Hawaii - James Michener [444]
At this outburst the first bride, who had also found a husband she did not want, shook Sumiko and cried in rapid Japanese, "Control yourself, you selfish little fool! In such an affair who expects to find a champion?"
"I will not marry this animal!" Sumiko wailed, whereupon the first bride, who had gracefully accepted her disappointment, delivered a solid slap across the girl's face.
"On the entire trip you were a mean, nasty child. You ought to be ashamed. Go to that good man and humble yourself before him." The first bride placed her hand in the middle of Sumiko's back and projected her across the hushed immigration room.
Sumiko would have stumbled except that from the astonished couples Ishii-san sprang forth to rescue her. He caught her by the waist and held her for a moment. Then, looking at Kamejiro and his own intended bride, he said with a frankness that startled even himself, "Kamejiro, you and Yoriko make a better pair. Give me Sumiko." And the beautiful girl, finding herself in the presence of a cultured man who wore a black suit, suddenly cried, "Yes, Kamejiro, you are too old for me. Please, please!”
In stolid bewilderment, Kamejiro looked down at the picture and recalled how deeply over the past months he had grown to love it. Then he looked up at the square-faced chapped-cheeked Mori Yoriko and thought: "She is not the girl in the picture. What are they doing to me?"
He hesitated, the room whirling about him, and then he felt on his arm the hand of the first bride, who had slapped Sumiko, and this quiet-voiced girl was saying, "I do not know your name, but I have lived with Yoriko for three weeks, and of all the brides here, I assure you that she will make the best wife. Take her."
The humiliated country girl, who had been so painfully rejected by her intended husband, found tears welling into her unpretty eyes, and she wanted to run to some corner, but she stood firm like the rock from which she had been hewn and bowed low before the stranger. "I will be a good wife," she mumbled, fighting to control her voice.
Kamejiro looked for the last time at the well-remembered picture on the floor, then picked it up and handed it to his friend Ishii-san. "It will be better this way," he said. Returning to the girl who still bowed, he said gently, "My name is Sakagawa Kamejiro. I am from Hiroshima-ken."
"My name is Mori Yoriko," the peasant girl answered. "I also am from Hiroshima."
"Then we will get married," he said, and the seven couples were completed.
DURING THE YEARS when Kamejiro Sakagawa and his bride Yoriko were discovering how lucky they were to have stumbled into their improvised marriage, the missionary families in Honolulu were experiencing a major shock, for one of their sons was proving to be a fiery radical, and reports of his behavior startled all Hawaii.
In these years Hawaii seemed filled with Hales and Whipples and Hewletts and Janderses and Hoxworths. In some classes at Punahou sixteen out of twenty-four students would bear these or related names. Only skilled genealogists tried to keep the blood lines straight, for Hales were Hoxworths and Hoxworths were Whipples, and fairly frequently a Hale would marry a Hale and thus intensify the complications, so that in time no child really understood who his various cousins were, and an island euphemism gained popularity: "He is my calabash cousin," which meant that if one went back far enough, some kind of blood relationship could be established.
Hawaii came to consider this Hale-Whipple-Hewlett-Janders-Hoxworth menage simply as "the family" and to recognize its four salient characteristics: its children went to Punahou; its boys went to Yale; invariably it found some kind of good-paying job for every son and for the husband of every daughter; and members of the family tried to avoid scandal. Therefore, when one of the boys became a radical, the family was deeply jolted.
As long as he had stayed at Punahou, this renegade had done well, but this was not unusual,