Sleeping Beauties (13 page)

She sat deep in the empty garden beneath the trees laid out four hundred years earlier by the Saadian kings and listened to the thousands of swallows who lived in the bougainvillea rustle irritably in crowded sleep. The air was cool; full of the scent of roses and the honeysuckle that climbed the desiccated pink mud walls of the Old City.

A waiter in a white tunic brought the tea to her on a silver tray. The teapot was silver, too, and the tray and the teapot and the boy’s buttons all shone brightly in the darkness. She watched him come across the garden, shining as he found his way among the trees.

In the hotel, men and women prepared for sleep, their sudden thin shadows slanting on the walls of the lighted rooms. The figures leaned on the balconies, smoking peacefully, and looked out into the dark garden, turning now and then to speak softly to someone in the room behind them. Two men rested against one another, their elbows on the parapet, and kissed.

There were voices in the garden, American voices. A man and a woman. People from the movie, Clio thought; returning from the party. The voices were soft. It was nice to hear her language spoken without effort.

Clio recognized the voice of the costume designer. “They got the donkey! But they did it all wrong!” Clio heard her say. “They did it all wrong!” The woman sounded as if she were weeping. A man and woman came into view at the end of a path. The man took the woman’s elbow and they went hurriedly up the marble steps into the hotel.

Clio sat in the garden all night.

C
lio wrote to Emma from Marrakech that they were going on to the south, to Taroudant and Ouarzazate. Clio thought that they would be in Honolulu in April for a short visit. She sent Emma a silver necklace, a hundred years old, in the shape of a snake. It was an open circle without a clasp. Emma would have to force it on like the Bedouin women who wore it before her, fitting her neck between the snake’s silver tongue and its smooth tapering tail.

Emma was wearing the Berber necklace the evening she came across the lawn at Hale Moku, frowning as she tried to make out the face of a woman sitting on the lanai with Mabel and Tadashi.

As the woman rose awkwardly to greet Emma, she swayed against the bamboo orchids. “It’s a funny story, really,” Clio said quickly. She reached down to still the trembling orchids, clutching them as if they could, in their frail impartiality, steady her. “I mean odd, not amusing.”

Emma stared at her. Clio’s eyes were swollen and flooded with blood. A suture across her cheek looked as if it would break open if she smiled. Flakes of red pepper seemed to float in the hair at her temple, and Emma realized with a shock that it was not pepper, but dried blood. She leaned
over to kiss Clio, but stopped herself, afraid that she might hurt her. She quickly brushed the side of Clio’s head with her mouth, unable to keep from wincing.

“Has the
Lurline
docked yet from San Francisco?” Mabel asked impatiently. She held a
pikake
lei in her lap. As always, Mabel was expecting her college friend from Mills, Miss Melanie L. Simpson. Mabel had not seen her since 1921, when Miss Simpson attended Mabel at her wedding. Clio often wondered if Miss Simpson were still alive. The
Lurline
, she knew, had not sailed in many years.

“It has not arrived, Grandmother,” Clio said. Although I have only been home a few hours, she thought, I am again caught in the efficacious lies of the past. She looked at Tadashi in acknowledgement of their old complicity, but Tadashi, used to such things, had turned away with a handful of dried leaves she’d plucked from Mabel’s hairnet.

“What a pity,” Mabel said sadly to Clio. She was very disappointed. “What will we do with Miss Simpson’s lei?” Mabel seemed not to remember that Clio had been away. “Clio, child, you wear it.” She shook the garland of ivory-colored jasmine buds in Clio’s direction. “
Pikake
is Melanie Simpson’s favorite flower,” she said. “She claims she can dream the smell of it. Just dream it up!”

Clio took the lei from her grandmother but did not put it around her neck.

“Thank you, girl,” Mabel said quietly. She held out a hand to touch Clio’s face. She quickly stepped aside, and Mabel’s hand glanced across Clio’s neck.

“We’re going to the seawall, Mother. Will you excuse us?” Emma asked. “The sun is going down.”

“I know that!” Mabel said furiously. “Mr. Kageshiro is coming to feed the orchids!”

My grandmother is that very interesting thing, Clio thought. An unreliable narrator. She tells lies.

“Do you hear?” Mabel shouted. “He is on his way!”

But Clio and Emma had already started across the lawn and could pretend that they had not heard her.

They sat with their legs hanging over the side of the seawall. Clio lay the
pikake
on the grass. The waves splashed over their bare feet. Clio had pulled her skirt around her waist so that she could sit, and swing her legs, and the white triangle between her thighs reminded her suddenly of girlhood. I have not worn white cotton underpants in some time, she thought. Not since Stant’s.

“This is an evening for the moon goddess, Hina,” Emma said, looking across the ocean. “Her shadow is on the water. She is hunting her favorite delicacy, the
kala
fish. I myself have seen it.”

Their legs were soon wet in the breaking waves and the spray. Clio watched the green reef disappear in the rising tide. The ocean lay unbroken to the horizon. Rain fell far at sea, moving quickly to the west in faint gray sheets, like ghosts fleeing the light.

“What happened to you, Clio?”

“I think salt water will help. Healing, I mean. To swim in. Not to drink. Not yet.” She put her hands to her face. “It really does hurt to laugh. I always thought it was just an expression.”

Tadashi came across the lawn with a tray. She tilted forward precariously, as if she were about to fall over onto the grass.

“I used to wonder if Japanese women walked that way out of custom,” Clio said as she watched her. “The toes, turned inward, suggest a bashful obsequiousness, don’t you think? They may have taken it, as they took many things, from the Chinese; the walk of women with suppurating
feet. Ritual bridles. Ritual brides. Or perhaps, less romantically, their kimonos make it difficult to walk.” Clio realized that she was trembling.

Tadashi gave her a glass of iced tea, made with fresh guava juice, and mint from her sister’s garden in Manoa Valley. Clio drank down the tea without pause. Tadashi placed a bowl of lichees on the grass, then sat back on her heels and smoothed her kimono over her knees.

“Do you remember when Grandmother was first blind?” Clio asked, laying her empty glass on its side. Her hands were shaking. Tadashi leaned forward to pick up the glass and set it on the tray. “She insisted on doing all the things she’d done before, like gardening or walking on the reef at low tide, only she couldn’t see. She really couldn’t see at all. So she would cut off all the orchid buds by mistake and walk on the reef with her eyes wide open, arms outstretched, until she would step into a hole in the coral and disappear. I would think, There she goes again, and I would swim out to get her. She was on her way to Tahiti.”

“She also believes that it is June of 1888,” said Emma. “And why not.”

Clio thought about it, as if Emma really were asking why her old and incontinent mother should believe in the present.

“I was frightened of her with her cloudy white eyes, but I couldn’t let her drown on the reef just because she believed that she could see.” Clio could feel herself becoming a little hysterical. “That is what I did, too, when I married and went away. I convinced myself that I could see.”

“My mother,” Emma said, trying to calm her, “believes that she was fishing and gossiping with her Great-Aunt Estelle yesterday. You remember, Estelle claimed she’d been the mistress of Robert Louis Stevenson. In fact, my mother thinks that Mr. Stevenson is coming to lunch today.
She has even asked Tadashi to make the sweet rice balls with fish that Mr. Stevenson is said to have liked so much. You’ve come just in time, Clio.”

Behind them, Tadashi rose, unsteady with age, and tiptoed across the lawn to the cottage. Clio watched as she struggled with the salt-swollen door of the cottage and went inside. She reappeared a few minutes later, dragging the
lau hala
floor mats after her. She went back inside. Menus from the old dining room at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Waikiki suddenly flew out the cottage door.

Tadashi stood in the doorway and recklessly skimmed wooden bowls and palm fans onto the lawn as if she’d been waiting for just such an excuse to loot the cottage. Clio smiled. Tadashi hadn’t much reverence for the things that Emma had spent her life trying to save.

“How did this happen to you, Clio? Who did this?” Emma asked again.

The garden was clamorous with birds and insects. “I’m not sure it’s possible for me to live this way. Like a ghost,” Clio said as she picked up the lei of jasmine flowers and put it around her neck. “Do you think this is what Grandmother has done, in her way? Escaped through make-believe? My mother, too. Mother often spoke about the cane fields of Hale Moku and the cattle rides with the
paniolos
, but the minute, the very second, she was able to get away, she left it all.”

“Your mother was really not like any of us,” Emma said. “She had skills. Of a sort. All she needed, really.”

“Is that what you call it? Skills?”

“Perhaps I am being harsh. I don’t think your mother ever liked Hale Moku very much.” She hesitated. “To tell you the truth, I couldn’t abide her.”

Clio smiled. “I know.”

“I suppose you do,” Emma said.

The storm at sea had moved to the west (or to the East,
as Clio used to insist when she was a child), toward Japan. She rose, groaning with the stiffness of her knees, and pulled down her skirt. As she leaned over to kiss Emma, the lei fell across her face. The scent of the
pikake
was very strong and her head throbbed with the closer fragrance of it.

“You’re safe here with me,” Emma said. “You know that.”

Clio walked onto the lawn, holding her side. The birds, light-boned and nervous, spun around her in the last light, diving for insects. “I was very frightened,” she said into the trees. “Not an island girl.”

Clio was happy living with the three women in the big house by the ocean. Emma brought her poultices of
limu
to heal the wounds on her face. She did not question her again, and Clio was grateful. Her broken rib began to mend on its own, as they do, and she was not in so much pain. The bruises on her face were less violently colored, but bright blood still floated in her eyes and there was a pink line along her cheekbone where the stitches had begun to dissolve. The salt and the
limu
and the sun healed her.

Clio sat with Mabel on the lanai, Mabel’s wheelchair turned so that she could better feel the warm wind from Kona, blowing from the southeast. Clio ate Japanese candy, putting the paper wrappings in her pocket, and listened to the orchids scratching in their shallow pots.

Clio knew that her father and stepmother would learn that she was at Hale Moku, even though she had not ventured very far from her grandmother’s garden. She wondered if she should call on them. They would not torment her, they no longer could do that, but she was not eager to see them. She knew that should the fragile and artificial civility that made their occasional meetings just
bearable ever be lost, the terror of her childhood and the fury that she felt because of that casual terror would overwhelm her.

“Have you recovered?” Mabel asked.

Clio was surprised. Mabel had never spoken of Clio’s injury.

“I myself have not been well,” Mabel said confidingly, not waiting for Clio’s answer. “As perhaps you are aware, I suffer from
kadami no yoru
, an inconvenient attachment to my daughter Emma. Inconvenient because it hinders my path to perfection. It is a Buddhist belief, this ‘darkness of the heart,’ and it pains me, Clio.” She arranged the hem of her muumuu over her bare feet.

“I’m not sure we could bear it if you were any more perfect,” Clio said, relieved that Mabel had so quickly lost interest in her.

“Don’t mock me,” Mabel said quickly. “You don’t yet know what it means to be attached to this earth. Don’t make the mistake of imagining that experience is something available to everyone. Experience is a luxury.” She turned toward the ocean and blinked her white eyes. “We used to swim the horses here,” she said, leaning to smell the salt in the air. “Have we any horses left?” Mabel was one of the last old people to speak Pidgin with an antiquated accent, passed down from the Yankee missionaries and Irish cabin boys who were her ancestors.

Before Clio could answer, she said in irritation, “Of course we have no horses! You know nothing, Clio!” Her contorted hand fished impatiently in a quart jar on her lap, searching for sour cherries, as she urinated through the webbing of her chair.
“Anata no atama wo watashi no, mata ni shikkari hasami,”
she said.

Clio recognized the poem. It was in one of the anthologies of
waka
that she often read to Mabel:
I hold your head tight between my thighs and press
.

Clio didn’t feel as if she did know very much, and she wondered if perhaps her grandmother were correct; perhaps she knew nothing. It was a self-pitying, even sentimental idea, Clio knew, and she went to fill a watering can to rinse off the lanai.

John Lynott and his wife, Burta Yamada, lived in Nu‘uanu Valley in a large stone house that Clio’s mother had inherited from her first husband, Kimo Danforth. Clio’s mother had never lived in the house, preferring the hot days and nights of the coastal plain. Queen Emma had built her summer palace in cool Nu‘uanu, and at the cliffs of the Pali, Kamehameha I had pushed his last opponents into the ravine to finally unite the islands under one king. Clio’s ancestors used to move to Nu‘uanu in the summer just to sleep through the night, lulled by the rain and the mist pluming off the mountains.

There was a waterfall in the back of the garden. Clio could tell how heavily it had rained in the night by the sound of the stream each morning. She had fished from its muddy sides for crayfish, using the spines of tree ferns. For many years after she left Nu‘uanu, it had been hard for Clio to sleep without the sound of the stream, without the thrumming of rain on the tin roof and on the swaying stalks of ginger and furled red hibiscus. She had missed the sound of rainwater sliding plumply, reluctantly, into the folds of the gardenia. She had missed the low song of the mourning doves in their gray habits, moving along the dark-leaved paths like nuns. She had missed the smell of vegetable decay and wet black wood.