The White Album (18 page)

Nor did the turnings of the Sixties effect much change at the Royal
.
What the place reflected in the Thirties it reflects still, in less flamboyant mutations: a kind of life lived always on the streets where the oldest trees grow
.
It is a life so secure in its traditional concerns that the cataclysms of the larger society disturb it only as surface storms disturb the seas bottom, a long time later and in oblique ways
.
It is a life lived by millions of people in this country and largely forgotten by most of us
.
Sometimes I think I remember it only at the Royal Hawaiian
.
There in the warm early evenings, the women in turquoise-blue and buttercup-yellow chiffons seem, as they wait for cars under the pink porte-cochere, the natural inheritors of a style later seized upon by Patricia Nixon and her daughters
.
In the mornings, when the beach is just raked and the air damp and sweet from the dawn rain, I see the same women, now in printed silks and lined cashmere cardigans, eating papaya on the terrace just as they have done every few seasons since they were young girls, in the late Twenties, and came to the Royal with their mothers and sisters
.
Their husbands scan the San Francisco and Los Angeles papers with the practiced disinterest of men who believe their lives safe in municipal bonds
.
These papers arrive at the Royal one and sometimes two days late, which lends the events of the day a peculiar and unsettling distance
.
I recall overhearing a conversation at the Royal’s newsstand on the morning after the California primary in June 1968, the morning Robert Kennedy lay dying in Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles
.
“How’d the primary go?” a man buying cigarettes asked his wife
.
She studied the day-old headlines
.
“‘Early Turnout Heavy,’” she said
.
Later in the morning I overheard this woman di
scussing the assassination: her
husband had heard the news when he dropped by a brokerage office to get the days New York closings
.

To sit by the Royal pool and read
The New York Review of Books
is to feel oneself an asp, disguised in a voile beach robe, in the very bosom of the place
.
I put
The New York Review of Books
aside and talk to a pretty young woman who has honeymooned at the Royal, because honeymoons at the Royal are a custom in her family, with each of her three husbands
.
My daughter makes friends at the pool with another four-year-old, Jill, from Fairbanks, Alaska, and it is taken for granted by Jill’s mother and aunt that the two children will meet again, year after year, in the immutable pleasant rhythms of a life that used to be, and at the Royal Hawaiian seems still to be
.
I sit in my voile beach robe and watch the children and wish, against all the evidence I know, that it might be so
.

1970: To look down upon Honolulu from the high rain forest that divides windward Oahu from the leeward city is to see, in the center of an extinct volcano named Puowaina, a place so still and private that once seen it is forever in the mind
.
There are banyan trees in the crater, and rain trees, and 19,500 graves
.
Yellow primavera blazes on the hills above
.
Whole slopes seem clouded in mauve jacaranda
.
This is the place commonly called Punchbowl, the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, and 13,000 of the dead in its crater were killed during World War II
.
Some of the rest died in Korea
.
For almost a decade now, in the outer sections just inside the rim of the crater, they have been digging graves for Americans killed in Vietnam, not many, a fraction of the total, one, two, three a week, most of them Island boys but some of them carried here by families who live thousands of miles across the Pacific, a gesture that touches by its very difficulty
.
Because the Vietnam dead are shipped first to Travis A
.
F
.
B
.
in California and then to the next of kin, those Mainland families burying their sons or husbands in Honolulu must bring the bodies back over the Pacific one last time
.
The superintendent of Punchbowl, Martin T
.
Corley, refers to such burials as his “ship-in Vietnams
.
”
“A father or an uncle calls me from the Mainland and he says they’re bringing their boy here, I don’t ask why,” Mr
.
Corley said
when I talked to him not long ago
.
We were sitting in his office in the crater and on the wall hung the Bronze Star and Silver Star citations he had received in Europe in 1944, Martin T
.
Corley, a man in an aloha shirt who had gone from South Ozone Park in Queens to the Battle of the Bulge to a course in cemetery management at Fort Sam Houston and finally, twenty-some years later, to an office in an extinct volcano in the Pacific from which he could watch the quick and the dead in still another war
.

I watched him leafing through a stack of what he called “transmittals,” death forms from Vietnam
.
There in Martin T
.
Corley’s office Vietnam seemed considerably less chimerical than it had seemed on the Mainland for some months, less last year’s war, less successfully consigned to that limbo of benign neglect in which any mention of continuing casualties was made to seem a little counterproductive, a little
démodé
.
There in the crater it seemed less easy to believe that weekly killed-in-action figures under 100 might by some sleight-of-hand add up to zero, a nonexistent war
.
There in sight of the automatic gravediggers what the figures added up to, for the first twelve weeks of 1970, was 1,078 dead
.
Martin T
.
Corley gets a transmittal on each of them
.
He holds these transmittal forms for fifteen or twenty days before throwing them away, just in case a family wants to bring its dead to Punchbowl
.
“See, we had a family bring a boy in from Oregon a few days ago,” he said
.
“We’ve got a California coming in now
.
We figure they’ve got their reasons
.
We pick the plot, open the grave
.
These ship-in families, we don’t see them until the hearse comes through the gate
.
”

On a warm windy afternoon a few days later I stood with Mr
.
Corley on the soft grass up in Section K of the crater and waited for one such family to come through the gate
.
They had flown out from the Mainland with the body the night before, six of them, the mother and father and a sister and her husband and a couple of other relatives, and they would bury their boy in the afternoon sun and fly back a few hours later
.
We waited, and we watched, and then, on the road below, the six Air Force pallbearers snapped to attention
.
The bugler jumped up from beneath a banyan tree and took his place behind the honor guard
.
We could see the hearse
then, winding up and around the circular road to Section K, the hearse and two cars, their headlights dim in the tropical sun
.
“Two of us from the office come to all the Vietnams,” Mr
.
Corley said suddenly
.
“I mean in case the family breaks down or something
.
”

All I can tell you about the next ten minutes is that they seemed a very long time
.
We watched the coffin being carried to the grave and we watched the pallbearers lift the flag, trying to hold it taut in the warm trade wind
.
The wind was blowing hard, toppling the vases of gladioli set by the grave, obliterating some of the chaplain’s words
.
“If God is for us then who can be against us,” the chaplain said, a red-headed young major in suntans, and then I did not hear any more for a while
.
I was standing behind the six canvas chairs where the family sat, standing there with Mr
.
Corley and an Air Force survival assistance officer, and I was looking beyond the chaplain to a scattering of graves so fresh they had no headstones, just plastic markers stuck in the ground
.
“We tenderly commit this body to the ground,” the chaplain said then
.
The men in the honor guard raised their rifles
.
Three shots cracked out
.
The bugler played taps
.
The pallbearers folded the flag until only the blue field and a few stars showed, and one of them stepped forward to present the flag to the father
.
For the first time the father looked away from the coffin, looked away from the pallbearers and out across the expanse of graves
.
A slight man with his face trembling and his eyes wet, he stood facing Mr
.
Corley and me, and for a moment we looked direc
tly
at each other, but he was seeing not me, not Mr
.
Corley, not anyone
.

It was not quite three o’clock
.
The father, transferring the flag from hand to hand as if it burned, said a few halting words to the pallbearers
.
I walked away from the grave then, down to my car, and waited for Mr
.
Corley to talk to the father
.
He wanted to tell the father that if he and his wife wanted to come back before their plane left, the grave would be covered by four o’clock
.
“Sometimes it makes them feel better to see it,” Mr
.
Corley said when he caught up with me
.
“Sometimes they get on the plane and they worry, you know, it didn’t get covered
.
”
His voice trailed off
.
“We cover within thirty minutes,” he said finally
.
“Fill, cover, get the marker on
.
That’s one thing I remember from my training
.
”
We stood there a moment in the warm wind, then said goodbye
.
The pallbearers filed onto the Air Force bus
.
The bugler walked past, whis
tl
ing “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head
.
”
Just
after four o’clock the father and mother came back and looked for a long while at the covered grave, then took a night flight back to the Mainland
.
Their son was one of 101 Americans killed that week in Vietnam
.

1975; The 8:45
a
.
m
.
Pan American to Honolulu this morning was delayed half an hour before takeoff from Los Angeles
.
During this delay the stewardesses served orange juice and coffee and two children played tag in the aisles and, somewhere behind me, a man began screaming at a woman who seemed to be his wife
.
I say that the woman seemed to be his wife only because the tone of his invective sounded practiced, although the only words I heard clearly were these: “You are driving me to murder
.
”
After a moment I was aware of the door to the plane being opened a few rows behind me, and of the man rushing off
.
There were many Pan American employees rushing on and off then, and considerable confusion
.
I do not know whether the man reboarded the plane before takeoff or whether the woman came on to Honolulu alone, but I thought about it all the way across the Pacific
.
I thought about it while I was drinking a sherry-on-the-rocks and I thought about it during lunch and I was still thinking about it when the first of the Hawaiian Islands appeared off the left wing tip
.
It was not until we had passed Diamond Head and were coming in low over the reef for landing at Honolulu, however, that I realized what I most disliked about this incident: I disliked it because it had the aspect of a short story, one of those “little epiphany” stories in which the main character glimpses a crisis in a stranger
’s
life—a woman weeping in a tearoom, often, or an accident seen from the window of a train, “tearooms” and “trains” still being fixtures of short stories although not of real life—and is moved to see his or her own life in a new light
.
I was not going to Honolulu because I wanted to see life reduced to a short story
.
I was going to Honolulu because I wanted to see life expanded to a novel, and I still do
.
I wanted room for flowers, and reef fish, and people who may or may not be driving one another to murder but in any case are not impelled, by the demands of narrative convention, to say so out loud on the 8:45
a
.
m
.
Pan American to Honolulu
.