Water under the bridge.
As Jack Lovett would say.
Water under the bridge and dynamite it behind you.
So I have no leper who comes to the door every morning at seven.
No Tropical Belt Coal Company, no unequivocal lone figure on the crest of the immutable hill.
In fact no immutable hilclass="underline" as the granddaughter of a geologist I learned early to anticipate the absolute mutability of hills and waterfalls and even islands. When a hill slumps into the ocean I see the order in it. When a 5.2 on the Richter scale wrenches the writing table in my own room in my own house in my own particular Welbeck Street I keep on typing. A hill is a transitional accommodation to stress, and ego may be a similar accommodation. A waterfall is a self-correcting maladjustment of stream to structure, and so, for all I know, is technique. The very island to which Inez Victor returned in the spring of 1975—Oahu, an emergent post-erosional land mass along the Hawaiian Ridge — is a temporary feature, and every rainfall or tremor along the Pacific plates alters its shape and shortens its tenure as Crossroads of the Pacific. In this light it is difficult to maintain definite convictions about what happened down there in the spring of 1975, or before.
In fact I have already abandoned a great deal of what happened before.
Abandoned most of the stories that still dominate table talk down in that part of the world where Inez Victor was born and to which she returned in 1975.
Abandoned for example all stories about definite cases of typhoid contracted on sea voyages lasting the first ten months of 1856.
Abandoned all accounts of iridescence observed on the night sea off the Canaries, of guano rocks sighted southeast of the Falklands, of the billiards room at the old Hotel Estrella del Mar on the Chilean coast, of a particular boiled-beef lunch eaten on Tristan da Cunha in 1859; and of certain legendary poker games played on the Isthmus of Panama in 1860, with the losses and winnings (in gold) of every player.
Abandoned the bereaved widower who drowned himself at landfall.
Scuttled the festivities marking the completion of the first major irrigation ditch on the Nuannu ranch.
Jettisoned in fact those very stories with which most people I know in those islands confirm their place in the larger scheme, their foothold against the swell of the sea, the erosion of the reefs and the drowning of the valley systems and the glittering shallows left when islands vanish. Would it have been Inez Victor’s grandmother Cissy or Cissy’s best friend Tita Dowdell who wore the Highland Lassie costume to the Children’s Ball at the palace in 1892? If Cissy went as the Highland Lassie and Tita Dowdell as the Spanish Dancer (Inez’s grandfather definitely went as one of the Peasant Children of All Nationalities, that much was documented, that much Inez and her sister Janet knew from the photograph that hung on the landing of the house on Manoa Road), then how did the Highland Lassie costume end up with the Palace Restoration Committee on loan from Tita Dowdell’s daughter-in-law? On the subject of Tita Dowdell’s daughter-in-law, did her flat silver come to her through her father’s and Inez and Janet’s grandfather’s mutual Aunt Tru? Was it likely that Aunt Tru’s fire opal from the Great Barrier Reef (surrounded by diamond chips) would have been lost down a drain at the Outrigger Canoe Club if Janet or Inez or even their cousin Alice Campbell had been wearing it instead of Tita Dowdell’s daughter-in-law? Where were the calabashes Alice Campbell’s father got from Judge Thayer? Who had Leilani Thayer’s koa settee? When Inez and Janet’s mother left Honolulu on the reconditioned Lurline and never came back, did she or did she not have the right to take Tru’s yellow diamond? These are all important questions down there, suggestive details in the setting, but the setting is for another novel.
3
IMAGINE my mother dancing,” that novel began, in the first person. The first person was Inez, and was later abandoned in favor of the third:
“Inez imagined her mother dancing.
“Inez remembered her mother dancing.
“Brown-and-white spectator shoes, very smart. High-heeled sandals made of white silk twine, very beautiful. White gardenias in her hair on the beach at Lanikai. A white silk blouse with silver sequins shaped like stars. Shaped like new moons. Shaped like snowflakes. The sentimental things of life as time went by. Dancing under the camouflage net on the lawn at Kaneohe. Blue moon on the Nuannu ranch. Saw her standing alone. She smiled as she danced.
“Inez remembered no such thing.
“Inez remembered the shoes and the sequins like snowflakes but she only imagined her mother dancing, to make clear to herself that the story was one of romantic outline. You will notice that the daughters in romantic stories always remember their mothers dancing, or about to leave for the dance: these dance-bound mothers materialize in the darkened nursery (never a bedroom in these stories, always a ‘nursery,’ on the English model) in a cloud of perfume, a burst of light off a diamond hair clip. They glance in the mirror. They smile. They do not linger, for this is one of those moments in which the interests of mothers are seen to diverge sharply from the wishes of daughters. These mothers get on with it. These mothers lean for a kiss and leave for the dance. Inez and Janet’s mother left, but not for the dance. Inez and Janet’s mother left for San Francisco, on the Lurline, reconditioned. I specify ‘reconditioned’ because that was how Carol Christian’s departure was characterized for Inez and Janet, as a sudden but compelling opportunity to make the first postwar crossing on the reconditioned Lurline. ‘Just slightly irresistible,’ was the way Carol Christian put it exactly.”
What I had there was a study in provincial manners, in the acute tyrannies of class and privilege by which people assert themselves against the tropics; Honolulu during World War Two, martial law, submariners and fliers and a certain investor from Hong Kong with whom Carol Christian was said to drink brandy and Coca-Cola, a local scandal. I was interested more in Carol Christian than in her daughters, interested in the stubborn loneliness she had perfected during her marriage to Paul Christian, interested in her position as an outsider in the islands and in her compensatory yearning to be “talented,” not talented at anything in particular but just talented, a state of social grace denied her by the Christians. Carol Christian arrived in Honolulu as a bride in 1934. By 1946 she was sometimes moved so profoundly by the urge for company that she would keep Inez and Janet home from school on the pretext of teaching them how to do their nails. She read novels out loud to them on the beach at Lanikai, popular novels she checked out from the lending library at the drugstore in Kailua. “ ‘The random years were at an end,’ ” she would read, her voice rising to signal a dramatic effect, and then she would invent a flourish of her own: “ ‘Now, they could harvest them.’ Look there, random harvest, that explains the title, very poetic, a happy ending, n’est-ce pas?”