Authors: Howard Fast
Back in the hotel, feeling stupid and totally disgusted with herself, Barbara hung over the toilet, vomiting up five cocktails and an assortment of canapes. Then she crawled into bed and had a night of restless sleep and bad dreams. It was past ten when Halliday called and said with excitement, "Absolute jackpot, my dear. Listen to this from the
Times:
'A totally disarming and deeply sensitive picture of Europe in the years before the war. The chapter on Berlin is unlike anything yet written about the Nazis, an understatement that makes the reader cringe with horror. Miss Lavette's command of her material is extraordinary in a new novelist,' and more of the same. The
Tribune
goes even further. Quote: 'Miss Lavette's book is more than a first novel. It's a sensitive, deeply moving record of a young woman's encounter with life
and
death. The love scenes, while explicit, are never prurient, and throughout the book there is a feeling of tenderness and compassion that is quite remarkable in a woman of twenty-seven. Not for years has this critic read a first novel of such sensitivity and promise.' End quote. There you are. What have you got to say to that?"
"It's lovely. Mr. Halliday, are you pleased with it?"
"Pleased? Barbara, I'm delighted!"
"Then you won't be provoked with me. I'm going home today. Back to the Coast."
"Oh, no. No, Barbara. You can't."
She put down the phone, pulled out her suitcase, and began to pack. She felt wretched, utterly worthless, and could not understand why the glowing reviews were meaningless to her.
Some two decades before, in the early twenties, Dan Lavette had entered into a business arrangement with Christopher and Ralph Noel, two brothers who were large landowners and even larger financial tycoons on the island of Oahu in Hawaii. Together with Dan, they had created one of the first great tourist hotels on Waikiki Beach at a time when it was still a lovely and sparsely used stretch of sand. It was Dan's notion that Hawaii, given the proper combination of cruise ships and hotels, could become a winter sunland for western America that would serve the same purpose that Florida served for the East. With the aid of the Noels' capital, the hotel came into being, and with the Depression, Dan's share in it went down the drain. However, there had been no bitterness in his abdication to the Noel interests, so that when Christopher Noel heard that Dan was coming to Hawaii with his wife, he had insisted that they be his guests.
Noel's chauffeur picked them up at the pier in Honolulu and drove them to the bungalow, a euphemism for the rambling twenty-two-room bamboo and hardwood home of the Noel family situated on two thousand acres of white beach, green lawn, and pineapple fields. The last time Dan and May Ling had been here, twenty years before, a sense of gaiety and relaxation had pervaded the place. The Noels then had a great luau, a Hawaiian feast, with several hundred guests. They had appeared to be living in an eternal now, without care or thought of the future. Twenty years older, the Noels had lost the carefree and bright blush of youth. Their children were at school on the mainland, and at dinner, the first evening after the Lavettes' arrival, Christopher Noel expressed their anxieties.
"We're living in a fool's paradise," he told Dan. "Back there on the mainland, they don't understand how wide open we are. This war is spreading over the earth like a disease, and the damn Japs are cuddling up to Hitler. When I was in Washington a few months ago, I tried to make them understand that. I spoke to Harry Hopkins, damned arrogant bastard. Looks at me and tells me, 'We don't expect Japan to enter the war. It's against her interest. The Japanese could not fight a major war.' No resources. Hell, Japan's got half of China for resources, but just try to make them understand that."
They were dining on the broad verandah of the Noel house, facing the white beach, the turbulent combers, with the setting sun turning a lacework of clouds on the horizon into a fantasy of red and lavender beauty. No talk of war could rob May Ling of her feeling of peace and beauty. This place was locked in her memories as the most wonderful spot on earth, and nothing could change that.
The group at dinner consisted of Christopher and Ralph Noel, both of them tall, slender, aristocratic-looking men, their blond hair turned white with the years; their wives, both of them curiously alike, small, dark pretty women, carefully gowned, carefully coiffured; Jerry Kamilee, an enormous, fleshy Hawaiian; his wife, part Hawaiian, part Japanese; and Dan and May Ling.
May Ling wore an old-fashioned, ankle-length Chinese gown of white silk, split at the sides and embroidered with gold thread in a design of pagodas, arched bridges, and tiny maidens with sunshades. Dan had brought the dress back with him after a trip to San Francisco, refusing to reveal what it had cost, and tonight was the first time May Ling had worn it. "You, little lady," Kamilee said to her, "have sold your soul to the. devil. We grow old and fat and tired, but you look no different than when we saw you twenty years ago."
"Ah, if that were only true," May Ling said. "Believe me, the enchantment is here. I listen to you men talk and grumble, and I suppose Adam grumbled the same way in Paradise. The truth is that there is no time here. It stands still."
"Oh, listen to her," Christopher Noel's wife said. Her name was Elii, and her family had been four generations in
the Islands. "No, my dear. Time doesn't stand still. I have
a mirror that proves it every day."
"She is right about one thing," Ralph Noel decided. "Here is the place. Stay here, Danny. My word, what do you have on the mainland that can compare to this?"
"A damn shipyard, for one thing. We're beginning to build them almost as fast as the U-boats sink them."
"What is the word back there? Are we going into this thing or not?"
"Our problem," said Kamilee, "is Japan. We underestimate them. Half of Hatti's family"—indicating his wife —"is Japanese. I know them a little. They are smart as hell, make no mistake, and damn near anything we can do, they can do better. And they want these islands. Jesus God, how they want these islands!"
"But there's no reason on earth for them to go to war with us," May Ling protested.
"When did reason have any part in making war? As far as they're concerned, it's their ocean. They want us out of it. Manifest destiny. They're sick with destiny. We sit here and grow pineapples and watch the sunsets and get fat and content. The truth is, we couldn't defend these islands against a troop of boy scouts."
"I still want to know what Dan knows," Christopher Noel said.
"What I know," Dan said, "consists of a mud flat called Terminal Island in San Pedro. A few years ago, Sam Goldberg—you remember him, my lawyer in San Francisco, dead now, poor guy—well, a few years ago, we took over a shipyard on Terminal Island. The bank practically gave it to us. Every shipyard on the Coast was dead, decaying, bankrupt, rotting away. Not a ship being built anywhere. Now—well, on our way out here, May Ling read me Coleridge's poem 'The Ancient Mariner.' I met up with my own ancient mariner. His name is Admiral Emery Scott Land, and he heads up a thing called the Maritime Commission, and he's been sitting on my back ever since. He's a man with a single obsession—ships. Now you want to know how insane this world is, I can tell you. A few years ago, you could walk along the waterfront in Wilmington, San Pedro, Long Beach, you'd see maybe two, three thousand men, just sitting, dying, rotting, pleading for a chance to clean a latrine. Now I have two men I pay a wage to, and they have one job. Find men. Find something that can walk and talk. They drive a truck through Orange County and L.A. County, and they stop men on the street, in the fields, anywhere, and ask them if they want a job with good pay. You ask me when we're going into this war? We've been in it. We're feeding England and arming England, and we're creating the biggest damn shipbuilding industry the world ever saw. And there's no way out. Suddenly, the Depression's over, and there's more money around than you can count."
"And Japan, Danny?"
"Before this is over, mark my word, there won't be a foot of ground on this earth that isn't involved."
That night, lying next to Dan, listening to the thunder of the breakers outside, May Ling said, "Danny, it's all changed—here at the Noels'. They've become old and tired and frightened."
"Time passes. People get older."
"But not this time, not here in Hawaii. I don't want to be old now. When we go back to the mainland, I shall become properly old and withered and take up knitting and do whatever an old woman should do."
"You are the strangest damn woman."
"I am. I am indeed. But right now, I feel very young and happy. Let's get away from here, Danny."
"Right. As soon as the yawl is seaworthy, off we go."
But the yawl, called the
Kahana,
had been up on the racks for a year now. It had to be caulked and painted and fitted with new rigging. Christopher Noel would not hear of Dan taking it out until it was completely seaworthy. He was somewhat dubious about Dan handling it without another man in the crew, but Dan insisted that May Ling was as good as any man on a boat. He had no intention of allowing any intrusion into their privacy.
Thus is was three weeks before they were able to set sail. The Noels were marvelous hosts, generous, unobtrusive, placing a car at Dan's disposal, diverting the Lavettes with dinner parties, luaus, theater evenings, and film showings in Noel's private viewing room at the house. May Ling guessed that even after all these years, they were haunted with a certain amount of guilt over the part they had played in the downfall of the Levy and Lavette empire. Dan and May Ling made frequent visits to Honolulu, where he was so insistent on buying anything she approved
of or admired that it reached a point where she didn't dare
comment on anything she saw in a shop window.
"Dan," she said, "you can't go on spending money like a drunken sailor." He had just bought her a string of ivory beads, each one a miracle of carving, made in China.
"I certainly can," he said. 'Do you know how much money we have?"
"No. I have no idea."
"You might as well know. I own the shipyard outright. Aside from the fact that no one stoops to talk about price these days, my lawyers tell me that the facility itself is worth a couple of million. When Sam and I bought it, it wasn't worth twenty cents."
"And if they stop buying ships? What happens then?"
"That's up to Hitler and Mussolini. If they stop sinking the ships, the government may stop ordering them. Isn't it a beautiful, stinking thing, May Ling, to get rich because those bastards in the submarines sink more ships than we can build? A ship is a thing of beauty, the result of two thousand years of planning and testing and modifying, a whole, fine precise world in itself, and we build them to be destroyed and get fat on the blood of the men who sail them. It stinks. The whole damn thing we call civilization stinks to high heaven."
"We're here in the Islands. Can't you forget about civilization for a few weeks?"
The day the Noels put the yawl in the water Dan and May Ling spent shopping in Honolulu, returning with their load of canned goods, smoked meat, beer, and wine. Dan bought everything from canned beans to caviar—to the disgust of Christopher Noel. "We have a larder that can feed an army," he informed them. Then he led both of them down to the dock to admire the boat.
"She's a Concordia," Noel told Dan. "Built in 1938 by Howland and Hunt. Essentially, she's a Buzzards Bay boat, built for the Atlantic waters off Massachusetts, which means she can take anything. They don't build boats like this on our side of the world, and there isn't another like her in the Islands. She's almost forty feet and she displaces nine tons, and still she sails like a witch. If worse comes to worst, you can handle her yourself. She has a Gray, four-cycle, thirty-one-horse motor, which won't send you scampering over the waves but will move you very nicely when you're becalmed."
"If I'm becalmed, I stay becalmed. My only hope of heaven is a small boat" Dan grinned. "By God, she is a beauty."
"She'll sleep two nicely, or four if need be. When Elii and I take her out, we spread mats in the cockpit. Plenty of room there if you like sleeping under the stars. She has a two-way radio, refrigerator, stove—everything the heart can desire. God damn it, I envy you. Where are you bound?"
"I thought we'd head southeast, circle the big island, and work our way back. Do some beachcombing. Say six or seven weeks."
"You've sailed a yawl?"
"I had a cutter that was yawl-rigged."
"The way the mast is rigged, she'll handle like a little catboat. And the weather's pretty good at this time of the year. The chartcase has everything you want for the Islands."
"I don't know how to thank you."
"I owe you," Noel said. "Just bring that lovely wife of yours back in one piece. We haven't seen enough of her."
Dan and May Ling left the following day, riding away from Oahu on a gentle easterly. They were in no hurry, and Dan left the small mizzen sail furled. May Ling was a good sailor. The wind held, and they picked up the heights of Molokai before dark.
The next five weeks were a time of peace and happiness and enchantment that Dan would remember and dwell on as long as he lived. They anchored in a tiny cove in Molokai where the sand was white as snow. They swam naked and make love on the sand under the hot sun. Dan let his beard grow. At night, they built fires of driftwood, and May Ling curled up in his arms and watched the colors of the flames. Then they sailed across the Kalohi Channel and found another paradise on the island of Lanai, and May Ling said to him, "Let's never go back, Danny."