Honolulu Story

by Leslie Ford

  “Oh, dear,” she said. “It’s very difficult, isn’t it?”

  “—Did you hear Corinne just then, Mother?”

  Alice turned slowly and looked at her. “Yes, dear. I don’t see how any one in the house could help hearing her. Do you?”

  “Then what is she telling Swede and the others? We’ve got a right to know too, Mother. What is she doing here? Why did she come? Why do you let her stay?”

  Alice Cather was silent for a moment. When she spoke her voice was as liquid smooth and casual as ever.

  “We’ve let her stay because she has a legal right to do so, Mary. I imagine she came for fairly obvious reasons.”

  She turned toward me, and her eyes met mine directly, for an instant, for the only time, recently, that I could remember.

  “And I imagine she is going to tell Swede that we have harbored a dangerous . . . spy in our house—even if the spy did happen to be her father. I don’t know how she plans to get around that aspect of it.”

  She hesitated then, and went on quietly.

  “It’s true, of course—as you’ve both realized. Roy Cather was here. In the air-raid shelter. I tried to get rid of him before he could do any harm to anybody.”

  The silence in the little room prolonged. When Mary spoke next she didn’t look at me.

  “—Where is he now?”

  “He’s gone, back to Japan. Unless they catch him trying to get away.”

  I suppose I stared at her as Mary did.

  “What do you mean, Mother?”

  “Just that. He was leaving last night. That’s why I was so appalled when I learned you two had locked the shelter so he couldn’t get out. He found the scheme he had wouldn’t work, and like a lot of other . . . cowards, he’d rather face death away from home.”

  “And you let him go?”

  “I let him go. For many reasons.”

  There was another silence in which Mary looked at me and quickly away.

  “Is it true, Mother . . .” She hesitated. “Is it true you . . . you’re in love with him?”

  “No, it is not.” Her voice was clear and definite. “It’s not true at all. I used to be, once. Love can die as suddenly as any other human thing. You saw it happen this afternoon. It happened to mine for Roy Cather . . . many years ago. There are times when honor is more important than love.”

  “Then why did you let him go?”

  “I wanted him away before Harry saw him, for one thing,” Alice Cather said. “Or before he saw Harry. I wanted him to go back to his Japanese. He is a traitor to this country. He serves them. I wanted him to see what he’d get for selling them his soul. I wanted him to die there. I wanted to get him away from here before we were branded as traitors too. We’d never clear ourselves—no matter what proof we offered. He came to do a specific . . . job. He didn’t do it. And he’s gone.”

  “Is that what Corinne is going to tell the boys?”

  “I assume it is.”

  There was a sound of voices outside, and Alice turned and went out. She stood looking down into the garden.

  “What is it, Kumumato?”

  A man’s voice, not Kumumato’s, answered. “We’d like to look at the air-raid shelter, ma’am. Is it all right?”

  Alice nodded without speaking. She stood very still for an instant, her hand on the rail. Then she turned and went around the corner of the lanai.

  Mary looked at me. “How much of that do you believe?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Frankly, I don’t believe a damned word of it. And I wonder how much she believes.”

  I shook my head. “I’ve no idea, Mary.”

  She went out onto the lanai and looked over. “What are they doing, Kumumato?” she asked. In a moment she said, “Thanks,” and came back in.

  “Fingerprints, in the shelter,” she said.

  She sat down abruptly. “They must have found him,” she said, after what seemed to me a long time. “Well, that means Corinne will go and the gendarmes will come. Aren’t you glad you’re a friend of ours? I should have told Tommy I wouldn’t marry him . . . to save him the embarrassment of having to take it back when I fool him and say yes.”

  18

  A LOW PRESSURE AREA HUNG HEAVILY OVER the wide eaves of the house in the hills that afternoon, in every sense of the word. The clouds, descending, suddenly opened up and it rained. It really rained. It poured. Below us, through an occasional break in the swirling soot-colored banners of mist, Honolulu lay clear and brilliant, the white garish jade she is. Inside the house it was dry, but no more could be said for it.

  “I don’t care if it is raining,” Mary said. “I’m going for a swim. I’ve got to get out of this house.” And she went.

  In the living room Alice Cather and Aunt Norah sat like two of the Three Grim Sisters. The only sound, as I came in, was the sharp brittle click of Aunt Norah’s knitting needles, each click, I thought, in effect taking off another small piece of Corinne Farrell’s hide. Alice had aged a thousand years.

  “—How Harry can sit in there adding up figures at a time like this is beyond me,” Aunt Norah said. Her needles clicked a wicked obbligato.

  “It’s better to be unconcerned,” Alice said wearily.

  “—I’m not unconcerned,” Harry Cather said. He’d come up the passage to the room. “I simply see no way we can get the girl out of here, if she’s determined to stay, except by time and patience.”

  The front door burst open at exactly that moment, and Corinne burst in. She’d been running. She was drenched to the skin. I couldn’t tell whether it was rain water or tears pouring down her face. If tears they were tears of fury, because she slammed the door behind her and ran like something blind and wild past Harry Cather. Then the door of her room slammed.

  “Well,” said Aunt Norah.

  “Let’s skip it,” Alice said. She went over to Harry. “Come on, darling, go back to your work.”

  She seemed determined still, I thought, to keep him wrapped in a rosy-pink cotton wool of ignorance of the drama being played out under his very nose, though how she could expect the whole Roy Cather epic to continue on without his ever being aware of it was inconceivable to me.

  She suddenly glanced over at the lanai, frowning a little, and went quickly across.

  “What is it?” Norah Bronson demanded.

  “Just Kumumato, taking Corinne some tea.”

  The needles clicked viciously.

  “You’re a fool to trust that man.”

  “Now, Norah,” Harry said patiently.

  “All right, Harry. Nobody will listen to me.”

  Alice shrugged and went over to her husband. “Come along, Harry.”

  “—I don’t care if he’s been around here a hundred and fifty thousand years,” Mrs. Bronson said when they’d gone, to me or to the room generally. “I wouldn’t trust one of them as far as I could see him in the dark. They don’t know what that man was doing all the years before he came back to them because he couldn’t get a job anywhere else.”

  She turned to me. “Why don’t you sit down? Why are you standing there? You make me nervous.”

  I didn’t sit down. She made me nervous too. I went past her out on the lanai and looked down at the pool. Mary was still there, and Tommy and Dave were standing there on the grass in swimming trunks, their faces turned up to the pelting rain.

  “You people are crazy,” I called.

  They looked up at me. “Sure, why not,” Tommy said cheerfully. “Everybody’s gone nuts.”

  I turned back wondering where Swede was. Whatever Corinne had said at the cottage obviously hadn’t made any difference to the two others.

  Kumumato was just opening the door to go downstairs, the way Mary and I had gone from her room to avoid meeting her mother the day before. It seemed to me it had taken him a considerable time to serve a tea tray. Almost immediately after he closed the door, Alice came along behind him. She stopped at the door, started to open it and changed her
mind. She was still frowning a little as she came on into the living room. Norah looked up at her. What it was they said to each other in the brief glance they exchanged I didn’t know, but it was something. Aunt Norah began knitting more violently than ever.

  That was the way things still stood, except that Mary and Tommy and Dave had come in and were playing the radio downstairs, when the doorbell rang a few minutes before five o’clock.

  Alice closed her eyes for an instant as if expecting some new kind of doom to enter. She got up and went quickly across the room to open it herself, beating Kumumato, coming up from below stairs, by a quarter length.

  There was a short silence before I heard her say, “Oh, yes, of course.” She came back. “Grace, it’s the car for you.”

  I looked up blankly from the paper I was reading.

  “The car, from Colonel Primrose,” she said.

  I started over to the door. Everybody else was a little odd, to say the least, and maybe it was contagious.

  “I’ve decided not to go,” I said. “Tell the driver . . .”

  I didn’t go on. I’d made a mistake, and I realized it instantly. In the door was the massive khaki-colored pillar of granite, my old friend Sergeant Buck.

  “Colonel’s orders, ma’am,” he said, menacingly, from the corner fissure of his lantern jaw.

  It occurred to me that I was not in the Army and that Colonel Primrose had no right to give me orders. It was a mistake, however, for me even to think so. Sergeant Buck’s iron face congealed degrees of hard and cold.

  “I . . . think you’d better go, dear,” Alice said hastily.

  “Colonel’s orders,” Sergeant Buck said. “Got to carry ’em out, irregardless.”

  For an absurd moment I determined not to be pushed around any longer. Was I a civilian and a taxpayer? Was I a mouse or was I a woman? I imagine, both, because as Sergeant Buck turned and spat out into the rain sluicing out of the gutter at the angle of the roof I was aware that he was, in effect, rolling up his sleeves, preparing himself for a particularly painful duty come hell or high water.

  I went, quietly. There wasn’t, obviously, anything else to do unless I wanted to get picked up bodily and hurled into the back of the car. Sergeant Buck did a double-quick around the car and got in under the wheel.

  “—No offense meant, ma’am,” he said.

  It was the only time in our long association of mutual animosity and mistrust that I’ve failed to reply, “—And none taken, Sergeant.” But I was mad, boiling mad, and I kept a silence as stony as the square, rigid back in front of me.

  And being a woman, I got progressively more instead of less mad as we drove down and out past Fort Shafter into Kamehameha Boulevard, the wide highway cut through cane fields and rock to form a stupendous artery for the mighty fortress built up from the destruction of the morning of the Seventh. It’s unlike any other highway in the world—a maelstrom of traffic, ammunition trucks, oil trucks, bulldozers, road machines, supply trucks, buses, jeeps and shiny new cars with stars on the plate in front . . . and beside it, carrying defense workers, tooting and rattling and strangely anachronistic, the Oahu Railroad, as absurd as a bamboo whistle in a magnificent orchestration of coordinated speed and power.

  Ahead of us to the left high up in the green hills, the sun shone on the terraced roofs of the Navy’s great Aiea Hospital. Below it where the bulldozers were cutting out the Red Hill road, hidden behind the low hills, lie the Pearl Harbor dead. Some three thousand of them lie there, under rows of small white crosses with the flag flying bravely above . . . the rock quarry behind them, the bulldozers in front and all around, grinding out a monstrous never-ceasing requiem. Their monument stretches out into the sea lanes and the air lanes from that reservoir of power, concentrated where three short years ago there were smoke and twisted steel, destruction and death.

  We crossed the railroad tracks below Pearl Harbor and went into Hickam Field. There were planes on the runways and planes in the air, fighters, bombers, transports, hospital ships unloading evacués on stretchers into waiting ambulances. We could see them as we passed the great central terminal and went right toward the quarters, against the background of a carrier moving slowly out of Pearl Harbor, and the massive superstructures of fighting ships lying to.

  Sergeant Buck stopped in front of a small mustard-colored bungalow with a red roof, a white oleander bush on one side of the steps and a pink one on the other. He conducted me in congealed silence into a small living room. There were stairs going up to the second floor. I waited for Colonel Primrose to come down them, a piece of my mind already cut out and sizzling hot to give him, but he didn’t come. He wasn’t even at home. I sat there, going over in my mind all past indignities I’d suffered at the hands of Colonel Primrose and his iron “functotum.” It was unfortunate that when he came at last Sergeant Buck, standing guard on the front stoop, got to him first.

  “—Some trouble, sir,” I heard. He jerked his head in toward me. “—Want to clarify my skirts, sir.”

  Colonel Primrose when he came in did not seem impressed. He looked at me without a word of condolence or apology.

  “They found the body,” he said. “You will undoubtedly be happy to hear.”

  He put his cap on the radio.

  I suppose it was a measure of the kind of existence I’d been living in for the last few days that I started to say, “What body?” But I stopped in time and said nothing, or rather, “Oh.”

  He stood there looking at me, almost grim and by no means friendly.

  “Do you know, Mrs. Latham,” he said deliberately, “that—I regret to say—I have you to thank for the most complete fiasco of my military career?”

  That was a little more than I was prepared to take just then.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know exactly what you’re talking about. But you didn’t give me a chance to tell you. You acted as if I was a complete fool. I could have told you there was a man in the shelter . . .”

  Colonel Primrose drew and exhaled a very long breath, and when he spoke he sounded like a man who was counting up to twenty before picking up a blunt instrument.

  “Listen, my dear lady,” he said. “Some day, some time, maybe you’ll learn to keep your pretty head out of other people’s business and not to jump to conclusions. Listen to me. When I came out on the lanai at breakfast, one look at your face, and Mrs. Cather’s face, and Mary Cather’s face, and hearing that absurd business of the keys, would have told anybody a man had been in the shelter. When we got down to it, a child could have seen where the broken orchid had been cut off—and the trail of broken orchids leading away. When we got inside I saw at a glance that somebody had been in there.”

  He paused, to count another twenty, no doubt.

  “And furthermore, my dear Mrs. Latham,” he said, with a kind of iron self-control. “Before I came there, I knew a man had been hidden in the shelter, and I knew you were in absolutely no danger . . . and I knew who the man was.”

  19

  I SUPPOSE I LOOKED AT HIM AS IF I REALLY were a complete fool.

  He pulled a chair over and sat down in front of me.

  “—And to think,” he said, ruefully, “that I know you as well as I do and I still let you spoil a year’s work for me . . .”

  I was quite speechless.

  “Some day, my dear, you’ll give me credit—not much, just a little—for some rudimentary professional intelligence. You ought to have known I wouldn’t conceivably have let you down like that unless I had a reason. I couldn’t let those people know we knew Cather was there.”

  He drew another long breath, got up and paced around the little room.

  “All I needed was for you to mind your sweet business and let mine alone. Listen, Mrs. Latham. I’d been working on this case for months. I knew who Roy Cather was—and a damned unprepossessing fellow.”

  That much, at least, I knew, very well.

  “I knew he was trying to get—from Japan—to Honolulu. I k
new somebody swam ashore Saturday night about nine-thirty from a Jap submarine. I knew Cather was a celebrated swimmer. The planes spotted a man, Sunday afternoon. I was in the one that did. When I saw it was a white man in a jungle suit making toward the Cathers’ place, I knew it was Roy Cather. We did everything we could to help him get there—kept people out of his way and so on. He got there, to that jungle back of the Cathers’ garden—Sunday evening.”

  I didn’t even have to close my eyes to see that chalky-white and stubbly-dark face, so oddly frightening against the trees.

  “We didn’t pick him up, in spite of the fact that he’d killed a sentry on the beach. We wanted, of course, to see what he’d do. I’d been building this up, stone by stone, for months. We wanted to know who he was going to see and what he was trying to do. And now . . .” Colonel Primrose shrugged. “. . . he’s dead.”

  I managed to speak, this time, and if I sounded meek it was the basest kind of deception. I was now getting madder still.

  “Is that my fault too?” I asked.

  “Yours and Mary Cather’s. He thought he was safe till you locked him in the shelter. He’d made a deal with Alice Cather, I imagine. When he was cornered he had to act. The minute he acted, somebody else had to act too. He was killed. If you’d only let him alone——”

  “You should have told me,” I said.

  “I couldn’t tell you.”

  He sat down again.

  “I’m in Army Intelligence. They make the rules. They don’t go around taking half-witted civilians into their confidence. There’s a war, Mrs. Latham. It’s no game of cops and robbers.”

  “What was I supposed to do, then?” I demanded. “Wait around and get my throat cut? I may be halfwitted, but I’m brighter than that.”

  He groaned.

  “What possible interest were you to him, Mrs. Latham? There was no question of getting your throat cut.”

  “It didn’t look that way to me with Roy Cather in my room with a knife in his hand,” I said bitterly.

  He was starting to get up and pace again, but he stopped.

  “—What did you say?”