Edward Jones - All Aunt Hagar's Children

Anita came out of the Honolulu Hilton and turned toward the sun. She did not yet know if she wanted to swim, but it would take her no time to return and change into a swimsuit. The airplane to Okinawa was in the morning. There were shops for the several blocks down to the beach, and she took her time and paused before all the windows. If there was something especially grand, there was no point in waiting until Okinawa for a present for her child. Indeed, two or three gifts would not be a problem for a little girl who was far from spoiled, who was turning out quite nicely.

About midway up the first block, there was a pawnshop, and she stood before a display of items for sale, things pawned but never redeemed. While everything she saw was in good condition, nothing seemed of her time, the present day. On a small red pallet on a stool nearest the window, some ten Morgan silver dollars in plastic packages had dates ranging from 1879 to 1924. Her father and grandfather had had small collections of such coins, and while she had been familiar with them growing up, had even played with those her father had, the money on the other side of the glass seemed from a place quite alien to her. Still, her father might like one, but she could not recall dates he did and did not have, and so she continued on.

In the third block, where she could hear clearly the sound of the sea coming to the shore and going back out, there was a candy shop. A SWEET OLD TIME, the many-colored letters said in a half circle on the window. She went in, thinking of the candy from childhood, the kind of sweets she had enjoyed for only a handful of pennies. Kits. Squirrel Nuts. Sugar Daddy. Sugar Mama. And the little Sugar Babies. She did not think they made that stuff anymore, and that was a shame because she had good memories of those treats, and it would have been nice for her daughter to know a part of what had been her childhood. But she was curious. “Welcome back,” a recorded child’s voice sang when Anita opened the door. “Welcome back to a sweet old time.”

The shop was nearly empty except for a man who was standing with his hands behind his back in front of the display case near the door. He seemed to be trying to decide what to buy. The man turned and said good morning, and Anita nodded and said good morning. “Welcome to my humble shop,” he said. The man, about her age, was mostly Asian, but, as she had noticed with many in Hawaii, he seemed a mixture of a good deal more; he could even have been partly black. “Let me know if I can be of service,” he said as Anita went to the first case. It had no more than an enormous variety of jelly beans, but in the second case she saw behind the glass a feast of that old-fashioned candy and she beamed at the man, and he beamed back, as if she and he had shared the same things from the same store once upon a time. “I get that look all the time,” he said. She leaned forward slightly and saw just about everything she could remember. The same girl on the Mary Jane wrapping, that candy of no more than an inch with the surprise nutty mixture buried within the hard outside. Necco wafers were there. She and her brother and their cousins, Catholics all, had played priest and churchgoers with that candy. “Don’t chew it. It’s the host, stupid. You not sposed to chew.” “I gotta chew. You want me to get sick or somethin?”

She bought two bags of various pieces, a large bag for Bethany and a smaller one she could enjoy going to Okinawa and then on the way back home.

“I thought all of this was a dying art,” she said to the man as she paid for her purchase. It wasn’t penny candy anymore.

“I thought so, too,” the man said, “until I found this company in Wisconsin that caters to people like us.” He tied each bag with a red bow. “I have colored string as well,” he said, “but that is for the men who come in and remember, too.”

The child sang again after she opened the door. Welcome back to a sweet old time. She took off her sandals at the entrance to the beach. She hadn’t had breakfast, and though she knew better, she decided that her breakfast would be candy on the beach. It was a good thing Bethany wasn’t with her. A few yards from the sea, she set down the sandals and the larger bag on the sand and began to open her bag, her mouth watering and her fingers failing to untie the bow. She tried biting it loose, but the simple bow held tight. She then tried rolling it up to the top of the bag where she might just pull it away. That failed as well, and she found herself smiling. “Serves you right, you little penny ninny. What kind of an example are you to your child, eating candy on an empty stomach at ten-thirty in the morning? And in Hawaii. Shame shame, everybody knows your name.”

At last she bit a tiny hole into the bag itself and into the opening she stuck a finger and made an even larger hole. She pulled out one Mary Jane, marveled at the familiar black and red and light brown wrapping. She popped it into her mouth. There was at first nothing but an overwhelming sugariness, and even after a flavor of some kind seeped through the sugar, it did not last, and it was not as she remembered. She tried other kinds of candy, and it was the same, a bunch of something she could not remember ever knowing.

Back in the shop, the man raised his head and seemed initially surprised to see her again, but long before the recording stopped, the surprise disappeared from his face. There were five children before that second case, and each was pointing at this or that piece. A man and a woman stood back, quietly conversing. As he waited for the children to make up their minds, the proprietor said, “Back for more?”

“No,” Anita said. “It doesn’t taste right. Maybe it’s old, or moldy, or something. It tasted funny.” The children were not even aware of her, but the two adults were listening.

“Well, it’s new. I just opened a brand-new shipment of everything last evening. See,” and he reached into the case and brought out different pieces and gave them to the children. “See.” The children unwrapped and ate, and they all showed happy faces and looked with some amazement at each other as they chewed. “See, just in from Wisconsin.”

Anita left. At the end of that third block, she took the candy piece by piece out of her bag, looked at the wrappers that she knew so well, and dropped them one by one into a trash can, which told her in letters of pink leis to KEEP HONOLULU CLEAN. Someone had told her that the military airplane would take four or five hours to get her to Okinawa. “Depending,” the person had said, but never said depending upon what. She crossed to the next block. The other candy would be fine for Bethany. Her discarded bag of stuff had cost $5.25. When she was a girl, it would have been no more than a quarter. And the trip back from Okinawa—another four or five hours. Depending…

In the first block, just before the pawnshop, she realized that even an hour of a perfect trip to Okinawa would now be too much. The desk clerk at the hotel told her she knew of a flight in seven hours that would take her to Los Angeles, but Mrs. Channing would have to go first to Chicago, rather than directly to Washington, and Anita told her that would be fine. The clerk said she would make the arrangements, and before Anita left the desk, she asked about sending a telegram, and the clerk said someone would call her room to make those arrangements.

On the elevator, she began to feel that she had slept through something and now that she was awake, she had to make do with what she now had.

The military people had one of their airplanes take the sergeant from Okinawa to Hawaii, and there he waited a day and a half for another to fly him to a base in California. The doctor who was a captain in Okinawa wanted him to rest as much as possible for the journey to Washington. Two days after getting to California, the military people flew the sergeant and fifteen other sick people to a base just outside Washington. There were files on all of these sixteen people, and in each one, from Okinawa to Washington to Germany, somebody had stamped on the first page of each file the red word INACTIVE. The army doctor had told the sergeant that Washington could do for him what Okinawa did not have the equipment to do. “Watch. You’ll see,” the doctor said. A fleet of twelve ambulances and military medical personnel left the base just after sundown and transported the sixteen men and women to Walter Reed Army Hospital on 16th Street. And there the sergeant’s daughter and his wife, who was already on her way to not being his wife, came to see him in his bright room on the third floor. They arrived on a Saturday, not even three weeks after the military people had torn into his body and cut away nearly a fourth of his chest. The pain drugs eased the crush of misery after that, but not thoroughly, and in his dreams the sergeant always lost a fight against a sexless monster that clawed him apart. It was the only dream he would have for a very, very long time.