Honolulu

  "Was that absolutely necessary?" I asked Esther.

  "Oh, but Jin, that's part of the game."

  "To knock each other down?"

  "Yes."

  "But it seems so rude," I said.

  After the St. Louis "Saints" won the game over McKinley High School's "Micks," we joined Joe and the Anitos in a celebration at Kamakela Lane that included Joseph Sr. and his wife Hannah, Joe's cousin Eddie Uli'i, and Bill Kama, who was now an officer with the Honolulu Police Department. "You're gettin' too big for me to box your ears," Bill kidded Joe, "so next time you get out of line-"

  He grinned and playfully twirled a set of handcuffs. Joe laughed, turned around, and crossed his wrists behind his back. "Take me in, officer," he joked. "For my own protection." We all laughed.

  More sadly, that same autumn Beauty's husband Mr. Yi fell ill, and at the age of seventy-nine any illness is a serious one. Pneumonia claimed him two weeks later, and he ended a long life in the comfort of his own bed, having overcome great obstacles to progress from plantation laborer to a wealthy and respected businessman. Our family attended his funeral service at the Korean Christian Church and then his burial at Puea Cemetery. Jade Moon and Wise Pearl also paid their respects, the latter bringing a lovely wreath of carnations. Beauty was saddened, of course, and even if she thought of Mr. Yi as more of a father than a husband, losing a kindly father is still a sorrowful event.

  As we left the cemetery, Jade Moon took me aside and declared, with excitement unseemly to the occasion, "I've found a rooming house to buy!"

  "Lower your voice," I said, "and at least pretend that you are bereaved."

  "Oh, he was a thousand years old, we should all live as long. Would you come see the property with me tomorrow and tell me what you think?"

  I sighed and said that I would.

  The following day we took the streetcar to a neighborhood called Makiki, on the windward side of Punchbowl. It seemed a great distance away, though in truth it was closer than Wise Pearl's farm in Kaimuki. We entered a two-story clapboard rooming house in slightly better repair than the tenement I had lived in in Kauluwela. "The manager's rooms, where we would live, are on the ground floor," Jade Moon said as we entered the vestibule. "There are fifteen other rooms, most already occupied, each bringing in twelve dollars a month in rent. That is almost two hundred dollars a month in rental income!"

  We ascended creaking stairs to the second story. "And what about expenses?" I asked. "Water, electricity, repairs?"

  "Negligible, I'm told. Twenty or thirty dollars a month."

  "Our water bill at the cafe is hardly negligible," I noted. "And these stairs could use some fixing."

  "Mr. Ha is good with his hands. Whatever repairs need done, we will do them ourselves. It is a great opportunity."

  The last time I heard that, I had found myself urinating into a trench at Waipahu. But I held my tongue.

  Walking down the hallway, we passed open doors and windows through which trade winds passed sluggishly. Inside the tiny flats there were large families, mostly Hawaiian, Chinese, and a handful of Koreans. "The owner is moving to the mainland and wishes to divest himself of his properties here. He's asking only twelve hundred dollars for the building, and for a thirty percent down payment he will carry the rest of the loan himself! What do you think?"

  "It seems like a good investment."

  "We'll need three hundred and sixty dollars for the down payment. Is there enough in the kye?"

  I nodded. "And a little more."

  "I told the owner I could have the money for him on the first of next month, and he said that was acceptable to him." She beamed as she took in the faded walls around us, which to me seemed in dire need of replastering and a fresh coat of paint; but to her they obviously represented something else: "Just think ... to own land again, as my parents did, and their parents before them!"

  To Jade Moon, this aging and dilapidated boardinghouse meant more than just a comfortable income: it meant being ayangban again. Seeing the proud smile on her face, I could not help but be pleased for her, and gratified that we could help her realize her dream.

  "It is perfect," she declared happily.

  Given her name, she might have remembered the old Korean adage, "Even jade has flaws." Or, in other words: Nothing in life is ever perfect.

  he next day, as we were preparing to open the cafe for dinner, there commenced a pounding on our door so loud, so frantic, that I hurried to the front to see what the commotion could be. There was a pane of glass in the door, an interior shade rolled down over it; around the edges I caught glimpses of a woman's white dress and a child's braided hair. "Grace Eun's Mother! Grace Eun's Mother!" came a voice from outside, and as I hurriedly opened the door I was startled to see a tearful Beauty standing on our doorstep, her face flush, tightly gripping the hand of her daughter, Mary.

  "Oh, my dear friend," she said plaintively as she entered, "forgive me! I didn't know where else to go, I don't know what to do!"

  "What is it? What's wrong?"

  She collapsed into a dining chair and began wailing:

  "Oh God, what have I done? What have I done?"

  I'd heard her utter these same words at the immigration station the day we first laid eyes on our husbands-to-be, but her tone now was even more desperate.

  Whatever was wrong, the child should not have been seeing her mother in such a state. I took Mary by the hand and hurried her upstairs to play dolls with Grace. Before I left, Mary asked me, "Why is Mama so sad?"

  "I don't know, little one," I told her, "but we'll make everything all right." I gave her a smile and went back downstairs to her still-weeping mother. "What on earth has happened?" I asked.

  "I am lost-lost," she said. "And it is all my own fault."

  "What is?"

  "I have been an unworthy wife, and ungrateful. I admit it. But my child should not have to suffer for my mistakes!"

  "For God's sake, what are you talking about?"

  She made an effort to stop crying and in a shaky tone told me of how Mr. Yi's attorney had come to read his will earlier that day. It was only then that she learned that she had been completely disinherited from it.

  "That cannot be right. You must have misunderstood."

  "No, it was made quite clear to me," she said bitterly. "Mr. Yi left the entire estate to his sons. The store, his savings ... even the house. Jung-su and Bae-su informed me they and their families would be moving into the house, and I need to be vacated by the end of the month."

  I was dumbstruck at first, then managed to ask, "But why?"

  She flinched from my gaze.

  "Because I was weak, and foolish," she said, "and wished to laugh and talk with someone my own age. To feel a young man's skin against mine, and not the wrinkled touch of an old grandfather! Because I wanted to feel something for a man-what a woman is supposed to feel for a man. Oh, what a fool I was!"

  "Are you talking about Frank Ahn?"

  She looked even more mortified. "You knew?"

  "I suspected as much." I sighed and took her hand in mine. "You are not the first woman to feel such things, or to be so foolish. But even if Mr. Yi was angry at you for your infidelity, surely he made provisions for his own daughter?"

  "He did not believe her to be his daughter. Neither do his sons."

  I confess, this thought had never crossed my mind. "Is she?"

  "I ... do not know," she admitted. "Jung-su said he and his wife were willing to adopt her, and raise her as their own. But"-her eyes flashed with anger-"she is my daughter! I may not know who her father is, but I know I am her mother! I can't give her up. I won't."

  She collapsed again into sobs. "Gem, my dear friend, what am I to do? Tell me. What am Ito do now?"

  I wrapped my arms around her as I would an injured fawn. "You will not have to give up your daughter. As for the rest of it ... we will find a way."

  "I'm sorry. I know I've sinned. I know I don't deserve your friendship."

  B
efore I could reply, someone did it for me:

  "That is untrue."

  I turned to see Jae-sun standing in the doorway to the kitchen.

  "I am sorry. I could not help overhearing," he said, embarrassed.

  Beauty smiled an unhappy smile. "It is I who should apologize. Please forgive my shameful display of emotion."

  "You have understandable cause." There was neither accusation nor recrimination in his voice. "What you did outside your marriage was wrong ... but what your husband has done is also wrong. He professed to be a good Christian; he should have forgiven you."

  "I can understand him for not forgiving me," Beauty said. "But Mary. .

  "Forgiveness can be difficult," Jae-sun told her. "I know this firsthand. But you and Mary have a place with us for as long as you need one. Don't trouble yourself over material losses. Make your peace with God. He will forgive you, even if Mr. Yi could not. You may be sure of that."

  He discreetly returned to the kitchen, and I was never prouder to be his wife.

  "I did care for him," Beauty said softly, "as a father." But the word was swallowed up in a sob, and I pulled her to me and held her as she wept.

  eauty and Mary moved in with us that day, and if it was a bit crowded in that one large room above the cafe, you could not tell it by the children. They played together in what we charitably referred to as the "backyard"-a rectangular courtyard between our building and the next, paved in concrete and filled with empty crates, which Harold, Charlie, Grace, and Mary overturned and imagined to be houses, boats, battlements, or warring airplanes. Above them flew flags of drying laundry from a cat's cradle of clotheslines strung between apartments.

  Beauty was ashamed of the actions that had brought her to such reduced circumstances and asked that I not tell either jade Moon or Wise Pearl what had happened. She was eager to help pay her way and offered to wait tables at the cafe-a well-intentioned gesture but a disastrous one. She spoke imperfect English and, never having worked on a plantation, little pidgin; taking meal orders for anything other than Korean dishes was a challenge for her, and trying to decipher what she had written down on the order ticket was equally challenging for me. I once stood for several minutes, puzzling over what "air pie" could possibly mean, until the Spanish couple at table three told me that they had ordered paella-phonetically, pie ay-a. Beauty assumed the second syllable was a modifier, hence "air pie." Another time I struggled to make sense of a dessert order that read, "horse, paid for," and only when I translated this back into Korean-mal, horse, and sada, to pay for-did I realize that the man at table five wanted malassada, a Portuguese sweet doughnut.

  But Beauty was also quick to help out around the house-laundering, ironing, sweeping the rug, cutting the children's hair and even Jae-sun's. As my husband sat there in a straight-backed chair, a towel draped across his shoulders, with Beauty deftly wielding a pair of scissors, inspiration struck me and I asked her, "You seem to have a talent for this. Might you consider doing it for a living?"

  "I suppose I could. But I have no experience, who would hire me?"

  The next day I took her to Hotel Street and the shop where Shizu worked as a barber. Shizu was candid about the requirements of the job: "We work twelve, fifteen hours a day-afternoons, evenings, sometimes till nine, ten o'clock at night." Beauty had nothing against hard work and long hours, and so Shizu approached the shop owner, Mrs. Origawa, about taking on another apprentice.

  Unfortunately, Mrs. Origawa was not interested in hiring another barber at that time. Shizu took us aside and told Beauty, "I'm sorry there is nothing for you here. But if ever I open my own shop ..."

  "Are you planning to open one?" Beauty asked hopefully.

  "Someday, when I save enough money."

  "How much do you need?"

  Aigo, I thought, afraid of where this was leading.

  "I have fifty dollars saved," Shizu told her, "but for rent, equipment, furniture-another hundred, at least."

  Beauty looked at me excitedly. "There's that much in the kye, is there not?"

  What could I say? "Yes, I believe so."

  The entire situation had spun rather quickly out of my control. Soon, Shizu and Beauty were scouting commercial space in downtown Honolulu, where the majority of Japanese barber girls worked their trade, and pricing the cost of barber chairs, mirrors, lotions, razors, combs, scissors, and brushes. They decided the minimum expenditure they needed to set up shop was a hundred and eighty dollars. Shizu had fifty, so they would need at least another hundred and thirty.

  There was four hundred and twenty dollars in our kye. But Jade Moon needed three hundred and sixty for her rooming house, and there was not sufficient funds for both her and Beauty. The thought of one of my friends having to lose out on the loan caused me great pain. But what could I do? I could not ask either one to give up their ambitions. I had to let things take their natural course.

  At the next month's meeting-held in Wise Pearl's tiny farmhouse amid acres of red carnations spilling down the hillslope like lava flows-I settled Charlie and Harold in the living room to play with Mary and the other keiki. I continued to fret as we prepared to bid on the kye. Each member was to submit a written offer of how much they would pay in interest for the privilege of borrowing the cash in the fund-say, twenty dollars on a loan of two hundred. Whoever won would then distribute five dollars to each member of the kye as an interest payment, and they would be left with a hundred and eighty dollars of working capital.

  For the hundred and thirty Beauty needed I had urged her to tender a bid of at least twenty dollars. But when the bids were all in and the numbers disclosed, it turned out jade Moon had offered a bid of thirty, and therefore won the kye.

  Beauty promptly burst into tears.

  Jade Moon was understandably taken aback. "What? What's wrong?"

  Beauty's resolve to keep silent about her situation blew away like an old dandelion puff. The truth spilled out, much to the dismay of her picturebride sisters.

  "Why didn't you tell us before?" Wise Pearl asked. "We could've helped."

  "I was ashamed. I am still ashamed."

  "Well, this changes everything," Jade Moon acknowledged. "I therefore wish to forfeit the kye to the next highest bidder"-which was, of course, Beauty.

  "No, no! You won the money fairly-"

  "Take it," Jade Moon said impatiently. "Are you a fool?"

  I cleared my throat, and jade Moon softened her advice: "I have a husband, a job, a home to live in. If Mr. Ha and I do not become landlords this year, we will not go hungry or homeless."

  Beauty stubbornly held on to her pride. "I don't want to win out of pity."

  "Then stop being so pitiful!" Jade Moon snapped, exasperated.

  "You won fairly. I should have bid more. The money is yours."

  Jade Moon gave her a smoldering look and I prepared for the bombast that would surely follow. But to my surprise she merely said, "Very well then. I win."

  She reached into the strongbox, took out three hundred and sixty dollars in cash, then counted off thirty dollars-the price of her bid-and distributed ten dollars apiece to the rest of us. "Here is your interest on the loan. "Now"-she turned to Beauty-"how much did you need for that barbershop?"

  Beauty was confused, but I began to see jade Moon's reasoning and answered for her, "A hundred and thirty dollars."

  Jade Moon counted off that precise sum and dropped it in front of Beauty.

  "What's this?"

  "A loan. To open your shop. We are now partners."

  Beauty's eyes widened with disbelief and denial. "No, I can't accept-"

  "It is not a gift, it is a loan. Give me back five dollars in interest. Go on, do it!"

  Beauty meekly handed her a five-dollar bill.

  "So now, on the first of each month you will pay me five percent of the shop's profits, until the whole amount of the loan is paid off."

  "But there may not be any profits for a long while."

  "I can wait. And in the
meantime"-Jade Moon folded the remaining two hundred dollars and tucked it safely in her purse-"I will put this to work earning interest in the bank until I have enough to buy property. You see? We all profit from this."

  "Thank you," Beauty said. There were tears in her eyes; she got up hurriedly and excused herself to go into the bathroom.

  When she was gone Jade Moon sighed, "Good God! I thought we would never get her to take the damned money!"

  "Woodrow's Mother, that was very kind of you," Wise Pearl said, in a tone reserved for miracles.

  "She has been humbled," Jade Moon said with a shrug. "Who among us cannot understand that?"

  After the meeting, Beauty headed straight to Shizu's shop with their newfound capital. Surprised and pleased at how the conflict had been so profitably resolved, I hoisted Charlie into my arms and shepherded him and Harold onto the streetcar at the top of Wai'alae Avenue. The car passed lot after lot of once-empty land here in Kaimuki on which the frames of new houses were sprouting like bamboo shoots. "Someday," I promised Harry and Charlie, pointing to one of the wooden skeletons, "we will live in a house like that."

  Harold looked at it and asked, "Can't we have one with walls?"

  I laughed. "Oh, and I suppose you'll want a roof, too."

  Charlie shook his head, vigorously opposed to the idea, but Harold just nodded meekly.

  "If you insist," I said agreeably, "but it would be cheaper without the roof."