Sleeping Beauties (4 page)

Clio saw right away that the books might provide her with the kind of light conversation that her mother seemed to enjoy at dinner. Clio read two of the mystery books the first night. Luckily, she did not see much of her mother, and this gave her the time that she needed to memorize the more interesting details of the dry, serious plots.

“I am going to move to Australia when I grow up,” Clio announced at dinner.

“Oh, are you?” Kitty asked, peering down the table at her.

“Perth sounds enchanting,” Clio said. It was the first time that she had ever used the word “enchanting.”

“Good sailing off Perth,” Rory said.

“What about your aunt? Unless I’m misinformed, Clio, you are my sister’s hope. You can’t live in Australia! Emma won’t let you leave the islands. You are the next keeper of the flame, poor child. Perhaps you’ll dance a hula for us after dinner. I’m surprised Mother and Emma allowed you even to visit your own mother.”

“It was Emma’s idea that I come,” Clio said, startled by her mother’s tone.

“Oh?” Kitty raised her eyebrows. “Is that so?” She pretended to be puzzled. “Emma considered
my
feelings?”

“First-rate fish tonight,” Rory said, laying his knife and fork side by side on his plate.

“Emma was thinking of me?” Kitty asked again. “I can’t begin to count the number of times I’ve asked you to come to stay.” There was melancholy, and grievance, in her lovely voice. The butler reached around her to remove a plate, but she waved him away. “Both you and your brother, Dixon. Countless times.” She was offended just thinking
of the injustices she had suffered on behalf of her children. “And you say that you wish to live here!”

“The child merely said she was interested in Perth, darling. Lovely city, Perth.
The Mystery of Swordfish Reef
, I believe?” Rory asked, turning to Clio.

“
I
wouldn’t know,” Kitty said. “I wouldn’t know any of it.” With a sigh, she waved her chiffon handkerchief, and the butler removed her plate. She sighed again and gazed sadly out the open terrace doors. There was no more conversation.

Rory and Clio went quietly into the library after dinner. He made himself a brandy and soda and smoked a cigarette of uncut Turkish tobacco that he folded inside thin slips of paper. Clio drank chamomile tea, the only drink her mother allowed her before bed. They sat in leather chairs before the fire, their feet on the fender. Rory’s dogs yawned in happiness as Clio and Rory discussed in low voices some of Inspector Bonaparte’s more confounding cases. Clio could hear her mother in the next room. Kitty sat at a card table in the salon and listened to records of Broadway shows as she filled leather albums with her clippings and photographs. Now and again, she would forget that her feelings were supposed to have been hurt, and Clio would hear her singing gaily to the music.

Clio was sent home a week before she was due to leave with a suitcase of books from Rory and an unmatched pair of riding boots, both right feet, from her mother. When Kitty gave Clio the heavy boots the night before she left, Clio knew that her small wrapping skills, although improved, would not be adequate to the task of one day returning them. And then she remembered that she was going home to Emma. Emma would know what to do with the boots.

And she did. When Kitty’s letter arrived at Wisteria
House, asking not for the boots but for a large organdy hat she’d given Clio as Clio was getting into the car to go to the airport, Emma said calmly, “You’re not to do it. Stop returning things and she’ll stop sending them to you.”

Clio understood that it would mean an end to their scant correspondence, but she knew that her mother really had very little to say to her, and even less to give her. Clio did not return the hat.

Although Emma was able to take care of their needs, Clio did not have much pocket money. She was not yet allowed to use the money that her mother put into the trust, and she did not receive money from her father. She convinced a man who owned a camera store in Waikiki to give her a job.

The store offered many courtesies to tourists. In the front of the store, a Chinese boy sat on a barstool in a red
malo
, a silk flower behind his ear, waiting for customers who wished to take a picture of a native. Clio was embarrassed watching him, especially after she realized that he had chosen to sit on the stool in the hope that something would escape from his loincloth. She was relieved when the manager moved her to a tiny room with blacked-out windows where customers could view their film as soon as it was developed. It was Clio’s job to thread an old Bell and Howell projector and run the film. She sat in the dark all day with strangers, usually men, and watched the reels of film.

As a child, Clio had wondered why tourists came to Hawai‘i, excluded as they seemed to be from the world that she knew, the world that Emma worked so hard to preserve, and she was made uncomfortable by the ease with which the visitors were so easily satisfied. They seemed to
get so little. Clio wondered if it were simply a matter of taste. She was confused by the difference between what people seemed willing to accept and what more there was for the taking.

She would see, over and over, unlikely images of her island home, Filipino dancers in pink cellophane hula skirts and Japanese children waving in front of the cement memorial at Pearl Harbor and
haole
girls swimming with sedated porpoises in hotel lagoons. After work she would go home to Emma and she would listen to Emma’s stories of leisurely visits to other islands by schooner, and descriptions of the mountain houses and cattle ranches of her friends and cousins, and their hospitality. Emma would hum verses of the lovely music that had been composed in her honor.

Each evening when Clio put the projector away for the night, covering it with its plastic hood like a bird in a cage, she would grow more and more furious at Emma. By the time Clio reached Wisteria House, she wanted to shout the truth she’d discovered about Emma’s beloved islands. But she did not say anything.

Clio knew that Emma wondered why she was so intent on working in the camera shop when she could have had a summer internship at the Bishop Museum. Clio explained to Emma that she liked Waikiki. She liked the bright fluorescence of it. She liked the good-natured college boys from Oregon in their Sex Wax T-shirts. Emma didn’t discourage Clio from working in the camera shop, she wouldn’t have, but Clio knew that it depressed her, and after the first month she left to work as a research assistant at the East-West Center at the university, tracking tidal patterns in the Marquesas. It was not so much fun as being in Waikiki, but she knew that it pleased Emma more. She was, at least in the area of ocean currents, staying closer to home.

•   •   •

At the head of the garden path was a young tamarind tree. It was rare to see a tamarind in the city. Emma thought the tree uncouth and she feigned displeasure at its unexpectedness, as if the little tree were to blame for wandering into the dying garden. Clio thought that the tamarind’s bright orange flowers resembled the tiger-claw jewelry once worn by the women of her family. Each growing season the tamarind shed all of its leaves, and for that reason Clio liked to think it capable of bringing itself to life each spring.

For generations, ferns had been brought by hand to Wisteria House from the rain forests of Koke‘e and the Big Island, the black clotted roots held carefully in damp towels, to be planted beneath the verandah. The ferns had grown sturdy and dense, less dependent on the sun than the other plants in the garden. They pushed their way through the gaps left by the missing floorboards, and through the splintered fretwork of the verandah railings.

Emma knew the origin of each fern and its genus, of course, but she was also learned in the medicinal and magical uses of the ferns. In the evening, she and Clio would water them with leaking hoses, the water slowly soaking their legs. Emma sat on the steps with her skirt tucked between her knees, the canvas hose held loosely in one hand. Clio was entrusted with the weeding, and her arms and face would become dotted with orange pollen as she bent among the slender leaves.

“You have found the chest full of slippers,” Emma said one night.

Clio straightened and stood with her hands on the small of her back, as she had seen Emma do many times, the scant weeds clutched in her fists. “Yes,” she said. “And they fit me!”

Emma tapped her empty beer bottle on the porch railing and Lester appeared as if by magic with another bottle. He looked at Clio, then disappeared along the verandah.

Music suddenly came from the house. It was Dinah Washington, singing “All of Me.” Emma moved her foot in time, her garden slipper swinging lazily from her toes. “Your great-grandmother used to go to dances at Iolani Palace. Just down the street. She would dance all night and walk home carrying those satin slippers to keep from ruining them in the mud of the unpaved roads.” She took a drink of beer. “That was only eighty years ago.”

“We have the same size foot,” Clio said proudly. “Great-grandmother and I.”

Emma nodded. “I’m not surprised.”

The dying trees seemed to draw the heat of the day into their leaves and bark, straining to find a little light for themselves. Clio thought it foolish of the trees, for the garden was lovely at night. The darkness hid its shame. The lights left burning in the big office buildings high above them shed a chill sheen on the garden, and sometimes when Clio looked up at the buildings surrounding them, it seemed as if she and Emma were on a stage.

Clio gently plucked spiders from the ferns and put them inside a glass jar to release later by the pond. She had lost the top. She used one hand to cover the jar, and the spiders danced across the palm of her hand, tickling her.

Emma turned off the water and they sat on the steps, leaning against the loose rail posts. Clio lay a wet rag over the top of the jar.

There was something outlandish about Emma, something that Clio felt even then. If Emma had too much to drink, it only showed in her use of language. A story would often begin with the words “In the indefinite past …” Clio eventually came to see Emma’s meaning, but in those
days, the past seemed to Clio to be very definite. Emma spoke as if to convey a literal truth, as if she believed what she said: “Namaka was skilled in the art of war as well as sport. He was particularly adept at backbreaking. When escaping from his enemies, he would spread his strong arms like wings and fly away. All of these things,” she said, “he learned at Kahuku, not far from our house, Hale Moku. I myself have seen it.”

She banged on the porch for Lester. “Have you ever noticed, child, how little there is here in the way of worldly things? There is no architecture left, not that there ever was much. A few plantation houses. Two or three coral churches. Some wooden chapels, barely standing they’re so full of termites. There is very little literature, very little art. All that we have is nature. The ocean that you love so much. The air—that lovely air that doesn’t even belong to us. And the ginger and the
pua kenikeni
and the ‘
opihi
. The native mountain apple.” She gazed into her dying garden. “Do you remember how surprised you once were to find me paying the water bill?”

Clio had not realized that water was a thing, a commodity, that could belong to someone who would charge for the use of it. She understood that the conveyance of the water must be recompensed, and the purification and storing of it, but she had imagined that water was held in trust, that all people owned the water and contributed to its maintenance and distribution. In her mother’s house in Nu‘uanu, rainwater had been collected in big wooden tanks and Clio had bathed, and washed her hair, in water turned red by the rust that grew on the iron bands of the tanks. She herself benefited, albeit indirectly, since her mother and Emma belonged to a family who had profited from the selling of water. It was a discovery, this ownership of water, that had caused her to recognize both her privilege
and her naiveté—a naiveté, or ignorance some might say, that was the result of that very privilege.

“The irony, Clio, is that the disappearance of everything is just what has allowed us to see the worth of it. When my husband, Johnny Fitzroy, asked me to fly away to Tahiti with him, to leave my family, I came from the ranch on Moloka‘i here to Wisteria House to ask my grandmother’s consent. The yellow monkeypod trees that once lined the drive were in bloom as I turned in the gate, and the smell of them was overpowering. It seemed as if all the nights of my life had been scented.” She looked around in surprise. “I could not bring myself to ask her consent. And here I still am! And the monkeypod trees are gone.”

She leaned forward to see Clio’s face in the dark. “Fitzroy was wrong to leave me here. And I was wrong not to go.”

She turned toward the house and called, “Lester! Come talk-story with us! It is lovely out!” She rested her head on the railing, waiting for Lester, but he did not appear, and when she spoke again, her voice was full of sadness. “I was not in love with Johnny Fitzroy, even though I married him. I knew it and he knew it, and no one minded. We got on. We liked horses. He taught me to play the guitar. We were compatible—even in matters of love we were compatible. And we thought that was enough. And it might have been. But when the great weight of things fell on us—this family, this place, even Mother”—Emma nodded her head politely at the garden to signify that it, too, was included—“Johnny Fitzroy was overcome by it. You know the feeling very well, Clio. It is this feeling that causes you to take flight, too.”

Clio looked at Emma. She was surprised. She had not imagined that Emma knew so much about her.

“Mabel wanted us to live at Hale Moku,” Emma said.
“To give parties and build municipal swimming pools. She didn’t believe me, that the money was gone. She still doesn’t believe me.” She gazed up at the dark house. “If you do not know what it means to be in a family, and in one so interfering as ours, it can be a terrible thing.” She reached out to take an album from a table on the verandah, and when she opened it, thousands of insect wings fell into her lap. “I have believed that the conscious experience of the past was everything. I have collected the past, as if it, too, were an artifact.” She sighed. “This afternoon I told you that in the old time the victor in a hand-to-hand struggle often consumed the heart of his opponent. I myself have seen it. It was a gesture of reverence, taking in the strength of the enemy.” She brushed the thousands of translucent wings from her lap and set aside the album. “What do you think about that?”