From Chapter One

Chapter I

“Oh God! For we were all swallowed up in a moment”

No memory presents itself of my first acquaintance with the sea. It was always there, and I was always in it.

One summer when my mother was recovering from a breakdown, we lived on the beach at Punalu’u on the north shore of the island of Oah’u. There were five children, of whom I was the eldest. That summer, I was eight years old. My mother was fairly irresistible. She was our leader. We would have jumped into a fire had she wished it. As it was, she had us jumping into the ocean.

I swam in the morning and again in the early afternoon. I swam at sunset. I would swim until I was tired, although not too tired to make it back to the beach. I found a hole in the reef into the deep water at the edge of the channel. If I swam far enough, I could see the big rock on the side of the mountain that marked the site of the shark-god’s burial place. Sometimes I was overcome by an inexplicable feeling of panic, as if there were too much beneath and above me. I feared that the ocean might suddenly curl me into a wave and fling me from the loneliness of Earth into the loneliness of space, and I would hurry back through the reef as if the ocean were trying to catch me.

As my mother became less and less rational, I grew convinced that I could see parts of bodies on the clean floor of the ocean. For some time, and to everyone’s bafflement, I would not go into the ocean. I spent my time instead with books, quickly exhausting the resources of the small provincial library where I discovered, among other things, that erotic masterpiece about Charles II, Forever Amber. I’d been given permission by the amiable librarian, a Samoan woman intent on converting me to Mormonism, to borrow books from the Adults Only shelves after she received a letter from my mother in which my mother duplicitously claimed that the books were for her own use. When I had read all of the library’s collection, I was allowed to order books by telephone from a store in downtown Honolulu.

The days were long, as summer days are for children in the countryside, and I found for myself a secret spot where I could read in a grove of coconut palms. The trees were said to have been planted by the King in 1830, and it was a cool and shaded place. There was the sound of the trade wind in the branches, and I could just make out the voices of my brothers and sisters in the water – the constant rush and sweep of the ocean made them sound like angry birds.

In the late afternoon, the men from the neighbourhood would gather on the lawn where they would play music through the night. I’d emerge from the grove each evening, books in hand, dazed and a little sleepy. By the end of the summer, and thanks to Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies, I’d returned to the ocean. I never left it again.

I know from my signature in the endpaper of Robinson Crusoe that I read it in March of 1954. I was eight years old, which seems hardly possible except that I recall reading it with great clarity. I was overcome by the idea of shipwreck. I suspect the unconscious was doing its work; my family, while high-strung, was not a shipwreck quite yet, but I divined its coming.

During the winter, we lived in the mountains in Tantalus, a fragrant rain forest, in a large 19th-century shingled house. In place of my palm grove in Punalu’u, I created my version of Crusoe’s island, complete with a lean-to made of palm fronds, stocked with old ropes, carefully-rendered maps of hidden treasure and hemp bags of dried fruit and stale bread. I had my own Friday in the form of my younger brother, Rick. It was then that I began to keep a journal about the sea by copying passages from the books I was reading. I began with Defoe, who led me to Stevenson and Conrad, among many others. I was very pleased to discover that Marie Antoinette read the Journals of Captain Cook while imprisoned in the Temple.

Hawaii was a ravishing little world. It was an isolated place, redolent with romance. Before the development of jet air-travel in the late 1950s, it had been difficult to reach the Islands – five days by ship from San Francisco (Los Angeles did not exist for us; it was thought to be a little vulgar). It was an hierarchical, snobbish and quietly racist society. This charming, even enchanting life of a mainly haole elite was to change, of course, but it lasted for a very long time.

The houses in which I lived were not of spectacular design; most often a vernacular version of a colonial villa, or a house of a simplified New England Greek Revival style with slender columns and a tin roof, or an oversized California bungalow in the Arts and Crafts style, sometimes grand with a screened Greene and Greene sleeping porch and porte cochère like our grey shingled house in Tantalus. Some children, those whose parents were architects or left-wing lawyers who represented longshoremen and other Communists, lived in more modern houses of poured cement and steel, one of which, I remember, was built rather snugly around a large monkeypod tree, suggesting that the growth of the tree had not been sufficiently calculated. Houses at the beach or in the mountains of Wai’anae, or Koke’e on the island of Kaua’i, were made of wood, well-constructed but extremely simple (not in a chic way), indistinguishable but for size from the cottages in the workers’ camps built at the turn of the century by Japanese craftsmen, sometimes to sublime effect with carved eaves and porch posts and tansu-like cupboards of ohi’a wood. The houses in the mountains had large stone fireplaces; the beach houses and sometimes even the big houses had outdoor showers. Occasionally, a porcelain bathtub was placed in the jungly part of the garden and filled when necessary with rainwater that was stored in large wooden tanks. This water was a rusty reddish-brown color and we used it to wash our hair as well as to bathe. Mainland guests who were unaccustomed to the collecting of rain thought that we chose to wash in dirty water but, out of politeness, never complained, and we did not know to explain. I sometimes worried about the tourists. I did not understand why they had come so far, excluded as they were from the secret and mythical world that I knew, and I was made anxious by the ease with which they were satisfied – a boat ride around Pearl Harbor to look at the sunken warships and the Kodak Hula Show with dancers in cellophane skirts seemed to suffice. It was the first time that I was to be confused by the difference between what people were willing to accept and what more there was for the taking.

The maids were Japanese; the cook was Chinese, sometimes Filipino. The gardeners were Japanese and the yardmen often the descendants of Portuguese plantsmen from the Azores. Hawaiians were never servants or gardeners; they were sometimes, but rarely, lawyers or doctors or schoolteachers – not because they were discouraged or deterred, but because it held little interest for them. It did not occur to anyone that they wished to be what is called professional, and to all appearances, they didn’t.

It took my young mother from Philadelphia, a newcomer then to the Islands, some time to relinquish her East Coast idea of how children ought to look and behave (sterling silver food pushers, like little hoes, to use before a knife was mastered, and tiny correspondence cards engraved with my initials suitable for enclosing with birthday presents). Big rectangular boxes noisy with tissue paper would arrive at the end of August from Best and Co. in New York with seersucker shorts and jackets for the boys, white linen blouses with red rickrack, plaid bathing costumes well elasticized, brown lace-up shoes, navy blue cardigans with faille trim, dresses smocked with little ducks, and piqué sun hats, but she gamely admitted her own particular failure of myth when we eventually rebelled and refused to wear the clothes. At home and when we were not at school, girls wore printed cotton mu’umu’us in unusually bright patterns, and Chinese pajamas with loose trousers, often of shantung or pongee, reaching to the middle of the shin. Twice a year, we were taken downtown to McInerny’s where clothes would be laid out for our approval by solemn Japanese saleswomen. The McInernys had been early residents of the islands and had done well, making it all the more thrilling to watch old Miss McInerny boldly stuff girdles, bathing caps, and evening gowns into worn brown paper sacks.

Each night, so we were told, Miss McInerny’s maid collected all the things that the old lady had stolen that day and returned them to the store, a system that seemed to please everyone, including us. We wore leis whenever we could (during the Second World War, lei-makers were put to work making camouflage nets), not only on special occasions, and flowers in our hair. Once freed of the Best and Co. boxes, my bathing suits were made for me at Linn’s, a small shop on Lewers Avenue, a shaded side street off Kalakaua Avenue in Waikiki. The bathing suit was always the same: two-piece, made of white cotton duck or yellow sharkskin; the bottom not quite a bathing suit but not tennis shorts either, with two vertical rows of buttons that made a flap in front like that on sailors’ trousers, and two thin vertical grosgrain stripes down the outside of each leg, usually in navy or red. They were astonishingly smart.

Bicycles were important. We often rode our rusty (the sea air) Schwinns to the old Waialae Country Club for lunch. As the club did not really get busy until the mysteriously named Happy Hour, we were able to commandeer one of the rickety green-felt card cables in the deserted Game Room, consuming egg salad sandwiches and Country Club Ice Tea (the d is not used at the end of a word in pidgin; it is ‘use cars’ and ‘barbecue chicken’) made with pineapple juice and mint, until we had played a few vicious rounds of greasy cards, at which point I signed the check and we decamped. It would be wildly self-dramatizing to say that we lived off the land, but, depending on the season, we did help ourselves freely (like Captain Cook’s Indians) to whatever was growing – mangoes, lichees, tart lady apples, Surinam cherries, liliko’i, guavas, oranges, bananas, wild strawberries in patches congested with poison-spewing toads, mint and watercress. There were one or two flowers that were unusually delicious to eat.

There were no fences, no locked gates, no marked boundaries or property lines, and we rode our bikes or roamed unconcerned through woods and plantations – to swim at Jackass Ginger pond in Nu’uanu, it was necessary to pass through many private gardens before reaching the waterfall. Much time, often at night, was spent in the trees, or on the beach, despite the mosquitoes and sand fleas, accompanied by two of our dogs, ungroomed and slightly foul-smelling (the salt water) black poodles, who were not then required to be on leads. We climbed the mountain called Koko Head – once named Kohelepelepe or Vagina Labia Minor – the fire goddess Pele was saved from being raped there by the pig-warrior Kamapua’a when her occasionally loyal sister, Hi’iaka, displayed her vagina to distract him – once innocently breaching the perimeter that a brigade of Marines had established in a war game and, to the curses of the officers, occasioning the failure of the operation.

I kept a large pet spider partly out of affection and partly to eat insects. She sat on my shoulder, retiring under my clothes to sleep. A red thread was tied to one leg (hers) so that I could haul her to safety should I wish to swim or lie down. I finally sat on her, and was somewhat relieved to be rid of her.

My youngest sister was placed eight months after her birth in my wicker bike-basket (lined in blue-and-white palaka) and accompanied us on all our jaunts. It is not an exaggeration to say that until she was two years old she lived by day in the bike-basket. I soon determined that it was too much trouble to pack and to change her cumbersome nappies (especially as there had been talk about the missing gross of diapers that I had tossed into the bushes when soiled), so she was naked. When we’d finished our gallivanting for the day, both she and the wicker basket were briskly hosed down.

I spent my entire childhood and adolescence at the Punahou School in Honolulu, as did all of my friends and my brother. We did not know many children from other schools. There were a few private schools that were Catholic, which meant that mainly Puerto Rican, Portuguese or Filipino children, segregated from us by social class and religion, even if we were Catholic. My second brother was a student at a private boys’ school called Iolani. The Kamehameha School, quite a distance from Punahou, held great allure for us. The school had been established in the 19th century by Princess Bernice Pauahi for children of Hawaiian blood. The Kamehameha boys, often very beautiful, and inaccessible to us in a subtle and unspoken way, were splendid athletes. We imagined that they had a familiarity with a sexuality forbidden and even unknown to us, perhaps because of their beauty and grace, but more likely because they were handsome boys with brown skin. We held the Hawaiians in a confused (not articulated or even understood) reverence.

There was a great deal of travel between the islands. This was so, in part, because there were few schools other than Punahou and Kamehameha that took boarders. As a consequence, my friends came from ranches on the Big Island and plantations on Maui and Kaua’i (adults went to Moloka’i only to shoot the slender deer that flourish in the eastern mountains, introduced in 1869 by the Duke of Edinburgh who’d had the deer pressed on him by the Mikado of Japan) and I would go home with them during the long holidays and the summer. I learned to drive when I was thirteen in a surplus World War II Army jeep in the cane fields of Kaua’i – my friend McCully Judd drove an Army tank, destroying beyond redemption Mrs. Johnson’s garden when he lost control of the tank one afternoon. That kind of visiting does not happen much anymore, perhaps because there are more schools on Maui and Hawai’i now.

We were not asked to wear shoes to school until the sixth grade, with the result that I could walk like a fakir over anything, including broken glass. I wore cotton dresses and, when it was very hot, pinafores, the latter causing me much embarrassment until I refused to wear them – I was so convinced that my featureless chest was exposed that I held my arms pressed to my sides, making the use of a blackboard or a baseball bat difficult. We ate lunch in the school cafeteria which was in its own building; it was thought a bit scholarship-ish if you carried your lunch to school in a bag or a pail decorated with a cartoon figure. It was possible to sit under a big monkeypod tree in the courtyard – when the tree was in bloom the petals dropped into your food. As at home, the menu was ecumenical – Spam, rice every day, inari sushi (which resembled the elbow skin of an old Japanese man), chicken hekka, tuna on damp white bread, char siu pork, Portuguese sausage, macaroni salad (known as mac), malasadas (sweet lumpy Portuguese doughnuts without holes), kimchee, Fritos, saimin (noodle soup), beef teriyaki on bamboo sticks.

I was passionate about my teachers. Some of them were shockingly young (it was rumored that in the upper school, known as the Academy, there was clandestine dating between some of the girls and the teachers – as a student in the Academy myself one day I can confirm that there was), in their early twenties, often from the East Coast, and I wonder if Honolulu was not a particularly good place to spend a year or two after leaving Yale and before moving on to a more suitable career (Viet Nam). In the second grade, I asked my teacher, Mrs. Corcoran, to have lunch with me one Saturday at the old Moana Hotel in Waikiki, signing my name to the check in a large left-handed scrawl. I have wondered why she agreed to go. I kept it a secret for many years. My fifth-grade teacher, a very attractive gentleman fresh from Williams, was, to my great distress, lost one summer taking a dugout up the Sepik River in Papua New Guinea.

After school, we would leave the grounds through the lower gate covered with night-blooming cereus (which we did not see in bloom until we were much older, being asleep in our beds by the hour that the big, waxy flowers deigned to open) to buy penny candy, preserved seeds of mango, plum, and cherry called see moi, and white paper cones of shaved ice flavored with artificial syrups in fluorescent colors at a tiny grocery. The store, called the Chink Store because of our unquestioned devotion to the Chinese husband and wife who owned it, had been patronized by Punahou children for generations. Away from school, I was sometimes chased by terrifying local girls called titas (from the Portuguese for ‘aunt’) who, for sport, did not take to haoles – the excuse for a chase was usually the absurd accusation that I had been staring at them. The signal for me to run was when one of them shouted loudly, ‘What? I owe you money?’

Once a week, I attended cotillion at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, held in a longhouse in the hotel’s then enormous garden. I was once required to leave in disgrace for surreptitiously turning on the fire-prevention sprinkling system concealed in the thatch roof (I was caught because I was the only one not drenched to the skin) and ruining everyone’s painful patent leather pumps, and once I was asked to leave for secreting a hat pin in my white cotton glove, the better to prick the balloon decorations, thus causing our instructor, the red-haired Mrs. Wallace, to fall to the ground holding her bosom as if shot. The classes, although sweaty, were useful in the end. I and my dazed partner (it was a far worse experience for boys) bumped across the polished floor in stiff but enthusiastic renditions of the box step, later to be revealed as the fox-trot by the amused older men I began to dance with when I was fifteen, usually at weddings.

I did not have many possessions. For some time, I was bewitched by a wooden dollhouse; a chalet from Switzerland, complete with tiny red velvet geraniums in pots and a clean cow barn with minuscule bundles of straw and threadlike brown leather halters hanging on painted hooks. A cloth doll from Jamaica with gold earrings and a bright red cotton head wrap, the kind of curio sold on cruise ships, held my attention for quite some time. I played with the doll and the house, wildly mismatched and the doll three times the size of the house, for perhaps too long, but I had little other than an endless supply of books, which was literally my salvation.

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From “Light Years” © 2007 by Susanna Moore and reprinted with the permission of Grove Press, an imprint of Grove/Atlantic Inc. First published in Great Britain in 2007 by Haus Publishing. Originally published as “Lichtjahre, oder Ein Madchen auf Hawaii” in 2006 by marebuchverlag, Hamburg/Germany. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.