Chapter Seven

Two days later I saw Jamison again. Even from the back, his broad shoulders were recognizable, but it was the woman walking next to him with her waist-length fall of ebony hair that first drew my attention.

At a few minutes past ten o’clock, I dropped off my mother’s painting at Director Oswald’s office, thinking I would tie up any last loose-ends involving Jamison and the painting he wanted to buy. Despite showing up without an appointment, I was greeted with a firm handshake by Director Oswald, though he clucked his tongue when I asked for an appraisal. “Would this be for a sale?” He squinted at me above his glasses. “Why not exhibit it with the other local artists in our ‘Painting Though History’ show next week? Then you can decide whether or not to sell.” His voice turned to fatherly concern. “There’s no need to be in a rush about this. Is there a title?”

“I was thinking of calling it At the End of Plantation Road.” I deliberately turned my mind away from thoughts of Jamison. “You’ll be sure to do an appraisal before the show,” I confirmed. Later, I would phone him to get the amount, and let him know that Jamison Sumida would pick it up after the show.

“Yes, and then there’s that other unpleasant matter.”

“You’ve heard from Captain Maddox about the burglary?”

“Only that they haven’t gathered enough evidence to make an arrest.” He sat down behind his desk and clasped his fingers in the prayer-like peak of a steeple.

I was glad to know that the investigation hadn’t been dropped. It’d give me a good excuse to phone the captain and mention break-ins at the house if they continued. Every extra repair drained what little money I had left from the auction and pushed back the opening—I couldn’t last indefinitely without some income.

It wasn’t yet noon when I left the Art Academy, giving me time to hunt for the Ah Wong furniture store in case they closed for lunch. The area around North King Street was a congested warren of Chinatown alleyways, funneling cars into the already jammed shopping district. I parked the Nash on a side street, then balanced my purse and the desk drawer in both hands as I walked from one shop to the next, peering into each doorway for a name or address. My single-minded search so occupied my attention that I didn’t notice Jamison and his companion until they were barely twenty feet ahead of me.

They were strolling side-by-side and close, glancing at each other in what seemed to be easy familiarity. When the woman turned her face toward him with a long upward look, I could see from her profile that she was exquisite—as petite as an Oriental doll, with skin as fair as a moon orchid. Her long straight hair was not in fashion. She must be very confident in herself, I admitted to myself with a twinge of reluctance. Like a character out of Madame Butterfly. I had to admire her show of independence whether I wanted to or not.

Before they spotted me, I ducked into a little jeweler’s store, though that was giving the place more credit than it deserved. There weren’t many gems in the window, and inside, a few old-fashioned rings sat in a dusty display cabinet alongside a used camera, several watches and some pieces of silverware. It wasn’t a pawnshop, but I guessed people could bring in whatever they had to sell, and the owner made a small profit from the resale.

Seated on a wooden stool was an elderly Chinese man hunched over a high table. He took off a jeweler’s eyepiece and peered at the desk drawer. “No can buy fu’niture, Missy.”

“I’m looking for Ah Wong’s shop.”

“Next block over.” He indicated the opposite direction Jamison had been walking, then fitted the eyepiece back in his left eye and swiveled back to the table.

“Do you buy jewelry here?” I stalled for more time.

“Yes, yes,” he said a little impatiently, not looking up. “You come back, bling what you want. I give you good plice, no wolly.”

Without any excuse to stay, I headed down the street in the direction the jeweler had pointed. A couple of times I turned my head, as if I might see Jamison and the woman out of the corner of my eye, but steeled myself against the impulse to look back.

What foolish nonsense I had been drawn into by something as simple as a kiss. I squared my shoulders and caught my reflection in a shop window. In a swingy skirt and blouse, with my blonde waves loosened by the wind, I couldn’t look less like a porcelain doll if I tried. Of course Jamison would have a Japanese girlfriend, why was I surprised? His family and friends expected it of him.

I would face expectations from my own side. After all, not a single one of the girls I’d grown up with was married to a Japanese man.

In the next moment I was as mortified by my own emotions as I was by what happened in the attic with Jamison—at first not willing to own up to how much I had wanted to kiss him. Today, seeing him with someone else, brought back our painful parting. In my subconscious I knew that someday he would hold another woman in his arms. A Japanese woman. I had no right to care. In that moment I tried very hard not to care. At least someone like Jerry was openly flirtatious. You knew where you stood. With Jamison I had been on dangerous ground since the first minute I laid eyes on him in the library.

I left the drawer for repair at Ah Wong’s furniture, since I’d driven all the way into Chinatown for just that purpose. But I didn’t mention that Jamison had referred me.

****

By Thanksgiving Day, November was sliding into the winter rains that blanketed Makana Valley in green. The delicate sprigs of summer had matured, pushing the year’s salad course aside. Cloudy mornings gave way to sunbeams by midday, and dried up the puddles that otherwise splashed over the running boards of the Nash.

I shivered into pants and a blouse then ran downstairs to get my blood moving. Auntie was boiling Mason jars in a kettle and chopping mangoes from a large burlap sack.

“The turkey is in the oven,” she said, helping me into an apron. “Between the two of us we can get the last jars of mango chutney sealed and put away in the pantry.”

I eyed the bulging bag with skepticism. Our trees had produced a bumper crop. “We’ll have chutney every day for a year at this rate,” I pointed out.

“And be grateful for it, if Honolulu’s surplus food warehouse runs out.” She sliced a mango with several swift blows to the chopping block for emphasis. “There’s only rations for eighty days.”

“You’re really taking the emergency warnings seriously, aren’t you?”

Dr. Kane was on the Medical Preparedness Committee and had recruited her as a volunteer supervisor. But it was more than that. News on the radio was becoming difficult to listen to, as days went by. Both of the Matson passenger liners Matsonia and Monterey had been taken out of service and put into the national defense fleet, as Japanese forces flooded Southeast Asia in their relentless conquest for raw materials and oil. It would be up to the military based in Hawaiʻi to repel an expanded Pacific assault, if Japan turned its sights to the east. Public service announcements on the radio urged families in Honolulu to stock up on reserve food, in case the special “war or peace” talks in Washington failed. The word “war” was openly being used.

Johnny joined us from somewhere outside, as if on command to save me from my growing concerns. “What’re you making?” He fingered a rim of one of the jars and yanked back his hand. “Ouch! That’s hot.”

“Rations,” I joked. “And dinner, or is it lunch? What time is Dr. Kane going to stop by?”

“About one. He can’t stay long.” Auntie filled another kettle with chopped mangoes, vinegar, brown sugar and ginger. “He’s on call at the hospital,” she explained. “People don’t stop getting sick just because it’s a holiday.”

I pulled a yellowing mango from the half-empty sack. “These are going to be too ripe to eat soon. And there aren’t any more jars.” It would be a shame to let them go to waste. “Let’s bring them to the tenant farmers. Johnny, if you carry the bag, we can go now before it gets too late.”

“Do the Japanese have Thanksgiving?” he wondered, as he hoisted the sack over his shoulder. Neither Auntie nor I spoke right away.

Down the road, on Wentworth land, the community of four tenant farms was a mix of two generations of Japanese and Chinese that I had never gotten to know well. Something about that gnawed at the chambers of my heart.

“The ones who were born here are as American as we are,” Auntie answered, “but they probably celebrate Thanksgiving in their own way.”

Johnny and I walked down the road, then cut over through tall grass that swished against our legs on the way to the Yamamoto house. There wasn’t any sign of Mr. Yamamoto’s truck with “lettuce 4 sale” painted on the side. Mrs. Yamamoto was hanging sheets on the line with her arms stretched out elegant and strong under the passing clouds. She was gripping a clothespin between her teeth and didn’t call out for her daughters until it was fastened.

Johnny and I mounted the porch to knock on the door as two girls about the same age as Johnny came out of the wooden house dressed in the pajama blouses they wore to work in the field. Inside I could see a small living room with a tidy kitchen and beyond that a door to a second room. There were woven mats and cushions on the floor, and a small altar was fragrant with burning incense.

The older girl who introduced herself as Rose picked out several mangoes from the bag, thanked us, and invited us inside for tea. Thousands of miles and two generations from their origins, traditions of Japanese hospitality survived unchanged in her manner.

“Thank you, not today,” I said. “We want to go around to the other farmers while it’s still early.”

For a split second, Rose stared past me at the field as though it weren’t there, as if she was searching for a dream. Her shy smile returned so quickly, I was unsure of what I’d seen. I wanted to reach out and pat her shoulder to make sure she was real.

The Hideto family lived close by because their plot was small. Their house was on short stilts, like the Yamamotos’. Half the roof was thatched instead of tin, sagging nearly to ground on one side. No one was home, so we left mangoes on the front steps, and continued on to the Suzukis’ and then took a long path to Mr. Ching’s house.

I remembered Daddy telling me about the Ching family because they had been in the valley the longest. Old Mr. Ching’s wife had been forcibly taken away and sent to the leper settlement on Moloka‘i where she died of what was then called “the Chinese disease.” His three sons prospered. They leased more Wentworth land in the valley and bought a grocery store on King Street. They lived over the ridge in Kalihi Valley, driving in to work the lettuce patch each morning with a whole clan of grandchildren and nephews who had started corn and okra plantings, too, leaving the old man to his solitude each night.

A black and white dog limped ahead of Mr. Ching as he hobbled down the unpainted steps toward us. “What you want?” he asked sullenly. “Take away my land?”

“We brought you some mangoes.” Johnny offered him the bag. “You can have them all.”

Mr. Ching grunted his appreciation, grabbed the bag, and turned to shuffle back to the house.

“Mr. Ching,” I called after him. “Can you please help me with something? I was wondering if you remember the old road to the house—do you know where it was?”

“Road?” He stopped, then took off a battered straw hat and scratched his bald head. “Bad luck, that road,” he growled at me in a menacing tone. “Big house, too. No good.”

His tone stung me like a slap. Stock still, I stared at his back as if my eyes could weave a tether between us that I could reel in, draw him closer, and get him to explain. I kept staring until he slammed the door behind him and the illusion snapped.

“What was all that about?” Johnny looked at me in the astonished way I used to look at my art history teacher.

“My great aunt Vivian—you’ll meet her one of these days—told me some stories about the Wentworth estate. I thought Mr. Ching might know about them. That’s all.”

Johnny and I started back on the path that led past the Yamamotos’ field to the road. Rose had come out into the far end with her sister, squatting over one of the lettuce rows, with her face shaded by a straw hat. A hank of her thick black hair had come loose and flew in the breeze.

“I’ve seen Rose at school. She seems nice.” Johnny kicked at an imaginary stone in the path, as he spoke.

“Is she in any of your classes?”

“Biology, but I don’t really know her.” He stubbed his toe at the path again with eyes down. “Once I thought we’d get teamed up to plant some seeds together. She’s really smart about that, then someone else got her instead. It was probably for the best. Her father would chop me up with his machete if he thought his daughter was talking to me.”

“I think you’re exaggerating a little, don’t you?”

“Well, yeah, but you know how it is. Japanese and all. And Mom wants me to take Agnes Garfield to the junior prom, anyway. Agnes comes to all the games and cheers like crazy.” He laughed and faked a punch to my shoulder, boxing style. “She’s almost as tall as you are.” He was jabbing and hoping around like a young Joe Louis.

****

Before dinner, Dr. Kane—who asked us to please call him Edward—and Johnny bounced a basketball around in the driveway, while Auntie May and I finished up the sweet potatoes and corn. At the kitchen sit-in, the four of us had to adjust ourselves in the small space to keep our elbows from bumping, because Edward was a leftie. “Shall we say some words of thanks?” Auntie suggested. “I’ll begin—I’m thankful we’re all healthy, and there’s someone to patch us up when we’re not.”

We all looked at Edward, who was beaming. “My turn,” he said, then articulated one considered word at a time. “I’m grateful to have been invited to this family dinner.” He and Auntie exchanged a soulful look.

Johnny said he was glad the basketball team won its first game.

I wished I had rehearsed something clever or terribly profound to say. Rattling on about Makani Kai would sound trite, or self-absorbed. “I’m grateful to have such a wonderful family,” I started. “And that war hasn’t come to Hawaiʻi or our country.”

Edward put his hand over Auntie May’s while I was speaking, covering it completely, as if it was possible to protect her from the danger brewing in the Pacific.