To Paradise (32 page)

“Well,” my mother said, “we should have them over for tea.”

And so, the following Sunday, they came. They couldn’t come on Saturday, I heard Jane tell my mother, because Mrs. Bishop had to work her shift. (“Her
shift,
” my mother echoed, in a tone that conveyed some meaning I couldn’t quite interpret. “All right, Jane, tell her Sunday.”) They arrived on foot, yet weren’t hot or flushed, which meant they had taken the bus and had walked to our house from the closest stop. Edward was wearing his school clothes. His mother was wearing another full-skirted cotton dress, this one
hibiscus-yellow, her dark-blond hair in its knot, her lips painted a cheery red, even more beautiful than I’d remembered.

She was smiling as my mother approached her. “Mrs. Bishop, such a pleasure to meet you,” she said, to which Mrs. Bishop responded, as she had to me, “Please, call me Victoria.”

“Victoria,” my mother repeated, as if it were a foreign name and she wanted to make sure she was pronouncing it correctly, but she did not reciprocate the offer, though Mrs. Bishop seemed not to expect it.

“Thank you so much for having us over,” she said. “Edward”—she turned her beam to her son, who was looking at my mother with a steady, serious expression, not quite suspicious, but alert—“is new this year, and Wika has been so kind to him.” And now she turned to look at me, with that little wink, as if I had done her son a favor by talking to him, as if I had departed from my busy schedule in order to do so.

Even my mother seemed slightly taken aback by this. “Well, I’m very glad to hear Wika has a new friend,” she said. “Won’t you come in?”

We filed into the sunroom, where Jane served us shortbread, pouring the women coffee—“Oh! Thank you—Jane? Thank you, Jane, this looks delicious!”—and Edward and me guava juice. I had seen other acquaintances of my mother grow silent and awestruck in this room, which to me was simply a room, sunlit and dull, but to them was a museum of my father’s ancestors: the scarred wooden surfboard my great-grandfather, known as the Portly Prince, had ridden in Waik
ī
k
ī
; the daguerreotypes of my great-great-grandfather’s sister, the queen, in her black taffeta gown, and a great-great-cousin, an explorer who had a building at a famous university named for him. But Mrs. Bishop seemed unintimidated, and looked about herself openly, with genuine delight. “What a lovely room this is, Mrs. Bingham,” she said, smiling at my mother. “My entire family has always been great admirers of your husband’s family, and how much he did for the islands.”

It was exactly the right thing to say, done simply and well, and
I could tell my mother was surprised. “Thank you,” she said, a bit stiffly. “He loved his home.”

For a while, my mother talked to Edward, asking him if he liked his new school (yes), and if he missed his old friends (not really), and what his hobbies were (swimming, hiking, camping, going to the beach). When I became the parent of a young boy myself, I was able to appreciate Edward’s composure, his apparent unflappability; as a child, I was eager, too eager, to please, smiling desperately through conversations with my parents’ friends, hoping I wouldn’t shame them. But Edward was neither ingratiating nor awkward—he answered my mother’s questions straightforwardly, without any pandering or apology. Even then, he possessed an unusual dignity, one that made him seem invincible. It was almost as if he didn’t care about anyone else, and yet that would suggest that he was aloof, or proud, and he wasn’t either of those things.

Finally, my mother was able to ask about Mr. Bishop: Certain members of the Bishop family had been distant cousins of my father, the way that all the old missionary families who had married into Hawaiian royalty were distant cousins—was it possible that there might be a connection?

Mrs. Bishop laughed. There was no bitterness in that laugh, no falsity: It was a sound of pure merriment. “Oh, I’m afraid not,” she said. “I’m the only Hawaiian, not my husband.” My mother looked blank, and Mrs. Bishop smiled again. “It was quite a shock for Luke, a haole boy from a small town in Texas whose father was a construction worker, to understand that, here, his last name made him something special.”

“I see,” said my mother, quietly. “So is your husband in construction as well?”

“He could be.” Again, the smile. “But we just don’t know, do we, Edward?” Then, to my mother, “He left long ago, when Edward was a baby—I haven’t seen him since.”

I can’t say, of course, that men didn’t leave their families all the time in the early fifties. But I
can
say—and this was true even decades later—that to have your husband or father leave was something
shameful, as if the responsible party was the abandoned, the wife and children. If people spoke about it, they did so in whispers. But not the Bishops. Mr. Bishop had left, but
they
weren’t the losers—
he
was.

It was one of those rare moments in which my mother and I were united in our discomfiture. Before the Bishops left, we learned that Sunday was Mrs. Bishop’s day off; the other six days, she worked as a waitress at a busy diner a few blocks from their house called Mizumoto’s, which my mother hadn’t heard of but Jane and Matthew had, and that she was from Honoka
‘
a, a tiny town, a village, really, on the Big Island.

“What an extraordinary woman,” my mother said, watching as mother and son turned right at the end of our driveway and walked out of sight toward the bus stop. I could tell she didn’t quite mean it as a compliment.

I agreed with her—she
was
extraordinary. They both were. I had never encountered two people who seemed less abashed by the circumstances of their lives. But whereas that lack of apology manifested itself in Mrs. Bishop as an irrepressible buoyancy, the kind of cheer that exists only in the rare people who have never felt embarrassed for who they are, they were realized in Edward as a defiance, one that in later years curdled into anger.

I see this now, of course. But it took me a long time. And by that point, I had already given up my life, and therefore your life, for his. Not because I shared his anger—but because I craved his certainty, this strange and wondrous notion that there really was a single answer, and that, by believing in it, I would cease to believe everything that had bothered me about myself for so long.

And now, Kawika, I will skip forward a number of years. First, though, I want to tell you about something that happened to me yesterday.

I was lying in bed as usual. It was the afternoon, and hot. Earlier in the day they had opened the windows and turned on the fan, but
now the breeze had died, and no one had returned to switch on the air-conditioning. This occasionally happened, and then someone would enter the room, exclaiming at how hot it was, scolding me a bit, as if I had the ability to call out for them and had simply refused to do so out of stubbornness. Once, they had forgotten to turn on the air-conditioning at all and my mother had made a surprise visit. I had heard her voice, and her feet marching in, and then I heard her march back out again, and return a few seconds later with an orderly, who was apologizing again and again as my mother rebuked him: “Do you know how much I pay for my son to be looked after? Get me the manager on duty. This is unacceptable.” I was humiliated hearing this, being so old and still in my mother’s care, but also comforted, and I fell asleep to the sound of her anger.

Normally, the heat didn’t bother me so much, but yesterday, it was oppressive, and I could feel my face and hair becoming damp; I could feel sweat trickling into my diaper. Why won’t someone come help me? I thought. I tried to make a sound, but I of course couldn’t.

And then something very strange happened. I stood. I cannot explain how this happened—I have not stood for years, not since I was rescued from Lipo-wao-nahele. But now I was not only standing, I was trying to walk, trying to move toward where I knew the air-conditioning unit was. As I realized this, however, I fell, and after a few minutes, someone came into the room and started making a fuss, asking me why I was on the floor, and if I’d rolled out of bed. For a minute I worried she might strap me down, as has happened before, but she didn’t, just buzzed for help, and then another person came in and they returned me to bed and then, thank goodness, switched on the air conditioner.

The point, though, is that I had stood; I had been standing. It felt both foreign and also familiar to be upright again, even if I trembled for a long time afterward because my limbs were so wasted. Last night, after I had been fed and washed and the space was dark and silent, I began to think. It had been luck that no one had seen me standing, because if they had, there would have been questions, and my mother would have been called, and there would have been tests, the sorts I had had when I first came here: Why would I not walk?
Why would I not speak? Why would I not see? “You’re asking the wrong questions,” my mother had snapped to someone, a doctor. “You should be asking why he
can’t
do those things.” “No, Mrs. Bingham,” the doctor replied, and I could hear an edge in his voice. “I am asking exactly the right questions. It’s not that your son
can’t
do these things—it’s that he
won’t,
” and my mother had been silent.

Now, however, I realized: What if I
could
learn how to walk again? What if every day I practiced standing? What would happen? The thought scared me, but it was exciting as well. What if I was getting better after all?

But I meant to continue my story. Throughout the remainder of fifth grade, Edward and I saw a lot of each other. Occasionally, he came to my house, but more often, I went to his, where we would play checkers or cards. When he came to my house, he’d want to play outside, as his yard was too small to toss a ball in, but he soon realized I wasn’t much of an athlete. The strange thing, though, was that we never seemed to grow closer in any meaningful way. Boys that age may not exchange intimacies or secrets, but they do become more physical with each other: I remember you at that age, how you would tussle on the grass with your friends like little animals, how much of the fun you had with them was getting dirty together. But Edward and I weren’t like that—I was too fastidious, and he was too composed. I sensed, early on, that he would never be someone I could relax around, and I didn’t mind that.

Then came summer. Edward went to the Big Island to stay with his grandparents; my mother and I went to H
ā
na, where we at the time had a house that had been in my father’s family since before annexation. And by the time school had resumed, something had shifted. Friendships at that age are so fragile, because who you are—not just the physical dimensions of you but the emotional ones, too—change so dramatically from month to month. Edward joined the baseball team and swim team and made new friends; I reverted to my solitude. I now suppose I must have been sad about this, but, curiously, I remember no feelings of sorrow, no feelings of anger—it was like the previous year had been a mistake, and I had known that things would at some point return to normal. Also, it wasn’t as if
there was any animosity—we had only drifted, not split, and when we saw each other across campus or in the hallways, we would both nod or wave, gestures you’d make across a wide sea, where you knew your voice couldn’t carry. When we reunited more than a decade later, it felt somehow inevitable, as if we had both drifted for so long that we were bound to find each other again.

There are, however, two encounters from those years apart that stood out for me. The first took place when I was around thirteen. I had overheard an exchange between two girls in my grade. One of the girls, it was well-known, had a crush on Edward. But her friend disapproved. “You
can’t,
Belle,” she hissed. “Why not?” Belle asked. “Because,” said the first girl, her voice dropping, “his mother. She’s a
dancer
.”

Since he had matriculated, Edward was occasionally the subject of—not rumors, because they were all true, but stories. Eventually, we came to learn who the scholarship students were, and their parents’ occupations were sometimes whispered from child to child, all mimicking the voices their own parents used to discuss the newcomers. Edward had no father, and his mother was a waitress, but he was spared from outright ridicule: He was good at sports, and moreover, he didn’t seem to care what people said, which was partly what motivated the stories—I think the other students hoped that they might provoke him to react, but he never did.

At least he wasn’t Oriental. This was in the years of the quota, when only ten percent of the school’s population was Oriental, even though the territory’s actual population was around thirty percent. Most of the Orientals who did attend arrived, in some cases, having never worn shoes, just rubber slippers. They were all on scholarships, identified by their public-school teachers as promising and bright, and subjected to multiple tests before they gained admission. Their parents worked on the island’s final sugarcane plantation or in the canning factories, and on weekends and in the summer, they worked there, too, cutting cane or picking pine, as they called it, in the fields, loading it onto the trucks. There was a boy, Harry, who had begun at the school in seventh grade whose father was a night-soil collector, someone who cleaned out the plantation outhouses
and transferred the human feces there to—where, we didn’t know. It was said he smelled like shit, and although he too always sat alone at lunch, eating his rice sandwiches, I never thought of introducing myself to him: I looked down on him as well.

Hearing about Mrs. Bishop made me miss her. Indeed, she was what I missed most about my friendship with Edward: the way she held me by the shoulders and then pulled me in for a hug, laughing; the way she kissed me on the forehead when I left their house for the evening; the way she told me she hoped she’d see me again soon.

I had never listened to the talk about Edward, but now I did, and after a few weeks, I learned that, while Mrs. Bishop was still a waitress at Mizumoto’s, she was now also dancing three nights a week at a restaurant called Forsythia. This was a popular place near Mizumoto’s, a hangout for union men of all ethnicities. Matthew’s brother, of whom he was very proud, was a union representative for the Filipino cannery employees, and I knew he sometimes went to Forsythia, because occasionally Jane would beckon me into the kitchen after school and, with a flourish, present the restaurant’s yellow bakery box, in which would sit a guava chiffon cake, its surface a glossy rose-pink.