Cocoa Beach

by Beatriz Williams

  We’re standing at the end of the Phantom Shipping dock, and the Indian River swirls around the pilings at our feet while a hazy white sun cooks us inside our clothes. Evelyn, restless, swings from my hand to look for fish in the oily water. Thirty yards away, a tugboat steams slowly upstream, trailing gray smoke from its single stack. The air is almost too hot to breathe.

  “What about the warehouse?” I ask.

  “Warehouse?”

  I turn and nod to the rectangular wooden building at the base of the dock. Like the ship at the drawbridge, the building identifies its ownership in confident, no-nonsense black letters above the massive double door: phantom shipping lines. The paint is fresh, on both the signboard and the white walls of the warehouse itself. There are no windows. I understand this keeps the fruit fresh and cool in its crates, waiting for a ship to transport it across the ocean. Citrus, mostly, but some avocado as well. There’s a growing taste for more exotic fare in the London drawing rooms, apparently, after so many years of restriction and rationing and self-denial. A growing taste for adventure.

  “Oh, there won’t be anything to see in there,” says Mr. Burnside. “The ship’s already loaded and left, and we’re not due to receive any goods this morning.”

  “I’d like to have a look, all the same.”

  He nudges aside his sleeve to check his watch. “Well, I can’t object to that. But it is nearly lunchtime, and we’ve still got the offices to visit, haven’t we? And your poor daughter looks like she might stand in need of a rest and a cool drink, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

  “If you don’t mind my saying so, you do seem pleased to offer up your opinion on a variety of matters, Mr. Burnside.” I strike off down the dock, holding Evelyn’s hand. “Even without being asked for it.”

  “That’s what I’m paid to do, Mrs. Fitzwilliam. Give you my opinion. Your husband, in his will, made very clear that—”

  I turn so quickly, Mr. Burnside nearly stumbles into my chest. He’s an inch shorter than I am, and his eyes are forced to turn up to meet mine. I can tell he doesn’t necessarily welcome the mismatch.

  “Let me make very clear, Mr. Burnside, that my late husband’s wishes are really no longer the point. My wishes are your business now, and if you find that task impossible, I’m afraid I’ll simply have to find myself a new lawyer.”

  He steps backward. Snatches the cigar from the corner of his mouth. Widens his eyes to regard the cast of my expression, which—after two and a half years of motherhood—is formed of iron.

  “Of course, ma’am.” He inclines his head. “I didn’t mean to overstep.”

  “I’m sure you didn’t. I presume the warehouse is locked?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And you have the key?”

  “I do.”

  “Then let’s proceed, shall we?”

  I swing Evelyn onto my hip and cut through the sweating atmosphere in long, masculine strides to the white double doors at the base of the dock.

  As it turns out, Mr. Burnside is correct. The warehouse doors swing open to reveal nothing at all: no cargo, at any rate. No waiting crates of citrus and avocado. Along the walls, ropes and tools hang at neat intervals, and the air—unexpectedly cool—smells of the usual dockside perfume, hemp and tar and salt and warm wood.

  And something else.

  I tilt my chin and sniff carefully. There it is again, sweet and spicy and tonic.

  “Is something the matter, Mrs. Fitzwilliam?” asks Mr. Burnside, lighting his cigar.

  “Nothing at all.”

  “What smell, Mama?”

  Evelyn’s wrinkling her tiny nose. Her face has grown pink from the heat, and I consider the possibility that Mr. Burnside’s correct about this, as well: she needs a rest and a cool drink.

  “Smell, darling? What do you smell?”

  “It’s my cigar, I expect,” Mr. Burnside says quickly.

  “No, it’s not that. I smelled it, too.”

  “Just the fruit, then.”

  “Possibly.” I try the air again, but the flavor has disappeared in the overpowering fog of the lawyer’s cigar. “Though it didn’t smell like fruit to me. If anything, it smelled like brandy.”

  Mr. Burnside turns for the door and laughs. “Ha-ha. Brandy? Your nose is playing tricks on you, Mrs. Fitzwilliam. Though I guess, if some of last night’s shipment had gone off in the heat . . . happens sometimes . . . sitting in the sun like that . . .”

  I wave away a delicate blue plume of smoke and cast a final gaze along the clean, well-organized walls of my late husband’s warehouse, and as I do I’m reminded, against my will, of the neat canvas walls of a casualty clearing station in northern France, everything in its place, equipment and instruments and creature comforts, while the rain drummed outside. Of a pair of hazel eyes, turned toward me in supplication.

  “Perhaps,” I say.

  Evelyn’s squirming weight pulls at my arms. I allow my daughter to slide to the scrubbed wooden floor. I take her hand, and together we follow Mr. Burnside through the doorway, into the suffocating Florida noon.

  We’re late for our visit to the offices of the Phantom Shipping Lines, on the second floor of a large, businesslike brick building set across from the Phantom Hotel, which now belongs to me, according to the terms of Simon’s will. My husband, you see, articulated his last wishes in clear, simple terms: in the event of his death, everything—every single article he possessed—should pass to his wife, Virginia Fitzwilliam of New York City.

  A dressmaker and a coffee shop occupy the storefronts on the ground floor, and the stairs for the upper floors lie behind a plain wooden door around the corner. Mr. Burnside reaches for the knob and unlocks it with a small Yale key from the chain in his jacket pocket.

  The stairs are wide and bare, and Mr. Burnside tells me to watch my step as I climb, holding Evelyn by the hand. The wood creaks softly beneath our feet. Simon climbed these steps, I think. Simon’s feet caused the same soft creak.

  “If you’ll allow me,” Mr. Burnside says, stepping around my body as we reach the top of the staircase and a square, high-ceilinged foyer made white by the glare of the sun through the window at the opposite end. He strides for a door halfway down the wall on the right side, the one facing the river, and unlocks that, too. The top half is made of frosted glass and also bears the name phantom shipping lines in the same uniform black letters.

  “After you,” says Mr. Burnside, stepping back, and Evelyn and I walk through the doorway into a beautiful, spacious room, lined on the east and south walls by large sash windows, shaded from the ferocity of the Florida sun by a series of green-and-white striped awnings. Above our heads, four electric fans rotate quickly. The walls are white, the furniture simple: a pair of desks, a sofa, armchairs, table, cabinets. Everything necessary, I suppose, to run a small, legitimate shipping company, sending fresh, nutritious Florida citrus and avocadoes to the kitchens and dining rooms of Great Britain.

  The room is occupied, of course. After all, business goes on, though the owner of Phantom Shipping Lines has died shockingly in a house fire four months earlier, leaving his company and all the rest of his worldly goods to a wife who, I suspect, most people here in Cocoa never knew existed. A young woman in a navy suit sits erect before a curving black typing machine, the clattering of which has abruptly ceased, and a middle-aged man looks up from the desk on the other side of the room and gazes at us from beneath the green shade covering his brow.

  More. There’s another man, stepping just now from a doorway along the north wall, closing the portal behind him and turning to face me. But he’s not the man that—at some hidden depth of consciousness, unknown to logic—I suppose I’m expecting to find before me. Whole and alive.

  No. This man is burly and straight-shouldered, grim-faced and dark-haired, bearing a jaw and a pair of hazel eyes so resembling those of my husband, my heart jolts in my chest and my legs turn to sand, and I squeeze Evelyn’s tiny hand in order to remain upright.
<
br />   Samuel Fitzwilliam.

  Chapter 2

  France, February 1917

  Hunka Tin

  . . . But when the night is black,

  And there’s blessés to take back,

  And they hardly give you time to take a smoke;

  It’s mighty good to feel,

  When you’re sitting at the wheel,

  She’ll be running when the bigger cars are broke.

  Yes, Tin, Tin, Tin!

  You exasperating puzzle, Hunka Tin!

  I’ve abused you and I’ve flayed you

  But by Henry Ford who made you,

  You are better than a Packard, Hunka Tin!

  —from the American Field Service Bulletin, 1917

  (in the spirit of Kipling’s “Gunga Din”)

  I met my husband in the least romantic setting possible: a casualty clearing station in northern France in the middle of February. A cold drizzle fell and the air stank of human rot. I suppose this constituted a warning from Providence, though Providence needn’t have bothered. I had always known better than to fall in love. I had always known love was something you would later regret.

  The CCS occupied the barn of an ancient farm, and by the time I reached it, late in the afternoon, the sky was dark and the ambulance wheels had choked with thawed mud. For weeks the winter had frozen the saturated ground; today, on the first day of a new offensive, the roads had turned to sludge. That was the war for you.

  I brought the motor to a grinding halt in what had once been a stable yard and yanked back the brake. No other vehicles inhabited the swamp around me, and for a moment I thought I’d got the directions wrong. It was all just a hunch, after all: Hazel bursting back from the village, rushing down the empty ward, calling out that there was a battle on! A new attack into some salient or another, and if we wanted patients we should take the ambulance down to the nearest CCS, they’d be lousy with casualties! We were all rolling bandages at the time, there was nothing else to do. No patients to care for. Everyone turned to me. And what could I say? Take the ambulance, Hazel had said: the ambulance just brought down from Paris, our precious Hunka Tin, a bastard born of much wheedling and carrying-on with the American Red Cross Ambulance Service. A tattered, battered Model T that, in our entire sisterhood of accomplished Manhattan ladies, only I could drive.

  Take the ambulance, Virginia, do! It’s not as if you have anything better to do.

  She was right, of course. The rain was crackling on the great windows overlooking the courtyard. An infinite roll of lint lay in my lap like a death sentence. What else could I have said? Yes. I dumped that damned lint back into the basket and said yes.

  A reckless act. Impetuous, my father would have said, shaking his head, and an hour later I’d regretted it passionately, but now that I’d arrived at my destination, the regret was gone. I rubbed my sleeve against the windshield fog—my breath kept clouding the glass—and spied the grim, erratic movements of a stretcher party lurching through the field beyond, half-obscured by mist. Above my head, a delicate whine pierced the air, high and gliding, ending in a percussive crump that rattled my bones. I reached for the door handle and forced myself out.

  Four hours ago, as I left the hospital, Hazel suggested I borrow her rubber boots—The mud’s just awful, Virginia—but I hadn’t listened. I had my leather shoes, and from there I’d wrapped army-style puttees around my trousers, all the way to the knee, like a pair of gaiters, and I thought that was enough. Smart and efficient. That was all the soldiers wore, wasn’t it? In those days, newly freed from my father’s house, I thought I didn’t have to follow anyone’s advice if I didn’t want to. I thought I was free. From the moment of departure, from the instant the gray-sided ocean liner cast off into the Hudson River, I had soaked up the knowledge of my independence. I had reveled in reliance on my own common sense.

  And that was all very well, except that the mud of northern France didn’t give a damn for my independence and my common sense. The mud didn’t give a damn for anything. I stuck my left leg out of the cab of the ambulance and into the wet French earth, and the muck swallowed up my neat leather shoe right past the ankle. You can’t imagine the greedy, sucking noises it made as I staggered across that stable yard, foot by foot, while the drizzle struck my helmet in metallic pings and the shells screamed and popped at some worryingly unknown distance. The front-line trenches were supposed to be miles away, but you couldn’t tell that to your ears, or to your heart that crashed every time those screaming whistles pierced the air in twos and threes, inhuman and relentless, followed by those acoustic crumps that meant someone had just gotten hell. Shellfire had a way of sounding as if it was going to drop directly on the crown of your head, every time.

  I was making for the stretcher party, not the barn. I don’t know why. I think I just wanted to help, right that second, after so many weeks and months of preparation. Like the rest of us American volunteers, I was simply dying for a real live patient. Two men carried the wounded soldier, who was covered by a blanket and nothing else, and my God, how I wondered that he hadn’t fallen off the canvas altogether as the stretcher-bearers staggered through the mud, drunken and exhausted. The rain dripped from their helmets. “Need a hand?” I called out, and their heads jerked hopefully upward at the sound of my voice.

  “Jesus,” the first one swore, “who the devil are you?”

  “I’m from the American Red Cross,” I said. “I was sent out to bring patients to a hospital nearby. They said you were overloaded.”

  “You’re a driver?”

  Of the two, the second man looked the worst, whey-faced and vertiginous, as if the next step might kill him. I leapt across a puddle and reached for the handles of the stretcher. “Yes,” I said. “What have we got?”

  The man was too tired—or else too astonished—to dispute the stretcher with me. He fell away, rubbing his blistered palms against his trousers, and I took the load in my own hands. It was lighter than I expected, a strange living weight, like a child instead of a man. The wounded soldier’s face was pale and wet; I couldn’t tell where he was hit, beneath the blanket.

  “Right leg,” said the second man. “Sent back straightaway for amputation.”

  “Can they amputate here?”

  “Got no choice, have they?”

  The soldier moved his head and groaned. Still wore his helmet, slipped to one side, covering his ear and part of his jaw while his face and young brow remained exposed to the drizzle. His pack lay next to him on the stretcher, shielded by the gray blanket.

  “Almost there,” I told him, and his startled eyelids swooped open and his eyes met mine, very briefly, before a patch of mud sent me wallowing for balance.

  “Blimey,” he said, blinking, “am I dead already?”

  “You ain’t dead, mate,” the second man said. “It’s the American Red Cross, innit.”

  “Blimey.” The soldier closed his eyes. “God bless America.”

  Ahead of us a door swung open on the face of the barn, and a man’s shoulders appeared in silhouette against the electric light within. “Goddamn it!” he shouted. “I told the last party we haven’t got room!”

  “Well, they ain’t told us back up the line, sir,” the first man said.

  “We can’t bloody well take him!”

  “He needs the leg off, sir, on the double.”

  The other man pounded his fist against the side of the doorway. He took a step toward us, into the soggy remains of the daylight. Stopped, frowned. He wore a dilapidated khaki tunic, officer’s stripes. The rain struck his bare head. “Who the devil’s this?”

  “The American Red Cross, sir,” said the first man.

  “How in the hell did she get here?”

  I nodded toward the Model T. “I drove, sir.”

  “You drove that? From where?”

  “From Marieux, sir. We’ve set up a private hospital there, only we weren’t getting any patients, so I went back to Paris and found a Model T from the American
Ambulance—” The stretcher handle slipped in my wet right hand.

  “Never mind.” The doctor stepped forward and yanked the stretcher handles from my fingers. “Carry on, for God’s sake. Get the poor sod out of the rain. Now!”

  He had the kind of manner you couldn’t refuse, the kind of resolve you couldn’t just turn. I think I admired him right then, whether or not I realized it. I couldn’t help it. After all, I was used to a strong masculine will. His authority seemed natural and just, derived from the consent of those governed. I scampered like a damned puppy at his heels. Followed him into the barn, refusing to be shunted. “We’ve got plenty of beds at the hospital,” I said. “I can take three stretchers or six sitting in the ambulance.”

  “I don’t know this hospital of yours.”

  “We’re fully staffed, sir. Eight nurses, two doctors. Both experienced surgeons. You said you’re full.”

  “All Americans, I suppose.”

  “Yes.”

  We ducked through the doorway of the barn, into a shower of electric light that stung my eyes. Around us stretched a ward of perhaps fifty beds, all of them occupied; a number of cots seemed to have been put up along the walls, staffed by a thin swarm of orderlies and a few nursing sisters in gray dresses and white pinafores. The smell of disinfectant saturated the damp air, swirling with the primeval odors of blood and earth. And not just any earth: this was the mud of France, battlefield mud, in which living things had died and decayed, and even now—years later—the stench still rots in the cavities of my nose like the memory of death. There is not enough disinfectant in the world to cleanse that smell.

  The doctor didn’t pause. I don’t think he even heard me, any more than he would have heard an actual puppy scampering at his heels. He called out commands to a series of orderlies—Prepare the theater, Pass the word for Captain Winston—and only when he handed off the stretcher to the men assisting in the operating theater did he turn and fix his full attention upon me, like the next item on a long list of daily tasks, to be checked off and disposed of.