To Paradise

“Well,” my mother said, “we should have them over for tea.”

And so, the following Sunday, they came. They couldn’t come on Saturday, I heard Jane tell my mother, because Mrs. Bishop had to work her shift. (“Her shift,” my mother echoed, in a tone that conveyed some meaning I couldn’t quite interpret. “All right, Jane, tell her Sunday.”) They arrived on foot, yet weren’t hot or flushed, which meant they had taken the bus and had walked to our house from the closest stop. Edward was wearing his school clothes. His mother was wearing another full-skirted cotton dress, this one hibiscus-yellow, her dark-blond hair in its knot, her lips painted a cheery red, even more beautiful than I’d remembered.

She was smiling as my mother approached her. “Mrs. Bishop, such a pleasure to meet you,” she said, to which Mrs. Bishop responded, as she had to me, “Please, call me Victoria.”

“Victoria,” my mother repeated, as if it were a foreign name and she wanted to make sure she was pronouncing it correctly, but she did not reciprocate the offer, though Mrs. Bishop seemed not to expect it.

“Thank you so much for having us over,” she said. “Edward”—she turned her beam to her son, who was looking at my mother with a steady, serious expression, not quite suspicious, but alert—“is new this year, and Wika has been so kind to him.” And now she turned to look at me, with that little wink, as if I had done her son a favor by talking to him, as if I had departed from my busy schedule in order to do so.

Even my mother seemed slightly taken aback by this. “Well, I’m very glad to hear Wika has a new friend,” she said. “Won’t you come in?”

We filed into the sunroom, where Jane served us shortbread, pouring the women coffee—“Oh! Thank you—Jane? Thank you, Jane, this looks delicious!”—and Edward and me guava juice. I had seen other acquaintances of my mother grow silent and awestruck in this room, which to me was simply a room, sunlit and dull, but to them was a museum of my father’s ancestors: the scarred wooden surfboard my great-grandfather, known as the Portly Prince, had ridden in Waikīkī; the daguerreotypes of my great-great-grandfather’s sister, the queen, in her black taffeta gown, and a great-great-cousin, an explorer who had a building at a famous university named for him. But Mrs. Bishop seemed unintimidated, and looked about herself openly, with genuine delight. “What a lovely room this is, Mrs. Bingham,” she said, smiling at my mother. “My entire family has always been great admirers of your husband’s family, and how much he did for the islands.”

It was exactly the right thing to say, done simply and well, and I could tell my mother was surprised. “Thank you,” she said, a bit stiffly. “He loved his home.”

For a while, my mother talked to Edward, asking him if he liked his new school (yes), and if he missed his old friends (not really), and what his hobbies were (swimming, hiking, camping, going to the beach). When I became the parent of a young boy myself, I was able to appreciate Edward’s composure, his apparent unflappability; as a child, I was eager, too eager, to please, smiling desperately through conversations with my parents’ friends, hoping I wouldn’t shame them. But Edward was neither ingratiating nor awkward—he answered my mother’s questions straightforwardly, without any pandering or apology. Even then, he possessed an unusual dignity, one that made him seem invincible. It was almost as if he didn’t care about anyone else, and yet that would suggest that he was aloof, or proud, and he wasn’t either of those things.

Finally, my mother was able to ask about Mr. Bishop: Certain members of the Bishop family had been distant cousins of my father, the way that all the old missionary families who had married into Hawaiian royalty were distant cousins—was it possible that there might be a connection?