Epilogue

1957

The Makana Valley of my childhood—of sweet scented jasmine, misty mornings and double rainbows—became home to Jamison and me, and the two sons that have been born to us since our small private marriage here at Makani Kai.

V-J Day opened up the Islands to the world, bringing shopping centers and Transocean flights winging from California to the Hawaiian Territory in a mere seven and a half hours.

In the valley, I tended the vegetable garden and completed restorations on the house, though, as it turned out, I never opened it as a guesthouse. Our sons were born here, and their laughter brought vitality back to the old place. I replanted the rose garden where my father picked his courtship bouquets and hung my mother’s paintings in the downstairs hall, near where the grandfather clock still chimes away the hours.

And so we live, within and yet curiously apart from the hurly burly that brought a paved road to within shouting distance of the carriage house turn-off, and no further.

The war years were not always easy for us. Jamison served as a translator for the army during the bloody Guadalcanal campaign in 1943 before he was transferred back to the Honolulu office of the military intelligence service. He doesn’t speak of those times; he tells me they are “top secret” but I know he’s shielding me from the horrors of battle. His architecture firm is now one of the busiest in Honolulu, and he opened a showroom for his custom furniture.

I suppose in looking back, the war years strengthened the bond we shared, when every sunrise parted a velvet-fringed curtain on the possibilities ahead of us for yet another day, if only we weren’t too distracted by calamity to enjoy the moment. The trick, I realized, was to greet hardship and injustice, abundance and victory, with an open spirit.

On a balmy evening in late July, these many years later, Jamison and I took our sons, whom we named Stanley and John, to the Haleiwa Jodo Mission for the annual lantern floating ceremony. Earlier that afternoon, the taiko drummers and musicians played for the O-bon dances, which are said to be a reminder that we, the living, can dance now because others have danced before us. The first dancers lead off the slow ritual movements in a circle around the musicians. Their turquoise kimonos set them apart from the rest of the crowd, who join them as the circle widens. Whether in hopi coats or aloha shirts and slippers, the dancers move rhythmically to celebrate the continuity of life.

When the priests begin chiming their bells, we join a procession walking to the shoreline—at sunset a shimmering wash of blue and yellow slaps against the sand. A large red lantern is set on the water, floating in a bright single light. I watch ripples upon ripples scatter in every direction, and feel myself rocked back and forth on their movements. How like memories they seem. None of them are separate; they are a pattern at the end of a dozen other patterns, each with their own associations.

To me, the days surrounding the attack on Pearl Harbor are as clear as though they happened yesterday. I remember the first time I saw Jamison in the dusky library, and later, the panic of bombs raining down on the city as America was dragged into the most devastating war the world has ever known.

My son John brings me back to the present. “Should we put our lantern in the ocean now?”

“I’ll let you do it.” I handed him the rice paper lantern mounted on a thin wooden plaque. My appreciation for the ceremony had come instantly, without dwelling on the departed who had left us far too soon.

Like many other families with lanterns that would sail tonight, we had written the names of our loved ones on the six panels. Jamison suggested that our parents’ names be on one side, together in our memory, as they had not been in life. Vivian and Frederick Grant’s names were there, too, along with Japanese translators from Jamison’s unit who died on the front lines alongside the American infantrymen they served. Gabby Gabinsky never came home to marry Bonnie. Though we never knew him, we added his name in respect for the nurse who had kept in touch over the years.

We saved one side of the lantern for a photograph. I’d thought long and hard about it. Finally I decided on one with Johnny in his basketball uniform, because that was how we remembered him best. After the war, Auntie May and Edward visited his grave in Lorraine, set among the thousands of identical headstones that stud the rolling green lawns of France. It was the resting place of so many young men who had dreams of playing basketball and becoming doctors or machinists who never came home. John had written the name of his namesake under the photograph.

Jamison reached for my hand as we waded into the water. “Have you ever noticed how the current and the wind push the lanterns out to sea?” Dozens of lanterns had been released and bobbed their way around the mouth of the bay, while the water lapped around our knees. John and Stanley took each of our hands, and other families were offering prayers and joining hands, too.

I couldn’t help thinking of how, when I returned to Makani Kai after my father’s death, I’d wanted to do something important with my life. I closed my eyes for a moment to picture two roads in a wooded glen. I had taken the one less travelled, by following my heart. Those first unfamiliar steps led the way toward tolerance and understanding on an island torn by war and suspicion. My sons would journey on their own road. It might take them way upon way and never end up quite as expected, but I could tell with perfect clarity that it would be smoother for the choices Jamison and I had made.

When I opened my eyes, the little armada of lights was rounding the northern headland and disappearing from view one by one. Over time, sun and salt and wind would wash away the last traces of the flimsy lanterns; people would come and go, tides would rise and fall, and the deepest currents of the sea would endure.