Sleeping Beauties by Susanna Moore Read Free Book Online Page A

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.
    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 winterin 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 blackpearls, 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