Ugly Duckels: A Contemporary Fairytale

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Chapter I

Veronica had never killed a priest before. But she would no more think herself a priest-killer tomorrow than she thought herself a pimp-killer today for something that had happened almost a year ago in St. Paul.

It was her first trip to Honolulu, and she had never even met Fr. Linus G. Arnholdt. The memorized photo in her purse showed an ageing face, hard and impersonal. That kind she remembered from her years in the orphanage. The photo had come two days ago, addressed to Veronica Dean but mailed special delivery to Jack’s apartment in San Francisco. The packet had also contained an airline ticket, together with three thousand dollars and a promise of two thousand more upon completion. In accepting it, she felt that at last her life, which at twenty had felt almost stalled, was finding in movement its own direction. On the corner now of Kaloa and Mani, across the street from the church, she paused.

Kaloa Street at dusk was bathed in the scent of plumeria, but she scarcely noticed it. She was intent on making her close study of the rectory and its approaches seem part of a housewife’s homeward stroll. Why were there priests in Hawaii anyway, she wondered. St. Dominic’s Orphanage had been set firmly in Kansas, where blizzards and scorching summers had at least given some credence to the stories of a fallen earth. And to those priests who glided over it in skirted robes. That lot had singled her out no more than twice a year—once in the spring, when they reviewed her progress and promoted her to the next grade

Father Arnholdt was expecting her. On the phone he had, in fact, seemed quite eager to meet her when she mentioned—as instructed via General Delivery—that she had some information about S.T.A.R. For six months the headlines had speculated about this secret organization and its simple demand—if you do not stop the arms race, we will detonate a nuclear device somewhere in the United States. The movement had been christened backwards from the intials of its slogan—Stop the Arms Race. Unlike Jack, who read radical books and loved writing letters to the editor, Veronica had followed the story with an odd detachment, as though it were another tale from Wonderland and she were Alice. S.T.A.R. was quite serious, however, and had already succeeded in stalling the military build-up in Washington, to the cheers of a growing number of ordinary citizens. In its wake, S.T.A.R. had attracted a coalition of semi-public pressure groups, some openly led by a number of prominent clergymen.

The dry bones of the palm fronds clattered. She smiled at the thought of a nuclear winter in such a place. The smile sagged noticeably on the right, just offshore where Madagascar would have been in the map that was her face. Only when she smiled or attempted animated conversation was the face distorted. And little tempted her to do either, given a face that displayed so boldly the mixed handiwork of God and man.

She had parked the rented car several blocks away. Little had eluded her inspection on a brief walk through the residential area. Not yet night, it was nevertheless too dark to read a newspaper comfortably. Three possible routes led from the rectory to the car, and she catalogued the features of each—a fence, a hedge, a garbage container, a tricycle left at the curb by an alleyway. She noticed that several doors were open, and for each she calculated the angle of vision it afforded on the street. In a real city, she thought, the doors would all have been locked and the street hers.

It was not indecision that kept her from selecting the escape route now. That would come after—if there was to be an afterward—and it would be keyed to the chance traffic of the moment. It was a familiar study. As a child she had followed such a regimen each day after school, running the gantlet of shrill eyes that lined the three blocks from the parish school to the orphanage. She did not know if Father Arnholdt was a S.T.A.R. sympathizer. Nor did she care. Out of the flurry of events that had crowded the past few days, she had seized only upon the idea of the test. It was the only thing that made sense. It

would answer the question of what she was.

At first she had been only what the world called her, an orphan with a face that no one would adopt. Until almost a year ago she had been a child-care aide, with a special aptitude for working with handicapped children. Since then she had killed two men. Yet her soul resisted the identity that circumstances pressed upon it. She was the one who even now should have been telling to a circle of broken children the story of the ugly duckling. But last week a hurried phone call from Jack had changed all that. He said that he had given her name to these friends of his, that they would be contacting her, that he would not even have suggested her if there had been more time, but that this could be the last one.

Jack was the only person who knew she had killed Simon and, later, that drug dealer in Oakland. It was after Oakland that Jack had helped her get the operation on her face, the operation that was to have let her look like other people. She would do almost anything for Jack. But not this. It was for herself that she was determined to go ahead with the test.

The priest was expecting her in five minutes, but there had been no witnesses thus far and she did not want to be seen loitering. For she did not know whether God would let her do this thing and had agreed to try only as a way of testing the divine. It reminded her somewhat of the old millpond test for witches. The innocent drowned. And the guilty floated to shore, where they were not suffered to live.

Perhaps Father Arnholdt would not be there. That might be a sign. Perhaps he would say something, anything, to tell her that he knew. And that could be a sign. Perhaps the housekeeper would be there, though the note from Willard had said she took Wednesday evenings off. It was all so confusing. Although she really knew nothing about signs from heaven, she did not seriously expect to hear voices commanding her. But she supposed, somehow, that those who took the test would be treated fairly, that God could arrange an April fool for December if He wished.

The phone service entry was where Willard’s diagram had shown it, but she decided against cutting it. She had never met Willard. But he had signed the note that came with the photo. And he had taken her call when she had arrived yesterday, having arranged for her to stay on Kauai. She had flown over to Honolulu this afternoon and would be returning tonight—by which time what she was, one way or another, would have been established. Willard had instructed her carefully, telling her where to pick up the gun and how he would contact her to deliver the additional two thousand when the work was finished. She did not wonder what kind of man this Willard was. It was pointless to question the means of the Test. Who hired the Willards of the world was not her concern. There would always be enough hate to go around.

In the gathering dark she took a last look at the garden in the rear, with its sandy path that wound among flowers she could not name. At St. Dominic’s when the weather had permitted, Father Guido used to read his breviary in the convent garden, his felt-slippered feet shuffling along the brick walkway to the cadence of his mumbled prayer. But here there was only sand to walk in. And there were no seasons—only politics and a meddling old man.

She rapped on the door, remembering a knob that had once stared back with Jacob Marley’s eyes. But then the old priest opened the door. She was vexed to see a Doberman padding beside him. Willard’s note had said nothing about a dog.

You must be the young lady who called—something about the S.T.A.R. movement, wasn’t it? He was much taller than the photo had suggested. Come in, the dog won’t hurt you.

The dog who would not hurt her had himself recently been hurt. His ears had been clipped and the stubs were held erect by a criss-cross arrangement of tape. He looked like the wolf who had been disguised in Grandma’s bed. The ritual mutilation left the scarred ears standing upright, dainty and pointed, like demonic horns in velvet. The priest was better than most, she told herself, at concealing the pain and pity incited by the ruin of her face. He hid his uneasiness in talk. They don’t look like Dobermans, he said as she entered, unless they have their ears fixed. A clear reproof to Lysenko.

As he closed the door she listened intently for signs of any third person in the house. His remark meant nothing to her, other than as proof that he was accustomed to living alone, carrying on a dialogue with himself and making sermon points despite the absence of the congregation. In the house she detected nothing but the hum of the refrigerator and the guttering sigh of a votive candle on the marble table next to the foyer.

He led her to the study, a small room lit only a dim lamp in the corner by the sofa. You said something about the peace bomb on the phone. Terrible phrase, that. Like nuclear exchange, overkill—or megadeath.

She studied him carefully. He was a lean elderly man whose sinews betrayed more of mountain climbing than genuflecting. The soutane was girded by a black belt, as though the art of turning the other cheek—how she hated the phrase—had given way to the martial arts. He stood oddly posed at the edge of the light, and the orange cast of the shadows tugged at her memory. The left arm buried itself in the gathered folds of his robe. It seemed more absent-mindedness than lack of tact when he indicated for her the wicker sofa, which put her right cheek next to the only lamp in the room.

The papers, he said, clearing his throat, the papers have traced the bomb to Vermont. Is it that you have news more recent than that? He peered over his glassses, his gaze fixed on her eyes.

Vermont? No, it went from there to St. Paul, she said, embellishing on the cover story that Willard had only sketched.

The television networks, which lived and died on their ability to procure bizarre graphics, had played a vital role in the movement from the beginning. S.T.A.R. had freely given them diagrams of the bomb, together with photos of it in recognizable places. The one last July, showing it under the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, had been a CBS exclusive, though later it made the cover of all three newsmagazines. The group seemed as efficient in surreptitious transport as the Underground Railroad had been in abolitionist days. The shadowy leaders of S.T.A.R. had remained effortlessly at least three steps ahead of the various alphabetically anonymous agencies which pursued them with monomaniacal frenzy.

From North Dakota to St. Louis to Vermont the device had hopped randomly about the continent. It had been assembled, the conspirators said, from readily available materials. Journal reprints giving construction details were in the public domain and could be had from the Government Printing Office for the asking. S.T.A.R. assured C.B.S., furthermore, that the skills required for its design and assembly would not have overtaxed a diligent high school graduate. And to a chorus of why weren’t we told? the device had trundled about the country for six months. It was no larger than a golf bag and—according to The New York Times—weighed only a bit more than a chubby second grade schoolgirl.

Father Arnholdt tried to draw her out. Is it still in Minnesota?

No, she said, loosening the lid on the box next to her, I have something for you more recent than St. Paul.

I knew it. It’s here in the islands, just as they said.

She paused. The framed engraving on the wall behind his head pried at a closed door, and she saw once again the illustrated catechism she had kept by her bedside at the orphanage, saw the bat-winged angels by Gustav Dore that she had traced on rainy days. Or were those the demonic wings of the other side? No matter. The idea of institutionalized piety and forgiveness defended by powers with such wings—it was absurd. At best they could only have lurched forward, leaden feet dragging beneath the futile flutter of thin-ribbed wings.

God would have been better defended by dogs, she thought. She had almost forgotten that she had been awaiting a sign. But she saw now that there would be none. The hard question had been answered—none of the above applied. She knew now for the first time since landing that she would be able to do this thing. That He would let her.

She was no marksman but at this range all it took was steadiness and resolve, both of which she now had. She shot the animal first, a single .38 slug that hissed between his shoulders as he sat facing her, posed like the dog in the classic ad, wrapped in his master’s voice. Dear God, Father Arnholdt breathed, as though dictating a letter to the Creator who, in His omniscience, might yet be said almost to have overlooked some of the absurd possibilities of a December evening.

And then she shot the priest, angling the bullet through the temple as he leaned over the dog. He sprawled across the animal with the white-trussed face, quite deaf now to the voice of the master.

In less than an hour she was on the plane to Kauai. Honolulu was behind her now and the test was over. She smiled grimly at the thought that perhaps God had failed it. Below, the ocean seemed no larger than a millpond. The inter-island flight was only a thirty minute hop, and she sat back, sipping the complimentary pineapple juice and puzzling over the last sight of the priest. She had known he was dead before his face fell into the pool of dog’s blood on the rug, but she had checked anyway. It was only then that she had noticed the arm. It was withered, arm and hand, to the size of a twelve year old’s, and

she saw him at once as a boy, one who had never been chosen first for the ball team, one who had perhaps barely held his own as an altar boy. Why, she asked herself, hadn’t they told her? Just another duckel. The plane lurched as it prepared to descend to a new island. The pineapple juice was lukewarm and thick but she drank it anyway.

—2—

When Tom Kinau brought the phone out to the poolside, the old man was doing his daily laps. Kinau looked more like a fullback than the nuclear physicist he might have been, had he not dropped out of Berkeley two months before graduation fifteen years ago. Anyone familiar only with his daily round of chores at Hale Ali’i, the old man’s Maui plantation, might have thought him just another houseboy, another native Hawaiian pressed into servitude. Tom Kinau, however, did not view his relation to the old man as one of employee and employer—not that he would have called David Stanley Willington the old man to his face. It was true that he did chores of a kind for the wealthy eighty-two year old entrepreneur. And Willington did him favors occasionally. Kinau captained Willington’s yacht and had directed several underwater explorations and water pollution studies for one of the old man’s corporations. The old man, in turn, had largely funded Kinau’s construction of a uranium bomb last year.

He wigwagged the old man to take the call, the earplugs having rendered the swimmer deaf to the outside world. The plugs, the nose clip, the goggles and the bathing cap made the wrinkled swimmer, despite his fitness, seem a grotesque amphibian. And though he was the third wealthiest resident of the state, with the bulk of his holdings in Maui real estate, he would never be mistaken for a frog prince. He remained in the water and removed only one earplug before taking the cordless phone from Kinau. A glance at Kinau and the younger man absented himself from poolside.

D.S.W. here, he announced, the voice pleasant though uninflected by any emotion. Power such as his did not need to reassure itself by barking at subordinates. He did not interrupt the caller, listening for several minutes with only an occasional nod of his bathing cap. And when he did respond, it was not with the expectation that any conversation would develop.

Even the dog? How needlessly thorough. I fear that S.T.A.R. has outlived its purpose, Walter, but I’ll keep our little arrangement in mind.

He placed the instrument face down on the marble walkway that surrounded the pool. In four days, he thought, S.T.A.R.’s precious symbol would be in place, ready to do the work for which it was intended. And that was not the stopping of an arms race, but the shifting of the tourist industry from Honolulu to Maui.

At midnight on Christmas eve, if all went well, a nuclear device would be detonated just off the shores of Waikiki. Though no tests had been possible, Kinau thought it would yield the equivalent of three or four kilotons of TNT. The physical damage would, of course, be considerable, and a certain number of people would be incinerated, but greater still, he hoped, would be the psychological damage. Molokai had suffered for years the onus of its past as a leper island, with a consequent depression in real estate values. He had every reason to think that mainland vacationers would shun Honolulu as they had in the past avoided Molokai—at least for a few seasons. And in those few seasons, his media consultants and publicists would be able to establish Maui as the center for Hawaiian vacationers.

That, however, was still four days away. More immediate things occupied his attention now—the James Group, for example, was still attempting to leverage him out of gold futures in the Hong Kong market. At eighty-two, a concern for his health also carried with it certain duties. The phone call had interrupted his daily swim in the pool. He disliked swimming, but its benefits had become apparent ever since he had taken it up twelve years ago, when he had abandoned the delights of bed, bar and board and embraced instead those of longevity. Seventeen laps remained, by his reckoning. He reinserted the earplug, pushed off from the side of the pool and swam, as he was fond of saying, for his life.

—3—

Arthur Cowan, professor of history, sat on the patio of the Malana Kai facing the ocean on the island of Kauai. He had not had a cigarette since Mike had crawled into his bed and awakened him at six that morning—and it was now almost sunset. Enough of a victory for this first day of vacation, he thought, opening a pack as he watched Winifred playing with the boy down in the lagoon. In the water Mike looked like any other six-year-old. Only the wheelchair, child-sized and metallic in the sand, suggested otherwise.

Cowan’s brother, Mark, poured a fresh cup of coffee. Unlike the vacationing Arthur, he was a year-round resident of the islands. Based in Honolulu, he was a retired army officer working now as a criminal investigator for the state’s attorney. He was also a part owner of the Malana Kai Beach Apartments in Kauai and had driven over from Lihue to see his brother’s family settled in.

The lagoon’s perfect for families with young kids, Mark said. That’s one of the reasons I bought in.

The state must pay you well, Arthur said. I could never afford such an investment on my income.

Free enterprise. Artie. There’s nothing else like it. You professors ought to get out in the world more. See what it’s really like.

It was an old point of contention between them and usually arose early in their infrequent reunions. Arthur did not feel, this time, like pursuing it. The idea of capital formation buttressed by military retirement checks did not clearly exemplify Adam Smith’s model for free enterprise. But it was enough that Mark had arranged such an attractive deal for them with the apartment, and he did not wish to appear ungrateful. Away from the university he had found that people tend to take personally every disagreement about ideas. In the ‘sixties he and Mark had argued about racial equality and in the ‘seventies about Viet Nam. Apparently the ‘eighties were to be devoted to the merits of capitalism.

He welcomed the change. There had been little satisfaction in their past debates on why black people had not invented the wheel, or on why body counts were not a useful measure of national will. Maybe they could be less acrimonious in their exchanges on mutual funds and tax shelters.

Arthur observed the tableau spread before him—his wife and son held in the curve of the lagoon, the fingered palms caressing the wind, the improbable blues that met at the horizon where sea and sky negotiated their limits. Indiana and the past semester were more distant now than Calvin Coolidge, more foreign than Addis Ababa. It had always been uncertain whether he or Winifred liked the islands better. Each seemingly convinced the other of the need to fly out from Indiana for a month or so every other year. It was a habit which devastated their savings, that increment which their less improvident friends invested in real estate—specifically, in student housing around the university. On this first evening in Kauai, however, nature conspired a casual perfection in sky and greenery, in surf and songbird—and Arthur would not have traded places with the most prosperous slumlord in Indiana.

What brings you to Kauai? Arthur asked. You didn’t fly over from Honolulu just to see that we had enough clean sheets.

We’ve got a stake-out over here. A motel down the road in Lihue. He spoke matter-of-factly, as though by volunteering less he could pique his brother’s curiosity the more. Arthur played the dutiful younger brother. Anything serious?

Well, it’s none of your peace bomb stuff. Arthur smiled at the your but let it pass. Fairly routine. Just a tip on a drug case. It may take several days. And it might come to nothing. Never can tell. The locals are handling it.

Do you get a lot of tips?

Affirmative. Punks will always rat on the competition. Just good business. No honor in the dope trade.

Arthur grinned over the coffee cup. Some more of that free enterprise you were talking about, I suppose.

It’s no joke, Artie. I saw the stuff there myself. At least ten grand, maybe more, on the street. Drug of choice or not, coke is bad news. And whoever shows up at that room has some explaining to do.

No argument there. The natural high of a curiosity pursued had always been Arthur’s drug of choice. My business, I’m afraid, is much less exciting. I’m finally finishing that critical biography of Lindbergh.

You’ve come to the wrong island, Artie. He lived over on Maui. Buried there, too.

Mark always seemed happy to set the ivory tower boys straight on the facts. Arthur traded fact for fact. At Kipahulu, wasn’t it?

Somewhere out past Hana. I can’t keep up on all these details unless I have to testify in court on them. To the best of my knowledge, he grunted wryly, Lindy wasn’t into drugs.

True enough. Anyway, I’ll fly over tomorrow for a few days and look the place over while Winnie and Mike settle in here. I might find a paragraph or two for the epilogue.

You could find all the facts you need in any Indiana library, he pointed out slyly. But I guess the trip makes a fatter deduction.

Affirmative, he replied, echoing Mark’s military speech habits. A friend of mine in the English department tells me there’s a glut of articles on Robert Louis Stevenson, simply because the Bishop Museum in Honolulu has a large collection of original Stevenson material.

That makes Oahu a real treasure island, doesn’t it? But why Lindbergh? What do you find interesting about him?

I think it’s the airplane. Arthur took off his horn rimmed glasses in ritual candid thoughtfulness, not unaware of the irony that dimmed vision contributed to the gesture. He was the last American to have been recognized overnight as an authentic hero. But though what he did required an intimate feeling for and knowledge of a machine, people ignored the one new element in his example, the airplane, and cast his deed in the same mold they use for all feats of human endurance, whether Perry’s or Byrd’s.

Well, I’ll say one thing. You sure make it sound like a book.

Arthur knew that he intended the remark as a compliment and ignored the implications of a dry chronicle. He was about to continue with certain parallels between peace-bombs and public attitudes toward technology when Winifred joined them.

Mike’s doing sand castles now. It’s my turn for coffee.

Mark had once told Arthur that Winnie’s was an easy face to describe. A witness need only remember the rounded line of cheek and chin, the smoothly upturned nose, the green eyes, and the widow’s peak—with these few facts a police artist could easily key in a fair likeness on the Identikit. Arthur would have thought mainly of the smile and the voice, though having to describe them would have left him fumbling for words. He saw in her face the twenty-three year stroll through life hand-in-hand, the easily forgotten tedium erased by the small triumphs, the gentleness beyond words that each drew from the other. Only Mike had ever come between them.

Seeing his worried-hen bobbing in Mike’s direction, Winifred smiled. It was chiefly about the eyes, however, and only her husband noticed it. Not that he was about to mention strolling past tedium to triumph or anything of the sort. Historians, she would have been quick to respond, should stick to the Lindberghs of this world and leave their wives unexplained.

Mark poured her coffee. You never look any older, Winnie. Is that what hanging around this guy does for you?

She laughed softly. Art’s the young one. He’s just never given me time to age properly. Didn’t he tell you? He’s leaving me tomorrow.

Yeah. A heated relationship, I hear, with another island. Face it, kid, you’ve lost him.

A straying Arthur is not one of the things that can happen.

Notice how delicately she puts that, Arthur said. Winnie, Mark’s here on business too. Mine’s the Lone Eagle, and his, apparently, is the Lone Pigeon.

Winifred spun the dial on the radio. All they have is music for easy listening, Mark. You’d think they’d play island music once in a while.

Looking momentarily beyond her at Mike playing in the sand, Arthur had a sudden fear that a tidal wave was about to engulf the boy. He was only temporarily reassured to note the waves lapping the sheltered curve of the beach. That was the way it always was with him. Not a day passed but that out of a hundred ordinary glances at Mike one would unaccountably return, hitting him in the pit of the stomach in twin waves of pity and fear that bypassed the mind and rasped directly on the naked ganglia. It was over but in instant after he recognized the familiar feeling, and he could only label it as sudden panic at the absolute vulnerability his son presented to the world. The fear having died until the next time—unpredictable though inevitable that it was—he looked again at Winifred. More pointedly than usual, his looking at her seemed a reward that familiarity never dulled.

Mike, he knew, had been from the start the most severe test on their marriage. Their third child, he had been born fifteen years after Alicia, seventeen after Linda. Had Winifred been less strong, the marriage would have ended shortly after Mike’s birth, after the congenital defects had been added up—the spina bifida with the resulting paraplegia and mental retardation—for the doctors had all agreed that, like Humpty Dumpty, little Mike could not be put back together again. The kindlier ones had suggested he be institutionalized.

On the radio forty violins climbed the tumescent heights of some impossible dream, after which the evening news came on. Resisting the heights, Arthur noted idly the lead story, something about a murder, when Mark swore softly.

What is it, Arthur asked.

Somebody’s killed a priest in Honolulu, he half-whispered, leaning over the tiny radio. Let me catch the rest of this.

The news gave was to basketball scores, and Marked thumped the table. Just my luck. Baby-sitting a local drug case while a first-class murder assignment passes me by. They’ll probably give it to Miller.

Can’t you pull seniority or something and switch cases?

They may do it that way on T.V., but the chief has different ideas. He likes a man to stay with a case till it’s wrapped. Luck of the draw, that’s all it is.

Winifred wondered at his chagrin. What’s so first-class about this case? Probably some poor-box thief who panicked.

You may be right. But the victim was Father Arnholdt. Word in the department was that he was the go-between with those bomb-nuts from S.T.A.R. and the feds. I see the press isn’t on to that angle yet.

Must there be a conspiracy in everything? Winifred asked.

Aiding and abetting, one way or another, Winnie—it turns up in every investigation.

Arthur grunted. It was certainly a pragmatic solution to the delicate problems of Self and Society that bedeviled graduate seminars. But at that moment he looked over at Mike. The boy had paused, kneeling in the sand, his castle nearly complete. A bird had alighted almost in his shadow to study the mound of sand, head immobile, half-cocked, one perfectly smooth ebony eye transfixed. Arthur recorded the tableau in that corner of the mind where ideal memories give the lie to imperfect cameras. The incongruity of a dead priest, he knew, would remain forever yoked to this moment that belonged to a smiling boy pointing out to the first creature that showed an interest exactly where the door of the castle would go.

—4—

Hawaiian Air arriving gate three. The disembodied voice touched only those who leaned toward it, which was more than could be said for the elderly cleaning woman who bent toward her work, sifting cigarette butts from the sand urns. Her invisible hovering touched no one, though her mind brushed against them all. The familiar faces of businessmen who commuted daily to the piled concrete warrens of metropolitan Oahu. The balding one who had worn the same tie these last three days. The overweight local mothers back from a day’s shopping in Honolulu, the cord handles of plastic shopping bags biting into their hands. The dutiful brother and sister, no more than seven or eight, following their grandmother, taking their turn with the bulky brown paper sacks they knew she was too tired to balance.

And everywhere the tourists. They reminded her of nothing but each other and connected with no memory of her childhood in the cane fields a half century ago but that of the anonymous stalks swaying eternally in the wind. That one with the face—she was different, not rushing like the rest but moving solidly and with a purpose. A patch of ghost-white skin on the cheek. Why doesn’t she cover it with make-up?

She hadn’t seen such a sight in years, though things like that and worse—elephant leg and goiter—had once been common in the islands. When she had first married, they had lived next door to a man like that. But his blotch had been red and he had been dark-skinned. And it wasn’t the same for a man.

No matter. In two hours she would be home. It was Wednesday and Theresa would be off to her night class, leaving the twins for her to bathe. What were mothers coming to, with jobs and college and straying husbands? And the young ones picketing for whales and even Peace Bombs. Island life had once consisted of large families living in unpaved villages where strangers were embraced at the luau held each Saturday next to the church.

The woman with the face slowed to observe the children helping