Moloka'i (50 page)

Rachel was helpless to do more than watch from her window as work crews cleaned up what was left of the shoreline. Staggering back to bed she felt useless, and reconciled to the idea that her time on earth was nearly over; in fact she welcomed it. She knew she had been luckier than most, luckier than Emily or Leilani or Violet; she had grown up, grown old, fallen in love and been loved. And not just by Kenji—she knew how blessed she had been to have an
'ohana
here to take her in, Pono and Haleola and Catherine and Francine and so many more. Her Kalaupapa family. She lay in bed at night listening for the sound of drums and marchers, content to die.

A month or so after the
tsunami
, as Dr. Sloan examined Rachel with grim purpose, he told her, “Rachel, I’d like to put you on a new medicine, they’ve had some success with it at Carville. It’s called Promin—one of the new sulfa drugs, an antibiotic.”

Rachel managed a faint derisive noise. “They tried penicillin, it didn’t work.”

“Yes, but these sulfa derivatives are quite effective against tuberculosis, which is similar to the Hansen’s bacillus.” More and more the doctors were calling it “Hansen’s disease,” the result of fervent editorializing by the patient-run newspaper
The Carville Star
, arguing that the Biblical connotations of the words “leprosy” and “leper” unfairly stigmatized Hansen’s patients.

“But it is an experimental drug,” Sloan advised her, “and though of low toxicity it is, to some degree, toxic.”

“Good,” Rachel said, closing her eyes. “Maybe it’ll finish me off quicker.”

That afternoon she received the first of her daily intravenous injections of Promin: six times a week, two weeks out of three. For most of that time there was no noticeable change in her condition other than a slight allergic reaction, which subsided after a week.

Then, in the third month of Promin injections, Rachel noticed that an open sore on her arm was scabbing over.

Over the next few weeks, to Rachel’s amazement, her ulcers began to heal, one by one—the purple bruises vanishing, fluids draining, skin clearing.

After three months’ treatment with Promin Dr. Sloan replaced it with another medication called Diasone . . . and within another month her swollen, distended face began to take on its old shape, its aging beauty.

It was a miracle. A
haole
medicine that actually worked! No thunderclaps, no proclamations from heaven; God spoke not from on high, but out of a test tube.

After six months’ treatment with sulfa drugs, fifty-five out of seventy-two patients at Kalaupapa showed marked improvement; only eight appeared not to have benefited. David Kamakau saw his fever cool and his ulcers disappear. The clawing of Hokea’s hands and the erosion of his nasal cartilage was arrested: the sulfones couldn’t reverse tissue damage, but they could prevent further deformation. Astonishingly, a scourge that had plagued humankind for generations was seemingly vanquished—virtually overnight!

“The drugs don’t kill the bacillus,” Sloan explained to Rachel, “they weaken it enough that your immune system can destroy it.” The Hansen’s bacilli were not completely wiped out, but Sloan and his colleagues were cautiously optimistic that their numbers would be greatly reduced.

Sister Catherine watched with a kind of stunned joy as hope took root at Kalaupapa for the first time in her fifty-two years at the settlement, and morale soared. Patients who had not been able to respirate without a tracheotomy tube in their throats were soon able to breathe unassisted. Failing vision was arrested; the nearly blind would now be able to see the future, however dimly. And as the cruel distortions of their bodies were halted, patients could consider surgery to repair their disfigurements, without fear that more would inevitably follow. They might yet live out lives measured in decades, not merely years or months.

Catherine was profoundly grateful to have lived to see this day. There would not be too many more for her, she suspected, but the triumph of this moment would light her path to heaven—
or wherever I’m headed
, she thought wryly. She was even able to foresee a time, not so distant surely, when this shore of exile was no more; when no one else would be brought here against their will. She went to the Franciscans’ little chapel, knelt before the altar, and with joyful tears thanked God for His mercy—for the spirit that had given men wings and now this miraculous cure, for the many lives that cure would save—and most of all, she had to confess, for Rachel’s life.

L

ong discharged from the hospital and living on her own again, Rachel was at the airport that day in June of ’47 when the little twin-engine plane bearing the settlement’s new superintendent touched down on the landing strip. A reception committee of staff and patients swarmed around the aircraft as the superintendent and his wife disembarked, Rachel among the first to greet him.

“Just can’t stay away, can you, Missionary Boy?” she said, and Lawrence Judd laughed heartily and said, “Apparently not.” Like her, he was in his early sixties now; his pleasure at seeing her was apparent and genuine. “You look wonderful, Rachel,” he said, extending a hand, and this time she took it.

It was a much different Kalaupapa that Judd was returning to oversee at the close of an enviable career in public service. Dr. Sloan had been right about Promin and Diasone:
bacilli leprae
were dying as leprosy victims once died, by the thousands. The sulfa drugs did not strictly “cure” Hansen’s disease, but it so dramatically reduced the number of bacilli in a patient’s system that in most cases the disease was arrested within a matter of months, and the patient was rendered noncontagious. The first wave of test subjects were now receiving one negative snip after another; the prospects of parole were no longer so remote.

In the light of the medical community’s growing realization that Hansen’s disease was even less contagious than tuberculosis, Superintendent Judd immediately set about making changes in the way things were done at Kalaupapa. He started with his own office, throwing out the ridiculous railing between superintendent and patient. He tore down the high wire fence around the visitors’ quarters as well as the mesh fence that separated patient and visitor inside the cottage. All unnecessary barriers between residents and staff came down—even the guard at the top of the
pali
trail was eliminated. Judd was determined that residents feel more like patients than prisoners. And he was doing it all quickly, as he confided to Rachel, “before they toss me out of here on my ear.”

“So if leprosy’s not so easy to catch as everybody thought,” Rachel asked him, “did we all get sent here for nothing? For no good reason?”

Judd sighed and considered that. “I don’t know, Rachel,” he said finally. “Hawaiians had no immunity to this disease. Did something need to be done to stop it? Yes. Was isolation far from your families and friends the only answer? I don’t think so. Was it all for nothing? No . . . but the price you and others paid was far too high.”

In December, Dr. Sloan informed Rachel that her sixth and final snip was negative, and she was now eligible for parole. Rachel heard the words, but couldn’t quite comprehend them. “Parole?” she said, as if she were slightly tipsy.

“Six negatives in a row, Rachel. You’ll need regular check-ups, of course, but once your application’s approved, you’ll be free to leave Kalaupapa whenever you wish.”

It was the moment she had dreamed of since she was seven, and now that it had come she didn’t know what to do.

She was sixty-one years old. Her youth was gone and all her friends were here in Kalaupapa. What promise did the outside world hold for her? Unlike some patients, she was not so disfigured that she feared living topside, but her right hand was definitely and noticeably crippled; how could she even make a living?

Catherine suggested, “Go for a visit, at least. A week or two. Don’t you want to see your brothers and sister?”

Now that this was a real possibility, Rachel wasn’t so sure. “Why should I go looking for them? I haven’t heard a word from them in fifty years!”

“They’re still your family.”

“You’re my family. You and everyone here.”

“You have other family too,” Catherine reminded her. “What about her?”

That gave Rachel some pause. “I . . . have no idea where she is.”

“There are ways of finding people.”

Rachel said, “What if she doesn’t want to be found?”

Catherine had no answer for that.

Leaving Bishop Home, Rachel drove up Damien Road to the Kauhak
trail and parked her car. Even with her clawed and missing toes she made it easily to the summit—it was amazing how much more energy she had now! She gazed out across the stone leaf of the peninsula and into the misty distance, the south flank of O'ahu peeking out from beneath wisps of cloud like strokes of Hokea’s brush. Beyond lay the world her father had brought back to her in pieces over the years—the lands of
sakura-ningyö
and
matryoshka
and Chinese Mission dolls, lands no longer
kapu.

And somewhere out there, a little girl, grown into a woman, who had never known the mother who birthed her.

She wished Kenji were here. She wished she could be leaving with him. But she knew what he would have done.

She filled out the parole application. She had some money saved from twenty years of her and Kenji’s combined salaries at the store, in addition to the small government pension she received for those years of service. Added to the few dollars that Papa had left her, she would be solvent for a while even if she couldn’t find a job right away. And she was told she could keep her house in Kalaupapa, in case she decided to come back.

David and Helen threw her a “parole party,” and Rachel was touched by the number of people who came. Amid food and laughter and music they celebrated not just Rachel’s imminent release but potentially their own. David and Helen were each only one snip away from freedom.

The day before Rachel’s flight to O'ahu, there remained only one more person to bid farewell to.

She walked down Damien Road to Puani Street—to Bay View Home perched on its low bluff overlooking the sea. Inside its blandly institutional hallways she walked past men—aged, blind, crippled—for whom the sulfa drugs came too late. She walked down corridors of despair and loneliness, glancing into rooms on either side, until she found the one she was looking for and she stopped.

She strode into Gabriel Crossen’s room, and when he turned and saw her his face went dust-white—almost as white as the patch over his gouged eye.

After a long moment she said, “I’m leaving.”

He stared at her, dumbfounded.

“You took the best part of my life,” she told him, “but not all of it. I’m going to go look for the rest of it. I’m leaving.”

She allowed herself a cold smile. “But you never will,” she added with satisfaction.

She could see the pupil of Crossen’s remaining eye dilate, as from a sudden light.

“Even if the sulfa drugs cure you,” Rachel said, “you’ll either be put in prison on O'ahu or just left here, in Kalaupapa . . . for the rest of your life.”

Crossen began to look a little sick.

“All this time,” she said softly, “and not a word of remorse from you. Of apology. ‘Regret,’ you said. You regretted the ‘accident.’ Well, now you can regret the fact that if you hadn’t killed Kenji . . . maybe you’d be leaving here someday.”

She didn’t wait for a reply. She turned, walked out of the room, and never looked back.

The next day Superintendent Judd was at the airport to drape a
lei
around her neck and give her a kiss.

Tearfully, Sister Catherine hugged her. “I love you, Rachel,” she said. “Godspeed.”

Rachel kissed her on the cheek. “I love you, too, Catherine. Thank you for being part of my life.” Before she could start crying, Rachel hefted her suitcase and walked up the short flight of steps onto the plane.

She sat in one of the six seats, fastened her seat belt as the pilot instructed, and was startled and exhilarated when the little Cessna began its fast taxi down the short runway. Then it leapt into the air, Rachel’s stomach turning over as the land dropped away from them. She stared out the window in wide-eyed wonder as the plane banked over the settlement and climbed up the green face of the
pali,
once so forbidding, now so easily vaulted; and then it was below them, falling away as from a bird in flight, as she left it behind.

N

ine days later the body of former Seaman First Class Gabriel Crossen was found floating in the waters off 'Awahua Bay. Some residents suggested suicide; others thought he’d simply had too much to drink. He was put to rest in the Protestant cemetery along the coast, a small American flag marking his grave. The only mourners were the minister from Kana'ana Hou Church and a single member of the Kalaupapa band, who indifferently blew “Taps.”

Chapter 21

F

lying, Rachel discovered, wondrously distorted space and time. From up here the turbulent whitecaps of the Kaiwi Channel were reduced to tranquil combers, and half a day’s steamer travel was miraculously compressed into a mere thirty minutes. It had even transformed her: no longer a sixty-one-year-old woman, she was a girl again, looking out the window with a child’s eyes and a child’s wonder. For fifty years the distant line of the horizon had been an implacable barrier—the unbreachable ramparts of the sky. And now in a matter of minutes they were breached after all, and so easily at that—not just the air travel but the suddenness of her cure (if it was a cure and not merely a remission, as the doctors were quick to caution). Did everything in the outside world move so fast? Had the nature and pace of time changed in the half century she had been trapped like a fly in the amber of Kalaupapa?

The plane banked as it approached O'ahu, the arc of its flight opening first a wedge, then a quarter, of land in the window—like a second hand sweeping across the face of a clock, revealing more moment by moment. The green crown of Diamond Head greeted her like an old friend, but it was a friend quickly lost amid strangers.

The city of Honolulu, once a sprinkling of low buildings dwarfed by groves of coconut palms, had erupted far above the treeline and expanded in every direction—even
makai,
seaward. It seemed to Rachel that the lush garden of her childhood had been pruned of much of its foliage, the greenery now merely garlanding block after block of concrete and asphalt. The marshes and duck ponds of Waikiki had apparently been drained. There seemed to be a new canal where once three streams fed rice paddies and taro farms on their drowsy way to the sea. Hotels dotted the familiar crescent of Waikiki Beach, including one behemoth, a gigantic, shocking-pink palace in the shape of an H. The sprawl of buildings stretched from Kalihi in the west to Koko Head in the east, and had begun penetrating the Manoa and Nu'uanu Valleys, houses blighting the face of the mountains like leprosy tubercles. Even the shoreline had been added to—a new yacht basin fringed the harbor with the masts of expensive boats.

And then they were landing, and as Rachel walked off the plane and crossed the tarmac she could scarcely believe that the ground beneath her was the land of her birth. Outside the interisland terminal she breathed in as many gas fumes as she did the scent of plumeria
leis
being offered to tourists at curbside. Rachel looked around in bewilderment at the welter of signs offering directions and instructions; taxicabs and buses rolled by every few seconds. Then she saw a bus approach with the word WAIKIKI emblazoned on its steel forehead, and when it stopped, she stepped through its sighing metal doors and boarded it.

She dropped the required coins in a fare box and sat up front on a bench behind the driver. She gazed out the windows with fascination as the bus left the airport and cleaved toward a sign reading NIMITZ HIGHWAY EAST, then onto a roadway bigger than any Rachel had ever traveled and into a flow of traffic faster than any she had ever imagined. Eventually the bus weaved through Kalihi, coming within two thousand feet of the old receiving station, and Rachel was surprised to find her heart beating just a little faster as they passed the road that once led to it.

Across the aisle from her a little boy was staring at Rachel’s clawed right hand and she quickly covered it with her other one, ignoring his puzzled gaze and whispered questions to his mother, who shushed him.

When she saw a sign announcing WAIKIKI→ she got off at the next stop; but after walking three or four blocks, searching in vain for something resembling a beach, she realized that she must have gotten off the bus too soon. The next to come along was a strange beast: it had the body of a bus but ran like a trolley on tracks, connected by wires to power lines running overhead. She boarded it, but was so fascinated with the “trolley bus” that it wasn’t until it was well underway that she noticed it was heading
mauka,
toward the mountains, not
makai
. She yanked the brake cord as she had seen other passengers do, and disembarked this one as well.

This time she asked for directions from passersby and caught a gas-powered bus heading east on a street named after King Kal
kaua. After five minutes she yanked the cord as the bus approached the intersection of Kal
kaua Avenue and Kapi'olani Boulevard. She got off at something called “Kau Kau Corner,” where a sign proclaiming itself CROSSROADS OF THE PACIFIC pointed the way to NEW YORK→ ← SYDNEY, and RIO DE JANIERO, among other far-flung spots. And indeed taxis, cars, and buses seemed busily en route to these very destinations, their wheels jostling over unused trolley tracks still cut into the road.

Suitcase dangling from her left hand, she made her way down this street honoring the king whose funeral procession she still remembered, and thought that there was little royal about Kal
kaua Avenue. But it was a wide, pleasant enough thoroughfare, ornamented with tall coconut palms. She passed hotels, gift shops, bars and night clubs, travel agencies, thatched-roof restaurants, street vendors selling
leis,
even a bowling alley. The pace was breakneck compared to the sleepy Waikiki of her youth, but Rachel rather enjoyed the sight of tourists and off-duty servicemen, the cars whizzing by, the conversation and commerce on every corner. She had drowsed enough in Kalaupapa. She was relieved to find that Honolulu was much more attractive at ground level than it had appeared from the air. The difference between Old Honolulu and New, she would come to decide, was the difference between a beautiful woman who was simply being herself and a beautiful woman calling attention to herself: a little vain perhaps, but you couldn’t say she wasn’t attractive.

She slowed as she came to what looked like a vast estate tucked away behind a tall screen of coconut palms. It was the behemoth hotel she had seen from the air, but like most of Waikiki it seemed more graceful and approachable up close. From the street it looked like a Moorish castle in pink stucco, its Spanish design and colors at once incongruous and felicitous, as if the coral reefs of Waikiki had spontaneously fabricated themselves into this pink palace. Eager for a closer look, Rachel wandered down the entry drive and onto the lushly landscaped grounds of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel. The rustle of the swaying palm trees was not so different from those amid the rice paddies and fishponds of Old Waikiki. Bamboo awnings shaded the hundreds of windows gazing down on guests strolling toward the Coconut Grove restaurant or up to the shops and sights of Kal
kaua Avenue. Fancy cars and taxis navigated a circular driveway to the main entrance, fronted by a pink portico; doormen helped passengers from their cars and through the colonnade to the hotel lobby.

Rachel loitered a few feet from the portico, taking in this magnificent structure, so much bigger than anything at Kalaupapa. Without even realizing he had approached, Rachel was startled by a doorman who asked gently if a bit condescendingly, “Ma’am? May I help you?”

His smile was a tad condescending as well, and Rachel’s response was sheer reflex.

“Why, yes,” she said. “You can take my bag.”

She held out her suitcase and the startled doorman took it with a little bow of his head. “Yes, of course. I’ll have the bellman bring it to your room.” He pointed to the lobby. “The front desk is right through there.”

Betraying not a trace of uncertainty Rachel smiled, thanked him, turned, and sashayed into the hotel. She didn’t dare do anything else!

The main lobby was tastefully appointed with Spanish tile floors, wicker chairs, and potted ferns; a succession of arched doorways echoed the colonnade outside. Rachel walked up to the registration desk, and with a straight face announced, “I’d like a room, please.” Some pragmatic inner voice inside made her ask, “How much are they?”

The desk clerk answered pleasantly, “For single occupancy we have a range of rooms from sixteen dollars to twenty-six dollars a night, on the American plan.”

Rachel tried not to look too stunned by that. In for a penny, in for a pound. “I take it the twenty-six-dollar rooms,” she said, smiling, “are made of fourteen-karat gold? With diamond doorknobs?”

The clerk laughed. “Yes, absolutely. But our sixteen dollar rooms are quite comfortable too.”

Well, why not? She had to stay somewhere until she found an apartment. And if she couldn’t celebrate her freedom with a little luxury, what was the point in being here and not in Kalaupapa?

“Yes,” she found herself saying, “that would be fine.”

A bellboy took her up by elevator—her first!—to the fifth floor, where she was ushered into a small pleasant room painted sea-green, with two beds, a vase of fresh flowers on a bamboo dresser, and a serene view of palm-shaded paths. The bellboy placed her suitcase on a luggage rack at the foot of one of the beds, opened the windows, and pointed out the amenities. Now Rachel became a little flustered: she knew she was supposed to tip him, but how much? Tentatively she handed him a quarter but by the incipient frown on his face she could tell it wasn’t enough; she handed him another, and that seemed to satisfy him. He tipped his cap and wished her a good day.

Rachel sank into one of the comfortable wicker chairs by the window and lifted her face to the cool breeze. She looked about at her surroundings and couldn’t help giggling. The Royal Hawaiian Hotel, good God! If her friends in Kalaupapa could only see her. If
Mama
could see her! “Sixteen dollars for a hotel room? Why not toss money in the street, use it to wipe the trolley horse’s behind?”

The thought of Mama spurred her to locate a telephone book, but a flip to the “K”s revealed no Dorothy Kalama, nor for that matter a Ben, Kimo, or Sarah Kalama. Rachel hadn’t expected to find Sarah; Papa had said she’d gotten married but he’d never mentioned her husband’s last name. For that matter even Ben and Kimo might not still be named Kalama. It wasn’t uncommon for Hawaiians to take an entirely different surname than their father’s, and it was even more likely if one of the family was known to have had the
ma'i p
k
. She sighed and put the telephone book back in its drawer; she knew it couldn’t be that easy.