Sleeping Beauties (24 page)

She heard the waves as they broke against the rocks of the king’s fish pond, and the lizards singing in the palms. The deer were on the mountain, and stars rushed through the dripping trees. She looked around her. All things were rustling with spirits. She ran through the field to home.

When Henry came a few hours later to bring her a fish, she was lying on top of the bed listening for the sixth time to Coleman Hawkins and Ben Webster play “It Never Entered My Mind.” It was one of the first songs that Lester had played for her at Wisteria House.

Henry looked at her and took the fish into the kitchen.

He came back into the room, drying his hands, and sat in a chair at the foot of the bed.

Clio reached over to play the song again. The air seemed to tremble with the rise and fall of the music.

“I spoke to my cousin Leroy,” he said. “There’s a demonstration in Honolulu in a few days. The Human Reactor
is coming. A protest against the missile tests on Kaho‘olawe.”

“The Human Reactor?”

Henry smiled. “He’s from Hiroshima. He travels to different countries for peace. He’s radioactive.”

Clio smiled, too. She lifted her hips from the bed and pulled down the top sheet and slid under it.

“Leroy says no one’s going to fire missiles on people in boats, not even the United States Navy.” He paused. “I’m not going. I’m sick of gestures.”

“Do you remember in high school the lecture on Appearance and Reality?” she asked. “It was very misleading, wasn’t it? It made me believe there was a distinction between the two. Reality was true and Appearance was false. But Appearance is just as real as Reality, sometimes even more real. Appearance
is
Reality.” She stopped for a moment. “My father, I now see, has always known this. I suppose my own mother has, too. Tommy knows it. My grandmother. It means that they can do whatever they want. If nothing is real, then nothing matters.”

“If appearance is reality,” Henry said, “everything is real.”

“Come here beside me,” she said, smiling.

His hair smelled like tar soap and woodsmoke. “I’ve been very happy here,” she said. She looked at his scars. When he was a boy, a lure had ripped from the mouth of a billfish and caught in the thin curl of his ear. There were scars at the corners of his eyes, one from a bar fight, the other from a fight in the Army.

“When are you going?” he asked after a while.

“Soon.”

“No more hiding in the forest?”

She shook her head. She could tell from the change in his breathing that he was falling asleep.

She did not move, but held him and thought about Earl and Ginger in the cold, dirty bus and Packard up on the hill making banana cream pies and reading sex magazines. She thought about her mother. She wondered if Kitty had clipped the Biwa pearls from her trousseau nightgown with her gold manicure scissors when she tired of it, the lime green of the silk no longer suiting her. Or had she simply dropped the nightgown on the floor of her dressing room for her maid to take away, to take home and snip off the little pearls herself? When Clio married Tommy Haywood, Kitty had sent her a silver tray and a book,
The Great Estates of Australia
, which had photographs of Kitty’s house in it. Although the book was a rather formal and unimaginative wedding gift, especially from one’s mother, Clio was happy to have it. She had had trouble remembering how her mother lived; the rooms in which Kitty received friends or worked on her scrapbooks as she sang along with the music from
Camelot
. I have had trouble remembering, Clio thought, because I have tried to forget.

Most nights Kitty would wait patiently for Clio—so uncharacteristic of Kitty, who never waited for anything—until Clio was no longer able to hide beneath the weight of the day. Then Kitty would ease herself in her lithe, careless way into Clio’s bed, sliding the pillow under her pale head, not caring that she had pulled it from under Clio’s head. Clio would say, “Go away, Mother, I cannot bear the sadness of thinking about you,” but Kitty would fold her hands daintily, commandingly, across her chest, and say, “Let me tell you about my day, Clio.”

I have missed her, Clio thought. Despite my efforts, I have missed her. Not my mother, I do not know my mother and I don’t think I would have liked her much if I did, but I have missed, as people do, having a mother. And my father. My father. I have missed them both. I have missed them very much.

•   •   •

Ginger made her a lei of white honeysuckle. Clio knew it had taken many hours to pick the tiny blossoms, and she was pleased by Ginger’s gift. Earl jumped up and down and pulled Clio’s hands, asking her when she was coming back to Moloka‘i. She told him that she didn’t know; soon. She could tell that he didn’t believe her.

The smell of the honeysuckle was strong inside the small plane. She watched from the window as the dry land of west Moloka‘i disappeared beneath her. She could see the houses on the hill of Maunaloa town. For a moment, she was startled to see two frightened giraffes running in the shadow of the plane, until she remembered that developers had opened a Safari Land.

She had been very happy on Moloka‘i. The drive into Kaunakaka‘i town to buy the Honolulu newspapers, usually two days late if they were there at all, and the hours spent drinking warm beer in the Mid-Nite Inn as she read them, were far more satisfying than having many things to read, in many restaurants, even with cold beer. There was, she had discovered, a serenity in the diminution of choice. On Moloka‘i, she had read with concentration every single article in the old editions of the
Star Bulletin
, not once through, but many times, and when she’d been able to find a mainland melon—a soft, too ripe melon—she had eaten it with as much pleasure as if it had been one of Mr. Kageshiro’s prize-winning fruit.

M
abel was in the moon-viewing pavilion. She looked up when she heard them on the gravel path and waved her calligraphy brush, and black ink flew across the room.

They drank the tea that Tadashi had left for them in a black iron pot. They ate miso soup and dumplings. Mabel greedily gulped down the broth and held out her lacquer bowl for more.

Clio said, “We live in a matriarchy, Emma, don’t we? Not just here in this house, but throughout these islands. There is the Charlotte Ranch. And the island of Ni‘ihau, bought by a woman a hundred years ago. And Miss Caroline and Miss Geneva Fairnsworth. I used to think it was because all of the men were killed early, like my grandfather, or because they went off, like your husband. There were so many accidents.”

“Your grandfather was spearfishing with Lester at Polihale, down toward Na Pali, when he drowned. He grew confused,” Mabel said. “He began to swim to the bottom, you know, away from the light, into the depths. Lester tried to save him.”

“Rapture of the deep,” Emma said, laying down her chopsticks.

“What?” Mabel asked.

“Rapture of the deep!”

“Yes, I believe that is what it is called,” Mabel said quietly.

“Hunting accidents and drownings and road accidents,” Clio said. “My mother’s first husband fell into Kaikea Canyon trying to pick ginger for her. But it isn’t only death or misfortune that has taken away the men. It is time. The women are strong; they live long. Only ten years ago, when your aunt, who was then eighty, came into town to make her calls, she was escorted by outriders, handsome men on horseback with rifles, their hats wreathed in flowers, ferns tied at the necks and fetlocks of their big horses.”

“She was known as Coconut,” Mabel said dismissively. “She saved her infant son, he’s dead now, from the tidal wave of ’34 by climbing a coconut tree. It was she who did that, not me. People thought it was me, but it wasn’t. She was washed out of the tree three times and washed back. It’s funny,” she said, pausing. “She never much liked that son.”

“We were called ‘Miss’ even if we were married, as if we were young girls,” Emma said, pouring broth into her mother’s bowl.

“Or spinsters,” Mabel said.

“Except my mother, of course,” Clio said. “My mother was never called ‘Miss,’ was she?”

Emma smiled. “She married young. She didn’t stay on the ranch.”

“I met Henry Kilohana’s father on Molokai’i,” Clio said. “An old cowboy.”

Emma looked up slowly. “An old cowboy? Are there young ones?”

“I’ve been thinking since meeting him how important it is not to sentimentalize those things that are disappearing from the world. It leads to kitsch.”

“Did he give you a piece of pie?” Emma asked. Her face was flushed.

Clio laughed with surprise. “You
do
know him! I thought you must have come across him.”

“Yes, I came across him.”

“He lives in Maunaloa in a cottage with a fence made of surfboards.”

“He used to say I was the only one who could dance the hula
Pua Kukui
.” To Clio’s surprise, Emma rose and began to move her hips in a slow circle, her arms bending like the branches of the
kukui
tree as she danced the old cowboy love song. “You’re caught by my lasso,” she sang.

Clio watched her, enchanted. “I didn’t know that you knew him.”

“It’s all right, Clio,” Emma said as she suddenly sat down. “It is all right that he didn’t remember me.” She was blushing.

Clio looked at her. She wanted to lie to her, to say that Packard had remembered her very well, but she could not do it—not because she was morally fastidious, but because she knew that she could not fool Emma.

“He was the most beautiful man I’d ever seen. I could tell he was coming from the sound of his bell spurs jingling in the wet grass. I’d have moved in with him, in that little house up there on the hill, if he’d have had me. He was married and I was married. I was different then, of course. I was younger and nicer-looking, but I don’t mean that. I mean that I was interested in the present. Not like now.” She paused. “I liked the way he made love to me. He was very gentle, very untried.” She spoke as if she had just awakened from sleep. “His hands were so rough and broken, the skin so split and calloused, that he at first refused to touch me. I had to take his hands and place them on my hips and my knees. My breasts. I once pulled a cactus spine out of his arm with my teeth and I would have
swallowed the little spear with love had he not made me spit it into his hand. I wanted everything, even his injuries.”

She rose and walked back and forth along the narrow verandah. She was grave with memory, and sorrow.

“Why did you never tell me?” Clio asked quietly, her eyes full of tears.

“
That
is why I didn’t go with Fitzroy to Tahiti. I did choose love, Clio. I chose Packard and I chose the right thing. I know that. I knew it then, even if he didn’t choose me.” She spoke in a rush, pale with regret. “I only went to him three times. My body was red with dust.”

“It is a strange thing to say, but I am happy for you.” Clio glanced at her grandmother. Mabel’s head was turned toward them and she was frowning with the effort to hear, but she was not listening to them.

“Hi, Cliome!” a voice suddenly called. “I hope we’re not bothering you girls!”

Clio looked into the garden. Tommy Haywood and Claire Clarke and Dix Lynott were walking across the lawn. Claire’s arms were linked with the men, and their arms pressed against her breasts.

The woman, speechless, watched as Dix came lightly up the wooden steps. He kissed Mabel on the forehead, and sat back on his bare heels on the tatami.

“You have to take your shoes off,” Claire said to Tommy. “My grandmother thinks we’re in Japan.”

She placed her shoes on the stairs and sat on the mat next to Dix.

Tommy pulled off his boots with effort and threw them impatiently onto the grass, nearly hitting Tadashi as she came across the lawn, weighed down by a tray heavy with saké cups and bottles.

“Oh, sorry, babe,” Tommy said to Tadashi. Tommy turned to Clio and winked. “I’m glad I didn’t have to come
to Moloka‘i to get you,” he said, hoisting himself onto the edge of the verandah. “Claire told me you were here.” He swung his legs over the side. His feet in their socks swept across Mr. Kageshiro’s orchids, grown dense in the slatted shade of Mabel’s pavilion. Clio started to warn him that he might break the stems, but, to her surprise, she stopped herself. She could think of nothing to say.

Emma poured the warm saké into cups and handed them round, first serving the men. “I didn’t know you admired
waka
,” she said to Dix. He was politely trying to read Mabel’s incomprehensible calligraphy.

“Admired who?” Claire asked as she reached out to tuck some hair behind Dix’s ear. “Who’s Waka?” Dix’s ear turned as pink as if Claire’s fingers had singed him, and he shook his head to escape her fingers.

Claire turned petulantly to Tommy. “Will you blow on my saké to cool it?”

“It is supposed to be hot,” Mabel said innocently.

“Thank you, Grans,” said Claire. “What would we do without you?”

“How is that cunning girl Charmian?” Mabel asked Dix, taking his hand. “Have you finished the repairs on your little boat? It is my understanding they do very good repairs at the Honolulu Iron Works. Your wife must be vexed not to be at sea.”

Clio looked at Emma. Mabel thought that Dix was Jack London. Dix very courteously agreed that it was vexing not to be at sea.

Tommy slid awkwardly across the mat to Clio. “I was going to have to use my big guns, babe. I was ready to get serious.” He was showing all of his tolerance and he was pleased with himself. “I’m glad you finally got some sense in you. Why didn’t you come right to the hotel?”

“I am trying to get away from you,” Clio said, speaking
for the first time. “Not to you. I thought you knew that. I am never living with you again.”

“Listen, what I know and what I know are two different things.”

Clio wondered if Emma had heard him. She realized that he embarrassed her. She looked at Emma, but Emma was gazing at her hands, frowning. “Perhaps we should talk about this another time,” Clio said quietly. “When we are alone.”

“There’s nothing to talk about.” He drank some saké and wiped his mouth with his hand.