Michener, James

by Hawaii

  "How have the marriages worked out?" Akemi-san asked.

  "Well, if you take the thirty lucky girls who married Caucasians, about twenty-eight of them are quite happy. Some of the girls say they're deliriously happy. They say they wouldn't go back to Japan even if I gave them all of Hibiya Park."

  "They wouldn't go back to Japan?" Akemi gasped. "Were they girls who were interested in books or plays or music?"

  "Much like you. But you see, when a haole man marries a Japanese girl, his parents are so shocked that they make a true spiritual effort to like the girl. And when they meet someone like you, gentle, well-bred, sweet to their son, they overcompensate. They love her more than is required. They make her life a heaven on earth."

  "Do such people listen to music?" Akemi asked.

  "Usually a haole man hasn't the nerve to marry a Japanese girl unless he's rather sophisticated culturally. Such couples experience a very full spectrum."

  Akemi looked glumly at the bleak walls of the Sakagawa home, with a four-tube radio invariably tuned to a station that alternated American jazz with Japanese hillbilly songs. Whenever she and Goro went to a movie it was invariably a chanbara, a Japanese western in

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  which the samurai hero fought sixty armed villains without suffering a wound.

  "The Japanese girls who marry Chinese soldiers," Dr. Yamazaki continued, "face a different problem. The Chinese parents are totally disgusted and convinced that there is no possibility of their liking the unseen daughter-in-law, so they spend the time till she arrives hating her so much that when she finally gets here, they find she isn't anywhere near as bad as they had feared. When she demonstrates that she really loves their son, everyone reaches a plateau of mutual respect, and things go reasonably well."

  "But the Japanese marriages?" Akemi asked. "You won't dare say they go well." '

  "Some do," Dr. Yamazaki assured her. "Where farm boys here have married farm girls from Hiroshima-ken, things worked out rather well. But in a surprising number of cases, the Japanese-Japanese marriage does not do well. I think our figures are going to show that over fifty-five per cent of such marriages have run into trouble."

  "Why?" Akemi pleaded.

  "I was born in Hawaii myself," Dr. Yamazaki said. "From the very kind of family you married into. Stout Hiroshima peasants� and remember that even in modern Hiroshima our Hawaii people would seem very old-fashioned. Anyhow, I'm partial to the local people. But the curious fact is this. The Caucasian mothers-in-law and the Chinese realize that they have to make a special effort to understand and love their strange new daughters. So they do so, and find happiness. The stolid Japanese mothers-in-law, and God help the Japanese girl who marries my brother and who has to put up with my mother . . . Well, it's obvious. They all think they're getting the kind of Japanese bride that used to flourish in southern Japan forty years ago. They make no effort to understand, so they haven't the slightest chance of finding happiness with their new daughters."

  "Do you know what's killing my marriage?" Akemi asked bluntly. Dr. Yamazaki was not surprised at the forthrightness of the question, for she had watched the dissolution of several such marriages, but now Akemi paused, and it was apparent to Dr. Yamazaki that she was supposed to guess, so she volunteered: "In Japan young men are learning to accept new ways, but in Hawaii they have learned nothing."

  "Yes," Akemi confessed. "Is that what the other girls say?"

  "They all say the same thing," Dr. Yamazaki assured her. "But many of them outgrow their distaste, or somehow learn, to modify their husbands."

  "But do you know what will keep me from doing that?" Akemi asked. "What cuts me to the heart day after day?"

  "What?" the sociologist asked professionally.

  "The way they laugh at my correct speech. This I will not bear much longer."

  Dr. Yamazaki thought of her own family and smiled bitterly. "I have the same problem," she laughed. "I have a Ph.D. degree."

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  Then, imitating her mother, she asked, 'Do you think you're better than we are, using such language?' So at home, in self-defense, I talk pidgin."

  "I will not," Akemi said. "I am an educated Japanese who has fought a long time for certain things."

  "If you love your husband," Dr. Yamazaki said, "you will learn to accommodate yourself."

  "To certain things, never," Akemi said. Then she asked abruptly, "Have you ever been married, Yamazaki-sensei?"

  "I'm engaged," the sociologist replied.

  "To a local boy?"

  "No, to a haole at the University of Chicago."

  "I see. You wouldn't dare marry a local boy, would you?"

  "No," Dr. Yamazaki replied carefully.

  Akemi tapped the sociologist's notebook and laughed. "Now I'm embalmed in there."

  "One of many," Dr. Yamazaki said.

  "But can you guess where I'd like to be?"

  "In a small coffee shop in the Nishi-Ginza, surrounded by exciting conversation on books and politics and music."

  "How could you guess so accurately?" Akemi asked.

  "Because I'd like to be there, too," Dr. Yamazaki confessed. "That's where I met my fianc6, so I know how lovely Japan can be. But I would say this, too. Hawaii can be just as exciting. To be a young Japanese here is possibly one of the most exhilarating experiences in the world."

  "But you said you wouldn't marry one of them," Akemi-san reminded her.

  "As a woman, seeking happiness in a relaxed home, I'll stick with my haole from Chicago. But as a pure intellect, if I were not involved as a woman, I would much prefer to remain in Hawaii."

  "Tell me truthfully, Yamazaki-sensei, do you think that any society which has as its ideal a long, black automobile can ever be a good place to live?"

  Dr. Yamazaki considered the question for some moments and replied: "You must understand that the visible symbols of success which our Japanese here in Hawaii are following are those laid down by the established haole society. A big home, a powerful car, a boy going to Yale whether he learns anything or not . . . these are the symbols people living in Hawaii must accept. You can't suddenly require the Japanese to prove themselves superior to the symbols upon which they've been raised."

  "For three years I've hoped my husband would," Akemi said bitterly.

  "Be patient," Dr. Yamazaki pleaded, "and you'll find Hawaii improving."

  "I think not," Akemi said slowly. "It's a barren, stupid place and nothing will ever change it."

  The two young women parted, and that night Dr. Yamazaki

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  called Shig Sakagawa, whom she had known at Punahou, and said, "Shig, it's none of my business, but your brother Goro is going to lose his wife."

  "You think so?"

  "I know so. She used every phrase the girls use before they catch the boat back to Japan. I've watched nineteen of them go back so far."

  "What could he do?" Shig asked. �

  "Buy her three Beethoven symphonies," Dr. Yamazaki said, knowing that to blunt Goro such a step would be beyond the outer limits of imagination. Besides, Mrs. Sakagawa Senior would never allow such music in her house.

  WHILE the labor leader Goro Sakagawa faced these problems� or rather did not face them�Hoxworth Hale was concerned principally with the forthcoming marriage of his daughter Noelani to her cousin twice removed, Whipple Janders, the son of bold, straightforward Hewlett Janders, on whom Hoxworth had grown to depend so much in recent years. At one time, when Noelani was younger, Hoxworth had rather hoped that she might go outside The Fort and find herself a completely new kind of husband . . . somebody from Yale, of course, but perhaps an easterner who had never seen Hawaii. For a while when Noelani was a senior at Wellesley she dated an Amherst boy, which was almost as good as Yale, but nothing had come of it, and when young Whip fanders, who was belatedly completing his Yale education, asked her to a spring dance at New Haven, each of them instinctively knew that they ought to ma
rry. After all, they had known each other at Punahou; they were from families who understood each other; and Whip had been the closest friend of Noelani's brother, who had been killed over Tokyo.

  However, at one point in. their engagement Noelani had experienced haunting doubts as to the propriety of their marriage, for Whipple had returned from the war somewhat changed. He was thinner, and his fashionable crew-cut did not entirely hide a tendency toward strongly individualistic behavior. Once at a Vassar dance he had appeared in formal dress but with a garish vest made of Hong Kong silk embroidered in purple dragons. He had been a sensation, but he had also been disturbing, for he had told one of the professors' wives, "Thorstein Veblen would have loved this vest," and she had stammered, "What?" and he had given his imitation of a dying tubercular patient, adding, "If you're going to have consumption, it ought to be conspicuous." It had been gruesomely funny, but unfortunately the professor's wife didn't catch on.

  Now Whip and his crew-cut were back in Honolulu, dressed in Brooks Brothers' most austere fashion, and the wedding was about to take place. Shortly before the event, Noelani asked her father, for her mother was in one of her spells and could not comprehend questions, "Do you think it's proper for kids like us to go on inter-

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  marrying, Dad? I mean, frankly, what are the chances that our children will be more like Mother than like you?"

  In considerable embarrassment, for this was the nagging fear that had made him hope that Noekni would marry some easterner, Hox-worth dodged the question and suggested: "Why don't we look into this with Aunt Lucinda. We always ask her about the family."

  "Which family?" Noelani asked.

  "The family ... all of it," Hoxworth replied, and he drove his daughter up to see Aunt Lucinda in the mist-haunted house in Nuuarau Valley. When they arrived, they found that she was entertaining half a dozen ladies of nearly her own age, and most of them were drinking gin, so that the conversation wasn't exactly on focus, but there was a sweet, relaxed gentility about it.

  "This is my great-niece, on my grandmother's side, Noelani Hale," Lucinda explained graciously, whisking her pale-blue lace handkerchief toward the girl. "She's Malama Janders Hole's daughter, and on Saturday she's going to marry that fine young Whipple Janders, who is the great-grandson of Clement and Jerusha Hewlett."

  At once, Noelani's place in the great succession was established, and the women smiled at her admiringly, one saying, "I knew your husband's great-grandmother Jerusha very weD, Noelani. She was a marvelous women and could pky polo better than the men. If young Whipple has her blood, he'll be a stalwart man, I can assure you."

  "What Noelani came to ask about," Aunt Lucinda explained, "is the extent to which she is rekted to Whip, and I would like to say right now that in my opinion it's a good deal safer to marry into a substantial island family, whose blood lines are known, than into some purely speculative mainland family whose backgrounds could have originated God knows where." The women all agreed to this, and a Japanese maid in crisp white took their cups for more tea or their glasses for more gin.

  "The only possible question about the marriage of Noekni and Whip," Aunt Lucinda began, "is that each of them," and she lowered her voice, "does have a strain of Hawaiian blood. If you go back to her great-great grandmother on her father's side, you find Malama Hoxworth, who was the daughter of Captain Rafer Hoxworth, who was not a missionary but who was a most marvelous and courtly gentleman of the finest character and breeding. Of course, he married Noelani Kanakoa, the last Alii Nui, but I think it safe to say that the Malama of whom we are speaking . . . the one that married the great Micah Hale, that is ... well anyway . . ." and with an airy gesture she dismissed the whole matter. One of the most gratifying aspects of talking with Aunt Lucinda was that she threw out so many names that you didn't really have to listen, for when she found herself hopelessly involved in family lines she stopped and started over again. Now she switched abruptly and said, with no one able to guess how she had arrived at the conclusion, "Anyway, no finer gentleman ever lived in Hawaii than Captain Rafer Hoxworth."

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  The Japanese maid brought back the drinks, and Aunt Lucinda asked, "Where was I? Oh, yes. So from that unfortunate marriage of Micah to the half-caste girl Malama . . . You know, I often wondered where Micah got the courage to appear in public so much when he was saddled with such a marriage. Well, anyway, our little Noekni here does have a strain of Hawaiian blood, but it's more than overcome, I should think, by the Hale and Whipple strains, except that the Whipple girl her great-grandfather married was not from what I like to call the unoontaminated Whipples, to which I belong, but from the branch that married into the Hewletts, which as you know were also half-castes, except for the first boy who married Lucy Hale, from whdm I am descended."

  The mists from the Pali began to fill the valley, and a waterfall echoed mournfully as Aunt Lucinda continued her analysis of the family lines. Most of the meandering comments she made were meaningless to her listeners, but since all were descended from these early ancestors who had done so much to build Hawaii, each kept in the back of her mind some three or four specially prized progenitors to whom she attributed her character, and whenever Aunt Lucinda mentioned one of those names, that listener snapped to attention through the gin and nodded with special approval. Through the years Lucinda had noticed that three names in particukr evoked veneration: it was best to be descended from Jerusha Bromley Hale, the great missionary mother; or from Rafer Hoxworth, the courtly and gracious sea captain; or from Dr. John Whipple, the patrician intellect. Aunt Lucinda, with modesty, could point out that she was descended from two of the three, and in a way she was happy that she was not rekted to Captain Hoxworth, for of course all of his offspring were part Hawaiian.

  "It's not that I'm against Hawaiians," she assured her visitors. "It's just that I get frightfully irritated at the hero-worship that goes on around here over the so-called Hawaiian royalty. I sit in the library and I can spot every malihini girl who is going to ask me, 'Do you have that book on Kelly Kanakoa?' I have to stop myself from warning them, 'You'll have to put your chewing gum away while you look at the pictures.' And when she hands the book back

  reverently she always says, 'Gee, his grandfather was a king!' As if

  that meant anything. I've always thought it was one of the most ridiculous aspects of Hawaiian life, the way they memorize these

  pathetic old lists of kings, as if a litany of imaginary names meant anything. You remember what Abner Hale, he was my great-grandfather, wrote about such ancestor worship: 'I think it impedes Hawaii as much as any other one thing, for the poor fools are so attentive to their past that they have no time to contempkte eternity.' And nothing makes me more irritated than the way a Hawaiian will point to some pathetic dregs of humanity and say accusingly, 'If the missionaries hadn't interfered, he would now be our king,' as if we had halted something fine and good. Do you know who the present king of Hawaii would be if the missionaries hadn't put a stop to such

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  nonsense? The beachboy Kelly Kanakoa! Have you ever heard him speak? He insists on using a vocabulary of about ninety words, half of them blalah. Everybody Kelly likes is blalah except that he calls me his seestah."

  Hoxworth coughed and his aunt collected her thoughts. "Oh yes, now about Whipple Janders. He went to Punahou and Yale, as you know, and had a very good record in the war. Handsome boy, but not so fleshy as his father, which is understandable, because Hewlett takes after the Hewlett side of the family, and they were always unprepossessing types, if you'll allow me to say so, Abigail, because as you know Abraham married a Hawaiian . . . well, he picked up a Hawaiian wahine after Urania died, but that's neither here nor there.

  "I suppose what you're really interested in is how the intended bridegroom Whipple relates to the Hales. If you'D go back to Micah, who married the half-caste girl Malaoia Hoxworth, you'll remember that he had two children, Ezra and Mary, and Ezra of cours
e was your great-grandfather, Noelani, and that takes care of that." The Japanese maid returned to pass coconut chips, toasted a delicious salty brown. "You may fill tie glasses, too, Kimiko," Aunt Lucinda reminded her.

  She never got back to Mary Hale, Micah's daughter, but the group understood that somehow Mary was related to Whipple Janders, but what Aunt Lucinda did say was perhaps of greater importance r "So you can see that Whipple comes from some of the finest stock in the islands. For three generations, Whipples have married Janderses, which accounts in part, I suppose, for the way in which their family fortunes have been conserved."

  Turning directly to Noelani, the beautiful girl who was soon to be married, Lucinda said, "I can think of no one you could have chosen finer than Whipple Janders, and I am extremely happy for you, Noelani. When I look at your marvelous face I see your great-greatgrandfather Mkah Hale, the savior of these islands. You have his high forehead, his courage and his force of character. But your beauty comes from the Whipples. Isn't it strange," she asked the hushed group, "how the seed of one handsome man could have produced so much beauty in these islands? I know it's fashionable to laugh at old maids who haven't married, and I'm sure you'll think me vain if I claim that when I was young I too was a typical Whipple beauty. Kimiko, fetch me that portrait in the bedroom!" And the Japanese maid silently brought in one of the last great portraits completed by Sargent, and it showed a glowing young beauty in white, with lace and combs, and Lucinda said, "Thaf s what I mean by the Whipple complexion. You have it, Noelani, and it's a great consolation to me to think that it will be reunited with the male side of the Whipple family. What handsome children you are bound to havel"

  The maid stood awkwardly with the heavy picture, and Miss Lucinda said, "You may take it back, Kimiko." And when the maid was gone she confided: "Sargent did that of me when I was en-

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