PART 1
Grandpa Sylvan was nineteen and stationed on Oahu.
He came home to Ohio in 1945, met my grandmother in a queue at a bank, and never went back.
He always meant to. Then it was Rose, and three children, and a mortgage, and forty-one years at the plant at Ardley.
After Grandma died he used to sit in that chair with an atlas open on his knee and put one finger flat on the Pacific.
Just once more, he would say. I’d like to smell that ocean before I go.
He is my person and I am not going to pretend otherwise. He taught me to drive in a church car park at fifteen and he rang me every Sunday for eleven years, including the years after his hands started shaking, when it took him four goes to get the number in and he never once mentioned it.
So I saved for two years and bought two tickets.
The flights nearly finished him and I want to say that, because everybody who tells this story leaves it out. He is a hundred and one. It took eighteen hours and a wheelchair and a doctor’s letter and four hours in a hotel in Los Angeles.
But he was young out there. That is the only way I can put it.
He let sand run out of his hand for about a minute without saying anything at all.
He put his palm flat on a banyan tree in the way you greet somebody.
He stood at Pearl Harbor with a photograph of my grandmother pressed against his chest and did not speak for twenty minutes, and then he said one sentence about the water being the wrong colour, and then he wanted to go and sit down.
We stayed at an old family-run place called the Hale Moana. Sixteen rooms. Same family since 1939. I picked it because it was the cheapest thing on that road with a lift.
Everything was perfect except one thing.
From the moment we walked in, the staff stared at us.
A housekeeper dropped an entire armful of towels on our floor on the first evening, and then apologised to my grandfather about four times, which was more than the situation needed.
The cook came out and stood in the kitchen doorway while we ate. Twice.
And on the second afternoon I caught the desk clerk pointing at my grandfather and then not pointing, extremely fast, when he saw me looking.
Grandpa said maybe they had never seen a hundred-year-old in a hibiscus shirt.
I did wonder about it, on the second night, and I want to be honest about what I wondered.
I thought somebody was going to try something. Not unkindly — I thought there would be an upgrade, or a cake, or a man with a ukulele, because a hundred-and-one-year-old veteran on that island is a thing people want to make a fuss of, and I had spent two days quietly working out how to head it off.
He would have hated it. He would have been polite for the whole of it and then not spoken for two hours afterwards.
So when the desk clerk pointed at him I put a sentence together in my head about how we would rather not have anything organised.
I never got to use it and I am extremely glad, because if I had used it on the first evening I think that room behind the desk would have stayed shut and we would have got on a plane.
On our last afternoon he went up for a rest and the manager stopped me by the desk.
Kimo is about fifty-four. His eyes were wet and I could tell he had been holding something in for four days and had decided, at about two o’clock that afternoon, that he was not going to let us get on a plane.
He said: ma’am, we have been looking for your grandfather for more than eighty years.
I stepped back from him. Physically, about a foot.
I said: my grandfather served here as a boy. He has never been back. Not once in eighty-two years.
And he said: he did something I am fairly sure he never told you about. Please come with me.
PART 2
The room behind the front desk is narrow and has one window and smells of cedar and old paper.
There was an elderly Hawaiian woman sitting in a chair against the wall.
Leimomi is eighty-seven. She looked at me and started to cry before either of us had said anything at all.
She said: you look so much like Henry.
Nobody has ever called my grandfather Henry in his life. He is Sylvan and he has been Sylvan for a hundred and one years.
I found out later that his middle name is Henry, that his mother used it, and that in 1942 a nineteen-year-old who did not like his own first name told a Hawaiian family at a boarding house that he was Henry.
Then I looked past her at the wall.
Photographs. Three of them from the forties, one of a group of servicemen on the front steps of that building, and my grandfather is fourth from the left and he is nineteen and he is laughing at something.
Letters. Dozens of them, pinned in rows, most of them returned unopened with post office stamps across the front, addressed in three different handwritings to Ballards in Ohio and Indiana and Kentucky and Pennsylvania, going back to 1962.
A framed page of a ledger.
And on a small table underneath it, an accounts book with a ribbon in it, open.
I got about four lines in before I had to put both hands flat on that table.
And I said it out loud, to nobody, in a cedar room with a crying woman behind me.
I said: Grandpa. What have you done. How are we supposed to live with this now.
I want to describe the four lines, because people assume it was the total at the bottom and it was not. I did not get to the total for another hour.
It was the entries.
1952 — $19.40.
1953 — $31.00.
1954 — nil. See note.
And then, in 1955, forty-four dollars and a shilling-sized amount of change written out to the cent.
Nineteen dollars and forty cents.
That is what a sixteen-room hotel on a back road could put aside in 1952, and somebody sat down at the end of that year and worked out what the percentage came to and wrote it in a book for a man they could not find.
If it had been a large sum in the first year I think I would have stayed standing up.
It was nineteen dollars and forty cents, and then it was thirty-one dollars, and then it was nothing at all with an apology attached, and that is when my hands went onto the table.
PART 3
Here is what he did.
In the February of 1943, the man who ran that inn died. Kaimana Kahale, fifty-eight, in his own kitchen, of his heart.
The family were four weeks from losing the building.
Nobody was travelling. There was martial law on that island and a blackout and a curfew and a sixteen-room hotel was worth approximately nothing. The bank in Honolulu had been patient for a year and had stopped being patient in the January.
A nineteen-year-old sailor from Ohio paid it off.
The whole outstanding balance. Two thousand eight hundred and forty dollars in 1943 money, which I have looked up eleven times and which I still cannot make sit properly in my head.
It was his accumulated back pay, everything he had saved in eighteen months, and a small inheritance from his own father who had died in 1940.
Every cent he had in the world, and he was nineteen.
He did it through a lawyer in Honolulu called Abner Toomey, on one condition, which is in the instruction letter in that room in his own handwriting.
The family is not to be given my name.
And then he shipped out in the April and he never came back.
Abner Toomey’s file is in that room too, and it is eleven pages, and it is the driest document I have ever cried over.
There is a note in it from the twenty-second of March 1943, in the lawyer’s hand, recording the meeting.
Client, USN, age 19. Wishes to settle Kahale mortgage in full. Advised him twice this is not recoverable and that he will have nothing. Advised him to settle part and retain balance. Declined both times. Instructed that his name is not to be disclosed to the family under any circumstances, in perpetuity.
And then there is a line at the bottom which is not legal at all and which Toomey had no reason to write.
Asked him if he was sure. He said he was very sure. Have not in 31 years had a client under 25 who was.
Abner Toomey was fifty-one when he wrote that and he kept that file for eighteen years until he died, and he never breached the instruction, not once, not to anybody.
Nobody in this story ever told anybody anything, and they were all being decent when they didn’t.
PART 4
They found out his name eighteen years later.
Abner Toomey died in 1961 and his practice was wound up and his files went out to the parties concerned, and in among the Kahale papers there was a receipt.
All it says is four words.
S. Ballard, USN.
That is what three generations of that family had to work with.
There are one hundred and nine letters on that wall and in the two boxes underneath it. I have counted them since.
The first is from 1962 and it is from Kalena Kahale, and it is addressed to a Samuel Ballard in Dayton who wrote back saying he had never been to Hawaii and wishing her luck.
The last one on that wall is from 2019 and it was written by Kimo, who is the fourth generation, and it went to a Stanley Ballard in Erie, Pennsylvania, and came back marked deceased.
FULL STORY on the next page.