The Death of a Much Travelled Woman Read online

Claudie laughed, “Oh Luisa, always the same worries!” Claudie was wearing a silk print shirt in tangerine and lemon over a pair of crisp white shorts and sandals. Her skin was a warm desert-sand tone—Filipina, I guessed—and her straight black hair swung all in one piece like a curtain. I had just been in St. Petersburg; coming from a bitter winter, my black Levi’s, cowboy boots, and worn bomber jacket felt completely inappropriate for the lush warm breeze. Underneath my beret, my crazed graying hair frizzed out humidly. Like Claudie’s, it was all of a piece, but more a piece of untended topiary than a swaying curtain of black light.

  Luisa took a long drink of iced tea and shrugged off poor, pathetic, over-read Gloria. “Claudie,” she said abruptly, remembering something. “Where is your Nell? The last time I was here, you had your Nell.”

  Claudie’s smile was almost easy. “Oh, Nell and I have broken up. She goes her way. I go mine.”

  “But the gallery?”

  “She kept it. I got the house. Some of the artists went with Nell, some with me. I’m hoping to get another storefront.”

  “But Claudie, this is not good. What happened? No, I know what happened! Another woman, no? I’m killing her.”

  Claudie laughed. “Oh Luisa, you’re always the same. It’s too late. It happened six months ago. One of those things. Believe me, it wasn’t easy for any of the three of us. No one’s to blame. I could have been the one to leave too.”

  “That’s different, if you leave,” said Luisa firmly. “That’s passion. Otherwise, it’s just betrayal.”

  “I’m getting used to being single,” Claudie began, on a positive note, and then the telephone rang and she excused herself.

  When she was gone, Luisa announced, “That Nell was no good anyway. You know the type: restless, a toughie, a big mouth, always feeling sorry for herself. You know I can’t stand that. Claudie is my friend from Paris; we went to cinematography school together. She deserves a good woman. Perhaps you’re interested, Cassandra?” Luisa eyed me speculatively. “When are you settling down?”

  “When are you?”

  “Me? Every day I don’t commit suicide is a miracle.” But Luisa was laughing now. “My writing is my only mistress. When you see what I have written, you will be amazed and astounded. It is the best work I have ever done, no kidding.”

  “The most extraordinary thing,” Claudie said, returning with more iced tea and sitting down. “That was a woman on the phone named Donna Hazlitt, calling from the Hana coast, on the other side of the island. I don’t know what to make of it, whether she’s lucid or completely confused. She was talking about a small painting that she said she discovered among her dead husband’s things. He apparently inherited it from his parents. It’s unsigned and seems not to have been quite finished, but Mrs. Hazlitt seems to think it might be an O’Keefe. Mrs. Hazlitt is interested in having it appraised and in selling it. She wants me to handle the sale for her.”

  “O’Keefe? You mean Georgia O’Keefe?”

  “The very same. She came here, you know, in the Thirties, courtesy of Dole Pineapple. They hired her to do two paintings for advertising purposes. They set her up on the Big Island, but when she asked if she could live among the workers on the plantation, the Dole people said absolutely not. She never did end up painting any pineapples for them while she was here. Eventually, in desperation, they air freighted a pineapple to her in New York and she managed to paint it, very unenthusiastically.”

  Claudie put down her iced tea without drinking it and stood up again. “The critics were never very excited about O’Keefe’s Hawaiian paintings, but I think some of them are lovely. There was an exhibit two years ago at the Honolulu Academy of Arts—it caused quite a stir. Gorgeous flowers, of course—crab’s claw ginger, hibiscus, plumeria, lotus, and jimson weed—which she called belladonna—those lovely angel’s trumpet weeds. There were also some landscapes from Maui. She stayed here for a few weeks, escaping the Dole people. Waterfalls and mountains in the Io Valley, and black lava on the Hana coastline.”

  Claudie paced up and down the terrace. “I can’t tell if Mrs. Hazlitt is on the up and up. She just started talking in the middle, as if we’d been discussing this for years. She said it’s a flower, an angel’s trumpet. Oh, what a coup if this is for real. It would make all the difference to me. Mrs. Hazlitt wants me to drive out there tomorrow to look at it. Why don’t the two of you come?”

  In a shop in Lahaina, where we stopped the next morning to buy a few provisions, I saw a T-shirt proclaiming, “I survived the Hana Highway.”

  All too soon I knew what that meant. The Hana Highway was a two-lane road that twisted around the north coast of the island like dental floss around teeth. The landscape was spectacular all right: a dark cobalt sea and only slightly lighter sky, waterfalls at every other turn and black lava rock formations and black sand beaches. Claudie’s Toyota, however, was a compact, and although Claudie and Luisa, being small and fine-boned, fit quite well, I had some trouble with my long legs.

  And with my stomach, which insisted on lurching in rhythm with the car.

  Luisa wanted to know more about O’Keefe, and Claudie had obliged by giving her a life history, ending with “She was essentially a solitary woman. Even though she was married to Steiglitz, she still managed to live her own life and spent half the year in New Mexico. I never really think of her as having been married at all.”

  “Have you ever noticed,” I asked, “how much we admire heterosexual women who remained single or as if single? Simone de Beauvoir, Gloria Steinem, Maya Angelou. With lesbians, though, it’s a different story. We don’t want to discount their relationships; we want them to be coupled.”

  “I am never coupled,” said Luisa. “I couldn’t ask anyone to share my suffering.” As always when she talked about her depressions, she began to laugh hugely.

  “I think you’re right, Cassandra,” said Claudie. “Is it perhaps because lesbians are not supposed to have the problem of being misunderstood and held back by their mates?”

  “Or because being a lesbian rests so much on proof. You need to actually have a lover by your side before you’re believed.”

  “I know that part is true,” sighed Claudie. “Since Nell left me, a few people—relatives mostly—have asked if I’m seeing any nice men.”

  “I am opposed to marriage for creative people,” said Luisa. “An artist’s life is always solitary. You two, on the other hand, are not artists, only the hand-maidens to creativity. There is nothing to prevent you getting together with each other. Why don’t you?”

  In the embarrassed silence that followed, Luisa murmured, “Claudie, pay attention to your curves, please.”

  Around the small town of Hana were a luxurious resort and clusters of houses on the hillsides. We pulled up a driveway half-hidden by ferns and hibiscus bushes to a simple but beautifully constructed wooden house, low and long.

  Claudie knocked on the door, but there was no answer.

  “That’s odd,” she said, looking again at her scrap of paper. “We’re right on time and this is the right address.”

  We waited for half an hour on the steps, drove away to the resort for a cool drink, and then came back. There was still no sign of Donna Hazlitt.

  “I hate to have come all the way out here for nothing,” Claudie said, and sounded close to tears. “I guess she changed her mind. Maybe she decided to take the painting to a gallery in Honolulu.”

  I’d had the feeling there was something odd about this adventure from the beginning. As the afternoon shadows lengthened, the impression grew stronger. I began to walk around the house, looking for a window I could at least peer into. Most of them were tight with blinds. Finally, in the back, I was able to peer through an opening in the blinds into what appeared to be a bedroom.

  The closet was open and clothes were strewn about; the drawers had been treated the same way. And on the floor near the bed lay the still body of an elderly woman in a dressing gown, a still body that did not move when I called
out, and would not move again.

  The next day back in Lahaina, the news was all over the local paper. Donna Hazlitt, long-time resident of Hana, had apparently been the victim of a robbery-murder. But subsequent editions of the paper backed down: there were no signs of breaking and entering, and nothing of value had been taken, though Hazlitt, the widow of a coin and stamp collector, had many obvious things to steal.

  It also appeared that what appeared to be murder may have really been a case of accidental poisoning. Apparently Mrs. Hazlitt had recently been treated at the local clinic for uveitis, an inflammation of the iris, for which she’d been prescribed atropine. The atropine came in a small dark brown bottle with a glass dropper and was similar to a second brown bottle found next to it on the kitchen counter. This second bottle held echinacea in a tincture of alcohol and was a herbal remedy for strengthening the immune system. The echinacea was usually taken orally, in a glass of water. Authorities speculated—and then, and after tests, concluded—that Mrs. Hazlitt had mistaken the two bottles. Instead of putting drops of echinacea into her glass of water before she went to bed that night, she’d poured atropine in instead. Taken internally, atropine is a poison that attacks the nervous system and causes flushed skin and a terrible thirstiness. If untreated, the symptoms increase to a state of delirium, in which the victim makes spasmodic movements and then falls into unconsciousness and death. The amount of atropine in the glass shouldn’t have been enough to kill her, but Mrs. Hazlitt was almost eighty and had a heart condition. She’d certainly shown all the signs of poisoning, including evidence of the spasmodic movements in the disorder in her room.

  Donna Hazlitt was known to be a solitary, rather mousy, and inoffensive woman, who had inherited her house and money from her husband. They had no children and she had no enemies. The coroner gave a verdict of accidental death by alkaloid poisoning.

  Of course, there was no mention, in the papers or anywhere else, of a Georgia O’Keefe painting.

  II.

  Everyone has many associations with a flower—the idea of flowers. You put out your hand to touch the flower—lean forward to smell it—maybe touch it with your lips almost without thinking—or give it to someone to please them.

  —Georgia O’Keefe

  ABOUT A WEEK AFTER our trip to Hana, I took a stroll through downtown Lahaina one morning. It had been an old whaling village, and a few structures remained from that period. There were a few lovely wooden arcades and a big old house where the Christian missionaries had lived, recording their astonishment at the ways of the Hawaiians, who seemed to enjoy singing and dancing, especially unclothed, as often as possible.

  As usual I was pondering not only the multiple ways of interpreting Luisa’s texts, but the problem of Luisa herself. In our typical fashion, we’d followed a pattern of glad reacquaintance, instantly followed by impatience on my part and a wounded sensibility (“You don’t understand me!”) on hers. This morning she’d accused me of willful language distortion and vowed to find another translator, someone who would appreciate her as the great genius of twentieth century literature. “Good,” I’d snapped. “And good luck finding someone who will put up with your megalomania, too!”

  I stopped now outside a gallery window to look at some flower paintings. Many of the galleries in Lahaina catered to tourists of the lowest common denominator and featured canvases of unbelievable awfulness, which depicted mystical underwater scenes—dolphins frolicking amidst schools of parrotfish and Moorish Idols, with the submerged towers of Atlantis in the background.

  But the watercolors displayed in this window were different: small, modest, exquisite. There was hibiscus the color of coral and rose, lying on a yellow tablecloth; a ginger plant with the cobalt sea in the background; and finally, the single petal of a plumeria flower, unfurling off the page, softly shirred at the edges, dark at the center, leading you into its heart. I thought, if these aren’t too expensive, perhaps I’ll buy one for Claudie. She had been so shaken by the whole experience with Donna Hazlitt that she had hardly come out of her room for days. She had told the police several times about the phone call, but it was clear they were not planning to take her information into much account.

  I stepped inside the door of the gallery, and immediately a woman came forward from between two of the small paintings. She was in her thirties, with a smooth bronze tan and soft, lingering brown eyes. Her hair was sun-bleached past blond to something closer to a light lemon cream. Her teeth were startlingly white when she spoke, in a deeper voice than I’d been expecting, but a voice that fit with how she looked, attractively roughened by the elements.

  “Can I help you?”

  I told her I might be interested in buying one of the paintings.

  “Great!” she said, and couldn’t help beaming like a child. “I painted them!”

  Her name was Susan Waterman, and she was just watching the gallery for the morning while the owner did some errands. They hadn’t sold any yet, so it was thrilling that it would happen while she was here. This was her first show. She was actually a botanist at an experimental growing station run by the University of Hawaii.

  In the end, overwhelmed by her bubbling gratitude, I bought two paintings, one for Claudie and one for Luisa. They weren’t cheap. Susan also persuaded me to have lunch with her the next day at her studio, where I could look at her latest work and see her garden.

  Claudie was strangely quiet when I first gave her the package, wrapped up with the label of the gallery stickered on the outside, but she admired the painting.

  “I hope you didn’t spend too much, Cassandra.”

  I was afraid to tell her, and said only, “Got it for a song. It’s her first show. Susan Waterman. She’s a botanist. She invited me over for lunch tomorrow.”

  “Leave it to Cassandra,” Luisa teased. “If there is a woman to be found, Cassandra will be having lunch with her.” She had embraced me violently when I gave her her package, regarding the present, rightly I suppose, as an overture of peace.

  Claudie looked as if she were going to say something, but then excused herself, telling us she had a headache.

  “I’m sorry,” said Luisa. “I think she is, how-do-you-say, crushed out on you. It hurts her feelings that you are going to lunch with someone else.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Claudie is definitely not crushed out. You know she’s been upset since the Hana incident. And anyway, it’s only lunch.”

  Susan Waterman lived in a small house outside Lahaina that seemed surrounded by flowering plants, protea, birds-of-paradise, crab’s claw ginger. Inside, the walls were covered with sketches and paintings, and on a table was a copy of Georgia O’Keefe’s One Hundred Flowers.

  “I’m a great fan of hers,” said Susan, “but it’s hard to paint a flower without being influenced by her. Women painted flowers for centuries and it was considered terribly feminine and safe, and then O’Keefe comes along and makes you see everything differently by putting flowers in the foreground and enlarging them so that they push the boundaries of the painting.”

  On the cover of book was a great white flower, one of the jimson weeds from the Southwest. “Don’t you have these too?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “The name in Hawaiian is Kikania-Haole.”

  “Doesn’t haole mean white person?”

  Susan laughed. “Yes. Though haole used to mean any troublesome foreigner. Maybe that’s how it got attached to the jimson weed.”

  “You’d hardly think of it as a weed,” I said.

  “That’s the marvel of O’Keefe,” said Susan. “She makes you see. The critics said her flowers were sexual. O’Keefe said, don’t be silly. But they do give you that feeling, a really powerful, self-revelatory eroticism. The petals both explore and close off entry to the inner core.”

  Underneath her tan, Susan blushed. “I admire O’Keefe so much. She didn’t seem to need anybody else. Not like me. I’m always getting mixed up in love affairs, in relationships that are bad for
me. Right now, I’m in the midst of deciding to break up and go back to being on my own. To really try to be independent.” She fixed me with soft brown eyes that implored me to rescue her from this fate.

  “Independence is my middle name,” I said. “I’ve always been independent myself.”

  She looked disappointed, but tried again, “For me, being independent would mean being financially stable, so I could paint full-time. But unless I strike it rich—or find a sugar girlfriend—I’m afraid that’s out of the question.”

  “Your current girlfriend…?”

  “…misrepresented herself badly,” Susan smiled. “But enough about me. Tell me what it’s like to be a world traveller and translator.”

  “Well, I couldn’t really support myself without my trust fund,” I began, just for the pleasure of seeing the infinitely sweet expression that came into Susan’s eyes.

  That evening when Claudie had gone out to see her therapist and Luisa and I were back to quarreling bitterly over the translations of tiny three-letter words, the doorbell rang. When I answered it, I found a woman on the doorstep. Before the woman could speak, Luisa called, “Hallo Nell. Claudie isn’t here.”

  “I’m not looking for Claudie.”

  She wasn’t tall, but she was athletic-looking. Her tanned face had a drooping sort of sneer that some might find attractive. Her eyes were blue, a little bloodshot around the iris. She looked about forty, and she looked angry.

  “What the hell were you doing with my girlfriend at her place this afternoon?”

  “Susan? Your girlfriend?” I stammered. “I bought two of her paintings yesterday. She invited me to lunch, that’s all.” I was certainly not going to mention those melting brown eyes or the lingering kiss Susan had given me on my departure. I stepped back from the doorway, recalling some karate moves. Luisa was, unfortunately, a total physical coward, so it was no good expecting help from her.

  But Nell didn’t raise her fists, only her voice. “This is Claudie’s way of getting back at me,” she said. “I know it. She wanted Susan for herself, and when she couldn’t get her, she recruited you.”