As usual with May, I understood every third word but somehow gleaned her meaning.
"Couple cabins down from mine, there are these two gentlemen." Her words dripped with uncharacteristic disdain. "The younger one's American, kinda good-looking ... I invited him to my cabin, but he gave me the cold shoulder. The older guy's an uppity Brit who looks me over like something he found on the bottom of his shoe. And while they're looking down their noses at me-` Tsk tsk, bad job, isn't she, Gerald? That she is, Willie'-these two queers are pretending to all the `respectable' folk on board like they're not goin' back to their cabin and buggering each other's brains out!"
I had absolutely no idea what this meant, and said so. When May explained, I was shocked: I had never heard of such a thing.
"Honey, it takes all kinds," May said with a shrug. "I got no problem with how anybody gets their jollies, long as they don't judge me. So wouldn't you know, not only do I get a snootful from Willie and Gerald, I get another one from some holier-than-thou missionary couple, hauling a shitload of salvation down to the aborigines. They'd give me the evil eye, and just to piss 'em off I'd wiggle my ass in their faces whenever I saw 'em.
"So we sail into Pago Pago Harbor, but there's some bushwah about an outbreak of smallpox on the schooner that's supposed to take us to Apiaand we all have to put up in some fleabag of a rooming house outside Pago Pago till the quarantine's lifted! And it's raining. Jesus, I never saw so much goddamn rain in my life. For five whole days, it's pissing down so hard we can't even drive the three lousy miles into Pago Pago for a little entertainment!
"But thank God for the red, white, and blue: Pago Pago is in American Samoa, and there's a U.S. naval base nearby. I got the quartermaster of the Sonoma to wangle me a tour of the base. My escort was tall, dark, and handsome, and oh boy, pretty soon shore leave's not lookin' so bad after all."
Little Bastard was curled up in May's lap and as she massaged his neck he emitted a wheezy purr of contentment. "But just my luck-I'm in this fleabag rooming house and on one side of me I've got the missionary and his wife, and on the other, Mr. and Mrs. Willie! The preacher raises hell with management about me having a man in my room, the Brit gives me a hard time about my playing music ... I mean, here we are, stuck in this miserable little dive at the ass-end of nowhere, and these killjoys are bellyaching about a girl getting a little recreation! What the hell did I do to deserve this?
"The missionary tried to get me tossed out, but it was the damn Brit who really got under my skin. He'd call downstairs to his lover boy, `Teatime, Gerald!'-and I couldn't help myself, I'd bang on the wall and yell, `No, it's nookie time, you bloody limey!'" She laughed uproariously. "I'd still be there partying if me and a friend hadn't decided to take a midnight swim in the bay, in the altogether. How the hell was I supposed to know that was the governor's motorboat pier?"
"I do not understand."
"They kicked me out of the goddamn country! And here I am again!"
May stayed that night with me, the two of us sharing my small bed, precipitating the only instance I can recall of May Thompson appearing demure: "Now, you just stay on your side, honey, okay? I ain't that kind of specialty act." The next day she rented a room for herself in Chinatown, where the city's remaining prostitutes had quietly settled after the closure of Iwilei. The absence of an unofficially sanctioned red-light district seemed to placate the righteous elements of Honolulu society, and women like May promptly went back to plying their trade, albeit a bit more discreetly.
We stayed in touch, occasionally even going to a movie togetheralways a matinee in advance of her "business hours"-but Jae-sun now occupied most of my social life. We had lunch several times a week at the cannery, and by mid-March I could not deny my growing attraction to him. Then one day he asked me, somewhat to my surprise, if I would accompany him to church that Sunday.
He explained matter-of-factly that he had converted to Christianity after his wife's death, finding it a comfort. When I asked him how his wife had died, he told me it had been an accident on the plantation. "She was coming home from a long day in the fields, carrying our newborn son. In the dark she stumbled and fell into an irrigation ditch. She hit her head on a pipe and fell facedown into the ditch. She and our son both drowned."
To a Westerner his expression would have seemed stoic, but I could clearly see his pain-in his eyes, in the tightness around his mouth, even in the way his hands lay in his lap as he spoke. "My wife had wanted us to leave the plantation and move to Honolulu, but I was afraid I would not be able to make a living here, and so we stayed. I should have listened to her," he finished quietly.
I was unprepared for such a sad and terrible response.
"I am so sorry," I said, feeling guilty for my own ruse of widowhood, which now seemed venal and self-serving. "How many years has it been?"
"There is no point in counting the age of a dead child," he said, invoking an old Korean maxim. "But I go to church, and I pray for them."
I told him I would be honored to join him.
That Sunday we attended services at a Korean Methodist church on Punchbowl Street, where we listened to a sermon by the pastor, Reverend Song. The hymns the congregation sang sounded lovely to my ears, and I could see how Jae-sun derived comfort from this community of believers. However, the presence here of so many of my countrymen and women heightened my fears of being exposed as the wife of Mr. Noh, and I found myself anxious for the service to end.
Finally we began filing out of the large wooden church shaded by tall palm trees, but just when I thought I had escaped detection, I heard a high breathy voice exclaim, in Korean: "Regret?"
My heart pounded at hearing my childhood name again, and fearfully I turned in the direction of the voice.
It belonged to my old friend Beauty, whom I had last heard sobbing through the thin clapboard walls of the Hotel of Sorrows.
But now she seemed anything but sorrowful. She ran toward me, a bright smile on her face, and as she came up to me she happily clasped my hands in hers.
"Oh, do forgive me the rudeness of using your name! I was just so stunned to find you here. You look wonderful, dear friend. Is this your husband?"
Jae-sun blushed.
Beauty, of course, had met Mr. Noh at the docks, and now I saw her dawning realization that this was not him.
"My husband is dead," I said quickly. "This is my friend, Mr. Choi."
Beauty's elderly husband, Mr. Yi, slowly hobbled up to join us and introductions were made; I explained to Jae-sun that Mrs. Yi and I had arrived together in Hawai'i as picture brides aboard the Nippon Maru. If Mr. Yi was shocked at the idea of Jae-sun courting a widow, he did not show it. We all chatted amiably for a few minutes, then Beauty insisted I must come visit her that week; I promised that I would. But even as we left the church grounds, I worried over how much longer I could keep Jae-sun from learning the truth.
eauty's husband owned a general store on Liliha Street that was enjoying considerable success, to judge by the number of customers when I came to visit. At seventy-two years of age, Mr. Yi no longer worked long hours at the store but left the running of it to his two sons from his first marriage (his previous wife was deceased some five years). Beauty worked as a sales clerk, and they also employed as a stock boy a young Hawai'i-born Korean in his early twenties, Frank Ahn, the son of a couple Mr. Yi knew from his plantation days.
Mr. Yi encouraged his wife to take a few hours to visit with me, so we walked to their large and well-appointed wood-frame house on Morris Lane. Beauty made a pot of hot rice water and we sat in the backyard amid a blaze of orange helliconia blossoms and the soft perfume of Chinese jasmine, or pikake as it was called here. When I told Beauty that her husband seemed as considerate as he was prosperous, she nodded. "He is a good man and he treats me kindly. And he is a good father to his sons, though I'm afraid neither cares much for me. It doesn't help matters that I'm pregnant."
"What?" I said. "Congratulations! What could be wrong with that?"
br />
"Mr. Yi's sons would prefer not to share their inheritance with a sibling from their father's second marriage. I would just as soon oblige them in this, but from the start my husband seemed intent on raising another family." Her previously sunny face now looked like a rainy day. "I work long hours at the store; I don't mind that. But-the nights are difficult. Mr. Yi is a kind and generous man; I don't wish to seem ungrateful. I think of him as a daughter does a father ... but not as a woman feels for a man."
I told her I understood, but that her circumstances could be worse. I related Mr. Noh's behavior toward me, her eyes widening as I described my year of married life. "Aigo, "she said softly. "No wonder you looked stricken when you saw me at church. But then, what is Mr. Choi to you?"
"He is everything that my husband is not. At the moment he is only a friend, but I suspect he will shortly wish to be more, and ask me to marry him. I will have to tell him the truth then, and that might well change his mind."
"But it is beside the point. You are already married."
"Then I will ask for a ..."-I had to use the English word, as ki-cho, "abandoned wife," hardly applied-"a divorce."
I did not entertain the idea as casually as I let on, but Beauty was horrorstruck: "Oh, no, no, dear friend, you mustn't! Bad enough being a Korean widow who dares to remarry, but divorce?"
"This is not Korea. Divorce is not uncommon here."
"But there is such stigma against it in the Korean community-in the church, especially! I knew one woman who dared seek a divorce, and the whole neighborhood shunned her, as if she were a leper from that hospital in Kalihi!"
"What am I to do, then? Hide like a mouse in a hole the rest of my life? Do I not deserve some happiness, with a man who is tender toward me?"
She looked at me miserably.
"I have asked myself that same question many times," she said quietly, "and I cannot pretend to have an answer."
I left feeling sorry for Beauty, but her unhappiness only strengthened my growing resolve to put my marriage to Mr. Noh behind me, regardless of the consequences.
s production slowed on the trimming line, I was assigned other tasks at the cannery, including packing various products for shipment to customers on the mainland. Depending on the size of the package, I might have to pad the boxes for transport, and there was a large stack of old newspapers available for this purpose. It was no less tedious than working the line, but considerably easier. When I grew bored I might sneak a look at one of the news stories, but most of the time I was barely conscious of what was on these sheets I was crumpling into ballast.
Then one morning my attention was caught as I stuffed a newspaper page into a box. Curiously, I withdrew it and, as I had done years ago to that old page from LadyUiyudang's book, I smoothed it out. What I saw was no less memorable, but hardly beautiful. There on the front page of the Pacific Com- mercialAdvertiser, dated May 25, 1915, was the headline:
BRIDE MURDERED ON BUSY STREET
Pretty Young Korean Stabbed and Slashed
By Husband While On Way Home
Walking hand in hand with a girl friend on her return home from a pleasant evening spent in a moving picture theater, pretty nineteen-year-old Kim Pak Chi Set, a Korean bride, was fiendishly attacked by her husband, a Korean man, and stabbed to death on a public highway, right in the heart of one of the busiest districts of the city, at half past nine o'clock last night ...
I read with understandable interest and increasing alarm the story of "Kim"-referred to as if this were her given name and not her family name-who was brought to Honolulu as a picture bride by a man "of considerably less education than she." The story went on, "After a time the husband commenced to ill-treat his wife, and the attention of the authorities being called to the existing state of affairs between them, the girl was placed in the Susanna Wesley Home on King Street." She soon found work as a domestic for a local family, and was walking home from a movie with some of them when her estranged husband "pounced upon his wife ... `like a big beast would jump on a little one.' He placed his hands over her mouth until she screamed out in terror ... there was the sound of a shot and the girl was seen to stumble ... on the ground with her husband kneeling over her and thrusting at her head with something that gleamed in the moonlight."
That something was a knife, and the girl died of her wounds on her way to Queen's Hospital.
All this was chilling enough, but bringing it even closer to my own lifeinto the realm of the terribly possible-was the name of the family for whom Kim worked, and in whose company she died:
Kim Pak Set had for the past month or so been in the employ of the family of Apana, the well-known police officer, and last night she and several members of the family attended the moving picture theater near Liliha and King streets.
The show over the party started to walk leisurely home. Mrs. Luhiwa Apana and her daughter Helen were walking some distance ahead of Mary, a fifteen-year-old daughter, and Sam, a little son of Apana ...
I stared at the wrinkled newspaper in what were now trembling hands. I read and reread the words, feeling for myself the panic and terror this girl must have experienced: the jolt of surprise as her husband sprang at her out of the shadows; the suffocating fear of his hand across her mouth; the sound of the gunshot that missed its mark; and the cutting pain of the knife that did not.
It made sense now: Detective Apana's paternal interest, his friendly protectiveness toward me. I reminded him of someone whom he had not been able to protect. He was not on the scene, according to the story, when the girl was murdered; had he accompanied his family to the movies that night, he might have disarmed the wild-eyed husband in time and poor Kim Chi Ser would still be alive.
But he had not been there, and she was dead.
And if a girl like her could be killed in the way she was-on a brightly lit, well-traveled street, in the company of the family of a prominent police officer-it could happen to me, too. Just as easily, and just as quickly.
I folded the newspaper page into quarters, placed it in the pocket of my work gown, and promptly put all thoughts of divorce out of my mind.
gainst my own desires, I began to distance myself from Jae-sun. I had no phone at home and the only way he could reach me was at the cannery, so I asked to be given a different work shift, hoping to simply avoid him. When that did not work, I found reasons not to lunch with him. When he asked me out to dinner the following weekend, I told him I had plans to see a motion picture with a girlfriend. He could clearly sense my new aloofness, and I readily saw the pain and confusion in his eyes. I told myself this was best for both of us, but it made me miserable to contemplate; and by Saturday, consumed with guilt and loneliness, I turned my lie into truth by calling on May to see if she would like to go to a movie. We went downtown to see the new Charlie Chaplin film, Easy Street, in which the Little Tramp improbably becomes a police officer, but I could not enjoy it. Afterward, as we walked to a coffee shop, all I could think of was poor Kim Chi Set, and I fought back the irrational panic that my own estranged husband might appear from around the next corner to attack me.
"So what's eating you?" May asked as we settled into a booth.
"Oh, perhaps just a cup of tea."
May rolled her eyes.
"No, not what are you eating, what's eating you? As in, you look like somebody ran over your dog and then backed up to finish off your mother."
I told her about my conversation with Beauty, as well as the newspaper story I had stumbled across. I admitted my fear of what might happen to me should I seek a divorce from my husband; or at the least of how Jae-sun might reject me for it. I laid out the impossibility, as I saw it, of a future with him, which was why I had decided to stop seeing him.
May listened patiently as she smoked a Lucky Strike, then when I was finished she asked me one question: "Are you in love with this guy?"
"Whether I love him, or he loves me, does not matter. There are too many reasons we should not marry."
May stubbed out her cigarette in an ashtray and said, "You're an idiot."
For once I understood her perfectly, and I was both taken aback and hurt.
"Why do you say such a thing?" I asked.
She sighed heavily, as if about to reveal something she would rather not.
"Remember how I told you," she said, "about that tour I got of the naval base down in Samoa?"
"Your `shore leave'?"
"Yeah. My escort was named Iosefo-Joseph. He was Samoan. Big handsome guy, with a smile like a goddamn sunrise. Not a mean bone in his body." She smiled in a way I had never seen her smile before. "We took to each other right off. He called me his `number one vahine.' And all the time I was down there, he was my number one man. I could've had any and all of those sailors at the base, but all I wanted was Joe.
"And baby, what a lover! He was sweet and he was fire. We couldn't get enough of each other. He'd sneak out of his barracks and we'd spend days at a time in that fleabag room, ordering up steaks from the kitchen. I'd play my records, or strum the ukulele ..."
She lit up another cigarette, breathed in the smoke and let it out again, like a cloud of thought in a newspaper cartoon.
"Well, hell, I went there to get away from civilization, right? To live in a little grass shack in Samoa? So one night I say to him, `Joe, let's go get married.'"
I must have looked dumbfounded at this. May smiled: "So help me God, it's true. I was crazy about him, and he was crazy about me-so I thought, why the hell not? I had money, we could do whatever we wanted. So I drag Joe's ass over to the courthouse and we apply for a marriage license.
"But turns out the judge is a good old boy from Florida who looks at us like I just asked for a license to marry a kangaroo. Gives us some bullshit about how we'd have to apply to the territorial governor. See, it's okay for all these horny white guys to screw, even marry, the vahines; but when a white woman wants to marry a guy whose skin is darker than hers ... well, you get the picture.