He tried to grin.
“Well, the big Swede wouldn’t have been a pushover for this babe you just saw if your friend Mrs. Cather hadn’t pulled a fast one the minute he got his back turned. That’s how she got poor old Ben. We’re damned if she’s going to marry the Swede too. So . . . the big Swede’s on your head—do what you can, will you?”
He dropped my hand and turned to pick up his cap. “Come on, David. Let’s shove. Let’s get the hell out. Let’s get the hell back to Saipan. . . .”
I sat there for several minutes simply staring after them, upset and shaken. Ben Farrell, the fourth of what they’d called the Organization when they came to batch next door to me, was dead, and he’d been married to the half-Japanese girl. And it wasn’t Swede’s aunt they were calling a she-buzzard. It was Alice Cather . . . the little Cather’s ma. The whole thing was incredible. Above all, how either Mary or her mother could be responsible for either Ben’s death or his marriage, was more than I could conceive. Or how they could call Alice Cather what they had, for that matter. If Alice was a she-buzzard she was also a genius at camouflage. I didn’t know her intimately, but I did know her well enough to know that much. Between her saying Swede had behaved very badly and Tommy’s obviously sincere conviction that both she and Mary had behaved worse, I was stranded on an unhappy and bewildering middle ground. I was very glad indeed that I hadn’t told Tommy or Dave—or Swede—that the two of them, Mary and her mother, were there in Honolulu, or that as soon as they left I was going to the Cathers’ to have dinner and spend the night.
3
I KEPT TRYING TO FIGURE SOME SENSE OUT of it as I waited for the major who was to come and take me to the Cathers’ house. They lived up the Pali road. To any one who thinks, as I did, of the Hawaiian Islands as a vast semitropical beach with girls in grass skirts dotting sunlit pineapple and cane fields, it’s a shock to find mountains everywhere. Honolulu spills into the sea out of a broad lee-side valley below folding hills, like the end of a great cornucopia made by two wild volcanic ranges. The whole windward side of the Island is a vast precipice above a narrow seaside plain and is called the pali, which means precipice. What is called the Pali is a sheer staggering drop of twelve hundred feet where there’s a narrow pass over the Koolu Range up Nuuanu Avenue from the swarming city. Because it’s the most dramatic place on the Island and I hadn’t been up there yet and we were early, my escort and I passed the Cathers’ entrance on the winding tropical road and went on up to see it.
I don’t bring this in because I’m writing a guide for the post-war tourist, but for two other reasons. The first is that when we got back into the car out of the tearing wind and sat a moment looking out over the narrow plain below us, it seemed to me there was an awful lot of deserted beach and rock-piled lonely coastline that was very vulnerable from the sea. And I’d been wondering about that.
“What’s to keep a submarine from landing people along there at night?” I asked. I knew we’d landed people from submarines ourselves. It wasn’t even necessary to surface to do it—they could be launched up from a hundred feet below if necessary.
The major looked at me a little oddly for just an instant. It was the sort of look I recognized from Washington, that’s followed by a more or less polite evasion or some slightly sententious humor. But this was not being taken humorously, and I was aware suddenly that however far from the forward area the Islands might at present be, they were a lot farther forward than Washington.
“May I take that back?” I asked quickly.
“Not at all. We used to have barbed wire along the beaches. There’s not much point in the Japs sending people in now. We still have patrols.”
He switched the motor on and turned the car back toward the Cathers’, and we went down in a rather sober silence.
The second reason I mention the Pali is that if I hadn’t been lashed to bits by the trade wind whipping across the platform up there, I wouldn’t have heard the redbird from the lanai outside Alice Cather’s sitting room. I suppose the view of the windward side of the Island, with its rocky steeps and the narrow plain sloping down in the evening light to an indigo sea, was both magnificent and enchanting, but I was such a battered wreck trying to keep my skirt, my hair and the plumeria lei the major had bestowed on me in their proper places that I wasn’t very appreciative.
The Cathers’ courtyard as we drove in was full of cars, most of them bearing star-studded plates on the bumper. A Japanese house man in a starched white coat took my bags from the car, and Alice Cather at the door gave me one look.
“You’ve been up to the Pali. Come with me, dear—you look awful.”
We went to the right along a passage away from the main quarters of the rambling house.
“I’ll wait for you here.”
She opened the door of her bedroom off a small sitting room that opened onto a lanai extending all around the house except at the entrance courtyard. “Your room’s over there, but it isn’t ready yet. You can get settled later.”
Where we came in, the house was one long low story. Here it was high above the slope of the hill, with a swimming pool below and gardens that ended abruptly in what looked like a minor pali itself before it rose up farther along, steep and heavily wooded, into a mountain against the solid cobalt sky. It was wild, rugged and silent, totally unrelated to the seething madhouse that surrounded the beach of Waikiki, which could have been a thousand miles away and in another country.
“It’s extraordinary, isn’t it?” I said.
Alice Cather turned and looked at me as if she’d forgotten I was there and was surprised to see me.
“Oh,” she said. “Yes. It is, isn’t it?”
She was standing with her fingertips resting on the redwood rail, slight and straight as an arrow, with gray eyes and light graying hair, exquisitely groomed, with delicate and what I think are called patrician features. Her manner was patrician certainly, gracious and charming with so firmly lacquered a surface that it was impossible to know what kind of a woman was actually inside it. Up to then I’d never been interested in finding out. I was, now, seeing her against her own background for the first time. And still being concerned with what Tommy Dawson had said with too much sincerity to brush lightly aside, I decided if he was right it was time I knew it.
“It’s quite extraordinary,” she repeated.
We turned to go back. There was a fireplace in the wall in front of us, and over it the portrait of a man. It was fairly modern and strikingly done. The man who had sat was striking too. He had large luminous dark eyes in a fine, sensitive face. He was lean to the point of thinness, and the way his dark hair clung to his skull, and the line of his long hands resting on the arm of his chair, gave him a peculiarly gentle and patient expression.
“That’s very nice,” I said. “Is it your husband?”
I stopped to look at it, and Alice Cather stopped too.
“No,” she said. “No. That isn’t my husband. It’s his brother.”
She laughed lightly.
“I don’t know why I said that. We let it go as my husband. Even Mary thinks it is. It was done when she was quite small, of course.”
“Were they twins?”
She shook her head.
“Just a strong family resemblance. Completely unlike in every other respect, I may say. But he’s dead.”
I thought for an instant she was going to add, “Fortunately,” but she didn’t. She was looking at it as if she hadn’t really