Sleeping Beauties (2 page)

Like her native ancestors, Emma believed in the power of dark forces. All of the ancient
kapus
had once had practical usages—the king’s excrement had been borne away
by his most trusted chief and destroyed in secret not because of modesty or shame, or even hygiene, but because an evildoer might use it for sorcery. If you were so reckless as to raise your head as the big calabash was borne past, you were taken to the
heiau
and strangled to death. During periods of mourning, no fires could be lit. Cats were muzzled and chickens were thrown into covered calabashes to keep them silent. At the death of the king, the people broke all the rules with exuberance. They burned, looted, and murdered, and the women joyously offered themselves as prostitutes—but only until the decomposition of the king’s corpse was complete, when social order, with its system of
kapu
, was effortlessly restored.

A taboo existed in order to be transgressed. Violence, ritualized violence, had lain deep at the center of things. To be an ancient Hawaiian was to be terrified most of the time. It is a modern idea that to live in a subconscious state is poetic. It is also a sentimental idea, and Emma would have been the first to agree.

The thirteen-year-old child and the childless, solitary woman fell into an easy routine of study and domesticity. Clio liked very much that time of the evening, after their early supper (cooked by Emma, served precariously by Emma’s servant, Lester, cleared and washed by Clio), when Emma would ceremoniously invite her to the library to talk-story. Emma drank a bottle of San Miguel beer and when she finished it, she banged loudly on the floor with a Maori war club for Lester to bring her another.

Emma talked to Clio of the things she had come to fear would be lost: the long songs without rhyme or metre called
meles
; the hulas and oral genealogies; the very history of her passing race: “Sandalwood was once plentiful in the mountains of the islands. It was of no commercial value
to the Hawaiians—they used it only to impart fragrance to their
kapa
—but the Chinese needed sandalwood, and soon a commerce began between the foreigners and the agents of Kamehameha, one of whom was your great-grandfather Redmond Clarke. The Hawaiians readily, even heedlessly, gave away the trees in exchange for nails and rough cloth, and later for muskets and ammunition. As a consequence, by 1840 there was little sandalwood left in the Hawaiian Islands.”

It was sometimes difficult for Clio to stay awake during the lessons. They worked steadily, surrounded by books and papers, until Clio would finally be sent to bed with a book that Emma had chosen for her, perhaps Isabella Bird’s nineteenth-century travel letters. Clio would try to read the book that Emma had given her, but it would not be long before she succumbed and reached under her bed to pull out the books that she had been waiting all day to read, books that she found in her aunt’s library, Rumer Godden and Somerset Maugham and Katherine Mansfield. She would read through the night. She kept the book that Emma had given her close by, so that she could open it if Emma came to her room, but Emma never disturbed her. It was not her way.

If Clio succumbed so easily, so willingly, to Emma, it was because Emma enabled her to wipe away her own small past. It was an extraordinary gift that Emma gave her. Clio was relieved to exchange the story of her own childhood for the vision that Emma conjured up for her. The myths that Emma told her, the legends that she whispered to Clio, became confused with Clio’s dreams, and even her recollections, so that eventually Clio came to believe, willed herself to believe, that Emma’s stories were her own memories. Because of Emma, Clio grew convinced that she’d come from the ocean, born of the marriage of earth and light. All cultures, all genealogies, begin with
the marriage of earth and light, Emma said. “I myself have seen it.”

Emma’s servant, Lester, had come to Wisteria House in 1922 as Clio’s grandfather’s chauffeur. He was of Chinese and Hawaiian descent, and he had left the islands only once, the time he accompanied the Rolls-Royce sedan to Scotland for Mr. Junior’s golf holiday.

As a young man, Lester had fallen in love with a Japanese girl whose father worked in the cane fields of Hale Moku. The girl had lived with her family in one of the small wooden houses in the workers’ camp, a half mile from the plantation house. In the evenings, Lester would walk to the camp to watch her tend the vanda orchids in her mother’s small garden. One night he found the courage to speak the few short sentences he had memorized as he walked down the beach. He stood in the road and persuaded her to take a walk with him.

Two days later, when he returned, the garden was empty. The girl’s father came out of the house and shouted at him to go away. Lester walked through the camp every night for weeks until Emma told him what she had heard at the mill store. The morning after her walk through the camp with Lester, the girl had been sent to her grandparents in Japan. A romance with a man who was not Japanese was considered impossible, a shaming thing, and the girl had been sent away for the good of her family and even, some might have said, for the good of the community.

Lester had a collection of blues and jazz recordings that was unusual to find in Honolulu, a city where there were few places to hear or to buy such music, and few people who listened to it. Lester would invite Clio to join him in his room at Wisteria House, often on a weekend evening when she did not have schoolwork and Emma had gone
to call on friends, where he played records for her, very loud. He smoked a Filipino cigar, his bad-tempered face dark against a frayed hand-me-down chair, and the cigar smoke filled the room as they listened to John Coltrane play “What’s New?” Sometimes if Emma returned early, she would bring a bottle of beer from the kitchen and stand in the doorway and listen to the music. Emma liked the later Billie Holiday, those recordings in which the singing was a little dissolute, a little slurred.

It was during these evening sessions with Lester that Clio realized with both elation and fear that there was something in the world that might be there for the taking, something that she came to think of, perhaps unwisely, as romance. The world itself, she thought then, was romance.

Sometimes Lester would arrive soundlessly at her door or suddenly appear ahead of her on one of the garden paths and hiss morosely, “You want to see things, missy?”

Then he would take her into the attic, into the empty stables and carriage house, into rooms that had not been used for fifty years. He wore a heavy ring of keys attached to his stained waistcoat with a gold watch chain that had belonged to Redmond Clarke. He would unlock the doors of the rooms with deliberate, malicious ceremony, hunched over to catch the dust-filled light, taking his time. He never condescended to try the key in the lock, but insisted on finding each key by sight. Once inside, he opened the shutters with a clatter, flinging them back with impatience. He did not allow Clio to spend much time in the rooms. The dust made her sneeze, and this upset him. He thought it impolite, and even disruptive, as if the sudden noise might disturb one of her great-aunts, dead for years, bending over her embroidery.

One afternoon, Clio noticed a small animal trotting down the center of the second-floor hall. She thought it might be one of the rats that sometimes slipped inside the house and she stepped back calmly to let it pass. To her surprise, the door behind her fell open.

A large
koa
bed sat heavily under a swag of faded striped damask. Festoons of dusty yellow feathers were tied to the top of each bedpost, an adornment, Clio knew, once allowed only the nobility. There was a slender chaise, its covering of gray sprigged silk faded and torn. There was a dressing table made of mother-of-pearl. She knew of the table; Lester had described it to her, a wedding gift to her great-grandmother from the ambassador of China. There were large mirrors in gilded frames, the glass blind with rust. There was a chamber pot under a tall
koa
chest.

She opened the chest. Hundreds of feathers floated to her feet. White doves, she thought in astonishment. And then she saw that they were not birds. They were shoes. Shoes sewn with feathers and lace and tiny rosettes of seed pearls, shoes with soles of thin white leather and the words Madame d’Espina, Rue Cambon embossed in gold in the faded satin linings. She sat on the floor and gathered the shoes into her lap.

A light fragrance of dusting powder rose from the shoes. Some of them had never been worn. She tried to pair them, delicately tucking her fingers into the toes so as not to soil them or injure the brittle velvet ribbons. She hesitated for only a moment, then slid her foot into a shoe that looked as if it had once been the color of lavender. She walked up and down the room, arms aloft, toes pointed like a ballerina.

Clio did not tell Lester that she had discovered the secret of the unlocked doors, nor did she fidget or otherwise give herself away while he slowly searched for the key to the
nursery. But she did avail herself night and day of the rooms that her ancestors had left open for her.

Lester pointed out to Emma that if Clio were staying, she would require new clothes. Could he put her into something of Miss Clara’s?

Emma, who was frowning with the effort of rendering a name-chant into English, a chant that had never before been written in any language, looked up absently and said, “Good heavens, Lester. You must be mad.”

Miss Clara had died in 1937. Lester looked at the floor, his face pinched with anger.

“They wouldn’t fit the child,” Emma said in explanation.

Clio exhaled with gratitude. It was the first time that her stay at Wisteria House, permanent or not, had ever been acknowledged, and she had thought for one moment that Emma’s chastisement meant that she would not be staying long. But neither Lester nor her aunt were thinking of that, nor was her presence at Wisteria House ever mentioned, not in all the years that she lived there with them.

Later that afternoon, after she had finished the translation, Emma took Clio to Stant’s Department Store. Emma parked her black Buick in front of the Stant building on Fort Street, only four blocks from Wisteria House. Clio had not been to the store for many years, not since her mother moved to Australia. Few people still patronized Stant’s, preferring instead the big mall at Ala Moana, even though their families had been dressed by the Stants for generations. The merchandise at Stant’s was not very fashionable.

There were no other customers in the store that day. Emma and Clio took the wrought-iron cage elevator to the second floor, the Children and Foundations floor, where they were greeted ceremoniously by Mrs. Okamura. Mrs.
Okamura proudly told Clio that she had helped her mother to order her first trousseau from
Harper’s Bazaar
. Still looking a little dazed, Mrs. Okamura said that Kitty had not thought the selection at Stant’s quite right.

She neatly laid out for their approval all of the things deemed essential for a thirteen-year-old girl, including, to Clio’s delight, a white cotton brassiere. Emma pronounced brassiere the French way, exaggerating the consonants and giving Clio a moment’s shame. Clio’s happiness, however, was so complete that she didn’t even blush when Emma went on to ask Mrs. Okamura if she advised the wearing of nylon slips, as if nylon were more lascivious, more tending to corruption, than cotton. Mrs. Okamura thought that nylon would do very well.

Clio’s stepmother, Burta Yamada, had enforced stringent economies of dress, as well as of food. She thought it important that her stepchildren learn the principle of cause and effect—or perhaps it was supply and demand, Clio could never get it straight. Clio had been made to wear Burta’s old clothes, dresses fitted with extra panels of cloth to accommodate Clio’s height. She was given four pairs of underpants and two nightgowns each September at the start of the school year, and she wore them until they were gray with use. She often went to school so oddly costumed that her friends gave to her clothes the name Paris-Frocks, which revealed as much about island standards of taste as Clio’s wardrobe. So no young girl in the world could have been happier than Clio when Mrs. Okamura ran her competent fingers under Clio’s breasts to ensure that the brassiere was a good fit. Mrs. Okamura even called it a training bra, but it was fine with Clio.

Their many packages, Clio’s many packages, were to be sent to Wisteria House, but when Emma saw the dismay on Clio’s face when she realized that the pleasure of laying the new clothes on her bed and looking at them would be
delayed, she allowed Clio to pick three things to carry home. Clio happily lugged the packages after her, banging them awkwardly against her legs as she followed Emma down to the Men’s Department. Emma needed to buy socks for Lester, who’d been complaining of cramp.

Clio waited patiently, thinking of her new things, while Emma chatted with Mr. Day, the salesclerk. As her aunt and Mr. Day discussed the decline of sugar prices, Clio noticed a woman putting dozens of bow ties into a straw bag. Without looking around, the woman moved confidently to a table laden with men’s bathing shorts. She examined and discarded several pairs before she found a few to her liking. She put them into her bag.

Clio was astonished. It was not just the thievery that confused her, but the idea that a woman who seemed so respectable, a person so like her aunt, was a thief. The woman wore a
lau hala
hat with a feather band, and a flower-printed dress, and laced white summer shoes chalky with polish.

Clio was so mesmerized that she did not hear Emma call her name. She jumped as if it were she who was filling the straw bag. She realized that Emma, too, had seen the woman, but Emma did not seem surprised or even concerned. She certainly said nothing to Mr. Day, who, Clio noticed, allowed his eyes to flicker for only the briefest moment to the woman clumsily wrestling with the torso of a mannequin, the better to remove its terry-cloth beach jacket.

Emma’s car was still in front of the store, undisturbed, although a line of cars was backed behind it. Drivers pushed their horns, and a Chinese man in a van swore furiously at them as he swerved around the Buick. Clio was embarrassed, but Emma was unperturbed.