Hawaii - James Michener [545]
First, there was the gnawing, never-ending pain that started when his son Bromley was shot down during the great fire of Tokyo in 1945, when the air corps practically destroyed the city. More than 70,000 Japanese had died in the great raids, and a city too, so that in one sense Bromley's death had contributed positive results, and after his raids victory for our side was assured. But Bromley Hale was a special young man. Everyone said so, and his departure left a gap both in the Hale family and in Hawaii that would never be filled, for in his last letters home, when capricious death had become so routine in his B-29 squadron as to depress all the fliers, he had spoken intimately of what he hoped to accomplish when the war ended, as soon it must.
He had written, from a hut on Iwo Jima: "We had to ditch our monstrous plane in the waters near here, and by the grace of God we were all saved, but in the going down, as I worked with the wheel I was not so much concerned about a perfect water landing as I was with my determination to do what years ago I had sworn to do while a senior at Punahou. I am determined to write a novel about--and this may stagger you, but bear with me--Aunt Lucinda Whipple. I shall have her sitting in the late afternoons in her house in Nuuanu Valley, and each day as the afternoon rains sweep down from the Pali and the white mildew grows on all things, she entertains the straggling members of our family. It has always seemed to me that Aunt Lucinda was everybody's aunt, and everybody comes to her and listens to her monotonous chatter about the old days, and nothing I write will make any sense at all--only an old woman's ceaseless vanity--until it begins to weave a spell, the kind of spell in which you and I have always lived. I shall show Aunt Lucinda exactly as she is, religious, family-proud, unseeing, unknowing, garrulous and unbelievably kind. She has become to me a web, a fatal emanation, an encroaching dream, and as our plane struck the water, I was listening not to my copilot, who was frantic as hell, but to dear old Aunt Lucinda. How she hated airplanes and fast automobiles and Japanese. As a matter of fact, if you took time to analyze it carefully, I guess she hated everybody but the Whipples, and the Janderses, and the Hales, and the Hewletts, and the Hoxworths. But even they gave her a lot of trouble, for she always took great pains to explain to visitors that she came from the branch of the Whipple family that had never had even a drop of Hawaiian blood, and she kept segregated in her mind those of her great family of whom this could not be said. She was suspicious of you and me, because we were not pure English stock; and of course all the Hoxworths and half the Hewletts were contaminated, and often when I spoke with her she would hesitate, and I knew she was thinking: 'I'd better not tell him that, because after all, he is one of the contaminated.'
"And from Aunt Lucinda's endless vagaries I want to construct an image of all Hawaii and the peoples who came to build it. I want to deal with the first volcano and the last sugar strike. You may not like my novel, but it will be accurate, and I think that counts for something. It is strange, I have been writing about Aunt Lucinda as if she were dead, but she is living and it may be I who shall be dead."
This dreadful hurt never left Hoxworth Hale's heart, and he started listening to Aunt Lucinda's meanderings, and he picked up the thoughts that his son had laid down: "We live in a web. Sugar cane, Hawaiian ghosts, pineapple, ships, streetcar lines,