Hawaiian Night
A limbo bar festooned with streamers, by the bathhouse entrance. Tuna on shish kebab and pineapple slices in large stainless-steel serving cisterns arranged on a buffet table. At the edge of the snack bar, the undergrad who gave golf lessons, in chefs hat and lei, carving a roast pig. The carcass had menaced the staff from the walk-in kitchen fridge for upwards of five days. The Olson kid, chaperoned on either side by his parents, in the moment of asking if they had cooked, you know, the pig on a spit. Logical inquiry under the circumstances, on Hawaiian Night. No evidence, however, of a spit. Polynesian slide guitar drifted across the patio, from a concealed speaker. Don Ho.
Lena Beechwood, at Table No. 1 (my table, though she was no relation of mine), worried aloud about her crew for the Round Island Race, peppering her sentences with fine acerbities: Pete Evans got his jib twisted in the middle of the Memorial Day course, just let the sheet right out of his hands.They’d placed second, when they could very well have won, and so He wont do, wont do at all, you just can’t trust him. They could take Evans’s wife, Hunter, but she was sluggish from having the twins and might not have the energy or the reflexes. Second place goes to the weary, to the inert.
Northeastern sun, that pink hatbox, drifted into a margin of haze as the kids of Hawaiian Night threw off their regulation jackets and ties or their cardigan sweaters and flats and began to caper on the lawn. The Costellos, Dan and Pete and Gretchen; the appallingly smart Sam Harvey, who intimidated everybody else’s towheads; little Rene Hennessy, with the platinum-blond crewcut and the French accent — his parents had been transferred to the Paris office, but they made it back across the pond for August; Marilyn Wendell, who would almost certainly get as stout as her mom, and, like her mom, be the consort of all local boys until that day. Two dozen kids, maybe, interchangeable, by virtue of their long-standing acquaintance; interchangeable, by virtue of the physical resemblances each to each; interchangeable, by virtue of the hidden entanglements of their parents over the years, or by virtue of these times. Perhaps it was simply that all children were one phylum, one kingdom, one species, one throbbing, pulsating corpus of velocity, language, and enthusiasm.
Andrew Grimms boy and girl were thick in the stew, though Andrews wife had died the summer before. The Grimms had taken the cigarette boat out, at dusk, with Ellen Moss and a shaker of cocktails, to pick up house guests who’d missed the last ferry. In the course of demonstrating for Ellen just how fast the Pretty Young Thing could go — she on the wheel, he the throttle, Andy’s wife, Debby, gazing pacifically upon the action — they had jumped a large wake. One engine failed, the craft lifted up into the air, and they began to spiral to port, to be thrown into the magnificent bay. Outboards exposed in the shadows above the three of them. Here comes tragedy. As Andy and Debby and Ellen bobbed and ducked and breaststroked, laughed nervously at first, their unmanned boat embarked on its repetitive circular course, leftward, sinisterly, coming around and bearing down again on the three swimmers, who couldn’t match its forty-nine miles per hour (fifty if you tilted the engines just so), who couldn’t get out of its way. The boat struck Andy’s wife decisively and crushed a plurality of vertebrae. Andy Grimm served as distraught witness, with the craft circling ominously between himself and the afflicted woman. Ellen Moss called out to Debby across the water, having just sidestroked inside the perimeter of the concentric rings that the Pretty Young Thing made in chop and spray. Don’t move! Then Ellen Moss, of Foyle, Decker, Greenwood and Peacock, Management Consultants, Ellen Moss of the size-four tennis skirts, of the collection of antique porcelain miniatures, Ellen Moss risked heavily insured life and limb to swim back to Debby Grimm, to remove Debby from harm’s way, to hold her as she lost consciousness, Ellen Moss whispering endearments as best she could, Just a minute or two, huh? while Andy watched, immobilized by the menace of events. At last, a passing speedboat threw out its coils, hauled them from the sea, and the trouble really began. Debby’s pulse fibrillated and then quit. The Coast Guard spent a couple of hours trying to figure out how to put a stop to the circular imperatives, the eternal return at forty-nine miles per hour of the Pretty Young Thing. Then they tangled its prop in a drift net.
Yet here were Debby’s kids on the lawn with the others, and it was proof that you could vanish from this sweet, colorful existence one summer, and the next summer Hawaiian Night would go off without a hitch, as with the Thursday-night dances, so with the annual complaints about club dues, and so forth. The tennis instructor, Maria, chased Robby Pigeon out of the ice-cream line, from which he had swiped a stainless-steel scoop and was now tongue-bathing it, consuming its strawberry delights, defiling the clubs make-your-own-sundae apparatus with his infantile contagions, the Grimm children right behind him, giggling. Maria, it appeared, wore plastic green palm fronds, a South Pacific plumage, over U.S.T.A.-approved whites, as she chased them past the beverage table.
Collectively the children of Hawaiian Night next divined that the leis, which had been bunched, folded, and gathered on an assembly line in Edison, New Jersey, could be untwisted, stretched, and retooled to resemble antique ticker tape, expanding to a length of nearly sixteen feet, something like the footage of Lena Beechwood’s small, sleek round-the-island sailing vessel. Andy Grimm’s son, last seen wearing khakis, blue-and-white-striped button-down Oxford shirt, beige corduroy jacket, and white bucks, now clad only in his trousers, emerged from a swelling population of kids carrying the orange streamer that had been his lei, like a banner proclaiming this club, this lawn, this evening, this way of life his own, where minutes before only the present had been his concern, as he raced from the end of Court No. 3over to the Adirondack chairs by the swimming pool, staking his claim at the site marked Shallow water, no diving. I confess that I held my breath as I tried, through the incantation of worry, to stave off further Grimm calamity, in which little Drew toppled over the Adirondack chairs, hovered briefly in the air, gathered gravitational freight, broke the surface of the wading end of the pool, struck bottom, cracked his skull, and then bobbed in the shallows, deceased, as Andrew Grimm, insurance executive, recited his next canto of loss. But nothing horrible would happen on this voluptuous Hawaiian Night as five, ten, twelve, fifteen kids chased each other with tropical decorations in the stiff, humid preliminaries of a late-summer storm.