Aloha, Mozart

by Williams, Waimea

  His voice was so soft that she sat still. Quietly he told her that at fourteen she was already grown, with her new job, and that she had too many boys who were already men. No woman could handle too many men, and no man could handle too many women. From now on her life could go up, or straight down. His own life had been good until Ma died, then it went down, all down, until he heard Maile singing on the radio. Even though they hadn’t said her name, on that day life went back up for him.

  Maile stared ahead at the sprawling house on the little parcel of land, home to more than a dozen people already leaning on her two hundred dollars a month. Doing it with six boys had not made her officially grown up. A big part of her was stalled in childhood.

  Someday, Makua assured her, they would say her name on the radio, because she was a singer, born for that, not for running wild. Their full name, Mānoa nā Ānuenue, meant many rainbows, the ancient sign of chiefs. On the haole side, Makua said, his grandfather Hermann Braumeister had come to Honolulu in 1885, planted his seed, and disappeared a year later, leaving behind only the memory of his name. Ma’s grandfather Hee Ming had stayed and died of plague back then, along with most of his relatives, but his name survived in the memory of the next generation. So Maile had all that, and didn’t she feel lucky?

  The backs of her legs no longer stung. Makua rarely sat to talk with any of his children, and his words felt like love. “Tell me about Ma,” she said, hoping for a story, to share with her sisters or keep to herself as a treasured intimacy.

  Makua reached across and grabbed the door handle on her side, his heavy arm a barrier that held her in place. “What I heard,” he demanded, “boys want you ‘cause you can’t hold the seed?” She struggled like a child, trying to pry his fingers apart and loosen his grip, but failed and sat in wordless fury with her fists clenched. He waited, both of them fuming, his arm cramping. Finally she admitted her secret: no ma‘i, no matter how much she went with boys. She’d been sure that was the way to make it come. But don’t tell! Nobody knows.

  “Fourteen’s way late,” Makua said. “Can be you got woman sickness same as Ma. Go with Lani tomorrow.” He relaxed his arm. “Find out what’s wrong. Skip school.”

  Maile recalled her mother lying in the back room, thin and silent, her eyes stark with pain. She had never imagined worse trouble than breaking a kapu, but here in Honolulu things could go badly wrong for no reason at all. She got out of the truck, feeling heavy with dread, went into the kitchen, and began chopping onions to disguise her teary eyes.

  EARLY NEXT MORNING Auntie Lani took Maile to an elderly relative of Ma’s who lived in back of a Chinatown herbal shop. The alert old woman had a tiny knot of white hair at the base of her skinny neck and wore dull black silk pajamas and flat black shoes, like an immigrant of fifty years ago. Maile saw no connection to herself or to Jade. The three of them drank tea and recited the Lord’s Prayer in English and in Hawaiian, then the healer chanted a blessing in Chinese, strange, high-pitched sounds that made Maile even more uncomfortable.

  No, she replied when asked, no pain in her eggs. No swollen belly like blood backed up. No problem going lavatory, nothing growing in the wrong place. The healer spent an hour slowly examining Maile through her school clothes. She grunted with approval at her womanly breasts, at the hair under her arms and between her legs. She pulled down Maile’s panties to poke a long, skinny finger deep into her pua, rotated the finger thoughtfully, then handed over a bowl and ordered, “Mimi.” In a lather of embarrassment Maile squatted over the bowl. The healer studied Maile’s urine, smelled it, swirled it, smelled it, swirled it again. Auntie Lani sat tensely silent. Maile went from feeling humiliated to bored to worried all over again.

  Finally the healer said that Maile was a rare kind of woman who could never have children: she lacked the connection pipes between the eggs and the womb. Because of that she would never get her ma‘i. At Queen’s Hospital, doctors could operate modern-style, but they would find the same thing. Auntie Lani sucked in a huge breath and expelled it in a howling sob.

  “I’m sick?” Maile asked. “I gone die like Ma?” No, not sick, she was told, and she would die because everybody died, but not the way Ma died, because when Ma was born, she had all her parts.

  On the ride home Auntie Lani snuffled and wiped her eyes. Maile felt like she’d been shoved forward into life, given no choice, the way she’d felt standing on the deck of the sampan as it passed the green cliffs of Kauai. Her worst fear was being called a freak who could not have a child. When she married, close relatives would have to give her one of their own babies if she asked for it, and then another baby when the first one was a few years old. Hawaiian tradition demanded such generosity to relieve the curse of loneliness. She pictured herself holding an infant boy while a little girl clung to her skirt, gifts from siblings who already had children. They were filled with the pride of young parents keeping little ones safe from hot stoves, knives, passing cars, allowing toddlers to run crazy while teaching them manners. But soon word would get around the family that Maile was cursed, the only one who “couldn’t have,” as they said, being nice because the word “barren” meant earth eroded to clay where nothing grew.

  In panic she shouted, “You keep you mouth shut!” Auntie Lani pulled off the road and stared at her. “Nobody finds out I got no ma‘i” Maile said, “My business! Nobody calls me freak, feels all sorry.”

  Auntie Lani insisted that she was just special. Maile didn’t believe it and made her promise on God and Pele that her secret was kapu. Makua would be told not to worry, his girl was okay. They drove on home in the edgy mood of having to trust each other without further discussion. Maile vowed to bury her secret where not even pili could find it, and go in search of more music: born to sing, like Makua had said.

  At school she advanced to performing Gilbert and Sullivan solos for holiday assemblies, difficult pieces that were fun but frustrating because they meant nothing. In the public library she listened to records of choral works from famous operas, Italian blacksmiths, Spanish prisoners, German hunters. The name Verdi was there, one among many, but the choruses were just scraps of stories, tantalizing and incomplete. Instead of dating, she befriended mahu boys who grew their fingernails long and gossiped about Waikiki and advised her on hair-styles and makeup. On Friday evenings, the Papakōlea family gathered to rip open salary envelopes, put the money in a calabash, and pay the most pressing bills.

  AFTER TWO YEARS with Mr. O’Doyle, Maile got a five-dollar raise. On the way home she made a mental shopping list—diapers, bleach, crayons—but once inside the house, she hid the bill in the dresser drawer along with the Kalākaua coin in the leather pouch. Week after week her little hoard grew, the worst kind of crime: selfishness. If discovered, she could not have said why she was doing it. She now sang for haole weddings, ten dollars for “Oh, Promise Me,” with whispered phrases that brought tears to the eyes of ladies wearing hats. If she was paid in singles, one rolled-up dollar went into the bottom drawer.

  The weddings led to a solo at a large church in a part of the city Maile had never seen; Panis Angelicus, sacred music from Europe. The simplicity and slow beauty of the melody line made her fearless rather than nervous. She sensed a musical connection to O patria mia, to chorus class, to the records in the school library, to the idea of opera. When the church music director motioned with a gentle dip of his wrist, her cue, she sang the odd text that meant “bread of heaven,” and in the high, wide interior she felt all her spirits flow out from her lips, mouth, and throat to touch the back wall and echo delicately. No microphone, no cuteness, no sarong, no smile. It was singing for Akua Jesus, like dancing for a goddess.

  Soon she worked at churches all over Honolulu, hunting for music, skipping those that relied on the same plodding hymns week after week. One choir director recommended her to a voice teacher, but Maile couldn’t afford lessons, and wondered why she needed them; music was just memorize, get the feeling, hit the right notes and rhythm. Her singin
g made people instantly listen, which gave her a sense of increasing power, even if it lasted only until her final note. She was a fishing net, flung out to gather them in.

  A CATHOLIC HIGH school announced work on The Magic Flute, an opera to be presented with piano, a violin, a cello, and students supervised by nuns. Maile was equally curious about Mozart and the strange sacred women, who wore only black and white, and she volunteered to make costumes during rehearsals. Each day after school, at the back of the Mystic Rose assembly hall, Maile covered a cardboard outfit in tinfoil: knight’s armor for an unnamed prisoner in an unnamed castle. Beside a small stage, Sister Bridget played the piano from a score with abridged sections clipped together by clothespins. Maile listened past the struggling singers and heard how the music connected to a story, a theme. Characters and tunes developed, an important clue, she felt, to something big; a ship rather than a canoe, an opera rather than a holiday medley.

  One afternoon she took her scissors and a leg of the costume, and moved closer to the piano. Ahead of her, six students in a line began a solemn chorus of warning. The melody had a deep richness and the cellist’s bow sang on the strings, moving to the right, to the left, urging the music to descend the scale. The voices and instruments shifted as one with the strength of a rising wave. Maile followed the printed notes of the score in amazement that they could be so transformed— black dots into human feelings. Pili pulsed in her chest, her gut. She started to cut the cardboard without looking and the cold blade of the scissors pressed against her thumb. She froze, certain that music had sent her a message: it possessed greater mana than she had ever imagined.

  At home Maile shrugged off questions about the opera and did not insist that Hermann pronounce “Mozart” correctly. She went to the remaining rehearsals, and to three performances, and each time waited in tense anticipation for the chorus and the cello to shift the melody. The moment became familiar, a promise of treasures in store.

  MR. O’DOYLE PAID Maile three hundred dollars to appear on a locally produced record album as an unnamed lead singer with the Voices from the Reef. She disguised the full payment from them and added ten fives to the rolls of bills lining the dresser drawer like skinny green cigarettes. Her guilty secret: hiding money for no reason when the roof was leaking, the electricity was cut for non-payment, a cousin’s outboard motor had broken down. Throughout the remainder of high school she kept saving with the vague intention of rejoining Tūtū on Kauai. They would gather medicine plants in the feathery rain, harvest salt in the stone pans at Hanalei, spend every day on the reef, honor the names of the winds streaking across the water in the season of Lono. But Tūtū was frail now. And there was no Panis Angelicus on Kauai. No jobs either. For a hundred years, outer island people had been moving to Honolulu to find work. The day-to-day, week-to-week need for cash always caught up with families, even if they raised chickens, vegetables, and fruit to swap with neighbors who fished.

  Maile’s first album with the Voices from the Reef was followed by two more, and all sold well. She joined the group of professionals considered successful by local standards, although Waikiki musicians never achieved national prominence. Standards she had sung hundreds of times, like “Hawaiian Wedding Song,” were rerecorded by mainland stars and made millions of dollars. Everyone recognized the limits of a singing career in Hawaii.

  In 1961, high school graduation was the great event in the lives of teenagers unable to dream of college or good jobs. A third of Maile’s class had already dropped out to work, have babies, or join the military. Jade was now assistant hostess at a large Chinese restaurant and the mother of two little girls. Hermann became a father the same week he turned sixteen, and he quit school for a job as a car mechanic. School counselors advised Maile against further study, saying that women who went to college got married anyway and devoted themselves to home life. Classical music conservatories were costly, distant, and part of haole culture. She saw herself restricted to hotel floor shows and Hawaiian music fast going out of style in favor of rock ‘n roll. The future seemed to be bearing down on her with the force of a storm wind.

  ONE AFTERNOON IN August, when all the graduation luau were over, Maile went to the university campus in Manoa to get a catalogue of classes. The lush uplands once reserved for ruling chiefs now held twenty academic buildings and the homes of plantation managers and bankers who could afford views of Diamond Head. She decided that her family name, Manoa of the Rainbows, meant she belonged in this part of Honolulu, but she had no plan other than a fierce desire to get more out of life.

  At the registration office she took a catalogue to sit outside under a tree and study the list of courses. Asian Art, no, because it reminded her of Jade; Beginning German, yes, because of Mozart; Classics of European Music, maybe, because there was a lot she still didn’t know; Freshman Literature, required; Stagecraft and World Drama, maybe, because opera took place on a stage. She made a mental list of fees, and shivered with fear and importance. Even if she lived at home, the university would cost a thousand dollars a year. She had nearly that much hidden away but dared not spend it and reveal her unforgivable miserliness. And once the thousand dollars was gone, who would pay for the next year, and the next and the next?

  The clan met to discuss Maile and the University of Hawaii. It took until late afternoon for everyone to arrive at the house, then for aged relatives from Wai‘anae and Waimānalo to be settled and served coffee, for homemade desserts to be consumed and complimented. Twenty-three adults crammed into the front room as babies fell asleep on laps and older children peered in through open doors. An hour later the majority decided that the university was too expensive. Maile had to keep her singing jobs and work full time. The decision caught her by surprise; no recognition of how much she had contributed over the last four years, no offer of half this, half that. What she wanted had been vague, no more than a need to not be locked in place until she was as old as the elders lined up on the sagging couch.

  “Talk for me!” she whispered to Makua.

  He looked around, uncomfortable at speaking ahead of people in their seventies and eighties, but he murmured to the group that a grown daughter should not be held back. Deliberations continued. After a while Makua reminded everybody that before the war he had gone to college for one year, and still regretted having to leave. He’d never planned on being a bus driver all his life. Auntie Lani spoke with her sisters, then with other women their age. She got them to agree that if Maile wanted to study that bad, it was only—she paused to do the math in her head—ninety-three dollars a month, we can manage, e nei? The objections of Jade and Hermann failed to change the final decision: Maile could study all four years if she continued to work as a singer. She thanked everyone but the thought of doing both filled her with anxiety.

  “Girl,” Makua said as people got up to leave, “I hope you know wat’s wat. At UH they don’t like us Hawaiians. Was bad back when, and still yet. You gotta be tough, proud.”

  “I can handle,” Maile replied without thinking.

  Makua smiled faint agreement, although his words made her wonder how much worse than high school the university would be. Each year certain teachers had sniped at Hawaiians and Samoans: Go sit in the back row, don’t ask questions, don’t bother reading that book. You’re born stevedores, truck drivers, beach boys, hula girls.

  She smiled back at her father. “Nobody can stop me study German, e?”

  3

  MAILE ARRIVED FOR the first day of class wearing a navy blue dress with a white collar. White high heels, navy blue handbag, hair pinned up. She caught sight of one man in a suit who could have been part Hawaiian, but everybody else except for a janitor was Japanese or haole. She felt that her clothes were perfect, the only conservative outfit she owned, although students and faculty still regarded her with surprise— a real local-local who could be spotted a block away, the Waikiki entertainer who also sang a little classical music. She headed straight for Beginning German, convinced that Hermann
Braumeister, who had fathered children in Honolulu in 1885, gave her a right to be there. She would claim her Caucasian blood in the same way that Jade had decided to be Chinese.

  As the students sat down, their professor counted rapidly, “Eins, zwei, drei, vier, fünf, sechs.” When no more appeared, he said, “Well, it is at least the minimum.” He spoke in a precise and foreign way, with what Maile did not realize was a Cambridge accent. On the blackboard he wrote “Avram Chaimowitz” and pronounced his last name slowly.

  “By way of introduction,” he said, “I am, of course, Jewish. However, in Honolulu that means nothing. I am above all, German. Now, my budding scholars, why in the middle of the Pacific does each of you want to learn this beautiful language?”

  To fulfill a requirement, the other students replied, to get a military job, to try something new. “Because I’m part German,” Maile answered too loudly, “and because of music.”

  Professor Chaimowitz waved away the laughter of her classmates. “Culture, dear students,” he said, pausing to look at each of them, “is the key. You shall learn that before Hitler appeared, German culture was magnificent. German was the language of poets and philosophers, elegant and uplifting. Unlike its current debasement in American motion pictures, where some brute shouts ‘Achtung!’ and the audience guffaws.”

  Soon Maile entered worlds beyond any she had imagined. The language class offered the exotic temptations of Goethe’s Faust, the agony of Rilke’s panther, but also Professor Chaimowitz’s descriptions of his life in Hamburg during the 1930s. After Jews were barred from teaching, he told students, his savings account was seized, his car, his house. He had continued to believe that wisdom and decency would prevail over politics, then new laws restricted Jews from using the same sidewalks as Aryans. It became a game for him to outwit officials and police. One morning he saw a rabbi beaten in a public square, teeth flying across the pavement, the crunch of the skull.