by Anthology
“All right,” said she, “I’ll bless the site, then your place.”
So I proudly ushered her onto my lanai, where she paused for a long moment, slowly surveying the city, and sky, and sea from Punchbowl to Diamond Head. “You see, the three people are unhappy, because the bones of each one are not together.”
“I don’t blame them,” said I. “I wouldn’t like to have one arm of mine on mainland China and the rest of me here.”
“Exactly,” said Emma. Extending toward the sky her left hand, as the hand nearer to her heart, and her right hand downward, as if touching the three spirits one by one, she blessed them gently and reassuringly in a voice as warm as that of the brightly shining sun. “In a little while we will all be one,” she said in such a way that I thought I had never before known grace. She paused for another long moment, then smiled, turning toward me very slowly but with evident satisfaction: “Everything is fine now. They are happy. Now let’s see the rest of your place.”
The blessing seemed an instant miracle. Nobody followed me again, nor was I disturbed by any more racket in my ears. In fact, it has seemed so quiet since then that I sometimes actually wish for noise, just to be certain other people are living here.
Emma gave my home a most detailed blessing, moving slowly and quietly from room to room, pausing with deliberate looks into the distant sky, scrutinizing carefully each comer of every room, touching all major items of furniture, silently verbalizing her blessings and following each of them with a smile. She would lay her great hand on walls, counters, and those appliances that have wires or pipes connected to the ground, at the same time waiting and listening but not moving on until satisfaction beamed over her face, permeating the air with a mother’s gentle assurance. While we were moving around my bedroom, she looked at the closet and asked what was in it. “May I have a look?”
“Of course,” said I and opened the doors. “Look anywhere. Nothing but clothes.”
But pointing toward one corner, “What’s in that?” she asked.
“My footlocker. I store my mainland winter clothes in it.”
“Something else too. What?”
Then I recalled. “Oh, some scrolls that I don’t want to get damp.”
“Scrolls!” Emma looked at me sternly, “You mean scrolls which the Chinese people respect and you chuck away in a dark comer like that? Hang them up! Don’t you Chinese people always have a place in your home where you keep a scroll hanging? A place for respect?”
“Yes,” said I. “In this apartment the place would be above the altar table in my living room facing Diamond Head.”
“Then hang the scrolls there.”
I promised I would.
After Emma finished blessing my apartment, I told her about the two women who followed me. She was interested to know if they were haoles (Caucasians) or if they had darker skin on the order of hers and mine. She herself, she said, was one-eighth Chinese on her mother’s side. As we talked, it seemed to me that the air was full of reluctance for us to break up, though we both knew she had to catch a plane soon for the island of Kauai. I later learned that she was going there to attend her brother’s funeral. When we said goodbye, I noticed her eyes were no longer so strange.
Since that first meeting, Emma has visited me quite often, frequently noting that my home was full of “such warmth.” We usually sit across my dining table, she facing out toward Waikiki, and chat about things of the spirit. Soon I began to call her “Auntie” because of my growing affection for her.
One day I showed her a clipping from a recent issue of Fate magazine (Vol. 25, No. 6, June, 1972, page 82), that identified her as the great-great-granddaughter of ka hum nui (the chief hum) of King Kamehameha the Great. It quoted her story about “a beautiful woman dressed in white” who appeared out of nowhere to halt the progress of her half-Hawaiian and half-Caucasian grandpa, Howard de Fries, on his way to gather mountain apples. Then a boulder that almost certainly would have killed him thundered across the path ahead, but when he turned around to thank the lady for saving his life, she was nowhere to be seen.
“Every word in it is true,” Auntie Emma said.
During another visit I asked her to get in touch with the three spirits who had been disturbed by the building of the Contessa and to tell them that they would be welcome at my place any time. “I’m a traditional Chinese,” I said. “We always share our home with others.”
She smiled. “They are not here any more. They have moved on. Don’t worry about them.”
Everything was going along just fine. When Auntie Emma again came to call, I told her that I had silently promised the first woman who had followed me that I would not walk on “her” side of the street. But now I wondered if it would be all right for me to do so. Not that I had to. I just wanted to know if it would be all right.
“Of course, walk anywhere,” she answered firmly. “There is no evil around you.”
And then, still walking on the Contessa side of the street a few days later, I saw two little Oriental girls of not more than five years old waiting at the Kahoaloha Lane crossing. Each had the most beautiful shiny smooth hair hanging below her waist. Each carried the largest size Philippine tote-bag. Their tiny hands clutched two or three of the largest University-of-Hawaii spiral notebooks, hugging them closely to their light pink sweaters. I thought I ought to cross in the pedestrian walk with them for the same reason I had earlier crossed the street with the woman who told me to go back to China. I asked the girls if they did not want me to help them. They looked at me shyly, giggled, and chatter-boxed with each other. I decided to mind my own business and walked on, but I could not forget the girls. So I turned back and crossed with them. Skipping and chatterboxing, they happily went ahead. But when they reached the pushbutton that allows pedestrians to change the traffic light, they stopped, pushed it, and waited to re-cross the street. It made me feel very strange indeed, having just gone out of my way to help them and now discovering they wanted to go back again. They turned around to look at me, talked to each other some more, re-crossed the street when the signal turned green, and disappeared into the morning crowd.
When I asked Auntie Emma if they were somehow related to the two women who followed me, she thought for a moment and said, “Who else would they be?”
“They came to walk me to the other side of the street to let me know that I could walk on their side of the street?” I continued.
Auntie Emma said, “What could be more obvious?”
One morning, remembering the person who had followed me onto the campus, I thought of how we both had stopped and looked at a long steep flight of steps in front of Bachman Annex. But when I got to this point, I discovered that there were no such steps and never had been, for the building has only a ground floor. And I wished I could have remembered the words I thought I had seen on a big gold sign at their top.
When Auntie Emma telephoned early in June, she asked me as usual how I was.
“Great, great, great!” said I. “Finals are over. Grades just got turned in. And I’m going to spend all summer doing nothing but decorating this place of mine until it’s exactly the toy box my heart desires. Just great! Remember, you always say ‘Do something for yourself’? I’m going to do it good and thorough. And! Next time when you come, those scrolls that were in my footlocker will be hung up, just as you said. Isn’t that great?”
She did not say anything for a moment, then she said, “Are you really so fine?”
I assured her that I was. There was no response at the other end of the line. So I went on, “Don’t you worry about me. I’m sitting on top of the world. Life is like one endless bed of roses.” Then I began to wonder. Why she had asked?
“Last night I dreamed I was boiling some lemon grass to give you a bath,” she said. “I just wondered what happened to you.”
At last I recalled a recent minor siege of shingles. My left leg, from knee to toe, had been covered with marks. “But I’m fine now,” I said. “I sti
ll have all sorts of black marks on my left leg, my foot, and all of my toes, but they don’t bother me. When they itch, I try to forget it. That’s all.”
Nevertheless, Auntie Emma soon arrived with a quart of lemon grass tea. I was to drink one glass the first thing in the morning and one glass the last thing before bed. “Are you going to drink it?” she asked.
“Sure,” I answered. “It’s just like Chinese herb medicine. My maternal uncles were herb doctors. I’m used to it. You are one-eighth Chinese; I’m sure you’ve seen Chinese herbs in Chinatown.”
I faithfully followed her directions. After one day, the itch was gone. At the end of the third day, all the black marks except for the first real bad one had disappeared. My doctor was delighted and amazed.
On December 7, her birthday, Auntie Emma came over again and said, “During deep meditation, your white-robed angel came to me in a radiant light to tell me you are my spiritual daughter. It has happened three times now.” And with this new relationship so well established, she began to confide in me more deeply.
“When I was five years old, we were living on Lemon Street in Waikiki,” she said. “And late one afternoon when I was sitting in my grandfather’s lap on our lanai I noticed a certain tall man going by. His clothes were loose and flurry, and he seemed different from the other people, very different. I looked at him and looked at him. It seemed as if he did not have any substance—as if he was sort of airy. I followed him with my eyes as he went by, and I felt very strange. At the same time, a loud wailing rose out of the house next door; and the following day we learned that the father had passed on—at about the same time I had seen the tall man.”
Later, when Auntie Emma was nine and living in Aiea, she was sitting one early morning on a bench under a guava tree on the big lawn in front of her house, when she saw behind her right shoulder a lady in white with flowing white hair, impressively white. She had two huge eyes that were very, very different from ordinary eyes. Instead of having pupils, they were full of radiance. Oh, they were so beautiful, Auntie Emma recalled. “What’s your name?” asked the strange lady.
“Emma,” she answered.
“But you are really Alexandria,” said the lady.
“Yes,” Auntie Emma replied, although she always knew that her grandfather had named her after Hawaii’s Queen Emma.
Entranced by the strange white-haired lady’s eyes, “Your eyes are so beautiful,” she said.
“Do you want to touch them?” the lady asked.
“Yes,” answered Auntie Emma, reaching up and touching them with the first three fingers of her right hand, and feeling a tingling sensation in the tips of her three fingers. Looking at her fingers, she could find nothing different. She rubbed them with her right thumb. The tingling feeling did not go away. Then she turned to look back at the lady again, but the lady was gone.
Still feeling a strangeness, she turned to look over her left shoulder—and there was a white robed man. His hair too was long and flowing but black. His eyes too were very big, without pupils but full of radiance. Oh, they were so beautiful. The man asked, “What’s your name?”
“Emma,” she answered.
“But you are really Alexandria, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” she replied. She realized then that her own name was supposed to be Alexandria. This was what they were telling her.
During this conversation the man’s black hair gradually turned white, and it became just like that of the lady, impressively white.
“The same person!” I interrupted Auntie Emma to say. “The same person!” I repeated.
“Yes,” she said. “You see, they can be either man or woman.” Then she went on with her story.
“You have beautiful eyes. May I touch them?” she asked the man, and he told her she might.
So she reached up and touched them with the first three fingers of her left hand and took her hand away. Again she felt a tingling in the tips of her fingers. And again she looked but could find nothing different. She rubbed them with her left thumb. The tingling did not go away. She turned around to look again at the man, but he was gone.
Earlier in her story, as Auntie Emma told of the first apparition, it seemed to me that the oval face of Hawaii’s Queen Emma gradually superimposed itself over Auntie Emma’s round one, Queen Emma’s slender neck over Auntie Emma’s full neck, and her angular shoulders over Auntie Emma’s ample ones. Above a low wide round dark yoke, the queen’s neck was bare, and her dark hair was piled neat and high, as in the pictures one sees of her. This clear image of the stately queen remained without motion for six or seven seconds. Then it gradually faded away; the top of her face, which appeared first, disappeared last.
While Auntie Emma was telling me about the second apparition, I again felt an intense presence, but different from that which I felt when the queen appeared. This presence began immediately in front of me and moved across the dining table to Auntie Emma and up over her bosom to her face, where I saw that single eye again, covering the part between temple and temple, eyebrow and cheek. Once again she looked the way she did at the very first; but in a few seconds the presence faded away, and Auntie Emma’s eyes returned to normal.
When I was unable to keep the experience to myself any longer, and interrupted to say I had seen the queen, Auntie Emma looked at me squarely for a long moment. I had known she was named after the queen and had been for many years a hostess at Queen Emma’s Summer Palace, which has been restored as a museum. Now quietly and contemplatively she said, “Many people have told me I’m her re-birth.”
Then she continued with her story.
After touching the eyes of the two apparitions, she gazed at the tips of all six tingling fingers. There was nothing different about them that she could see. She rubbed them with her thumbs again and again. Then she brought her hands together with the ends of the three fingers of one hand touching those of the other. And as if from some magnetic attraction, her hands stuck together. She tried to separate them but could not. She pulled and pulled and pulled but could not pull them apart. Finally, with great effort, she managed to do so. She looked at the tips of the fingers again—still nothing different to be seen. Again she rubbed the three fingers on each hand with their respective thumbs—still the tingling was there. Then, with her fingers, she stroked her eyes a few times. When she stopped and opened her eyes, everything she saw appeared nearer and clearer.
She got up and walked back to the house, where her grandfather was standing on the lanai. “Emma!” he demanded. “Where have you been?”
And when she said nothing, he told her that her eyes looked different.
Before she left the Contessa that day, Auntie Emma, who says she’s approaching seventy, broke into a big smile. “All my life people have told me I would have a Chinese daughter,” she continued. “I always wondered how that was going to be. The day after your doctor told me about you, I said to my sister Marion, ‘My Chinese daughter has come.’ ”
A week or so later, I told Auntie Emma over the telephone that the more I thought about Queen Emma appearing at my home, the more honored I felt. “Imagine! Hawaiian royalty condescending to visit my humble shack, when I’m a total Chinese without a single drop of Hawaiian blood or a solitary Hawaiian cell in me.”
“That’s right,” Auntie Emma’s voice said at the other end of the line. “In this life.” A long pause. “In one of your previous births you were a Hawaiian.” Then she went on, “Did you not say that you felt something telling you that you were moving away from Ann Arbor before you came out here? Did you not say that you felt something telling you that you were moving out of your former apartment in Honolulu before you settled at the Contessa? There must be a meaning behind all this.”
In trying to sense out this meaning, I recalled the Chinese concept of the relation of heaven, earth, and the individual: a person completes one life cycle when he reaches sixty, and a new cycle begins at sixty-one. At sixty, after wandering for thirty-five years from one ren
ted apartment to another in the United States, I had at last bought a permanent residence. But it was not until I had come to know Emma de Fries—as kahuna, auntie, mother, and queen—that I was made to feel at home, and ready for a new cycle to begin.
Eugene Burdick
The Puzzle of
the Ninety-Eight
Born in Iowa in 1918, Eugene Burdick went as a child to California. After high school he worked as a clerk, ditchdigger, and truck driver until he had saved $150, enough to enable him to enter Stanford University. He was graduated in 1941 and soon thereafter was married, taken into the Navy, and sent to Guadalcanal. As a gunnery officer aboard various ships, he spent twenty-six months in the Pacific.
With a Rhodes scholarship at Oxford, Burdick won a Ph.D. degree and while a professor of political science at the University of California at Berkeley published his first novel, The Ninth Wave (1956). Thereafter he gained celebrity as co-author of The Ugly American with William Lederer (1958) and Fail-Safe with Harvey Wheeler (1962). “The Puzzle of the Ninety-Eight” is taken from The Blue of Capricorn, a collection of factual and fictional writings about the Pacific (1961). Burdick died in 1965 of a heart attack during a tennis match.
THIS story is nine-tenths true. The ninety-eight died, and they died in the circumstances which I depict. These facts are as accurate as the records of a military court-martial can make them. But no court-martial knows what goes on in the minds of ninety-eight men who lived the most isolated life of any prisoners of World War II. That must be the task of imagination.
Wake Island is a V-shaped atoll which rises about twelve feet above the water. The land above water is tiny, no more than two and a half square miles. It is also miserable—coral rubble and sand so porous that it will hold no fresh water. Few plants can live on such land, but the morning-glory vine, a shrub called desert magnolia, and a dwarf Buka tree supply patches of green color.