Sleeping Beauties (6 page)

Clio’s
haole
great-grandfather had been aide-de-camp to the last queen of Hawai‘i. Clio’s Hawaiian great-grandfather was the son of the last chiefess of the sacred island of Kaua‘i. Clio belonged to a family whose fortune had come from the ownership of land. With that ownership came privilege, of course, but also responsibility. Her family was proud of its generosity. There were few places in the small town of Kaikea on the windward side of O‘ahu that did not bear her grandmother’s name: the Clarke Elementary School, the Clarke Library, the swimming pool, the clinic.

As a child, before her mother Kitty went away, Clio had sometimes sneaked away from Hale Moku to sleep with the housemaids in the small workers’ camp that was part of the plantation. At first light, the fishermen would take her out with them to catch tuna for the new hotels. Days would go by before Kitty, who was spending the winter
in a cottage in the garden of Hale Moku, would realize that she had not seen Clio in some time. Kitty would only realize it then because she needed Clio to assist her in some way; needed Clio to put on a smocked dress and shoes if Aunt Cliome were coming to tea, lest Aunt Cliome, after whom Clio was named, decide to leave her black Tahitian pearls to a niece in San Diego. Kitty thought it important to have her daughter at her side, if only for a few minutes, even if Clio flinched involuntarily when Kitty stroked her with tense, soft fingers.

Hysterical maids would be sent to find Clio, bringing her back just in time to make her bathe and dress before her aunt’s station wagon came slowly up the grass driveway. For years, Cliome had promised the pearls to Kitty, then taken them away whenever Kitty displeased her. Although Cliome never went anywhere without them, she did not wear them. They were enormous, and she thought them a bit vulgar. She carried them in her handbag. She had last taken back the pearls when Kitty married John Lynott. Emma used to say that although Kitty claimed to spend the months at Hale Moku waiting for her divorce from Lynott on behalf of her reputation, it was really on behalf of the pearls.

Kitty did not understand that the old woman would not have noticed whether her namesake, Clio, were present or not, so deeply was she lost in dreams. She was far out to sea with her own fishermen—not the teasing, rough-skinned Filipino men who’d taught Clio to bail with a rusty coffee can, but princely men, Hawaiian men—long since dead. It was difficult for Miss Cliome to accept that the old ways were lost forever. Enthralled to the past, she understood just enough to realize that the world had not changed to her advantage.

Kitty did get the black pearls eventually, but Clio could not recall them. It is unlikely that Clio never saw the black
pearls, which were as big as brussels sprouts. She had trained herself to put certain things out of her mind, things that did not, at first glance, seem worthy of such a banishment. It was not lack of curiosity, or disinclination, but a kind of necessary unconcern. She spent her time in reflection—not in thought, not in remembrance. Years later, when Emma spoke of the pearls, a little enviously, Clio could say in wonder that she did not remember them.

As Mabel Clarke was not interested in the same things that interested Emma, Emma did not torment her mother with passages from
A Journal of a Residence in the Sandwich Islands
. Clio’s book might be David Malo’s
Hawaiian Antiquities
written in Hawaiian, which she was still trying to learn, or a monograph on the one hundred and forty-seven pieces of Hawaiian sculpture left in the world, nine pieces of which were owned by her family, two of which were on a table in her blind grandmother’s dining room.

More often, Mabel recited Japanese poetry from the
Man’yoshu
, especially the work of Izumi Shikibu, whom she loved more than any other poet. She began reading Izumi in middle age. “Clio,” she used to say, “Izumi Shikibu is to blame for everything,” and Clio would agree.

Emma and Clio spoke as if the old woman were still able to see, still able to reason. This did not in any way impede conversation. Even on her worst days, Mabel took their meaning. There were people in the small town of Kaikea who for years refused to believe that Mabel was either sightless or mad. She was confined to a chair. Her legs were swollen to the size of palm trunks. Her hands looked like gingerroot.

While Mabel was going blind, she built a moon-viewing pavilion in the garden. It was copied from a Hiroshige
print in
One Hundred Views of Edo
, and the architect from Japan lived in the guest cottage, the same one that Clio used, for the year it took to build the pavilion to his and Mabel’s liking. Mabel composed poetry in the Japanese style, using the
waka
or haiku form. The poems were published in a small but handsome edition by the University of Hawaii Press. She was not untalented. Clio was not very talented, especially not in composing thirty-one-syllable poems about the dew on plum blossoms. She had tried, to please Mabel, but even Clio had known that the poems were not very good. Too much feeling.

Mabel had decorated the library at Hale Moku to resemble a ten-mat Japanese room. There were
tansu
chests in which to hide rolls of Scotch tape and staplers and the telephone, all of the totems of the twentieth century which would have spoiled the illusion that they were sitting at the foot of Mount Hiei, outside the old capital city of Nara. It was somewhat impractical, this room that was a manifestation of Mabel’s bitter fantasies. Each time one of them needed to wrap a package or find an envelope or writing paper, they had to remove everything from a
tansu
and, because there were, of course, no tables of the right height, lay everything on the tatami mats until the twine, or a ballpoint pen, was finally found. It was a reminder to Clio that too strong an interest in the past, even if it were only an aesthetic interest, required patience and a willingness, even an eagerness, to do things the hard way.

Mabel’s grandfather had been the son of a chiefess, so she could not deny her Hawaiian birthright. Although Mabel knew many secrets—the location of the
‘ape‘ape
herb found only in the damp mountain gullies of east Maui or the recipe for the love potion made from the last remaining stalks of red cane—she pretended that she had forgotten them. Emma would ask, “What was the prayer of the
kapu
chief when he wanted to put aside his dread exclusiveness so as to mingle with his people?” and Mabel would answer with vagueness, “What
kapu
? Whose people?”

Emma had counted on her mother to give her these gifts—her story and the story of her ancestors—just as she counted on Clio to receive them. She had counted on a more capacious truthfulness, or rather, because Emma understood that there were countless degrees of truth, a more capacious accuracy. Mabel was one of the few people left who could speak with any certainty. She knew that Emma had spent her life memorizing and recording, at first in large notebooks and later onto tape, the lore of her race, but Mabel would not help her. “She doesn’t care,” Emma said. And Mabel didn’t care. Although Emma understood why Mabel was so intent on denying the past, and was even sympathetic to her mother, Emma had chosen, unlike her mother, knowledge over revenge.

Mabel kept secret the chief’s chant as a way of repudiating her rank and her blood. As a married woman of forty, she had fallen in love with a prosperous orchid grower named Shiro Kageshiro whom she’d met one afternoon buying rootstock in Hilo. They saw each other over many months and many orchids and finally planned to travel in secret to Kyoto, separately, desperate with love, to sleep together for the first time. Although he was a widower, and Mabel would have given up her husband and Hale Moku and even her children for him, she was not permitted, in the end, to give up her past. They did everything to keep her from him—her husband, her mother, her lawyer and banker, her cousins and aunts, her maids and gardeners, even the old house—everyone and everything, except her eldest daughter, Emma, who implored her to go to Mr. Kageshiro. Mabel hadn’t the strength, in the end, to prevail against their combined
power. She did not go to Kyoto, and she never forgave them. She did not even forgive Emma, especially not Emma, who had been so generous.

Her family treated her, a grown woman, as if nothing had happened. They did not even give her the gift of condemnation. And so in retribution Mabel forgot overnight how to dance a hula, the way to weave
haku
lei, the verses of the birth chant. She became interested in Japanese lacquerware. She studied Buddhism. She practiced calligraphy. When her husband drowned one summer evening at Polihale, she did not run straight down the dirt road to Mr. Kageshiro’s orchid farm, but shut herself even deeper into Hale Moku, as if her refusal to claim her belated happiness was just punishment for those who had deprived her of it in the first place.

Every Monday morning before the house was awake, until he, too, died, Mr. Kageshiro left a wheelbarrow full of orchids and fruit at the kitchen door of Hale Moku; fruit that Emma only took in her hand at breakfast, so bitter did it taste to her, who had implored her mother to spend all for love. Emma told Clio that Mabel always ate the fruit greedily, as if it were her due, as if she had traded Mr. Kageshiro himself for the sweet fruit and the rare Madagascar orchids. And perhaps she had. In Hawaiian, Hale Moku means Island House. But the word
moku
may also mean to cut or to sever. To break in two.

“I’m going over!” screamed Mabel.

Clio lifted her head to look at her grandmother. She wondered, not for the first time, if Mabel made so much noise when she ate—smacking and gulping; ripping apart the Portuguese sweet bread with her old jumbled teeth as if it were a struggle to the death—because her sightlessness
had in some sympathetic way diminished her hearing. It was supposed to do just the opposite, Clio knew. No one who retained the gift of hearing would make so much noise as did Mabel when she ate. As an affectation of childishness, she pretended, or perhaps did not pretend, that the Rice Krispies spoke to her. “They’re crying, ‘Ouch, ooh, that hurts! I’m going over the falls! Ahhhhhh!’ ” Her shout would fall to a horrified whisper as the last of the cereal was swept over the Akaka Falls of her throat into the pool of her stomach.

“Do you think the word ‘schooner’ is best rendered
moku kia lua
or
kuna
?” Emma asked Clio one morning at breakfast. She was working on a new Hawaiian translation of Mark Twain’s letters from the South Seas.

Clio rolled her eyes in mock exasperation and let her head fall forward onto the table. “What is the good of an oral tradition, Emma, if it cannot even tell you where you have come from? No one knows where the first Hawaiians came from—even they didn’t know!”

“The Hawaiians came from the Marquesas,” Emma said calmly.

Clio picked up the morning newspaper. She did not want to think about Mark Twain’s letters. Lately, she had felt exhausted by their work—her work and Emma’s work. Her tiredness was moral, not physical. She was, for the first time, unsure of their effort.

Emma glanced over Clio’s shoulder as she came to what Emma called the society page. “Once I would have known all of those faces,” Emma said. “We were related to most of them.”

Once Clio would have known all of the faces, too. Once there would have been no one on the beach at Makapu‘u whom Clio did not know. But now when she went to the beach or back into Nu‘uanu Valley to pick ginger, there
were Japanese and Chinese and Filipinos shooting down the mud slide into Jackass Ginger Pond, and pale
sansei
girls in gingham bikinis at Sandy Beach. The girls were still very Japanese with their neat ponytails and baskets of sunscreen and lip salve. They had that particular precision of movement that Clio so admired. They still kept apart, but the very fact that they were sitting at Makapu‘u Beach watching their boyfriends in the surf made Clio wonder where they had been all those years, even before the servicemen and the tourists had found the beach at Makapu‘u, all those years when Clio and her friends had been the only ones on the beach. Perhaps the Japanese girls had been in sewing class or Japanese language school. She could not imagine what their grandmothers thought of them now. It could no longer be said that the most sensual part of a Japanese woman was the nape of her neck.

Clio had discovered the conflict of democratization. If there were twenty Japanese girls in bikinis lying on the beach at Makapu‘u, there were twenty fewer Japanese girls who still wore kimonos and
geta
, who knew how to play the
samisen
, how to prepare tea, and arrange cherry branches in a way no
haole
girl could ever devise, no matter how many
ikebana
classes she endured.

Clio knew that the
samisen
was an instrument already unknown to these girls’ mothers and grandmothers, women who would not have had the time or the training or the inclination to play difficult court music after twelve hours in the pineapple fields, their fingers too horribly slashed to play anything. It was a wonderful thing, in the end, to walk in jeans and sneakers rather than a hobbled silk robe and awkward, even dangerous, elevated lacquered clogs.

But the old ways were lovelier. The world was less full of beauty, even if it were bursting to good effect with
equality. Clio knew that it was easy enough for her to lament. It was desirable, preferable, that Japanese girls be at Makapu‘u Beach.

“Clio, child, put me in the orchids,” Mabel said, looking like an owl who has suddenly found itself in the light. Clio rose and pushed her grandmother’s chair onto the lanai.

The descendants of the flowers once left on the kitchen steps by Mr. Kageshiro were planted in black sand in old Chinese pots—white
Macroplectrum
and fragrant cattleya and lilac
Spathoglottis
and the beautiful
Odontoglossum
with its heavy, petulant lip like a pouting girl.

“Did you really save Emma from a tidal wave by throwing her into a tree?” Clio asked as she placed her grandmother among the orchids.