In Marble and Light

Abstract

In Marble and Light Garrett Hongo (bio) Albert Kazuyoshi Hongo, I.M. I once saw somewhere, in a box of old financials, check stubsand paid bills, or leaned up against a dusty mirror, amidst vials of nail polish and mascara cluttered on my mother’s vanitytable in their bedroom, an old 8 x 10 photograph of my father with two of his war buddies. It was a black and white studio shottouched up so their faces looked like smooth marble, but sepia- toned with a cast of weak coffee. They wore dress khakis,smoothly starched shirts with campaign ribbons across their chests and a stripe or two on their long, pressed sleeves. My father’sbore none, but his black hair rode up like a glassy wave slicking over one side of his head, hatless, unlike the others who wore caps.It must’ve been when we lived in Midtown L.A., in the apartment house with a Hawaiian name on North Kingsley Drive when I saw it.I was six or seven, and he told me he’d been a guard at Nuremberg, [End Page 579] passing Lucky Strikes to S.S. officers imprisoned therewho begged for them before they went on trial. Zigaretten, bitte, he’d say, his one phrase of German,and he grinned when he said it, as though it were the cheesiest joke of his life. He never told me one thing else about the warexcept that he’d brought a Luger and a Leica back from there that my mother made him sell. “She no like war souvenir,”he said, waving his hand in dismissal. In the fall of 1987, three years after he died, I went along to a memorialgathering at Arlington, the National Cemetery, invited there by my senators from Hawai‘i, themselves decorated veterans.I stood at the top of an amphitheater and gazed down at all the assembled of the 442nd that day, scores of old menin their sixties and seventies, gray and shrunken in their informal aloha clothes, their hair silver under VFW caps.Dan Inouye, my father’s teammate from McKinley High’s football varsity, led me down the shallow steps, saying“There are some guys I want you to meet.” I staggered obediently along. About halfway, a group of less than a dozenmen stood up as we approached, some reaching to take the senator’s only hand. He slipped it free and gesturedtoward me, turning. “This is Al Hongo’s boy,” he said, simply. [End Page 580] Then, one by one, like mourners at a funeral, each of themshuffled up and shook my hand, some saying nothing but looking deep into my eyes, theirs glistening in the autumn light.One in a wheelchair backed himself out from the end of the aisle — his hands were in dark half-gloves and I saw trousers rolled upwhere his legs might’ve been. Then he pushed toward me, reaching, his hands beckoning me to bend toward him. I did, thinkingthat he might take the lei of green ti leaves from his shoulders and place it around my neck, that I would be kissed in greeting.But his hands reached past to my face, and I felt his free fingers rubbing a soft arpeggio against my cheeks and the hollows above my jaw,slow strokes as though a dirge were in their touch, cadenced and resolute. “Your face the same as your father’s,” he said, the palms of his gloves roughas emery against my skin. And I was made marble, wet with a shining light. Memorial Day, 2018 Anzio [End Page 581] Garrett Hongo Garrett Hongo is the author of three collections of poetry, three anthologies, and Volcano: A Memoir of Hawai‘i. He lives in Eugene, Oregon, and teaches at the University of Oregon, where he is a Distinguished Professor in the College of Arts and Sciences. Copyright © 2021 The University of the South