Aloha, Mozart Read online

  “All gods and ancestors, they get respect,” Tūtū said.

  Again Maile nodded, although what she heard made little sense. Caucasians on Kauai were obvious outsiders who didn’t share their land, yet they were magically smart and successful, blessed by God. Chinese were smart too, but they could be real stingy. Where did she fit in with her pieces of this and that? All haole or all Asian: not so good. All Hawaiian: good, as long as you weren’t flat-out stupid, which could happen. Best was Hawaiian with a salting of haole and Pake. Yes, Tūtū, Maile promised, she would respect her ideal mixed heritage, but all she wanted was not to get caught next time she was tempted to break baby rules.

  Two days after the luau Maile discovered that a neighbor’s heavyweight fishing line could make spectacular bah-wing bah-woing noises. Its spirit begged to be let out for a run. Furtively she took the fishing line from a shed and strung long strands between trees for greater effect, being careful because the thick nylon was expensive. She sat down to wait for a breeze. On her left shoulder the devil she pictured as a cranky black chick began to hop up and down until its feathers stood straight out. A sudden wind rose, catching the lines and filling the air with fantastic sounds that made her head feel like a kite soaring up into a storm, music gone wild. An instant later the lines snapped and swirled into a giant knot, tangled beyond saving.

  The following week Maile borrowed a fine ukulele without asking, no crime until she accidentally sat on it. The violations continued, serious and not so, each having to do with music. Some folks excused them because the girl had a singer’s gift to reach people and trees and animals, even rocks and water. Others were less forgiving. Tūtū relaxed her rules, tightened them again, and was finally called to a meeting at the minister’s house.

  BY THE TIME the sampan left Nāwiliwili harbor, Maile was crying for her school friends, the minister’s dog, the radio. Her best mu‘umu‘u with the starched sleeve ruffles had already wilted. Beside her on the deck lay a heap of bananas, mangoes, dried fish, and jars of guava jam for her family in Honolulu.

  From the dock Tūtū called out, “Jesus bless you, sweetie!” Maile wiped her eyes and scowled. Tūtū couldn’t carry the fifty-pound bag of rice from the store anymore, and Maile could, but it had still been decided that the girl was too rascally for her own good. Was spoil rotten, ‘at’s wat. She needed her brothers and sisters. Tūtū accepted the decision with regret and made a phone call to Oahu that cost a whole dollar twenty cents. An exchange of children would take place.

  As the sampan turned toward the ocean channel and picked up speed, the wind whipped Maile’s hair across her face. “Remember where you born,” she heard Tūtū shout. “Kauai folks, they different!” She shouted more in Hawaiian, something about minamina, regret, and aloha pau ‘ole, unending love, her words lost in the slap-slap of choppy waves. Maile sobbed, no longer a temporary only child with a grandmother all to herself. She couldn’t understand why music wasn’t always a good thing, why it was also trouble, why everything in the entire world was always half of a pair—right and wrong, good and evil, kapu and okay.

  Beyond the breakwater, the sampan passed the last high green cliffs that formed a protective crescent around the harbor. People standing on the dock shrank to the size of pebbles on a beach, then to grains of sand that disappeared among the pilings. Maile turned to stare at the open sea. Within her the lower spirit she called pili shivered with dread. She had seen only a few old photos of her parents. There was one phone call a year at Christmas, shouting “Hello” and “Howzit” to children and adults she couldn’t picture. On the other side of the channel lay Honolulu, a city full of stacked-up buildings and swarms of cars that all went too fast. As soon as she landed she would be run down by drivers who didn’t even know her name. The boat split a wave, and spray shot up, drenching her. She gasped and crouched behind the fish storage chest, hugging her knees as she waited for the hours to pass.

  Half a day later at Kewalo Basin, several dozen relatives crowded onto the landing to greet the sampan from Kauai. The Manoa clan cried and sang for the nine-year-old son who was leaving, and kissed and hugged the almost-grown daughter who had arrived. Family members told Maile their names as they laughed and joked and wiped away tears. Children, elders, and adults carrying babies and Tūtū’s gifts filed onto a city bus. Borrowed for two hours, an older boy told Maile, “It’s special for us.” She had never ridden a bus and tripped getting on. He snickered. An aunt swatted him.

  The bus driver said to Maile, “I’m your father. You can call me Makua.” He kissed her and gave her a pīkake lei, flowers usually reserved for adults. Maile beamed. The dainty jasmine buds took hours to pick and string. She was pulled away to sit in back with the children and teenagers, and they rode off singing songs about the beauties of Kauai’s valleys and mountains, “Hanohano Hanalei,” and “Nani Wale Lihue.” Maile craned to look at the driver. “Makua,” she knew, was short for makuakane, “father,” like a Hawaiian version of Dad. So modern-sounding. She wondered where her mother was, and inhaled the intense fragrance of pīkake. New sounds assaulted her: the huffing of the bus, an airplane droning overhead, the whoosh of passing cars. Fast, so fast!

  Partway through the city, Makua stopped at a large building and said, “Come, Maile.” She got off with him and they were joined by everyone else who wasn’t holding an infant. It happened only last night, he explained; her mother was in the hospital and needed an operation. Half the relatives took the stairs to the third floor. Maile rode an elevator for the first time, more curious than worried, and she entered a ward as large as the Lihue Grammar School cafeteria. With her family she stood around a bed to gaze down at a sleeping woman with brown skin and black hair. For a moment they watched the white sheet pulse with the slight, gentle motion of her breathing.

  “Pīkake,” the woman murmured, and opened her eyes. “I smell pīkake.”

  Maile stood paralyzed with importance, prepared to say hello, to take off the lei and give it to her mother, but a nurse came over and ordered the visitors to leave: This patient needed rest. No one was allowed a kiss or a final word, and they all trooped back to the bus.

  At home more relatives waited. For Maile the weekend dissolved into a swarm of people who cooked, ate, sang and danced, told funny or boring stories, slept, played cards, washed dishes, and started over. The party flowed out into the road, where passersby joined in. “E, girl got a voice,” people exclaimed when Maile sang for them. “Hana hou, one more time!” She was startled to meet a group of aunts who worked as musicians, something she felt sure that Tūtū did not know. On Kauai singing for money was a disgrace. If God gave you a good voice, the only thing to do was share it.

  ON MONDAY, MAKUA went off to work. Ma stayed in the hospital. With school closed for the summer, Maile was just one of eight brothers and sisters still living at home, aged two to fifteen. None of them spent much time with Makua or knew much about either of their parents. Because, she soon realized, from sunup to sundown everybody was too busy: peeling, scraping, sorting and cleaning fruit, rice, fish, washing dishes, diapers, clothes, watching babies, little kids, old folks. Each morning it was get up, grab a clean blouse before a sister put it on, pick bananas for breakfast, feed the baby first, you heard me, and go chase ‘at mean dog come in again, e? Family members went to church, although Maile was surprised when several uncles lounged at home on Sundays and nothing was said. No one talked much about Jesus. After a month she felt that having a black chick and a white one on her shoulders was something only a first grader would believe.

  The family lived in the Papakōlea neighborhood of winding streets spread out along the hot slopes of Punchbowl Crater, two miles by foot from downtown Honolulu. The area unsettled Maile, a packed community of unpainted houses on both sides of badly paved roads, home to clusters of mixed-race families. The Manoa clan occupied a one-story four-room house with additions built onto three sides. A constant stream of relatives from elsewhere on Oahu came to borrow a sewing m
achine, return a loaned guitar, make vats of mango jam. Aunties were in every room. Older sisters with boyfriends sat outside on a sprung couch, and silent teenagers repaired a junked car until long past midnight.

  Maile ached for Tūtū. She wanted her own bed, not shared with little sisters, wanted a house for just two people, quiet enough to hear a breeze coming down from the mountains and rustling the leaves of all the different kinds of trees it passed through before reaching the noni branches where the chickens hid. Life at the edge of Honolulu felt like being part of a vast, ticking machine that could never be fully explored. Her relatives did not point out what was kapu. They didn’t discuss mana. She was drawn to the huddles of older girls talking about their monthly ma‘i, trading tips and secrets, although she wasn’t yet a woman and had nothing to share. Sometimes at night when the house was quiet she hummed O patria mia and thought about the word “opera” and the name Verdi. During the day she was alert for similar music anywhere in Honolulu, but heard none.

  FROM HER FIRST days in Papakōlea, Maile idolized her fourteen-year-old sister Jade, who considered herself more Chinese than Hawaiian or haole. Jade’s only explanation was, “I pull my Oriental side.” This impressed Maile, but Jade rejected her younger sister as a pest, and refused to explain the Chinese book and sticks she used to tell the future. Siblings closer to Maile’s age deserted her to go off with neighborhood friends. In her loneliness she charmed babies with imitations of a machete whacking into a stem of bananas, an overripe papaya plunging to the ground, a lizard’s peep-peepity-peep song as it flickered into a wall crack.

  Her brother Hermann, thirteen, noticed and followed her around, demanding, “Think you special, e? Watchu know bout downtown, country doodoo-head?” He set chewing gum traps and slipped cockroaches into her hair. She chased him up a mango tree. He pelted her with rotten fruit and mocked her outer-island pidgin and her Standard English carefully learned in school. She sharpened a thumbnail to pinch him until his skin bled, furious and shamed because she couldn’t talk like Honolulu kids: “E, we go spark cheerleaders,” or “You chocho lips, no more da kine.” She had never seen the football stadium, or tasted saimin soup with green onions and pink pork, or been downtown where everyone wore shoes. The only good thing about her new life was that the radio in the kitchen stayed on all day.

  Among reports on sugar and pineapple production, news of ships and storms, from time to time Maile heard snatches of music from distant places: cowboy songs, jitterbug, jingles for selling soup and soap. One morning there was a chorus of people singing one word at high volume, “Hallelujah,” over and over, voices rushing onward in complex rhythms, halting to sway down into a softer, slower mood, as if passing from a storm-swollen river to a quiet pool. An aunt paused in the kitchen, listened for a moment, then said with a sigh, “Fancy church music. Some mainland church.” Not-our-kind-of-music, Maile knew, something as unattainable as the lives she saw in movies. There was an unknown world outside the crowded house, and she wanted to grab it with both hands, but she had no idea where to begin.

  IN LATE AUGUST the entire household was roused just after dawn. Children were hustled into proper clothes and given fierce warnings to behave. Ma was finally leaving the hospital. Makua took off work to fetch her in his truck, and an hour later he carried his wife and the mother of their nine children inside to a room set up with only one bed. Siblings fought to be allowed to take in flowers and special treats that weren’t eaten, to tell Ma stories and ask questions that weren’t answered. As the girl who had never known her mother, Maile was easily elbowed aside. The older women regretted the absence of the one son living with Tūtū. Cancer, they whispered, the doctors cut off both Ma’s chi-chis but it spread anyway. Got her eggs. Then, you know, no hope.

  The dying took just a day. When the feet were cold, and the legs and torso, and the neck and face, and there was no sign of breath, the family elders began wailing, “Auwe, auwe, ua hala!” Their ancient howls embarrassed the teenagers and frightened the babies. At midmorning Ma’s few possessions were distributed: an ivory-handled hairbrush, a thin gold bracelet with black enamel, worn by court members during the monarchy period; for Jade, a deep green pendant on a gold chain.

  Maile received a small leather pouch with a silver quarter, on one side the Hawaiian coat of arms, on the other King Kalākaua’s profile and the date 1883. She stared at it in confused disappointment. Makua told her that the coin had been his wedding gift to Ma, the only thing left from his grandfather, the German. “Now ‘at quarter’s worth real money,” he added with tears in his eyes, “so you keep ‘im safe, e?” Maile nodded, crushed not to have something as personal as the brush, which had strands of her mother’s hair threaded in its bristles. She hid the pouch in a dresser, under the roach paper in the bottom drawer, which was hard to open and for that reason unused.

  During the week, relatives from all over Oahu gathered, but Tūtū did not come from Kauai. The only music everyone wanted to hear was Maile singing “Aloha ‘Oe,” over and over, as though the melody that vanished so quickly into the air around them could be held on to. She sang as often as asked, sensing the brief power it gave her over Honolulu people, but she felt only shallow grief for Ma. Her own breasts had begun to grow, which made her worry that she would also get sick, and get cut.

  On the last funeral evening, after the babies were asleep and the last food was packed up for the last relatives to take home, Maile was nowhere to be found. Auntie Lani became concerned. “That girl,” she told Makua, “first no more Tūtū, now she loses Ma. And our kids, they rough on her, you know.”

  As Tūtū’s oldest child, Lani was allowed to boss her younger brother Makua. She did not abuse the privilege because she and three sisters worked in Waikiki until midnight and needed a place in the city to sleep. In contrast to Tūtū’s enduring good looks, by middle age Lani’s features and figure had spread and sagged. She harnessed her vast bosom into a black brassiere that children stared at when they saw it hanging on the clothesline. Her eyelids drooped at the corners, her naturally broad nose had flattened more with each decade, and her wide mouth opened enormously when she sang. Each night after work the four aunties slept in until rampaging children made Lani rear up in bed to disperse them with a shout. Then she wound her waist-length gray hair into a topknot, lit a cigarette, coughed, and went out back to wash.

  Makua stared at his sister with a look of sleepwalking exhaustion. “Jus give ‘er time,” he mumbled, and wandered out front to help his brothers stack folding chairs borrowed from the church. An hour later Lani demanded to know if Makua was waiting for the police to call saying they had the girl. His drained expression didn’t change, but with his sister he searched every room, then the dark backyard, where they found a ladder leaning against the house. Makua climbed up and saw Maile sitting alone on the roof.

  “Watchin’ stars,” she replied when asked, “‘at’s all.” What she was unable to put into words was that the spirits she felt in her gut had expanded until she was overwhelmed: the dim ancestors, the upper spirit that remembered everything, and the rascal pili that remembered nothing but was always ready to go. Three souls, Tūtū had said. Everybody got.

  Auntie Lani wouldn’t stand for leaving Maile on the roof. “Fall asleep up top ‘n roll off?” She traded places with Makua on the ladder and coaxed her niece to come down. Inside the house she stretched Maile out on an empty couch for a massage and told her that she was now part of the aunties’ vocal group, Voices from the Reef. No back talk. Learn Waikiki songs. Get ready for your try-out day and turn pro.

  “Wad-evah,” Maile murmured.

  2

  MAILE LEARNED THE standard entertainer’s repertoire of seventy songs from her aunties, but she could only tag along with them after school, too young to work in Waikiki. She didn’t like the music at Robert Louis Stevenson Intermediate: Souza marches played by the band at assemblies, holiday tunes played on harmonicas. O patria mia and “Hallelujah” nagged her, so unlike pretty
Hawaiian songs. Sometimes the phrases ran through her mind, alternating with all the verses of “The Cockeyed Mayor of Kaunakakai,” memorized for the Voices from the Reef. She searched for a common ground, a connecting force of music, but found none.

  Once, during an English test, she was stopped by the first question: With two sentences, demonstrate the active and passive forms of the verb “to knock.” She had never understood why the last word was spelled like that, or how a language could be so twisted around with sounds that snapped and clicked and hissed off the tongue. The classroom was quiet with concentration, and in the stillness two sharply accented tones entered her mind: tok-tok. Not music, something much older, from her spirits. Tok-tok, distinct and unmistakable, a sound from a particular place, a hand slapping a dried gourd. First heard when she was about four years old, hiding behind a coconut tree on a deserted, rocky shoreline. Too young to join in, she had watched a group of hula students going down to a blowhole where a lizard goddess was trapped under the stones. Sometimes when a cresting wave struck the coast, the goddess cried out with a jet of seawater, but only if a certain dance was offered.

  The girls had lined up in silence. Their teacher knelt beside them with her tan gourd, shaped like the breasts and belly of a pregnant woman. In the calm, hot afternoon air, rain clouds overhead turned a darker and darker blue. The ocean below rolled in wide, heavy waves topped by a ruffled edge of white, looking calm but ready to respond if called in the right way. The platform of rocks baked under a bright afternoon sun that left ghost rims of salt around every tiny pool. Seaweed at the girls’ feet gave off a fresh green smell. The water glittered. No breeze stirred. Then tok-tok! on the gourd. A sound that had shot out in all directions, going into Maile’s bones, rapping on her spine.