Hotel Honolulu

36 Another Death

"Pinky. She's coming in a few weeks, when she gets her American visa." What sounded like his chuckling was the ice in his drink.

At a family gathering to which I was invited that week — Bula, Melveen, all the rest of them — Buddy pulled a snapshot out of his wallet and held it up: Pinky smiling with her lips pressed together and the nail of one slender finger held against a dimple.

"Look at your new mother."

Buddy was drunk, in his thronelike chair, drinking while the others ate. He masticated the ice, his chewing giving him a crooked grin, and he shifted the noisy stuff to the side of his mouth like a dog with a bone in its bulging cheek.

Two days later I remembered Buddy's funny face with anguish. The eldest boy, Bula, called me and told me in a stuttering voice that his father had drowned in a fishing accident off the Big Island, near Earl Willis's place. It was something I had been both dreading and expecting from this reckless man.

"I think my dad would have wanted you to know first. Willis called from Puna to say that they picking opihi and my dad get hit by one wave

and he wipe out." After this hesitant explanation Bula honked, "They never find him!"

"Missing or drowned?" I asked.

I heard the bugling sour notes of the boy blowing his nose.

"Missing mean drowned!"

"I am very sorry." Then I remembered. "What about that woman from the Philippines, the one he married?"

It was so hard to think of her as his wife, I could not use the word.

Bula said, "Man, we need you help wid dis incredulous thing."

I was put in mind of a cruel folktale or a myth. The new wife arrives in a far-off country only to discover that her husband has died and she, a total strangei is the mistress of the house.

The moment I saw her at the airport, arriving in her cheap new traveling clothes and carrying her cheap old suitcase, after the nine-hour flight from Manila, I knew that I could not give her the tragic news. I recognized her from the video, though she was thinner, not smiling, watching nervously for Buddy.

"Pinky Rubaga?" I said, heading her off.

She looked wary and vulnerable, the way tired, rumpled passengers do just off a long flight, like people who have been interrupted while sleepwalking.

"Where is Buddy?" she said, stiffening with suspicion.

"This is his son Bula. He'll explain."

Bula was standing just behind me, breathing hard through what sounded like baffles in his nose. I could sense the damp heat radiating from him. He was big, his body a large, anxious parody of his father's.

When I looked again she had gone gray, her skin was ashen, and her face was dusty, as though decomposing with sorrow. She got into the back seat of my car and did not say a single word for forty miles.

"This the house," Bula said as I pulled into the driveway.

Pinky winced at the house and then, with an involuntary smirk of fear twisting her face, headed for the front door.

It was a two-million-dollar house on the beach, not pretty, even boxlike, a squarish, flat-roofed building. But big — three stories, with fluttering awnings, famous for its large size and the number of rooms, for the long dining table that could seat eighteen people, and for the wonderful view over the most dangerous surf breaks. She saw a castle with an entrance like a gaping mouth.

Pinky kept walking, through the open door, leaving her shoes at the bottom of the stairs with the jumble of sandals. She stepped back on the top landing and clutched her throat.

"What is that noise?"

It was the boom of surf, a long buffeting punch, traveling across the beach and through the house; when it subsided with a sigh, there was another, much louder. The winter swell had hit with its ceaseless cannonade. At the edge of the shore the breaking waves collapsed into a mass of foam that creamed the whole beach, sliding and bubbling to the foundations of the house, before percolating through the sand.

The family was waiting, though only the small children were active. Taunting, laughing, hogging the chairs, they seemed to be speaking for the others, who remained silent. Pinky timidly asked for a drink and was given guava juice.

She sniffed a flower. "Nice smell. Ylang-ylang."

It was a mistake to presume, and wrong, in that flower-loving household, to be so specific.

"Pak-lan," Melveen said, correcting her, and Pinky withered and went gray again.

Buddy's room had been locked and secured by Jimmerson, his Honolulu attorney, the day the news came of the disappearance. All Buddy's personal effects were there, with Stella's jewelry, and his photographs and curios, glass-ball net floats, fish traps made into lamps,

potted plants, the big-screen TV, the four-poster on which he had held court, the filing cabinets, the locked safe.

Pinky was taken to the guest room on the second floor, where she remained with the door closed. Sometimes the splintery sound of her weeping could be heard. After two days, she came downstairs, gripping the banister tightly. She looked unsteady, fearful, and a bit feverish, not ailing but seasick, and she walked as though on the deck of a ship in a rising storm. Her makeup had turned her face green.

Pinky found the telephone in the kitchen and, with a scrap of paper in her hand, dialed a number.

Melveen stared at her. "You know some people here?"

"I meet one on the plane."

Melveen's eyes were blank, and so were Bula's, but when they met, they shared the disapproval and uncertainty that was in their hearts.

"Mrs. Pinky Hamstra," the woman was saying into the phone. Everyone listened, everyone heard. Switching to her own language, there was a note of timid inquiry at first, and then a sudden screech of urgency, a sort of sobbing explanation, but her passion made it sound like a beseeching prayer spoken backward.

None of Buddy's eavesdropping children knew the foreign language they took to be Filipino. To them it was grief and a torrent of twanging talk and some sharp rejoinders that resembled warning barks.

This young woman was explaining her plight, one she felt was desperate, to a stranger who was quickly becoming her friend and confidante. They knew this without knowing the language.

When Pinky hung up and stared into space, her eyes glazed and vague with concern, Bula said, "You went invite this woman over the house?"

Somehow he knew that, too — that it was an older woman, that an invitation had been extended, that it was for a visit to the house, that the answer had been yes.

Perhaps it was deliberate on Pinky's part that she was playing with her wedding ring, twisting it against her small knuckle to make the stone sparkle. She was hesitating, as if working up the courage to speak. No one helped her, but after some moments of wringing her fingers she began to speak, asking for something, a keepsake, to remind her of her husband.

"Like a memory relic," she said. "Maybe a watch."

"He wearing it when he died," Melveen said. "Poor old kolohe bugga."

"This house his relic," Bula said. "You standing in one relic, Sister."

It made them sad to think how much had changed since Buddy had died. On the beach, staring at the surf with salty eyes, they were not thinking of the sea but of their father, tossed in it, pocked with fish bites and swollen, his corpse bulging against his clothes. They had seen such corpses on the edge of the beach some mornings, staring blindly at them

with dead eyes and big blue lips. They could not bear to think that he was being nipped by sharks.

The friend's name was Ronda Malanut. She simply appeared in the doorway one day, carrying a large handbag. She was dark and quite plump in a topheavy way — skinny legs, pot belly, large flat face losing its shape.

A gold tooth showed when she laughed her hungry laugh, but not when she smiled her scheming smile.

"I am here to see Pinky."

The woman's bag was full of candles. That afternoon a shrine was set up on a table that faced the ocean: Buddy smiling in a framed picture inscribed, Stick with me, Pinky, and you'll fart through silk, and surrounded by twenty twinkling votive lights and some scattered flower petals.

Pinky Rubaga spent most of the day in her room, except when she was changing the candles on Buddy's shrine. She kept fresh flowers in the vases and a garland hooked on Buddy's picture. Bula noticed that Pinky also began picking the ripe mangoes from the tree at the side of the house. What did she do with them?

Ronda made herself inconspicuous by being helpful. Now she knew where everything belonged and could empty the dishwasher without asking where to put anything.

A strange boy was eating breakfast one morning at the long table.

"Tony Malanut," he said, keeping his elbows on the table, smiling as he chewed.

He was Ronda's son, and he went on moving food to his mouth with stubby fingers. A bracelet with his name on it clanked on his wrist. He was short and stocky, in his late twenties, with a wispy mustache, a big square head, and dark, deep-set eyes. A noisy bunch of keys hooked to his belt made him seem idle and self-important.

"That red pickup yours?" Bula asked.

Tony nodded, his mouth too full for him to speak. He swallowed and said, "Dodge Ram. Turbocharged. Loaded."

"Blocking the driveway," Bula said. "So move it."

The place was filling with strangers — Ronda mopping the floor, Pinky tending Buddy's shrine, now Tony tinkering with his pickup truck. Far from making them seem like menials, these chores gave them an air of authority. Each time Ronda polished or dusted something, she seemed to be taking possession of it.

"I miss Dad," Bula said.

"I miss him too," Pinky said.

"How you go miss someone you know for two-tree days?"

"Five days," Pinky said. "Also five nights."

Bula and Melveen, who had remained in the house, resented their father for choosing this woman. They hated him for dying. They were angry that his business affairs were in such a mess. The bedroom was kept locked, the bank accounts had been frozen until the will could be read and probated. The Hotel Honolulu was his main asset, so I was involved. But the will was an enigma. Melveen, the executoi would not discuss it, taking her cue from Buddy, who had been superstitious about mentioning it.

Unable to enter into the grief, I had stayed away from the house. But one Sunday after a picnic with Sweetie and Rose on the North Shore, I drove past and saw a young woman sitting at a wooden table by the roadside. The table was heaped with green fruit, and on a hand-lettered sign was the word Mango's. The misspelling caught my attention, and so did the woman, who was Buddy's widow, Pinky.

"She say she need money," Bula explained the next time I saw him.

The strangers ranged more freely in the house. Tony Malanut started sitting on the lanai to watch the surf, his feet braced on the rail. Bula hated the man's feet. And that was the very spot where Buddy used to sit and drink, with Stella's ashes in one hand and a drink in the other as he studied the sunset for a green flash.

Buddy's shrine remained, swelling with flowers and trinkets, though the photograph of the man was darkened and its frame scorched from all the candle flames.

Bula called Jimmerson, and in the middle of explaining his anxieties, he became inarticulate and, struggling to speak, was overcome by a fit of sobbing.

"I can hear the concern in your voice," Jimmerson said. "I've been meaning to call you. Her lawyer's been in touch with me about the will."

Bula stopped weeping, and now his mouth gaped over the receiver. "What do you mean, 'her lawyer'?"

The reading of the will was held in a large conference room at Jimmerson's office in downtown Honolulu. Buddy's children occupied the first row of chairs. Pinky, Ronda, and Tony sat at the rear with their lawyer, Pagal, a middle-aged Filipino man with a lined, anxious-looking face, who kept his worn briefcase on his lap.

"Jimmy, I got a question before we start," Melveen said. "I thought this just the ohana."

"That's up to you."

"So what these people are doing here?"

Pagal, the lawyer, said, "May I remind you that this is Mrs. Hamstra."

Then came a voice from a side door that was swinging open: "Did I hear someone say my name?"

It was a familiar voice, gravelly, rising to a howl. Pinky screamed. The children turned. The grandchildren cried, "Grandy!"

"I'm back!"

It was Buddy, in a T-shirt and shorts, looking rested, grinning, holding a cellular phone in his hand. Only Ronda and Tony stayed seated, wondering who this man might be. Tony reached for Pinky, but she slapped him away and began to tremble, looking ashen, as she had that first day at Honolulu Airport.

Before Buddy could say anything, his children began screaming at him. Bula snatched at his shirt and smacked him repeatedly on the shoulder. The others brayed at him and pummeled him, while the grandchildren yelled and clung to his legs. Buddy was looking across the room at Pinky, who, having stood up, still seemed to be rising, as though unwillingly levitating in apprehension.

"Don't go!" He was laughing, but his face was grubby with tears.