Читать книгу Honolulu Story - Leslie Ford - Страница 7

I KEPT TRYING TO FIGURE SOME SENSE OUT of it as I waited for the major who was to come and take me to the Cathers’ house. They lived up the Pali road. To any one who thinks, as I did, of the Hawaiian Islands as a vast semitropical beach with girls in grass skirts dotting sunlit pineapple and cane fields, it’s a shock to find mountains everywhere. Honolulu spills into the sea out of a broad lee-side valley below folding hills, like the end of a great cornucopia made by two wild volcanic ranges. The whole windward side of the Island is a vast precipice above a narrow seaside plain and is called the pali, which means precipice. What is called the Pali is a sheer staggering drop of twelve hundred feet where there’s a narrow pass over the Koolu Range up Nuuanu Avenue from the swarming city. Because it’s the most dramatic place on the Island and I hadn’t been up there yet and we were early, my escort and I passed the Cathers’ entrance on the winding tropical road and went on up to see it.

I don’t bring this in because I’m writing a guide for the post-war tourist, but for two other reasons. The first is that when we got back into the car out of the tearing wind and sat a moment looking out over the narrow plain below us, it seemed to me there was an awful lot of deserted beach and rock-piled lonely coastline that was very vulnerable from the sea. And I’d been wondering about that.

“What’s to keep a submarine from landing people along there at night?” I asked. I knew we’d landed people from submarines ourselves. It wasn’t even necessary to surface to do it—they could be launched up from a hundred feet below if necessary.

The major looked at me a little oddly for just an instant. It was the sort of look I recognized from Washington, that’s followed by a more or less polite evasion or some slightly sententious humor. But this was not being taken humorously, and I was aware suddenly that however far from the forward area the Islands might at present be, they were a lot farther forward than Washington.

“May I take that back?” I asked quickly.

“Not at all. We used to have barbed wire along the beaches. There’s not much point in the Japs sending people in now. We still have patrols.”

He switched the motor on and turned the car back toward the Cathers’, and we went down in a rather sober silence.

The second reason I mention the Pali is that if I hadn’t been lashed to bits by the trade wind whipping across the platform up there, I wouldn’t have heard the redbird from the lanai outside Alice Cather’s sitting room. I suppose the view of the windward side of the Island, with its rocky steeps and the narrow plain sloping down in the evening light to an indigo sea, was both magnificent and enchanting, but I was such a battered wreck trying to keep my skirt, my hair and the plumeria lei the major had bestowed on me in their proper places that I wasn’t very appreciative.

The Cathers’ courtyard as we drove in was full of cars, most of them bearing star-studded plates on the bumper. A Japanese house man in a starched white coat took my bags from the car, and Alice Cather at the door gave me one look.

“You’ve been up to the Pali. Come with me, dear—you look awful.”

We went to the right along a passage away from the main quarters of the rambling house.

“I’ll wait for you here.”

She opened the door of her bedroom off a small sitting room that opened onto a lanai extending all around the house except at the entrance courtyard. “Your room’s over there, but it isn’t ready yet. You can get settled later.”

Where we came in, the house was one long low story. Here it was high above the slope of the hill, with a swimming pool below and gardens that ended abruptly in what looked like a minor pali itself before it rose up farther along, steep and heavily wooded, into a mountain against the solid cobalt sky. It was wild, rugged and silent, totally unrelated to the seething madhouse that surrounded the beach of Waikiki, which could have been a thousand miles away and in another country.

“It’s extraordinary, isn’t it?” I said.

Alice Cather turned and looked at me as if she’d forgotten I was there and was surprised to see me.

“Oh,” she said. “Yes. It is, isn’t it?”

She was standing with her fingertips resting on the redwood rail, slight and straight as an arrow, with gray eyes and light graying hair, exquisitely groomed, with delicate and what I think are called patrician features. Her manner was patrician certainly, gracious and charming with so firmly lacquered a surface that it was impossible to know what kind of a woman was actually inside it. Up to then I’d never been interested in finding out. I was, now, seeing her against her own background for the first time. And still being concerned with what Tommy Dawson had said with too much sincerity to brush lightly aside, I decided if he was right it was time I knew it.

“It’s quite extraordinary,” she repeated.

We turned to go back. There was a fireplace in the wall in front of us, and over it the portrait of a man. It was fairly modern and strikingly done. The man who had sat was striking too. He had large luminous dark eyes in a fine, sensitive face. He was lean to the point of thinness, and the way his dark hair clung to his skull, and the line of his long hands resting on the arm of his chair, gave him a peculiarly gentle and patient expression.

“That’s very nice,” I said. “Is it your husband?”

I stopped to look at it, and Alice Cather stopped too.

“No,” she said. “No. That isn’t my husband. It’s his brother.”

She laughed lightly.

“I don’t know why I said that. We let it go as my husband. Even Mary thinks it is. It was done when she was quite small, of course.”

“Were they twins?”

She shook her head.

“Just a strong family resemblance. Completely unlike in every other respect, I may say. But he’s dead.”

I thought for an instant she was going to add, “Fortunately,” but she didn’t. She was looking at it as if she hadn’t really seen it for a long time.

“—A strange family,” she said then. “Oh, God, how strange they are!”

It came out so suddenly, and with a sharp break as she drew her breath quickly in, that I was more than startled, as I think she was herself. She turned abruptly and went out on the lanai.

“I wish to God I’d never come back, Grace,” she said. She made a sharp movement with her head as if trying to shake something out of it.

“Forgive me—I don’t know what’s got into me lately. I’ve been like this for . . . weeks, it seems to me. Even in Washington. I didn’t want to come back, but Mary was so set on it. I kept thinking it was going to be the plane, but up there I didn’t have it. I lost it till we landed. Now it’s back and it’s worse.”

Her eyes moved restlessly over the side of the hills beyond the garden.

“If I were Hawaiian I’d know. They always know what’s going to happen. But I don’t. All I know is I feel as if something ghastly is just over my head. I can’t stand it, Grace . . . I’ll go jump over the Pali if it doesn’t stop. I think I’m going mad. I——”

She broke off abruptly, listening, and her face went slowly the color of dead ashes. She put her hand out and touched my arm.

“Grace,” she whispered. “What was that? Do you hear it?”

All I could hear was the liquid sliding note of a bird somewhere in the pale green of the kukui trees in the ravine. At home I would have said it was a redbird calling. I didn’t know what it would be in these fantastic hills.

“What is it, Grace?” she whispered again.

“It sounds like a cardinal to me,” I said.

She turned her head slowly. “Of course.” She gave a sort of broken laugh. “How absurd of me. I’m really losing my mind.”

Inside the door she stopped and looked at herself in the gilded mirror over a large mat-covered sofa. The color was seeping back into her face and her eyes weren’t so almost colorlessly gray.

“I meant to tell you, my dear,” she said casually. “You have to be awfully careful about makeup out here. The air is so clear rouge stands out horribly. It makes one look hard. Let’s go in, shall we?”

She rested her arm lightly in mine. “It’s so nice you’re here.”

I wondered. My doubts, grave from the moment I’d stepped out of the transport plane, five thousand miles from home, onto the blistering surface of Hickam Field, and trod a minute section of over eleven miles of continuous concrete runway where Army and Navy air stations merge into a vast maelstrom at this crossroads of the world, were really serious now. Maybe Alice Cather was more Hawaiian than she thought, the shadowy primeval wilderness around her more potent than she knew. It was silent, now, the redbird’s note stilled in the evening woods. Maybe it was the threatening emanations from Tommy Dawson and Dave Boyer that she was feeling, I thought, and the perilous proximity of the man she wanted her daughter never to meet again. And so far as I was concerned, none of them ever would meet—I was determined about that. Tommy and Dave could take their rest and go back to Saipan, Swede Ellicott could marry the glamorous Corinne and regret at leisure, for all of me, and neither Mary Cather nor her mother need ever know how close those paths had come to crossing again. It was all too involved and unhappy. I didn’t want to be any part of it.

We came into the long room that opened out onto the lanai looking over the treetops down to the city sprawling at the edge of the Pacific. Alice Cather was superbly herself again, cool and assured and liquidly charming.

“Harry, my dear, this is the Grace Latham, Mary and I have told you so much about.”

There were many other people in the room—men in uniform with stars on their shoulders, women who were handsome—but Harry Cather in his rumpled white linen suit, and his daughter Mary, were as dominating as the great mass of torch ginger that was the only decoration against the silver-panelled wood walls, and as arresting as the two little Japanese maids, kimono-clad, slipping in and out among the guests with trays of cocktails and hors d’œuvres. They were standing together in front of the fireplace at the side of the room. It was easy to see how the portrait of his brother back in the sitting room could pass for Harry Cather, except that his hair was white now and he wasn’t so thin. I saw the same large luminous dark eyes, rather sad until he smiled, and the same patient, kindly droop of the shoulders. He was very tall. His mouth was not as full or sensuous as the portrait’s, and his hand taking mine was warm and very friendly.

“How do you do, Grace,” he said smiling. “We call people by their first names, here in the Islands, and I’ve heard about you, from my daughter.”

He turned to smile down at her.

“I hope you’re going to love it here, Mrs. Latham,” Mary said.

Standing there by her father, she was very different from the silent resentful child I’d first seen on the dock in San Francisco in February of ’42. And different from what she’d been in Washington. Seeing her now I could understand the magic she’d distilled, or the four young men on their way to war had divined in her, the night they fell as a man. She’d been attractive enough then so I wasn’t worried about getting her as a blind date for them. She was lovely, now, and the light in her violet eyes as she looked up at her father was lovely too. It must have been the way she looked at the four boys that night. Her hair was in short curls the color of shiny ripe wheatstraw that made her look younger than her twenty years and the long bob she wore in Washington had done. The sun tan she’d already got since she came home was a glowing and golden apricot against the slim whiteness of her long dress and the shower of white butterfly orchids on her shoulder. But it was the radiance in her eyes that made her different. They were clear as the dawn, and if any shadow had ever touched them it was gone, forgotten in the rapt enchantment of being home. Of guile or duplicity there was none. And I could hear Tommy Dawson’s voice again:

“We were four happy Joes—now one of us is dead on her account. . . .”

Her mother was at my side again, and I was meeting the other guests, with names I’d read in victorious communiqués from the South and Central Pacific, some of whom I’d already met around Washington. It was when Alice Cather led me to the lime-yellow cushioned hikiee in the corner that my heart gave a short power-dive and didn’t come up.

“Well, bless me!” a voice said. “It sure is a small world, isn’t it? How do you do, Mrs. Latham—I bet you don’t remember me.”

A young officer rose briskly. I bet I did remember him. He was one of those brash young men whose name never fully registers but whose face is as familiar at large cocktail parties as an established caterer’s number one old waiter. He was some sort of a friend of the four boys who had a brother in the State Department and landed in its sacred precincts himself for a brief stay before General Hershey’s large figure loomed ominously somewhat nearer than the horizon. And there must be some Hawaiian in me too. I knew what was coming as clearly as if he’d already said it.

“Have you seen the old gang yet? They’ll all be here, all except Ben Farrell. . . .”

Alice Cather’s hand on my elbow contracted sharply. I didn’t look at her, and I couldn’t see Mary without definitely turning. And I couldn’t stop the young man.

“Poor old Ben got it, Saipan or some place.”

It was as if he were announcing a winner in the bingo game.

“You ought to use your influence, Mrs. Latham. Old Swede’s running around with that slant-eyed Mata Hari that Ben Farrell was married to. That babe is a smart operator . . . Corinne something or other, I forget——”

“Farrell, I expect, isn’t it?”

Alice Cather’s voice was as cool as a thin slice of cucumber in ice water.

“—Why don’t you show Mrs. Latham the garden before it gets dark?” Alice Cather was going on pleasantly. “And I’m sure she’s anxious to hear about your friends.”

She’d moved a little, as I had, so we both had a direct view of Mary through half a dozen generals, one of whom was producing a package of bobby pins for a delighted woman in gray chiffon with a pair of diamond ear clips that would have bought a shipload of bobby pins in other times. Mary was still by her father, her arm in his, talking to a naval officer whose white starched coattail was flipped out like the wing of a crinoline kite. Her face was still radiant. She hadn’t heard. I was sure of it, and so was her mother. There was a perceptible relaxation in the tiny crow’s-feet at the ends of her eyelids. And it couldn’t be plainer that she was determined to get the brash young man out of the room. I supposed in addition to everything she didn’t want him to go on talking about slant-eyed Mata Hari’s with the Japanese house man standing correct and politely unobtrusive less than three feet away.

She took him firmly by the arm. “You know the way, Captain.”

I was sure then she didn’t know his name either. That’s the nice thing about the uniform; all you have to do is tell silver from gold, eagles from leaves and stars from both.