Chapter Six

The week sped by more quickly than I expected. Talk of war found its way into the news more often since Winston Churchill made a speech pledging he would declare war “within the hour” if Japan and America engage forces. In headline news the FBI denied that the U.S. will jail Hawaiʻi aliens in the event of war; the article went on to assure that government action would be taken only if laws were broken.

Into days of passing showers came two unsettling events. The first one had little to do with me, although it caused me to rethink an opinion I’d formed, and for this reason I couldn’t get it out of my mind.

Dr. Kane had come to pay a house call on Johnny—to see how his leg was recovering from the basketball accident. This kind of personal attention was unusual in itself, and more so considering the rainy weather. I paid my respects to the doctor, then went up to my room to give them what little privacy our small living room offered. My impression was that the doctor was a calm soft-spoken man, demonstrating what most would call a kindly bedside manner.

Not long after, Johnny came into my room and sat in the window seat. “Still painting?” he asked idly.

“Are you finished with the doctor already?”

“Yeah, he says I’m okay to play again.”

I must have been looking at him quizzically because he explained, “He’s talking to my mom now.”

“Is something wrong?” I was worried until I remembered that she was interested in becoming a volunteer nurse.

“No, they’re making plans to go to my game on Friday.”

“You mean, a date?”

“If old people have dates, then, yeah, I think so.”

I kept Johnny in my room talking about the rules of basketball, penalty shots, anything—until I heard Dr. Kane’s car pull away from the house. Then we went down the stairs to join Auntie, who was washing coffee cups in the kitchen.

“Soooo?” I prompted.

“Dr. Kane left to go back to the hospital,” she stated the obvious.

I would need to be a little more direct. “Johnny tells me that you’re going to the game with him?”

“It’s not a date, Lei, if that’s what you’re thinking. He wants to watch Johnny move around on the court, that’s all. Because of his leg.”

“Wait a minute. A tall, dark,” I couldn’t honestly say ‘handsome’ “doctor comes to the house, asks to take you out for an evening, and you don’t think it’s a date?” My voice sounded too incredulous for comfort.

“If you put it that way—”

“He’s nice,” Johnny put in.

“So what’s his background, what do you know about him?” My questions tumbled out, and I regretted sounding as big a gossip as Jerry.

“He’s interested in gardening. I’ve told him about the orchid club.” She went on to tell us about his training and residency, the schedule he kept at Queens and the volunteer nursing program he was heading up. “He’s part Hawaiian, from a few generations back.”

“Do you like him?”

“The more I talk to him…I think so, yes. We have a lot of interests in common.”

Later that night in bed, with the soft sounds of rain pattering on my closed window, I was lulled into a mood of introspection. I didn’t usually think of Auntie May as having a romantic life—wasn’t she nearly forty? Yet there had been a glow about her as she spoke of Dr. Kane. She almost looked pretty.

The prospect of falling in love wasn’t bounded by age or ancestry, I marveled, as if I had come up with an entirely original idea.

I took Pride and Prejudice from my nightstand and opened to where I had left off. Elizabeth Bennett was suffering the attentions of the deliciously reluctant Mr. Darcy, whose romantic intentions were hampered by class differences he could barely overlook.

****

The second situation was much more disconcerting. In fact, it scattered all the puzzle pieces I had so neatly—so rationally—fit together, and tossed them into the wind.

Friday had been a moderately productive day, meaning that walls in one of the bedrooms had been prepared for painting, and peeling wallpaper removed in another. While we were upstairs, Mr. Gonsalves and I looked at the latch on the attic door without being able to detect why it jammed when Jamison and I had been bringing down the paintings. To prevent a future, more serious mishap, Mr. Gonsalves installed a little peg behind a rafter, and I hung a skeleton key on it.

That afternoon, I freshened up, and put on a skirt and blouse before I set out to have tea with Vivian Winston. At the last minute I swung by Makani Kai to remind Mr. Gonsalves to lock up. Jamison’s Cadillac was in the turn-around, so I backed out and turned onto the valley road before I was spotted.

My heart was beating a crazy staccato at the near miss, while I could have kicked myself for being such a coward. Maybe I would have to face Jamison again someday, though it couldn’t hurt to put off the awkward meeting as long as possible.

Just before four o’clock, with my composure returning, I pulled up in front of Vivian Winston’s colonial bungalow on Diamond Head Road. An elderly housekeeper welcomed me and showed me into the sitting room. It was an airy space of floral chintz curtains, bright prints hanging on the wall and a small table with two wicker chairs.

“Hello, my dear. You had no trouble finding the house?”

I had never called her Great-aunt Vivian. Certainly not Auntie or Tu-Tu. “Hello Vivian. I’m gradually reacquainting myself with the city,” I assured her, expressing my appreciation for her kind invitation while I sat down with the table between us.

“Cook is making tea, and I hope you like banana bread—oh, here it is now.” The housekeeper brought in a silver tray, with a delicate porcelain teapot and two cups with saucers. A smaller silver plate had a selection of pastries.

“Shall I pour?” Vivian asked. “My husband Richard always did the serving for us. Of course that was many years ago, and I’ve grown to enjoy the ritual.”

We sipped our tea while I enjoyed every subtlety of her graceful lifestyle and the pleasant prospect of what she called a little chat.

“Tell me,” she said. “How is Makani Kai coming along? Happier days must be ahead for everyone in the old house.”

“I hope I’ll be able to open the guesthouse after the first of the year. So in that respect we’ll be happier.” And more financially stable, I added to myself. I detected a glimmer of what I interpreted as cautious optimism in her eyes. “My mother would appreciate how conscientiously we’ve brought the house back to the way it was.”

I thought about how her last moments had been spent in her private bedchamber, darkly shuttered and stifling, with Daddy holding her hand and the doctor and I beside him hoping for a miracle. I was not opening up that room again.

“Ah, your mother.” Vivian looked at me, her eyes soft with sympathy. “She never fit in to the place from the beginning, no matter how hard she tried.”

“It wasn’t the kind of extravagant lifestyle she was used to, but Daddy would have given her anything to make her happy.”

There was a slight pause. “Yes, I believe Ralph was utterly devoted in his way.”

I waited breathlessly for Vivian to continue. Her tone suggested there was a side of my parents’ life that I’d been only dimly aware of during childhood.

“He courted your mother with an ardor that had the family in an uproar. Your grandfather Stanley complained to me once that the entire rose garden would be ‘picked clean’—those were his words—if your father made even one more bouquet for her. It was rumored that she was holding out for a secret sweetheart and not willing to make a commitment to your father. Then everything changed, and a wedding date was set. Some thought it was too sudden.”

“A shotgun wedding, you mean.”

“You were born more than two years later, so the wagging tongues quieted down. Carolyn turned all her attention to you, then came her art work. I wasn’t in Hawaiʻi often during those years when Richard was lecturing on the Mainland. I sometimes regret that I didn’t have the chance to do more,” she said, almost to herself. Her blue eyes peered into her nearly empty teacup, as though she might have read the leaves so many years earlier and saved a lot of heartache.

“I remember that you encouraged my mother with her painting.”

“She had begun to retreat into a world of painting. At the time I didn’t fully recognize the extent of it—and, I questioned how much I should interfere in her life. I rationalized that Carolyn had found a refuge from a marriage that wasn’t quite what she expected. But her painting became more like an escape from herself,” Vivian lamented.

“Your father always kept her on a pedestal, and I never heard an unkind word pass between them,” she said quickly, almost anticipating what my next question might be. “There were roses for each anniversary, and he hired a large staff to help her with the house and garden. Your father had his own struggles during those years,” she went on, “inheriting in his mid-twenties a business that he didn’t understand or particularly care for.”

“How was it that things went downhill for him so badly that he finally lost everything?”

“The Islands were developing rapidly when your father took over—it would have been in 1920, after your grandparents’ accident. Roads were being built to remote villages all over the islands. After a few years, steamships weren’t needed anymore. Trucks could haul supplies everywhere from centralized harbors. Especially when tugboats hauled everything on barges at lower costs.”

“The Wentworth Lines could have used tugboats too, couldn’t they?”

“It was beneath your father’s dignity,” Vivian said bluntly. “He said that he wouldn’t tarnish the Wentworth name by using those ‘dirty little boats.’”

“There wasn’t anything unlucky, then, about the way the business failed. Something that had to do bad luck at Makani Kai?” I asked.

“Where did you get that idea?”

“Someone told me there was an unlucky rock, I think it was, on the property. It sounded like a curse.”

“The pohaku,” Vivian reflected. “A large boulder covered with petroglyphs from ancient Hawaiian days. It wasn’t unlucky and not cursed, though I can see how it might have gotten that kind of reputation.”

“The petroglyphs were carved into the rock?”

“Yes, they were stick figures, birds, anything that could be chipped into the face of stone to guide travelers on a footpath. Archeologists at the Bishop Museum have done a study of petroglyphs around Hawaiʻi, and I believe they documented some that were on the pohaku. Let’s see what I have in the study.” She picked up her reading glasses and rose from her chair to leave the room briefly to come back with an unbound volume. “I can give this to you, if you like.”

I leafed through the pages of a manuscript on the Archeology of Oahu, dating from 1933, noting several pages of hand drawings. “Do you know where the pohaku is located?”

“I did once. It’d be difficult to find in the forest now after so many years. Your father played near there as a child because it was alongside the old road that came into the Wentworth property. The idea of bad luck became associated with the pohaku while the road was being widened, but it wasn’t the rock itself.”

Vivian looked out the window of the sitting room for a minute, into the faded daylight, watching the years roll back without much awareness of my presence.

“It was in 1904 that your grandmother was expecting her second child. For ten years she’d been hoping to have another son, so Stanley bought one of the first gas-engine Fords on the island to safely carry around his growing family. The original horse-and-carriage cobblestone road into the valley had been built at the command of King Kalākaua, about twenty years earlier. It had been a long backbreaking project built by prison labor with picks and shovels after the pohaku was discovered—the King wouldn’t allow the rock to be disturbed by any dynamite blasting. An ancient chant told of a trail bordering Makana Valley that had been used for making offerings. Kalākaua believed the pohaku could have been a powerful pointer or boundary marker that should be respected. He brought a team of brothers—they were stone masons—from Italy to build the bridge over Makana Stream.”

An alarming tingle had started up my back and hot tears burned behind my eyelids at the mention of the bridge. For a moment I was seized with the notion that this must be what it’s like to go quietly insane.

“They used a construction technique that was called formed-arch,” Vivian continued. “I seem to recall that in the building process a wooden form was put into place, with the arches of the bridge laid in stone above it. Then the form was removed. A similar bridge still spans a small creek leading into Nuʻuanu Stream, you may have seen it.”

I hadn’t seen the Nuʻuanu Bridge. It didn’t matter. I knew the one in Makana Valley well, though I’d never seen it either. It existed in my imagination even before I sketched it, or saw the bridge in my mother’s painting.

“There were three arches supporting the span across the creek,” I managed to say in a croaking voice I didn’t recognize as my own.

“Yes, that’s what I remember.” Vivian paused. “Would you like more tea?” she asked with a worried look, and I nodded without trusting myself to speak again right away.

“Was the bridge demolished to make way for a motor road?” I finally asked.

“That’s where the bad luck comes in. When your grandfather Stanley contracted to have the road—and the bridge—widened, some large pieces of equipment were pulled in by mules. The pohaku was bumped and dislodged by several feet, so the foreman ordered it broken up into rubble to get it out of the way. As soon as Stanley heard about it, he ran out to the building site and fired the company on the spot. Told them to leave the valley immediately, but it was too late, if you believe in these things. Your grandmother Grace had gone into premature labor, and the baby couldn’t be saved.

“I came back from Georgetown, where my husband was lecturing at the time, to stay with Grace during her convalescence. I’d always felt as close to her as a sister, though we were related only through our father.

“In time Grace revived. She never fully regained her health, so the Ford became a way for her to be driven into town more comfortably. A new route into the valley had been devised by then, and the road was constructed—the one you use now to get to Makani Kai. In nearly forty years that have passed, the forest must have completely covered over the old road.”

“The bridge must have been washed away by now.”

“I wouldn’t be too sure of that. It’s said that the strength of the arches would last centuries. King Kalākaua had wanted to create a legacy when he built ʻIolani Palace, but it may be that the little bridges of his reign will be remembered just as fondly. They were such a convenience to the people at the time.”

“What happened to the pohaku?”

“Your grandfather decided against moving it again. It was left where it came to rest downstream a bit from the bridge. Your father was cautioned not to play around the pohaku when he was young, out of respect, but the bridge was fair game. I saw him one afternoon pretending to fish from the top of the center arch. He was sitting with his feet dangling high above the stream. He had a nickname for the bridge. Something that was silly, in a boyish way, and also quite clever.”

Vivian sat back in her chair, remembering, I believe, my father in his youth. Before my mother’s untimely death, and something else less clearly understood, had shaken him into the shell of a person neither of us would have recognized at the end.

“The name had something to do with the arches.” Vivian paused to search her memory. “Their shape, and also the way they’d been built, sitting atop the wooden form.”

I was gripped with a searing wave of what I could only describe as déjà vu—a piercing melancholy that had my eyes nearly brimming again. “The King’s Crown.” I didn’t realize I said the words out loud until Vivian spoke.

“Yes, that was it. The King’s Crown. Quite inventive, don’t you think?”

I didn’t know what to think. The line between what I couldn’t possibly have remembered, and yet knew so well, had been smudged away. So I agreed and gulped down another swig of tea.

The rest of the evening with Vivian swirled away into the topic of her most recent book tour and my plans for the holidays, which were no plans at all aside from the Aloha Ball. I wanted to ask more about my parents’ life together. First, I needed time to let my imagination simmer down before it got the better of my common sense. Still, through a haze of half-conscious attentiveness, I accepted an invitation to attend a dinner party she was giving next Saturday, before leaving for the dark drive home.