Sleeping Beauties Read Free Page B

Stant’s has always had wonderful delivery service and I’ve often wondered if there were any connection.” She stopped at the rusted iron gate laced with chicken wire and dead palm branches. She smiled at Clio as if Miss Stant were only a little eccentric, as if Emma herself were only a little eccentric. She set the heavy hand brake, making her point. “She was unhappy in love.”
    Clio nodded in agreement, not understanding but wanting to understand, and jumped out to open the gate.
    Clio often wondered if Emma had asked her father, John Lynott, to allow her to stay at Wisteria House. She liked to think that he had at least inquired about her, but she knew that it was possible that he and Emma had never spoken about her at all. He certainly never spoke to Clio about it, and the few times each year that she saw him, he never mentioned Emma’s name. There was a tradition in the islands of taking the child of a relative or friend to raise, a
hanai
child, but Emma did not adopt Clio. There were legal considerations.
    After he divorced their mother, Lynott had not allowedClio and her brother, Dix, to see their mother’s family except for formal calls at Christmas and Easter. John Lynott did not like his sister-in-law, perhaps because he knew that she had never been fooled by him. It is true that she didn’t admire him, but she did not dislike him. It would not have occurred to her to dislike him. It wasn’t because he was a newcomer to the islands, Emma wasn’t a snob; he just did not interest her. But he mistook her reserve for haughtiness, and it made him resentful.
    Emma was careful not to appear to supersede the tentative, even questionable, authority she had gained in regard to Clio, and it was she who suggested that Clio visit her mother, Kitty, in Australia. Arrangements to visit Kitty and her husband, Rory Armacost, had been made and broken many times in the years since Kitty’s marriage. Kitty would suggest a time, but it would be in the middle of the school term. Lynott would ask Kitty to take Clio at Christmas, but since the seasons were reversed and it was summer in Australia, Kitty would be at her fishing camp in New Zealand; no place for a child, she said.
    Every so often, Kitty sent Clio a stuffed koala bear, sometimes a windup bear that played “Waltzing Matilda.” Clio had seven of them. Kitty also sent her alligator handbags with broken clasps and bed jackets with stains that might have been crème de menthe. Kitty seldom wrote, but when she did, it was to ask that Clio return something that Kitty had sent her. Clio particularly remembered an ermine muff that looked as if bites had been taken out of it, which Kitty wanted to use to line some bedroom slippers.
    While Clio still lived with her father and stepmother in Nu‘uanu, the arrival of one of Kitty’s letters would fill her with alarm. Sometimes Clio had lost Kitty’s gifts or given them away, and she would spend days composing letters of apology. Even if she managed to retrieve from one of the maids the shoe with the ripped ankle strap, she stillhad to make up the package. She needed someone to take the package to the post office. She needed help to fill out the customs form. Burta would catch Clio making arrangements with the gardener to mail a badly wrapped box, and Burta would gloat for weeks over Kitty’s bad behavior. “Well, your mother never asked for you back, did she?” Burta would say.
    To be fair to Kitty, she had been obliged to establish a small trust fund for Clio and Dix. Kitty was discovered mishandling, selling really, some ranchland that had been left to Clio and Dix by their grandfather. A check for seven hundred dollars was deposited in each of their savings accounts on the fifteenth of each month by Kitty’s lawyer in Sydney. Clio used to study the monthly statements as if they were diaries or atlases. Clio was always flattered to see herself addressed as Miss Cliome Meliaokamalu Lynott, which was, after all, her