Yardley sets romance in gentle circle

By Wanda A. Adams
Advertiser Books Editor

"Letters from the Lanai" by Maili Yardley; Editions Limited, paper, $19

Maili Yardley book signings 11:30 a.m. Friday, Kapi'olani Medical Center cafeteria; 2:30 p.m. Friday, Waldenbooks, Ala Moana; 3 p.m. Saturday, Barnes & Noble, Kahala; 11 a.m. Feb. 15, BookEnds, Kailua; 2 p.m. Feb. 16, Borders, Ward Centre; and 2 p.m. Feb. 22, Borders, Lihu'e, Kaua'i. Read on, book club! There are but two weeks left in the reading period for "Peace Like a River," the Honolulu Advertiser Book Club selection. We'll be "discussing" the book in print, online and on books editor Wanda Adams' Hawaii Public Radio show March 2. To participate, just read the book and send your comments, questions or tirades to us: Via e-mail By fax: 525-8055 By mail: Wanda Adams, Island Life, The Honolulu Advertiser, P.O. Box 3110, Honolulu, HI 96802

She remembers funerals held at home, when everyone helped and all the flowers came from friends — always white flowers, no colored blossoms.

She remembers the Hawaiian ladies wading into the sea with their holoku "billowing about them like sails" and eating poi lunches with their fingers "so daintily."

She remembers summer homes on the Neighbor Islands and a busy round of social activities — staying in Puako on the Kohala Coast, "Hawai'i at its best," then hiking out three hours in the broiling sun to catch a plane at the tiny airstrip at 'Upolu, landing back in Honolulu just in time to dress for a lu'au.

"We had such energy, " she recalls. "Yet at the same time, we weren't being rushed from one thing to another."

All these memories and a keen sense of the period find their places in Yardley's new novel, "Letters from the Lanai" (Editions Limited, paper, $19), a piece of romantic fiction that itself belongs to another time. "I'd had cookbooks up to there," said Yardley, "so I thought I'd try something new. I wanted to preserve the old Hawai'i, and I didn't quite know how to do it."

A longtime Advertiser columnist who lives on Kaua'i, Yardley is best known for her food writing. Her "Hawaii Cooks" quartet is a favorite in island kitchens, with the early editions becoming sought-after collectibles.

Yardley's columns were beloved for the way they wove history together with cooking instruction: A chutney recipe would be introduced with a piece on the life of its giver, the late Kinau Wilder; a column on the lu'au dishes and practices of old would be woven into a biography of Prince Jonah Kuhio Kalaniana'ole; in a piece for Mother's Day, she would recall her grandmother's Nu'uanu kitchen in such detail that you could see the calabash of poi 'ulu on the table, the jar of red pa'akai, the Saloon Pilot crackers stored under the food safe.

The author of several short island histories, Yardley hopes to venture into both fiction and history again in future books, though she is kept busy caring for her ailing husband, Paul, a retired businessman who also is an artist.

Her energy hasn't flagged though she belongs to a now-fading generation that grew up in an unhurried, uncrowded Hawai'i.

The world she revisits here is that of the comfortable haole or hapa-haole upper middle class, people who moved smoothly between perfect English in the Outrigger dining room and gentle pidgin well-peppered with Hawaiian at home, whose bosom buddies included both Big Five dowagers and lauhala-hatted aunties.

These were women whose fathers, brothers and husbands were Hawai'i's business executives, ranchers and plantation managers, whose volunteer work was the mainstay of the nonprofits, who roughed it in primitive summer homes in the country or on Neighbor Islands but also voyaged annually to the Mainland to buy clothes and see some shows, women who had "help" but knew how to manage a sprawling household. "Of course, you had servants then," she said, adding quickly, "but you're not supposed to use that word now."

Yardley's main character is Prudence Farnham, the daughter of a Kaua'i ranching family. "I could just see her, sort of a pathetic girl at first and yet very sweet," the author said. Prudence is of a type you don't often see anymore — the stay-at-home daughter who cares for her aging mother and waits without impatience for the right sort of man to come along. When her beloved elder brother dies of cancer at just 36, she is brought into closer touch with his best friend, a New York businessman. Pete is happily married and a father, and the two begin an innocent and touching correspondence that serves as an expository tool to reveal their lives.

The reader knows they'll come together, but not how, and Yardley takes her time in the old Hawai'i way.

Along that "kapakahi alanui way," Yardley said, "I got a lot of the old days in it, a lot of the old superstitions, the way people lived."

The novel takes place during the 1950s, and that's deliberate. "It was an interesting time. The dowagers were still around, but they were leaving the big houses, moving into their apartments," said Yardley. "The older generation was passing on and leaving it to the younger ones. We were going to carry it on, but they couldn't have known how Hawai'i would change. As soon as the war was finished, all the people who had fallen in love with Hawai'i came back here to live, and it started to fill up."

She considers the early years of the 20th century "the golden era": "We didn't know what we had."