“This is my great-niece, on my grandmother’s side, Noelani Hale,” Lucinda explained graciously, whisking her pale-blue lace handkerchief toward the girl. “She’s Malama Janders Hale’s daughter, and on Saturday she’s going to marry that fine young Whipple Janders, who is the great-grandson of Clement and Jerusha Hewlett.”
At once, Noelani’s place in the great succession was established, and the women smiled at her admiringly, one saying, “I knew your husband’s great-grandmother Jerusha very well, Noelani. She was a marvelous woman and could play polo better than the men. If young Whipple has her blood, he’ll be a stalwart man, I can assure you.”
“What Noelani came to ask about,” Aunt Lucinda explained, “is the extent to which she is related to Whip, and I would like to say right now that in my opinion it’s a good deal safer to marry into a substantial island family, whose blood lines are known, than into some purely speculative mainland family whose backgrounds could have originated God knows where.” The women all agreed to this, and a Japanese maid in crisp white took their cups for more tea or their glasses for more gin.
“The only possible question about the marriage of Noelani and Whip,” Aunt Lucinda began, “is that each of them,” and she lowered her voice, “does have a strain of Hawaiian blood. If you go back to her great-great-grandmother on her father’s side, you find Malama Hoxworth, who was the daughter of Captain Rafer Hoxworth, who was not a missionary but who was a most marvelous and courtly gentleman of the finest character and breeding. Of course, he married Noelani Kanakoa, the last Alii Nui, but I think it safe to say that the Malama of whom we are speaking … the one that married the great Micah Hale, that is … well anyway …” and with an airy gesture she dismissed the whole matter. One of the most gratifying aspects of talking with Aunt Lucinda was that she threw out so many names that you didn’t really have to listen, for when she found herself hopelessly involved in family lines she stopped and started over again. Now she switched abruptly and said, with no one able to guess how she had arrived at the conclusion, “Anyway, no finer gentleman ever lived in Hawaii than Captain Rafer Hoxworth.”
The Japanese maid brought back the drinks, and Aunt Lucinda asked, “Where was I? Oh, yes. So from that unfortunate marriage of Micah to the half-caste girl Malama … You know, I often wondered where Micah got the courage to appear in public so much when he was saddled with such a marriage. Well, anyway, our little Noelani here does have that strain of Hawaiian blood, but it’s more than overcome, I should think, by the Hale and Whipple strains, except that the Whipple girl her great-grandfather married was not from what I like to call the uncontaminated Whipples, to which I belong, but from the branch that married into the Hewletts, which as you know were also half-castes, except for the first boy who married Lucy Hale, from whom I am descended.”
The mists from the Pali began to fill the valley, and a waterfall echoed mournfully as Aunt Lucinda continued her analysis of the family lines. Most of the meandering comments she made were meaningless to her listeners, but since all were descended from these early ancestors who had done so much to build Hawaii, each kept in the back of her mind some three or four specially prized progenitors to whom she attributed her character, and whenever Aunt Lucinda mentioned one of those names, that listener snapped to attention through the gin and nodded with special approval. Through the years Lucinda had noticed that three names in particular evoked veneration: it was best to be descended from Jerusha Bromley Hale, the great missionary mother; or from Rafer Hoxworth, the courtly and gracious sea captain; or from Dr. John Whipple, the patrician intellect. Aunt Lucinda, with modesty, could point out that she was descended from two of the three, and in a way she was happy that she was not related to Captain Hoxworth, for of course all of his offspring were part Hawaiian.
“It’s not that I’m against Hawaiians,” she assured her visitors. “It’s just that I get frightfully irritated at the hero-worship that goes on around here over the so-called Hawaiian royalty. I sit in the library and I can spot every malihini girl who is going to ask me, ‘Do you have that book on Kelly Kanakoa?’ I have to stop myself from warning them, ‘You’ll have to put your chewing gum away while you look at the pictures.’ And when she hands the book back reverently she always says, ‘Gee, his grandfather was a king!’ As if that meant anything. I’ve always thought it was one of the most ridiculous aspects of Hawaiian life, the way they memorize these pathetic old lists of kings, as if a litany of imaginary names meant anything. You remember what Abner Hale, he was my great-grandfather, wrote about such ancestor worship: ‘I think it impedes Hawaii as much as any other one thing, for the poor fools are so attentive to their past that they have no time to contemplate eternity.’ And nothing makes me more irritated than the way a Hawaiian will point to some pathetic dregs of humanity and say accusingly, ‘If the missionaries hadn’t interfered, he would now be our king,’ as if we had halted something fine and good. Do you know who the present king of Hawaii would be if the missionaries hadn’t put a stop to such nonsense? The beachboy Kelly Kanakoa! Have you ever heard him speak? He insists on using a vocabulary of about ninety words, half of them blalah. Everybody Kelly likes is blalah except that he calls me his seestah.”
Hoxworth coughed and his aunt collected her thoughts. “Oh yes, now about Whipple Janders. He went to Punahou and Yale, as you know, and had a very good record in the war. Handsome boy, but not so fleshy as his father, which is understandable, because Hewlett takes after the Hewlett side of the family, and they were always unprepossessing types, if you’ll allow me to say so, Abigail, because as you know Abraham married a Hawaiian … well, he picked up a Hawaiian wahine after Urania died, but that’s neither here nor there.
“I suppose what you’re really interested in is how the intended bridegroom Whipple relates to the Hales. If you’ll go back to Micah, who married the half-caste girl Malama Hoxworth, you’ll remember that he had two children, Ezra and Mary, and Ezra of course was your great-grandfather, Noelani, and that takes care of that.” The Japanese maid returned to pass coconut chips, toasted a delicious salty brown. “You may fill the glasses, too, Kimiko,” Aunt Lucinda reminded her.
She never got back to Mary Hale, Micah’s daughter, but the group understood that somehow Mary was related to Whipple Janders, but what Aunt Lucinda did say was perhaps of greater importance: “So you can see that Whipple comes from some of the finest stock in the islands. For three generations, Whipples have married Janderses, which accounts in part, I suppose, for the way in which their family fortunes have been conserved.”
Turning directly to Noelani, the beautiful girl who was soon to be married, Lucinda said, “I can think of no one you could have chosen finer than Whipple Janders, and I am extremely happy for you, Noelani. When I look at your marvelous face I see your great-great-grandfather Micah Hale, the savior of these islands. You have his high forehead, his courage and his force of character. But your beauty comes from the Whipples. Isn’t it strange,” she asked the hushed group, “how the seed of one handsome man could have produced so much beauty in these islands? I know it’s fashionable to laugh at old maids who haven’t married, and I’m sure you’ll think me vain if I claim that when I was young I too was a typical Whipple beauty. Kimiko, fetch me that portrait in the bedroom!” And the Japanese maid silently brought in one of the last great portraits completed by Sargent, and it showed a glowing young beauty in white, with lace and combs, and Lucinda said, “That’s what I mean by the Whipple complexion. You have it, Noelani, and it’s a great consolation to me to think that it will be reunited with the male side of the Whipple family. What handsome children you are bound to have!”
The maid stood awkwardly with the heavy picture, and Miss Lucinda said, “You may take it back, Kimiko.” And when the maid was gone she confided: “Sargent did that of me when I was engaged to an Englishman, but Father felt that it would be better if I found a young man closer to home, and as you know I became engaged to my cousin Horace Whipple, but he …”
She hesitated; then realizing that all of her listeners except perhaps Noelani knew the story anyway, she concluded: “Before the wedding Horace shot himself. At first it was suspected that he might have stolen money from J & W, but of course that was quickly disproved, for there has never been a case of theft in the family.”
“Which family?” Noelani asked.
“The family. All of us,” Aunt Lucinda replied, and when her nephew Hoxworth had departed with his attractive daughter, she summoned Kimiko to refill the glasses, remarking, “That Noelani is one of the loveliest these islands have ever produced. She did marvelously well at Wellesley, and I think we’re lucky that she’s come home to marry with her proper kind. After all, she comes from excellent stock.”
It was a major characteristic of Hawaii that everyone claimed distinguished ancestors. In 1949 there were no Hawaiians who were not descended from kings. The Hales had constructed the myth that cantankerous old Abner from the miserable farm near Marlboro had been, were the truth known, of knightly ancestry dating far back in English history. The Kees never mentioned the fact that their progenitor was a shifty little gambler who had bought his concubine from a Macao whorehouse; he was, if you listened closely, something of a Confucian scholar. And even Mrs. Yoriko Sakagawa always loved to tell her children, “Remember that on your mother’s side you come from samurai stock.” Of all these gentle fables, only Mrs. Sakagawa’s was true. In 1703 the great Lord of Hiroshima had had as one of his flunkies a stocky, stupid oaf whose principal job it was to stand with a feathered staff warning away chance intruders when his lord was going to the toilet. Technically, this male chambermaid was a samurai, but he had been too stupid even to hold the toilet signal well, and after a while had been discharged and sent back to his home village, where he married a local girl and became the ancestor of Yoriko Sakagawa; and if she, like the others in Hawaii, derived consolation from her supposed illustrious heritage, no harm was done.
The Hale-Janders wedding was a splendid affair, held in the flower-decked old missionary church, with Reverend Timothy Hewlett officiating; but as I said earlier, it only seemed that Goro Sakagawa was having more domestic trouble than his adversary, Hoxworth Hale, for Noelani and Whipple had been married only four months when Whipple suddenly announced, out of a clear blue sky if ever an announcement were so made: “I just don’t love you, Noelani.”
“What?” she asked in heartbroken astonishment.
“I’m going to live in San Francisco,” he said simply.
“Is there some other girl?” Noelani pleaded, without shame.
“No. I guess I just don’t like girls,” he explained.
“Whip!”
“There’s nothing wrong with you, Noe, but Eddie Shane and I are taking an apartment. He’s the fellow I was with in the air corps.”
“Oh, my God, Whip! Have you talked with anyone about this?”
“Look, Noe! Don’t make a federal case of it, please. Marriage isn’t for me, that’s all.”
“But you’re willing to marry Eddie Shane, is that it?”
“If you want to put it that way, all right. I am.”
He left Hawaii, and word filtered back that he and Eddie Shane had a large apartment in the North Beach area of San Fancisco, where Eddie made ceramics which were featured in Life magazine, in color.
Aunt Lucinda loved to explain what had happened. She said, as Kimiko passed the gin, “Go back to Micah Hale’s daughter, Mary. This girl was one-eighth Hawaiian, through her mother Malama Hoxworth, who was the daughter of Noelani Kanakoa, the last Alii Nui. Now that’s bad enough, but as you know, Mary Hale married a Janders, and you’d expect that rugged stock to have counterbalanced the weak Hawaiian strain, but unfortunately she married into the Janders’ line that had married one of the Hewlett girls, and as you know, they were Hawaiian. So poor Whipple Janders, when he ran off with the air corps man, was only doing what could be expected, because he had Hawaiian blood from both sides of his family.”
But Hoxworth Hale, seeing the effect of this pathetic marriage on his high-strung daughter Noelani, thought: “Unless I can help her, there’s going to be another woman sitting upstairs in the late afternoons.” But what help he should offer, he did not know.
IN 1951 Nyuk Tsin engineered her last big coup for the Kee hui, and in many ways it was her most typical accomplishment, for it derived from intelligence and was attained through courage. She was a hundred and four years old, sitting in her ugly house up Nuuanu listening to her grandson Harvey read the paper to her, when, in a shaky old voice, she interrupted: “What’s that again?” Since Harvey was reading in English and speaking in Hakka, he could not be certain that he himself understood the confusing story, so phrase by phrase he repeated: “In American business today it is possible for a company which is losing money to be more valuable than it was a few years ago when it was making money.”
Impetuously the old matriarch forced her grandson to read the strange concept three times, and when she had comprehended it she said in her piping voice, “That’s exactly the kind of trick smart haoles think up for themselves and which we stupid Chinese never catch on to until it’s too late.” Accordingly, she summoned her great-grandson Eddie, Hong Kong’s boy, whom she had sent to Harvard Law School, and told him: “I want a complete report on how this works.”
At that time not much was known in Hawaii relating to this marriage of losing companies to those that were prosperous, but Eddie Kee applied himself to the task of assembling opinions from mainland tax courts, and within two months he was an expert in the field. Then with several tax reports airmailed in from New York he reported back to his great-grandmother in her little house, and when he came upon her she was picking lint from a shawl, and he thought: “How can she be so old and yet so interested?”
“Can you explain it now?” she asked in a high, cackling voice.
“Fundamentally,” Eddie began in his best professional style, “it’s an old law and a good one.”
“I don’t care whether it’s good or bad,” Nyuk Tsin interrupted, her voice suddenly lower. “What I want to know is how it works.”
“Take the Janders Brewery. For years it’s been losing money. Now suppose next year it makes money. It won’t have to pay any taxes because recent years’ losses can be used to offset next year’s gains.”
“Makes sense,” Nyuk Tsin nodded.
“But look at what else we can do,” Eddie lectured stolidly, as if addressing a class of legal students. “If the Kee hui buys the brewery, we can then add to its assets all of our old pineapple land. Then if the brewery sells the land, the profits will be offset by the past losses of the brewery. Do you see what that means, Wu Chow’s Auntie?”
Little Nyuk Tsin did not reply. She sat in the late afternoon sun like a winsome old lady embroidered on a Chinese silk. She was smiling, and if an outsider had seen her beatific, wrinkled face he might have thought: “She’s dreaming of an old love.” But he would have been wrong. She was dreaming of the Janders Brewery, and she said, “How heavenly! We can use the Janders’ losses to balance the Kee profits!”
“Wu Chow’s Auntie!” Eddie cried. “You see exactly what I’m talking about.”
“But I’m afraid you don’t see what I’ve been talking about,” Nyuk Tsin replied.
“What do you mean?” Eddie asked.
“Suppose that we do buy the Janders Brewery and do hide our pineapple lands inside it …” she began.
“That’s what I’ve been explaining,” Eddie said gently. It was the first sign that day that Wu Chow’s Auntie was losing her acuity.
“But what I’m explaining,” Nyuk Tsin said firmly, “is that after we have done this clever thing we will put some member of our family in charge of the brewery, and he will give it good management and he will turn what has been a loss into a profit.”
Now the beatific smile passed over to Eddie’s face and he said, “If you could arrange that, Wu Chow’s Auntie, we’d make a fortune.”
??
?That’s what I had in mind,” the old woman replied. “This law seems to have been expressly written for the Kee hui. It is our duty to use it sagaciously.”
She summoned Hong Kong, and after discussing the theory of the law, told him abruptly, “Make us up a list of all the companies in Honolulu that are losing big money. Then write alongside each one the name of someone in our hui who could turn that loss into a profit.”
“Where will we get the money to buy the sick companies?” Hong Kong parried.
“We don’t have to buy them for cash,” Nyuk Tsin replied, “but we’ll need money for down payments. So we have to sell some of our holdings now and pay the taxes on our profits, but if the plan works we’ll more than make up for those taxes in the end.”
“Are you determined to go ahead on such a wild scheme?” Hong Kong asked. “Getting rid of profitable businesses in order to take a big gamble?”
Nyuk Tsin reflected a moment, then asked Eddie, “Does anyone else in Honolulu understand how this law works?”
“They must know,” the Harvard man replied, “but they aren’t doing anything about it.”
Nyuk Tsin made up her mind. Clapping her hands sharply she said, “We’ll go ahead. In six months everyone will know what we’re doing, but by then there’ll be nothing left to buy.” And as Hong Kong and his son departed, old Nyuk Tsin looked at the back of the latter and thought: “I wonder what his education at Harvard cost us? It’s been worth rubies and jade.”
The next day Hong Kong returned to the weather-beaten old house up Nuuanu with his homework well done. Spreading papers which Nyuk Tsin could not read, he indicated all the businesses that had accumulated large losses: the brewery, a taxicab company, a chain of bakeries, some old office buildings, some stores. But now the perpetual drive of Nyuk Tsin manifested itself with unbroken force, and as each item was listed she asked simply, “How much fee-simple land does it have?” And if Hong Kong said that it owned no land of its own, she snorted: “Strike it off. Even better than accumulated back losses is land.” So the final list that the Kees were going to buy contained only companies with big losses and bigger parcels of land.