Moloka'i (51 page)

Suddenly tired, Rachel stretched out on one of the comfortable beds and the next thing she knew it was close to six o’clock. She’d napped the afternoon away. Waking to waning sunlight gilding the walls, Rachel for a moment could believe the room was indeed fourteen-karat.

She washed up and went downstairs to the main dining room, getting a little lost on the way. When she finally entered the Monarch Room, she gaped at the high ceiling supported by massive pillars, the glittering chandeliers, the sparkling silverware on crisp white linen. She had never eaten in a restaurant before, but suspected she had started at the top of the heap. When the maître d’ asked her if she had a reservation she admitted she did not; but he merely asked for her room number and escorted her to a small table.

The menu he gave her was a window into another world: she wondered what on earth a “Consommé Royal” was, or for that matter “Borscht a la Russe” or “Navarin of Spring Lamb aux Primeurs.” Fortunately there were other options in both English and Hawaiian—a few too many in fact. Imagining each item would be a little sample, as at a
l
'au
, she inadvertently ordered two entrees—Filet of Opakapaka and Young Suckling Pig—and three vegetables.

When it arrived she ate all of it as though it had been her precise intention from the start, and was happy at least that the menu bore no prices, so the contemplation of the cost couldn’t spoil what was unquestionably the best meal she had ever had.

She listened to the orchestra perform a handful of tunes, then went for a walk on the beach. At last out of the long shadow of the
pali,
she saw the sunset for the first time in fifty years, a blaze of gold on the horizon; it was every bit as beautiful as she’d remembered it. She wished Kenji could have lived to see this, the two of them enjoying this new world together. She looked into the distance of the Kaiwi Channel, toward the island that had been both home and prison to her for most of her life, and Kenji left behind there.

“You would have known not to order two entrees,” she said with a smile, and blew him a kiss before returning to her room.

S

he knew she couldn’t afford to stay in a hotel, any hotel, for long, so her first order of business had to be finding an apartment. After breakfast she bought copies of both the
Star-Bulletin
and the
Advertiser
; her search of the classifieds yielded half a dozen prospects, which she then took the bus to inspect. The first was too expensive, the second too down at the heels, but the third, a furnished room on Beretania Street, was clean and affordable at $40 a month. When the landlord asked for references and her last address, unthinkingly she wrote down Kaiulani Street in Kalaupapa and the man’s pleasant demeanor chilled. His eyes went to her crippled right hand, then they clouded with fear; he snatched the application from her hands and promptly tore it up. “This no good,” he announced, “we got no rooms for you!”

Stunned, Rachel said, “You just showed me a room.”

“It’s rented. I make mistake. You go!”

She would soon discover that this landlord was more polite than most. The next, a woman renting out a one-bedroom apartment on King Street, didn’t even bother to make excuses. “What the hell you doing here? You unclean, don’t belong inna city with clean people!”

Rachel tried to tell her, “I’m cured, I’m no danger to anybody,” but the woman didn’t believe a word and flailed her arms at her. “Get outta here, get outta my house! I call police, they send you back to Moloka'i!”

Rachel stumbled onto the street, trudging wearily to the bus stop and the next faint prospect.

She wasn’t about to tell the truth anymore about her previous residence, but with no references she was shown the door almost as quickly. Some landlords deduced her origins on their own, on the evidence of her crabbed hand. One woman became hysterical, screaming for Rachel to get out, she had a child in the house; and an elderly man repeated the threat to report her as an escaped leper.

Rachel said, “I didn’t escape, I was released,” and took a step forward, hands spread peaceably, trying to make some human connection with him.

In panic the old man snapped up a crystal ashtray and hurled it at her. It grazed the side of her head, dropping her like a fallen deer; and as she lay stunned on the man’s filthy rug he screamed, “Get out! Dirty leper! Get out!” and ran for the phone.

Blood trickling down the side of her face, Rachel fled the apartment. She didn’t stop running until she was at least three blocks away. She pressed a handkerchief to her temple, and in the reflection of a store window she could see that it was just a tiny cut, nothing serious. But enough to make her want to cry.

Finally, at the end of the day, she found a rooming house whose landlord didn’t care that she had no references as long as she paid three months’ rent in advance. It was a dreary, one-room furnished flat on South King Street, with a Murphy bed and a greasy little kitchenette, overpriced at seventy dollars a month.

She leapt at it, signing the lease immediately, happy to have found it.

She spent a last night at the Royal Hawaiian but could no longer enjoy its dreamy fantasy. She knew what freedom really looked like now. She rose early to move into her new home, such as it was. Her neighbors ranged from salesmen and seamen to mothers with children but no husbands, and women who might have been prostitutes. But they all smiled and welcomed her, and one fatherless
keiki
even showed up on her doorstep with a batch of cookies his mother had baked. Rachel insisted he eat some of them himself, which—solely to please her, of course—he did.

She bought cleaning supplies and groceries at the Piggly Wiggly supermarket, itself a revelation to her: so many kinds of food, so many different brands! Rachel wandered up and down the aisles, frozen with indecision, overwhelmed with choices. Should she buy a can of Coral Tuna or Mid-Pacific Tuna Flakes? Star-Kist or Chicken of the Sea? Which was the better coffee: Schillings, Chase & Sanborn, Chock Full O’ Nuts, Maxwell House? For breakfast cereal there was an array of brightly colored boxes with inscrutable names: Kix, Pep, Cheerios, Post Toasties, Rice Krispies. Did she want to feast tonight on Eastern Grain-Fed Pork or California Stewing Chicken? How about Utah Yearling Leg-O-Lamb? What about her wash—should she use Oxydol or Clorox or Rinso? What on earth was Nucoa Sandwich Spread? Did the phrase “Boston Butt” on the meat package mean what she thought it meant? Why would anyone want to drink sauerkraut juice?

She bought fresh pineapple and papaya, deviled ham and bottles of big Greek olives, freshly ground chopped meat and plump lamp chops. She had to stop herself from buying more; it all looked so good! She also took home an armful of detergents and soaps, where she scoured a layer of grime from the windows and wiped rancid grease from the ancient stove. And as she mopped and dusted and scrubbed, her new home began to look . . . well, not as bad.

She slept soundly that night and the next morning went out intending to see more of Honolulu. She got more than she bargained for. There was an unusually festive atmosphere on the streets, with everyone she saw in bright
aloha
shirts or dresses; women wore fragrant plumeria blossoms in their hair, men wore red carnation
leis
banded around their hats or draped around their necks. There was an air of celebration as hundreds of pedestrians swarmed
makai
for some reason, and Rachel amiably fell in step with the crowd heading toward the harbor. “What’s all this about?” she asked one man, who looked at her as if she’d been living underwater and said, “It’s Lurline Day,” then moved on, leaving Rachel no more enlightened. No matter; she found the mere presence of so many people around her exciting. Being in a real city again, amid a crowd of faces she didn’t know, was strangely thrilling. She happily followed the crowd to its mysterious, irrelevant destination.

Suddenly a roar split the air above and Rachel looked up to see a squadron of Army and Navy planes passing low over the city and out to sea. Straggling behind was a tiny biplane trailing a banner reading ALOHA LURLINE. Who the hell was Lurline and how did she rate a welcome like this?

At the harbor Rachel was astonished to see an even larger crowd at Pier 11, where the Royal Hawaiian Band was playing. The music was nearly drowned out by whistles and sirens from a flotilla of tugs, sailboats, yachts, all making the loudest racket they could as their flags saluted in the breeze. Rachel at last understood what everyone was waiting for as the most enormous ship she had ever seen steamed into port—planes buzzing it in greeting, boats circling and blaring their horns. The ship was as long as an entire city block and from the waterline to the tip of its smokestacks it was as tall as a five-story building! And she laughed to see that, like so many people here, the steamship sported a colossal orange
lei
around its bow.

The crowd cheered as the SS
Lurline,
flagship of the Matson Line, arrived at the end of its first passenger voyage from San Francisco since service as a troop ship during the war. From her vantage point Rachel couldn’t make out all the ceremonies going on—a
kahuna
performing a blessing, the governor greeting the ship’s captain—but it didn’t matter. The ship itself commanded her attention, seized her imagination—a seafaring city out of Jules Verne, one of his “floating islands” like the
Nautilus
. It was hard to imagine anything so massive staying afloat; she was as impressed as she had been when waiting with Mama at the docks for Papa’s ship to arrive.

Over the next few days Rachel would discover how much had changed, and how much had not, in this new Honolulu. Kapi'olani Park was no longer laced with canals but was still quite beautiful, and there was an aquarium and a zoo nearby now. Love’s Bakery had moved long ago from Nu'uanu Avenue to industrial Iwilei, but the company’s delivery trucks—emblazoned with the Love’s logo and the motto BLUE RIBBON BREAD—crisscrossed the city, and it pleased Rachel to see them. Kaumakapili Church had burned to the ground in the great “plague fire” of 1900, as officials attempting to burn buildings contaminated by bubonic plague inadvertently wiped out most of Chinatown, and Kaumakapili as well. Another church bearing the name had been built uptown, in P
lama.

Gone too was Kapi'olani Girls Home, its doors closed in 1938, its remaining orphans placed in foster homes or with relatives. Rachel had hoped the sisters there could help her locate her daughter, but now all she could think to do was go to the offices of the Board of Health in the Kapu
iwa Building. “Oh, no,” the Chinese woman at the front desk told her, “only records we have here are birth, death, and marriage certificates. No adoption papers.”

Rachel thought a moment and asked, “Could the adoptive parents have filed for a new birth certificate? Maybe I could find out their names that way.”

The clerk shook her head regretfully. “Sorry. Three years ago, they change the law—all adoption records sealed now. You gotta go family court, ask the judge to unseal the records.” She gave directions to the courthouse. Rachel thanked her, started out, then turned back. “Did you say you have marriage records here?”