Sleeping Beauties by Susanna Moore Read Free Book Online Page B

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 Hiroshigeprint 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