Sleeping Beauties (5 page)

“Heart-eating?” asked Clio warily.

“All of it.”

Clio paused. She did not know if she would be able to say what it was that she felt. “When I used to hide from my father and stepmother, I would go into the forest, in order to be myself again. I have that feeling now, here with you, of being myself, whoever that is. But I don’t know what to think about the past. I don’t know if I want it.” She was embarrassed. “Like Johnny Fitzroy.”

When Emma did not speak, Clio leaned forward to find her face in the dark. “But I could try,” she whispered.

“You have suffered more than anyone knows,” Emma said quietly.

She held out her hand and Clio pulled her to her feet. “If you give me your heart, Clio, I promise I won’t eat it.”

Clio nodded solemnly as they found their way into the house, nodded her acceptance, but Emma did not see her, and she did not ask again.

•   •   •

Clio was asked by her cousins, Mamie and Claire Clarke, to come to stay at Waimea, on the island of Kaua‘i. Their father, McCully, had drowned in a tidal wave, and their mother, Mary, ran the sugar plantation. In 1841, a king grateful to be absolved from the sin of polygamy had given the land to an obliging, even enterprising, missionary named Asa Clarke, but Mary Clarke was from the mainland, and although she was already an accomplished gardener, it was with envious surprise that her Clarke relatives watched her manage the plantation. She was not an island girl, and although she won the family’s gratitude, she did not win their affection.

Mamie and Claire met Clio at the airport. They drove through the dark fields to home in an open Jeep, the radio turned loud. Claire, who was thirteen, a year younger than Mamie, sat in the back, smoking marijuana. She leaned on the back of Clio’s seat, her arm around Clio’s neck.

“Gertrude is back,” she yelled in Clio’s ear. “She works days now. She had a baby and Mother pretends that Gertrude and Benjie are married.”

Mamie laughed. “She asked Gertrude what china pattern she had picked.”

“And Gertrude didn’t know what Mother was talking about,” shouted Claire. “Until Mamie said to Gertrude, ‘The plates, not the place.’ ” She screamed with delight.

Clio was elated by their independence, their mischief, the cool blackness, the speed with which they moved through the night. She had friends at school in Honolulu, but she had not often brought them to Wisteria House. Her work with Emma did not leave her much time for Play.

“Claire gives kissing lessons now,” said Mamie. “It’s her summer job.”

Clio turned around to look at Claire.

Claire nodded and passed Clio the joint. The sparks from the cigarette flew out of the car, bouncing behind them in the dirt road. “I charge three dollars a lesson. Two kisses a lesson. More for French,” she said.

“I have to kiss
you
?” Clio asked, taking a drag on the cigarette.

The sisters screamed. “No,” Mamie said, both hands tight on the steering wheel, leaning forward to see the road. There were no streetlights. “She has an assistant. Claire just supervises. She’s the make-out manager.”

“Do you remember Orval? Orval Nalag from the camp?” Claire asked Clio. “He is my assistant. He does it for free.”

They laughed all the way home, the sound of their high, light voices weaving through the swaying stalks of cane.

At Clio’s request, made that first night, Claire arranged a lesson for her.

On their way through the garden to the old banyan tree, Mamie said to Clio, “Don’t mention this to Mother.”

Clio looked at her. Claire had told her mother that they were walking to the library to see a slide show on New Guinea. “Don’t go through the camp,” Mary had said, reading a book on rose culture.

“I mean, don’t say that you even know Orval. Mother doesn’t like us seeing local boys.”

Clio promised not to mention him.

“You know about kissing, right? You’re seventeen,” said Claire as they settled themselves into a fork high in the tree.

There was a strong odor of resin and sap. It reminded
Clio of the smell of earwax. The insect tracks on the leaves glistened like dried sugar water. “Of course,” she said to Claire.

“I don’t think she should have to pay,” Mamie said to her sister.

“I want to,” Clio said, and Claire did not demur.

There was the sound of a bicycle, its salt-rusted tire chains squeaking rhythmically. Clio looked down through the leaves. The top of Orval’s black head, greased with pomade, shone up at them. “Why does your mother mind?” she whispered to Mamie.

“She’s prejudiced. Like everyone here. They all mind someone.”

Clio watched him climb up to them. She felt a quick tightening between her legs, and she put her hand there.

“You can go first,” Claire said to Clio.

Clio looked at her.

“We all get a turn, even the teacher. But you’re paying, so you can start.”

“I’d rather go second. Or last maybe. To see how it’s done,” Clio said.

“How it’s done?” Claire asked, as if she’d been misled about Clio’s qualifications.

“I mean how you guys do it. You know, the lesson part.”

“I’ll go first,” Mamie said with a sigh, sliding down a branch. “Hi, Orval,” Clio heard her say in the darkness.

Clio could see the porch lights of the house. She could smell his hair.

“Hi, Mamie,” she heard him say. “How’s it?”

Mamie had her turn, about ten minutes, and then Claire took her own turn, a bit longer and a bit livelier, Clio could tell by the shaking of the tree, and then Orval hoisted himself up onto the branch where Clio sat alone in the
dark and said, hanging from the limb like a monkey, “I’m kind of worn-up.”

She thought that he was canceling the lesson. She was so disappointed that she felt tears come to her eyes. “Okay,” she said. She saw a large green lizard sitting on the branch beneath her. Motionless, unblinking, it looked as if it had been sewn into its bright green suit, the badly stitched thread knotted roughly up his back.

Orval shimmied along to her, straddling the branch. She wondered if it were painful, if it hurt his testicles, or his penis. It cannot hurt, she thought, or he would not do it.

“Okay what?” he asked, smiling at her. His skin was dark.

“Okay, you can stop if you’re tired.”

He reached out and touched her breast.

Her nipple grew hard and she was embarrassed that he would know it, as if her excitement made her suddenly vulnerable.

“Where’s my cousin?”

“She went.”

“Where?”

He shrugged. “She said she’d be back. After.”

“After what?”

“The lesson.”

Drawn by expectation and desire, she was docile.

“Stand up,” he said.

She stepped lightly along the branch and stood where he told her, in a fork in the banyan. He leaned her against the tree. The dense, drooping limbs, thick with leaves, fell around them.

He took her hand and pressed it against his jeans and she felt him get hard.

He stood on the branch and opened her shorts, his hand caught between her body and his body, pressing against
her. He licked his fingers and put them into her vagina.

She watched him. She knew that if she closed her eyes, she would grow dizzy and she would fall out of the tree. His eyes were closed, the corners raised elegantly, the lids paler than his face, the lashes thin, disparate, as if they’d been combed. She wondered idly if his greater experience in trees enabled him to shut his eyes. She felt separated from her body, as if she were watching both the boy and herself in the crook of the tree.

His face in her neck, breathing into her neck, not overcome, her body swollen, enlarged, slow. She thought at first that he must be searching for something inside of her without knowing what it was that he sought, without knowing that it caused her pain, or if she minded or did not mind, but when he found it, to her surprise—surprise because she realized that he had known what he was seeking all along, and more than that, she had known, too—she succumbed into his hand, flooded into his hand, and he succumbed, too.

Not long after Clio’s return from Waimea, the slate roof on the third floor collapsed during a summer storm, damaging some of the furniture that had been stored in the attic, furniture that Emma, to her own surprise, had forgotten she owned. The structure of the house was precarious with damp, termites, and age, and a cousin of Lester’s, who owned an exterminating company, advised Emma to leave the house as quickly as possible. She told him that she valued his concern, but she hoped to stay a while longer. He shook his head in disapproval and left without submitting a bill.

The rare gardens of Wisteria House, planted in 1871 for Clio’s great-grandmother, Princess Ruth, fared no better
in the storm. Those trees that had not perished from lack of light finally surrendered—not to darkness, but to damp.

The legislature—composed of members whose names Emma had never heard before, most of them Japanese—quickly voted to condemn the house. They requisitioned the land for a city park.

There was a fuss in the newspapers, one of them owned by Emma’s aunt, and the final vote to take the land was indefinitely delayed. Or definitely delayed, as Clio said. There were offers from developers, but Emma refused to sell. Editorials were written, and letters to the newspaper, but Emma did not read them, not even the ones that defended what her critics called
haole
imperialism.

Clio dreamed that the house was being taken away from them because she had left Emma for the month that she spent at Waimea. She told no one of her dream, and she worried in secret that she had somehow caused the ferns that grew under the verandah to die.

Lester was of no help to her. His gloom turned to belligerence. He seemed to seek out Clio to harry and chastise her.

“I am not going with you,” he said. “I am not leaving you anything.”

“Good,” she said. “I don’t want anything.”

“Good. Good for you, too. You thought you were getting Mr. Redmond’s watch. But I’ve hidden it. Only Mr. Redmond knows where.”

Clio, who had been brought up by people so firmly placed in the past that she might be said to have been raised by ghosts, did not gainsay him. He wearied her, but she said nothing. She loved him.

“She has no one to blame but herself,” Lester said fretfully, walking up and down the verandah, sidestepping the loose boards out of habit.

“Blame?” Clio asked, sitting on the porch steps.

“I told her. She should have gone years ago. Years ago. We all should have.” He stopped to look at her, squinting in fury. “And you! What are you doing here?”

“I don’t know,” she said, trying to soothe him. “The same as you perhaps.”

“You seem different, girlie,” he said, standing so close to her that she could smell the tobacco on his breath, and the Crème de Singapore that he used on his still-black hair.

“Like something happen to you.”

“I am different.”

“You going away now? You going to the mainland to school?”

She shook her head.

“You’re a stupid girl.”

“I’m staying with Emma.”

“You think I don’t know that?” he shouted.

“Why are you so mad at me, Lester?”

He looked down at the brown spots that made his hands look like tiger lilies. “I’ll give you the Coleman Hawkins,” he said. “And McCoy Tyner.” He looked up. “Might be the Coltrane.” He threw his cigar over the railing and she saw that he was crying.

“Come with us,” she said to him.

He waved her away and disappeared inside the house.

A few days after Lester’s departure to live with his grand-niece on Maui, Emma and Clio went to live with Clio’s grandmother, Mabel Clarke, on the north shore of O‘ahu at the plantation house known as Hale Moku. To Clio’s surprise, Emma took only the few pieces of furniture and decoration that were in her private rooms, leaving the rest
to be packed and stored in warehouses downtown. Clio took all of her things—books, childhood souvenirs, clothes, trinkets—and a fern from Kaua‘i, the
Lawai
fern, that she had carried by hand from the mountains of Koke‘e to plant under the verandah steps.

M
abel Clarke stopped receiving guests the day that her second husband drowned. Except for those rare hours when they could escape Mabel’s bad-tempered vigilance to run into town to flirt with the cowboys, her young daughters, Kitty and Emma, had grown up with women. Their brother, McCully, was away at school. Miss Mabel only allowed Japanese women to work at Hale Moku, and year after year, the women wandered through the rooms in which they dreamed at night and malingered through the long hot days. By the time Kitty and Emma were sent to boarding school on the Big Island, only a few of the old servants were still alive. When Mabel reluctantly asked a former employee of the telephone company to do long-neglected repairs, he became famous because of it, and was known after that as the Hale Moku Man.

Sometimes tourists found their way down the drive, drawn perhaps by the red
huapala
vine considered unlucky by the Hawaiians, the vines enflaming the smooth gray trunks of the trees. The intruders were astonished to come suddenly upon the house, shrouded as if under an enchantment. The eaves and balustrades were so thickly netted with jasmine and Chinese honeysuckle that the very house seemed made of flowers. The trespassers were further
startled to see old and hobbled Japanese women in kimonos and
tabis
come stumbling along the verandah shouting curses at them as if the intruders were Koreans.

The treasure and detritus of six generations of collectors filled the house, the possessions not of scholars or antiquaries, but of ordinary people who simply could not throw away anything: quilts, hymnals, the weightless skulls of owls, shell-and-rattan maps, netted calabashes, chipped Venetian glass,
koa
bedsteads,
makaloa
mats, paintings on velvet, crates of black China tea, jawbone fish hooks, cloaks and capes and helmets,
ukiyoe
, tenth-century wedding kimonos, lacquer boxes, bolts of Thai silk, rusted swords, conch-shell tea sets, opium pipes, Buddhas, poison arrows, stained satin ball gowns, sea nets, rare
tifaifai
from Tahiti, stovepipe hats,
lau hala
sails, polo mallets, one stuffed
nene
goose (an endangered species in the Hawaiian Islands), and every proclamation of Queen Liuliu‘okalani’s court from 1891 to the day of her bitter abdication.