Most of the money had been spent by the time my father joined the family firm, and he didn’t seem interested in replenishing its coffers. We’d spend weekends at the club, where we’d have lunch together—people stopping by our table to shake my father’s hand and smile at my mother; the slice of coconut layer cake, soapy-sweet and shagged like a carpet, that my father always ordered for me at the end, despite my mother’s protestations, placed in front of me—before my father joined his golf game and my mother sat with her stack of magazines beneath an umbrella near the pool, where she could watch me. Later, when Edward and I were becoming friends, I would stay quiet as he talked about going to the beach on the weekends with his mother; they would pack containers of food and spend all day there, his mother sitting on a blanket with her friends, Edward running into the water and then back out, in and then out, until the sky began to darken and they packed their things to leave. The club was near the ocean—when you were on the course, you could see stripes of it through the trees, a band of glinting blue—but we would never have thought of going there: It was too sandy, too wild, too poor. But I never said this to Edward; I said I loved going to the beach as well, even though, when we started going together, part of me was always thinking about when we could leave, when I could take a shower and become clean again.
It wasn’t until my father died that I realized we were rich, and by then, we were far less rich than we had been. But the kind of wealth my father had possessed wasn’t of an obvious kind—our house was large, but it was like everyone else’s, with a wide porch and a large, crowded sunroom, and a small kitchen. I had all the toys I wanted, but my first bike was secondhand, a hand-me-down from a boy on the next street. We had Jane and Matthew, but our meals were simple—rice and meat of some kind for dinner; rice and fish and eggs for breakfast; a metal bento box I took to school for lunch—and it was only when my parents entertained, and the candles were lit and the chandelier was cleaned, that the house looked grand, and that I was able to recognize that there was something stately in its simplicity: the dark, shining dining-room table; the smooth white wood of the walls and ceiling; the vases of flowers that were replaced every other day. This was in the late ’40s, when our neighbors were laying linoleum over their floors and replacing their dishware with plastic, but ours was not, as my mother said, a house of convenience. In our house, the floors were wood and the cutlery was silver and the plates and bowls were china. Not expensive china, but not plastic, either. The postwar years had brought new wealth to the islands, new things from the mainland, but here again our household did not indulge in what my mother considered trends. Why would you buy expensive oranges from Florida when the ones from our yard were even better? Why should you buy raisins from California when the lychee from our trees were even sweeter? “They’ve gone mainland mad,” she would say about our neighbors; she was dismissive of what she saw as their gullibility, in which she saw a kind of self-loathing for where we lived and who we were. Edward was never able to see that aspect of her, her fierce nationalism, her love for her home—he saw only the inconsistency with which that pride was expressed, the way she scorned other people for wanting the latest music and food from the mainland while also wearing the pearls she had bought in New York, the long cotton skirts that she ordered from her dressmaker in San Francisco, where she and my father had made annual trips, a habit she continued after his death.
Twice a year, the three of us would drive out to Lā‘ie, on the North Shore. Here there was a small coral-rock church for which my great-grandfather had been the benefactor since he was a young man, and it was from here that my father would distribute envelopes of money, twenty dollars for each adult, to celebrate my great-grandfather’s birthday and then the day of his death, by giving a gift to the people of the town his grandfather had loved. As we approached the church, turning off the road onto a dirt path, we would see the townspeople clumped around the door, and as my father climbed out and advanced toward the building, they would bow. “Your Highness,” they would murmur, these big dark people, their voices unnaturally soft, “welcome back, King.” My father would nod at them, offer his hands to be taken and squeezed, and inside, he would distribute the money and then would sit to listen to the best singer among them, who would sing a song, and then someone else, who would chant, and then we would get into the car and drive back to town.
These visits always made me uncomfortable. I felt, even as a young boy, as if I were a fraud—what had I done to be called “Prince,” to have an old woman, so old that she spoke only Hawaiian, bow before me, her hand clenching the head of her cane so she wouldn’t fall? On the ride home, my father was cheery, whistling the song that had just been performed for him, while my mother sat by his side, straight and silent and regal. After my father died, I had gone with her alone, and although the townspeople had been respectful, they had acknowledged only me, not her, and although she was always polite to them, she didn’t have my father’s good humor, or his ability to make people far poorer than he feel like his equal, and the occasion took on a strained quality. By the time I was eighteen, and expected to discharge this duty myself, the entire enterprise had begun to feel anachronistic and condescending, and from then on, my mother just sent an annual donation to the local community center, for it to distribute in whatever way benefited its members. Not that I was capable of being my father, anyway. That was what I had told her—that I wasn’t a substitute for him. “You don’t understand, Wika,” she had said, wearily, “you’re not his substitute. You’re his heir.” But she hadn’t contradicted me, either: We both knew I couldn’t equal my father.
Things changed after he died, of course. For my mother, the changes were more profound and threatening. Once his debts had been paid—he had liked to gamble and had liked cars—there was less money left than she had assumed. She had also lost with him a sense of security in who she was—he had legitimized who she always claimed to be, and without him, she would forever be defending her right to call herself nobility.
But the other change was that my mother and I were left with only each other, and it wasn’t until my father had left us that we both realized that it was he who had provided us our identities: She was Kawika Bingham’s wife; I was Kawika Bingham’s son. Even now that he was gone, we still defined ourselves in relation to him. But without him, our relation to each other seemed more capricious. She was now Kawika Bingham’s widow; I was Kawika Bingham’s heir. But Kawika Bingham himself no longer existed, and without him, we no longer knew how to relate to each other.
* * *
—
After my father’s death, my mother became increasingly involved with her society, Kaikamahine kū Hawai‘i. The group, whose members referred to themselves as the Daughters, was open to anyone who could prove noble lineage.
My mother’s own claim to noble blood was a complicated subject. Her adopted father, who was a distant cousin of my father’s, had been noble: He, like my father, could trace his family all the way back to before the Great King. But my mother’s origins were more opaque. As I grew older, I would hear various stories about who she was. The most common was that she was in fact her adopted father’s illegitimate child, and that her mother had been a fling, a haole cocktail waitress who’d returned home to America soon after giving birth. But there were other theories as well, including that she was not only not noble but not even of Hawaiian blood, that her mother had been her adoptive father’s secretary, and that her father had been her adoptive father’s manservant—her father had been known to prefer hiring haoles, because he liked to show off that he had the stature and money to have white people work for him. When she occasionally spoke about her adoptive father, she would say only that he was always kind to her, though from someone—who, I don’t know—I must have gotten the sense that, while he might have been kind to her, it was in a vague sort of way; he was strict with his own children, his daughter and his son, because he expected more from and for them. They had the power to disappoint him, but they also had the power to please him. They were embodiments of him in a way my mother was not.