Hawaii - James Michener [493]
"No, Dad. He thinks I can write." There was a long pause in the big room as the pastel lights of morning spread across the city below, and one of those rare moments developed in which a son can talk to his father, and if Hoxworth Hale had growled in his customary manner, the moment would have passed, like the ghost of Pele ignoring one whom she considered not worth a warning, but Hoxworth's personal god sat heavily on his shoulder, and he said nothing, so that his son continued: "You and your father and all your generations used to sit up here, Dad, and look down at Honolulu and dream of controlling it. Every streetcar that ran, every boat that came to port did so at your command. I appreciate that. It's a noble drive, a civilizing one. Sometimes I've caught a glimpse of such a life for myself. But it's always passed, Dad. I just don't have that vision, and you've got to find someone who has, or you and I will both go broke."
"Don't you have any vision at all?" Hoxworth asked quietly, back in the shadows.
"Oh, yes!" The handsome young fellow pointed to Honolulu, lying tribute beneath them, and confided for the first time to anyone: "I want to control this city too, Dad. But I want to bore into its heart to see what makes it run. Why the Chinese buy land and the Japanese don't. Why the old families like ours intermarry and intermarry until damned near half of them have somebody locked away in upstairs rooms. I want to know who really owns the waterfront, and what indignities a man must suffer before he can become an admiral at Pearl Harbor. And when I know all these things, I'm going to write a book . . . maybe lots of them . . . and they won't be books like the ones you read. They'll be like The Grandmothers and Without My Cloak, books you never heard of. And when I know, and when I have written what I know, then I'll control Honolulu in a manner you never dreamed of. Because I'll control its imagination."
He was slightly drunk and fell back in his chair. His father watched him for some minutes, during which fragments of The Grandmothers repeated themselves in Hoxworth's agitated mind. Finally the father said, "I suppose you don't want to bundle off to the cram school?"
"No, Dad."
"What will you do?"
"There's no sweat getting into either Cornell or Alabama. I’ll register Monday at McKinley High."
Hoxworth winced and asked, "Why McKinley?"
"The kids call it Manila Prep and I'd sort of like to know some Filipinos."
"You already know . . . Doesn’t Consul Adujo's son go to Punahou?"
"I want to know real Filipinos, Dad."
Hoxworth Hale started to rear back, as if he were about to tell his son that he would tolerate no nonsense about McKinley High School, but as words began to formulate he saw his son etched against the pale morning light, and the silhouette was not of Bromley Hoxworth, the radical essayist who had outraged Hawaii, but of Hoxworth Hale, the radical art critic who had charged Yale University with thievery; and a bond of identity was established, and the father swallowed his words of reprimand.
'Tell me one thing, Bromley. This Mr. Kenderdine? Can his ideas be trusted?"
"The best, Dad. Unemotional, yet loaded with fire. You heard, I suppose, that we're losing him. Joining the navy. Says there's bound to be war."
There was a painful silence and the boy concluded: "Maybe that's why I want to go to McKinley now, Dad. There mayn't be too much time." He started to bed but realized that he owed his father some kind of apology, for the mimeographed essay had created a storm which he, the author, had not anticipated. "About that photograph of you, Dad . . . What I mean is, if I do become a writer, I'll be a good one." And he stumbled off to bed.
IN 1941 the Thanksgiving Day football game was largely a replay of the 1938 classic, with Punahou pitted against McKinley, but this time two Sakagawa boys played for Punahou; for Hoxworth Hale and his committee of alumni had been so pleased with Tadao's performance that they had automatically extended scholarships to the younger boys, Minoru the tackle