The Rites of the House

His clothes had been laid out in the dressing room while he was on the veranda: the dark suit for church, a white shirt, the black tie, the shoes that had been polished by somebody he had never seen do it. He dressed himself. That was another of his rules, and the household had never liked it, because a King who dresses himself leaves a valet with nothing to do between six and seven in the morning, and old Moses, who had dressed his father for thirty-eight years, had been obliged to find other occupations, and had found them in the silver.

The dressing room was on the mauka side, and its window looked up the valley. While he did his collar he could see Punchbowl and the long green slope of Nuʻuanu going up behind it into cloud, and the rooftops of the town climbing the lower slopes in no particular order, and the white of a church tower, and the trees. The light had come up enough now to show colour. The mountains were the green of wet felt and the cloud on the Pali was pink at its edges and grey in the middle. It would be gone in an hour.

He did not look at the portrait, but he knew where it was. It hung on the wall behind him, where his father had hung it himself in 1910, and it showed his grandfather in the uniform of a colonel of a regiment that had been disbanded before the King was born. His father had had no portrait of himself painted at all. He had said that a restored dynasty should spend its first generation not looking at itself.

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His father had been the first King of the second House of Kamehameha, and had spent thirty-eight years on the throne apologising for the arithmetic.

The Council of Aliʻi had restored the house in the year 1900, in the months after the old Queen gave up her Crown. The King had read the minutes of those sittings in his twenties and had found them, to his surprise, very dull. Forty chiefly families had sat in the Throne Room through a long hot summer and argued genealogy, and the grounds they had given at the end for preferring his grandfather’s line had been genealogical, and the reasons had been political, and everyone in the room had known the difference and had been very careful never to say it aloud. The Kalākaua line had signed the constitution of 1887 at the point of a rifle. The Kingdom had restored its Crown in 1894 and given its land to the Realm’s defence in 1898, and by 1900 it needed a sovereign who had signed nothing. The King’s grandfather had been a rancher on the slopes of Hualālai with a sufficiently long genealogy and no political history whatever, and had died in 1899 before anyone could ask him; so the Council had asked his son.

And then, having restored the house, the Council had renumbered it. It had held that the numbering had lapsed with the old dynasty in 1872 and should resume from the last King of the direct male line, who by its finding was Kamehameha III, and so the restored sovereign had been proclaimed Kamehameha IV, though there had already been a Kamehameha IV, who had died in 1863. The genealogists had objected at once. They had gone on objecting for forty-one years. The King had a drawer in his library desk, the second on the left, that held their letters, and on the dull afternoons he sometimes read one, for the pleasure of the prose. There were men in Hilo and Lahaina and one in Edinburgh who wrote to him every year on the anniversary of his accession, with great courtesy, to point out that he was not the fifth Kamehameha but the sixth, or the seventh, or in one view the first of a new house altogether, and that the Council had no more power to renumber a dynasty than to renumber the islands. He had never answered them. His father had told him that the only answer to a genealogist was to outlive him.

“There are two of everything now,” his father had said, the first time the boy had asked about it. “Two Kamehameha Fours. Two Kamehameha Fives, when it comes to you. It is very confusing for people in the Realm, who think we are trying to deceive them, and very pleasant for us, because it means that nobody will ever be quite sure which one of us they are talking about.”

He had been eight. He had thought it was the cleverest thing he had ever heard.

He had understood later that it had been the truth, and that his father had meant it in the way he meant most things, which was completely and with no expectation of being believed.

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The restored Kamehameha IV had been a tall, slow, heavy man with a rancher’s hands and a rancher’s patience. He had come to the throne at thirty knowing nothing about it, and had spent the rest of his life, as far as his son could tell, learning to do as little as possible extremely well.

It had been a deliberate art, and the King had only seen it whole after his father died. The old King had extended the vote to women in 1902, because the Hawaiian women who organised the campaign had come to see him and he had listened to them, and because the old Queen in her retirement at Washington Place had said one sentence in its favour that the newspapers printed, and after that he had said nothing more about it. He had signed what the Kuhina Nui put in front of him, all of it, every day for thirty-eight years, and he had read every word first, and he had asked a question about perhaps one paper in a hundred, and when he asked it the Kuhina Nui of the day went away and thought about it for a week. He had sat in the gallery of the Nobles twice a year and in the courts not at all. He had gone to one cathedral or the other on Sundays, the Anglican and the Catholic in their turns, and had told the Bishop of the one and the Bishop of the other, separately and with the same face, that he belonged to neither, and had then gone to both of them for thirty-eight years and given each the same amount at Christmas. He had walked in the grounds in the evening. He had been there.

“The Crown is there,” he had said. It was the only lesson. The boy had been given it at fourteen, the evening before Mr Pell, standing on the mauka veranda in the last of the light with his hands behind his back. “That is the whole of it. The Crown is there. It does not go away when things are difficult and it does not come forward when things are easy. It is there in the morning and it is there at night. If you do that, you will find that you have done more than any King of your house before you, because every one of them did something, and every time they did something, somebody took the Kingdom away from them for a while.”

The boy had asked what he was supposed to do, then, all day.

“Read,” his father had said, “and listen, and get up early, and be there.”

The King had thought about that sentence for twenty-three years. He thought now that it was the best account of constitutional monarchy he had ever been given, including all of Mr Pell’s, and that his father had known it was, and had chosen to deliver it on a veranda at dusk to a boy of fourteen because he had known the boy would not understand it for twenty years and would therefore not be able to forget it.

His father had died in his sleep in the spring of 1938, in the bedroom along the corridor, at sixty-eight. The Council had proclaimed the new King before noon on the same day, in the Throne Room, from the old form, and the King had stood and listened to it and been surprised to find himself weeping, not at the death, which he had been expecting for a year, but at the sound of his own name in his father’s place in the sentence. The investiture had come five months later, in the September, when the genealogies had been chanted in full on the front steps for three hours and forty minutes in the heat and the feather cloak had been put on his shoulders and the helmet on his head, and nothing else. No Hawaiian sovereign had a crown put on his head. Kalākaua’s crowns from 1883 sat in their case in the Throne Room, used once, and the Kingdom had decided long before the King was born that once had been enough.

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He had been an heir for twenty years.

He tied his tie, and looked at it, and untied it and tied it again.

Twenty years. From fourteen to thirty-four. It was a long time to spend learning a thing that consisted, when you came to it, of not doing very much. He had been to the Royal Navy’s college at Dartmouth in England for a year at sixteen, because his father had thought he ought to see what the other side of the world was like and the Realm’s own naval college at Annapolis had not answered the letter. He had sat in the gallery of the House and the gallery of the Nobles and listened to land law until he could have drafted it. He had toured the outer islands until there was no school on Molokaʻi that had not had him to tea. He had learned the genealogy of his house from his father’s old kahu, a woman of ninety who had known Kamehameha III, in a room at the back of the barracks on Tuesday and Friday evenings for two years, and he could still say it from the beginning, though he said it now only to himself. Mr Pell had taught him what the Crown was for in law. The old woman had taught him whose it was. He had thought at sixteen that the two lessons were at war. He had come to think that they were the same lesson, said in two languages.

And for twenty years the Realm had paid him almost no attention at all.

He had minded it, once. He had gone to New Westminster at twenty-one, in 1925, for the opening of Parliament, as the heir to a Crown in the Realm’s own union, on an invitation that had arrived a week late and been addressed to the old Queen, who had given up her Crown a quarter of a century before. He had been seated at the State Opening in the gallery, between the wife of a junior minister and the Dean of a cathedral in Ohio, and nobody in the Lords had looked up at him, and at the Governor-General’s reception afterwards a gentleman from the Foreign Office had asked him, kindly, whether he found the climate in New Westminster very cold after Manila. He had said that he did. He had come home on the next boat and told his father about it, expecting sympathy, and his father had laughed until he had to sit down.

“That,” his father had said, “is the most useful thing that will ever happen to you. They think we are somewhere else. Let them.”

It was the same thing he had been thinking on the veranda, and he caught himself thinking it a second time, and was impatient with himself. He was thirty-seven and had a Kingdom and he was still having his father’s ideas in his father’s order, like a boy reciting.

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He put on his jacket and went out along the corridor towards the stairs, and passed the door at the end.

This time he stopped.

He did not know why. It was a door like the other doors on the corridor, of koa, with a brass handle that the household polished every Friday though nobody had turned it in six years. Behind it was a room on the Diamond Head side that got the morning sun, with a cot in it and a chair and a cupboard of small clothes that the Queen had folded herself and had not opened since. The room had been their daughter’s for four months.

Keʻala had been born in the November of 1934, early, in the bedroom along the corridor, and had died in the March, of a fever that came on in the evening and was over before the morning, and the doctor had stood in the corridor afterwards and said that there was nothing that could have been done, and had said it three times, as though he wanted somebody to argue with him. She was at Mauna ʻAla now, in the vault of the second house, between his grandfather and the place where his father would be put three years after. There had been no other child. The Queen had not wanted to talk about whether there would be, and then, after a while, there had been nothing to talk about.

He put his hand flat on the door. The wood was cool. He did not open it.

The Council had asked him in his first year whether he intended to name an heir, as the law allowed, and he had said that he would think about it, and the Council had been content to let him think about it for three years, which was a thing the Council was good at. He had a cousin’s boy in mind on Maui, eight years old, who was said to be clever and to cry when the cattle were sold. He had not met him. He thought perhaps in the new year.

He took his hand away and went down.

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The Grand Hall was dim and smelled of koa oil and the flowers somebody had put in the vases on Saturday, white ginger, already a little brown at the edges. Through the open front doors he could see the steps and the gravel and the lawn and the great banyan by the gate, and the light lying flat and gold across all of it now, the first real light of the day, so that the shadows of the palms ran half the length of the lawn.

Old Moses was standing at the foot of the stairs with nothing in his hands, as though he had been waiting for the King to come down so that he could not dress him.

“Good morning, Moses.”

“Your Majesty.” Moses looked at the tie. “Your Majesty has tied it twice.”

“Your Majesty has,” the King agreed.

“I could do it once, sir.”

“I know you could.”

Moses looked at it a moment longer with the expression of a man watching somebody else’s horse go lame, and then bowed and went away towards the dining room, and the King went out onto the front veranda, because it was nearly time and he liked to see it.

The flagstaff stood on the roof above the central tower, and the Guard ran the flag up it from inside, by a rope that came down through the tower to a landing on the upper floor, so that from the gravel below you saw nothing but the flag itself climbing. It had been done like that since Kalākaua’s time. It meant that nobody had ever seen the Guard raise the flag of the Kingdom; it was simply there, at sunrise, every day, and gone at sunset, and the city looked up and saw it the way it saw the sun. The King had thought, as a boy, that it was the most mysterious thing in the palace, and had climbed the tower once at dawn to see who did it, and had found a corporal of the Guard named Akana with the rope in his hands, eating a malasada, who had been very much embarrassed.

The Guard raised it at a quarter to seven, which the Guard had called sunrise in every month of the year since Kalākaua’s time, whatever the sun was doing. He stood at the top of the steps and waited. The sun was up behind him. He did not turn round to look at it. On the gravel below, the two men at the gate had come to attention without being told, because they knew the time as well as he did.

The bugle went inside the tower, muffled by the stone, eight notes, and the flag came up.

It went up quickly, the way it always did, as though it were glad to be out, and at the top it caught the wind off the mountains and stood straight out over the roof towards the sea: the eight stripes, white and red and blue, one for each island, and the Union in the canton. The Union had been in the canton since about 1816, when the first Kamehameha had taken it, more or less, from the ensign of a British ship he admired, decades before the Realm had any claim on the islands of any kind. The Kingdom had never changed it. When the Treaty was signed, the Realm’s commissioners had asked, with great tact, whether the Kingdom might now wish to; and the old Queen had looked at them for some time and said that it had been the flag of the Kingdom for eighty years, and that the commissioners were welcome to look at it for as long as they liked.

He watched it a moment, the eight stripes moving against a sky with no cloud in it at all now except over the Waiʻanae range in the west, where the cloud lay along the ridges like something left there to dry.

Then he went in to breakfast. It was ten minutes to seven, and he had been King for a thousand and some days, and the Kingdom was as quiet as it had been every morning of them, and the Realm was paying it no attention at all.