My grandson is nine. I am in my sixty-eighth year.
The memorial terrace on which we are standing, alongside my wife, has been erected above the remains of the USS Arizona, a 608-foot Pennsylvania-class battleship overwhelmed at its moorings on the morning of December 7, 1941, by Japanese dive bombers. It sank in minutes. The flooded hulk, a necropolis ever since, holds the remains of many of the 1,177 sailors and marines killed or drowned on the ship that morning. I’m explaining to the boy that sometimes we do this to each other, harm each other on this scale. He knows about September 11, 2001, but he has not yet heard, I think, of Dresden or the Western Front, perhaps not even of Antietam or Hiroshima. I won’t tell him today about those other hellfire days. He’s too young. It would be inconsiderate—cruel, actually—pointedly to fill him in.
Later that morning the three of us snorkel together on a coral reef. We watch schools of tropical fish bolt, furl, and unfurl before us, colored banners in a breeze. Then we have lunch by a pool at the hotel where we are guests. The boy swims tirelessly in the pool’s glittering aqua-tinted water until his grandmother takes him down to the beach. He runs to jump into the Pacific.
He can’t get enough of swimming.
I watch him for a few minutes, flinging himself into the face of wave after wave. His grandmother, knee-deep in the surf, scrutinizes him without letup. Eventually I sit down in a poolside chair with a glass of iced lemonade and begin to read a book I’ve started, a biography of the American writer John Steinbeck. I glance up once in a while to gaze at sunlight shuddering on the surface of the ocean, or to follow flocks of sparrows as they flee the tables of the hotel’s open-air restaurant, where they’ve been gleaning crumbs. For prolonged uninterrupted minutes I also watch, with a mixture of curiosity and affection, the hotel’s other guests, sunning on lounges around the pool or ambling past, completely at ease. The clement air and the benign nature of the light dispose me toward an accommodation with everything here different from myself. When I breathe, I’m aware of a dense, perfume-like scent—tropical flowers blooming in a nearby hedge. Is it bougainvillea?
The exuberance of my grandson has also enhanced this sense of tranquility I feel.
Most of the guests here are Asian. I recognize in particular the distinctive cast of Japanese and Chinese faces. Strolling through the poolside restaurant in expensive clothes, discreetly signaling a pool attendant for a towel, snapping copies of The Honolulu Star-Advertiser to straighten the pages, they all seem to have the bearing of people familiar with luxury, as I imagine that state.
I return to the biography. In the paragraph I’m reading, the writer is describing a meeting Steinbeck once had at his home in Pacific Grove, California, with the historian of mythology Joseph Campbell. The night before this, Steinbeck, the composer John Cage, Campbell, Steinbeck’s first wife, Carol, and a few others had all enjoyed dinner together in the Steinbeck home. Campbell has now come out onto the patio to inform his host that he has fallen in love with Carol. He accuses Steinbeck of treating her shabbily, and says that if he won’t change his ways then he, Campbell, is prepared to ask Carol to marry him and to return with him to New York.
I look up abruptly from the book, recalling that I’d been in summer camp in 1956 with both of Steinbeck’s sons, Thom and John. It had been a memorable encounter for me. I was eleven and I met their father at the same time. I marveled at the burly reification of this person who’d written The Red Pony. (I was introduced to his third wife, Elaine, then, too. She was cool. Dismissive.)
I pick up again where I’ve left off, keen to follow this unanticipated triumvirate—Steinbeck, John Cage, Joseph Campbell.
Pages later, I am feeling the westering sun burning hot on my right cheek. Another tight flock of sparrows hurtles by my head and suddenly I wonder whether I’d done absolutely the wrong thing that morning at Pearl Harbor, before we’d all gone to see the Arizona. I’d walked my grandson through the interior of a World War II American submarine, explaining the architecture, the periscope in the conning tower, the forward torpedo tubes. He had touched the sleek torpedoes gingerly, a lingering caress, his small hands cupping the warheads.
Just then a handsome Japanese woman striding along the pool’s edge makes a graceful, arcing dive into the water. An impulsive act. A scrim of water rises around her like the flair of a flamenco dancer’s skirt. The pool water shatters into translucent gems.
In the beauty of this moment, I suddenly feel the question: What will happen to us?
I stand up, a finger marking my place in the book, and search the breaking surf beyond a hedge of sea grape for my grandson. He waves hysterically at me, smiling from the slope of a wave. Here, Grandpa!
What is going to happen to all of us now, in a time of militant factions, of daily violence?
I want to thank the woman for her exquisite dive. The abandon and grace of her movement.
I want to wish each stranger I see in the chairs and lounges around me, every one of them, an untroubled life. I want everyone here to survive what is coming.