Hawaii - James Michener [561]
"Hi, Mom. Prepare for a shock! I'm bringing' home a haole wahine." Lest his mother be aware of the changes he had undergone for this girl, Kelly lapsed into his worst pidgin.
His mother left the doorway, walked in stately fashion to the edge of the porch, and extended her hand: "We are truly delighted to welcome you to the Swamp."
"Muddah, dis wahine Elinor Henderson, Smith. Muddah’s Vassar." The trim Bostonian and the huge Hawaiian shook hands, each respectful of the other, and the latter said in her soft voice, "I am Malama Kanakoa, and you are the first of Kelolo's haole friends he has ever brought here. You must be special."
"Eh, Muddah, watch out!” Kelly warned. "We not in love. Dis wahine mo eight years older dan me. She all fixed mo bettah in Boston."
"But she is special," Malama insisted.
"Special too much! She gotta brain da kine, akamai too good."
The trio laughed and each instinctively felt at ease with the other. Kelly helped by explaining, "Muddah, dis wahine she come from long-time mission pamily Quigley. I not speak dis pamily, but maybe you do."
"Immanuel Quigley!" Malama cried, taking her visitor's two hands. "He was the best of the missionaries. Only one who loved the Hawaiians. But he stayed only a short time."
"I think he transmuted all his love for Hawaii into his children, and I inherited it," Elinor said. She saw that she had entered a nineteenth-century drawing room, complete with chandelier, tiered crystal cases, an organ, a Steinway piano and a brown mezzotint of Raphael's "Ascent of the Virgin" in a massive carved frame. The ceiling was enormously high, which made the room unexpectedly cool, but Elinor was distracted from this fact by an object which hung inside an inverted glass bowl set in a mahogany base. "Whatever is it?" she cried.
"It's a whale's tooth," Malama explained. "Formed into a hook."
"But what's it hung on?" she asked.
"Human hair," Kelly assured her.
Malama interrupted, removing the glass cover and handing her visitor the precious relic. "My ancestor, the King of Kona, wore this when he fought as Kamehameha's general. Later he wore it when the first mission ship touched at Lahaina. I suppose that every hair in this enormous chain came from the head of someone my family cherished." She replaced the glass cover. Then she said, "Kelly, while you show Mrs. Henderson why we call this the Swamp, I'll be getting tea. Some of the ladies are coming in."
So Kelly took Elinor to the rear of the house, through a kitchen that had once prepared two hundred dinners for King Kalakaua, and soon they were in a fairyland of trees and flowers bordering a rash-lined swamp whose surface was covered with lilies. With some irony Kelly said, dropping his pidgin now that he was again alone with Elinor, "This was the only land the haoles didn't take. Now it's worth two million dollars. But of course Mom takes care of a hundred poor Hawaiians, and she's in hock up to her neck."
To Elinor, the scene of old decay was poignant, and as red-tufted birds darted through the swamp and perched on the tips of dancing reeds, she saw the complete motif for her biography. "You really are The Dispossessed," she mused, fusing reality with her vision of it.
"No, I think you have it wrong, Kelly protested. "This is the walled-in garden that every Hawaiian knows, for he tends one in his own heart. Here no one intrudes."
"Then you're contemptuous of the haole girls you sleep with?" she asked.
"Oh, No! Sleeping is fun, Elinor. That’s outside what we're talking about."
"You're right, and I apologize. What I meant was, insofar as they're haoles, you're contemptuous of them?"
Kelly thought about this for a long time, tossed a pebble at a swaying bird, and said, "I don't believe I would admit