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By Root 1040 0

had told the university, she was mistaken. Eighteen months after returning from Jakarta, she passed her comprehensive exams, having submitted a list of two dozen theoretical issues in anthropology and archaeology that she was prepared to discuss. But her dissertation, on five peasant industries, had ballooned to nearly seven hundred pages. It was already twice as long as many Ph.D. theses, and it was far from finished. “But I’ll definitely be through and out of here when Maya graduates in June,” Ann wrote to Suryakusuma. A year later, she was wishing she had chosen a smaller topic. Her enthusiasm was waning. “I don’t find I care very much about it,” she wrote again to her friend. “The creative part was over long ago, and it’s just a matter of finishing the damn thing.” It was not an uncommon problem. Financial support for graduate students in anthropology was hard to come by. Jobs in international development would turn up, promising good pay plus expenses. Graduate students, burdened with credit card bills, would accept, figuring they could finish the dissertation on weekends. Repeatedly, Ann appealed to the university for patience. “I regret the delay, but hope you can once again hold the fort for me till I get back,” she would write several years later to Dewey. Ben Finney, a member of Ann’s dissertation committee, recalled drafts “of this and that” coming in and Dewey “pulling out her hair. ‘It’s too long!’” Dewey received in the mail from Ann a postcard of a painting by Picasso, Interior with a Girl Drawing. In the painting, a brown-haired woman wearing a garland of flowers draws blithely on lemon-colored paper. Another woman slumps over a table nearby, burying her face. “Rather a nice Picasso I picked up at the Museum of Modern Art en route,” Ann wrote in the letter attached. “I call it, ‘Ann writing her dissertation on yellow tablets while Alice waits patiently (I hope) in the background.’”

Ann’s parents had little understanding of Ann’s professional passions. Stanley, nearing seventy, had never found work that he loved. Retired from selling insurance, he now devoted himself to crossword puzzles and television game shows such as The Price Is Right. He started projects—photo projects, albums, a family tree—that as often as not went unfinished. He had an immense repertoire of jokes, at which his granddaughter cringed while dutifully laughing. Madelyn, by contrast, loved her work and did it well. By the time Ann returned to Hawaii in 1984, Madelyn had risen to become one of the first female vice presidents at the Bank of Hawaii. Her marriage to Stanley did not seem, at least from the outside, to have improved with age. They bickered and sniped and took refuge in separate bedrooms. Madelyn drank. Occasionally, Ann told a friend, Madelyn would rent a hotel room in Honolulu where she would spend a solitary vacation. “Well, you know how Mother and Father are,” Ann would say to her uncle Ralph Dunham after her father’s death, some years later. “They fought all the time, but they really loved each other.” Ralph Dunham agreed: As far as he could tell, they couldn’t live with each other, or without. Ann sometimes wondered if Madelyn was reminded of Stanley when she gazed on her restless, voluble, dark-haired daughter. “I don’t think either one of her parents read her dissertation or really even knew what it was about,” Maya told me. “So there was a whole side of her adult life that remained a mystery to them. There was a difference in interests and in manner and in temperament that was difficult to bridge.”

At the same time, Madelyn made it possible for Ann to live the life she chose.

“Our mom was the one who gave us the imagination and the language, the storytelling, all of those things,” Maya told me. “And those things are really important. . . . But I think that if my grandmother had not been there, in the wings, making sure that we had savings accounts and school tuition taken care of and that sort of thing, maybe I would have felt more torn about the way that I was raised. As it was, I could feel free to love my childhood