From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [46]
She was waiting for him at the door, leaning against the jamb and looking out through the screen, one hand propped against the other jamb as if barring the door to a salesman. It seemed to him that no matter what time of day or night he walked up the macadam road from the highway intersection, she was always waiting in that same position, as if he had just phoned and she was watching for him. It was uncanny, as if she always knew when he was coming. But it was no more strange than anything else connected with her.
He had never pretended to understand her since the first time he met her at Kahuku and took her to the carnival and, knowing carnivals which are the same in any portion of the earth, found that Violet was still a virgin. That in itself surprised him, and he did not get a chance to recover from it from then on.
Violet Ogure. Oh ǵoo-rdee. You pronounced the r like a drunken d. Even the name was strange and unpredictable. The strangeness of a foreign land is understandable, because you expect it when you go among foreigners, you’re even looking for it. But the equation of the simple first name and the alien-tongued surname was unreadable. Violet was like all the other second and third generation Japanese, Chinese, Hawaiian, Portagee, Filipino girls with their first names after English flowers and their last names coming across alien centuries, girls whose parents had been shipped in like cattle to work the cane and pineapple for the Big Five, girls whose sons were often among the numberless hordes of little boys shining your shoes on the sidewalk outside a bar, repeating the antique legend: “Me half Japanee, half Schofield,” or, grinning obliquely, “Me half Chinee, half Schofield.” A crop fathered by soldiers who had served their hitch and mysteriously vanished into that mythical “Mainland” that was the United States.
Violet was an ambivalent mingling of the intensely familiar and the inscrutably alien; she was like the city of Honolulu with its highpowered, missionary-owned bank buildings and its shanty Japanee-language movie just off Aala Park, a polygenetic blend nobody, least of all Violet, could encompass. He had learned to pronounce her name correctly, and that was all he learned about her.
He walked into the unkempt chicken-defiled front yard and she came out on the homemade leanto porch. He took her hand and helped her down the three rotting steps and they went around to the back, a ritual they repeated every time he came, because in the time he had been coming there he had never been invited or allowed in their front room.
The back porch was three times as large as the leanto on the front, unscreened, and with a network of vines from floor to roof that made it a secluded cave, almost another room, that was the living room of the Ogure family.
And behind the house was the chicken coop, a miniature of its shanty self, where conceited hens stalked complacently about peering beadily this way and that, crooning their smug song of the Sacred Vessel, and squirting their droppings in the grass with the righteousness of saints. The sour odor of their house and clan pervaded the whole place. And forever after the smell of chickens brought to Prew’s mind a vivid picture of Violet and of her life.
Her bedroom alongside the kitchen was perpetually cluttered. The covers on the peeling gilt iron bed were always rumpled, and clothes were always draped across the bedfoot and the single chair. There was spilled powder on the homemade dresser, but in one corner there was a closet, made of two by fours for frame and hung with a lushly green and riotously flowered material made especially for Hawaii. Violet had fixed it up herself, to carry all the heavy hope of someday something better.
Prew stripped off his gook shirt and slacks and, naked, hunted through the clutter for his trunks, moving with the ease of long association. The clutter did not bother him; kicking shoes aside and tossing clothes from chair to bed, he was more at home in this flimsy shack than Violet was.
The cluster of