Silversword

by Phyllis A. Whitney

  “No!” She was fully Elizabeth Kirby again. “I don’t believe that for a moment!”

  Again I answered quietly, “I wonder if we can ever dare to say, ‘I don’t believe.’ That closes all the doors and nothing new ever comes through a closed door.” Or a closed mind, I might have added. “So we go on believing what we choose, and maybe we never catch a glimmer of what might be learned if only we’d leave everything open.”

  She looked at me quickly in the dimming light. “You’ve changed, Caroline.”

  “Not enough,” I said. “I’m still trying.”

  What I was trying to do at the moment was to hold to my surface calm, and suppress the bitterness against my grandmother that wanted to rise again. I didn’t succeed entirely.

  “You’ve always believed what you wanted to believe about my father,” I told her. “And you’ve tried to make me feel exactly the way you did.”

  She drew away from me and started ahead, but I held her back. My own anger was suddenly in the open, and perhaps it had to be released.

  “For once you’re going to listen to me!” I cried. “Whenever trickles of the truth about my father have tried to come through—as must have happened at times—you just slammed the door again. You wanted me to worship my father. You tried to see another Keith in Scott so you could imprint my father’s pattern all over again. But Scott can’t be Keith. Not that hero on a pedestal. Or even the man who lived for his own pleasure. He’s too weak for that. You’ve always had to be stronger than anyone else, no matter how much damage you did!”

  We were on the private road to Manaolana now, and she stopped to face me—not giving in for a second. But these things had been suppressed for too long, and I had to spill them all out.

  “You’ve never listened to me before, but you have to listen now. You chose to think my father was murdered, and you blamed others for his death. But you’ve never blamed him. Not even though he may have asked for what happened.”

  “I don’t blame him now!” she cried. She stumbled again in her smart shoes, and I caught her arm.

  We could see the lights of the house shining through the trees. For a moment, feeling drained, I wanted more than anything to get on Pom-Pom and ride away—escape, as my mother had tried to do. But there was still one thing more I had to say to Grandmother Elizabeth.

  “The time has come for you to blame him—to start seeing him the way he must have been. I’ve learned all sorts of things about him since I came here. And from different people. I think he must have always been a taker. Perhaps you taught him that. He manipulated women and used them—including you. But you would never see that. All you gave me were the myths you built up around him—and fooled yourself with.”

  “Keith died—he was murdered!” She sounded defensive now, fighting for everything she’d believed. At least she had believed these things on the surface. Perhaps somewhere deep inside her some ugly truths were trying to get out. I felt a sudden misgiving about what I had done, and I tried to speak more quietly.

  “Please listen to me, Grandmother Elizabeth. What we need to accept now is that none of this matters. What happened doesn’t matter by this time. He’s gone and all that was a long time ago. We have to work out our lives as they are now. I’ve thought that it might help Noelle to recover if only she would remember what happened. But perhaps that was wrong too. I’m not sure anymore that I want her to go back to what happened.”

  “Because she killed my son?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think anyone really knows, even though they’ve been protecting her. All I want now is for her to realize that time has passed, so she can accept me as her daughter. Let her keep her blank spaces about all the rest.”

  Elizabeth answered me sharply. “You’re as wrong-headed as ever! It certainly matters if my son was murdered and someone has gone unpunished. It matters to all of them at Manaolana because they’re frightened about something.”

  She hadn’t changed. She would never see anything except her own course.

  “Tell me one thing,” I said. “What did Noelle mean when she said she wouldn’t go to the crater, and you couldn’t force her to go?”

  “But that wasn’t true! She’s distorted everything in her poor, crazy mind. By that time I was trying to persuade them all to call off the trip. Keith wouldn’t hear of that. He told me that everything would be all right—that he had a plan. He told me—” she broke off suddenly.

  I caught her up at once. “What plan?”

  She went on as though she hadn’t heard me. “I did ride after them. But I didn’t make it to the top. I can’t tell you any more.”

  Or else she wouldn’t tell me. We’d reached the camphor tree, and there was nothing to do but give up for now.

  “Go ahead to the house,” I said. “I’ll take Pom-Pom around to the stable.”

  She walked away from me, her back stiff and her head high. I watched her go with a grudging sense of admiration. Perhaps she bluffed as much as anyone else—maybe even more, since she didn’t dare allow anyone to guess her vulnerability. I felt an unexpected pity—which was the last thing Elizabeth Kirby would want.

  Tom was waiting for me, and he took charge of Pom-Pom. “Did you find David’s cabin all right?” he asked.

  “Yes. I had no trouble.” I followed him down the wide aisle between stalls and watched as he began rubbing Pom-Pom down. I stroked her nose and fed her the reward of an apple, postponing my return to the house.

  “The old woman’s going to blow everything sky high, isn’t she?” Tom said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I remember her. I’ll bet you don’t even know that she rode after them up Haleakala that day?”

  So he’d known about that. “Do you think she made it to the top?”

  “I didn’t say that. She was too soft from city living. But one of the horses had been out, and I found it tethered to a tree here when I came back. Nobody else said they’d had it out. I saw her the next day and asked her straight out if she’d ridden up there. She looked like she wanted to spit in my eye and she walked off without answering.”

  It was possible that even Elizabeth could have had misgivings and tried to stop what she’d indirectly started. But I couldn’t deal with anything more right now, and I started for the door.

  “Take the flashlight,” Tom said. “And you’d better hurry. I think a squall is blowing up.”

  There’d been no rain since I’d come here, but where the air had been calm a little while before, now the tree branches were thrashing, and the luminous night sky had clouded over. Wind tugged at me as I hurried along the path to the house, grateful for the flashlight’s beam.

  Inside, good dinner smells came from the kitchen, and when I looked into the dining room I found Grandmother Elizabeth, who would never have done such a thing at home, dutifully helping to set the table. She looked perfectly calm and in control, and I trusted her less than ever. Vulnerable she might be—but who knew why?

  As I went down the hall to Noelle’s room, I could hear sheets of rain slashing against the house, while wind gusts made the windows rattle. I found my mother standing before glass doors in her room, looking out at the lighted area around the house.

  She smiled as I came to stand beside her. “Lono’s beating his thunder drums tonight. Do you hear them? There—that was a lightning spear. He’s the god of thunder, and of growing things too. He brings the rain that we need so badly.”

  Her mood seemed calm, undisturbed, in spite of what she’d been through earlier that day. Perhaps the gift of being able to put away memory as she would a cape was good for her.

  “I’m painting a new picture,” she said. “I’ve been working hard on it, though it’s not nearly done. Just the idea is there. Would you like to see it?”

  I walked over to the easel and found that this painting was no childish concept. The canvas was fairly large, and she’d used acrylics, though not bright colors. The strange scene had been painted entirely in e
arth tones, from wheat to beige to deep tan. A wide window occupied most of the picture, and the observer stood outside looking into a room. I knew it was outside because a few straw-colored vines with dead brown leaves clinging to them wove beneath the window and along what was the wooden siding of a house. Nothing else of the building had been shown. The interior of the room into which one looked was as drably colored as the rest, and barely sketched in. The one thing clear was another window across the room, again shown with a vine and dead leaves. This slightly smaller window looked through to another window, which looked into another—and on and on into infinity. There was something eerie about the painting, and terribly unsettling.

  “What does it mean?” I asked.

  She shook her head, and jumped as a thunderclap sounded outside. “I’m not sure. It was what I had to paint. I suppose there are rooms after rooms after rooms—but I only cared about the windows. Because you can look through windows.”

  “What do you see when you look through these?”

  “That’s the trouble—I don’t know. They get smaller and smaller, and there’s nothing at the end—just tinier windows forever. Too tiny to paint.”

  She turned from the easel and dropped into a chair. Rain beat against glass, and a branch somewhere scraped across the roof. Outside, the evening was filled with sound, and sometimes lightning slashed the garden, followed by Lono’s thunder drums.

  Noelle looked at me solemnly, not childlike now—more like the woman she needed to become. “Perhaps I was painting my memory. Perhaps that’s what it’s like when I try to go back in time. It all becomes tiny and disappears. I don’t know how to reach through all those windows.”

  I sat beside her, and she let me take her hand. “Perhaps you don’t need to see through to the end. Just close all the windows and let what lies beyond go. It doesn’t matter if there are things you can’t remember. It doesn’t really matter, so long as you can cross the years to the present.”

  “I wonder if I can do that,” she said wistfully.

  “Perhaps you can. You know now that Keith died a long time ago. How he died isn’t important anymore. Just accept that years have passed and you’re older now. The Linny you remember is gone, back there in the years, but she’s not lost, because she still lives inside me. I used to be Linny, and I can remember how it was. I can remember the lovely times we spent together, and how much I loved my young mother. I’m grown up now, but I’m still your daughter. We can love each other in a different, new way. We can become friends.”

  Her eyes never left my face, but there was a difference in her expression—as though she grew older as I watched—still beautiful, but a woman in her early fifties—which she really was. She took both my hands in her own and held them tightly, looking deep into my eyes, searching.

  Then her gaze shifted toward the door. “Hello, Marla. Come in—I want you to meet my daughter.”

  Marla came in slowly, her face as dark as the storm outside. “My God!” she said, and stared at Noelle.

  “It’s all right,” her sister assured her. “Caroline—who is really Linny grown up—has been helping me to come through the years. There’s so much that’s missing, but she thinks it doesn’t matter anymore.”

  “Of course it doesn’t matter,” I said. “It’s the good things that you’ll want to remember.”

  Marla had been struck speechless for once. She saw the painting on the easel and went over to it. “What’s this?”

  “It’s not a picture for Linny,” Noelle said quickly. “It’s for me. Though I don’t think I’ll bother to finish it, now that I needn’t look back through all those windows.”

  I heard the sound of Marla’s breath as she released it. This change in her sister wasn’t something she would welcome.

  My concern about what might happen tomorrow night increased. My mother’s new, precarious hold on reality could be so easily destroyed, yet any suggestion of this to Marla would bring denial, because this was what she wanted.

  Marla took a step closer to the painting, studying it. For some reason it seemed to fascinate her, and she spoke as if to herself.

  “I wonder what it would be like to go back and back through all those windows—clear to the way it was before. Perhaps that was the really happy time, Noelle.”

  When she turned from the painting, she looked a little dazed, and I wondered if she was thinking of those missing moments from her own life that lay far back in the years.

  But except for her effect on Noelle, it was’t Marla who concerned me most now, and I began to make a plan of my own. Somehow, Noelle must be spared the emotional danger that might be present for her tomorrow night. Marla herself had planned the evening, and everyone had fallen in innocently with all she’d suggested. Joanna had protested at first, and then given in. Now I must convince my grandmother that Noelle shouldn’t be allowed to become a victim of Marla’s manipulation. The moment I could see Joanna alone, I would talk to her, convince her.

  Marla put an arm around her sister. “Come along now, dear. We’re ready for dinner.”

  As always, her manner was the one she used in addressing the young, confused person she saw in her sister.

  Noelle answered her with a new dignity that gave me a little hope. “All right, we’ll come in for dinner, and I want to sit next to Caroline tonight. We need to get acquainted all over again.”

  She walked ahead of us toward the dining room, and Marla spoke in a whisper to me. “It won’t last. She’ll start looking for Linny any minute now.”

  “Not if I can help it,” I said, and Marla gave me a black look as we followed Noelle to the dining room.

  Joanna glanced at us casually as we came in, and then looked more closely at Noelle.

  “Come and sit down,” she said.

  I sat beside my mother on one side of the long table, with Marla at the opposite end from Joanna, and Elizabeth and Scott across from us. Of us all, I think Scott was the most uncomfortable. He had no idea of what the undercurrents at Manaolana meant, but he was indignant with me, and ready to show his displeasure. He still hadn’t understood that I no longer cared. By now Grandmother Elizabeth had retreated into her own reserve that enabled her to dismiss what she didn’t understand. She paid no attention to the talk around her, barely answered when anyone spoke to her, and seemed not to notice the change in Noelle. I wondered what she was planning now.

  On and off, as we ate, Joanna studied my mother intently, still puzzled and questioning. She knew her daughter as she’d been when time had stopped for her, but this new Noelle was a stranger. It occurred to me that no one in this house had ever seen the mature Noelle. Later I would try to explain the unexplainable to Joanna, and persuade her to help, but for now she would have to find her own way.

  It was a strange, uneasy meal. I was still afraid that Noelle might slip away again at any moment, as Marla had promised she would.

  When lightning struck brilliantly nearby and a clap of thunder shook the house at almost the same moment, Noelle jumped and began to tremble. I remembered that she had been afraid of storms when I was little, and I put my hand on her arm.

  Manaolana’s lights dimmed and went out.

  “A power line’s down,” Marla said. “I’ll get more candles.”

  Those on the table flickered in disturbed air, and the room beyond was shadowy except when lightning brought everything to life for a moment. It was a livid illumination—not like any other.

  When extra candles had been placed around the room, we went on with our meal. Joanna attempted to keep a desultory conversation going, and sometimes she spoke directly to Noelle. My mother said little, though she didn’t seem frightened anymore. She must feel rather like a stranger at this table, since she’d stepped into a new space where everything was unfamiliar. There was no telling what might be happening in her mind now, though I hoped that she would be able to talk to me and tell me before long.

  Once during the meal, she brought tears to my eyes. I’d been aware
that she watched me now and then—perhaps seeking Linny in the woman I’d become? Whatever conclusion she’d reached, she suddenly rested her hand over my own on the table, and I knew this was a loving gesture from mother to daughter. As unexpectedly as this, I seemed to have recovered, if only for a moment, the mother I’d come to Maui to find.

  Marla, cynically watchful, said, “How touching!” If I had regained a mother, she had lost a dependent child, and she didn’t like it at all. Marla was still to be reckoned with.

  The storm had lessened a little when we heard voices at the front door, and Tom O’Neill burst into the dining room, wearing a dripping slicker over shirt and jeans.

  “Is your phone working?” he asked Joanna. “David’s been hurt. Koma brought him down to my place, but I guess a pole must be down somewhere, because I can’t get through. We’ve carried him into the living room. I’d better go for a doctor right away.”

  Joanna took charge, first trying the nearest phone and finding it dead. “Yes—go get the doctor,” she told Tom.

  I rushed into the living room, where David lay stretched on a sofa. A streak of blood had trickled down his cheek, and in the wavering candlelight he looked deathly pale. Koma wiped off the blood with a piece of gauze Joanna brought, and then slapped him smartly on each cheek, trying to bring him to. There was nothing I could do except kneel beside the sofa and take one of David’s cold hands into mine.

  “Tell us what happened,” Joanna said to Koma.

  He looked up from his ministrations. “This pupuli—this crazy guy—went out to take pictures of the storm. He thought it was far enough away and he has a new camera. Photographers get carried away—anything for a good shot! I got in my car and went after him. He was out of his car and ready for the next flash of lightning against the mountain. But the storm shifted. There was a big clap of thunder and lightning struck a tree not far from where Dave was standing. The shock knocked him cockeyed. I dragged him to my car and came down here to Tom to get help.” He slapped David’s face again. “Hey, man, come out of it! You’re okay—come on!”