Honolulu (24 page)

She laughed. “That might be one place you’d rather forget.”

“I cannot and will not. I went there alone and frightened, but a friend was kind and took me in.”

She seemed pleased, perhaps even touched, by this.

“Good luck, kiddo,” she said fondly. As she stepped out the door she gave me a small wave and promised, “I’ll keep in touch.”

But she did not. I neither saw nor heard from May Thompson again.

Yet, in a way-I did.

Some years later, I was reading the morning newspaper when I happened to notice a small advertisement for a motion picture about to open at the Princess Theatre downtown. It pictured a line drawing of a woman in a wide-brimmed hat, flirting with a man in a uniform, and the text surrounding it read:

STARTS
TOMORROW-2:45 • 7:45-
FOUR
DAYS

An Outcast Girl of San Francisco’s Underworld A Marine Sergeant-Pago Pago

Gloria Swanson

in

“
SADIE
THOMPSON”
THE
SCREEN
VERSION
OF “RAIN”

I found myself staring at the advertisement, the words not so much “ringing a bell” in my mind as jangling in some nagging, disjointed manner. It was not merely the familiar surname in the title that drew my attention, but its juxtaposition with other familiar phrases: “A Marine Sergeant,” “Pago Pago,” “An Outcast Girl of San Francisco’s Underworld”-the latter surely a euphemism for prostitution.

Even the badly drawn picture showed the character wearing a floppy white hat not unlike the one May-Maisie, as she was sometimes calledhad worn the day she had left aboard the SS Sonoma.

And then there was that line at the bottom: “The screen version of ‘Rain.”’

V never saw so much goddamn rain in my life. ”

I tried to dismiss it all as merely an odd coincidence, but despite my best efforts it kept bobbing to the surface of my thoughts. The film was playing here for only four days; if I wanted to satisfy my curiosity about it, I would have to do so soon.

The next day, Thursday afternoon, I went downtown to the Princess Theatre, paying my nickel admission for the 2:45 matinee of Sadie Thompson.

Raptly, I watched this story of a “painted woman” from San Francisco, Sadie Thompson-cheery, vulgar, sensual-arriving in Pago Pago, where she and the rest of the ship’s passengers, quarantined due to an outbreak of smallpox, are forced to stay in a rundown rooming house. There she loudly plays her gramophone, falls in love with a U.S. Marine stationed at the naval base, and runs afoul of a self-righteous “reformer” who pressures the governor to have her deported.

There the similarities to the story May told me ended: The man “Sadie” falls for isn’t Samoan but white-“Sgt. Timothy O’Hara”-and the film goes on to portray her browbeaten conversion by the reformer who himself turns out to be more human, and prey to sin, than he imagined. At the end of the film, Sadie Thompson remains in Pago Pago, eventually to marry her very white Marine.

It seemed almost a cruel parody of what had actually happened to May in Samoa. And there was one dialogue title that stuck in my mind for its eerie resemblance to what May said to me before she left Honolulu for the last time:

“I’m on my way-don’t know where but I guess I’ll get there. ”

Again, I tried to dismiss the similarities as merely coincidence. How could something that happened to a Honolulu prostitute, halfway around the world in Samoa, find its way to Hollywood and the silver screen? It was silly even to contemplate.

Yet I could not stop contemplating it.

The film was based on a long-running mainland stage play called Rain, which itself was based on a short story by one W. Somerset Maugham. When I went to the public library and inquired if they had a copy of the story, I was given a collection of Mr. Maugham’s fiction titled The Trembling of a Leaf.

The short story was titled simply, “Miss Thompson.”

With a kind of baffled wonderment, I read the story of Sadie, who fled Iwilei after its closure. Maugham described her as blond, pretty in a “coarse” way, curvaceous, and wearing “a white dress and a large white hat,” with white cotton stockings and white boots “in glace kid.”

This was, I remembered, precisely what May had been wearing that December day in 1916 when she boarded the SS Sonoma.

What’s more, Sadie Thompson not only looked like May Thompson, she spoke like her, with the same colorful blend of foul language and hard-boiled slang.

I went back to the library and asked the librarian if she knew what the “W” in Mr. Maugham’s name stood for. “William, I believe,” she told me.

William. “Willie”?

“Its nookie time, you bloody limey!”

Could it be true? And if so, how could I ever know for sure?

“You might try the `Passengers Departed’ column,” the librarian suggested. These were brief notices of passengers leaving, and arriving in, Honolulu-a quaint mainstay of the local papers for as long as I had been in Hawai’i.

I thanked her and, remembering quite vividly when May and I left Iwilei, I asked to see copies of the local papers from December 1916.

It did not take long to find. There on page eleven, column three of the Pacific Commercial Advertiser for December 5, was a list of travelers who had left Honolulu the previous day aboard the Sonoma:

“Somerset Maugham, Mr. Haxton, W. H. Collins, Miss Thompson.”

Aigo-it was true! They had sailed together and, almost certainly, stayed together in that rundown little boardinghouse in Pago Pago.

Little had May dreamed that the “uppity Brit” in the room next door-who “looked down his nose” at her, and whose pomposity she took such delight in puncturing-would one day exact his revenge on her by appropriating her for a character in a short story. He had even used her real family name, though not her given one. Perhaps he never knew it.

The whole world knows “Sadie Thompson” now, but surely I am one of the privileged few who knew the real woman on whom she was based. I knew her cheerful vulgarity-her cunning, her wit, her generosity-and her sorrow, shared with few, perhaps none, but me.

Today, as I sit looking at the tarnished old brass morning-glory horn of May’s gramophone-as brassy as May herself-I wonder whether she ever saw any of the three motion pictures inspired by this small but significant part of her life. In a way it is painful to imagine her sitting in a movie theater, watching as a private hurt of hers was laid bare, even in fictionalized, literally “whitewashed” form … and with a happy ending that likely never graced her real life. But somehow I doubt she ever saw the movie, or was aware of the revenge Maugham had taken on her. Because if she had seen it, I can’t help but envision her sitting in the theater in a righteous lather, as the lights come up and the last frame of film fades from the screen.

“Jesus H. Christ on a bicycle!” I hear her cry out, indignantly. “So where the hell is my piece of the take?”

The “Sadie Thompson” Iknew would have sued-and won.

Summer in Honolulu brings the sweet smell of mangoes, guava, and passionfruit, ripe for picking; it arbors the streets with the fiery red umbrellas of poinciana trees and decorates the sidewalks with the pink and white puffs of blossoming monkeypods. Cooling trade winds prevail all summer, bringing what the old Hawaiians called makani ‘olu’olu-“fair wind.” On one such radiant Sunday morning in July, I proudly slipped my silver wedding pin back into my hair as Jae-sun and I were married by Reverend Song. The ceremony was Methodist and our wedding attire American: My husband wore a dark suit and tie, and I, a white wedding dress I made myself. In other ways, however, it was a typically Korean wedding. Beauty and her husband appeared properly solemn, though Esther Kahahawai, here with Joey, was distressed by the wedding party’s somber demeanor, taking me aside before the ceremony to ask if everything was all right. I tried to ex plain to her that smiles were regarded as bad form at Korean weddings, and assured her that I was happier than I had ever been before. She looked at me as if this were the saddest thing she had ever heard, then accepted it with a small shrug. I was happy that one of my first friends in Honolulu could be here today, though I was disappointed that Joseph Sr.’s new job as a streetcar conductor kept him from attending.

The ceremony was a sunny antidote to my first, bleak dockside wedding. Afterward, Jae-sun and I toasted with a wedding wine called Jung Jong, and our guests feasted on a banquet that my husband himself had prepared, as well as Esther’s delicious pineapple cream pie. Joey gulped a little of the wine and got very light-headed. Gazing at the jolly smile on his face, I thought of my tipsy grandmother back in Pojogae and wished that my mother could have been here today. But of course I could not tell my family in Korea of my second wedding, any more than I could tell them of my divorce: they would have been mortified for me, and deeply shamed. Easier to simply let them believe, when in the future I would mention “my husband” in letters home, that I had had the same one all along. And we were forced to maintain a similar fiction-that of my “widowhood”-with Jae-sun’s church, or else we would not have been allowed to marry here at all.

Since our wedding coincided with the height of the summer pineapple harvest, and thus the busiest time of year for the cannery, our honeymoon was limited to a single day and night-most of it spent moving my belongings out of my tenement room in Kauluwela and into a slightly larger tenement room Jae-sun was renting on Kukui Street. I could not bear the thought of another wedding night at the Hai Dong Hotel, so we simply retired to our new shared home and suppered on leftovers from the wedding banquet. What this may have lacked in finery it made up for in feeling. I had longed for some trace of tenderness that night, three years before, at the Hotel of Sorrows; tonight I felt it in my husband’s every touch. For the first time I felt as though a man were actually making love to me, rather than merely drawing some selfish pleasure from my body. To finally know such joy and intimacy-such gladness of heart-was a bounty I had never expected, and afterward I wept for my good fortune, for the gift I had been given in Jaesun.

Then the next morning we arose, packed our lunches, and reported to work at the cannery.

Strange as it may seem, I liked this. I liked the fact that the happiest night of my life was followed by a day like any other. It seemed to say that such happiness, so long denied, was now a part of my everyday life.

“I will see you at lunch, yobo,” my new husband told me before heading to his job on the loading dock. I smiled. I liked the way he called meyobo- “dear.” I had never felt as though I were truly dear to anyone before.

In summer the cannery was in operation twenty-four hours a day, with three rotating shifts of workers to accommodate the tons of pineapple being processed. Jae-sun and I were soon assigned different shifts, and often the only time we saw each other was in passing on our way to and from work. But the end of the summer harvest also marked the end of my employment at Hawaiian Pineapple. By October I was pregnant; Jae-sun fretted over my being engaged in manual labor, and in truth we were both tired of seeing so little of one another.

I applied for work as a seamstress at tailor shops, dry-goods stores, dressmakers, laundries-all enjoying robust business in the wake of America’s entry into what was then being called the Great War. Honolulu was the base of operations for America’s Pacific fleet, and a major port for American allies like Japan-the presence of whose warships, slipping into the harbor like fat gray sharks, infuriated Jae-sun and other Korean nationalists. But it meant boom times for Honolulu’s tailors, who were kept busy fitting, repairing, and replacing uniforms for the men of the American, Australian, and Japanese military.

I was hired by a tailor named John Ku’uana, an affable Hawaiian with a small shop on King Street, directly across from the O’ahu Railway terminal. Since it was a short walk to the cannery, Jae-sun and I were able to continue our occasional custom of sharing a bento at lunchtime. At my new job I soon found myself doing everything from hemming ladies’ skirts to patching bullet holes in a seaman’s cap. The work was no less demanding than my job at the cannery, but it was far more satisfying and even paid somewhat better, close to a dollar a day.

I also learned much from Mr. Ku’uana about the history of clothing here in Hawai’i. For the many centuries Hawaiians had lived in serene isolation from the outside world, they had woven fabrics from the inner bark of the paper-mulberry tree-kapa, or “bark cloth.” Women and men alike had worn only a kind of loose wrap around their waists, but the missionaries quickly put an end to that. After trade with the rest of the world was established, Hawaiians enthusiastically began to import foreign fabrics-calico, cotton, gingham, satin, velvet, muslin-and adopted more Western-style dress. Women took to wearing long gowns called holokus outside the home and yoke-necked mu’umu’us inside it. Affluent men favored Western-style business suits, while laborers wore the rugged, checked palaka work shirts and “sailor mokus,” blue denim pants. Also popular was a Filipino shirt called the barong Tagalog, which was of lighter weight and usually worn loose over one’s trousers. At Mr. Ku’uana’s shop I often found myself assembling palakas from bolts of checkered cotton, but I was as likely to be asked to mend the collar on a Mandarin jacket, or to fashion a kimono from colorful yukata cloth that a customer had purchased from a dry-goods store like Musa-Shiya Shoten.

One morning in November, however, Mr. Ku’uana came to work with an unusually somber cast to his face. When I asked him what was wrong he grimly informed me that the waters of the harbor were filled with schools of ‘aweoweo-a bright red fish whose appearance inevitably tolled a death knell for Hawaiian royalty.

Tears came to his eyes. “It’s her time,” he said softly, and I did not have to ask who he meant; she had been in ill health for quite some time. On the following Sunday, November 11, as the red fish had augured, Queen Lili’uokalani passed away at the age of seventy-nine. The islands were draped in mourning for a week as the queen’s body was borne by hearse from Washington Place to Kawaiaha’o Church, to be viewed by thousands of grieving visitors who came to pay their final respects.