Honolulu Story. Leslie Ford
as she drew her breath quickly in, that I was more than startled, as I think she was herself. She turned abruptly and went out on the lanai.
“I wish to God I’d never come back, Grace,” she said. She made a sharp movement with her head as if trying to shake something out of it.
“Forgive me—I don’t know what’s got into me lately. I’ve been like this for . . . weeks, it seems to me. Even in Washington. I didn’t want to come back, but Mary was so set on it. I kept thinking it was going to be the plane, but up there I didn’t have it. I lost it till we landed. Now it’s back and it’s worse.”
Her eyes moved restlessly over the side of the hills beyond the garden.
“If I were Hawaiian I’d know. They always know what’s going to happen. But I don’t. All I know is I feel as if something ghastly is just over my head. I can’t stand it, Grace . . . I’ll go jump over the Pali if it doesn’t stop. I think I’m going mad. I——”
She broke off abruptly, listening, and her face went slowly the color of dead ashes. She put her hand out and touched my arm.
“Grace,” she whispered. “What was that? Do you hear it?”
All I could hear was the liquid sliding note of a bird somewhere in the pale green of the kukui trees in the ravine. At home I would have said it was a redbird calling. I didn’t know what it would be in these fantastic hills.
“What is it, Grace?” she whispered again.
“It sounds like a cardinal to me,” I said.
She turned her head slowly. “Of course.” She gave a sort of broken laugh. “How absurd of me. I’m really losing my mind.”
Inside the door she stopped and looked at herself in the gilded mirror over a large mat-covered sofa. The color was seeping back into her face and her eyes weren’t so almost colorlessly gray.
“I meant to tell you, my dear,” she said casually. “You have to be awfully careful about makeup out here. The air is so clear rouge stands out horribly. It makes one look hard. Let’s go in, shall we?”
She rested her arm lightly in mine. “It’s so nice you’re here.”
I wondered. My doubts, grave from the moment I’d stepped out of the transport plane, five thousand miles from home, onto the blistering surface of Hickam Field, and trod a minute section of over eleven miles of continuous concrete runway where Army and Navy air stations merge into a vast maelstrom at this crossroads of the world, were really serious now. Maybe Alice Cather was more Hawaiian than she thought, the shadowy primeval wilderness around her more potent than she knew. It was silent, now, the redbird’s note stilled in the evening woods. Maybe it was the threatening emanations from Tommy Dawson and Dave Boyer that she was feeling, I thought, and the perilous proximity of the man she wanted her daughter never to meet again. And so far as I was concerned, none of them ever would meet—I was determined about that. Tommy and Dave could take their rest and go back to Saipan, Swede Ellicott could marry the glamorous Corinne and regret at leisure, for all of me, and neither Mary Cather nor her mother need ever know how close those paths had come to crossing again. It was all too involved and unhappy. I didn’t want to be any part of it.
We came into the long room that opened out onto the lanai looking over the treetops down to the city sprawling at the edge of the Pacific. Alice Cather was superbly herself again, cool and assured and liquidly charming.
“Harry, my dear, this is the Grace Latham, Mary and I have told you so much about.”
There were many other people in the room—men in uniform with stars on their shoulders, women who were handsome—but Harry Cather in his rumpled white linen suit, and his daughter Mary, were as dominating as the great mass of torch ginger that was the only decoration against the silver-panelled wood walls, and as arresting as the two little Japanese maids, kimono-clad, slipping in and out among the guests with trays of cocktails and hors d’œuvres. They were standing together in front of the fireplace at the side of the room. It was easy to see how the portrait of his brother back in the sitting room could pass for Harry Cather, except that his hair was white now and he wasn’t so thin. I saw the same large luminous dark eyes, rather sad until he smiled, and the same patient, kindly droop of the shoulders. He was very tall. His mouth was not as full or sensuous as the portrait’s, and his hand taking mine was warm and very friendly.
“How do you do, Grace,” he said smiling. “We call people by their first names, here in the Islands, and I’ve heard about you, from my daughter.”
He turned to smile down at her.
“I hope you’re going to love it here, Mrs. Latham,” Mary said.
Standing there by her father, she was very different from the silent resentful child I’d first seen on the dock in San Francisco in February of ’42. And different from what she’d been in Washington. Seeing her now I could understand the magic she’d distilled, or the four young men on their way to war had divined in her, the night they fell as a man. She’d been attractive enough then so I wasn’t worried about getting her as a blind date for them. She was lovely, now, and the light in her violet eyes as she looked up at her father was lovely too. It must have been the way she looked at the four boys that night. Her hair was in short curls the color of shiny ripe wheatstraw that made her look younger than her twenty years and the long bob she wore in Washington had done. The sun tan she’d already got since she came home was a glowing and golden apricot against the slim whiteness of her long dress and the shower of white butterfly orchids on her shoulder. But it was the radiance in her eyes that made her different. They were clear as the dawn, and if any shadow had ever touched them it was gone, forgotten in the rapt enchantment of being home. Of guile or duplicity there was none. And I could hear Tommy Dawson’s voice again:
“We were four happy Joes—now one of us is dead on her account. . . .”
Her mother was at my side again, and I was meeting the other guests, with names I’d read in victorious communiqués from the South and Central Pacific, some of whom I’d already met around Washington. It was when Alice Cather led me to the lime-yellow cushioned hikiee in the corner that my heart gave a short power-dive and didn’t come up.
“Well, bless me!” a voice said. “It sure is a small world, isn’t it? How do you do, Mrs. Latham—I bet you don’t remember me.”
A young officer rose briskly. I bet I did remember him. He was one of those brash young men whose name never fully registers but whose face is as familiar at large cocktail parties as an established caterer’s number one old waiter. He was some sort of a friend of the four boys who had a brother in the State Department and landed in its sacred precincts himself for a brief stay before General Hershey’s large figure loomed ominously somewhat nearer than the horizon. And there must be some Hawaiian in me too. I knew what was coming as clearly as if he’d already said it.
“Have you seen the old gang yet? They’ll all be here, all except Ben Farrell. . . .”
Alice Cather’s hand on my elbow contracted sharply. I didn’t look at her, and I couldn’t see Mary without definitely turning. And I couldn’t stop the young man.
“Poor old Ben got it, Saipan or some place.”
It was as if he were announcing a winner in the bingo game.
“You ought to use your influence, Mrs. Latham. Old Swede’s running around with that slant-eyed Mata Hari that Ben Farrell was married to. That babe is a smart operator . . . Corinne something or other, I forget——”
“Farrell, I expect, isn’t it?”
Alice Cather’s voice was as cool as a thin slice of cucumber in ice water.
“—Why don’t you show Mrs. Latham the garden before it gets dark?” Alice Cather was going on pleasantly. “And I’m sure she’s anxious to hear about your friends.”
She’d moved a little, as I had, so we both had a direct view of Mary through half a dozen