To Paradise (33 page)

“From Matthew’s brother,” she’d say—she was proud of him, too, and pride made her even more generous. “Have a big slice, Wika. Have more.”

I didn’t understand why I wanted to see her so badly. But one Friday afternoon, I told Matthew and Jane I had to stay late to help paint sets for the annual school play, and then I cycled over. Forsythia (much later, I would wonder who had chosen this name, as it wasn’t a plant that grew in Hawai
‘
i, and no one knew what it was) was at the end of a row of small, mostly Japanese-owned stores of the sort that surrounded the Bishops’ house, and though its stucco exterior had been painted a bright yellow, it was designed to resemble a Japanese teahouse, with a peaked roof and small windows cut high into the walls. In the rear of the building, though, near one of the corners, there was a long, skinny window, and it was to here that I quietly wheeled my bike.

I sat down to wait. The kitchen entrance was a few feet away,
but there was a dumpster, and I hid behind that. A Hawaiian music group performed here on Fridays and the weekends, playing all the big-band standards, music my father had liked to listen to—“Nani Waimea,” “Moonlight in Hawai
‘
i,” “
Ē
Lili
‘
u
ē
”—and it was after the fourth song that I heard the guitarist announce, “And now, gentlemen—and some ladies, yeah?—please join me in welcoming the lovely Miss Victoria N
ā
m
ā
h
ā
naikaleleokalani Bishop!”

The crowd cheered, and I looked through the window to see Mrs. Bishop, in a close-fitting yellow holok
ū
printed with white hibiscus, a lei of orange puakenikeni around her head, her hair coiled into a bun, her lips scarlet, ascend to the small stage. She waved to the audience, which was clapping, and I watched as she danced to “My Yellow Ginger Lei” and “P
ā
lolo.” She was a beautiful dancer, and although I didn’t speak more than a few words of Hawaiian, I understood the lyrics from watching her movements.

It occurred to me as I watched her, her face lit with happiness, that, although I had always liked her, part of me had wanted to see her degraded in some way. “Dancing,” in my classmates’ voices, had sounded so sordid, something a desperate woman would have to do, and something in me had craved witnessing it. Watching her now, queenly and elegant, was both a relief and, as much as I hated to admit it, a disappointment—I realized that I resented her son after all, that I wanted him to have something to be ashamed of, and that I had wanted that something to be his mother, who had always been kind to me, kind in a way her son could never be. She was not dancing because she had been forced to out of circumstance—she was dancing because she loved to dance, and although she dipped her head graciously at the crowd’s applause, it was also clear that her joy was separate from their approval.

I left before her set was over. But in bed that night, I lay awake thinking of the night I had departed the Bishops’ house for the first time and had turned back to see them in the kitchen together, laughing and talking in the house’s warm yellow light. Now I revised that memory: They had put a record on the player, and Mrs. Bishop, still in her Mizumoto’s uniform, was dancing, and Edward was strumming his ukulele, playing along. Outside, in the tiny yard, were
crowded all of Edward’s and my classmates, and all of the patrons from Forsythia as well, all of us watching and clapping, though mother and son never turned to acknowledge us—to them, there was only each other, and it was as if we didn’t exist.

That was the first incident I wanted to tell you about. The second occurred three years later, in 1959.

It was August 21, and the school year had just begun. I was in tenth grade, almost sixteen. Now that we were in high school, I saw more of Edward than I had in the previous years, when we had been assigned to single, different classrooms. Now we moved from teacher to teacher, and sometimes we were in the same class. His earlier spell of popularity, when it had been discovered he could play sports, had tempered, and now I mostly saw him around the same three or four boys. As always, we nodded at each other in passing, and sometimes we even spoke a few words if we were in proximity—
I think I messed up on that chem test.
Oh, me too
—but no one would have identified us as friends.

I was in English class when the intercom crackled and the principal’s voice, rapid and emotional, started speaking: President Eisenhower had signed a bill granting Hawai
‘
i statehood. We were now officially the fiftieth American state. Many of the students, and my teacher, began clapping.

We were given the rest of the day off in celebration. For most of us, this was a formality, but I knew that Matthew and Jane would be excited; they had lived in the territory for thirty years—they wanted to be able to vote, which was not something I’d considered.

I was walking up toward the campus’s western gate when I saw Edward heading south. The first thing I noticed was how slowly he was moving; other students were passing him by, talking about what they were going to do with their unexpected free day, but he appeared to be sleepwalking.

I was nearing him when he suddenly looked up and saw me. “Hi,” I said, and then, when he didn’t respond, “What’re you going to do with your day off?”

For a moment, he didn’t answer, and I thought that he perhaps hadn’t heard me. But then he said, “This is horrible news.”

He spoke so quietly that I at first thought I’d misheard him. “Oh,” I said, stupidly.

But it was like I’d tried to argue with him. “It’s horrible news,” he repeated tonelessly, “horrible.” And then he turned from me and kept walking. I remember thinking he looked lonely, even though I’d seen him alone many times and had never associated his aloneness with loneliness, the way I did with mine. This time, though, something felt different. He looked—though I wouldn’t have had the word for it then—bereft, and although I couldn’t see his face, there was something about his back, the slump of his shoulders, that, had I not known better, would have made me think he had just suffered a terrible loss.

I understand that that incident, knowing what you do of Edward, might not seem particularly notable. But it was uncharacteristic of the Edward I knew—admittedly not very well—back then. However, I would have known—through him or through gossip—if he had expressed any strong sentiments about native Hawaiian rights, even given the fact that the very
idea
of native Hawaiian rights had not yet been invented. (Now I can hear Edward saying, “Of
course
it had been invented.” So, all right: It had not yet been named. Named, or popularized, not even on a small scale.) There were a few boys in our grade who were interested in politics—one, whose father was the territorial governor, even got it into his head that he would one day be president of the United States. But Edward was not one of them, which made what happened later all the more surprising.

I should add, though, that Edward was not the only person who was upset that day. Back home, I found my mother sitting in the sunroom, quilting. This was unusual, as she was typically with the Daughters on Friday afternoons, volunteering at a food kitchen that served Hawaiian families. When I entered the room, she looked up, and we stared at each other in silence.

“They let us out early,” I said. “Because of the announcement.”

She nodded. “I stayed home today,” she said. “I just couldn’t bear it.” She looked down at her quilt—it was a breadfruit pattern, dark green on white—and then back up at me. “This doesn’t change anything, you know, Kawika,” she said. “Your father should still be king. And someday, you should still be king, too. Remember that.”

It was a strange mix of tenses, a sentence of promises and grievances, reassurances and consolations.

“All right,” I said, and she nodded.

“This changes nothing,” she said. “This land is ours.” And then she looked back at her quilting ring, my signal that I was dismissed, and I went upstairs to my room.

I had no strong feelings about statehood. I thought of it as falling under the broad roof of “government,” and I had no interest in government. Who was in charge, which decisions were made—none of it affected me. A signature on a piece of paper was irrelevant to the facts of my own life. Our house, the people within it, my school: These things wouldn’t change. My burden was one not of citizenry but of legacy; I was David Bingham, my father’s son, and all that went with it. I suppose, looking back on it, I might even have been relieved—now that the islands’ fate was settled, it would perhaps mean that I would no longer bear the responsibility and obligation of trying to correct a history I had no hopes of changing.

It would be another decade, almost, before I returned to Edward’s orbit, but in those years, many things happened.

The first thing is that I graduated—we all did. Most of my classmates went to college on the mainland; it was what we had been groomed to do, after all—it was the entire point of the school. We were to go away and get our degrees, maybe do a bit of traveling, and then we would return after college or law school or medical school and get jobs in the most prestigious local banks and law firms and hospitals, which were owned or founded by our relatives and ancestors. Quite a few of us would go into government, leading the Departments of Transportation or Education or Agriculture.

At first, I was among their number. The dean had directed me toward an obscure liberal-arts school in the Hudson Valley of New York, and in September 1962, I left home.

It quickly became clear that I was not meant for the college. It may have been small, and expensive, and unknown, but the other students, most of whom were from rich but vaguely bohemian New York City families, were somehow much more sophisticated and much better educated than I was. It wasn’t that I had never traveled, but my travels had been oriented toward the East, and none of my new classmates seemed to care about the places I’d been. They’d all traveled to Europe, some of them every summer, and I was soon made aware of my own provinciality. Few of them knew that Hawai
‘
i had been a kingdom; more than one asked if I lived in a “real” house, by which they meant one made of stone, with a shingled roof. The first time, I hadn’t known how to reply, the question was so ludicrous, and stood there blinking until the other person moved away. The references they made, the books they quoted, the vacations they took, the food and wine they preferred, the people they all seemed to know—all of it whirred past me.

The strange thing, though, is that I didn’t resent them: I resented where I had come from. I cursed my school, where generations of Binghams had gone, for not better preparing me. What had I learned there that was useful? I had taken all the same subjects my new classmates had, but so much of my education, it seemed, had been taken up with learning Hawaiian history and bits of Hawaiian language, which I couldn’t even speak. How was that knowledge meant to be useful to me, when the rest of the world simply didn’t care? I didn’t dare bring up who my family was—I sensed that half of them wouldn’t believe me, and the other half would mock me.

I knew this for certain after the variety show. Every December, the college presented a series of brief sketches by different students satirizing various professors and administrators. One of the sketches was about the school’s president, who was always talking about recruiting students from new countries and unlikely places, trying to convince a Stone Age tribe boy—Prince Woogawooga of the Ooga-ooga, was his name—to attend the school. The student
playing the tribe member had darkened his skin with brown shoe polish and wore an oversize diaper; on either side of his nose was taped one half of a cardboard bone, so that it looked as if the length of it had pierced though the bridge. On his head he wore a mop, its ropes dyed black and tied back from his face.

“Hello there, young man,” the student playing the president said. “You look like an intelligent young person.”

“Ooga booga, ooga booga,” hooted the student playing the tribesman prince, scratching beneath his arms like an ape and bouncing from foot to foot.

“We teach everything that a young man needs to learn in order to be considered educated,” the president continued, stoically ignoring the tribesman’s antics. “Geometry, history, literature, Latin; and, of course, sports: lacrosse, tennis, football, badminton.” And here he held out a badminton ball to the tribesman, who immediately stuffed it into his mouth.

“No, no!” cried the president, finally flustered. “This is not for eating, good man! Spit it out at once!”

The tribesman did, scratching and jumping, and then, after a pause during which he looked at the audience, his eyes opened wide, his mouth, which had been circled with red lipstick, stretched taut, he made a lunging leap at the president, trying to take a bite out of his cheek.

“Help!” shouted the president. “Help!” The two began to run around the stage, the tribesman’s teeth coming together in a sharp wooden click as he bit down on air, cackling and whooping as he chased the president into the wings.

The two actors returned to the stage to loud applause. The audience had been laughing the entire time, in an exaggerated, obscene way, almost as if they’d never laughed before and were just learning how. Only two of us were silent: me, and an upperclassman from Ghana whom I didn’t know. I watched him watching the stage, his face still and clenched, and realized he thought it was about him and his home, but I knew it was about me and mine—the cardboard palm trees, the ferns tied in clumsy bunches around the savage’s ankles and wrists, the lei made of cut-up plastic straws and
newsprint flowers. It was a cheap, coarse costume, cheaply and coarsely made, dismissive even in its ridicule. This is what they thought of me, I realized, and later, when Edward first mentioned Lipo-wao-nahele, it was this night that I remembered, the sensation of watching, frozen, as everything I was, and everything my family was, was brutally dismembered, stripped naked, and pushed onto the stage to be howled at.