Hotel Honolulu

72 Stand-In

Being deaf in one ear, Peewee walked slightly lopsided, scuffing the sole of one foot, his head cocked to the side, his finger always at his bad ear. "Pacific" he said for "specific," and "pwitty good" and "pwoblem." And you had to shout. Even so, he heard everything Buddy had said about Brudda Iz. As though there were something moral in his hearing, he never missed anything that was unjust. Brudda Iz had the sweetest voice imaginable and could sing in the most plangent falsetto, Peewee said. He was the nearest thing there was to Hawaiian royalty; his size and his presence proved that.

"Don't talk to me about Whyan royalty," Buddy said as Pinky pushed him through the lobby in his wheelchair. "Most Hawaiian royals are gay or blond or howlie-looking or all three. They boast that they're ali'i, as though being a noble meant something."

"Don't it?" Peewee said.

"Only if you're Yerpeen," he said.

Peewee, a pacifist, just smiled and waited for Buddy to be rolled away on the rubber tires of his wheelchair. He reminded me of someone I knew well, but at first I could not make the connection. He was kind, generous, solicitous, most contented when he was pleasing someone. He

seemed very familiar to me in this, and I liked to be with him for this reason.

His long residence in Hawaii and his travels in the Pacific had left him half deaf, blotchy and liver-spotted, blind in one eye, and he was small, not much taller than my eight-year-old Rose. As a chef and a habitual sampler of his own cooking, particularly his creamy coconut cake, he was plumper than he should have been. He had had a heart bypass, and because a vein had been torn out of his leg, he got calf cramps when he walked upstairs. He was about seventy-five and uncomplaining. Because of his sunny disposition, he seemed to me a healthy man. He said his afflictions were part of being old. He had adjusted to them. "Lots of people have it worse than me." He was always bright — up early, accommodating, helpful to me, praising me when I was least deserving of it, as though to buck me up with encouragement.

To be with him was always a pleasure and a relief, for like many other thoroughly sane and healthy people I had known, he made me feel stronger and gave me hope for myself.

After a few years of working with Peewee, I was able to make the connection. As with Leon Edel, he had many of my father's traits: upbeat, no grudges, an avoider of conflict, not a forced smiler but a naturally happy man. Being with him was like being with my father, whom I had loved. Treating him like my father, I was rewarded, for he became more like my father. "I'm a hollow oak," my father had said in his old age. After my father had been dead for some years, I began to see that many kind old men resembled him in the way he talked, deflecting hostility, offering generosity. In his apparent meekness there was such strength it helped me understand the Sermon on the Mount.

Peewee did not contradict Buddy to his face, nor even behind his back. In a casual way he said that even if some of what Buddy had said was true, it wasn't the whole story. Hawaiians could be just as lovely or mean as anyone else.

"Back in the days when Buddy was happy, he used to get along great with the locals, and he loved Whyan music," Peewee said. "We played it at night, at sunset, and Momi would do the hula for him. I never saw a happier guy than Buddy."

Peewee had once been married to an island woman. "I feel a lot of aloha for them," he said, using a characteristic turn of phrase. When he thought of Hawaiian history he got miserable.

"These people were here when we came. It's their land. They are kanaka maoli. If you don't know that, you don't know anything," Peewee said. "But that's why history is so sad."

Nothing on earth was more beautiful to him than a woman doing the hula at sunset — and all women were beautiful doing the hula, no matter what they looked like when they weren't doing it. The music was sweet, he said, and even the corny tunes, like "Lovely Hula Hands," were wonderful. As for the shouted chants, they gave him chicken skin.

Hawaiian-style objects — the calabashes, the wooden poi bowls, the old fish hooks — pleased him. They might look simple but thought had gone into them. What looked to us like a pile of stones might be an altar to a Hawaiian, and when you understood it was an altar, you saw how important it was and everything around it; you knew why it was there. Buddy had once known that. You had to be happy to understand, and understanding made you even happier.

Peewee believed that Keola had a sixth sense. It was true, as Buddy had said, that Keola cockroached articles from the hotel — soap, shampoo, once a broom, now and then an ashtray or glasses. But these were incidentals. The important thing was that Keola was truthful: if you asked him about cockroaching, he would say, "Okay, I busted."

"You can watch a thief," Pewee said. "You can't watch a liar."

How often had my father said those words? It seemed to me that Peewee was there to remind me that my father was not dead. Seeing my father in him, I grieved less, and I saw that even here in Hawaii — older and far from home — I was still part of some great cycle and my father was nearby. It helped me to see my father in him; it calmed me; it eased my pain.

Only if you were happy, Peewee said, could you see that what was best in Hawaii were Hawaiians — their lives and their history as warriors, navigators, fishermen, music makers, lovers. Their legends were as dazzling and grand as any from the classical world — they too had giants and demons and magicians and fabulous beasts.

Nowadays, Hawaii was like one of those beautiful broken bowls of koa wood: you could admire the beauty in the separate pieces, and you could also see how some people were trying with little success, to reassemble it. The effort was worthwhile, yet it was impossible to make it whole again — too many pieces had been splintered or lost. Even if it were possible, it would still be no more than a patched wooden bowl, a fragile antique.

Some nights after the dining room closed, I saw Peewee in the kitchen, bent over the butcher-block table, reading a book obliquely, looking sideways with his one good eye, and the book might be James Michener or Robert Louis Stevenson. One day it was one of mine.

"What are you doing with that thing?"

"It's pwitty good!"

I did not know what to say. My father also read my books obliquely, as though with one eye, not knowing what to think, not seeming to connect the author of that scabrous book with the young man he knew as his son. A similar confusion seemed to exist in Peewee's mind, yet after he finished the book he treated me the same, as fairly as always. He was kind to people. I had known he was considerate by the way he treated Hawaiians, always as friends, because in the same way I knew what a person was like when, seeing me as a stranger, they dealt fairly with me. I liked being a stranger for that reason.

Some time later, Peewee said to me, "If you can write like that, why are you working at this hotel?"

"I wrote that book long before I came here."

"So what?"

"I haven't written anything here. I don't know whether I can." He would not be brushed off. He said, "You already proved you can write it."

Awweddy pwooved, he said, and wite. His speech impediment from his deafness made him sound wise.

"What would I write?"

"There's so much. Nobody writes about Hawaii really." Weally. "They don't see it. Buddy stopped seeing it — he's too worried about his health. It's not just the beach. It's the whole place, even the prostitutes." Pwostitutes.

I said, "You're so kind toward the local people."

"I'm local myself. I was married to that Tahitian girl with the tattoos. We were so happy. I was a chef at a restaurant in Kona. She introduced me to Whyans, and later I married one of them. We were all friends. They're good people. If you stay on the outside, you don't know them. If you get to know them, you understand."

"Everyone has something different to say about Hawaiians."

"Because they're anything you want them to be. If you see them as rascals, they'll hate you. If you like them, they will be your friend."

"So they're a reflection of your mood?"

"So to speak." He thought a moment. He went on, "I don't sentimentalize the Whyans. But I hate hearing Buddy badmouth them, because I know he doesn't really mean it. And it's somehow more cruel when you don't mean it."

"Maybe I should write about Buddy."

"People always say they're going to write about him, but they never do. They used to do interviews with him in the Advertiser, but they never sounded right."

"Buddy in paradise."

"This was paradise once. That was lovely — I remember it. Before Pearl Harbor. Before the war. I was just a kid. Of course, it's not paradise anymore. That's why I like the name you gave the bar — Paradise Lost — because the only place that can truly be hell is the one that was once paradise." He was silent and then said, "That's what makes Whyans so sad."