“You gave these outrageous children …”
“What I stopped by to see you about, Hoxworth, is that I just called that tutoring school near Lawrenceville, and they’ve agreed to take Whip and Brom … if you want to send him … and guarantee to get them into Yale. That’s the only problem, really, Hoxworth. Get the boys into Yale.”
“What school are you talking about?”
“What’s the name? It’s right near Lawrenceville. Mark Hewlett sent his boy there when he got busted out of Punahou. They got him into Yale.” Seeing the three novels on the low table, Janders picked one up in the way men do who never read books, and asked, “You drowning your sorrows in a good book?”
“Do you know an English master at Punahou named Kenderdine?”
“Yes. Crew-cut job.”
“I had a fearful scene with him. He’s at the root of this business, I’m convinced.”
“He’s a troublemaker. Some jerkwater college like Wisconsin or Wesleyan. I keep telling Larry, ‘Get Yale men. They may not be so smart but in the long run they give you less trouble.’ But Larry always drags in some genius … Yes, Kenderdine’s Wisconsin.”
“He’s no longer Punahou.”
“You fire him?”
“I certainly did. But you know, Hewlett, he said about the same thing you did. Said Bromley’s essay would do us all a lot of good. Get people laughing. He said it was crystal-clear that Brom wrote the essay with love and affection … that he wasn’t lampooning the missionaries.”
“That’s what one of the judges at the club thought,” Janders recalled. “But I’ll tell you what, Hoxworth. Seems it was my son who took the photo of you in the bunk, proving that sex was impossible. Well, if you can handle him, you’re welcome to thrash hell out of him. I won’t try because he can lick me.”
The door banged and Hoxworth Hale was left alone in the big room overlooking Honolulu. For a while he studied the never tedious pattern of lights, as they came and went along the foreshores of the bay, and the bustling activity at Pearl Harbor, and the starry sky to the south: his city, the city of his people, the fruit of his family’s energy. He leafed his son’s startling essay and saw again the provocative last sentence: “We can therefore conclude, I think, that whereas our fathers often paced the deck of the Thetis, wrestling with their consciences, they usually wound up by hustling below to the cramped bunks, where they wrestled with their wives.”
Idly he picked up the three books Kenderdine had left. Hefting the Irish novel, he found it too heavy and put it aside. He looked at Willa Cather’s slim book, A Lost Lady, but its title seemed much too close to his own case, and he did not want to read about lovely ladies who become lost, for it seemed to be happening throughout his group. That left The Grandmothers, which was neither too heavy in bulk nor too close to home, although had he known when he started reading, it was really the most dangerous of the three, for it was a barbed shaft directed right at the heart of Honolulu and its wonderful matriarchies.
To his surprise, he was still reading the story of Wisconsin’s rare old women, when the lights of Honolulu sadly surrendered their battle against the rising dawn. The door creaked open gingerly, and Bromley Whipple Hale, flushed with pride of authorship and Uncle Hewlett’s good whiskey, stumbled into the room.
“Hi, Dad.”
“Hello, Bromley.”
The handsome young fellow, with indelible Whipple charm stamped on his bright features, slumped into a chair and groaned. “It’s been quite a day, Dad.”
Grudgingly, Hoxworth observed: “You seem to have cut quite a niche for yourself in the local mausoleum.”
“Dad, I got thrown out of school.”
“I know. Uncle Hewlett’s already made plans for you and Whipple to get into one of the good cram schools. The one thing you have to safeguard is your Yale entrance.”
“Dad, I was going to speak about this later, but I guess now’s … I don’t believe I want to go to Yale. Now wait a minute! I’d like to try either Alabama or Cornell.”
“Alabama! Cornell!” Hoxworth exploded. “Those jerkwater … Good heavens, you might just as well go to the University of Hawaii.”
“That’s what I wanted to do … seeing as how I want to write about Hawaii. But Mr. Kenderdine says that Alabama and Cornell have fine classes in creative writing.”
“Bromley, where did you ever get the idea that you want to be a writer? This isn’t a job for a man. I’ve been relying on you to …”
“You’ll have to rely upon somebody else, Dad. There’s lots of good bright young men from Harvard and Penn business schools who’d be glad …”
“What do you know about Harvard and Penn?”
“Mr. Kenderdine told us they were the best in the country … in business.”
Hoxworth stiffened and growled, “I suppose your Mr. Kenderdine said that anyone who bothered to go into business …”
“Oh, no! He thinks business is the modern ocean for contemporary Francis Drakes and Jean Lafittes.”
“Weren’t they pirates?” Hoxworth asked suspiciously.
“They were adventurers. Mr. Kenderdine told Whip Sanders he ought to try like the devil to get into Harvard Business School.”
“But he didn’t tell you that, did he?”
“No, Dad. He thinks I can write.” There was a long pause in the big room as the pastel lights of morning spread across the city below, and one of those rare moments developed in which a son can talk to his father, and if Hoxworth Hale had growled in his customary manner, the moment would have passed, like the ghost of Pele ignoring one whom she considered not worth a warning, but Hoxworth’s personal god sat heavily on his shoulder, and he said nothing, so that his son continued: “You and your father and all your generations used to sit up here, Dad, and look down at Honolulu and dream of controlling it. Every streetcar that ran, every boat that came to port did so at your command. I appreciate that. It’s a noble drive, a civilizing one. Sometimes I’ve caught a glimpse of such a life for myself. But it’s always passed, Dad. I just don’t have that vision, and you’ve got to find someone who has, or you and I will both go broke.”
“Don’t you have any vision at all?” Hoxworth asked quietly, back in the shadows.
“Oh, yes!” The handsome young fellow pointed to Honolulu, lying tribute beneath them, and confided for the first time to anyone: “I want to control this city too, Dad. But I want to bore into its heart to see what makes it run. Why the Chinese buy land and the Japanese don’t. Why the old families like ours intermarry and intermarry until damned near half of them have somebody locked away in upstairs rooms. I want to know who really owns the waterfront, and what indignities a man must suffer before he can become an admiral at Pearl Harbor. And when I know all these things, I’m going to write a book … maybe lots of them … and they won’t be books like the ones you read. They’ll be like The Grandmothers and Without My Cloak, books you never heard of. And when I know, and when I have written what I know, then I’ll control Honolulu in a manner you never dreamed of. Because I’ll control its imagination.”
He was slightly drunk and fell back in his chair. His father watched him for some minutes, during which fragments of The Grandmothers repeated themselves in Hoxworth’s agitated mind. Finally the father said, “I suppose you don’t want to bundle off to the cram school?”
“No, Dad.”
“What will you do?”
“There’s no sweat getting into either Cornell or Alabama. I’ll register Monday at McKinley High.”
Hoxworth winced and asked, “Why McKinley?”
“The kids call it Manila Prep and I’d sort of like to know some Filipinos.”
“You already know … Doesn’t Consul Adujo’s son go to Punahou?”
“I want to know real Filipinos, Dad.”
Hoxworth Hale started to rear back, as if he were about to tell his son that he would tolerate no nonsense about McKinley High School, but as words began to formulate he saw his son etched against the
pale morning light, and the silhouette was not of Bromley Hoxworth, the radical essayist who had outraged Hawaii, but of Hoxworth Hale, the radical art critic who had charged Yale University with thievery; and a bond of identity was established, and the father swallowed his words of reprimand.
“Tell me one thing, Bromley. This Mr. Kenderdine? Can his ideas be trusted?”
“The best, Dad. Unemotional, yet loaded with fire. You heard, I suppose, that we’re losing him. Joining the navy. Says there’s bound to be war.”
There was a painful silence and the boy concluded: “Maybe that’s why I want to go to McKinley now, Dad. There mayn’t be too much time.” He started to bed but realized that he owed his father some kind of apology, for the mimeographed essay had created a storm which he, the author, had not anticipated. “About that photograph of you, Dad … What I mean is, if I do become a writer, I’ll be a good one.” And he stumbled off to bed.
IN 1941 the Thanksgiving Day football game was largely a replay of the 1938 classic, with Punahou pitted against McKinley, but this time two Sakagawa boys played for Punahou; for Hoxworth Hale and his committee of alumni had been so pleased with Tadao’s performance that they had automatically extended scholarships to the younger boys, Minoru the tackle and Shigeo the halfback. Thus it was that the former privy cleaner Kamejiro sat in the stadium along with his wife and his two older boys—Goro was in army uniform—cheering for Punahou. A newspaperman remarked: “It’s a revolution in Hawaii when Sakagawa the barber and Hoxworth Hale support the same team.”
Throughout Hawaii these minor miracles of accommodation were taking place. When a child felt pain he said, “Itai, itai!” which was Japanese. When he finished work it was pauhana. He had aloha for his friends. He tried to avoid pilikia and when he flattered girls it was hoomalimali, all Hawaiian words. He rarely ate candy, but kept his pockets filled with seed, a delicious Chinese confection tasting like licorice, sugar and salt all at once and made of dried cherries or plums. After a dance he did not eat hot dogs; he ate a bowl of saimin, Japanese noodles, with teriyaki barbecue. Or he had chop suey. For dessert he had a Portuguese malasada, a sweet, sticky fried doughnut, crackling with sugar. It was an island community and it had absorbed the best from many cultures. On this day, as Punahou battled McKinley in a game that was more thrilling to Honolulu than the Rose Bowl game was to California, Punahou, the haole heaven, fielded a team containing two Sakagawas, a Kee, two Kalanianaoles, a Rodriques and assorted Hales, Hewletts, Janderses and Hoxworths. That year Punahou won, 27-6, and Shigeo Sakagawa scored two of the touchdowns, so that as he went home through the streets of Kakaako the perpetual toughs taunted him contemptuously with being a haole-lover, but they no longer tried to assault the Sakagawa boys. They knew better.
Logically, the Sakagawas should have been able—what with the aid of scholarships for three of the boys—to retire Reiko-chan from the barbershop, allowing her to enroll in the university, but just as the family had enough money saved ahead for this, the consulate on Nuuanu Street convened the Japanese community and told them gravely, “The war in China grows more costly than ever. We have got to assist our homeland now. Please, please remember your vows to the emperor.” And the fund had gone to help Japan resist the evil of China’s aggression, though Goro asked his friends, “How can China be the aggressor when it’s Japan that’s done the invading?” He wanted to ask his father about this, but Kamejiro, in these trying days of late 1941, had pressing problems which he could not share with his children, nor with anyone else for that matter, except Mr. Ishii.
They began when Hawaii established a committee of American citizens whose job it was to visit all Japanese homes, beseeching the parents to write to Japan to have the names of their children removed from village registers, thus canceling their Japanese citizenship. Hoxworth Hale was the committee member who visited the Sakagawas, and with Reiko as interpreter he explained on the day after Thanksgiving: “Mr. Sakagawa, Japan is a nation that insists upon dual citizenship. But since your five fine children were born here, legally they’re Americans. Emotionally they’re Americans too. But because you registered their names in your Hiroshima village years ago they are also Japanese citizens. Suppose the war in Europe spreads. What if Japan and America get into it on opposite sides? Your sons might face serious difficulties if you allow them to retain two citizenships. To protect them, get it cleaned up.”
The five children added their pleas. “Look, Pop,” they argued. “We respect Japan, but we’re going to be Americans.” Their father agreed with them. He nodded. He told Mr. Hale that it ought to be done, but as always before, he refused to sign any papers. This the children could not understand and they sided with Mr. Hale when he said, “It really isn’t right, Mr. Sakagawa, for you to penalize your sons, especially with three of them being Punahou boys.”
But Sakagawa-san was adamant, and after Mr. Hale had left, and his family began hammering him with their arguments, he felt caged and finally kicked a chair and shouted, “I’m going away where a man can get some peace.” He sought out Mr. Ishii and sat glumly with him.
“Our evil has caught up with us, old friend,” he said.
“It was bound to, sooner or later,” Mr. Ishii reflected sadly.
“The children are insisting that I write to Hiroshima and take their names off the village registry.”
“You aren’t going to do it, are you?” Mr. Ishii asked hopefully.
“How can I? And bring disgrace upon us all?”
The two men, now gray in their late fifties, sat moodily and thought of the shame in which they were involved. In their village Kamejiro had been legally married by proxy to the pretty girl Sumiko, by whom he had had five children, all duly reported; and Mr. Ishii had been legally married to Mod Yoriko, no children reported. Yet by convenient switching, Kamejiro had married Yoriko, American style, and she was the mother of the children; Mr. Ishii had likewise married Sumiko, and she had turned out to be a prostitute. How could they explain these things to the Japanese consulate on Nuuanu Street? How could they explain this accidental bigamy to the five children? Above all, how could they explain it to the village authorities in Hiroshima? “All Japan would be ashamed,” Mr. Ishii said gloomily. “Kamejiro, we better leave things just as they are.”
“But the children are fighting with me. Today even Mr. Hale came to the house. He had the papers in his hands.”
“Of course he had the papers!” Mr. Ishii agreed. “But you watch his face when you try to explain who your wife is. Kamejiro, friend, let the matter drop.”
But on Saturday, December 6, Mr. Hale returned to the shack and said, “You are the last holdout on my list, Mr. Sakagawa. Please end your sons’ dual citizenship. With Goro here in the army, and Tadao and Minoru in the R.O.T.C., it’s something you’ve got to do.”
“I can’t,” Kamejiro said through his interpreter, Goro, who had a weekend pass from Schofield Barracks.
“I don’t understand the old man,” Goro said, smoothing out his army uniform, of which he was obviously proud. “He’s loyal to Japan, but he’s no great flag waver. I’ll argue with him again when you’re gone, Mr. Hale.”
“His obstinacy looks very bad,” Mr. Hale warned. “Especially with you in the army. I’ve got to report it, of course.”
Goro shrugged his shoulders. “Have you ever tried to argue with a Japanese papa-san? My pop has some crazy fixed idea. But I’ll see what I can do.”
That Saturday night the entire Sakagawa family battled out this problem of dual citizenship, in Japanese. “I respect your country, Pop,” Goro said. “I remember when I had the fight with the priest about going back to Japan. When I finally surrendered, I really intended to go. But you know what’s happened, Pop. Football … now the army. Let’s face it, Pop. I’m an American.”
“Me too,” Tadao agreed.
The sons hammered at him, and finally he said, “I want you to be Americans. When I put a newspaper picture like that over the sink, ‘Four Sakagawa Stars,?
?? don’t you think I’m proud? Long ago I admitted you’d never again be Japanese.”
“Then take our names off the citizenship registry in Japan.”
“I can’t,” he repeated for the fiftieth time.
“Damn it, Pop, sometimes you make me mad!” Goro cried.
Kamejiro stood up. He stared at his sons and said, “There will be no shouting. Remember that you are decent Japanese sons.” They came to attention, and he added sorrowfully, “There is a good reason why I cannot change the register.”
“But why?” the boys insisted.
Through the long night the argument lasted, and stubborn Kamejiro was unable to explain why he was powerless to act; for even though his sons were American, he was forever Japanese, and he expected one day to return to Hiroshima; when he got there he could quietly tell his friends about the mix-up in Hawaii, but he could not do so by letter. He himself could not write, and he could not trust others to write for him. It was two o’clock in the morning when he went to bed, and as he pulled the covers up about his shoulders, on a group of aircraft carriers six hundred miles away, a task force of Japanese airmen, many of them from Hiroshima, prepared to bomb Pearl Harbor.
Shigeo, the youngest of the Sakagawas, rose early next morning and pedaled his bicycle down to Cable Wireless, where he worked on Sundays delivering cables that had accumulated during the night and those which would come in throughout the day. His first handful he got at seven-thirty and they were all addressed to people in the Diamond Head area like the Hales and the Whipples, who lived in big houses overlooking the city.
He had reached Waikiki when he heard from the vicinity of Pearl Harbor a series of dull explosions and he thought: “More fleet exercises. Wonder what it means?”
He turned his back on Pearl Harbor and pedaled up an impressive lane leading to the estate of Hoxworth Hale, and while waiting in the porte-cochere he looked back toward the naval base and saw columns of dense black smoke curling up into the morning sunlight. More explosions followed and he saw a series of planes darting and zigzagging through the bright blue overhead. “Pretty impressive,” he thought.