Hotel Honolulu

8 Child's Play

The California guest said to Rose, "I have to make a telephone call." He picked up a banana, held it to the side of his head, and began talking into it in a serious voice, saying, "Look, this is Ed Figland, and it's important that you bring the toys to the hotel right away, because there's a pretty little girl here who wants them."

Rose frowned at him. She said, "That's not a telephone."

"It's a cellular phone."

Another guest, Mrs. Charmaine Becker, hearing this exchange, laughed hard into her newspaper, rattling the pages.

"It's a banana," Rose said.

"But what about the toys?" Figland said, and the note of pleading in his voice seemed authentic, like the symptom of an illness.

"If it's not a telephone, how can there be toys?" Rose said, almost tearful in exasperation.

Figland, struggling to recover but still holding the banana like a phone, said to Mrs. Becker, "I guess when she sees the toys she'll believe that this thing works."

"What kind of toys?" Rose asked.

"Nice ones. Little dolls that talk."

"They don't really talk. They have a machine inside that makes a voice."

"How do you know it's not a real voice?"

"Because it's a machine and because it says the same thing ovgr and over," Rose said in a quaky voice. She was fighting the urge to scream at the man.

"But you can pretend it's real," Figland said.

And then she did scream. "It's not real!"

Speaking into the banana, Figland said, "What kind of little girl doesn't like dolls?"

"I like these," Rose said, showing her GI Joe in his combat fatigues, "but I know they're not real."

Looking up from her newspaper, Mrs. Becker, who also tried to play with Rose from time to time, said, "That's a doll, kiddo."

"It's an action figure," Rose said.

"Who said they were real?" Figland asked.

"You did. You said they talked."

"I didn't mean they really talked."

"What did you mean?" Rose was staring at Figland, who was stammering. Mrs. Becker moved her lips, encouraging him. There was both anger and pity in Rose's eyes, as though this sad ignorant man was trying to mislead her. She said, "Can I have that?"

"Want to make a call?"

"No. I want to eat it."

On another occasion, late one night when Rose was down with a cold but still feeling well enough to trail after me while I set the burglar alarm in the lobby, another guest, Harriet Najeeby, just arriving at the front desk, saw Rose and with wide eyes said, "I just made it! If I hadn't've hurried, that car would have turned into a pumpkin."

With feverish eyes, Rose looked at this white-haired woman and said, "It's a taxi."

"But it changes into a pumpkin at midnight."

"No it doesn't."

"How do you know?"

"Because it's a taxi," Rose said in a croaky voice. "A pumpkin is something you make into pies."

"And you pay 'taxis' to the government."

"Taxes," Rose said.

"What if I told you that taxi was pulled by twenty white mice, right under the hood?"

Her face crumpling, Rose turned away from Harriet Najeeby and said, "Daddy!"

Smart kid, these guests said, but I knew they didn't believe it. To them Rose seemed obstinate and flat-footed. No imagination. One guest who had failed with Rose said to me, "Kids are supposed to dream," and Figland seemed to hate her after his encounter, though he did not give up. Because my daughter was the issue, I began to watch Figland closely. He scratched dogs' ears, picked up stray cats and stroked them, bantered with waitresses, pinched the leaves off potted plants, engaged other children in conversation — all of that, I assumed, to draw attention to himself. But I saw that he was not malicious; he could be genuinely playful. His wife saw me watching him and said, "He's a kid at heart."

So I didn't intervene. Anyway, Rose could look after herself. She was not a child at heart. She was thoughtful, intense, a listener, a watcher, a rememberer, trying to make sense of the world from her child's vantage point, three feet off the ground.

Mrs. Becker and Mrs. Najeeby said Rose was cute. Figland said, "Great-looking kid." I suppose they were trying to reassure me, because she was of mixed race, a Hawaiian hapa. Get used to this, I told myself.

But Sweetie was head of Housekeeping, and Puamana kept odd hours and, except for exercise and her idiosyncratic work, stayed in her room on the third floor with her cat, Popoki. I did not tell anyone that Rose's grandfather was John E Kennedy, but I could see the features of the late president in her, the Irishness as well as the islands in her face, something about the mouth and the bright eyes. I often looked after Rose, and I did not object to her playing in the lobby. Other children fooled there, though not many. The Hotel Honolulu was better known for its scandals than its children's programs (Buddy, who liked the scandals, told me, "No hula lessons, unless they're horizontal"), and so like most visitors to Hawaii, Mrs. Becker and the Figlands left their children at home, if they had any.

"That man's silly," Rose said. "And that woman is a lolo."

Figland said, "This is a magic wand."

"It's a fishing rod."

"The fact that it looks like a fishing rod doesn't mean it can't be a magic wand," Figland said. "Why can't it be both?"

"Because there's no such thing as a magic wand," Rose said.

Keeping himself in check — I could see his shoulders rise toward his neck — Figland grasped the fishing rod like a horsewhip.

"So it's a fishing rod," Rose said.

But Ed Figland, seeking friendship, persevered, and on another day, when there was thunder, he said to Rose, "My mother used to tell me that thunder was the sound of the angels' bowling balls."

"Why are you joking me?" Rose said in a demanding tone, not so that he would reply but so that he would stop.

"It made me less afraid," Figland said.

He was a tall man who had to crouch in order to hold this conversation.

"What were you afraid of?" Rose wrinkled her nose and looked up at the bent-over man.

"The noise."

"Are you afraid now?"

"A little bit," Figland said, hesitating.

"Thunder won't hurt you," Rose said in the childish singsong that suits the childishness of pedantry, "but lightning can. It's electricity. Electricity can kill you. Never put your finger in the wall socket or you'll get a shock."

"So you're afraid too," Figland said, pleased with himself.

Rose faced him, narrowing her eyes in mistrust as though he had unfairly cornered her; and then she raised her head and with the breathy haughtiness that only a child can bring off, said to Figland, "I'm afraid of scabby people in dirty clothes who scream bad words and fight in the street."

Mrs. Becker tried too. She showed Rose a potted orchid and said, "This is a happy little plant."

"Plants don't have brains," Rose said.

"A plant can still be happy."

"You mean healthy."

Instead of intervening I simply listened and awaited Sweetie's approach, her scooping up Rose in the early evening and saying, "Time for your bath, Rosebud," and my stern, literal-minded daughter was transformed into a picture of smiling placidity.

"Say good night, Rosebud."

"Good night."

Mrs. Becker was smiling at the mother and daughter. In a little far-off hotel among palm trees and volcanoes, these visitors liked being reminded of the most humdrum rituals of domesticity, even more than being reminded of the palm trees and volcanoes.

"Time for swimming," Mrs. Becker said.

"Not swimming," Rose said. She glared at Mrs. Becker. "A bath."

Ed Figland, on his way through the lobby with a towel over his arm, heard the exchange and said, "When I was little I used to be afraid that I'd go straight down the drain when my mother pulled the plug at night."

While Mrs. Becker laughed softly and touched Figland's arm in appreciation, as though he had awakened in her a memory of infancy,

Rose said, "No one is little enough to go down the drain."

Upstairs, in the bathtub, she became exasperated again at the mere mention of Figland's name and said she didn't want to see him or talk to him. She did not use the words; she did not need to; but it was clear that she regarded Ed Figland and Mrs. Becker as irrational, shallow, and easily frightened, a skittishness that caused them to be unreliable, provocative, and unfunny.

Rose said, "I don't like them."

After that, these people kept away from Rose. Figland was much happier when his wife showed up and accompanied him. They went everywhere, in matching aloha patterns.

"That's the little girl I was telling you about," he said one day.

Mrs. Figland looked at Rose with disapproval, saying nothing. She had heard the whole story.

"Aren't you glad we never had any children?" she said, and soon after that the Figlands became friendly with Mrs. Becker and Mrs. Najeeby. I often heard their giggling at mealtimes and their shrieks as they splashed in the pool.