Hotel Honolulu

4 ROSE

History happens to other people. The rest of us just live and die, watch the news, listen to the guff, and remember the names. No one remembers us, though sometimes we are brushed by those bigger events or public figures. My boss, Buddy Hamstra, was a celebrity, because he knew many of the famous people who had visited Hawaii. He talked about them as though to prove that these little islands were part of the world and he was part of history. Babe Ruth had stayed in this hotel in 1927, before the renovation, when it was the height of a coconut tree. So had Will Rogers. Buddy had played golf with another rascal, Francis H. I'i Brown, who was part Hawaiian. Francis Brown had known Bob Hope. Hope was a regular in the islands.

"Zachary Scott — cowboy actor — I knew him," Buddy said. "He used to come here a lot."

I said, "His ex-wife ran off with John Steinbeck." But that didn't impress Buddy, for he had never heard of Steinbeck.

Buddy had found Zachary Scott an island girlfriend. "They did the horizontal hula." He could manage such an introduction in a friendly, uncomplicated way that took the curse off it and made him seem a matchmaker rather than a pimp.

A significant request of this sort was made early in 1962 when Sparky Lemmo asked whether Buddy could find him "an island girl" — and the implication was that she would be young and pretty and willing. Buddy asked for more details. She was needed, Sparky said, to spend an evening with a visiting dignitary who was staying the night with his official entourage at the Kahala Hilton. The man's visit was secret, and he was so powerful he had not landed at Honolulu Airport but at one of the other airports — there were thirteen on the island of Oahu, including the military fields. The man had been brought to the Kahala in a limo with blacked-out windows.

"Howard Hughes?" Buddy asked.

It was the sort of thing Hughes was doing in those years, with his flunkies and his millions and his private jet. Sparky gave no details; a hesitation in his manner, when the name came up, suggested to Buddy that the man in question might have been Howard Hughes.

Yet he could have been anyone. Famous people came to Hawaii and famous people lived here. Doris Duke lived on Black Point, Glare Boothe Luce on Diamond Head, Lindbergh was in Maui, Jimmy Stewart had a ranch above Kona, Elvis visited Hawaii all the time. Famous people had famous friends.

"Bing Crosby?" Buddy asked. Crosby played golf in Hawaii.

Sparky just ignored that. He repeated that the man wanted a local girl, an island beauty.

"Ha!" Buddy Hamstra was triumphant. "So they can't find a wahine at the Kahala. They have to come to the Hotel Honolulu!"

He was pleased to be in demand, because even then his hotel's reputation had slipped. The Tahitian dancing on the lanai — his Pretty Polynesia show — only convinced people that Buddy was a rascal. And he was, which gave him some insight into how weak some men could be. He would say, "I never had to pay for it" — one of those men — but he was acquainted with the single-minded nature of desire.

"Tell me who the guy is," Buddy said.

Sparky indicated by tightening his face that he wanted to tell but couldn't. He said, "This man is very important. The idea is to find a girl who won't recognize him."

"Would I recognize him?" Buddy said.

"Listen, this is urgent. And not a hooker. Just someone who's friendly. A little coconut princess."

There was just such a girl, Puamana Wilson, who hung around the hotel saying that she was looking for work. Buddy had sized her up as a runaway and was protective of her. She had been educated in a convent on the mainland but had run away, and was still hiding from her family in Hilo. He gave her casual jobs in the kitchen, to keep her out of the bar and under the protection of Peewee. He put her up in a back room so he could keep his eye on her. If she stayed out of trouble, he might marry her when she got a little older. She was still a girl, twenty or so, immature for her

age because of the convent, freckled, funny, but experienced, as Buddy knew. She was sweet, not very bright, alluring in the pouty island way, half surf bunny and half shrew. She was simple and she was willing. But Buddy said, "I want her back."

Puamana was summoned from the kitchen. Even damp-faced, in her apron, she looked pretty.

"You're needed across town," Buddy said.

"What I have to do?"

"Just be nice."

She understood this and knew what to do without being told.

While she washed and dressed, Sparky offered Buddy a tip, which Buddy waved away, offended by the imputation that he was part of the deal or that it was a commercial arrangement at all. This was something between friends, he said.

With a flower behind her ear and wearing a pareu, Puamana left for the Kahala with Sparky Lemmo. Buddy was asleep when she returned.

Later that day he saw her in the kitchen — in a Tshirt and apron and rubber sandals once more — and asked her how it had gone.

"Beautiful room," Puamana said. "Was a suite."

How like Puamana to comment on the room and say nothing about the man or the money. So Buddy asked about him.

"He was stoked."

She said nothing else. And she grew quiet, staying in her room as though hatching an egg. Six weeks later, Puamana told Buddy she was pregnant. When the little girl was born, Puamana said, "She's hapa" — half islander, half haole. Puamana called her Ku'uipo, "Sweetheart," and with the birth she became a serious mother. She stopped flirting, saved her money, and devoted herself to her daughter, a lovely child who, before she was a year old, could totter across the hotel lobby and do hula moves without falling down.

That same year, President Kennedy was assassinated. Sparky stopped by the hotel and found Buddy Hamstra drunk and weeping. "I fought in the Pacific with that guy!" It wasn't true.

"He's the one that Pua cheered up at the Kahala Hilton," Sparky said.

Buddy said, "I don't believe it."

This sort of memory seemed wrong on a day when a nation mourned a man whose coffin was draped with Old Glory and pulled by six white horses on a gray caisson.

Buddy said, "Anyway, we'll never know the truth."

A short time after that, Buddy asked Puamana if the man at the Kahala could have been Sweetie's father.

"I never sleep with no one else that month," she said.

Buddy had watched her closely. The child had made her moralistic.

He said, "You know anything about him?"

"That howlie guy," Puamana said. She smiled as she thought of the man who had made love to her that night. "From the mainland."

"That's all you remember?"

There was a look of reminiscence like a particular memory in her smile of concentration.

"He had one beautiful bed," she said, and laughed a little. "But he wouldn't do it in the bed. He did it in the bathtub — warm water, just him laying there, me on top. And after that, standing up, his back against the wall."

"You never told me that."

"It was too crazy." She remembered something else. "He say he have a bad back."

That one detail, the so-called "White House position," everyone knew about Kennedy, if you knew about Kennedy at all. Though Puamana was innocent in an island way when she met him, and was an attentive mother, that one-night stand seemed to corrupt her. When she drifted into prostitution, Buddy took a greater interest in the little girl, Sweetie, and for a time she became his hanai daughter under the loose adoption system of the islands.

Buddy told me this story nearly thirty years later, after I had fallen in love with Sweetie and we'd had a child of our own. Sweetie wanted to call her Taylor, Brittany, or Logan. Logan? But I suggested Rose, and Sweetie agreed, though she didn't know it was the name of the child's paternal great-grandmother.