I lived through the 1960s in the USA, working on defense projects. Of course, I was seen as one of the bad guys. I married an American, raised two children. I am proud of the life I have made here. My interests are sailing, skiing, and gardening. I am now retired — a happy man.
Here is the strange part. About every four years I go back to my village, which is near Bergen. It is always a horrible visit. I become enraged when I see what has happened. It has gotten so bad that I dread going home. The visits disturb me, because I see that I am a bigot. My lovely village is now the residence of Pakistanis, Indians, Africans, Vietnamese — brown people, who have come there as refugees, so called, because Norwegians are so happy to provide houses and welfare.
When I was a boy, we had one religion, one language, one culture — one race. Now it’s a filthy mess. Skullcaps, shawls, smells. There is crime. So many languages. A mosque! A temple! Not refugees but opportunists. I am so angry when I am there: my lovely village spoiled. I think I will never go back again. I know I am a bigot there, and I hate myself when I am home.
Mrs. Springer, a longtime resident of our facility, was born in 1900. She was vain about the date, being the same age as the century. She clearly remembered the First World War. “I was at school. The school bell rang when the war ended, and we were given the day off.” She remembered talk of Al Capone and Prohibition, the Great Depression and Lindbergh’s flight. She was married to a science-minded German, living in Munich when the Second World War started. Her husband’s family was wealthy — Springer was their name. She volunteered for war work, knitting socks. She told us all her stories. She had met Hitler. “He had very fine hands, small and pale, like a woman’s.”
She became a refugee after the war. She went to Los Angeles; her husband followed her later, and he became a metallurgist for Hughes Tool Company. He died. She lived alone a few years and then entered our facility.
We went to her ninetieth birthday party. We predicted that she would live to be a hundred. She accomplished this, but it was a decade of failing health. She lost most of her hearing. Her sight dimmed. At her hundredth she needed to be steered to the cake. We shouted for her to blow out the candles, but she couldn’t hear us or see the candles. Even so, she smiled and said it was a great day.
Her hundred-and-first she spent in her room. We were away a lot after that, and each time we got back, we were surprised to see her still alive. Her other friends were less attentive too, even a little irritated when they had to run an errand for Mrs. Springer. We missed her hundred-and-second birthday. That year I saw her once. It seemed inconvenient and somewhat unfair, her living into another century. Her nurse called and complained that no one bought her medicine anymore. Her son died, not of any specific cause. “He was getting on,” someone said.
We forgot about Mrs. Springer, we guessed she had died, and we were astonished to hear that she had a hundred-and-fourth birthday. We were not invited. Only her nurse, her cleaning woman, and — somehow — the plumber were there. She kept to her room. People said she was alert, that she asked about elections and the weather. No one visited her. We were embarrassed and, I’m sorry to say, a bit bored by her, and none of us saw her again until her funeral.
It was my first winter cruise. I was a waiter on the Allegra, most of the passengers well-to-do people who spent part of the winter cruising in the warm waters of the Pacific, from Puerto Escondido to Singapore and back, including stops in Australia and New Zealand. That winter we stopped along the South American coast too, from Guayaquil to Santiago, and then to Hawaii via Easter Island. Often the passengers did not bother to go ashore — just stayed on deck and looked at the pier and drank and made faces.
Ed and Wilma Hibbert avoided the others. They were in their mid- to late seventies, from Seattle. Always dined alone, did not socialize, Ed very attentive to Wilma, who seemed the frail type. I heard whispers. “Snobs,” “Stuffed shirts,” “Pompous,” “Cold.” They must have heard them too.
Wilma fell ill at Callao, stayed in her suite, and was taken to a hospital in Lima, where she died. Ed Hibbert left the Allegra but did not vacate his suite. His table was empty until Honolulu, where he rejoined the ship.
And then the invitations began, one widow after another inviting him to dinner, to drinks, to the fancy-dress ball. They were not amateurs but persistent and alluring seducers.
Amazingly, Ed obliged. He seemed to welcome the attention, not like a bereaved spouse at all but like the most discriminating bachelor. The same women who had made demeaning remarks now praised him and competed for his affection. And I had the feeling that in obliging them, dallying with them, without committing himself, he was having his revenge, perhaps revenge on his wife, too.
He went on two more cruises, same routine, didn’t remarry.
I did not know Dennis Concannon. I was invited to his funeral by a friend of his son’s who needed a ride. As it was a rainy day and I had nothing else to do, I stayed for the service, sitting in the back. The whole business was nondenominational, according to Mr. C’s wishes. The turnout was very large — the church was filled. A reading of his favorite poem, by Robert Frost, with the memorable line “That withered hag.” Several sentimental songs. Then the eulogies. One man got up and said, “I never met anyone else like Dennis. I worked for him for almost twenty-five years, and in all that time he didn’t even buy me a cup of coffee.” He went on — people laughed.
A woman: “I used to tremble whenever I was called to his office. I never knew whether he was going to make a pass at me or fire me.”
Another man: “The salesmen put in their expense reports that they’d had their cars washed. ‘Salesmen have to have clean cars.’ But Dennis said, ‘This was the fourteenth of last month. I compared the car washes to the weather report. It was raining that day. I’m not paying.’”
Someone else: “His partner, George Kelly, would be sitting next to him at some of the meetings. One would talk. Then the other, but saying the same thing. It was terrible. We called it ‘Dennis in Stereo.’”
There were more speakers, with equally unpleasant stories of this man. At the end of the funeral I knew Dennis Concannon as a mean, unreasonable, bullying bastard who had gotten rich by exploiting and intimidating these people, the attendees at his funeral — not mourners but people who were having the last word.
Neighbor Islands
This was all twenty-some-odd years ago. What I remember is the sound from my front door, which was shut, just off the lanai, the underwater murmur of voices from a TV set inside the house, and my thinking, We don’t have a TV set.
I’d been making the run to Hanalei to see my deputy there, on a weekly basis, always on the same day, a Thursday. He was an officer named Barry Moniz, the chief’s cousin, the one who had fished the key of coke out of Hanalei Bay. Usually we talked sports and went over his paperwork. But his voice sounded strange.
“Ho, get flu, brah. No can talk.”