Chapter Eight

Vivian’s dinner invitation slipped my mind until about four o’clock on Saturday. It wouldn’t do to send my regrets at this late hour, even though I’d been tempted to join Auntie and Johnny for an afternoon matinee of Here Comes Mr. Jordon. There was an hour before I needed to get ready, so I strolled over to the house, thinking I would pick a couple of late blooming roses to bring as a house gift.

The path through the garden was strewn with rose petals that had been beaten off their stems by the rain, and were now drying into an outdoor potpourri that rustled underfoot. A single remaining blossom offered the promise of summer but fell apart at my touch. One by one the petals dropped off and landed on my old tennis shoes. Autumn was passing into winter. I picked one of the last remaining petals and pressed it on my lips—its velvety smoothness struck me as infinitely sad and beautiful.

****

Vivian’s dining table was set for eight places, the cut crystal sparkling against white china edged with blue trim. The room was spacious and appeared even larger because of the bay window and double French doors leading to a patio garden.

Frederick Grant, a retired anthropology professor whom I had just met, led me on his arm into the dining room. Benjamin Hastings and his wife Ethel were already standing around the table with Vivian and another couple who were introduced as Celeste and Albert Bancroft, a botanist recently returned from Singapore. My impressions of everyone were a bit of a blur. I wished I had paid more attention and asked who was coming when I’d accepted Vivian’s invitation. I had been too preoccupied by her revelations about my family to think ahead.

Vivian was arranging seating around the table, and in the slow shuffle of chairs being drawn for the ladies, the final guest was shown in by the housekeeper.

If I hadn’t been so busy concentrating on the three people being seated opposite me—Celeste, fashionable in mauve silk, Ethel who was straightening one of the flatware settings, and Albert Bancroft elegant in cravat and sport coat with an English accent to match—I’d have likely agonized over the newest arrival until I was blue in the face. As it was, I met Jamison’s eyes while he stood in the dining room archway and felt a clutch of anxiety well up in my chest, then spread in a paralyzing rush to my senses. This was the first time I’d seen him since our kiss, not counting that day on the street.

Spun for a loop by his unexpected entrance, I smiled through all the introductions by rote, hoping I would land on my feet in time to contribute more than “How nice,” and “Yes, isn’t it,” to a conversation that was largely passing me by.

“Jamison Sumida is designing a china cabinet for this room,” Vivian said, with a grand gesture. “I thought he would appreciate an evening of inspiration.” The spinning around me gradually slowed, replaced by controlled focus as Jamison sat down at the last place at the table to my left. We were now all seated around the table, Vivian at the head.

“I didn’t expect…” I spoke to Jamison in what I wanted to pass off as casual small talk, then caught myself. I would have to pretend that Jamison and I were barely acquainted. “I didn’t expect to be sitting next to a famous Honolulu architect. And now you’re designing furniture?” I mentally ran back through the introductions. Had anyone mentioned he was an architect? At the Historic Society, I exhaled in relief.

“How does one go from buildings to furniture?” Albert asked, with a congenial tone of interest.

“Using much smaller proportions,” Jamison said with a small smile, and everyone laughed in appreciation.

“Reminds me of the time in Bombay,” Albert reminisced, while the housekeeper served each of us small plates of mango, pineapple, and sliced bananas with sauce drizzled on top.

“The dressing is made from kiwi fruit. I hope you like it,” Vivian addressed the table. “It’s something new from New Zealand. Albert, you must have come across it in your travels.”

“Ah, yes. Chinese gooseberry, now being planted as a commercial crop.” Despite interruptions, he began regaling us with a story about how the fruit had been recently introduced in India. Celeste exclaimed her delight in the flavor, and Benjamin attempted to get a word in about the first pineapple plants brought to Hawaiʻi. The general hubbub gave Jamison an opportunity to speak to me in a low undertone. “I believe you visited the Ah Wong furniture store on Monday. My cousin and I were sorry to have just missed you.”

He was keeping things polite and impersonal, so I would play along. “Does your cousin make furniture, too?”

“No, she’s a teacher at the plantation school.” He seemed to let that sink in for a minute. “She would very much like to meet you one day.”

“Your cousin?” I asked. The identity of his companion on Monday was beginning to register, and my heart was soaring to a place it hadn’t been since our kiss. “You told her about me?”

“A little. She knows that a little from me means a lot.” He could have stopped there. I had the feeling he was mustering up more words for my benefit, though he wasn’t in need of them himself. “During school days at McKinley High, I stayed with her family to save the money it took for the train ride back and forth from the plantation. I wouldn’t have been able to attend, otherwise.”

“What are you two chatting about so intently?” Frederick Grant asked from his seat at the end of the table.

“We discovered that we both went to the same furniture store in Chinatown early this week.” I quickly came up with a reasonably truthful explanation.

He was sitting near enough to Jamison to have overheard scraps of our conversation. If he suspected anything out of the ordinary, he kept it to himself.

I felt the warm embrace of Jamison’s next words, wrapping us up in our shared secret. “The shop isn’t well-known to people outside the furniture business.”

“It’s a small town in many ways,” Ethel commented, apparently the practical one. She refolded her napkin in precise quarters and placed it on her lap.

“A lot of what goes on around us can be explained by probabilities,” Frederick put in. “In anthropology we sometimes use modeling to explain occurrences, but it’s also a way of looking at what’s going on in daily life.”

“Sounds very intellectual,” said Celeste.

“Not so dull as you might imagine,” he interpreted her meaning. “Take the eight of us, for example.” He did a calculation under his breath. “Would you believe there’s a ninety-five percent chance that two of us were born in the same month?”

The cook had come in to remove our fruit salad plates, but Benjamin kept the conversation going. “We should go around the table to test the theory.”

“Not on your life,” Celeste protested.

“Darling,” Albert coaxed, “only the month, not the year.”

She put away her tube of flame red lipstick, artfully having touched up the color without a mirror, and gave everyone a brilliant smile. “I’m February.”

Ethel went next with April, followed by Albert with October and then Frederick, who was smiling broadly. “I’m also February.”

“So you’ve won, I suppose,” Celeste conceded, then brightened. “It’ll be fun to try this out at our next dinner party. Won’t everyone be amused?”

“Would you have me calculating the odds on Captain Cook reaching the Islands, then, old friend?” Vivian asked Frederick with a smile.

“Now that would take a different analysis altogether.” His eyes twinkled at her. “I’m just saying that coincidences are often less remarkable than they first appear. Then again, what often passes for coincidence might be more than what chance allows. Some researchers argue that coincidences occur in the minds of the observers. Selective memory, that kind of thing.”

“The way a fortune teller draws you in by saying something like ‘you’ve returned from a journey,’ and you think, ‘yes, there was that trip across the island last week,’ then hand over another nickel to hear more.” Benjamin was chuckling to himself with what must have been a youthful memory.

I wanted to ask Frederick what he thought about the experiences I’d been having that couldn’t be explained by selective memory—my painting of the bridge, and my sense of having known Jamison before. “What about…” This wouldn’t be easy if I didn’t want to sound like a madman. “It has to do with…a clock.”

It had all seemed to begin on that afternoon when the clock stopped. Jamison came into the library, and my life hadn’t been the same.

“There’s a grandfather clock in the hallway of my family’s home—the one I’m turning into a guesthouse—and one day it stopped at exactly the time I’d been born. That seemed, well, unusual.”

“So you think it was more than a coincidence?” Frederick asked.

A momentary lull had settled around the table leaving everyone looking toward me for an answer. I took a sip of wine and mentally ran through my options. In point of fact, at the time I had more or less dismissed the clock thing as a strange coincidence. It was only later that all the other unexplainables began stacking up that confounded me. As I felt Jamison’s eyes on me, I knew that I wanted to build on the openness he had initiated minutes earlier. Let him know I was willing to put any misunderstandings behind us. In other words, I decided to lie.

“I have to admit, I thought it could be a sign of a new beginning, and a new way of thinking about things. Leaving the fears and prejudices of the previous generation behind.” Funny, how a big weight seemed lifted off my chest.

“And how has that worked out?” Jamison asked. His expression read as mild curiosity, with a flicker in his eyes.

“I think I’ve missed some chances to put those ideas into practice.” I pressed my lips together firmly. “That doesn’t mean that I won’t try.”

“Bravo,” Albert applauded. “Every end is a new beginning, as they say.”

Just then the cook came in with the first dinner plates, and everyone’s attention shifted to matters that more directly concerned them, as is usually the case.

“The fish is our local ahi, baked on a ti leaf,” Vivian informed us.

“We’ve had fish served like this on a banana leaf in Singapore, haven’t we darling?” Albert asked his wife. He described a botanical garden they visited, which he planned to recreate in Honolulu. Eventually the whole table was in raptures over the possibility of a new arboretum.

I followed the conversation with half an ear, falling out to consider that Frederick Grant’s parlor game had not ruled out the clock stopping as something other than a coincidence. So many things had happened—were they all occurring in my mind?

My attention was brought back to the group at the table when Frederick proposed a toast. “To Vivian’s next book.” We raised our glasses and clinked all around. The convivial mood tempted me to announce that one of my mother’s paintings would be on exhibit at the Art Academy beginning on December 1st. “It’s called, At the End of Plantation Road,” I said, and felt Jamison shift ever so slightly in his chair beside me.

Later, when we were all leaving for the evening, he asked to walk me to my car. We were the last ones at the front door, thanking Vivian for a lovely dinner. “Watch your step,” she called after us, as we left the lighted glow of her porch.

I hoped Jamison would say something. When he didn’t, I made a feeble attempt at explaining away Vivian’s warning. “The nights are always darkest around new moon.”

“Am I walking too fast for you?” He let me know he had taken her words at face value.

“Not at all. The stars are bright tonight, aren’t they?”

For someone like Jerry, that was the perfect romantic opening, but Jamison murmured, “She’s right, you know. There could be dangerous times ahead. The Provisional Police are using informers to track local Japanese.” His voice dropped lower. “I wouldn’t want you dragged into anything that would get doors slammed in your face because of me.”

“You mean Japanese people are being spied on?” When he didn’t answer, the enormity of his warning dawned on me. “You’re being spied on? In case there’s a war with Japan?”

“Everyone who visited Japan has become a suspect. You could be interrogated just for being seen with me. It’s not fair to you. There’s so much suspicion against local Japanese. I couldn’t forgive myself if you were embarrassed or brought in for questioning.”

“That won’t happen, and if it does, I’ll face up to it then.” Surely, the Wentworth name must still carry some weight around town, I reasoned. “Anyway, aren’t there going to be peace talks soon? I heard that a special envoy arrived in Washington to negotiate an end to the oil embargo and—” I stopped.

“What?”

“I don’t want all that to matter right now,” I whispered.

“I don’t either.”

We reached the Nash, but he didn’t open the door. His tone made me look up into his face. I had peeled away the mask he wore in public and could read his silent stare into the night; there was cold realism mingled with hope.

“So, I’m going to be deprived of your mother’s painting.” He had willed himself out of his introspective mood, and was using a lighter tone. I couldn’t hear any trace of the steely resignation I expected. “How long is the exhibit?”

“Three weeks.”

“Until the middle of December,” he estimated, then was quiet for a second, as if deciding whether or not to say anything. “If I’m not going to have the painting on my wall, the next best thing is to drive out past the old mill to see the place that inspired it. I haven’t been out there in years.” He cleared his throat. “Would you like to come?”

“I would, thank you.” My answer came fast and sure.

“What about next Sunday afternoon? I could pick you up at say, one o’clock?” He turned the handle on the door and swung it open for me.

During the time it took for me to get seated behind the wheel, I mentally ran through a list of questions. What would Auntie say? Was this a date? What would his mother say? Would someone be spying on us? Would he kiss me again? A wave of heat burned across my face and I became grateful for the darkness. I thanked him again, and told him that Sunday would be just fine.

After he closed the door, I slowly rolled down the window, reluctant to drive away and bring the evening to end. Jamison started walking toward his car, then turned back before I had the chance to crank the ignition.

“Merrylei?” he asked in a husky voice, serious but hesitant.

“Yes?” I took the key out of the ignition, and tilted my face near the window.

“I’ll see you next Sunday.”

I nodded to myself and grinned like a lunatic, knowing he couldn’t see me. Then, his footsteps crunched on the pavement, slow at first, then quickening as he whistled a few notes into the starry sky.

****

Back in my room, I plumped the bed pillows and opened Pride and Prejudice to the page I had bookmarked several nights earlier. Elizabeth Bennett was reconsidering her first impressions of Mr. Darcy, but her deliberations didn’t hold any fascination for me tonight. My own life had made a dizzying turn that left me reading the same page twice, not comprehending a thing. While my eyes moved from one word to the next, my mind was busy picturing Jamison and myself at the end of plantation road. The effort brought on moments of reservation, outright joy, and a little panic at the idea of an outing alone with him, all knocking my breath away. Until I recalled his gentle voice, lulling me into pleasurable anticipation.

In the morning, one pillow was on the floor and my arms were wrapped around the other. At Makani Kai by myself, I practiced dance steps for the Aloha Ball, counting out one-two-three as I waltzed around the music room. Other times, I listened to Auntie’s radio, tuning in to Alan Jinx’s program of swing and jazz whenever possible, but unable to avoid the news.