The White Album (17 page)

At twenty-four she left all those opinions behind and went for the first time to live in Texas, where there were no trees to paint and no one to tell her how not to paint them
.
In Texas there was only the horizon she craved
.
In Texas she had her sister Claudia with her for a while, and in the late afternoons they would walk away from town and toward the horizon and watch the evening star come out
.
“That evening star fascinated me,” she wrote
.
“It was in some way very exciting to me
.
My sister had a gun, and as we walked she would throw bottles into the air and shoot as many as she could before they hit the ground
.
I had nothing but to walk into nowhere and the wide sunset space with the star
.
Ten watercolors were made from that star
.
”
In a way one’s interest is compelled as much by the sister Claudia with the gun as by the painter Georgia with the star, but only the painter left us this shining record
.
Ten watercolors were made from that star
.

1976

1969:
I
had
better tell you where I am, and why
.
I am sitting in a high-ceilinged room in the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu watching the long translucent curtains billow in the trade wind and trying to put my life back together
.
My husband is here, and our daughter, age three
.
She is blond and barefoot, a child of paradise in a frangipani lei, and she does not understand why she cannot go to the beach
.
She cannot go to the beach because there has been an earthquake in the Aleutians, 7
.
5 on the Richter scale, and a tidal wave is expected
.
In two or three minutes the wave, if there is one, will hit Midway Island, and we are awaiting word from Midway
.
My husband watches the television screen
.
I watch the curtains, and imagine the swell of the water
.

The bulletin, when it comes, is a distinct anticlimax: Midway reports no unusual wave action
.
My husband switches off the television set and stares out the window
.
I avoid his eyes, and brush the baby’s hair
.
In the absence of a natural disaster we are left again to our own uneasy devices
.
We are here on this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of filing for divorce
.

I tell you this not as aimless revelation but because I want you to know, as you read me, precisely who I am and where I am and what is on my mind
.
I want you to understand exactly what you are getting: you are getting a woman who for some time now has felt radically separated from most of the ideas that seem to interest other people
.
You are getting a woman who somewhere along the line misplaced whatever slight faith she ever had in the social contract, in the meliorative principle, in the whole grand pattern of human endeavor
.
Quite often during the past several years I have felt myself a sleepwalker, moving through the world unconscious of the moments high issues, oblivious to its data, alert only to the stuff of bad dreams, the children burning in the locked car in the supermarket parking lot, the bike boys stripping down stolen cars on the captive cripple
’s
ranch, the freeway sniper who feels “real bad” about picking off the family of five, the hus
tlers,
the insane, the cunning Okie faces that turn up in military investigations, the sullen lurkers in doorways, the lost children, all the ignorant armies jostling in the night
.
Acquaintances read
The New
York Times,
and try to tell me the news of the world
.
I listen to call-in shows
.

You will perceive that such a view of the world presents difficulties
.
I have trouble making certain connections
.
I have trouble maintaining the basic notion that keeping promises matters in a world where everything I was taught seems beside the point
.
The point itself seems increasingly obscure
.
I came into adult life equipped with an essentially romantic ethic, holding always before me the examples of Axel Heyst in
Victory
and Milly Theale in
The Wings of the Dove
and Charlotte Rittenmayer in
The Wild Palms
and a few dozen others like them, believing as they did that salvation lay in extreme and doomed commitments, promises made and somehow kept outside the range of normal social experience
.
I still believe that, but I have trouble reconciling salvation with those ignorant armies camped in my mind
.
I could indulge here in a little idle generalization, could lay off my own state of profound emotional shock on the larger cultural breakdown, could talk fast about convulsions in the society and alienation and anomie and maybe even assassination, but that would be just one more stylish shell game
.
I am not the society in microcosm
.
I am a thirty-four-year-old woman with long straight hair and an old bikini bathing suit and bad nerves sitting on an island in the middle of the Pacific waiting for a tidal wave that will not come
.

We spend, my husband and I and the baby, a restorative week in paradise
.
We are each the other’s model of consideration, tact, restraint at the very edge of the precipice
.
He refrains from noticing when I am staring at nothing, and in turn I refrain from dwelling at length upon a newspaper story about a couple who apparently threw their infant and then themselves into the boiling crater of a live volcano on Maui
.
We also refrain from mentioning any kicked-down doors, hospitalized psychotics, any chronic anxieties or packed suitcases
.
We lie in the sun, drive out through the cane to Waimea Bay
.
We breakfast on the terrace, and gray-haired women smile benevolently at us
.
I smile back
.
Happy families are all alike on the terrace of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu
.
My husband comes in from Kalakaua Avenue one morning and tells me that he has
seen a six-foot-two drag queen
we know in Los Angeles
.
Our acquaintance was shopping, my husband reports, for a fishnet bikini and did not speak
.
We both laugh
.
I am reminded that we laugh at the same things, and read him this complaint from a very old copy of
Honolulu
magazine I picked up in someone’s office: “When President Johnson recen
tly
came to Honolulu, the morning paper’s banner read something like
‘pickets to greet president
.
’
Would it not have been just as newsworthy to say
‘warm aloha to greet president’?”
At the end of the week I tell my husband that I am going to try harder to make things matter
.
My husband says that he has heard that before, but the air is warm
and the baby has another frangi
pani lei and there is no rancor in his voice
.
Maybe it can be all right, I say
.
Maybe, he says
.

1970: Quite early every morning in Honolulu, on that stretch of Waikiki Beach which fronts the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, an employee of the hotel spends fifteen or twenty minutes raking the sand within a roped enclosure reserved for registered guests
.
Since this “private” beach differs from the “public” beach only by its raked sand, its rope, and its further remove from the water, it is at first difficult to see why anyone would sit there, but people do
.
They sit there all day long and in great numbers, facing the sea in even rows
.

I had been an occasional visitor to Honolulu for several years before I entirely perceived that the roped beach was central to the essence of the Royal Hawaiian, that the point of sitting there was not at all exclusivity, as is commonly supposed on Waikiki, but inclusivity
.
Anyone behind the rope is presumed to be, by tacit definition, “our kind
.
”
Anyone behind the rope will watch over our children as we will watch over theirs, will not palm room keys or smoke dope or listen to Creedence Clearwater on a transistor when we are awaiting word from the Mainland on the prime rate
.
Anyone behind the rope, should we venture conversation, will “know people we know”: the Royal’s roped beach is an enclave of apparent strangers ever on the verge of discovering that their nieces roomed in Lagunita at Stanford the same year, or that their best friends lunched together during the last Crosby
.
The fact that anyone behind the rope would understand the word “Crosby” to signify a
golf tournament at Pebble Beach
suggests the extent to which the Royal Hawaiian is not merely a hotel but a social idea, one of the few extant clues to a certain kind of American life
.

Of course great hotels have always been social ideas, flawless mirrors to the particular societies they service
.
Had there never been an Empire there would not have been a Raffles
.
To understand what the Royal is now you must first understand what it was, from 1927 through the Thirties, the distant and mildly exotic “pink palace” of the Pacific, the resort built by the Matson Line to rival and surpass such hotels as the Coronado, the Broadmoor, Del Monte
.
Standing then almost alone on Waikiki, the Royal made Honolulu a place to go, made all things “Hawaiian”—leis, ukuleles, luaus, coconut-leaf hats and the singing of “I Wanna Learn to Speak Hawaiian”—a decade’s craze at country-club dances across the United States
.
During the fourteen years between the Royal’s opening and Pearl Harbor people came in on the Matson Line’s
Malolo
and
Lurline
and they brought with them not only steamer trunks but children and grandchildren and valets and nurses and silver Rolls-Royces and ultramarine-blue Packard roadsters
.
They “wintered” at the Royal, or “summered” there, or “spent several months
.
”
They came to the Royal to rest “after hunting in South Africa
.
”
They went home “by way of Banff and Lake Louise
.
”
In Honolulu there was polo, golf, bowling on the green
.
Every afternoon the Royal served tea on rattan tables
.
The maids wove leis for every guest
.
The chefs constructed, as table decoration, the United States Capitol Building in Hawaiian sugar
.

The Royal’s scrapbooks for those years survive as an index to America’s industrial fortunes, large and small
.
Mellons and Du Ponts and Gettys and the man who had just patented the world’s largest incubator (47,000-egg capacity) seem to differ not at all from one another, photographed at the Royal in 1928
.
Dorothy Spreckels strums a ukulele on the verandah
.
Walter P
.
Chrysler, Jr
.
, arrives with his mother and father for a season at the Royal
.
A figure on the beach is described as “a Colorado Springs society woman,” a young couple as “prominently identified with the young-married set in Akron
.
”
At the Royal they met not only one another but a larger world as well: Australian station owners, Ceylonese tea planters, Cuban sugar operators
.

In the faded photographs one sees mostly mothers and daughters
.
The men, when they a
re present, display in the main
an affecting awkwardness, an awareness that they have harsher roles, say as mayor of Seattle or president of the Overland Motor Company, a resistance to the world of summering and wintering
.
In 1931 the son of President Hoover spent time at the Royal, was widely entertained, caught thirty-eight fish off the Kona coast of Hawaii, and had his picture taken on the Royal beach shaking hands with Duke Kahanamoku
.
This photograph appeared in
Town and Country,
which also reported in 1931 that “the diving boys in Honolulu harbor say that fishing has been good and there are no indications of hard times in the denominations of coins flipped to them as bait from incoming steamers
.
”