Hawaii - James Michener [559]
"Never heard of them," Kelly said honestly.
"They didn't stay long. But I'm doing a biography of them . . . for my thesis. I teach at Smith, you know."
"You da kine wahine bimeby gonna write a book?" Florsheim asked, as he resumed the trip.
"Tell him he doesn't have to talk pidgin," Elinor suggested.
"He can't talk anything else," Kelly laughed.
"I think pidgin's just adorable," the girl in front said, and Kelly thought: "Looks like I've got a four-nighter at best, and maybe not at all, but good old Florsheim better watch out or he's going to be layin' that babe in the lobby."
Kelly's suspicion about Elinor Henderson proved correct, for she was not a four-nighter or even a six. She loved surfing and felt secure in Kelly's arms, but that was all. Yet one night when Kelly borrowed Florsheim's convertible--for the Kansas City girl had said flatly, "Why go riding in a Chevy when you can have so much fun in bed?"--he drove Elinor out to Koko Head, where they sat in darkness talking.
"In the islands we call this kind of date, 'Watching the midnight submarine races,'" he explained.
"Very witty," she laughed.
"How's the biography coming along?" he asked.
"I'm quite perplexed," she confessed.
"No good, eh?"
"I have been sorely tempted to put it aside, Kelly."
"Why?"
There was a long pause in the darkness as the late moon climbed out of the sea in the perpetual mystery of the tropics. Along the shore a coconut palm dipped out to meet it, and the night was heavy, bearing down on the world. Suddenly Elinor turned to Kelly and took his hands. "I have been driven mad by the desire to write about you, Kelly," she said.
The beachboy was astonished. "Me!” he cried. "What's there to write about me?"
She explained in clear, swift sentences, without allowing him to interrupt: "I have been haunted by Hawaii ever since I read my great-great-great-grandfather's secret journal. He stayed here only seven years. Couldn't take any more. And when he got back to Boston he wrote a completely frank account of his apprehensions. I can see his dear old handwriting still: 'I shall write as if God were looking over my shoulder, for since He ordained these things He must understand them.'"
"What did he write?" Kelly inquired.
"He said that we Christians had invaded the islands with the proper God but with an improper set of supporting values. It was his conviction that our God saved the islands, but our ideas killed them. Particularly the Hawaiians. And at one point, Kelly, he wrote a prophetic passage about the Hawaiian of the future. I copied it down, and last night I read it again, and he was describing you."
"Gloomy prophecy?" Kelly asked.
" The Hawaiian is destined to diminish year by year, dispossessed, distraught and confused.' That's what the old man wrote. He must have had you in mind, Kelly."
Kelly was twenty-three years old that night, and he realized that in Elinor Henderson he was mixed up with an entirely different kind of woman. She was thirty-one, he guessed, clean, honest and very appealing. He hair was crisply drawn back, and her white chin was both determined and inviting. He put his left hand under it and slowly brought it up to his. There was enough moonlight for him to see the visitor's eyes, and he was captivated by their calm assurance, so that for some moments the missionaries' descendant and the dispossessed Hawaiian studied each other, and finally his hand relaxed and her chin was released, whereupon she took his powerful face in her soft white hands and brought it to hers, kissing him and confessing, "I have forgotten old missionaries, Kelly. When I start to write I see only you. Do you know what I wish to call my new biography? The Dispossessed."
They talked for a long time, while other cars came to observe the midnight submarine races and depart. Elinor asked directly, "Do you call this a life, Kelly? Making love to one neurotic divorcee after another?"
"Who told you?"
"I can