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?
Mrs. Bishop laughed. There was no bitterness in that laugh, no falsity: It was a sound of pure merriment. “Oh, I’m afraid not,” she said. “I’m the only Hawaiian, not my husband.” My mother looked blank, and Mrs. Bishop smiled again. “It was quite a shock for Luke, a haole boy from a small town in Texas whose father was a construction worker, to understand that, here, his last name made him something special.”
“I see,” said my mother, quietly. “So is your husband in construction as well?”
“He could be.” Again, the smile. “But we just don’t know, do we, Edward?” Then, to my mother, “He left long ago, when Edward was a baby—I haven’t seen him since.”
I can’t say, of course, that men didn’t leave their families all the time in the early fifties. But I can say—and this was true even decades later—that to have your husband or father leave was something shameful, as if the responsible party was the abandoned, the wife and children. If people spoke about it, they did so in whispers. But not the Bishops. Mr. Bishop had left, but they weren’t the losers—he was.
It was one of those rare moments in which my mother and I were united in our discomfiture. Before the Bishops left, we learned that Sunday was Mrs. Bishop’s day off; the other six days, she worked as a waitress at a busy diner a few blocks from their house called Mizumoto’s, which my mother hadn’t heard of but Jane and Matthew had, and that she was from Honoka‘a, a tiny town, a village, really, on the Big Island.
“What an extraordinary woman,” my mother said, watching as mother and son turned right at the end of our driveway and walked out of sight toward the bus stop. I could tell she didn’t quite mean it as a compliment.
I agreed with her—she was extraordinary. They both were. I had never encountered two people who seemed less abashed by the circumstances of their lives. But whereas that lack of apology manifested itself in Mrs. Bishop as an irrepressible buoyancy, the kind of cheer that exists only in the rare people who have never felt embarrassed for who they are, they were realized in Edward as a defiance, one that in later years curdled into anger.
I see this now, of course. But it took me a long time. And by that point, I had already given up my life, and therefore your life, for his. Not because I shared his anger—but because I craved his certainty, this strange and wondrous notion that there really was a single answer, and that, by believing in it, I would cease to believe everything that had bothered me about myself for so long.
* * *
And now, Kawika, I will skip forward a number of years. First, though, I want to tell you about something that happened to me yesterday.
I was lying in bed as usual. It was the afternoon, and hot. Earlier in the day they had opened the windows and turned on the fan, but now the breeze had died, and no one had returned to switch on the air-conditioning. This occasionally happened, and then someone would enter the room, exclaiming at how hot it was, scolding me a bit, as if I had the ability to call out for them and had simply refused to do so out of stubbornness. Once, they had forgotten to turn on the air-conditioning at all and my mother had made a surprise visit. I had heard her voice, and her feet marching in, and then I heard her march back out again, and return a few seconds later with an orderly, who was apologizing again and again as my mother rebuked him: “Do you know how much I pay for my son to be looked after? Get me the manager on duty. This is unacceptable.” I was humiliated hearing this, being so old and still in my mother’s care, but also comforted, and I fell asleep to the sound of her anger.
Normally, the heat didn’t bother me so much, but yesterday, it was oppressive, and I could feel my face and hair becoming damp; I could feel sweat trickling into my diaper. Why won’t someone come help me? I thought. I tried to make a sound, but I of course couldn’t.
And then something very strange happened. I stood. I cannot explain how this happened—I have not stood for years, not since I was rescued from Lipo-wao-nahele. But now I was not only standing, I was trying to walk, trying to move toward where I knew the air-conditioning unit was. As I realized this, however, I fell, and after a few minutes, someone came into the room and started making a fuss, asking me why I was on the floor, and if I’d rolled out of bed. For a minute I worried she might strap me down, as has happened before, but she didn’t, just buzzed for help, and then another person came in and they returned me to bed and then, thank goodness, switched on the air conditioner.