Honolulu Story. Leslie Ford
Mary Cather laughed too.
“You’re all right, aren’t you, Kumumato?” she called across the lanai.
He had probably heard his name anyway. He stopped with his tray of glasses, grinned broadly and nodded, and went on.
“It must be sort of tough, when they’re loyal,” Mary said, “being eyed by everybody. It’s crazy, really. Kumumato’s as much an American as we are. He was born here in Honolulu and he’s got two sons in the A. J. Battalion in Italy. And he had a daughter killed on the 7th. You know the bombs the Japs dropped on the city didn’t hit anything but Japanese property. Of course, people who don’t know them and aren’t used to them the way we are out here are always sort of shocked.”
“Mainlanders don’t quite see the picture,” Harry Cather said. “It would be a little hard to put that many people in concentration camps, in the first place, and it would play hob with every kind of labor. Except in the defense plants. They’re not allowed on military jobs. I don’t say there aren’t some black sheep. It wouldn’t be human nature if there weren’t a few, out of the hundred and fifty thousand right here on Oahu. But they’re a practical people. Only forty families went back to their emperor, when they were all given the chance, at the beginning of the war. Not very many, was it?”
“No, it wasn’t,” I agreed. “Not out of a hundred and fifty thousand.”
“And we’re all pretty well tabbed here, by Internal Security. They’ve got us all fingerprinted and we carry civilian identification cards—every man, woman and child in the Islands. The curfew wasn’t anything anybody took lightly—blackout at sundown, at first, and after the war moved out, off the streets at ten.”
“I wish I’d been here all the time,” Mary said. “Everything wouldn’t have been so different if I’d seen it gradually. You can’t imagine how different it looks now.”
We’d moved along to the corner of the lanai where we could look down over the dark valley to the jewelled brilliance of the city, and up to the dark mountains, stretching in an endless chair against the sky.
“It’s funny how an Islander feels strange when there’s nothing but flat land and buildings everywhere,” she said. “It smells different, here, and it feels different. Even if they have made a fortress out of it, it’s still Oahu, and I love it. Did you know, Mrs. Latham, that in the early days in California the wealthy people used to send their children here to school? It was shorter than sending them across the plains or around the Horn. It seems odd, doesn’t it, when you can get from here to Washington in thirty-six hours now. It’s going to be a funny world, isn’t it, when we’re all under each other’s feet and you can’t get away from anybody very far.”
She laughed suddenly.
“Remember how glad we were, Dad, when Aunt Norah moved just over to Maui, because it was eighty-eight miles away and it made her seasick to ride on boats? Now she can take a plane and be here in half an hour.—I hope she doesn’t, as soon as she sees in the papers we’re back home again.”
“I believe we’re safe,” her father said, I thought rather dryly.
Mary laughed again. “Do you have relatives too, Mrs. Latham?”
“A few,” I said.
“Well, it’s wonderful to be back home, anyway,” she went on. “Are you turning in, Dad?”
Harry Cather stopped a few steps off. “No, I’m going to get a book for Grace. Hawaii, Off Shore Territory, it’s called. I think it’s a very intelligent picture of the situation here.”
Mary watched him until he disappeared around the angle of the living room . . . a little covertly, I thought at first. And in an instant I was sure of it.
She turned to me quickly when he’d gone.
“—Mrs. Latham,” she said, lowering her voice almost to a whisper. “Do you mind if I ask you something? Did . . . did I hear the captain talking to you about . . . Swede Ellicott?”
My heart sank a little. If she’d heard that much I didn’t see how she could have helped hearing the rest of it, including the fact that the old gang was there in Honolulu and the bit about the slant-eyed Mata Hari. I didn’t know what to say to her, and I must have hesitated much longer than seemed natural under the circumstances, because she looked away.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have asked, should I? But I . . . I thought I heard his name. I wasn’t sure. I seem to hear it a lot even when the room’s empty and nobody could possibly be saying it.”
She turned her head and gave me a quick smile.
“Crazy, isn’t it? Maybe it’s the atmosphere. The Hawaiians hear things—music, and drums. . . . They see things too. Maybe it’s catching. I’ve seen Swede a dozen times since I got here—only it’s always somebody else when I get up to him.”
She stood there, her body resting lightly against the rail behind us, poking at the lau-hala mat with the silver toe of her slipper.
“I always thought I ought to explain to you what happened,” she said quietly. “About me and Swede, I mean. You were so sweet to us both, it seemed a little . . . abrupt, just to have Mother call and say it was over, without . . . without anything else.”
“It’s not customary to go around explaining things like that,” I said. I was curious nevertheless.
“I know. And there’s really nothing to explain. It was just over, that’s all. I guess it was too . . . well, too swell to last.”
I looked around at her quickly. The note in her low velvety-throated voice was too warm and too wistfully tender not to be arresting, especially in view of Tommy Dawson’s derisive “the little Cather.” She was still looking down at the tip of her shoe poking the edge of the woven mat.
“I thought I was all over it,” she said. “All the . . . the hurt part of it, anyway. But I guess I’m not. I thought getting home, away from running into his aunt all the time, and seeing places that reminded me of him, I’d get him out of my head. But it doesn’t seem to work that way.”
She looked around at me and smiled. “It doesn’t make any sense, does it?”
Not to me it didn’t, certainly. There was obviously something very wrong somewhere. That might just possibly be the spot where the she-buzzard came in—but I didn’t know. I still couldn’t think of Alice Cather in such terms.
“Every time I think I see him it all comes back with a wallop, and of course I know it’s because there are so many flyers around, and they do sort of look alike.”
“Do you want to see him, Mary?” I asked.
She drew her breath quickly.
“Oh, no!” she said. “Oh, I couldn’t bear it. I’d do something crazy that I’d regret the rest of my life. No, it’s not that.”
She stopped short then, looking at me oddly. “But of course, it is that, isn’t it? I mean, I wouldn’t always be thinking I see him if I didn’t really want to, would I?”
“I guess not,” I agreed.
She hesitated.
“I suppose I was just awful young,” she said slowly. “I’d never been in love with anybody else before. It hit me too hard, I suppose. I just didn’t stop to use my head. I can see it now, but it’s a bit late, and it doesn’t help very much. If I’d been . . . older, or been around more, I’d have known it was just an exciting game—for all four of them. I guess maybe I should have asked for a copy of the ground rules before I got so much involved.”
She tried to laugh, but it wasn’t very successful.
“And I’m not blaming them at all. Don’t think that. It’s myself I’m blaming. After all, I’d known Swede only