Cocoa Beach

by Beatriz Williams

  I wonder if you will like Miami at all, my dear. It is frightfully busy, chock-full of speculators and hedonists. A chap called Fisher is dredging up the bay nearby, at his own unimaginable expense, in order to create a beachside paradise out of the mangrove peninsula protecting us from the open ocean. Of course we could live wherever you like. But I rather prefer the territory further north at Cocoa, which is less frenetic. Last week, I engaged in a spot of tramping about the beaches there, and I wonder if a pretty villa by the sea might not be just the thing for us both. We could listen to the waves roll in beneath the moonlight and be perfectly content.

  Yours faithfully,

  S.F.

  Chapter 7

  Miami, Florida, June 1922

  The president of the First National Bank of Miami apologizes for our modest surroundings. They’re constructing a brand-new building on the corner of Forsyth, he tells me, and these quarters are only temporary. Slapdash.

  A pair of electric fans whir furiously overhead. I lift my voice to reply that I don’t mind a bit.

  He pulls back one of the armchairs before his massive desk. “The wait’ll be worth it, though. Steel frame, ten stories high. The finest building in downtown Miami, if not the entire Southeast. Drink? Iced tea?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Indiana limestone façade, marble floors. Hired a New York outfit to design it. Mowbray and Uffinger?” He settles himself in the chair behind the desk and lifts his eyebrows, as if he expects me to know the architects personally. I don’t reply—what is there to say, really?—and he raises one hand to cough gently into his fist. His gaze darts to Evelyn, who’s arranging herself on my lap, and back to me. “I’m terribly sorry for your loss, of course. Mr. Fitzwilliam was one of my favorite customers.”

  “Oh, I’m sure he was.”

  “A real shock. Terrible accident. Young fellow like that, in the prime of life.” Shakes his head. Steeples his fingers. “I hope you’ve found the papers are all in order? Accounts all shipshape? Anything more I can do for you?”

  You know, for all his banker-statesman airs, Mr. Edward Romfh doesn’t look as if he’s much older than Simon himself. Forty, forty-five at the most. His brown hair parts straight down the middle, lustrous with some sort of invincible pomade, and his healthy Florida sportsman’s tan sets off a pair of clear, bright eyes. He smells of laundry starch and leather: the kind of man who regards you from behind round, wire-rimmed spectacles as if he’s calculating your precise value in dollars and cents, down to the last copper penny. As if he knows what you’re going to say, even before you do.

  Evelyn wriggles in my arms. I allow her to slide free and dart for the window, where you can see all ten stories of the new First National Bank of Miami Building, a few blocks away and nearly complete, as it scrapes the hazy sky. The fans stir the hair at my nape and temples. I’m wearing one of Clara’s hats, which are much smarter than mine, close and brimless like a cap. Isn’t it funny, how a smart new hat gives you moral strength? I cross my legs and say crisply—surprising even myself with the backbone in my voice—“I just want to learn more about my husband’s time here in Florida, Mr. Romfh. His—the fire was so sudden, you know. I never had the chance to come down and see the business firsthand. His life here.”

  “Yes. Well. You’ll forgive me, Mrs. Fitzwilliam, but down here in Miami, we frankly didn’t know he had a wife to begin with. Not until I heard from that fellow up in Cocoa. His lawyer.”

  “Mr. Burnside.”

  “That’s the one.”

  Again, the expression of male expectation. I suppose he wants to know more—why I didn’t live here in Florida with my lawful husband, why I’ve only journeyed south now that he’s dead. Whether I loved my husband. Whether my husband loved me. I suppose you’d have to be made of stone not to wonder these things, and bankers make it their business to know as much as possible about their clients, don’t they? To learn every detail—however everyday and inconsequential—that might affect a man’s willingness and ability to repay his creditors.

  Well, let him wonder.

  “Mr. Burnside’s been very kind, of course,” I say, “but he’s the kind of man who thinks that women aren’t capable of understanding business matters.”

  “Well!”

  “Yes. Would you believe it? But he’s older, you know. You have to make allowances for the prejudices of an earlier generation. I’m sure he means well.”

  “I’m sure he does, though in all truth—”

  I wrap my hands around the ends of the chair arms and lean forward over my crossed knees. “But you, Mr. Romfh. You strike me as a much keener sort of man. A modern man. The kind of man who really comprehends women. Who respects our native intelligence, to say nothing of our peculiar intuition.”

  “Well. Yes, of course.”

  “I’m sure I can rely on you to treat me as a human being of reasonable acumen. Capable of understanding a figure or two.” Here I smile, nice and warm. Conspiratorial. To my right, Evelyn’s lost interest in the view of the new bank building and skips across a dark Oriental rug to the windows on the other side. “Do you know how we met, Mr. Romfh? Mr. Fitzwilliam and me? I was driving ambulances for the American Red Cross in France. Why, if you’ve got a Model T Ford outside, Mr. Romfh, I’ll bet I can take the engine apart and put it back together again, all without dirtying my gloves.” I hold up my hands, clad in white cotton.

  And my stars, if that doesn’t do the trick. Mr. Romfh unsteeples his thick hands and draws his chair closer to the desk. He reaches for a drawer and asks if I mind if he smokes. I say of course not. And he takes out a cigar—a cigar, mind you!—and lights it up slowly, puff puff puff, until they’re both content, man and cigar, smoking quietly in that hot Miami room, while the electric fans suck the fog upward in mighty drafts.

  “What do you want to know, Mrs. Fitzwilliam?” he asks.

  By the time I return to the Flamingo Hotel and arrange the Packard in the lot outside, under the shade of a cocoanut palm, it’s eleven o’clock in the morning and the golfers are trudging indoors, sweating and flushed.

  “There you are!” says Clara, rising from the bed, fully dressed and holding a crisp new novel, which she tosses on the pillow behind her. The room is already made up, though a breakfast tray lingers untidily on the desk, covered by a careless napkin. “Where on earth have you been?”

  “Just to meet with Simon’s bankers.”

  “You might have woken me first.”

  “You looked so peaceful. What have you been reading?”

  “A detective story. Too clever. What did the bankers say?”

  I remove the hat and set it on the desk, next to the tray, while Evelyn dashes into her room. The scent of coffee and toast lingers in the air, and I find I’m rather hungry. “What I expected, more or less. Despite the bank’s known reluctance to invest in anything but the soundest of ventures, Simon managed to persuade Mr. Romfh to extend him over a hundred thousand dollars in credit, in the form of a mortgage on Maitland Plantation.”

  “My goodness! A hundred thousand dollars! It sounds like a very great deal of money. What’s that in pounds sterling?”

  “About twenty or thirty thousand, more or less.”

  Clara whistles low and moves across the room to examine her reflection in the mirror. Nudging this, tidying that. “I suppose I’m not surprised. He had a knack for that sort of thing. Convincing people to do impossible things for him. I doubt the plantation is worth a tenth of that. What do you think he did with all the money?”

  I angle my neck to peer through the connecting door, where I can just glimpse Evelyn on the rug in the middle of the room, scribbling on a piece of paper.

  “I’ll have to look at the accounts, to be sure. But I presume he used it to rebuild the hotel and shipping business. The house on the beach.”

  “His little empire.”

  “Yes. But that’s not the strange part, you see. It seems the whole thing’s been paid off in full.”
r />   “Paid off! By who?”

  “Mr. Romfh wouldn’t tell me that. Just the name of the bank that issued payment, and that it came in February, soon after Simon’s death.”

  “After his death. How strange. Samuel said nothing about it.”

  “Samuel might not have known. It was a mortgage, after all. Not part of the shipping business.”

  “Still.”

  I shrug my shoulders and follow Evelyn into her bedroom, which is much smaller than ours. Just a single bed, a wardrobe, a chair, a white enamel sink in the corner. Designed for maids and children. Evelyn looks up and shows me the paper, on which she’s drawn a picture of some kind of person. A woman in a sharp triangle dress with long arms and stubby legs.

  “Oh, that’s lovely, darling. Who is it?”

  Evelyn totters to her feet and points to the doorway. “Auntie Clara!”

  “Do you know,” says Clara, standing in the doorway, “when I’m feeling rather low, I find an outing to the beach cheers me up straightaway. What do you say to that?”

  For many years after we first moved to New York, an uncanny sensation dogged the pattern of my daily life: the certainty that someone was watching me.

  I felt it continuously, in those early months. That first brutal winter in our grubby, alien basement apartment that reeked of beer and wet earth and vomit, when Father slept on the creaking Victorian sofa in the front room and Sophie and I huddled together in a tiny cot in what I guess was the back room, though it was really more like a cupboard. A cold, damp cupboard. And yet it was a relief to descend those dark steps and duck into our cave—a small relief, anyway—because at least here, unlike the streets and buildings of Manhattan, a billion eyes didn’t follow your every movement. At least here you didn’t have to resist the physical urge to look over your shoulder every two seconds, to scour the surface of every reflective shop window; at least here, in our tiny apartment, you knew that the crawling sensation of somebody’s eyes on your skin, penetrating your secrets, was only an illusion.

  As the weeks trudged on, however, the feeling began to fade. In the anonymity of city life, the months upon years in which our obscurity remained undisturbed, I came to escape—first for an hour or two, then for an entire day—the immediate, visceral awareness of being observed, of being stalked and hunted, a consciousness in which every window was a menace and every patch of open space a danger.

  But I have never lost it entirely. The sensation still returns from time to time, like an unwelcome relative: sometimes in faint, gradual steps and sometimes suddenly, with such debilitating force that my reason scatters, my logic crumbles, leaving me alive on instinct alone.

  And I am nothing more than a rabbit, caught in the open.

  I mention this not because the hunted feeling strikes me anew, as Clara directs the casino attendant in the proper fixing of a pair of striped beach umbrellas, but because a man really is watching us. From a round table at the edge of the boardwalk, all by himself, nursing a tall glass of something-or-other and a grim, clean-shaved expression. Rather handsome, in a thick-boned way, if you imagined away the scar on his chin and the ruggedness of his nose. He’s wearing a worn straw boater, adorned above the brim with a thin strip of grosgrain, a plain navy blue.

  I don’t think Clara notices, and I’m certainly not going to mention him. For once, I’m not troubled. Isn’t that funny? All those years of false alarm, and now a real live man observes my every gesture from a corner table, and I don’t give a flying damn. The sun is fierce, the ocean beats on the nearby sand. The salt breeze rushes against my face, electric with life. I hold Evelyn’s hand and wade into the foam, and a wave hurtles through the skirt of my old serge bathing costume, washes between my legs, cool and tempestuous, swirling and sucking as I hoist Evelyn free of the undertow. If a man wants to watch us play in the sea, then let him. The murder trial’s over. All our secrets are out. Nothing left to fear, is there?

  Clara wades by, wearing a different bathing costume altogether, modern and daring. No thick black stockings for her; oh no. She looks like a child, lean and narrow-hipped, navy suit clinging to her skin. At least six inches of fair, bare English thigh separate the edge of the skirt from the top of her knee, and yet she thrashes her arms and legs, she laughs and skips as if she doesn’t think anyone’s watching. As if she’s not trying to excite any male attention whatsoever by this lascivious display, as if she just wants to be free. She takes Evelyn’s other hand, and together we swing my daughter up into another wave, giggling and gasping, while the sun burns our skin and the ocean washes us clean, and the sand scrubs our feet all smooth. As smooth and pure as a newborn’s tummy.

  But you can’t endure such pleasure for long, and the sun really does burn your skin. A quarter of an hour later we take shelter under the umbrellas, and Evelyn starts to work with a bucket and spade while Clara fetches drinks to cool us down. “Lemon ice!” she announces, handing me a paper cup. “Isn’t it divine? You Americans are so terribly clever. Where do you get all this lovely ice?”

  “The iceman, of course.”

  “Cheeky.” She plops into the canvas chair beside me and stretches her legs into the sand. “I say. What heaven. Imagine Simon having his own house, right on the beach like that. I wonder what he used it for. I don’t believe he had any particular passion for the sea, when we were young. Do you?”

  “I don’t know. I wasn’t there.”

  She kicks me with her toe. “Aren’t you the smart one! You know what I mean.”

  “No. He never spoke about the sea.”

  “You see? And you can’t get much better beach than this. But why?”

  “I suppose he had his reasons.”

  Clara sucks on her ice. “What are you going to do with it, then? The house on the beach, I mean. Or what’s left of it.”

  “I haven’t decided.”

  “But what do you want to do?”

  “I don’t know. We’ll see.”

  Clara leans forward to the edge of the shade, where Evelyn is dumping her pail of sand over her toes. “Evelyn, my darling. Do you absolutely love the beach?”

  “Yes!”

  “Would you like to live on the beach?”

  Evelyn turns to me. “Can we, Mama? Can we?”

  “Oh, darling—”

  “Please, Mama!” She flings herself on my knees. “Please beach!”

  I stroke her head and stare down at her limpet eyes, and I say to Clara, “Thanks very much.”

  “Anytime.”

  She closes her eyes and leans back in her chair, absorbing what dilute sunshine penetrates the thick striped canvas of the umbrella, and I direct Evelyn’s attention back to the sand. I don’t tell Clara that I’ve already given those ruins many hours of thought, and that any day—even now, perhaps—a steam shovel will cross the bridge from the mainland and start to work on that rectangle of charred land on Cocoa Beach, rebuilding Simon’s house according to the original plans. If work progresses on schedule, the new villa will be ready for occupation by the end of winter. Perhaps even sooner.

  No, I don’t share this piece of information with Clara, because—for one thing—I expect she’ll find out, soon enough. From Samuel, at least, who will surely learn that a new villa is rising atop the old, even though I’ve instructed Mr. Burnside to keep the matter secret for the time being.

  For another thing, I haven’t really decided who’s going to live there.

  Evelyn turns over her bucket onto the beach and lifts it carefully. The loose sand falls away in a flattened cone, and she begins to cry.

  “What’s the matter, darling?” I ask.

  “Castle! I want castle!”

  “A castle, is it? In that case, we’re going to need water. Water makes the sand all sticky, so it doesn’t fall apart like that.”

  But Evelyn’s only two and a half, and the chemical properties of water and sand are unknown to her. So I take her hand and lead her down to the water, and together we fill the bucket with water and retu
rn to our umbrellas. I love the sun on my shoulders and chest, the sand clinging to my stockings. I stare down at the thick, loathsome scar on my left arm and wonder what it’s like, having the sand and the water on your bare legs. Whether the salt stings your skin, or whether it just makes you more alive. Whether maybe I should go shopping while I’m here in Miami Beach, and buy myself a new swimming costume, one more like Clara’s. Clara, whose legs splay comfortably into the sand, and whose dozing face now tilts into her shoulder, lips parted. I bend over the bucket with Evelyn, showing her how to send the water in a stream over the sand, and a finger touches the small of my back.

  “Mrs. Fitzwilliam?”

  I whirl about. A little scream rises in my throat. Dies away at the sight of the man before me: the grim, clean-shaven, thick-boned man watching us earlier from the table at the corner of the boardwalk. His eyes, staring hard, are the same opaque shade of navy blue as the ocean lying beyond the surf. His massive jaw might have been dug out of an ancient German valley. He lays his right forefinger vertically across his lips, hands me a piece of paper, and walks away through the sand, barefoot, shoes and stockings hanging from one hand. Back to the boardwalk.

  At my feet, Evelyn squeals at the results of our little experiment. I stand there watching the man’s broad back, his thick shoulders and swift stride, the swinging ends of his blue jacket, the scrap of short brown hair under the rim of his straw boater, until he turns the corner of the casino building and disappears from sight.

  The paper in my hand is thick and white, folded once across the middle. The edges waver, but that’s just my nerves. My shock. Clara’s still lying there, not a single muscle awake, and Evelyn scoops the sand with her small hands. I close my eyes briefly, and when I open them the paper’s still there, though the man who delivered it has gone, as if he never existed. A burst of screams carries across the surf, followed by the thundering crash of an especially large wave. I think, It’s just paper, fraidycat. A note of some kind. Just read the damned thing.