Moloka'i

by Alan Brennert

  “No, not for that. Sister Catherine talked to Mr. McVeigh, they’ve made an exception for the wedding.” She looked at him, his hair speckled with gray, his face deeply lined, and said softly, “I’ve missed you so much, Papa.”

  “I missed you, too, baby.” Henry looked at her—at her, and not the glass wall—for the first time. “My God, baby . . . you’re so beautiful. Such a beautiful woman!”

  Rachel felt herself blushing. “Thank you, Papa.”

  They sat down, pulling their chairs closer so that only a few feet—and the glass—separated them. They chatted about his steamer trip for a while, then Rachel asked him, “Do you ever see Ben and Kimo and Sarah?”

  Henry seemed flustered by the question. “Oh sure. Now they’re all grown up, they invite me over alla time. Mama’s not so much a problem like before.”

  “How are they?” she asked.

  “Well . . . Kimo’s a salesman. At McInerny’s Shoe Store.”

  Rachel whooped. “He hated shoes worse than Sarah!”

  Henry chuckled. “Yeah, well, not now! He sells five, six, seven pair a day, makes a good commission too. You know Kimo, he could talk a fish right out of the water!”

  “Is he married? Am I an auntie?”

  “Yeah, sure. Two boys.”

  “And Ben?”

  “Oh, Ben’s building fishing boats in Kaka'ako. Says that’s as close to the sea as he wants to get—he builds ’em, somebody else goes out on ’em. I told him that was okay by me. Still not married yet.”

  “Sarah? She’s got keiki, right?”

  “Yeah, sure.” Rachel looked at him expectantly and he elaborated, “There’s Charlie, he’s the oldest, Miriam, and Gertrude, everybody calls her Gertie.”

  “And how’s Mama?” Rachel felt a sudden weight in her heart.

  “I . . . don’t know,” Henry admitted. “I don’t see her.”

  Rachel decided to let it go at that.

  “Papa,” she said, “would you like to meet Kenji now?”

  His face brightened and he said that he would.

  Outside there was more distance between visitor and patient, but the picket fence was somehow a more decorous barrier. Out here, at least, patient and visitor shared the same air. Rachel joined Kenji on their side of the interior fence. Kenji seemed to Henry a fine handsome young man, if a little more serious than he had expected; but the moment Rachel’s hand slipped into Kenji’s Henry saw the faint flush of color in his daughter’s cheeks, saw the happiness in her eyes and an answering gladness in Kenji’s.

  “I’m pleased to meet you at last, Mr. Kalama,” Kenji said. “I only wish I could shake your hand.”

  “Me, too.” They all settled into lawn chairs, and but for the fence between them it might have been a meeting between any anxious father and prospective son-in-law.

  “How was your trip over?” Kenji asked.

  Henry shrugged. “The usual.”

  There was a moment of nervous silence and Rachel filled it with, “Papa, did I tell you we’re holding the ceremony in Kana'ana Church?”

  “The little church down near the landing?”

  “Yes. And you remember Francine? She’s my bridesmaid.”

  Henry smiled, nodded. Another awkward silence as father and groom sized each other up; then Kenji cleared his throat and said, “Yes, there’s only one detail we haven’t decided, and that’s where to go on our honeymoon.”

  His tone was so dry it even took Rachel a moment to realize it was a joke; but Henry got it a moment after her, and burst into laughter.

  “Maybe you try Kalaupapa, eh?” Henry suggested with a smile.

  Rachel joined in. “Or maybe, I don’t know, Kalaupapa?”

  “Then again,” Kenji said, straight-faced, “I understand Kalaupapa is quite lovely this time of year.”

  They all laughed with equal measures of mirth and rue, and conversation came more easily after that. Kenji spoke of his family back on O'ahu and it turned out that Henry had even been in Haru Utagawa’s shop more than once. Henry shared the latest news from Honolulu, principally the pride and excitement generated by native son Duke Kahanamoku, now world-famous. A Waikiki beachboy of no special ambition, Duke was cajoled into entering his first swimming meet in the summer of 1911; and to the astonishment of the judges he casually broke the world record in 100-yard freestyle. The following year he did it again at the Olympic Games in Stockholm, earning a gold medal. Six foot one, 190 pounds, he was a godlike bronzed figure, cleaving the waters with his massive hands, feet kicking up almost as much chop as a propeller. Even more exciting to Rachel was Duke’s prowess at surfing. She was delighted to hear that the sport was enjoying a renaissance in Waikiki, no longer the “godless” activity reviled by missionaries. Hawai'i was beginning to reclaim its past, and in Duke Kahanamoku—handsome, unassuming, whose accomplishments could not be denied—Hawaiians found again the royalty they had lost, and which this time could not be taken from them.

  Henry, Rachel, and Kenji talked well into the evening, skipping the supper they could not share, feasting on one another’s company instead; and Henry went to bed content. Walking home with Rachel, Kenji said, “Your father obviously loves you very much to come here.”

  “I’m sure yours would have, too.”

  Kenji shook his head. “It would have been a great shame for him or my mother to come. Even just inviting them would have put them in an embarrassing position.”

  “So you’d never see your family again, just to let them save face?”

  “You don’t understand what it’s like for the Issei,” he said sharply. Rachel didn’t press the point. He took her hand in his, squeezed it, and they walked on. Tomorrow at this time, they would be married. And despite whatever differences there were between them, it was still a thought that warmed her in a way nothing ever had before.

  H

  enry, along with Rachel’s bridesmaid Francine, waited nervously in the rear of Kana'ana Church, a tiny, tin-roofed Protestant chapel dating back to Damien’s time. He was nervous not just for the usual fatherly reasons but because he found it difficult to look at Francine’s ravaged face—and impossible not to, since she kept jabbering away at him. The energetic little jockey he’d once known had been spirited off and replaced, as if by sorcery, with a crippled old woman of thirty-one. The fingers of both hands had been resorbed into fleshy stumps; her flower bouquet had to be tied to her wrist with twine. Her once-lively eyes now seemed drowsy, occluded by pouchy eyelids; her cheeks were rosy with swollen tubercles; her nose and mouth, subsumed by her disease, were the smiling cavities of a jack-o’-lantern. And yet she did, in fact, smile.

  “Mr. Kalama! Look,” she cried, turning. “She’s so beautiful!”

  Rachel walked up the path to the church wearing one of the long white gowns which had been reserved for special occasions at Bishop Home, carrying a bouquet of plumeria in her hands and smiling nervously.

  “Oh,” Francine said, a wistful sigh, “isn’t she? Isn’t she beautiful?”

  Henry looked at Francine and told himself his daughter would never look like this—that her bright smiling face would never be so blemished or the fingers stolen from her hands—and as Rachel approached he tried to think only of the happy event about to take place.

  “Baby girl,” he said softly, “you look so pretty.”

  “Thank you, Papa.”

  They were barely a foot apart, no longer separated by glass or fences, and Henry wanted so badly to reach out and hold her. But he knew the rules and knew the only exception that had been granted. He crooked an arm and held it out to her: “My little girl ready?”

  She nodded and looped an arm through his, each happy for the other’s touch, such as it was.

  Francine started up the aisle to where Kenji, in the dark suit he’d worn his first and only week at Halstead & Company, was waiting. Once the bridesmaid was in position a proud Henry Kalama escorted Rachel to the altar. Walking as if in a dream, Rachel saw a pleased, smiling Sister
Catherine, beside her an aging Ambrose Hutchison. She saw Kenji standing so handsomely at the altar and though she wanted to give herself to him, she also wished she could have held onto Papa, like this, forever; but that wasn’t possible, even in a world without leprosy. When Pastor Kaai ultimately pronounced the couple man and wife, Rachel first kissed Kenji, then spontaneously turned to her father and gave him a long, loving hug. No one reported them.

  After the ceremony the wedding party repaired to the visitors’ compound, with Henry and Sister Catherine on one side of the picket fence and Rachel, Kenji, Francine, Ambrose, and other patients on the other. The wedding cake, baked by the Franciscans’ cook, had already been apportioned on each side; punch and coffee was prepared in similar fashion. There was laughter and talk well into the night. And though they never said as much to one another it reminded both Rachel and Henry of the old Kalama family feasts that now existed only in the distant kingdom of the past.

  Henry stayed at Kalaupapa the remainder of the week, and when the Claudine arrived the following Tuesday, it was harder than ever for him to board it. He feared that his health might never permit a trip like this again, that this would be the last chance he would have to see his daughter, and as usual he waited at the landing until the very last launch returned for the departing passengers. Rachel and Kenji were here to see him off; and the sight of them together, hands entwined, faces bright and happy in a way Henry remembered from the first years of his own marriage, made easier the prospect of leaving.

  “You’ll take good care of my little girl,” he told his son-in-law. “I won’t worry.” Touched, Kenji nodded.

  “I love you, Papa,” Rachel said, tears appearing in her eyes. “Write me. Every day if you want.”

  “Yeah, I will. Yeah.” Not caring what he did or who saw, he stumbled forward and took her in his big arms; Rachel pressed her face against his chest like she did when she was small, breathing in the familiar papa-smell of his sweater. “Baby girl,” Henry said softly. “My baby girl.” He kissed her on the cheek, told her he loved her more than anything on earth, then let her go and descended the ladder into the rowboat. As the oarsmen maneuvered the launch toward the Claudine Henry waved and, as ever, didn’t stop waving until the steamer had turned and put out to sea. He was right: it would be his last visit to Kalaupapa.

  K

  enji moved into the house Rachel had inherited from Leilani and their lives settled into a comfortable routine. Kenji was a fine cook and a fair fisherman. In the afternoon he would often take a tiny boat out and net a fat tuna or mahi-mahi; sometimes they ate the fish raw, marinated with kukui seed paste in the Hawaiian style. And with the purchase of a rice cooker from the general store, Kenji was able to whip up great heaping servings of ozaku—rice cooked with fresh shrimp or dried sardines.

  Rachel enjoyed married life but Kenji—though passionate in bed and generally companionable—had a tendency to brood, and frequently seemed restless. Finally one evening, as they sat on the porch watching the daylight fade, Kenji suddenly announced, “I need to do something.”

  “What?” Rachel asked.

  “No, I mean—I need to do something. I’m still young, still healthy—I can’t just sit here on the lnai for the rest of my life.”

  “All right,” Rachel said, and waited.

  “Yesterday,” Kenji went on, “I got to talking with the manager of the Kalaupapa Store. I mentioned my business degree and what a waste of time it had been, and to my surprise he said, ‘Well, hell, come to work for me. You can keep the books—learn the ropes of ordering.’ He said he couldn’t pay much—believe it or not the Board of Health pays him less than seventy dollars a month—but he said, ‘I can start you at twenty dollars a month.’

  “I know it doesn’t sound like much, but at least I could put my skills to use. And maybe I could send some of the money back to my family. To try and reimburse them for the costs of my education. What do you think?”

  He was trying to sound casual, but Rachel could tell how important this was to him.

  “I think it’s a fine idea,” she said.

  Seeing Kenji’s spirits rise with something to engage his mind, Rachel too began to itch for something more than surfing and reading to occupy her time . . . something that might also bring in a few extra dollars for Kenji’s family. But what? She hadn’t a clue, at first. Then one morning as she rode a five-foot wave in to shore, Rachel looked up at a familiar cluster of green and white buildings in the distance, and the answer was suddenly obvious.

  The next day Rachel went to work at Bishop Home as a housekeeping aide—cleaning the dormitories, laundering sheets and blankets, scrubbing floors and washing windows. All tasks she had performed as a resident here years ago, and comforting in their familiarity. She also enjoyed being a big sister, of sorts, to a new generation of Bishop girls, helping new arrivals who were as scared and lonely and angry as young Rachel had been. Arrivals like ten-year-old Myrtle, who wouldn’t leave her bed her first day here. Rachel sat down beside her and Myrtle admitted, “At Kalihi they said that everybody who goes to Kalaupapa dies.” Rachel squeezed her hand and said, “I’ve been here almost twenty years. Do I look dead to you?”

  She crossed her eyes and fell backwards onto the bed. Myrtle giggled, then laughed, and was soon out playing kickball with the other girls.

  But there were fewer Bishop girls these days, even as the population of Kalaupapa had dwindled to roughly eight hundred souls. However badly conceived and cruelly enforced the quarantine had been over the years, the number of leprosy victims in the islands was indisputably on the decline. The government took this as confirmation that its policy of segregation was working.

  Sister Catherine was only too happy to have Rachel around and sometimes they would sit together on the lawn, eating separate lunches, gazing out to sea. On one such occasion Catherine looked at her friend and said, “Rachel?”

  “Uh huh?”

  “What’s it like?” Catherine asked, a bit shyly. “Being married?”

  “Cold feet,” Rachel answered flippantly. “Middle of the night you’re sleeping, suddenly, wham, you’ve got icy cold feet warming themselves on the back of your legs.” She made a brrrr! sound and rubbed her arms.

  Catherine laughed. “No, I’m serious, what’s it like?”

  Rachel was surprised at the genuine curiosity in the sister’s face.

  “It’s . . . nice,” she said. “It’s nice, even if I’m home alone, seeing Kenji’s things around . . . feeling his presence even when he’s not there.”

  Catherine nodded to herself. “I wish I felt God’s presence as often,” she said quietly.

  Rachel’s response was cut short by what sounded like an automobile motor—but although there were a handful of motor cars in operation at the settlement, a quick glance around revealed not a single Model T in sight.

  The cough of the motor grew louder, and Rachel suddenly realized the sound was above them. She looked up.

  Swooping down from the green heights of the pali was an aeroplane—the first either of them had ever seen. Its double tier of stiff wooden wings tilted as the aircraft banked away from the cliffs, a lattice of wires strung between the double wings like a spider’s web. Rachel and Catherine got to their feet, gawking as the plane dove toward them. They could see its propeller spinning in a fuzzy radius around the nose; could hear the staccato of its engines; and when it was only a hundred feet or so above their heads they could see its pilot, capped and goggled, as he genially waved to them.

  Awed into silence, they waved back.

  The biplane banked again, gliding like a hawk above Kalaupapa town. Residents stopped in their tracks, gazing up in wonder and delight at the aeroplane, which tipped its wings back and forth by way of saying “hello.”

  “I think they call them ‘barnstormers,’ ” Catherine said. “Could it be that fellow who was in Honolulu recently? Tom Gunn?”

  In a rousing display the pilot, whoever he was, opened his throttle and
sent the plane climbing up and into a loop, the vehicle briefly upside-down before leveling out again. People in the street cheered. Rachel applauded.

  “Bravo!” she cried. “Bravo!”

  The speeding plane was already past Kalaupapa and buzzing over the Pelekunu Valley. Soon it had scaled the heights of the pali and was lost from view. The pilot surely had known that he couldn’t land at the settlement, but perhaps he had just been curious to see the infamous leper colony close up.

  Rachel thought of how quickly the plane had traversed the peninsula and she marveled at how swiftly one could travel now, how close the farthest lands could be. She would gladly have given a year of her life for just one ride in that amazing flying machine.

  But Sister Catherine had seen something else in it. “How can one doubt the presence of God,” she said wonderingly, “in the sight of men whom He has given wings?”

  T

  he year 1915 saw the construction of the settlement’s first social hall, with both a dance floor and a stage for amateur theatricals and movies. It quickly became the fulcrum of Kalaupapa’s social life, even for the kkuas (the word now referred chiefly to the medical and administrative staff). Not that patients and kskuas were permitted to actually socialize in the social hall: there were separate entrances for each, and the kkuas’ portion of the dance floor was demarcated by a row of potted plants. Here Rachel and Kenji learned the latest dances, like the foxtrot and the tango. At the movies they laughed at this new character of the Little Tramp, gasped at The Golem, and watched the actress once known only as “The Girl With the Golden Hair”—now “America’s Sweetheart,” Mary Pickford—in Cinderella.

  It was while walking home from a screening of The Tramp that Francine stepped unknowingly—for she had no feeling left in her feet—on a rusty nail that penetrated her shoe. By the time she realized she’d been injured the foot had turned quite gangrenous. Dr. Goodhue was forced to amputate it, but the infection had already become systemic and Francine soon lapsed into a coma. Rachel and Kenji joined Francine’s husband, Luis, at her bedside, but in the early morning hours of June 30, 1915, Francine died without awakening. Luis was devastated; Rachel felt the loss almost as keenly.