He couldn’t completely understand Charles’s and his friends’ interest in their legacy. Sometimes at these parties, talk would turn to how they might be remembered when they died, to the things they would leave behind. Sometimes their tone would be content, or defiant, or, more often, plaintive; it wasn’t only that some of them didn’t feel they were leaving enough but that what they were leaving was too complicated, too compromised. Who would remember them, and what would they remember? Would their children think of how they had had tea parties with them, or read to them, or taught them how to catch a ball? Or would they instead recall how they had left their mothers, how they had moved out of their houses in Connecticut and into apartments in the city that were never comfortable enough for children, no matter how hard they tried? Would their lovers think of them when they were so bright with health that they could walk down the street and men would literally turn around to look at them, or would they think of them as they were today, as old men who weren’t even old, from whose faces and bodies people shied? The knowledge and recognition of who they were in life had been hard-won, but they wouldn’t be able to control who they became in death.
And yet who cared? The dead knew nothing, felt nothing, were nothing. When he told Eden of Charles’s and his friends’ concerns, she had said that it was a very white male fixation to be concerned with legacy. How do you mean? he’d asked. “Only people who have a plausible hope of being immortalized in history are so obsessed about how they might get immortalized,” she said. “The rest of us are too busy trying to get through the day.” At the time, he’d laughed and called her melodramatic, and a reactionary man-hater, but that night, as he lay in bed, he had thought about what she said and wondered if she was correct. “If I had had a child,” Charles occasionally said, “I’d feel like I was leaving something behind—like I had left my mark on the world.” He knew what Charles meant by this, but he was also puzzled by his inability to see the assumptions inherent in that statement: How did having a child guarantee anything? What if your child didn’t like you? What if your child didn’t care about you? What if your child became a terrible adult, an association you were ashamed of? Then what? A person was the worst legacy, because a person was by definition unpredictable.
His grandmother had known this. When he was very young, he had asked his grandmother why he was called Kawika if his real name was David. All of the firstborn males in their family were named David, and yet all of them were known as Kawika, the Hawaiianization of David. If we’re all called Kawika, why is our name David? he had wondered aloud to her, and his father—they had been at the dinner table—had made that little chirping noise he did when he was fearful or worried.
But there had been nothing to be frightened of, for his grandmother had not only not been angry, she had even smiled a bit. “Because,” she said, “the king was named David.” The king, their ancestor: He knew that much.
That night, his father had come to see him before he went to sleep. “Don’t ask your grandmother questions like that,” he’d said. Why? he had asked: She hadn’t been mad. “Not with you,” his father said. “But later, with me—she asked me why I wasn’t teaching you these things better.” His father had looked so upset that he had promised, and apologized, and his father had exhaled in relief and leaned over and kissed him on his forehead. “Thank you,” he said. “Good night, Kawika.”
He hadn’t the words for it, he was too young, but he knew even then that his grandmother was ashamed of his father. In May, when they went to her society’s annual party, it would be David who would walk into the palace with his grandmother, David whom his grandmother would introduce to her friends, beaming as they kissed him on the cheek and told him how handsome he looked. Somewhere behind them, he knew, would be his father, smiling at the ground, not expecting recognition and not receiving any, either. After the guests had moved outdoors for dinner on the palace grounds, David would sneak back into the building and find his father still in the throne room, sitting half shrouded by silk curtains in one of the window bays, looking out at the torchlit lawn.
Da, he’d say. Come join the party.
“No, Kawika,” his father would say. “You go, have fun. I’m not wanted there.”
But he would insist, and finally his father would say, “I’ll only go if you come with me.” Of course, he’d say, and hold out his hand, which his father would take, and they’d walk outside together toward the party, which had continued without them.
His father had been his grandmother’s first disappointed legacy; David knew he was her second. When he had left Hawai‘i for what he knew would be forever, he had gone to tell her—not because he wanted her approval （he had told himself at the time that he didn’t care either way）， and not because he expected her to argue with him, but because he wanted to ask her to take care of his father, to protect him. He knew that, by leaving, he would be forsaking his birthright as well—the land, the money, his trust. But it seemed a small sacrifice, small and theoretical, because none of it had ever been his to begin with. It had belonged not to him specifically but to the person who happened to possess his name, and he would renounce that as well.
By then he had been living for two years on the Big Island. Back he had gone to the house on O‘ahu Avenue, where he had found his grandmother in the sunroom, sitting in her cane-backed chair, gripping the ends of its arms with her long, strong fingers. He had spoken, and she was silent, and at the end, she had finally looked at him, once, before turning away again. “You’re a disappointment,” she said. “You and your father, both. After all I did for you, Kawika. After all that I did.”
My name’s not Kawika anymore, he said. It’s David. And then he had turned and fled before his grandmother could say anything else: You don’t deserve to be called Kawika. You don’t deserve that name.
Months later, he would think of this conversation and cry, because there had been a time—years—when he was his grandmother’s pride, when she would have him sit next to her on the love seat, pressed against her side. “I’m not afraid of death,” she’d say, “and do you know why, Kawika?”
No, he’d say.
“Because I know I’ll live on in you. My purpose—my life—will live on in you, my pride and joy. My story, and our history, lives in you.”
But it hadn’t, or at least not in the way she’d intended. He had failed her in so many ways. He had left her, he had rejected his home, his faith, his name. He was living in New York with a man, with a white man. He never spoke of his family, or his ancestors. He never chanted the songs he had been taught to chant, he never danced the stories he had been taught to dance, he never recited the history he had been taught to revere. She had assumed that she would be preserved in him—and not just her but his grandfather and his grandfather’s grandfather. He had always told himself that he had chosen to betray her because she hadn’t loved his father well enough, but lately, he had been wondering whether his betrayal was deliberate or whether it was attributable to something deficient within him, some fundamental coldness. He knew how happy Charles would be if, after one of their conversations, David would promise Charles that he would be Charles’s legacy, that Charles would always live on in him. He knew how moved Charles would be if he did. And yet he never could. Not because it wasn’t true—he would love Charles, he would tell all his future lovers, his future husband, his future son, his future colleagues and friends, about Charles for decades after his death: the lessons he had learned from him, the places they had visited together, the way he smelled, how brave and generous he had been, the way he had taught him to eat marrow, escargot, and artichokes, how sexy he had been, how they had met, how they had parted—but because he had had enough of being someone’s legacy; he knew the fear of feeling inadequate, the burden of disappointing. He would never do it again; he would be free. What he wouldn’t know until he was much older was that no one was ever free, that to know someone and to love them was to assume the task of remembering them, even if that person was still living. No one could escape that duty, and as you aged, you grew to crave that responsibility even as you sometimes resented it, that knowledge that your life was inextricable from another’s, that a person marked their existence in part by their association with you.