To Paradise

There was another person, however, who would have agreed with my mother’s characterization of the events that followed, and ironically, that person was Edward. Later, he would say that he had been “transformed” by that night at Hale Kealoha, that it had been a kind of resurrection. I believe he felt that. On the ride back to town that night, we had been mostly silent, me because I was uncertain what I thought about Bethesda and what he had said, Edward because he had been so thunderstruck by it. As he drove, he would occasionally strike the steering wheel with the heel of his hand, bursting out with a “Damn!” or “Man!” or “Christ!,” and had I not been so unsettled, I might even have thought it was funny. Funny, or alarming—Edward, who showed so little excitement about anything, capable only of expulsions of sound, rather than speech.

Bethesda’s lecture had been recorded, and Edward procured a copy. In the weeks that followed, we would lie on the mattress in the bedroom he was renting from a family in the valley, listening to it again and again on his reel-to-reel, until we both had it memorized—not just the speech itself but the audience’s angry gasp, the creak of the floor as Bethesda shifted his weight from one foot to the other, the crowd’s singing, faint and tinny, atop of which Bethesda’s occasional claps were like explosions.

And yet, even after that night, it took some months for me to realize that something irrevocable had changed for Edward. I had never known him (insofar as I knew him at all) to be a dabbler or a bounder, someone who vaulted from one enthusiasm to another, so it wasn’t as if I witnessed his increasing interest in Hawaiian sovereignty and thought it was just a phase—rather, I’m convinced that he hid something of his transformation from me. I don’t believe it was because he was being duplicitous; I think it was because it was precious to him, precious and personal and also to some degree unfathomable, and he wanted to nurture it in private, where no one could see it and comment on it.

But if I could date the beginning of his different self, it was probably in December 1970, about a year after we listened to Bethesda in that house in Nu‘uanu. Even then, my mother was largely unaware that Edward had reentered my life—he still dropped me off at the bottom of the hill; he had still never come to the house. Before I got out of the car, I’d ask him if he wanted to come in, and every time, he’d say no, and I’d be relieved. But one night, I asked and he said, “Sure, why not?,” as if accepting were a regular occurrence, based on nothing more than his mood.

“Oh,” I replied. I couldn’t pretend he was kidding—as I’ve said, he didn’t kid. And so I got out of the car and he, after a second, followed.

As we walked up the hill, I grew more and more anxious, and when we reached the house, I mumbled something about needing to check on you—on the days I brought you with me, I’d sit in the back seat and hold you in my arms—and sprinted upstairs to look at you, asleep in your bed. We’d recently moved you into a little bed of your own, low to the ground and surrounded by cushions, because you were an active, squirmy sleeper and sometimes rolled off the futon and onto the floor. “Kawika,” I remember whispering to you, “what should I do?” But you didn’t answer, of course—you were asleep, and you were only two.

By the time I returned downstairs, my mother and Edward had already encountered each other and were waiting for me at the dinner table. “Edward tells me that you’ve reacquainted yourselves,” she said, after we’d served ourselves, and I nodded. “Don’t nod, speak,” she said, and I cleared my throat and made myself speak.

“Yes,” I said.

She turned to Edward. “What are you doing this Christmas?” she asked, as if she saw Edward every month, as if she knew enough about how he normally spent Christmas to understand whether this year’s celebrations would be typical or unusual.

“Nothing,” he said, and then, after a pause, “I see you have a tree.”

He spoke neutrally enough, but my mother, already suspicious of him, and therefore alert, straightened. “Yes,” she replied, also neutrally.

“That’s not very Hawaiian, is it?” he asked.

We all looked at the tree in the corner of the sunroom. We had a tree because we always had a tree. Every year, a limited number were imported from the mainland and made available to buy at great expense. There was nothing special about it except its sweet, uriney scent, which for many years I associated with the entire mainland. The mainland was asphalt and snow and highways and the fragrance of pine trees, the country trapped in perpetual winter. We took no particular pains in decorating it—indeed, it was Jane who did most of the ornamentation—but this year it seemed more interesting than before, because now you were here, and old enough to pull on its branches and laugh when you were scolded for doing so.