To Paradise (30 page)

Most of the money had been spent by the time my father joined the family firm, and he didn’t seem interested in replenishing its coffers. We’d spend weekends at the club, where we’d have lunch together—people stopping by our table to shake my father’s hand and smile at my mother; the slice of coconut layer cake, soapy-sweet and shagged like a carpet, that my father always ordered for me at the end, despite my mother’s protestations, placed in front of me—before my father joined his golf game and my mother sat with her stack of magazines beneath an umbrella near the pool, where she could watch me. Later, when Edward and I were becoming friends, I would stay quiet as he talked about going to the beach on the
weekends with his mother; they would pack containers of food and spend all day there, his mother sitting on a blanket with her friends, Edward running into the water and then back out, in and then out, until the sky began to darken and they packed their things to leave. The club was near the ocean—when you were on the course, you could see stripes of it through the trees, a band of glinting blue—but we would never have thought of going there: It was too sandy, too wild, too poor. But I never said this to Edward; I said I loved going to the beach as well, even though, when we started going together, part of me was always thinking about when we could leave, when I could take a shower and become clean again.

It wasn’t until my father died that I realized we were rich, and by then, we were far less rich than we had been. But the kind of wealth my father had possessed wasn’t of an obvious kind—our house was large, but it was like everyone else’s, with a wide porch and a large, crowded sunroom, and a small kitchen. I had all the toys I wanted, but my first bike was secondhand, a hand-me-down from a boy on the next street. We had Jane and Matthew, but our meals were simple—rice and meat of some kind for dinner; rice and fish and eggs for breakfast; a metal bento box I took to school for lunch—and it was only when my parents entertained, and the candles were lit and the chandelier was cleaned, that the house looked grand, and that I was able to recognize that there was something stately in its simplicity: the dark, shining dining-room table; the smooth white wood of the walls and ceiling; the vases of flowers that were replaced every other day. This was in the late ’40s, when our neighbors were laying linoleum over their floors and replacing their dishware with plastic, but ours was not, as my mother said, a house of convenience. In our house, the floors were wood and the cutlery was silver and the plates and bowls were china. Not expensive china, but not plastic, either. The postwar years had brought new wealth to the islands, new things from the mainland, but here again our household did not indulge in what my mother considered trends. Why would you buy expensive oranges from Florida when the ones from our yard were even better? Why should you buy raisins from California when the lychee from our trees were even sweeter? “They’ve gone mainland
mad,” she would say about our neighbors; she was dismissive of what she saw as their gullibility, in which she saw a kind of self-loathing for where we lived and who we were. Edward was never able to see that aspect of her, her fierce nationalism, her love for her home—he saw only the inconsistency with which that pride was expressed, the way she scorned other people for wanting the latest music and food from the mainland while also wearing the pearls she had bought in New York, the long cotton skirts that she ordered from her dressmaker in San Francisco, where she and my father had made annual trips, a habit she continued after his death.

Twice a year, the three of us would drive out to L
ā
‘
ie, on the North Shore. Here there was a small coral-rock church for which my great-grandfather had been the benefactor since he was a young man, and it was from here that my father would distribute envelopes of money, twenty dollars for each adult, to celebrate my great-grandfather’s birthday and then the day of his death, by giving a gift to the people of the town his grandfather had loved. As we approached the church, turning off the road onto a dirt path, we would see the townspeople clumped around the door, and as my father climbed out and advanced toward the building, they would bow. “Your Highness,” they would murmur, these big dark people, their voices unnaturally soft, “welcome back, King.” My father would nod at them, offer his hands to be taken and squeezed, and inside, he would distribute the money and then would sit to listen to the best singer among them, who would sing a song, and then someone else, who would chant, and then we would get into the car and drive back to town.

These visits always made me uncomfortable. I felt, even as a young boy, as if I were a fraud—what had I done to be called “Prince,” to have an old woman, so old that she spoke only Hawaiian, bow before me, her hand clenching the head of her cane so she wouldn’t fall? On the ride home, my father was cheery, whistling the song that had just been performed for him, while my mother sat by his side, straight and silent and regal. After my father died, I had gone with her alone, and although the townspeople had been respectful, they had acknowledged only me, not her, and although she was
always polite to them, she didn’t have my father’s good humor, or his ability to make people far poorer than he feel like his equal, and the occasion took on a strained quality. By the time I was eighteen, and expected to discharge this duty myself, the entire enterprise had begun to feel anachronistic and condescending, and from then on, my mother just sent an annual donation to the local community center, for it to distribute in whatever way benefited its members. Not that I was capable of being my father, anyway. That was what I had told her—that I wasn’t a substitute for him. “You don’t understand, Wika,” she had said, wearily, “you’re not his substitute. You’re his heir.” But she hadn’t contradicted me, either: We both knew I couldn’t equal my father.

Things changed after he died, of course. For my mother, the changes were more profound and threatening. Once his debts had been paid—he had liked to gamble and had liked cars—there was less money left than she had assumed. She had also lost with him a sense of security in who she was—he had legitimized who she always claimed to be, and without him, she would forever be defending her right to call herself nobility.

But the other change was that my mother and I were left with only each other, and it wasn’t until my father had left us that we both realized that it was he who had provided us our identities: She was Kawika Bingham’s wife; I was Kawika Bingham’s son. Even now that he was gone, we still defined ourselves in relation to him. But without him, our relation to each other seemed more capricious. She was now Kawika Bingham’s widow; I was Kawika Bingham’s heir. But Kawika Bingham himself no longer existed, and without him, we no longer knew how to relate to each other.

After my father’s death, my mother became increasingly involved with her society, Kaikamahine k
ū
Hawai
‘
i. The group, whose members referred to themselves as the Daughters, was open to anyone who could prove noble lineage.

My mother’s own claim to noble blood was a complicated subject. Her adopted father, who was a distant cousin of my father’s, had
been noble: He, like my father, could trace his family all the way back to before the Great King. But my mother’s origins were more opaque. As I grew older, I would hear various stories about who she was. The most common was that she was in fact her adopted father’s illegitimate child, and that her mother had been a fling, a haole cocktail waitress who’d returned home to America soon after giving birth. But there were other theories as well, including that she was not only not noble but not even of Hawaiian blood, that her mother had been her adoptive father’s secretary, and that her father had been her adoptive father’s manservant—her father had been known to prefer hiring haoles, because he liked to show off that he had the stature and money to have white people work for him. When she occasionally spoke about her adoptive father, she would say only that he was always kind to her, though from someone—who, I don’t know—I must have gotten the sense that, while he might have been kind to her, it was in a vague sort of way; he was strict with his own children, his daughter and his son, because he expected more from and for them. They had the power to disappoint him, but they also had the power to please him. They were embodiments of him in a way my mother was not.

Marrying my father had quieted most of the rumors—
his
origins were inarguable, unimpeachable—but with his death, I believe she felt she was once again on the defensive, alert and attuned to any challengers. It was why she did so much work with the Daughters—why she hosted their annual fund-raisers, why she led committees, why she chaired charity initiatives, why she tried, in all the ways appropriate for her imagination and her era, to be the ideal Hawaiian woman.

The problem, though, with trying to be the ideal anything is that eventually the definition changes, and you realize that what you’d been pursuing all along was not a single truth but a set of expectations determined by context. You leave that context, and you leave behind those expectations, too, and then you’re nothing once again.

When Edward first met my mother, he was careful and polite. It wasn’t until later, when we became close again as adults, that he became suspicious of her. She couldn’t speak Hawaiian, he pointed
out (neither could I; aside from the few phrases and words we all knew, and a dozen songs and chants, I spoke only English and some French). She didn’t support the struggle. She didn’t support the return of the Hawaiian kingdom. But he never mentioned, as others had, how light-skinned she was; he was lighter still, and if you hadn’t grown up on the islands, you wouldn’t know to look past his hair and eyes to see his Hawaiianness, a secret hiding just beneath. By that point, he had grown envious of my own appearance, my own skin and hair and eyes. Sometimes I’d look up to catch him staring at me. “You should grow your hair out,” he said to me, once. “More authentic that way.” It bothered him that even then, when everyone was wearing their hair long, I still wore mine as my father had worn his—tidy and very short—because it was woolly and dense, and if it got too long, it puffed out around my head.

“I don’t want it to look like an Afro,” I said, and he sat up from his usual slouch, leaning forward.

“What’s wrong with an Afro?” he asked, giving me that unblinking stare he sometimes did, when his eyes darkened, turned a deeper blue, and I began to stammer, as I did when I was nervous.

“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing’s wrong with an Afro.”

He leaned back and gazed at me for a long moment, and I had to look away. “A real Hawaiian wears his hair big,” he said. His own hair was curly but fine, like a child’s, and he wore it tied back with an elastic band. “Big and proud.” He began calling me Accountant after that, because he said I looked like I should be working in a bank somewhere, counting other people’s money. “Howzit, Accountant,” he’d say in greeting when he came to pick me up. “Business good?” It was a taunt, I knew, but at times it felt almost loving, a term of affection, something only we shared.

I never knew what to say when he criticized my mother. By this time, it had long ago been made clear that I could never make her happy, and yet I couldn’t help but feel protective of her, even though she’d never asked for my protection, and, indeed, I had none to give her. I would like to think, in retrospect, that part of what made me uncomfortable was his implication that there was only one way to be
Hawaiian. But I hadn’t been sophisticated enough to think in those terms back then—the idea that my race compelled me to
be
one way or another at all was so foreign that it would have been like telling me that there was another, more correct way to breathe or swallow. I now know that all around me there were people my age who were having those very conversations: how to be black, or Oriental, or American, or a woman. But I had never heard those conversations, and when I finally did, it was in Edward’s company.

So instead I would just say, “She’s Hawaiian,” though even as I said it I could hear it sounded like a question: “She’s Hawaiian?”

Which is maybe why Edward answered as he did.

“No, she’s not,” he said.

But let me go back to when we first met. I was ten at the time, recently made fatherless. Edward was new that year. The school admitted new waves of students in kindergarten, fifth grade, seventh grade, and ninth grade. Later, Edward would curse the fact that we’d attended this school when we could have attended the school that only admitted students with Hawaiian blood. Our school had been granted by the king’s charter but was founded by missionaries. “Of course we didn’t learn about who we are and where we came from,” he’d said. “Of course we didn’t. That damn school’s entire mission was to colonize us into submission.” And yet he’d gone there as well. It was one of the many examples of things in my and Edward’s shared life that he would come to hate or be ashamed of, and my refusal or inability to be equally ashamed—though I was ashamed of plenty of other things—came to infuriate him, too.

I attended the school because members of my family had always attended the school. On the high-school part of the campus there was even a building called Bingham Hall, one of the first structures the missionaries had built, named for one of the reverends who would later marry the crown princess. Every Kawika Bingham who had attended the school—my father, and grandfather, and
great-grandfather, and great-great-grandfather—posed for a photograph or drawing in front of the building, standing beneath the name, which had been tapped into stone.

No one from Edward’s family had ever attended the school, and it was only—he told me—because of a scholarship that he was able to go at all. He told me these things matter-of-factly, without self-pity or embarrassment, which I found remarkable.

We became friends slowly. Neither of us had any others. When I had been younger, there were some boys whose mothers wanted them to befriend me because of who my father was, who my mother was. It makes me cringe even now, the memory of one of them trudging across the playground toward me, introducing himself, asking if I wanted to play. I always said yes, and there’d be a lackluster game of catch. After a few days of this, I’d be invited to his house; Matthew would drive me if they didn’t live in the valley. There, I’d meet the boy’s mother, who would smile at me and serve us a snack: Vienna sausages and rice, or bread and passion fruit jam, or baked breadfruit with butter. There’d be another, silent game of catch, and then Matthew would drive me home. Depending on how ambitious the boy’s mother was, there might be another two or three invitations, but eventually they would stop, and at school, the boy would bolt toward his real friends at recess, never looking at me. They were never cruel to me, they never bullied me, but that was only because I wasn’t worth bullying. In the neighborhood, as I told you, there
were
boys who bullied me, but I grew used to that as well—it was a kind of attention.