next-to-last passenger off the plane. She is a woman at that age (a few months over forty in her case) when it is possible to look very good at certain times of day (Sunday lunch in the summertime is a good time of day for such women, particularly if they wear straw hats that shade their eyes and silk shirts that cover their elbows and if they resist the inclination to another glass of white wine after lunch) and not so good at other times of day. Five-thirty-seven A.M. is not a good time of day for this woman about to deplane the Pan American 747. She is bare-legged, pale despite one of those year-round suntans common among American women of some means, and she is wearing sling-heeled pumps, one of which has loosened and slipped down on her heel. Her dark hair, clearly brushed by habit to minimize the graying streak at her left temple, is dry and lustreless from the night spent on the airplane. She is wearing no makeup. She is wearing dark glasses. She is wearing a short knitted skirt and jacket, with a cotton jersey beneath the jacket, and at the moment she steps from the cabin of the plane into the moist warmth of the rainy tropical morning she takes off the jacket and leans to adjust the heel strap of her shoe. As the passenger service representative starts up the steps with the umbrella she straightens and glances back, apparently confused.
The man behind her on the steps, the man whose name appears on the manifest as DILLON, R.W ., leans toward her and murmurs briefly.
She looks up, smiles at the passenger service representative, and leans forward, docile, while he attempts to simultaneously shield her with the umbrella and place the plumeria lei on her shoulders.
Aloha, he would be saying.
So kind.
Tragic circumstances.
Anything we as a company or I personally can do.
Facilitate arrangements.
When the senator arrives.
So kind.
As the passenger service representative speaks to the man listed on the manifest as DILLON, R.W ., clearly a consultation about cars, baggage, facilitating arrangements, when the senator arrives, the woman stands slightly apart, still smiling dutifully. She has stepped beyond the protection of the umbrella and the rain runs down her face and hair. Absently she fingers the flowers of the lei, lifts them to her face, presses the petals against her cheek and crushes them. She will still be wearing the short knitted skirt and the crushed lei when she sees, two hours later, through a glass window in the third-floor intensive care unit at Queen’s Medical Center, the unconscious body of her sister Janet.
This scene is my leper at the door, my Tropical Belt Coal Company, my lone figure on the crest of the immutable hill.
Inez Victor at 5:47 A.M. on the morning of March 26, 1975, crushing her lei in the rain on the runway.
Jack Lovett watching her.
“Get her in out of the goddamn rain,” Jack Lovett said to no one in particular.
Two
1
O N the occasion when Dwight Christian seemed to me most explicitly himself he was smoking a long Havana cigar and gazing with evident satisfaction at the steam rising off the lighted swimming pool behind the house on Manoa Road. The rising steam and the underwater lights combined to produce an unearthly glow on the surface of the pool, bubbling luridly around the filter outflow; since the air that evening was warm the water temperature must have been, to give off steam, over one hundred. I recall asking Dwight Christian how (meaning why) he happened to keep the pool so hot. “No trick to heat a pool,” Dwight Christian said, as if I had congratulated him. In fact Dwight Christian tended to interpret anything said to him by a woman as congratulation. “Trick is to cool one down.”
It had not occurred to me, I said, that a swimming pool might need cooling down.
“Haven’t spent time in the Gulf, I see.” Dwight Christian rocked on his heels. “In the Gulf you have to cool them down, we developed the technology at Dhahran. Pioneered it for Aramco.
The man behind her on the steps, the man whose name appears on the manifest as DILLON, R.W ., leans toward her and murmurs briefly.
She looks up, smiles at the passenger service representative, and leans forward, docile, while he attempts to simultaneously shield her with the umbrella and place the plumeria lei on her shoulders.
Aloha, he would be saying.
So kind.
Tragic circumstances.
Anything we as a company or I personally can do.
Facilitate arrangements.
When the senator arrives.
So kind.
As the passenger service representative speaks to the man listed on the manifest as DILLON, R.W ., clearly a consultation about cars, baggage, facilitating arrangements, when the senator arrives, the woman stands slightly apart, still smiling dutifully. She has stepped beyond the protection of the umbrella and the rain runs down her face and hair. Absently she fingers the flowers of the lei, lifts them to her face, presses the petals against her cheek and crushes them. She will still be wearing the short knitted skirt and the crushed lei when she sees, two hours later, through a glass window in the third-floor intensive care unit at Queen’s Medical Center, the unconscious body of her sister Janet.
This scene is my leper at the door, my Tropical Belt Coal Company, my lone figure on the crest of the immutable hill.
Inez Victor at 5:47 A.M. on the morning of March 26, 1975, crushing her lei in the rain on the runway.
Jack Lovett watching her.
“Get her in out of the goddamn rain,” Jack Lovett said to no one in particular.
Two
1
O N the occasion when Dwight Christian seemed to me most explicitly himself he was smoking a long Havana cigar and gazing with evident satisfaction at the steam rising off the lighted swimming pool behind the house on Manoa Road. The rising steam and the underwater lights combined to produce an unearthly glow on the surface of the pool, bubbling luridly around the filter outflow; since the air that evening was warm the water temperature must have been, to give off steam, over one hundred. I recall asking Dwight Christian how (meaning why) he happened to keep the pool so hot. “No trick to heat a pool,” Dwight Christian said, as if I had congratulated him. In fact Dwight Christian tended to interpret anything said to him by a woman as congratulation. “Trick is to cool one down.”
It had not occurred to me, I said, that a swimming pool might need cooling down.
“Haven’t spent time in the Gulf, I see.” Dwight Christian rocked on his heels. “In the Gulf you have to cool them down, we developed the technology at Dhahran. Pioneered it for Aramco.
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