When he grew too tired to swim, Rachel convinced him to join her. Together they straddled her board—the Nisei sitting forward, Rachel behind, their legs brushing against one another—riding the swells toward shore and paddling between waves. Rachel found herself staring at his broad shoulders, the sharp ridge of his shoulder blades, the way his muscles tensed as he leaned forward to paddle.
“You’re good in the water,” she said, no small compliment for her.
He sensed that and thanked her. “So are you.”
“You surf?”
“Not really. Just a little body-surfing at Waikiki.”
“Honolulu boy, ’ey?”
He nodded.
His name was Charles Kenji Utagawa, the second son—literally, kenji—of a plantation worker who had emigrated to Hawai'i in 1885 aboard the steamship City of Tokio. As a contract field laborer Haru Utagawa earned all of nine dollars a month, and like many Issei wasted little time in fulfilling his obligations and leaving the plantation for higher paying work. Eventually he opened a shop in one of the Japanese neighborhoods, or “camps,” in Honolulu.
And he prospered, enough that Kenji could pursue an education beyond the reach of many immigrants’ children. “Although, in Japanese families,” he explained, “it’s also the responsibility of the first-born son to help finance the education for the latter-born sons.”
Rachel had not seen his face in five minutes, had heard only the sound of his voice, a pleasant baritone. His polite speech and quiet tone were quite at odds with the violence which she had seen him capable of. “So your brother helped pay for your schooling?”
“Yes. Jataro apprenticed with a Japanese boat builder. Between his job and my father’s shop they were able to send me to St. Louis College in Honolulu.”
“You’re Catholic?”
For the first time she heard amusement in his voice. He chuckled. “Actually my family’s Shint and Buddhist. But thinking to improve my chances of getting accepted at St. Louis, my father converted. Down came our little Buddhist shrine, up went a picture of the Virgin Mary. At his first confession he asked the priest, ‘What do I confess?’ ‘Confess your sin,’ the priest told him. ‘It doesn’t have to be something you did, it can be something you just thought about.’ Well, my father wanted desperately to please him, so he thought a moment and said, ‘I kill a man, back in Japan. I feel very bad for it.’ ”
Kenji laughed warmly. “He concocted this tall tale about a man who’d made unwanted advances on my mother and challenged my father to a duel with ceremonial swords. Had the priest spellbound. After that we called my father ‘Saint Samurai.’ ”
Rachel was actually disappointed to see Papaloa Beach drawing nearer; she wanted to hear him laugh some more, wanted to see what his face looked like when he did.
“Well,” Kenji said as they skimmed over the shallows. “This looks like my stop.”
Was that disappointment in his voice, too? They got off the board and waded to shore. They were both a little wobbly and dehydrated; Rachel found a bottle of water she had half-buried in the sand and handed it to Kenji. He took a gulp, then another, then handed it back to her and thanked her. She took a swallow—was she imagining the taste of his lips on the bottle?
They stood there on the beach looking at each other as if for the first time. He was very handsome, even with his hair wet and knotted by salt; there was still an intensity in his face but now it was leavened by a certain diffidence. In fact he seemed downright embarrassed.
“I must apologize,” he said slowly, “for the trouble I’ve caused you.”
“Forget it. I’ve thought myself about what it would be like to ride a wave to Maui or Lna'i.”
He nodded once, a faint intimation of a smile on his lips . . . bowed slightly . . . then turned and walked away.
Rachel realized that she was sad to see him go.
H
e was waiting for her on the beach when she came out of the water the next day. There was a real, not merely hinted, smile on his face as he watched her carry her board from the surf, and Rachel found herself smiling back. He wore denim pants and a loose fitting cotton shirt, no shoes, and he looked both relaxed and friendly. Hard to believe this was the man who only yesterday had either tried to swim to Honolulu or to lose himself in the cold embrace of the ocean.
They bought doughnuts and coffee at Will Notley’s shop and walked down the coast to 'Awahua Bay, where their feet left the only marks of any kind on the black sand, and they talked for hours. Like her, he was a child of Old Honolulu. They each knew that a Tahiti lemonade tasted more of lime than lemon; knew the sound of Ah Leong cursing in Chinese at keiki pilfering candy from his store. More importantly, they were both readers. Rachel was humbled to find that Kenji had read books by writers of whom she hadn’t even heard: Lafcadio Hearn, August Strindberg, G. K. Chesterton, Herman Hesse. But they both enjoyed Conan Doyle’s stories, especially The Hound of the Baskervilles; both found Theodore Dreiser a crashing bore; both loved O. Henry and Jack London and H. G. Wells.
Kenji had studied business at St. Louis College, and a month after graduation he was offered a job at a Honolulu stock brokerage, Halstead & Company. “I might not have been the most brilliant student in school, but I was a hard worker, and I was going to work just as hard in my new job. I had dreams of buying my family a new house, maybe someday working on the mainland.”
He looked down at his cooling coffee. “The bounty hunter came for me my first week at work. Right there in Halstead’s office on Fort Street, with my boss looking on, he said, ‘Charles Utagawa, you must come with me to Kalihi Hospital on suspicion of being a leper.’ Everything just . . . stopped around me. I could feel my life, my future, end in that one moment. Even if the tests had been negative I knew I would never have gotten my job back.”
“You lost a lot,” Rachel realized. “No wonder you get angry.”
“It’s what I deserve,” he said, much to her surprise. His voice was low. “I shamed my family; my ancestors. When a Japanese gets leprosy, it disgraces the entire lineage for all time. It’s written into the Yakuba, a neighborhood archive for family histories—a black mark that can never be erased. The family with leprosy is shunned, no one wants to marry into it.”
His eyes looked away from her and out to sea. “And all the money my father and brother put into my education, that’s all wasted. I’d hoped to repay them if I became a successful broker. Now I never can.”
Without thinking about it Rachel took his hand in hers and they sat there wordlessly, sharing more than silence.
The next day they went riding together, and the tenor of it was entirely different from her rides with Jake Puehu. With Jake she had been the resident showing the sights to a welcome guest—for that’s all he was, really, no matter how long he might stay. But she and Kenji took in the same landscape with the eyes of those for whom this green triangle, these six square miles of shore, rock, and pali, were all the world they were ever likely to see. They knew that within these boundaries—the implacable geometry of their confinement—they would have to make a life for themselves. And they began to suspect it was a life they would share.
Kenji was unlike either of the men Rachel had truly loved in her life: her father, easygoing and affable; Uncle Pono, boisterous and funny. But Kenji did have a sense of humor, a dry one, and the fact that he was unlike any man she’d ever known only made him more appealing. She waited for the angry outbursts of the sort she had witnessed on the baseball field, but they never came; perhaps the anger had burned itself out, as leprosy sometimes did, that day on the sea. Or was it, like leprosy, merely lying dormant?
The first time they made love Kenji kissed her in places no one had ever touched before (certainly not Nahoa). If Rachel became at all hesitant or self-conscious he would hold her until she was ready to go on. And when Kenji entered her, that was different, too—having the privacy of her body breached but rejoicing in it, giving it up for an intimacy both frightening and won
derful.
No one was more thrilled for Rachel than Leilani, who often shared breakfast with the new couple and only occasionally forgot to drape her lovely breasts in front of Rachel’s beau. Once or twice Rachel thought Kenji would literally die of embarrassment right before her eyes, but not only did his reserve remain intact, he even warmed to Leilani in time. And since Rachel hadn’t revealed Lani’s true gender to him, Kenji would listen to Leilani’s opinions on men, women, and love and find himself marveling, “That girl really understands men,” and Rachel would agree that yes, Leilani was uncommonly perceptive.
But in February Lani caught what she believed to be a cold; within a matter of days it was apparent she had contracted influenza. Dr. Goodhue admitted her to the infirmary at once and placed her in isolation. He treated her with salol, quinine, and aspirin for the fever that soon spiked to a hundred and three degrees. The same disease that had given Leilani her womanly body now sapped her resistance to the virus, her condition rapidly deteriorating. And for someone as hungry for touch as Lani, being placed in isolation was the most terrible of ends.
Rachel was allowed to visit for very brief periods and only while wearing a mask and gloves, which would be burned afterward—as much because of Rachel’s disease as Leilani’s. She held her friend’s hand, called for the nurse when Lani collapsed into a coughing fit, even held the bedpan when Lani needed it. Still grieving for Emily, Rachel was terrified for what tomorrow might bring, but Leilani claimed to be at peace. “I would happily live a hundred years as a leper,” she said, “for one day as a woman.” She thought about that, then smiled wanly. “And I believe I have.” On the next visit she amended that: “I’ve changed my mind. I’d like two days.” There was no next visit.
She was buried on a clear, cold morning in the Mormon cemetery, the pastor believing that his late parishioner had been nothing more remarkable than a devout young woman. Rachel stood at the graveside with Kenji, pleased that he was here to share her grief; but aware too that no one could ever quite share another’s grief, that no one would miss Leilani in the same way as Rachel would. Before the casket was closed she took one last look at her friend. In death the outward signs of leprosy had vanished and Lani’s face was as clear and finely featured as the day she had stepped off the SS Likelike. Laid out in her favorite floral dress she looked, Rachel thought, like Sleeping Beauty awaiting a prince’s kiss. Because she was, she truly was, the most beautiful woman Rachel had ever known.
Chapter 16
1913–16
H
enry Kalama stood on the rolling deck of the steamer Claudine, tossed on the perpetually angry waters of the Kaiwi Channel. Foaming surf broke over the bow as the ship plunged down the steep face of a wave, water streaming up the tilting deck to soak Henry’s shoes. His knees, already inflamed by gout, were jolted with every spasm of the ship; his hands, stiff with arthritis, gripped the railing like pincers. The blustery wind chilled him under his wet clothes, the salt spray stung his eyes, and the roar of the engines conspired with the wind to deafen him.
He hadn’t been so happy in years.
He hadn’t been to sea in years, and hadn’t realized how much he missed it. He missed its moods, one moment becalmed and the next stormy, the exciting inconstancy of it. He had seen some of that in Dorothy, so fiery and unpredictable, and had loved her for it; and after he lost her the sea had been both balm and bitter reminder. And then he lost the sea as well, and his life these past two years had been one of landlocked stability, the ground dull and steady beneath his feet.
But now he felt alive again. Not to say he didn’t feel some nasty pain in his joints, and his doctor would harangue him about making this voyage—but no way could he have missed it, whatever the cost in aches and pains.
Now land crept up from below the horizon: the green towering pali brooding above the low plain. It had been a while since Henry had made this trip and he was surprised to see how lush the peninsula looked, how tall the trees had grown: eucalyptus, algarobas, and ironwoods shouldering one another on a plain once flat as a griddle, and just as hot. His heart rose as the steamer neared shore and the crowd clustered at the landing. Rachel was not, as best he could see, among them, but he did spy a tall figure robed in black, a cowl of white framing her face, and he smiled.
The Claudine anchored and put out its boats, and soon Henry was climbing stiffly up the ladder at Kalaupapa Landing. From above a woman’s hand was offered in assistance: it was, like his, a hand worn and callused by hard work, and as he took it he looked up into the smiling eyes of Sister Mary Catherine Voorhies.
“Welcome back, Henry,” she said, knowing better than to try and call him “Mr. Kalama” after all these years. “Aloha.”
“Aloha, Sister!” In one hand he hefted a pair of duffel bags, filled with two weeks’ worth of sea rations and clean linen, as he stepped off the last rung. He squeezed the nun’s hand affectionately. “Good to see you.”
His gaze as it swept across the crowd revealed his puzzlement at what he didn’t see. Catherine explained, “Rachel asked me to come and take you to the visitor’s compound. She’ll meet us there.”
“Ah, good, good.” Henry took in the sleepy town, somewhat energized by the arrival of the steamer, and smiled as if he were a traveler coming home after a long absence. “Kalaupapa,” he said in a tone of affection few in the islands would have echoed.
He followed her off the breakwater and onto the well-trod shoreline path, and now he noticed for the first time the stutter in the sister’s step, the way one leg hit the ground with a slight roll of her hip. “Sister, what’s the matter with your leg?”
“Oh, I just took a wrong step, a while back.” She changed the subject. “Rachel wanted to meet you today—”
“I know, she’s gotta be busy. I remember when Dorothy and me got married—so much running around that day I thought I was gonna die.”
“My brother Jack very nearly did, or so he claims. Before the ceremony he was standing in front of a mirror, clipping his nose hairs—I swear this is true”—she stifled a laugh—“and he was so nervous he cut his nostril with the clippers, a deep cut. He was so mortified he was afraid to leave the bathroom”—Catherine did laugh now, and Henry with her—“but luckily the family doctor was among the guests and stitched him up with a little catgut, so he didn’t bleed to death on his wedding day.”
“You saw this?”
“Would that I had! But by that time I was already here in Hawai'i.”
“You go back, ever, to see him?”
Catherine said wistfully, “No. We write letters—talk on the telephone, sometimes—but I haven’t actually seen either him or my sister in . . . twenty-one years.”
Henry nodded, understanding all too well how the healthy also suffered from “the separating sickness.”
They walked in silence a moment, then Henry said with studied casualness, “This Kenji sounds like a nice boy.”
Catherine heard the nervous question in his voice and nodded. “He is. He’s a very nice young man.” Henry looked visibly relieved by her endorsement, but before he could say anything more Catherine stopped and announced, “Here we are. The visitor’s compound.”
They were standing before a two-story plantation-style building with a number of individual lnais on each floor. Fronting it was a well-kept yard with lawn and garden seats, encircled by not one but two corral-style fences, one an interior fence.
“Big,” Henry said, impressed. He looked around at the other buildings, many of them still sporting their first coat of paint. “Things’ve changed a lot.”
“Yes,” Catherine said, a bit softly, “they have.”
She escorted Henry into the house and into a dormitory-like room with six beds; there were six on the other side of the house, she said, for women.
Henry quickly gleaned that he was the only occupant of the men’s dormitory. “Guess I got my choice of bunks, ’ey?” he laughed, tossing his duffel bag onto the nearest. “So, when
can I see Rachel?”
Catherine looked and felt acutely uncomfortable. “As I said, things have . . . changed. The rules against . . . fraternization . . . are more strictly enforced these days.”
Puzzled, Henry followed the sister out of the dormitory, down a long hall, and into what Catherine called the “reception room”—a comfortable sitting room with chairs, tables, and curtained windows through which sunlight sifted brightly. So comfortable, so pleasant, that it took Henry a moment to apprehend its most salient feature.
Bisecting the room—from wall to wall and from nearly ceiling to floor—was an enormous pane of plate glass.
And on the other side of this transparent barrier stood Rachel.
Her father stared, dumbstruck. Catherine was chagrined. “I’m sorry, Henry. I think it’s ridiculous myself; if one could contract leprosy from casual contact I’d have come down with it years ago.”
“Then why?”
“Alas, I don’t make the rules. Bureaucrats in Honolulu and Washington make them, and they’re still very much afraid of leprosy. And even more afraid that they’ll be accused of endangering the public welfare. If you wish,” she added sheepishly, “you can go outside and sit on opposite sides of the inside fence, if you find that more . . . sociable.” Embarrassed, she slipped quietly away to leave father and daughter alone, if not quite together.
“Hello, Papa,” Rachel said, her voice slightly muffled by the glass. Henry slowly approached and touched the pane with the tips of his fingers. Rachel did the same, their fingers separated by less than a quarter of an inch—only light slipping through the barrier, no warmth.
“At least at Kalihi,” Rachel said, reading the thought in his face, “you could feel something through the mesh.”
“Bastards!” Henry’s astonishment gave way to anger. “I come alla way to Moloka'i for my daughter’s wedding, and I’m gonna see it from behind some damn window?”