The resemblance to Seven’s sister was uncanny. The same heavy-lidded, protuberant eyes with their golden-brown irises. All our boys have been born with eyes as black as night. It was never possible with any of them to see where the pupil stopped and the iris began. But Seven’s eyes are not dark. His hair is black, but his eyes are a warm honey color, just like the Hawaiian kings and queens.
We walked around the alcove studying the portraits. Here was King Kamehameha IV and Queen Emma, posed and painted exactly as if they were burghers or Puritans or well-to-do benefactors (which, in fact, they were). Their severe but elegant costumes and serious expressions suggested something melancholy, as though they were looking down the barrel of time at what it had all come to. Beside them hung a sentimental portrait of their son, the young Prince Albert Edward Kauikeaouli Leiopapa a Kamehameha. The last child born to any of the Hawaiian monarchs, he died in 1862 at the age of four.
It was odd to see this family resemblance and yet it made a kind of sense. Maoris and Hawaiians are not as closely related as, say, Maoris and Cook Islanders, or Hawaiians and Marquesans. But Polynesian populations have never been large and they must all have been quite closely related at one time. One study suggests that a single canoe-load of twenty young adults could theoretically have produced a population of a hundred thousand Maoris or Hawaiians by the time the Europeans arrived. This is probably not exactly how things happened, but the founding populations of any island group might have been quite small. And while they probably maintained contact with the islands they came from, there is no evidence to suggest contact with anyone from outside the Polynesian triangle.
Unless you ask Seven, of course.
There were several things Seven and I disagreed about: whether aliens had landed on Earth; whether the dead visited the living; whether buying life insurance was “asking for it.” But one of our recurring disputes had to do with the origins of the Polynesian people. It began one night when we were watching an anthropological program on TV. They were discussing the peopling of the Pacific and the curious fact that all the domesticated plants and animals found in the Pacific originate in Southeast Asia—with one crucial exception: kumara, the sweet potato, a staple of the Maori diet, a plant so central to Maori life that myths of Hawaiki sometimes claim that the very cliffs are made of it. Hawaiki nui kai, they call it, a land of milk and honey, “Hawaiki of much food.” Kumara comes indisputably from South America. And so the question presents itself: how did it get to Polynesia?
In the late 1940s a Norwegian adventurer named Thor Heyerdahl set out to demonstrate experimentally that Polynesia might have been originally populated by Mesoamericans who drifted there on balsa wood rafts. He called it the Kon-Tiki Expedition and he did, in fact, manage to make landfall on an island in the Tuamotus after a harrowing voyage of 102 days. The experiment did not prove that this was the way Polynesia was settled and, as it ran contrary to all the other archaeological and linguistic evidence, the theory did not take hold. But it helped keep alive the question of whether there was ever any contact between the people of Polynesia and those of the Americas.
“The circumstances which brought the first Mesoamerican high culture into existence are not fully understood,” intoned the documentary’s narrator. “All we know is that it happened about three thousand years ago and the evidence for it is monumental.” And then the screen was filled with the image of a massive stone head, one of twenty-one such sculptures, thought to be portraits of Olmec rulers. It had a stern and beautiful face, with wide, sightless, almond-shaped eyes, a broad nose, and full lips that turned down at the corners.
“Hey,” said Seven, “that looks like Tu!”
The likeness to Seven’s eldest brother was, in fact, striking. It was the lips, I think, that were so persuasive, that beautifully curved, characteristically downturned mouth, and the broad, flat plane of the face, and the sense of heaviness. But for Seven it was more than that. It was proof that some kind of link existed between the steamy, lowland jungles of Central America and the Land of the Long White Cloud. The accepted thesis is that if Mesoamericans and Polynesians share any ancestral roots, they are not less than thirty thousand or forty thousand years old and they share them with most of Asia. There is no hard evidence for contact between the Olmecs or anyone else in the Americas and Seven’s ancestors. But Seven was never one for received wisdom.
“And the kumara?” he would say when we argued. “How did we get the kumara? Tell me that. If we could sail to Easter Island, I don’t see why we couldn’t go all the way. Maybe those Olmecs were really Polynesians …”
It was during that year in Hawaii that Seven’s father died. His death was unexpected; he was not an old man, and at first we imagined that his cancer might be treatable. Perhaps, If he had lived in a city, gone regularly to the doctor, been willing to undergo the indignities of treatment, who knows, maybe it would have been different—for a while. But his disease was already well advanced by the time anyone knew about it.
Seven flew home just in time to see his father before he died, taking the baby with him. Because Aperahama had been born in the United States, his paternal grandfather had never seen him. The family wanted him christened, if possible, before his grandfather died. Seven’s father was too weak to perform the ceremony, but one of the uncles would do it and he would be there to bless the child.
There was no question of my going with them. We barely had enough money as it was for the airfare, and it just seemed like one of those occasions on which I wouldn’t know what to do. With all the brothers and sisters gathered, not to mention the cousins and uncles and aunts, I knew it would be a dense and private affair. Of course, I would have been welcome, but I also thought it was something Seven should do alone. That said, it was not easy letting them go. Aperahama was only just old enough to go without me and I gave Seven a thousand instructions about what to do.
“Make sure you dress him warmly. I know it’s summer, but it’s not Hawaii, is it? It might get cool at night. And try not to lose his blanket. I think you should be careful how much kina you give him. And don’t take him over to Harry’s; I swear that house has bugs. If you need anything, ask Hera. She’ll know what to do. And call me, OK? when you get there.”
I spent the week alone in Honolulu, sitting in the living room, alternately reading and waiting for the phone. I was stunned at the silence and the sudden absence of things that needed my attention. I took my umbrella and walked all the way to Manoa. I got a few books from the library and walked back. The sun shone, the clouds gathered over the Pali, the evening fell abruptly, like a blind being suddenly drawn. I sat on the step and watched the moths and the giant cockroaches fling themselves at the light above the door. One of the books I got from the library was a collection of Maori laments. Maori songs are hard to follow because they are extremely allusive. They are packed with references to people and places and events of the past; almost every phrase is metaphorical and requires a huge body of traditional knowledge to decode. But eventually I found one I could make sense of. I could even make out a few words: mate, death; haere, come or go; taonga, something of value, a treasure of some kind.
Haere, kua uhia koe ki ou taonga, ki nga kakahu o tenei bunga o te mate.
I could almost hear my mother-in-law’s voice, could almost see them sitting with the body, could almost hear the quiet murmur of noise in the tnarae. I read the lament aloud, in English, alone in the empty house.
You have been wrapped in the precious clothes of this thing, death;
you have been clothed in the words of farewell; and
immersed in an endless spring of tears;
these greetings we have given you.
So, leave us now, farewell! Go, descendant of the ancestors,
go, the sheltering rata tree,
go upon your land, go upon your waters,
borne on the words we have spoken for you,
to the dark night, the deep night, the dense night.
Go to Antare
s, to the star of summer,
to the gathering of the thousands,
Forsaking love, go!
A week later I went to pick them up at the airport. Seven had lost the blanket but he’d brought back a beautiful flax kit made by his auntie and a stuffed kiwi that he’d bought for Aperahama in the airport on the way home. He was very tired but he didn’t seem what I would call sad. He was sad, but he was also calmer than any sad person I’d ever known. He wasn’t in shock or trying to hold himself together. He wasn’t in denial. He was just the way he had always been, except a little subdued.
He didn’t have much to tell me. Just that his father had died, there had been a funeral, it had lasted for several days, and a great many people had come to bid him farewell. On the last night there had been a storm. Seven and his brothers had gone up the hill and were sitting looking out over Mangonui when a hole opened up in the clouds right over the marae.
“Look at that,” said one of them. “Must be the exit.”
“Yeah,” said another. “The old man’s on his way to Hawaiki now.”
“Well, then,” said Seven, “guess I’ll see him there.”
13
Once Were Warriors
When we left Hawaii, it was, by my count, the ninth time I had crossed the equator in less than seven years. I had flown every possible airline, made every possible stopover, tried every combination of long and short legs, and I was beginning to think of myself as an Old Pacific Hand. We were headed south, back to Australia, but this time we were bound for Queensland, where I had another fellowship for two years.
The far north of Australia occupies roughly the same position, culturally and semantically, as that of the Deep South in the United States. It is hot and tropical—about half the state of Queensland lies within the Tropic of Capricorn—and famous for its reactionary politicians, most notably Joh Bjelke-Petersen, who was premier of Queensland for nearly twenty years and whose positions included, among other things, support for the white minority government of apartheid South Africa. Tucked into the southeast corner of a state four times the size of Texas, Brisbane belongs in many respects to the metropolitan corridor of Sydney-Canberra-Melbourne that stretches down Australia’s eastern coast. But, unlike these other cities, there is—or was—something of the frontier about it still.
With Aperahama and Seven’s sister Kura, who had come over from New Zealand to live with us, we made quite a little family. We all lived together in a poor-man’s Queenslander, a charming style of house with high-ceilinged rooms and windows made of louvered glass. Like all such houses, it was set about six feet off the ground both to discourage insects and to allow the cool night air to circulate underneath. There was a big mango tree in the backyard, which attracted a squeaking crowd of bats at dusk, and beneath the house lived a large but innocuous blue-tongued skink.
Across the river, a five-minute ride by passenger ferry, was the University of Queensland. It was set on nearly three hundred acres of landscaped grounds and was far and away the most beautiful campus on which I’d ever worked. The walk up to my office from the ferry took me through a maze of gardens, past an ornamental lake, and on up through an avenue of purple jacarandas to the Great Court, a large green lawn surrounded by monumental sandstone buildings. It was, in many ways, idyllic. I had colleagues that I liked and an office of my own, but I was hard-pressed to support the four of us on my tiny postdoctoral salary and so, as soon as we were settled, Seven set out to get a job.
He had never had any trouble finding work before, despite moving almost yearly to a new city. In Boston he’d built titanium bicycles; in Hawaii he’d been a dispatcher for the American Automobile Association. In Brisbane his first thought was to go back to foundry work, which, in that somewhat less sophisticated economy, seemed to hold out the best hope of a decent wage. He answered an ad in the paper for a jobbing molder, and they told him to come in for an interview the next day. But when he got there, they said, sorry, the job was filled. Two days later the ad was back in the paper.
Outraged, I rang up the office of equal opportunity.
“What does it take,” I asked, “to file a claim of racial discrimination against an employer?”
“Did they tell him they wouldn’t hire him because he was black?” asked the woman on the other end of the line.
“No, of course they didn’t! They just told him there was no job. But there clearly is a job because they’re continuing to advertise.”
“Well, I’m sorry, but it has to be spelled out, either verbally or in writing, that they are not hiring him for reasons of ethnicity.”
“That,” I said, “is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”
Kura, meanwhile, had enrolled in school. She was twenty-three years old and had the equivalent of a tenth-grade education and I was adamant that she go back and finish high school. We found a day care for Aperahama and Seven continued to look for work. He talked about becoming a taxi driver and worked for a while as a janitor in a factory where they made salads for supermarket chains. He did a stint as a laborer for a builder, who was himself only intermittently employed, and then one day he came home and announced that he had taken a job selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door.
“I hope you’re kidding,” I said.
When I was a very little girl, according to my mother, I had what I described as a nightmare. I dreamed that I lived in a little house with a picture window. Inside the window there was a table and on the table there was a lamp. “That was it,” said my mother. “Isn’t that funny? I don’t think you were more than five.”
I don’t remember having this dream but I know exactly what kind of house it must have been. Between the place where I grew up and the city of Boston there was a town through which we used to drive. It was full of little houses with metal screen doors set close to each other and to the road. They were houses like a child might draw: a peaked roof with a chimney, a door, and a picture window through which I could often see the flickering blue glow of a television as we drove past in the night.
As a child, I felt that there was something sad about these houses, though I wouldn’t have been able to put my finger on what it was. They seemed poor to me, not with the desperate, bombed-out poverty of places like Harlem, through which we sometimes drove when we went to New York, but in a strained, respectable sort of way. They were like places I could almost imagine living, places I might have ended up in, if things had gone another way. To me they represented the sort of poverty into which one might actually fall.
I felt about these houses exactly the way I felt about a traveling salesman who used to come to my family’s house once or twice a year when I was young. He was the only traveling salesman I ever knew—it was the end of the traveling salesman era—and I still remember the feeling I had when his car pulled into our driveway and I saw him get out and make his way slowly across the driveway to the front door. He must have come in early spring or late autumn because I can only see him crossing the gravel on some bleak and chilly day. He was a sad little man with a toupee and a face that fell in fleshy folds. Even as a child I thought his life must be miserable and I was embarrassed that we lived in a nice warm house while he had to be outside, going from door-to-door.
My mother always invited him in and he would nod and thank her and scrape his feet and lug his sample case full of linens into the dining room, where he could open it up on the table and show her what he had. I was always worried that my mother would say no, there was nothing that she wanted. But she always looked through everything carefully and picked out something, a set of embroidered pillowcases or handkerchiefs for my father. I now wonder how she paid him—did she give him cash?—and I wonder, too, when he stopped coming and when it was we finally realized that he wasn’t going to call on us anymore.
I never quite got over the feeling I had about him. When I was a little older, I took to disappearing whenever he arrived. But even that didn’t help, because the very idea of him, the shabby clothes, the stringy
hair, the pathetic occupation, made me feel depressed. And so, when Seven announced that he had taken a job as a door-to-door salesman, I felt the memory of this man wash over me and, for the first time in our marriage, I despaired.
I told him he wouldn’t be any good at it. He had never sold anything in his life; he gave away everything, including our cars. And while it was true that he could lie like the devil when he wanted, he would never be able to cheat anyone out of their money, which was what, I told him, this kind of selling really was. What was even more worrying was the fact that after attending a single training session he had been completely indoctrinated with the view that this overpriced appliance was superior to every other vacuum cleaner on earth. I knew he was very susceptible to quackery, not always having a good basis on which to evaluate competing claims. And besides, I wondered, since when had he become an expert in vacuuming?
Up to that point, I had viewed Seven’s various occupations with a mix of humor and something like pride. There was a certain undeniable glamour in being a bicycle messenger—it required such tremendous stamina and strength—and even his work as a foundryman had a kind of masculine integrity. I didn’t care that his work wasn’t white-collar; I even found it kind of a relief. There hadn’t been a blue-collar worker in my family for a hundred years—we were all businessmen and engineers and professors—and I was always drawn to the unfamiliar. Besides, I was no more interested in money than he was. I, after all, had had all the opportunity in the world, and I hadn’t exactly chosen a lucrative career. But, for me, this business of the vacuum cleaners crossed some kind of line. I found it weirdly humiliating and I begged him not to take the job.
Seven thought I was being completely ridiculous and for years he continued to sing the praises of this particular brand of vacuum cleaner. But I was right about one thing: he couldn’t sell. He lasted in the job about two weeks before he realized he wasn’t going to make any money and, to my inexpressible relief, he gave it up.
Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All Page 17