Hawaii - James Michener [590]
"For three years I've hoped my husband would," Akemi said bitterly.
"Be patient," Dr. Yamazaki pleaded, "and you'll find Hawaii improving."
"I think not," Akemi said slowly. "It's a barren, stupid place and nothing will ever change it."
The two young women parted, and that night Dr. Yamazaki called Shig Sakagawa, whom she had known at Punahou, and said, "Shig, it's none of my business, but your brother Goro is going to lose his wife."
"You think so?"
"I know so. She used every phrase the girls use before they catch the boat back to Japan. I've watched nineteen of them go back so far."
"What could he do?" Shig asked.
"Buy her three Beethoven symphonies," Dr. Yamazaki said, knowing that to blunt Goro such a step would be beyond the outer limits of imagination. Besides, Mrs. Sakagawa Senior would never allow such music in her house.
WHILE the labor leader Goro Sakagawa faced these problems-- or rather did not face them--Hoxworth Hale was concerned principally with the forthcoming marriage of his daughter Noelani to her cousin twice removed, Whipple Janders, the son of bold, straightforward Hewlett Janders, on whom Hoxworth had grown to depend so much in recent years. At one time, when Noelani was younger, Hoxworth had rather hoped that she might go outside The Fort and find herself a completely new kind of husband . . . somebody from Yale, of course, but perhaps an easterner who had never seen Hawaii. For a while when Noelani was a senior at Wellesley she dated an Amherst boy, which was almost as good as Yale, but nothing had come of it, and when young Whip Janders, who was belatedly completing his Yale education, asked her to a spring dance at New Haven, each of them instinctively knew that they ought to marry. After all, they had known each other at Punahou; they were from families who understood each other; and Whip had been the closest friend of Noelani's brother, who had been killed over Tokyo.
However, at one point in. their engagement Noelani had experienced haunting doubts as to the propriety of their marriage, for Whipple had returned from the war somewhat changed. He was thinner, and his fashionable crew-cut did not entirely hide a tendency toward strongly individualistic behavior. Once at a Vassar dance he had appeared in formal dress but with a garish vest made of Hong Kong silk embroidered in purple dragons. He had been a sensation, but he had also been disturbing, for he had told one of the professors' wives, "Thorstein Veblen would have loved this vest," and she had stammered, "What?" and he had given his imitation of a dying tubercular patient, adding, "If you're going to have consumption, it ought to be conspicuous." It had been gruesomely funny, but unfortunately the professor's wife didn't catch on.
Now Whip and his crew-cut were back in Honolulu, dressed in Brooks Brothers' most austere fashion, and the wedding was about to take place. Shortly before the event, Noelani asked her father, for her mother was in one of her spells and could not comprehend questions, "Do you think it's proper for kids like us to go on intermarrying, Dad? I mean, frankly, what are the chances that our children will be more like Mother than like you?"
In considerable embarrassment, for this was the nagging fear that had made him hope that Noelani would marry some easterner, Hoxworth dodged the question and suggested: "Why don't we look into this with Aunt Lucinda. We always ask her about the family."
"Which family?" Noelani asked.
"The family ... all of it," Hoxworth replied, and he drove his daughter up to see Aunt Lucinda in the mist-haunted house in Nuuanu Valley. When they arrived, they found that she was entertaining half a dozen ladies of nearly her own age, and most of them were drinking gin, so that the conversation wasn't exactly on focus, but there was a sweet, relaxed