Hawaii

by James A. Michener

  The other pastime that he and Florsheim loved was sakura, a crazy Japanese card game played with little black cards that came in a wooden box with a picture of cherry blossoms on the cover. Any beachboy was hailed as the day’s hero who could scrape together enough money to buy a fresh box of sakura cards, and through the long hot days the gang would sit beneath coconut umbrellas, playing the silly game. No other was allowed, and if a man couldn’t play sakura, he couldn’t be a beachboy. Of course he must also speak degenerate pidgin, as on the afternoon when Kelly was protesting the price of cube steak at the corner drug store.

  “Me t’ink high too much, da kine pipty cent,” he mused.

  “Kelly blalah, wha’ da kine da kine you speak?” Florsheim asked idly.

  “Whassamatta you, stoopid? You akamai good too much da kine da kine,” Kelly growled, adding with a chopping motion of his right hand, “Da kine chop chop.”

  “Oh!” Florsheim sang in a high, descending wail of recognition. “You speak da kine da kine? Right, blalah, price too moch. Pipty cent too bloody takai.” And they passed to other equally important topics.

  As Kelly became better acquainted with American girls, he felt sorry for them. Invariably they confided how wretched their lives had been with their haole husbands, how the men were not interested in them and how unsatisfactory sex had been. This latter knowledge always astonished Kelly, for while the girls were with him they could think of little else, and if the world had women who were better at sex than the wahines who came over to Hawaii on the Moana Loa, he concluded they must be real tigers. One day he told Florsheim, “How some wahine gonna be any bettah than da kine wahine we get over heah? What you s’pose da mattah wid dese haole men?”

  In 1947 he got a partial answer, because Florsheim married one of his young divorcees, a girl who had a lot of money and who gave him a Chevrolet convertible, and as long as they stayed in Hawaii things went rather well, but after three months in New York they broke all to hell, and Florsheim came back alone to resume his job on the beach. On a day when there was little doing he explained to his companions, “Dese wahine da kine, seem like dey two people. Over here on a surfboard dey relax, dey screw like mad, dey don’t gi’e a damn. Ova’ heah I t’row my wahine in da jalopy and we go okolehau.” He steered the imaginary car with his hands. “We have bes’ time.”

  “Who’ hoppen?” Kelly asked.

  “I tell you, Kelly blalah,” Florsheim drawled. “She take me New York, she no like da way I dress. She no like da kine talk, and. She doan’ like one goddam t’ing, I t’ink. Allatime give me hell. No more time to go bed in de apternoon, when it’s de bes’. So bimeby she tell me, ‘Florsheim, you gotta go night school learn speak haole no kanaka,’ and I tellem, ‘Go to hell. I ketchem airplane Hawaii,’ and she speak me, Wha’ you gonna use money da kine?’ and I tellem, ‘Seven hunnerd dollars I scoop f’um you,’ and she speak, ‘You dirty boa’, you filthy mountain pig!’ and what I tellem den, I ain’t gonna repeat.”

  “Da kine wahine turn out like dat?” Johnny Pupali mused. “Well, da’s why I tell you boys, ‘Screw ’em but doan’ marry ’em.’ ”

  Florsheim reflected: “Seem like dey good wahine ova’ heah, but anudder kine back home.”

  “You gonna keep da kine Chevvy?” Kelly asked.

  “Yeah,” Florsheim said, adding, “I not halp so sorry for dem wahine like I was b’fore.”

  The sweet days rolled on and Kelly discovered what the older beachboys already knew: that the best wahines of all were those from the Deep South. They were gentler, kinder, and in memorable ways much more loving. They seemed fascinated by Kelly’s dark-brown body, and on three different occasions Kelly stayed for days at a time in one suite or another with some adorable girl from the South, without ever leaving the room and often without dressing from one day to the next. At mealtime he would throw a small towel about his waist, tucking in the ends as if it were a sarong, and the wahine from Montgomery or Atlanta or Birmingham would admire him as he lolled about the davenport. Once such a girl said, “You’re awfully close to a nigra, Kelly, and yet you aren’t. It’s fascinating.”

  “Hawaiians hate niggers,” Kelly assured her, and she felt better.

  “How do you make your living?” she asked softly, coming to lie beside him after the food had been pushed away.

  “S’pose I learn you surfin’, I get paid.”

  “You get paid for what you did on that surfboard?” she gasped.

  “Whassamatta, you no look you bill? Clerk put ’im on dere.”

  “Do you get paid … for days like this?”

  “Clerk put ‘im on. Rules say I’m s’pose teachin’ you somethin’.”

  “That you are,” she said softly as they lapsed off into another nap.

  In time the girls he slept with became fused in his memory, for one sent another who sent another, but they always seemed to be the same girl, someone he had first met during the war. But there were a few whom he remembered forever. Once a young widow from Baton Rouge flew into the islands, and when he met her he calculated: “Dis wahine t’ree nights da kine, maybe four.” He had underestimated, for in her sorrow the young woman would accept no man, yet when they stood in her cabin aboard the departing Moana Loa she said in a soft southern drawl, “The world is such a goddamned lonely place, Kelly.”

  “S’pose you lose da kine man you love, I t’ink maybe so,” he said.

  “I never loved Charley,” she confessed, blowing her nose. “But he was a decent man, a good human being, and the world is worse off now that he’s gone.”

  “What you gonna do bimeby?” he asked her, lolling with one arm about the end of the bed.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “How old are you, Kelly?”

  “I twenty-two, las’ week.”

  “You have your life ahead of you, Kelly. It should be so exciting. But never kid yourself, Kelly. The world is a very lonely place.”

  “People come, dey go,” he said philosophically.

  “But when a good one comes, hold onto the memory. It’s almost time for the whistle, and I wonder if I might do one thing before you go?”

  “Who’ dat?” Kelly asked suspiciously.

  “Could I kiss you good-bye? You’ve been so kind and understanding.” She started to say something more, but broke into tears and pressed her beautiful white face to his. “You are such a goddamned decent human being,” she whispered. “More than anything in the world I needed to meet someone like you.”

  Biting her lip and sniffling away her tears, she pushed him back toward the door and said, “Kelly, do you understand even remotely how deeply a woman like me prays for the success of a strong young man like you? I wish the heavens could open and give you their glory. Kelly, make a good life for yourself. Don’t be a bum. For you are one of the men whom Jesus loves.” And she sent him away.

  Often when the surf was breaking he contemplated her words and wondered how a man went about building a good life for himself. He suspected that it consisted neither in being an old stud horse like Johnny Pupali, fun though that was, nor in wasting one’s energies on a haole wife the way Florsheim had done. Yet all he knew how to do was lie in the sun, play slack-key and sakura, and teach wahines how to surf. So for the time being that had to be good enough.

  In late 1947 however a night-club singer from New York arrived in the islands—a two-night wahine, she turned out to be—and she took such a boisterous joy in Kelly that one night she cried, “God, they ought to build a monument to you, Beachboy!”

  She was outraged when she learned that the current popular song, “The Rolling Surf,” was something that Kelly had composed on the beach and had given away to whoever wanted it. A mainland musician had glommed onto it, added a few professional twists, and made a pile of money from it.

  “You ought to sue the dirty bastard!” she yelled. Later she tested Kelly’s voice and found it good. “Tomorrow night, Kelly Kanakoa, you’re going to sing with me. In the dining room of the Lagoon.
”

  “I no like singin’,” Kelly protested, but she asked, “What’s that lovely thing you and the falsetto boy were doing with your ukuleles?”

  “You speak da kine ‘Hawaiian Wedding Song’?” he asked.

  “The one where you start low, and he comes in high?”

  Casually, Kelly started singing “Ke Kali Ne Au,” the greatest of all Hawaiian songs, a glorious, haunting evocation of the islands. At the moment he was wearing a Lagoon towel as a sarong, with a hibiscus flower in his hair, and as he sang, the night-club girl sensed his full power and cried, “Kelly, nothing can stop you.”

  After one day’s rehearsal, for the girl was a real professional and learned quickly, Kelly Kanakoa, dressed in a red and white sarong, with one of his mother’s whale-tooth hooks dangling from a silver chain about his neck, and with a flower in his hair, came onto the floor of the Lagoon and started singing with the voice that was to become famous throughout the islands. “The Wedding Song” was unusual in that it provided a powerful solo for a baritone voice and a high, soaring dreamlike melody for a soprano. It was a true art song, worthy of Schubert or Hugo Wolf, and although that night’s audience had heard it often before, sung by blowzy baritones and worse sopranos, they had not really heard the full majesty of the lyric outcry. Kelly was a man in love, a muscular, bronzed god, and the slim blond girl from New York was in all ways his counterfoil. It was a memorable evening, and as it ended, the singer called to Kelly while he washed down in her shower, “How’d you like to come to New York with me?”

  “I doan’ leave da rock,” he called back.

  “You don’t have to marry me,” she assured him, aware before he was of his apprehensions. “Just sing.”

  “Me ’n’ da beach, we akamai,” he said, and although she begged him several more times while they were in bed, he insisted that his place was in Hawaii. “See da kine wha’ hoppen Florsheim!” he repeated.

  “Well, anyway,” she said as she dressed for the plane. “We taught one another a lot in a few days.”

  “You speak da trufe,” Kelly agreed.

  “You gonna keep on singing?” she asked.

  “Skoshi singin’, skoshi surfin’.”

  “Don’t give up the surfing,” she said sardonically. “You got a real good thing working for you there.”

  “Seestah, dis kanaka doan’ aim to lose it,” Kelly laughed.

  “I’m sure you don’t,” she cracked. She was brassy, and her hair was dark at the roots, but she was a good clean companion, and Kelly appreciated her.

  “I ain’t able come out to da airport,” he said apologetically.

  “You took care of things here,” she assured him, patting the bed, “and that’s where it counts.”

  Then, in early 1948, when the tourist business was beginning to boom, he received a cable from some wahine in Boston named Rennie, but he couldn’t remember who she was, but anyway she said, “MEET MOANA LOA MRS. DALE HENDERSON.” And when the ship came in, Florsheim, barefooted and staring up at the railing asked, “Which one you wahine, Kelly blalah?”

  “Maybe da kine,” he indicated with a shrug of his shoulder.

  “You s’pose she gonna lay?” Florsheim asked, appraising the slim, handsomely groomed girl who appeared to be in her early thirties.

  “She look maybe two nights, maybe four,” Kelly calculated, for he had found that women who spent unusual care on their appearance were often more tardy in climbing into bed than their sisters who called to the world, “Here I am, wind-blown and happy!”

  Kelly, who like the other beachboys was privileged to climb aboard the Moana Loa before disembarkation started, elbowed his way along the crowded deck and touched Mrs. Henderson on the arm. She turned and smiled at him, a clean, unconfused greeting. When he shook hands with her he asked, “You name Dale or somethin’ else? Seem like nobody can’t speak man’s name, woman’s name no more.”

  “My name is Mrs. Henderson. Elinor Henderson,” she replied in the crisp and self-possessed voice of a New Englander. “I’m from Boston.”

  Kelly very much wanted to ask, “Who dis Rennie wahine cable me? I no remember nobody in Boston.” But he didn’t speak. One rule he had learned in his beachboy business: never mention one woman to another, so that even though most of the customers he met had been referred to him by others, often intimate friends, he never mentioned that fact. Culling his brain furiously, he still failed to recall who Rennie was and he did not refer to her cable. But Mrs. Henderson did.

  “A college classmate of mine at Smith …”

  “Dat doan’ sound like no wahine college, Smith.”

  “Rennie Blackwell, she told me to be sure to look you up.”

  Quickly Kelly composed his face as if he knew well who Rennie Blackwell was, and just as quickly Mrs. Henderson thought: “After all she told me, and he doesn’t even remember her name.” Wanting perversely to explore the situation further she added, “Rennie was the girl from Tulsa.” Still Kelly could not place her among the nameless girls that populated his life, and now he was aware that Mrs. Henderson was playing a game with him, so he lapsed into his most barbarous pidgin and banged his head with his fist. “Sometime I no akamai da kine. Dis wahine Rennie I not collect.”

  Mrs. Henderson smiled and said, “She collects you, Kelly.”

  He was irritated with this secure woman and said, “S’pose one year pass, bimeby I say Florsheim, ‘Cable here speak Elinor Henderson. Who dat one wahine?’ Florsheim he doan’ collect. I doan’ collect.”

  “Who’s Florsheim?” Elinor asked.

  “Da kine beachboy yonder ‘longside tall wahine,” Kelly explained.

  Mrs. Henderson laughed merrily and said, “Rennie told me you were the best beachboy in the business, but you must promise me one thing.”

  “Wha’ dat?”

  “You aren’t required to talk pidgin to me any longer. I’ll bet you graduated with honors from Hewlett Hall. You can probably speak English better than I can.” She smiled warmly and asked, “Aren’t you going to give me the lei?”

  “I’m afraid to kiss you, Mrs. Henderson,” he laughed, and handed her the flowers, but Florsheim saw this and rushed up, protesting, “Jeezus Crisss! Kanaka handin’ wahine flowers like New York?” He grabbed the lei, plopped it around Elinor’s head and kissed her powerfully.

  “Florsheim’s been in New York,” Kelly joked. “He knows how to act like a Hawaiian.”

  “Florsheim? In New York?” Mrs. Henderson reflected, studying the huge beachboy with the long hair and the wreath of maile leaves. “I’ll bet the city’ll never be the same.”

  “He married a society girl,” Kelly explained. “Stayed with her three months and came back. He got a Chevvy convertible out of it. In fact, we’re riding back to the hotel in it.”

  At this point Florsheim’s girl from Kansas City hustled up, heavy with leis and mascara, and giggled: “My God! Aren’t these men positively divine?” She grabbed Florsheim’s dark-brown arm, felt the muscles admiringly and asked, “You ever hit a man with that fist, Florsheim?”

  “Nevah,” the beachboy replied. “Only wimmin.”

  His girl laughed outrageously, and when the various bits of luggage were piled into the Chevvy, the two couples headed for the Lagoon, but when Florsheim drove up King Street and past the old mission houses, Elinor Henderson abruptly asked him to stop, and she studied the historic buildings carefully, explaining at last, “My great-great-grandmother was born in that house. Originally I was a Quigley.”

  “Never heard of them,” Kelly said honestly.

  “They didn’t stay long. But I’m doing a biography of them … for my thesis. I teach at Smith, you know.”

  “You da kine wahine bimeby gonna write a book?” Florsheim asked, as he resumed the trip.

  “Tell him he doesn’t have to talk pidgin,” Elinor suggested.

  “He can’t talk anything else,” Kelly laughed.

  “I think pidgin’s just adorable,” the girl in front sai
d, and Kelly thought: “Looks like I’ve got a four-nighter at best, and maybe not at all, but good old Florsheim better watch out or he’s going to be layin’ that babe in the lobby.”

  Kelly’s suspicion about Elinor Henderson proved correct, for she was not a four-nighter or even a six. She loved surfing and felt secure in Kelly’s arms, but that was all. Yet one night when Kelly borrowed Florsheim’s convertible—for the Kansas City girl had said flatly, “Why go riding in a Chevvy when you can have so much fun in bed?”—he drove Elinor out to Koko Head, where they sat in darkness talking.

  “In the islands we call this kind of date, ‘Watching the midnight submarine races,’ ” he explained.

  “Very witty,” she laughed.

  “How’s the biography coming along?” he asked.

  “I’m quite perplexed,” she confessed.

  “No good, eh?”

  “I have been sorely tempted to put it aside, Kelly.”

  “Why?”

  There was a long pause in the darkness as the late moon climbed out of the sea in the perpetual mystery of the tropics. Along the shore a coconut palm dipped out to meet it, and the night was heavy, bearing down on the world. Suddenly Elinor turned to Kelly and took his hands. “I have been driven mad by the desire to write about you, Kelly,” she said.

  The beachboy was astonished. “Me!” he cried. “What’s there to write about me?”

  She explained in clear, swift sentences, without allowing him to interrupt: “I have been haunted by Hawaii ever since I read my great-great-great-grandfather’s secret journal. He stayed here only seven years. Couldn’t take any more. And when he got back to Boston he wrote a completely frank account of his apprehensions. I can see his dear old handwriting still: ‘I shall write as if God were looking over my shoulder, for since He ordained these things He must understand them.’ ”

  “What did he write?” Kelly inquired.

  “He said that we Christians had invaded the islands with the proper God but with an improper set of supporting values. It was his conviction that our God saved the islands, but our ideas killed them. Particularly the Hawaiians. And at one point, Kelly, he wrote a prophetic passage about the Hawaiian of the future. I copied it down, and last night I read it again, and he was describing you.”