For years, movie goers and readers have been fascinated with the fictional possibilities that arise with the premise of a man or woman—or even a cast of characters—actually living for a time in a hotel. In my lifetime, Hollywood as given us such hotel works as Neil Simon’s 1971 production, “Plaza Suite,” with the puckish Walter Matthau playing three separate roles. After Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 screen adaptation of Stephen King’s “The Shining,” it took Hollywood a few years to get over the horrors of that hotel, until Sofia Coppola’s understated gem “Lost in Translation” took us and Bill Murray to a Japanese hotel for a stay in 2003. And then there came two recent hotel box office hits in a row: “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” in 2011, followed shortly thereafter by Wes Anderson’s enchanting comedy, “The Grand Budapest Hotel” in 2014.
In novels, I remember reading 1971’s “Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont,” written by Elizabeth Taylor (no, not that one), which was short-listed for a Booker Prize. Almost a decade later, Anita Brookner actually won the Booker Prize in 1984 for her delicate novel “Hotel Du Lac.” And now we have the much-read, much-discussed, soon-to-be-its-own-made-for-television-movie, 2016’s tour de force “A Gentleman in Moscow,” by Amor Towles.
As of today, over 1.5 million readers know the novel’s plot outline: Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov is arrested in Moscow in 1922, accused of being an unrepentant aristocrat who wrote an anti-revolutionary poem that itched the Bolshevik leaders of the 1917 Russian Revolution. Rather than killing him or sending him to a certain death in a cold Siberian exile, the Bolsheviks instead place him under house arrest and sent him to live—for the rest of his life—in the Metropol, the grandest of Russian hotels, conveniently located across the street from the Kremlin, where he could be kept under watchful eyes.
The very clever Towles knows he has boxed himself into a fictional corner (the Count’s “cell” is a 10×10 foot hotel room) where he must create a story around: A) the lives of the people who work at the Metropol who must deal with The Count on a daily basis; B) the guests who stay at the Metropol, with whom some will have an opportunity to interact with the Count; C) the history of Russian people and the developing conditons under which they must live in their new post-Czarist, communist world.
Not many of us ever find ourselves in a similar life situation where, because of Russians, we are assigned to live for an extended period of time in a hotel, an alien world, a world within which we are largely, in a sense, at sea, inhabited by its own set of characters, its own culture, a world we cannot escape from but must adapt to through time.
But this is what happened to me at a young age, many years ago, and what made me especially susceptible to, and admiring of, Towle’s story-telling ingenuities.
In 1958, when I was eleven-years-old, we lived in a small two-bedroom, concrete block house in Mountlake Terrace, Washington. By we, I mean my mother, Verlie; my two younger sisters, Gema and Paula; my new-born baby brother, Mark; and my newly acquired step-father, Melvin Pernell Gordy, a Navy enlisted man, whom my mother had married the previous year. My father and my mother had been divorced since I was six.
“Gordy” (Navy personnel in my experience were always called by their last names) was a crew member of the U.S. Forster (DER 334), one of many radar ships that roamed the Pacific Ocean in the late 1950s and 1960s to protect the United States from surprise attacks by Russian planes or their submarines in surface-to-air attacks. As a family, we had grown used to Gordy’s ship’s schedule of roaming the Pacific for thirty days at a time and then the return home for thirty day, when the domestic fighting would begin again, before his return to sea. Thirty out, thirty in, as we became accustomed to calling his tours of duty. Thirty days of peace, thirty days of war.
Just before Christmas in 1958, we found out that Gordy’s ship was to be re-assigned from a pier in Seattle to join the Pacific Fleet in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Our family didn’t know how long this assignment would be for, but we understood that, at a minimum, we would be living in Hawaii for two years.
In 1958, Hawaii wasn’t a state, it was still a U.S. territory. We had little idea of what to expect when we arrived there. I imagined palm trees, sandy beaches…and hula girls.
On February 17th, 1959, with Gordy already out to sea on one of his thirty day departures, the five of us boarded the USS Billy Mitchell troop ship on a gray Seattle morning, found our private room, unpacked, and then went top-side to watch as our 622 foot cruise ship, loaded with hundreds of other navy dependents and an almost equal number of naval personnel assigned to the other half of the ship, embarked on an eight-day cruise to Oahu, via a twenty-four hour layover in San Francisco where we took on even more families.
My mother, Verlie, was an extraordinary woman, possessed of many talents. One of them was being able to simultaneously nurse four sea-sick children as the Billy Mitchell tossed and turned and moaned and groaned during a first-night-at-sea winter storm as we bounced down the Washington-Oregon-California coastline.
Verlie was a petite, strikingly beautiful brunette thirty-seven-year-old, and nobody’s fool. Toughened by being raised in Port Orchard, Washington as the second-oldest daughter in a family of eight children during the depression, a family that had lost their father to tuberculosis when she was only eleven-years-old (my age, during this trip), she knew the value of a dollar, of how to stretch an enlisted man’s meager salary to clothe and feed a family of four children, of how to make birthdays, holidays, and even a Pacific cruise with a guest list of boisterous, bawling children, memorable.
During the cruise, after we left San Francisco, I learned how to hide out and watch open-air movies for the crew late at night on the other half of the ship; how to order hamburgers at lunch with extra fries and a Coke; how to perform a magic card trick that I learned from an old card shark, a trick that still fascinates my friends to this day when I perform it, finally coyly explained to me by him as we sailed past Diamond Head and Waikiki Beach on the sunny, tropical morning of February 24th, entering Pearl Harbor, where we eventually docked around 10 a.m.
I don’t know how our mother was able to do the research that she did before our arrival in Hawaii. It wasn’t by phone, as trans-Pacific phone calls were too expensive in those days. Once she knew what our “per diem” was going to be (per diem is the amount of money the U.S. Navy gives to dependents to live on when they are inconvenienced and don’t have a permanent apartment or home to live in when a sailor is reassigned to a new post), but she had already come to the conclusion that she wasn’t going to “waste” our per diem on fancy Waikiki hotels like the pink Royal Hawaiian or the Princess Kailani or the Reef, Moana, or the Waikiki Biltmore. No. She made our reservations for a hotel far away from Waikiki Beach, at 1030 S. King Street, near old Honolulu and its mysterious Chinatown neighborhood.
The five of us and our luggage were transported by bus to the Napua Hotel (napua in Hawaiian means “the flowers”). No other military family from the Billy Mitchell arrived with us at this hotel. Verlie was a good judge of character.
Below is a picture of the Na Pua Hotel as it appeared in the “Honolulu Advertiser” on Sunday morning, January 23, 1938. The article explains that the newly named “Na Pua” Hotel, formerly the Vida Villa, then just the Villa, had first opened “thirty years ago” or in 1898. That was the year that Hawaii became a U.S. Territory.
The article goes on to say that the remodeled Na Pua Hotel and its 55 rooms and guest suites sat on 2 ½ acres of landscaped grounds, highlighted by bright bougainvillea around the entrance. Also, the new manager of the Na Pua was Gottfried E. Andermahr, a distinguished and well-regarded hotelier, who began his career at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City.
On this warm Tuesday morning, we stepped off our bus under tall coconut palm trees to walk amidst beautifully manicured grounds filled with the perfumed scent of plumeria, hibiscus, and bird of paradise clusters, and or course the entrance bougainvillea. We entered the hotel’s lobby which looked to me like a film set from a Dorothy Lamour movie. The hotel’s owner, Mrs. Kaneshiro, welcomed us and signed us in, then gave my mother our room key.
We were assigned an ample, second-floor suite comprised of four rooms: a screened-in entrance porch; a good-sized great room that had four single beds in it, a couch and coffee table and several chairs; a small kitchen with small appliances; and a bathroom with a shower but no tub. The great room had a ceiling fan; the wood-framed glass windows were all open wide, and every window was screened.
Mom made our bed choices then put unpacked our clothes. Before day’s end, Mom pushed Mark in a stroller while we three other kids tagged along so that we could buy groceries after enrolling in nearby Queen Kaahumanu Elementary where I would be in 6th grade, Gema in 5th, and Paula in 3rd. (At the time, we didn’t realize it, nor would we have understood, that Kaahumanu Elementary was named after the favorite mistress of King Kamehameha, the native who unified the Hawaiian Islands in 1810.)
The next morning, the three of us walked the four blocks to our elementary school together. It was already so warm when we awakened in our hotel room that I remember dressing only in a red and white tee shirt, a pair of jeans, and my scuffed brown oxfords. No jacket or sweater, even though it was February. We were in a new world.
When I walked into my classroom that first day, I knew I was a stranger in a strange land. My teacher, Miss Tom, a diminutive Chinese woman wearing a plain brown dress (this was easy to remember; she wore a version of a brown dress every day I knew her), assigned me to a desk and introduced me to the class. “Everyone, this is Ron Powers.” As I looked around the classroom, I immediately saw that I was the only one wearing shoes. Everyone else was either barefoot or wearing flip-flops–zoris, as some called them. I was also the only Caucasian in my class.
We began the school day with the Pledge of Allegiance. The class then sang a Hawaiian song, selected by a classmate standing in the front of the classroom who was leading the class in morning songs that week, a role than changed from student to student during the course of the year. We ended by singing an American patriotic song. I think it was “My Country, Tis of Thee.” There were about thirty of us in the classroom. I had never been in such a patriotic group in any American school that I had attended.
The morning seemed endless. When recess finally came, a couple of boys came up to me and one of them said, “Hey haole! (a Hawaiian term for white people in Hawaii, “newcomer”). “You like play chaze-mastah?” This was my introduction to pidgin English. I was being asked if I wanted to play “chase master,” a tag game that begins with one person being “it” and whose job is to tag others from the group until all the tagged members have narrowed down the chase to just one last person to be caught who has “won” the game, the “chase master.”
I said, “Sure,” and we went outside to play this new game for me. Running in my brown oxfords, it didn’t take long before I was tagged by the fleet-footed boy who was “It.”
I couldn’t wait to return home to the Napua Hotel. As I said, it was an endless day, and the weekend was still two more days away. My sisters, I discovered later, fared better than I did. They actually enjoyed their first days in class.
At first, our after-school routines were the same: come home from school; go to our hotel room; tell Mom about our day; do our homework; read; play with Mark; change Mark’s diaper (Mom made sure that all three of us knew how to change a diaper); eat dinner; do dishes (one of us washed dishes, one of us dried dishes, one of us had the night off, every third day). After dinner was a difficult time. We didn’t have a television. We didn’t have a radio. There wasn’t much to do but read and then go to bed.
Because I was older than Gema and Paula, I got to stay up later. And because I was older, I was allowed to roam around the hotel grounds, even as darkness approached, unsupervised, as long as I didn’t get into trouble.
Going into our memories is like walking into an amusement park’s house of mirrors. Our memories are dark, and they’re filled with images that may be real or may not be real because we are constantly being tricked. That being said, I’m fairly certain about many memories that I’ve shared here because they’re reinforced by photo albums and written records. What I’m not certain about is the sequence of events that led me to visit the lobby of the Napua Hotel one night after we have moved in. It may have been the first evening after my first day in school. It might have been as much as a week later. I just can’t remember.
But what I am certain of is that I did wander into the Napua Hotel lobby one evening after dinner. It must have still been light out or my mother wouldn’t have allowed me to leave our room. If the sun was setting, the lobby would have bathed in fading light. I do remember the configuration of the lobby: two sets of complementary Hawaiian furniture on either side of the room; potted plants in front of the windows on the sides of the lobby; the hotel desk at the back of the lobby, lit for late arrivals.
The Count, from “A Gentleman in Moscow,” now comes to mind. He is living in The Metropol, built in 1905. I was living in the Napua Hotel, built in 1898. He is there because of communist Russians. I was where I was because of communist Russians. The Count one night, sipping a second glass of wine in the Metropol’s Piazza restaurant after dinner, regards “a young man at the neighboring table, who was sketching in his sketchbook.” After dinner, I wasn’t drinking any beverage, but I did spy a young man, an artist, working at an easel in a chair near the sign-in counter.
But rather than engaging this young artist in conversation, as the Count did with his artist, I sat down on one of the lobby couches and quietly watched as the young man took a sponge, dampened it, and then wetted the surface of the art paper secured to the easel. Before long, he began to brush water colors on the wet paper, eventually turning the page into an abstract landscape of muted colors. The young man never looked at me or spoke to me.
I didn’t say a word. My mother had imbued me with many childhood responsibilities, including, “When you’re with adults, don’t speak until you’re spoken to.” And so, I sat there, watching, but minding my own business, probably thumbing through a “National Geographic” because that was one of the magazines the hotel subscribed to.
I don’t remember how long I stayed that evening. I don’t remember how soon I returned on following evenings. But I did return, as often as I could. It seems to me now that I was a lot like The Count’s Sofia, who at thirteen-years-old was “an expert at subterfuge,” moving about the hotel day and night, learning its secrets.
I am also remembering The Count’s good friend, Richard Vanderwhile, who left a portable phonograph in The Metropol with The Count along with “a small stack of records,” including some classical recordings, for The Count’s enjoyment.
One of the things I do remember about that night in the lobby, watching that young man painting his watercolors, was that he was playing music on what appeared to be a Magnavox stereo located against the wall near his painting station. It was a classical recording. I had no idea what the name of the piece was, but it seemed to perfectly fit the mood of the darkening lobby. As weeks went by, I listened to many recordings on that stereo.
February turned to March. We had no idea of how long we would be living in the Napua Hotel, but the news of securing permanent housing didn’t sound good when I listened in on Mom’s conversations with other hotel guests. We had several housing options including Naval Housing Area 1 (abbreviated NHA 1), NHA 2, NHA 3, or a large World War II housing area that I only remember being called the Quonset Huts. (We eventually moved into one of the quonset huts, but that turned out to be months later.)
A young navy couple living in the Napua Hotel in a unit just below our great room window must have noticed me playing outdoors with my brother, Mark, one day after I had returned home from school. Mark was nine-months-old then. The wife asked Mom if she would be willing to let me babysit their young son so that they could go out for dinner. Their son was about four months old, and Mom told them that I could change a diaper and feed a baby a bottle and that I would often babysit Mark for her. Besides, she was within ear call of their unit in case something went wrong. And that’s how I got my first babysitting job. I do remember babysitting for four hours that evening because I walked back upstairs to our suite with a dollar in my hand. I charged 25 cents an hour.
Just off the hotel lobby was a large suite where an older woman lived. Lived! In retrospect, she could have been in her sixties, seventies, or eighties. To an eleven-year-old, everyone over twenty seems old. In any event, my sisters and I learned about this woman, a Mrs. Hedger, if I recall her name correctly, because she approached my sisters one day in the hotel lobby to ask if they knew how to play Canasta. Neither of my sisters knew the card game. “Does your brother know how to play Canasta?” They assured her I didn’t. “Well then, I’ll teach you all how to play, and then we can have four-handed Canasta games every afternoon when you come home from school!”
That chance encounter led to many, many days in March of playing Canasta with Mrs. Hedger in her lovely one-level, Hawaiian hotel suite after our school day ended. The three of us felt very “grown up” sitting at her card table, learning the rudiments of the game, learning how to partner, learning how to meld, learning card strategies. What amazed me then—and amazes me even more, now—is that my sister, Paula, was only eight years old when she learned to play Canasta, and she was very good at the game. When Paula’s partner was Mrs. Hedger, Gema and I were usually doomed.
Mom made sure we didn’t “overstay our welcome” by insisting that we play no longer than one hour every afternoon. After all, we had “chores” to take care of, a brother to babysit, a dinner to prepare for, and homework to complete before evening’s end.
During the month of March, after dinner, I would steal away to the hotel lobby to watch that nameless young man paint picture after picture as he played album after album of music, mostly Broadway show tunes. He would leave the album jacket standing up on top of the stereo as the music played, so if I sat close to the stereo, I could read the jacket covers. Eventually I learned to recognize the songs from “My Fair Lady,” “Oklahoma,” “The Pajama Game, “and many more.
Occasionally the artist would look up at me, but I was always well-behaved, so he had no reason to scold me or engage in conversation with me because I was self-sufficiently involved enough with my own reading or homework projects. In 1959, Easter Sunday was on March 29th when we were living in the Napua Hotel. My step-father had returned from one 30-day-out stint on the Pacific on his DER, and now he was back out on another mission, looking for Russian submarines, other Russian naval vessels, or Russian planes. Mom dressed all of us up in the best finery we could afford, and we must have gone to a church that day. I can’t remember. But I do know that Mom asked someone at the Napua Hotel to take a picture of the five of us.
End of Part One
jensenmk
mirghanbari
pmunrafp
Richard Smaby
stirlingsmith
vanperdue
Tacoma Retired Men's Bookclub 