Sleeping Beauties by Susanna Moore Read Free Book Online

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 restto 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 furtherstartled 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