and Aunt Norah had joined the family pow-wow, Tommy and Dave came with me. Swede stayed where he was, getting used, I supposed, to the strange sort of middle world on either side of which he had been cut out and cut in.

  “Jeepers,” Tommy said.

  We sat down on the big sofa in front of the fireplace, not interested in the cupboard with the backgammon board and whatnot in it.

  “Jeepers!”

  He shook his red head back and forth.

  “—Ain’t Stardust the perishable stuff. Baby! You know it’s funny, but I almost felt sorry for that dame. She’s so god-awful on the wrong course and hasn’t brains enough to see it.”

  Dave Boyer scowled.

  “She’s got it figured all wrong,” Tommy said. “She figures he hates the Cathers’ guts. He’ll be tickled to death to see ’em get a kick in their gold-plated teeth. She’ll show ’em up in a big way and they’ll kick and scream. But they don’t. Mary comes through like an angel. And then, my God, that handmaiden stuff! Did you see her try to light his cigarette? Some fall for it, lady—home, they’re not so used to it. But it’s like flypaper, you don’t want to get your feet tangled up in it in public.”

  He laughed mirthlessly. “The poor old Swede. Did you pipe the blinders falling off? It’s damn lucky you have to wait three days from the time you put your head in the noose till they spring the trap.”

  He put his hand out and shook Dave’s shoulder.

  “See, David? My old Pappy used to say, there’s more ways of killing a horse than choking it to death with butter. All we had to do was wait for the Divine Wind . . . Kamikaze on the home front.”

  “I wonder,” Dave said laconically.

  “He’s through, David. He’s got the old peepers wide, starin’ open, boy.”

  “Yeah. She’s not through.”

  “—The Voice of Doom, eh. That’s easy, David.”

  We heard the upstairs door open and Mary’s voice. “. . . down with the rest of them,” she was saying. “Corinne will be along in a minute.”

  There were heavy steps behind hers, and she and Swede came in.

  “Hi, there. We’re all set, you’ll be happy to know. My stuff’s stowed in with yours, Grace. Move over, children. We can’t swim yet. What about a game of gin?”

  “Hearts,” Tommy said. “I want to play hearts. On the floor.”

  “Michigan,” Mary said.

  “Michigan it is.”

  I sat there on the mat on the floor playing a card game, knowing that the body of a murdered man was in the ravine not a good stone’s throw from where we sat, and that upstairs his daughter was wreaking a strange vengeance on . . . I almost thought, “his murderers,” but backed away from it quickly. It was a statement I’d been avoiding making even to myself, because in effect I was saying Alice Cather had murdered him . . . or executed him was perhaps a better term. I felt bitterly sorry for her, wondering whether Corinne had already told Harry Cather what Alice had been so desperately trying to keep him from knowing. I looked at Mary. How she could be keeping her mind on the cards was more than I could see. The chips, though, were piling up in front of her.

  Swede sat across from her between me and Dave, his pipe in the corner of his mouth, intent on his cards. Whatever was going on inside of him wasn’t shown.

  Tommy Dawson pushed his last chip into the center.

  “Cleaned out,” he said. “Unlucky at cards.”

  He took the hand Mary dealt him without looking at it, his eyes resting on her.

  “Mary,” he said, “—will you do me a favor?”

  “If I can.”

  “You’re the only one that can,” Tommy said. “And it’s this. I’m nuts about you. I think you’re wonderful. Will you marry me?”

  I was the only one who looked at him. Swede and Dave Boyer were concentrating on sorting their cards.

  “Well,” Mary said, “I don’t know, Tommy. It’s very sudden, isn’t it?”

  “Not sudden at all.”

  He looked at his cards.

  “Not at all sudden. It’s what’s called a simple reiteration of a request brought to your attention in ours of the I don’t know which instant . . . but in Washington, a long time ago. You were too young, then, lady. You didn’t realize the stupendous opportunity——”

  “It’s sweet of you to give me another chance, darling,” Mary said. She smiled across at him. “Perhaps I ought to——”

  Swede put his cards down and got up.

  “Excuse me, will you?”

  He strode out onto the terrace and disappeared at the side of the garden toward the ravine.

  “You dumb dope,” Dave Boyer said angrily. “What the hell——”

  “I have a right to propose to the young girl,” Tommy said calmly. “I love her.”

  “You red-headed ape, she doesn’t love you. It’s your play.”

  Tommy tossed a card in.

  “That’s straight, Mary. No kidding. I mean it—every word of it.”

  Her cheeks were warm and her eyes suddenly a little too bright and liquid. “Thanks, Tommy,” she said.

  Alice Cather’s voice coming down the stairway interrupted Dave Boyer’s annoyed remark. “Mary? Grace?”

  Mary put down her cards and got up. “Yes, Mother.”

  “Just down there, Mrs. Farrell,” Alice was saying. “You’ll find Swede and the other boys. They’ll show you the garden——”

  Tommy rose to his feet in a single motion. “Come on, David. We’ve got to see a dog.—So long, girls.”

  We waited at the bottom of the stairs for Corinne to come down. There was no doubt who’d been the victor. Her whole manner showed it.

  “—Where are they going?” she asked, looking instantly after the boys.

  “I don’t know,” Mary said. “Swede’s outside, somewhere. Will you excuse me?”

  I followed her toward the stairs. Corinne stepped past us toward the terrace entrance. Kumumato had come out of the service quarters door and was picking up the cards and chips we’d left on the floor. Corinne looked at him rather oddly for a moment, and then said something to him that I couldn’t understand. And Mary, ahead of me, stopped short and half turned. The look on her face was extraordinary, almost as it had been at the pool after she’d seen Roy Cather’s dreadful face staring up from the leafy shelf of the tree growing out of the cleft in the rocky wall.

  She went on up. Corinne had gone out on the terrace. I looked at the houseman. He was still on one knee picking up the chips, but his hand rested motionless. He was looking after Corinne’s disappearing figure, and I thought he was grinning.

  “What did she say to him?” I asked after we’d closed the door.

  Mary shook her head. “I only understand a little Japanese,” she said. I thought she seemed both frightened, a little, and puzzled.

  She didn’t say any more until we were out on the lanai. Below us, sitting on the edge of the pool, were Swede and his prospective bride. She was speaking, her small kitten-soft hands fluttering like butterflies as she talked. Swede was listening, I suppose. He didn’t look very happy, but I couldn’t, off-hand, have thought of any reason why he should.

  Mary looked over at them and turned away at once. “Let’s go to our room,” she said. “And look, Grace—don’t leave me. I mean don’t go back down town to stay. I couldn’t stick this by myself.”

  She glanced back along the lanai.

  “I don’t understand it. Do you think she knows her . . . her father was here? She must, or she couldn’t have come up this way.”

  I nodded. “I think she does.”

  “I don’t want to think about
any of it,” she said slowly. “You see, either Mother knows he’s dead, and doesn’t dare put her out, or . . . she doesn’t know, and thinks she has a right to be here. Because, you see, the minute he’s dead she has no more right. It’s the way I told you. It’s only for their lifetime—Dad’s and Aunt Norah’s and . . . his.”

  Her things were arranged on another dressing table they’d put in the room, her clothes were hanging in the closet with mine. She sat on her bed. We didn’t say anything. There was woefully little to say, that I could think of.

  Then from outside came a sudden silvery peal of laughter . . . silvery, but not very mirthful. It was much closer than the pool, in fact just outside under the lanai.

  “—I do not release you, Swede. You made a big mistake. I think so.”

  “Okay. If that’s how you feel, I’m stuck. But you’re getting out of here, and right now.”

  “Oh, no. I am staying. Aunt Alice wants me to stay.”

  “The hell she does.”

  “The hell she does,” the girl repeated. “I think so. Very anxious for me to stay . . . very anxious. And I’ll tell you why, Swede.”

  Mary sat there, rigid and intent.

  “—I tell you why tonight, Swede—after I see—what is it Tommy says—a dog. I’ll tell you why.”

  The silvery peal of laughter came again. It was not amused but cruel, and it had an almost hysterical break in it.

  “Stop it!”

  It sounded as if he had taken her by the shoulder and shaken her.

  “If you’ve got anything to tell me, tell it now.”

  “Oh, very well. I will tell you right now. Come on. I’ll tell your friends Tommy and David too. I’ll tell that Mrs. Latham. We’ll find them. You’ll see what fine Americans . . .”

  They were out of range, going past the house and up to the cottage. Mary sat perfectly still. She looked at me after a moment, but before she could speak we heard a light step on the lanai. It was Alice.

  “Hello, dears,” she said. “Exhausted? I don’t blame you.”

  She dropped into a chair and looked out at the fluffy white clouds moving across the lovely clear blue of the sky under the low drooping roof of the lanai.