Silversword

by Phyllis A. Whitney

  But I didn’t want to talk about Scott. There were older hurts, older questions, that had never been answered, and this was my opportunity to probe into the past that she had always refused to discuss with me.

  “Sometimes,” I said, “I think that the reason why I’ve never settled down to anything is because of all those unfinished, unexplained happenings back in Hawaii. Perhaps I need to return and find out what Maui holds for me.”

  Her betrayal of inner emotion startled me. “No! You must never go back—I forbid it!”

  She’d forgotten that she could no longer “forbid” or make decisions for me, and she was immediately uncomfortable with her own outburst. Any open discussion or revelation of emotion was something she shied away from, and her control was in place again when she went on.

  “Scott is going to join us in a few moments. He asked me to arrange this meeting without letting you know ahead of time. When he comes in, I’ll leave you two together.”

  This was the last thing I wanted, and I stood up quickly. “I have nothing to say to Scott and I’ll leave right now.”

  She sat back, watching me calmly, and I knew it was already too late. Her hand had touched a bell nearby, and when I looked around Scott Sherman stood in the doorway. Grandmother Elizabeth slipped quietly past him out the door, closing it behind her, and I was trapped.

  I stiffened as I stood looking at him across the room. Like my father, Scott was dark, with eyes that were deeply blue. He wasn’t as tall and he was a bit more slender than Keith Kirby had been, but he had the same winning charm that could break any woman’s heart. I knew all about that from my grandmother, who had always been charmed by her son. The awful part was that it could still reach me. I knew everything about him. I knew how crisp his hair would feel to my fingers where it grew back from his forehead. I knew how he looked with the shadow of a beard in the early morning, and the way the sleepy look in his eyes could quicken to something else. I knew how gentle he could be, how disarmingly tender—when undoubtedly he gave such tenderness easily to other women who attracted him.

  “Hello, Caro,” he said. “Don’t be angry with your grandmother. I had to see you.”

  He was coming toward me across the gold rug and I stood my ground stiffly.

  “It’s over,” I said. “There isn’t anything left for us. I have nothing to say to you.”

  He was so close that I could catch a whiff of his spicy cologne. “I don’t think you ever wanted to leave me, Caro. I know you were hurt, and I’m sorry. But we still love each other, and if you’d give me another chance we could work things out. Don’t you remember all the plans we made, all the happy times we had together?”

  I remembered everything, and hated the remembering.

  “Caro …” I heard the break in his voice. A calculated break that had so often twisted my heart in the past. Now I could resist—I had to resist.

  “If you won’t leave, I will,” I said.

  For a moment he hesitated, but he must have sensed my resolve. “All right, Caroline—if this is the way you want it. But I don’t give up easily.”

  No, he didn’t, I thought, and one of the things he hated to give up was the chance of my someday inheriting a great deal of money from Grandmother Elizabeth. He’d even admitted this to me one time when he’d wanted to put down my own personal worth and make me all the more unsure of myself. No more!

  I held quite still as he touched me lightly, caressingly, his fingers stroking along my cheek, leaving an electric trail. Then he walked out of the room and I looked after him, hating the old response he could rouse in me. This was a man I never wanted to have touch me again. I must get away!

  When he’d gone, Grandmother Elizabeth came back into the room and sat down. She’d seen Scott’s face, and she shook her head in disapproval.

  “You are a foolish young woman, Caroline. I suspect that there are too many unsettled ghosts in your life.”

  “Not ghosts,” I said. “Just unanswered questions. That’s why it’s time for me to go back to Maui. I wonder if Grandma Joanna and Aunt Marla are still alive.”

  She stared at me fixedly for a moment, while I waited for her further disapproval. For once, she completely surprised me.

  “I’ve changed my mind. It may not be wise, but perhaps you do need to go back and take care of those ghosts. Joanna Docket, at least, is still there. I’ve heard from her recently.”

  I dropped into a chair. “You’ve heard from her?”

  “Yes. For the first time in years.” She gestured, and jade on her hand flashed green in the firelight. “There’s a letter lying on that table. Get it, please.”

  I reached for the envelope, which had been opened, but when I would have handed it to her, she shook her head. “No—read it yourself.”

  I noted the recent postmark from Maui, and that the letter was addressed to Grandmother Elizabeth. At the top of the single gray sheet was printed the name MANAOLANA. The signature was that of Joanna Docket.

  “Real it aloud,” Grandmother Elizabeth commanded.

  I steadied the sheet by resting it on my knee, and did as she ordered.

  “Dear Elizabeth:

  “It’s time for me to see my granddaughter again. I have learned that her marriage is failing, so she may need a change of scene. Even though she has never answered my letters, she may still remember the mountain and Manaolana. Send her to me for a little while. I need her here,

  “Yours,

  “Joanna Docket.”

  I choked over the words and blinked back my tears. Manaolana—that lovely name Joanna Docket had given the ranch house. A word that meant all those hopeful qualities of spirit of which she was made.

  “What does she mean—that I never answered her letters?” I demanded. “What letters?”

  Grandmother Elizabeth shrugged. “Oh, they kept coming for a while. Letters from your Aunt Marla too. I thought it best to keep them from you. Just as I never mailed your letters to her. It was far better, as you must agree now, to help you to make a clean break. Otherwise you’d have pined and moped, instead of settling into your life here as you did reasonably well.”

  I couldn’t speak. Shock held me silent. She saw my face and looked faintly surprised. “Why, Caroline, you aren’t going to mind at this late date, are you?”

  Somehow I found my voice. “How dared you! By what right could you do such a thing to a small child? How could you be so heartless?”

  I stood up and walked to the door. I never wanted to see her again, and I had to get away before I burst into furious tears. All my life I’d nursed this pain that I’d tried to sublimate in restless ways. All needless—all for nothing. My longing for Grandma Joanna might have lessened gradually if there had been letters between us for a while. As it was, there had been only a deep, sharp wound that had never stopped aching.

  “Sit down, Caroline,” Grandmother Elizabeth said.

  The habits of childhood years die hard. This was my Grandmother Elizabeth at her most commanding. I came back into the room and sat down.

  “I’ve been worried about you for a long time,” she said, surprising me again. “I knew you weren’t doing your best when it came to your marriage or your life. These silly jobs you hold—they never amount to anything, and you’re always changing to find something new. Someday you will be a very rich woman. Someday you will own this hotel. I think the time has come for you to work at the management with me. So take your little vacation to Hawaii and answer those questions that trouble you. Then come home and start a new life. It may even be that you’ll eventually get back with Scott again. I don’t think he wanted this divorce.”

  My anger died. I knew how useless it was. She would never understand. Even her relenting about my return to Maui didn’t really show understanding. Her very concern was for the wrong aspects of my life. She was simply woven of different cloth, belonging to a different time, and she didn’t realize in the least how atrociously she’d behaved.

  “I’ll think abo
ut what you suggest,” I said. I would think about it for all of three minutes, but it was senseless to tell her now that her hotel was not for me. “I’ll write to Grandma Joanna right away,” I added.

  A water glass stood on a small table beside her chair, and she moved her hand, knocking it over. Grandmother Elizabeth was never clumsy. On the way to the door I looked around, and was alarmed by what I saw. The hint of rouge on her papery skin stood out against her pallor, and both hands were gripping the arms of her chair.

  I went back to her quickly.

  With an effort she relaxed her hands and folded them in the lap of her silk jacquard skirt. “There’s something I’ve never talked about, never been willing to discuss with anyone. Perhaps because if I brought it into the open I couldn’t live with it. Yet it’s been there, trying to destroy me for all these years. Now it must be your burden to carry. There’s no one else I can pass it on to.”

  I couldn’t imagine what she was talking about. I sat down again and waited.

  “Caroline, I’ve always believed that your father’s death was no accident. Someone hated him. Someone wanted him dead. I don’t know whether your Grandmother Joanna ever suspected this, but if you go back you must face the possibility that a terrible crime was committed. You are Keith’s daughter and you owe him something. You must search for the truth.”

  Her words opened a possibility so terrible that I couldn’t accept or believe. Some of my shock crept into my voice.

  “If this is so, why didn’t you—” I began.

  She answered before I finished, in a tone bereft of all feeling, cold as stone dropping on stone. “Because I was afraid. Because I was a coward. I couldn’t face up to what was possible. Perhaps I could have prevented what happened—and that was too awful to live with. Besides, I had you to think of. I had to get us both away as quickly as I could. It would have done no good to stay—there was never any proof. The police were satisfied that it was an accident. But something in me always knew better. I tried to make it up to Keith—” She waved a hand toward the end of the room where all the record of my father’s early life hung on the wall and stood around on tables. “I had to make you understand and love him—I did that for you both! But I didn’t want you ever to go back, so I broke the bonds that might have held you.”

  Staring at her, I saw for the first time that her eyes had sunken with age, and the lids had begun to droop. I had no idea whether there was any truth in her words, or whether she had built up some awful fantasy over the years—just as she might have built up a fantasy of what my father had been like. Only lately, since the breakup with Scott, had I begun to question her ideal of Keith Kirby, and recognize that it was only my loving memory of my father that was true. A small child’s memory. If I returned to Maui now, it wouldn’t be to do as my grandmother asked, but I would try to find out what he had really been like as a man. So I could get to know him as I never had.

  “Promise me!” she cried. “Promise that you’ll try.”

  It was the first time I’d ever pitied her. I kissed her crumpled cheek lightly. “I can’t promise. But I’m glad to be armed with what you’ve told me. Of course, any trail would be too cold to follow.”

  “Be very careful, Caroline. There were those who hated your father.”

  This was melodramatic and very unlike her.

  “I’ll let you know when I leave for Maui,” I told her, and this time I made my escape.

  Elizabeth Kirby had so little in her life besides a hotel. Grandma Joanna had made money raising horses, and she’d inherited pineapple money besides. But she had been rich in so many other ways, whereas Elizabeth, when it came to loving and caring, had lived at a poverty level. She’d lived as well with a secret that had been eating at her for all these years—though the facts might not even be as she thought them.

  I caught a taxi back to the small apartment I’d taken when I left Scott, and as the distance increased between me and the Prince Albert, a strange sense of freedom and hope began to rise in me.

  The moment I was inside I went to an old camphor-wood chest in my bedroom—a chest that had come with me from Maui. I opened it and took out my scrap-book. Grandmother Elizabeth had never discovered this book because I’d been very clever at hiding it from her in a series of ingenious places. In its pages I had lovingly pasted every picture, every article I came across that told me anything about Hawaii. There was a stunning photograph of Iolani Palace in Honolulu, and of course pictures of Diamond Head, which had been easy to come by. Scenes of Maui had been harder to find, but there was one whole page from a newspaper, worn from much handling by me. It was about the mountain, Haleakala. I could still roll those syllables on my tongue: Hah-lay-ah-kah-lah. They’d been fun to say as a child, and I spoke them aloud now to confirm my decision.

  I was going back, as I’d always said I would. I would see my Grandma Joanna again, and perhaps my Aunt Marla, whom I hadn’t thought about in years. She had been hurt in the same accident in the crater of Haleakala as the one that had killed my father, and so injured my mother that she had died weeks later. I refused to let the dreadful suspicion Grandmother Elizabeth had planted in my mind take hold. She was quite capable of believing what might not be true at all. She had done that about Scott and our marriage. But I didn’t need to believe. And when I saw her, Grandma Joanna would undoubtedly clear the air. Not only would I be able to find my father again—the real father of my early years—but I would learn about my beautiful mother too, so she could become a stronger memory for me.

  I made up my mind suddenly.

  I wouldn’t wait to write. I would find out Joanna Docket’s telephone number and call Maui as soon as the time there made it possible.

  It was Grandma Joanna who answered the phone, and we could hardly talk for the tears that choked both her voice and mine. I told her about never receiving her letters, and how they’d never mailed mine to her.

  She moaned, “Auwe!” several times—that expressive Hawaiian wail that I remembered very well. I told her about my divorce and said that Grandmother Elizabeth had shown me her recent letter. “I want to come home,” I said. “I want to come home to Manaolana and you!”

  “I want you to come, Caro honey,” she told me, and the old affectionate name poured soothing comfort around me. With Grandma Joanna I’d be able to figure out my life. I’d been unsettled and searching for too long a time, without knowing where to look for answers. Or even what the questions were. Now they were ready to pour out of me.

  “I’ll make flight reservations and let you know,” I said. “I suppose I’ll need transportation up the mountain to Makawao.” That was the nearest town to the ranch, and the name came readily to my lips.

  “I may not be able to meet your plane, Caro,” she went on. “Your mother—”

  “That’s the main thing I want to know about,” I broke in. “I need to know what happened that awful day in the crater. I need to know more about her death in the hospital.”

  It was her turn to interrupt, and now there was something strange in her voice. She spoke slowly and deliberately. “Caro honey, your mother didn’t die. Whoever told you that? Noelle is very much alive.”

  I couldn’t speak. A wilder anger than any I’d ever known filled me against Elizabeth Kirby. How could she have lied to me like this?

  “I—I didn’t know,” I faltered. “My Grandmother Elizabeth told me—”

  “I’d like to wring Lizzie’s neck,” Joanna said. To call Elizabeth Kirby “Lizzie” was almost as bad as sticking a knife in her back.

  We talked a little more before we hung up. Then I lay down on my bed to stare at the ceiling, and after a time a slow joy rose up in me to wipe out present rage and past anguish. I was going home. I would be with Grandma Joanna again, and somehow my mother had been given back to me miraculously. My beautiful, fragile mother, who had always smelled so delicious, and who had held me so lovingly and sweetly all those years ago. She’d loved to laugh too—I could remember that now. I�
��d had a mother all along! Was there to be a happy ending at last?

  But there are very few happy endings. Just to know that she was alive wasn’t enough. There were still too many questions. Why hadn’t she come after me, no matter what the obstacles? There had been something in Joanna’s voice, something unexplained. I wondered suddenly if Grandmother Elizabeth had really believed that my mother was dead. Had she been hoodwinked herself? If that were true, why would she have been told such a lie?

  I had no answers now—but they would come.

  At least I would escape from Scott Sherman. Today’s meeting had shown me that I might still be vulnerable. In San Francisco he would always be too close.

  For now I would simply look ahead. I was going home to Maui.

  2

  The women flight attendants on the plane wore muumuu—those long, graceful garments that had evolved from the Mother Hubbards that had been requested of the first missionaries by the queens and high chiefeses of Hawaii. They used the word “mahalo” for “thank you” frequently, and I recognized it with pleasure. Though the word seemed clipped on American lips—the vowels not as musically soft as I remembered.

  As a child I had known quite a few Hawaiian words, and perhaps they would come back to me. It was a language of emotion, of spirit, so that even the simple “mahalo” meant more than our English phrase. A sense of warm gratitude and affection was implied, and now the word reached out to me as a Maui-born stranger coming home.

  I settled in my seat for the nearly six-hour flight from San Francisco and closed my eyes so that I could let my thoughts drift. Fortunately, there was no one in the next seat, so I didn’t need to talk.

  When I’d called to let Grandma Joanna know my arrival time and flight number, she told me that Tom O’Neill had agreed to meet my plane and drive me up the mountain. “Agreed,” she said, which seemed strange.

  “Do you remember Tom?” she’d asked.

  I remembered vaguely a vigorous, red-haired man who had worked for her. He had been an Irish paniolo—a cowboy who had worked with the horses in the old days.