Chapter Twenty-One Beverly
Chapter Twenty-One
Beverly
On my second flight to Honolulu, I hand out one junior-captain wing to a little boy and two junior-stewardess pins to little girls. As well as a bassinet for a baby seated behind the bulkhead. I brace myself for whines and cries that never come. The girls of Marymount had nothing on their deportment.
As I walk up and down the aisles, I can’t help but glance at seat 15A. I knew, of course, that the passenger would not be Mark Oakley, but my heart flutters at the memory of our first meeting. And our drinks on Waikiki.
The crew is atwitter, though, because Montgomery Clift sits in that place, nine years removed from that time my mother rented out an entire movie theater on Lexington Avenue for my twelfth birthday, and my friends and I squealed when he graced the screen in From Here to Eternity.
He is still a looker, in the words of my fellow stewardesses, flecks of gray distinguishing his black hair, the embodiment of the disparity between men and women as they pass each successive birthday.
He garners a good bit of whispers in the galley and in the jump seats, even though there are plenty of stories to go around about much bigger stars who have sat in the seats of the illustrious Pan American fleet. I note that he is here in coach. Not first class. Probably an indication of how much a studio believes an actor to be worth. How long it’s been since he’s had a hit.
I thought I would be more excited to see my first celebrity on one of my flights.
I might have been. If he had not been seated in 15A.
And I might have forgotten about Mark Oakley, or at least tried to, if, upon my return to SFO, an elaborate bouquet of pink roses had not been waiting at the offices at San Francisco with my name on them.
With a note that revealed his address in Sunset Beach, Oahu. And a plea to come visit next time I was on the island.
“I accept, Operator.”
I’m happier than I’d anticipated when I hear my mother’s voice as she approves the charges for the collect call. She’d insisted that I save the money I am earning at Pan Am—I am still paying off the uniform and absorbing the expense of living in California—and this is the first time I am taking her up on her offer.
I’ve refused her attempts, however, to wire funds to me behind my father’s back. If Mr. Wall Street doesn’t want me, I don’t want his money.
“Beverly!” she says, nearly shouting. I can hear her excitement. I have a tinge of regret that we spent my entire childhood misunderstanding each other so thoroughly. Now that we are treading upon the first bits of a real relationship, I miss her. I honest to God miss her. When for all those years, I couldn’t get away fast enough.
Maybe that is merely the natural devolvement of every mother and daughter during those challenging last years at home, but I doubt it. If movies are to be believed, it can be a contentious time. But Upper East Side culture allows cordiality and propriety to conceal emotional distance, emotional rifts, and it is only now that she and I are letting our vulnerabilities seep out. It’s only now that we are relating to each other in a way that I find genuine.
“Where are you now, my dear? What time is it?”
I look out the window of my balcony room. I’m on a high enough floor that the Waikiki sunbathers look like colorful little specks dotting the sand. Just as before, there is a spectacular view of Diamond Head to my left. Pan Am spares no expense for my comfort. And this layover will be two whole days.
Rachel is my roommate once again, though just like last time, she refreshed her lipstick and headed out.
“I’m in Honolulu, Mom. And it’s just after noon here.”
That means it is three o’clock in California. I am overdue for lunch, and my stomach is letting me know. But I didn’t want to call too late in New York.
“Isn’t that a funny thing?” my mother ponders. “You’re just beginning your afternoon, and I’m putting my pearls on for dinner with your father and one of his clients.”
“Where are you going?”
“Delmonico’s.”
“I might have guessed.”
“It’s near his office, and it always impresses.”
“No doubt you’ll be having the filet mignon, burned to a crisp, with blue-cheese crumbles and rosemary potatoes on the side. And you’ll take the blue-cheese crumbles off at the last minute, deciding that the calories aren’t worth it.”
She laughs. “Am I such a creature of habit?”
I could set my clock by my mother’s predictability. That’s why our bimonthly jaunts to get our hair done at Sami’s had been so special. A break in our daily routine.
“Let’s see. Tomorrow is Friday, so you’ll be playing bridge at Molly Ashby’s penthouse and stopping into Saks afterward because they will have just put their new shipment of shoes on display.”
She laughs again. I am enjoying this relaxed side of my mother.
“I can’t deny it. And you’ve made your point. Though you’re wrong about the potatoes. Your father commented that I’ve put a few pounds on, so it’s salad for me, no dressing.”
I ignore this comment. Our relationship will have to mature quite a bit more before I can pontificate on how she shouldn’t let a man’s opinion of her body take such root. Especially when I know her to be so slim that you can’t see her if she turns sideways.
I stretch the telephone cord past the balcony door and sit on the chair, kicking my shoes off as I set my feet up on the ottoman. The sky is cloudless, the temperature perfect. I don’t miss the New York pace that was all I ever knew.
“You should come see me,” I suggest, surprising myself.
“In Honolulu?”
I shrug, which seems a silly gesture, as she can’t see it. “Sure. Honolulu. San Francisco. Hong Kong. Wherever. Get out of New York. Especially with all that troubling business brewing with Cuba. Missiles can’t make it to the west as far as I know.”
I’d read that schoolchildren were doing drills in expectation of a showdown with the Communist nation. Anyone within missile range of Cuba was on alert. Including New York.
I’m more worried than I let on. I think about Miami and everyone we met there. It’s spitting distance from the island nation.
Although with what seems to be brewing in Vietnam, it makes me wonder if anywhere is safe.
Perhaps tens of thousands of feet in the air, far above the conflicts on Earth, is the very best place to be.
My mother never has followed the headlines. “I wish I could, but I can’t do that, Beverly. You know your father expects me to be at these client dinners. And they seem to be happening even more frequently. Life goes on for us.”
I used to love that my parents were away for so many evenings. Not that I was one to sneak boys in or pinch money from their wallets. But the air of our rooftop apartment felt a little less stale, a little less stifling when they weren’t in it.
Yet now that I’m here, seeing the world and chasing my dreams, it occurs to me that my mother is a prisoner of sorts. Of my father’s expectations. Of her rigid schedule. Of the life she’d crafted for herself.
Who is my mother? Do I really know her?
Does she really know herself?
“Think, though, Mom,” I say, finding newfound ease with the more casual moniker. “Which of Dad’s clients would up and leave the firm if you weren’t there? I’m not minimizing your importance—goodness knows that if I were a client, I wouldn’t want to be trapped at a dinner table with him alone for hours either. But what is the price of that? When do you get to just be Diana Caldwell rather than Mrs. Wall Street?”
“You know I don’t care for that nickname, Beverly.” I wince at her half-hearted reproach, but I don’t give in.
“Well, it’s the natural one when you’re married to Mr. Wall Street, isn’t it?”
“Your father provided very well for you because of how much he works.”
I feel my blood warming, the direction of the conversation bringing up old sentiments that I’d prefer not to revisit.
But distance has emboldened me.
“Wonderful. Because I was so much better off living on the penthouse floor of the building instead of the third floor along with regular people, even though it meant that my father was at work before I went to school and came home after I’d already gone to bed. Do you realize that six whole days went by before I realized that he’d shaved his beard?”
That had happened just a few months ago and had been an ill-advised decision on his part, a poorly aimed attempt to look younger. Mr. Wall Street’s face was definitely better off hidden behind well-maintained facial hair. When that escapade didn’t work, he swelled his ego by purchasing a Shelby Cobra, forest green with white stripes across the front, a flashy new roadster that sat unused in the garage except for its placement in the photo spread that Business Week did on him.
Not once had he taken it out for a weekend cruise into Connecticut as he’d planned. So it remained an expensive monument to his useless effort to remain young and virile.
Or rather, to appear so.
My mother lets out a breath. “I’m sorry, Beverly. There I go again, a creature of habit. You don’t know what it’s like to come from nothing and to work hard to hold on to everything.”
“I hear that, Mom. But it doesn’t have to be so extreme, does it? Dad’s good at what he does. You don’t think he could have provided you all the security you needed and still been home for dinner?”
I can imagine her dabbing a tissue to her nose and wished there was some way that telephones and televisions could be one and the same so that I could see her.
“Yes. Yes, you’re right. But I’ve lived this way so long that I haven’t considered a notion like that in, well, as long as I can remember.”
“So let me help you consider other notions,” I suggest, using her own words in order to open her up to the point I want to make.
“Like what?”
“What were your dreams before you met him?”
My father is older than my mother by fifteen years. She’d been his secretary, fresh from typing classes at Katharine Gibbs’s Secretarial School. I long suspected that she had not been the first secretary he’d dallied with, nor the last. But she is the one who had gotten pregnant, winning the sperm lottery as I liked to irreverently think of it, so she was the one who was awarded the wedding ring.
Not that it was ever discussed, but mathematics are not so challenging that I can’t count backward from nine months. My existence predates their wedding anniversary.
“I dreamed of not being poor,” she answers me at last.
“But there must have been something more than that.”
Shame on me, I think, as soon as those words leave my lips. Do I really understand what she went through? Or am I only looking at it through my own comfortable perspective?
She sighs. “Beverly, I grew up during the Great Depression. And you’ve heard my story. Having a dream beyond mere survival was an unimaginable luxury. Too impossible to even entertain a hope.”
This hits me hard. It takes me a moment to even form a response.
“You’re right. I’m sorry that I didn’t sound very sympathetic.”
I hear her chuckle, and I’m grateful for the levity. “I’ve done all I’ve done so that you wouldn’t have to experience what that’s like. Apparently I’ve done my job very well.”
Too well, I think. So well that I’ve had to run away to find out what it means to live in the real world.
I wonder what would have happened if she hadn’t married him. If she’d lived with Sami and had me out of wedlock. She might have cut hair for a living, and I might have made pennies sweeping up the discarded locks.
For a moment, it seems idyllic.
Simple, unrestrained.
But more likely, she would have been ostracized. Even now, whispers abound when a woman has a baby and there’s no ring on her finger. The man, however, escapes unscathed.
I can see that she didn’t have any other choice. She did it for me. And I’ve indeed lived a life most can never imagine. I swallow hard, and the lump in my throat feels akin to the sharp pain of strep.
“You’ve done many things very well, Mom.”
I can feel her smiling on the other end. So I continue.
“Let’s start from scratch, though. Your job with me is done. Dad’s position is amply secure. What are your dreams now ?”
The silence goes on for so long that I fear we’ve been disconnected.
“I don’t know,” she finally says. Finally admits.
I want to press further, but I sense that I’ve been hard enough on her. We can continue this line of conversation another time.
“How is Sami?” I say instead. I put lots of sunniness in my voice to counteract the somber turn we’d taken. And I hear the relief in her voice.
“Good. Much better, Beverly. Much. She’ll be so excited to hear that you’re in Honolulu.”
“Has she told you more about her family?”
My family, I think. But it still feels foreign to think it.
“She has. She wrote some cousins in the Philippines while she was recovering at the Waldorf, and she just received an answer. She has the address of some nieces of hers and asked me to pass it along to you.”
I write down what she tells me. I’ll have to ask the front desk where it is. Oahu is a big island, and I know nothing of its geography.
Except that Waikiki is as far from Sunset Beach as you can get.
That one, I’d looked up.
“What will I even say?” I ask. “Isn’t she estranged from them?”
“Family is now and forever, Beverly. She’s already written ahead asking them to welcome you. You might be the catalyst for a reconciliation.”
“That’s a lot of responsibility to place on my shoulders. I’m still learning how to make a decent dirty martini while I’m thirty thousand feet up in the air. And without spilling it on a passenger.”
Her voice gets soft. “It’s not a responsibility, dear. It’s an invitation. Neither Sami nor I have any expectations. Only a hope that I can give you back what I took from you—a sense of family.”
I look down at the note I’ve written and run my finger over the ink. Aluahaina Street. Wherever that is, I’m going to find them.
I’ll send a postcard from the hotel before I fly out telling them when I’ll next have a layover in Oahu. Asking to come see them.
But that’s something for tomorrow. Tonight, I’m going to see Mark Oakley.
I see him from afar, relieved that he has come. I’d sent him a letter and invited him to meet me in the lobby of the Reef Hotel in Waikiki at this date and time. In New York, everyone I know has a telephone, but I’ve come to learn that elsewhere—hello, budget—there are more often party lines. And as Mark hadn’t left a number for an exchange, I assumed he was altogether without one.
So there was a healthy likelihood that he wouldn’t show. Or didn’t get my message.
Or didn’t want to come.
After all, the girls here are beautiful and exotic. Perhaps our flirtation has been no more than that. The very idea deflates me.
But there he is. Goodness, I’m feeling my bones turn to lava just at the sight.
I stand, steady my legs, and walk over to him.
His eyes light up when they see me, and I am more relieved than I want to admit. He is here. He’s all I’ve been thinking about since that last evening on Waikiki.
“Hello.” He smiles, taking my hands in his and giving me a polite kiss on the cheek. My skin burns in that spot, and my thoughts dance to imagining more.
“Pan American isn’t putting you up at the Royal Hawaiian this time?”
“They are. But—”
“There are too many eyes,” he finishes. I am surprised that he had the same thought I did. I wanted to go somewhere away from the crew, the pilots, even the staff who would come to know me on my many visits there. As much as my blood feels fiery around Mark Oakley, I do not want to open up the gossip channels when I don’t yet know if there is something worth gossiping over.
I’m sure he doesn’t need that kind of attention either.
“Too many eyes,” I agree. “So thank you for meeting here. I heard about a show that the Reef Hotel has on Monday nights. I thought we could stop in. A Night in the Philippines.”
I’d seen a brochure in one of those tacky tourist shops along the beach last time I was here. My eyes were drawn to it because it mentioned the birth country of Sami—the cradle of my heritage that was still a stranger to me.
“I’ve heard of it,” he says. “But I’ve been training too much to take in the sights. Good thing I have you for that.”
He grins and I am again molten.
I check my watch. The show starts at seven, only five minutes from now. Pan Am has trained us to be vigorously punctual, and it has become a part of my very fabric.
I lead him to the hotel’s ballroom, and we are ushered to a tiny cocktail table with two seats. Mark holds mine out for me, and I take it, pleased with his gentlemanly ways. The tightrope returns—I am an independent woman who likes a man to show her this kind of regard.
Maybe that sets the women’s movement back a bit, but right now, I don’t care.
We are served some kind of tropical drinks. Guava, perhaps. I love it.
The show begins with six young women entering the stage, wearing matching plaid dresses of orange, gold, and brown hues. On their heads, they wear conical black hats, topped with matching plaid fabric. The program indicates that they are doing the Itik-Itik Dance, also known as the Duck Dance.
Indeed they do look rather avian as they wave their arms over their heads and step around the imaginary rice paddies that the program describes. I wonder if Sami knows this dance, if her mother might have taught it to her. If I would have these steps memorized if my mother had not married Mr. Wall Street and instead raised me south of Houston Street.
But if she had, I wouldn’t be here. Right now. In magical Hawaii with this dreamy man by my side.
All in all, a good trade.
As the women exit the stage, six men take their places. Each is shirtless, drawing a comparison to my memories of Mark on the beach, none measuring up to his picture-perfect physique.
“I think you might need to add coconut shells to your swimming attire,” I say, flashing a grin at him and referencing costumes of the men onstage. I’m used to seeing pictures of hula girls with coconut brassieres, but this is entirely different. The men each have ten shells on their bodies—two on their shoulder blades, two on their pecs, two on their hips, two on their thighs, and two in their hands.
Mark grins back and leans in just as the music starts. “I think they’d look better on you.”
I feel a shiver run through me at the suggestiveness of his tone. And though he has pulled out my chair, and though I’m certain that he won’t let me pay for our drinks, I don’t mind making the first move. I slide my hand over to his. The warmth of his hand in mine floods me with a sense of security. I expected, frankly, something more carnal in nature given the heat that clearly races between us. But in this simple gesture, I feel like I am home.
That’s crazy. Right? I know so little about him, and yet that’s the word that comes to mind.
I wonder what to make of that.
The Maglalatik Dance begins, and I try to refocus on the performances. The music is rhythmic and goes up and down in a simple, folksy way. But what surprises me is that the coconut shells are not just for decoration—they become instruments themselves. The men clap the shells together, and it sounds like tap dancing. But in this case it’s not coming from their feet, it’s choreographed so that the clicks happen over their own bodies—and even each other’s. With perfect coordination, they leap around the stage, garnering applause even before it’s finished.
I look over, and Mark is equally fascinated. I am bemused that both of us are swaying to the beat.
I can’t see dear old Freddie back in New York doing this. I can’t imagine anyone I know back home doing this. And yet here is this amazing, surprising man losing himself in the music as much as I am.
The show takes us on a musical journey through the Philippines, a piece of the Polynesian puzzle that makes up Hawaii. In another circumstance, I might be keener to pay attention, but I am blissfully distracted by the presence of my companion.
The show ends with the Dance of the Maiden in the Moonlight, but well before its first notes resonate, Mark and I are ready to leave. The Reef Hotel had offered an unexpected glimpse into my alternate past—what I’d come on this adventure to find. But time is precious, and my brief layover is a potent reminder that I very much want my present to be filled with getting to know Mark Oakley better.
We glance at each other, already wordlessly speaking the same language, and we slip out before the final measures.
A sign in the lobby points the way to the beach.
The night sky is dark, illuminated only by a full moon that casts rippled strands of light over the Pacific. Ukuleles play in the distance, and romance permeates the air as honeymooners and lovers stroll with dreamlike strides.
“I love that sound,” Mark says, breathing in the fresh air. “The ocean waves breaking against the shore. I sleep with my windows open at night and listen to them until I fall asleep under their spell.”
“I would like to hear that.” I realize after I say it that it sounded like I want to lie in his bed with him. It’s not what I mean.
Or maybe it is.
This island makes me feel like I am walking in a dream. Like I am an uninhibited version of myself.
I slip my sandals off, and Mark does the same, taking both pairs in his right hand as he holds my hand with his other one. We leave the vast lanai of the hotel and step onto the sand, our feet sinking into its softness. I assume we are going to walk the length of Waikiki—or at least back to the Royal Hawaiian. But Mark leads me to the water’s edge.
He drops our shoes to the ground and pulls me close to him. The moonlight frames us as if it were a spotlight, but I give it no more attention than that because all my senses are overwhelmed by his nearness. Only my thin gauzy dress and his light linen shirt are between us, and as I press my hands against his chest, I can fully appreciate his well-toned swimmer’s body. I shiver even though the night air is warm.
I move my hands to his neck, look up at him, and invite him—dare him—with my eyes to kiss me.
I’ve never been kissed. I’ve only read about it. But I’m certain that if—when—Mark Oakley kisses me, it will be better than in any novel.
He leans in, eyes open, intensity stirring feelings in me that I don’t have names for. Then he closes them and places his lips on mine.
I’m glad he’s holding me because I want to collapse at his touch. My head feels dizzy, and all I can think of is ... more. More of this. Forever.
And yet, it is gentle. I want to be engulfed in this, and I can feel the tension in his neck as he holds himself back. The restrained discipline of an athlete. I want to bless and curse it all at the same time.
Mark pulls back, leaving me aching where he has awakened me.
“Beverly,” he whispers. He tucks a strand of hair behind my ear. “You are so unexpected.”
He doesn’t have to explain. I know what he means. Neither of us came to Honolulu for this.
And yet we found it.