Honolulu (36 page)

The following Thursday morning I took the streetcar to Mrs. Quigley’s home in the Nu’uanu Valley. I had seen houses like these from the outside, and just once-Lili’uokalani’s home, Washington Place-from the inside, but I was completely unprepared for the luxury I found within the gates of the Quigley estate.

Past a broad green lawn, a winding stone path wended like a mountain stream through a grove of tall coconut palms. As I walked up the path, gardens of helliconia and Chinese jasmine bloomed on one side of me; on the other, birds sang from the branches of a huge banyan tree, which also shaded a small fishpond. I followed the stone “stream” to its source, and no mountain could have been more impressive to me than the imposing Victorian mansion I now approached, two stories high, long settled on seven acres of lushly landscaped grounds.

I ascended the front steps onto a wide lanai decorated with white wicker chairs, tables, divans, and fragrant laude ferns spilling out of hanging wicker baskets. I rang the bell and the door was answered by a Chinese servant who asked my name, then politely ushered me inside.

We passed through a hallway decorated with fine Oriental rugs and calabashes of flowers adorning antique tables, into a spacious living area-it was far more than merely a room-the centerpiece of which was a marble pool and fountain, a stream of water spouting from the mouth of a marble fish. I had never seen such a thing inside a home before and, as impressive as it was, I could not for the life of me see the purpose of having it, other than the restful sound of bubbling water. My impolite gaping was fortunately cut short by the appearance of Mrs. Quigley, who greeted me warmly, offered me tea, then turned me over to a woman named Mililani, who managed the household staff.

I followed Mililani up a winding staircase to the second floor, and as we passed at least five enormous bedrooms I asked, “How many people live here?”

“In the main house? Mr. and Mrs. Quigley, their daughter, two sons, and Mrs. Quigley’s mother. I live on the grounds out back. The gardener has his own quarters, too.”

I reeled to think of how much money it must take to keep this house and all its employees running, but as I would see, it seemed to do so quite effortlessly.

Mililani showed me into a sewing room that was almost as big as our cafe’s kitchen, and I spent the day doing a little bit of everything: mending lace doilies, letting out a few of Mrs. Quigley’s older dresses, repairing a satin bedroom curtain. I was treated like one of the family-or at least like one of the family servants-and for lunch was served fresh papaya and little cucumber sandwiches.

Later, a young woman about twenty years old with bobbed black hair poked her head into my room and introduced herself as Mrs. Quigley’s daughter, Eustace. “Oh, I just loved the holoku you made for me!” she said. “I hope you’ll make all my party dresses from now on. I think your work is just the bee’s knees!”

I assumed this was a compliment and told her I would be happy to do so.

Indeed, as I discovered, these kama’aina seemed to throw a party of some sort every other day: dinner parties, garden parties, dance parties, luncheons, afternoon teas on the lanai, picnics, horseback rides, and concerts. I never imagined anyone could enjoy so much free time as did these people. Mrs. Quigley asked me to assist with the decorations for one such garden party: I fashioned white tablecloths shaped like the blossoms of the pua tree, whose petals curved downward and so draped naturally over the lawn tables. These tables were then filled with a bountiful array of treats-coconut cakes, fruits, tea sandwiches, bowls of guava punch-the leftovers from which Mrs. Quigley insisted I and other employees take home. I watched from the window of my sewing room as men and women strolled the grounds, nibbling on little sandwiches and chatting as phonographs played Hawaiian ballads. I marveled to realize that there was a whole other Honolulu of whose existence I was only now aware: a Honolulu of elegant homes and gracious hostesses, where music was always playing and time passed as sweetly as a song. For the kama’aina who lived in this Honolulu, whose life was a long afternoon of amusement and painted sunsets, these truly were Hawai’i’s “glamour days.”

Or they were until September 18, 1928.

On that now barely remembered date, a ten-year-old haole boy, Gill Jamieson-a student at the prestigious Punahou School, as well as the son of the vice president of the Hawaiian Trust Company-was abducted from the school grounds and held for a ten-thousand-dollar ransom.

Nothing like this had ever happened before in Hawai’i-certainly not to a haole child. Everyone in Honolulu snapped up the newspapers’ “extra” editions as fast as they were printed. In these pages we were to learn of the ransom note the kidnappers had sent the boy’s father:

“We want you to have the utmost confidence in us,” it read, almost in the manner of an advertisement for gout remedy. “Have all fears swept aside. Do what we say and you will see your son again. Fight us and you will never see him again, nay, he will be but a shadow: lifeless.”

It was signed, mysteriously, “The Three Kings.”

The boy’s father paid the ransom-in marked bills, it turned out.

It is no overstatement to say that the crime threw the island into turmoil. The police placed a cordon around O’ahu, National Guard troops were mobilized, hundreds of ordinary citizens deputized-even some twenty thousand Honolulu schoolchildren were recruited to engage in door-to-door searches. (Oddly, no one at the time questioned the wisdom of sending children to look for a kidnapper.) Jae-sun was one of the many volunteers who helped comb the city, even as I watched over our own keiki at home, prohibiting them from playing anywhere but in the safely enclosed alley between buildings.

But sadly, on Wednesday morning, police found the body of Gill Jamieson hidden in some brush behind the cottages of the Seaside Hotel, near the Ala Wai Canal. He had been killed by a particularly brutal combination of strangulation and a tempered steel chisel to his head.

No parent could hear this without feeling heartbreak, rage, and worry; but haoles in particular were shaken to discover that the bubble of privilege and security in which they had long lived no longer protected them from the sort of brutal crime the “other” Honolulu had always been prey to.

Because witnesses had identified the Punahou kidnapper as Asian, suspicion had quickly fallen on twenty-year-old Henry Kaisan, a former chauffeur for the Jamieson family. Kaisan was repeatedly interrogated, but just as repeatedly denied any connection with the crime. Chief of Detectives John McIntosh told the press he was “convinced that Kaisan has knowledge that will be of benefit to the police in the solution of the case.”

But a number of prominent haole citizens, dissatisfied with the lack of progress their police department was making, allowed panic to override their good sense and organized a group calling itself the Vigilante Corps, to seek their own justice.

That weekend our friend Taizo told us how, close to midnight, he had been readying his boat to go out the next morning when he saw members of the Vigilante Corps gathering on Pier 2, calmly debating whether or not to storm the police station and administer their own justice to Henry Kaisan.

“Then they see me looking at them, and listening,” he said, “and I think: If they can’t get Kaisan, they settle for me. I said hell with the next day’s catch, and hurried home.”

We kept the cafe closed that night, just in case violence were to erupt. None did, but it was a long, tense night and we barely slept more than a few hours.

Then, on Saturday, a marked ransom bill led to the arrest of one Myles Fukunaga, a nineteen-year-old elevator operator at the Seaside Hotel. The young man promptly confessed to the police that he, acting alone, had kidnapped and slain the boy in a scheme to get money for his parents, who owed twenty dollars in back rent on their home to the Hawaiian Trust Company, and who, Myles felt, had been humiliated in the bank’s attempt to collect the money.

“I killed the boy to bring happiness to my family, my mother and father,” he told a newspaper reporter. “In their life they have always had many troubles.

“I expect and hope for the death penalty. It would be too awful to have to think about it for the rest of my life. I’d rather die.

“I know what is right and what is wrong-and I know I did wrong.” He concluded, quite emphatically: “I am not insane. I am perfectly sane.”

He asked for swift, merciless justice-and he received it. His trial began promptly on October 3; his court-appointed counsel didn’t put on much of a defense, declining to call any witnesses. The state refused to allow a psychiatric examination of Fukunaga, despite the fact that he had tried to take his own life just six months before the kidnapping. After only two days of trial and deliberation, a jury unanimously convicted Myles Fukunaga of firstdegree murder. Under territorial law this carried with it a probable sentence of death by hanging.

This was still more merciful than the death poor Gill Jamieson had suffered, and I shed no tears over Fukunaga’s fate. But Tamiko pointed out to me that not long ago a haole man had poured gasoline over a Japanese plantation worker, then set him on fire, and was only charged with manslaughter. “And even then,” she said, “the jury acquitted him.” She thought the verdict in the Jamieson case was partly a product of anti-Japanese sentiment. There was truth in what she said, but at the time I believed that Myles Fukunaga had helped convict himself with his stubborn assertion that he knew right from wrong: “I am not insane. ” The jury merely took him at his word.

Or perhaps I simply did not wish to consider that prejudice against the Japanese could mean prejudice for all of us with different eyes and skin.

On that Thursday evening of Fukunaga’s conviction, two plainclothes police officers-both native Hawaiian and searching for an escaped prisoner-intervened to break up an argument between a pair of drunken soldiers and a woman on the lanai of a tenement house off Liliha Street. The soldiers had apparently paid someone to take them to a brothel, and when they didn’t find what they wanted, they became belligerent. When one of the policemen displayed his badge and told the soldiers to leave, Private Chester C. Nagle pulled out a pistol and shot both officers without a second thought, grievously wounding them.

Liliha Street was quite nearby our home, but the crime struck even closer than that: one of the policemen was Officer William Kama. He was shot in the forehead, and died hours later at Queen’s Hospital, while his partner Sam Kunane, shot in the chest, remained critically injured but would live. Private Nagle ran away in an attempt to return to his ship, but was quickly found and arrested. He claimed that he shot the men “as self-protection.”

All this greeted me from the front page of the next morning’s paper, along with news of Myles Fukunaga’s conviction.

I cannot say I knew Bill Kama well, but I knew how much he meant to Joe and his family, and so went to the Anitos’ home to convey my sympathies. Joe was at the mortuary where Bill’s funeral was to be held the next day, and I asked Esther to pass along my condolences and to let me know if there was anything I could do. She suggested making a donation to the memorial fund the Star-Bulletin had started for the benefit of Bill’s widow and five children.

She also confided in me her worry over Joe now that Bill was gone. Last year, at age eighteen, Joe had agreed to return to St. Louis College, where he played another season of varsity football. But then a motorcycle accident caused him to miss too many classes. He was already several grades behind others his age, and finding himself even further behind-and the renewed butt of jokes for being a “dumb country boy”-he quit school for the last time in 1928 and took a seasonal job trucking pineapples at the California Packing Company cannery. When that season’s work ended, he drifted back onto the streets in the company of his fellow Kauluwela Boys. When he wasn’t tussling with other aimless young men, Esther said, he spent his time playing volleyball with his cousin Eddie.

At Bill’s funeral Joe kept to himself, and I was able to give him only some brief words of condolence, as I did Bill’s ‘ohana.

A month later-late in the evening of November 15-I was clearing tables in the cafe after closing, when I heard a tapping on the front window. I glanced up to see a tall, dark figure outside, his face partly obscured by our window stencil. For an instant I feared it was Mr. Noh, and dropped the plate I was holding. But even as the tableware shattered on the floor, the figure stepped to one side and I could see his sheepish smile as he peered in through the little triangle in the letter A. It was Joe.

Relieved, I opened the door. “Joe. What brings you here so late?”

He entered, a little wobbly on his feet. “‘Lo, Aunt Jin.”

But his breath preceded him inside. “Joe, have you been drinking?”

“Couple beers.” Joe could never lie to me, though, and then admitted, “Eh, maybe more’n a couple. Aunt Jin, could I get some coffee before I go home?”

I knew what he meant was, before Mama sees me like this.

“Yes, of course. Come in back.”

I hastily swept up the broken crockery, then took Joe into the kitchen, where Jae-sun and Liho had just finished washing the night’s dishes. My husband saw at once the state Joe was in, greeted him warmly, and discreetly told Liho he could go home. I sat Joe down at our family table and poured him a cup of black coffee. Jae-sun left us alone and went upstairs to look in on the children.

“Thanks, Aunt Jin,” Joe said, taking a hot swallow of coffee. He stared into the cup for a moment as if into a wishing well, then said, as if by explanation for his condition, “We were supposed to go out tonight, have a couple drinks.”

“Who?”

“Bill. He’d have been thirty-two today.”

I sat down beside him. “I’m sorry.”

“Yeah,” he said, his voice growing colder, “and that Army bastard’s the one who gets the birthday present. You hear?”

“I heard he was being court-martialed for Bill’s murder.”

Joe shook his head. “Not murder. Yesterday they found him guilty of `voluntary manslaughter’-that’s all.” He snorted contemptuously. “One shot to the head, bam-like you’d kill a dog.”