Sleeping Beauties (3 page)

When they were in the car, Clio asked Emma if she had seen the woman in the store.

“Yes,” Emma said, pulling confidently into traffic. The car behind them was forced to change lanes, and the driver made an obscene gesture with his finger.

“We were at school together,” Emma said.

“Did you see what she was doing?” Clio was suddenly unsure that she had seen anything, so extraordinary did it seem.

Emma signaled to turn into the back gate of Wisteria House with her arm held stiffly out the window. “Her name is Alice Stant,” she said as she turned, both hands on the big steering wheel. “I’m afraid she has not been herself for some time. Her mother sees that everything is returned the next day, of course. Stant’s has always had wonderful delivery service and I’ve often wondered if there were any connection.” She stopped at the rusted iron gate laced with chicken wire and dead palm branches. She smiled at Clio as if Miss Stant were only a little eccentric, as if Emma herself were only a little eccentric. She set the heavy hand brake, making her point. “She was unhappy in love.”

Clio nodded in agreement, not understanding but wanting to understand, and jumped out to open the gate.

Clio often wondered if Emma had asked her father, John Lynott, to allow her to stay at Wisteria House. She liked to think that he had at least inquired about her, but she knew that it was possible that he and Emma had never spoken about her at all. He certainly never spoke to Clio about it, and the few times each year that she saw him, he never mentioned Emma’s name. There was a tradition in the islands of taking the child of a relative or friend to raise, a
hanai
child, but Emma did not adopt Clio. There were legal considerations.

After he divorced their mother, Lynott had not allowed
Clio and her brother, Dix, to see their mother’s family except for formal calls at Christmas and Easter. John Lynott did not like his sister-in-law, perhaps because he knew that she had never been fooled by him. It is true that she didn’t admire him, but she did not dislike him. It would not have occurred to her to dislike him. It wasn’t because he was a newcomer to the islands, Emma wasn’t a snob; he just did not interest her. But he mistook her reserve for haughtiness, and it made him resentful.

Emma was careful not to appear to supersede the tentative, even questionable, authority she had gained in regard to Clio, and it was she who suggested that Clio visit her mother, Kitty, in Australia. Arrangements to visit Kitty and her husband, Rory Armacost, had been made and broken many times in the years since Kitty’s marriage. Kitty would suggest a time, but it would be in the middle of the school term. Lynott would ask Kitty to take Clio at Christmas, but since the seasons were reversed and it was summer in Australia, Kitty would be at her fishing camp in New Zealand; no place for a child, she said.

Every so often, Kitty sent Clio a stuffed koala bear, sometimes a windup bear that played “Waltzing Matilda.” Clio had seven of them. Kitty also sent her alligator handbags with broken clasps and bed jackets with stains that might have been crème de menthe. Kitty seldom wrote, but when she did, it was to ask that Clio return something that Kitty had sent her. Clio particularly remembered an ermine muff that looked as if bites had been taken out of it, which Kitty wanted to use to line some bedroom slippers.

While Clio still lived with her father and stepmother in Nu‘uanu, the arrival of one of Kitty’s letters would fill her with alarm. Sometimes Clio had lost Kitty’s gifts or given them away, and she would spend days composing letters of apology. Even if she managed to retrieve from one of the maids the shoe with the ripped ankle strap, she still
had to make up the package. She needed someone to take the package to the post office. She needed help to fill out the customs form. Burta would catch Clio making arrangements with the gardener to mail a badly wrapped box, and Burta would gloat for weeks over Kitty’s bad behavior. “Well, your mother never asked for you back, did she?” Burta would say.

To be fair to Kitty, she had been obliged to establish a small trust fund for Clio and Dix. Kitty was discovered mishandling, selling really, some ranchland that had been left to Clio and Dix by their grandfather. A check for seven hundred dollars was deposited in each of their savings accounts on the fifteenth of each month by Kitty’s lawyer in Sydney. Clio used to study the monthly statements as if they were diaries or atlases. Clio was always flattered to see herself addressed as Miss Cliome Meliaokamalu Lynott, which was, after all, her name. It was as if the formality of her mother’s legal obligation conferred on her not an insult but an honor.

Kitty Clarke would have been surprised at the distress she seemed to cause. She had had a life so full, it had been impossible to find the time for even a moment’s reflection. She prided herself on her impulses. They were everything to her. If she suddenly felt she should be killing sheep in the Yukon, she was gone the next day, on her way to the Northwest Territories. She once decided that her maids should wear uniforms copied from a nineteenth-century engraving. Unhappy Filipino girls wore hot black bombazine frocks with piqué collars and cuffs for three days until they finally buried the dresses in a cane field and disappeared back into the workers’ camp. Kitty was without servants, uniformed or not, for months. She demanded one very dry summer that the missile base at Dry Sands use its nuclear reactor to provide desalinated water for her garden. When the Navy declined
her request, she’d stamped her foot and predicted that we’d lose everything to the Japanese. That she had money certainly helped, although she claimed, completely disingenuously, that money had nothing to do with the way that she lived.

Impulse led her to marry Kimo Danforth straight from the schoolroom. They spent their days going from ranch to ranch, as they all did, and plantation house to plantation house, until Kimo was killed in a fall. Kitty had insisted that he pick ginger for her one moonlit night. He had been drinking all day and lost his footing at the edge of the cliff. It took a week for the cowboys to find his body and to hoist it, bouncing it against the rocks, back up the mountain.

Kitty moved across the island to Honolulu, where she met John Lynott, a lawyer from the mainland. He’d first come to Hawai‘i in 1955 with the Stanford varsity crew, and after two weeks at the Outrigger Canoe Club, he vowed to return. He had never seen anything so promising as Honolulu. It was a small town even then, just beginning to change, easy and provincial. He knew that he would do well.

He was not interested in the disturbances of the past, and this was to his benefit. He began with a small business, making T-shirts. He sold the shirts in a booth at the International Market Place in Waikiki. The T-shirts had slogans like
Maui No Ka ‘Oi
and SPAM and Love’s Bakery Makes Jelly Rolls and Remember Pearl Harbor. All the while, he was studying law and waiting on tables at the Pacific Club, where the important men of the city and state had their chicken sandwiches every afternoon after a game of squash. He was taken up by the wife of a senator, who engaged him to give tennis lessons to her teenage children and, some said, although Emma never believed it, some lessons for herself as well, although she had won the club’s
women’s singles championship three years in a row. Emma did not believe that John Lynott was ever the lover of the delightful Mrs. Irwing not because he was incapable of seduction or betrayal, but because he did not need sex to make his way. He needed Senator Irwing, not his wife. And it was Senator Irwing for whom he went to clerk during his summer vacation. Lynott was too clever, and too practical, to settle for pleasure. He was in too much of a hurry. By the time Kitty met him, at a dinner party given by Clare Boothe Luce, he was thought to be one of the most promising, most interesting young men in Honolulu, even taking into consideration the fact that six years earlier no one had ever heard of him.

Impulse led Kitty to Lynott, just as it led her to a rather too young and too beautiful beach boy named Bunny Mendonca, with whom Lynott found her one afternoon shortly after Clio’s brother was born. Kitty was not one of those women who lose years of their lives to pregnancy and the raising of children. She liked to say that if you saw her from behind, eight months pregnant, in a bikini, you’d never have suspected that she was
hapai
. So although her newborn son Dixon had not even shed the pig’s tail of his umbilical cord, she followed her impulses. Not maternal, although Emma said admiringly that Bunny Mendonca had been young enough to qualify. It may not be true, but Lynott told everyone that he’d found Kitty and Bunny naked in the bottom of a canoe after the July Fourth regatta.

Kitty did not hold herself responsible. Her little wishes and desires existed outside herself, supernaturally, like spirits who playfully led her on for good or ill. In a pleasant and even mischievous way, they were beyond her control, beyond even her wish to control. She was not particularly upset to be thrown out by Lynott, who was by then bored to death with her. He was playing golf every Thursday
afternoon with Mrs. Yamada, a Japanese woman who worked in his office. He didn’t need Kitty anymore.

Dix and Clio were sent to San Francisco to attend their mother at her marriage to Mr. Rory Armacost. They stayed only two days, as Kitty and Mr. Armacost had been eager to be alone. Mr. Armacost had not known that Kitty had two young children. Although she told him about Clio and Dix only a week before the wedding, he was very nice to them. He took them to watch the sea lions at the Cliff House when Kitty went to Elizabeth Arden.

Kitty moved with Rory Armacost to a ranch in Australia that was larger than the state of Colorado, and Clio’s father married Mrs. Yamada, a woman of such envy and cruelty that it was a wonder to everyone that Dix and Clio grew up at all. Their mother was gone, riding on her million acres, swatting black flies and sleeping with the hands, and their father was busy defending gray whales and Cambodian refugees in preparation for running for the state senate, and their stepmother hated them so much that she tried to starve them.

Clio had her brother, Dix, but Dix was like Kitty—full of a tireless, excitable vanity. Later there was her half-brother, Steamy, who really did love her, but by the time Steamy might have done Clio some good, she was nearly grown, flirting awkwardly with the boys who came in the summer to surf and take classes at the university. And she had Emma. You would think that having one or two people to love you would be enough, but the heart really wants more. Not all that it can get, at least not in Clio’s case. She was not greedy. But she wanted more than Emma, a woman, and Steamy, a boy, could give her.

Clio was eight years old the summer that her mother moved to Australia. It was the summer that she invented the Love Contest. She and Dix would round up their animals—two poodles, three cats, an old gray-haired
dachshund, a Chinese pig, a mynah that lived in the rafters of the garage—and herd the excited animals into the center of the lawn. The mynah, tempted by the fruit in their hands, circled above them, screaming and diving at their heads as the animals raced back and forth in frenzies of joy. Clio and Dix whooped and shouted at them, trying to lure the animals into their arms, for the child who gathered the most animals was the winner of the Love Contest.

One morning, Dix and Clio awakened to find that the dogs were not in their accustomed places at the foot of their beds. The cats were not on the lanai. Even the mynah was gone. They went from room to room looking for them, calmly at first, then more and more worried as they went through the house. They ran into the garden and into the rain forest, but the animals had vanished.

Burta Yamada was waiting for them when they came out of the forest. “I did it while you were asleep.” She lighted a small black cigar and shook out the match. “I decide who lives here now.”

Clio turned back to the forest.

“It won’t do any good,” Burta said. “Hide in the forest, Clio. Hide in the bushes if you want. No more Love Contests.”

A few weeks later, there arrived at the house two King Charles spaniels. Burta had read that the breed was admired by the Japanese royal family. Clio and Dix would have nothing to do with the dogs, which suited Burta just fine. The dogs were devoted to Burta, and she to them.

Working late at night in his room with a hammer wrapped in a beach towel, Dix spent weeks grinding a bathroom glass into tiny splinters. Burta caught him putting the ground glass into the dogs’ food bowl, and two days later, as soon as his trunk was packed, he was sent to
boarding school on the Big Island. Then he, too, was gone. Burta decided who lived there.

Clio told Emma that she did not want to visit her mother and Mr. Armacost in Australia. Emma said, as she was to say hundreds of times, “You are an island girl. You know how to do these things. Island girls are not afraid.” She wiped the tears from Clio’s face and sent her to Melbourne more terrified of being a frightened island girl than she was frightened of her mother.

The visit wasn’t as bad as Clio had expected. The good thing, it turned out, was that her mother was exactly the way Clio had remembered her. Clio realized that she had a mother who was meant to be very far away. Not a mother to hold Clio in her arms and caress her, to talk to her, to calm her and praise her, but a mother who came to dinner in taffeta capri pants holding an amber cigarette holder; who frowned in distaste at Clio’s short fingernails; who told Clio that she was lucky to have breeding, as she hadn’t the good fortune to have money. Clio saw from the start that Kitty was incapable of being interested in any child. It had nothing to do with Clio. She was relieved. It was not that she had failed her mother—Kitty was simply thinking of other, more fascinating things. Kitty wasn’t even particularly interested in Rory Armacost. Clio thought that she liked him better than Kitty liked him.

Uncle Rory, as her mother insisted that she call him, was the first man, other than a teacher, to put a book into Clio’s hands and say, read this. In Rory’s case, he put twenty books in her hands, small paperbacks happily, and said solemnly, “These may change your life, Clio. They did mine.” The books were the adventures of Napoleon Bonaparte, a mission-educated aborigine who had risen
through his gifts of Socratic deduction and primitive instinct to become the most feared detective-inspector in Australia.