Cocoa Beach

by Beatriz Williams

  I think not of my own wound, or of the pain in my burned fingers and my scored palm, but of the bottle of aspirin waiting for me in the medicine cabinet, and how I will now miss my evening dose, because I cannot possibly rise from this floor again. I am too sick. I have lost too much blood. I am just plain drained.

  Chapter 19

  France, August 1918

  One time, when I was about twelve, I got lost. Only for an hour or two, but it was January and quite dark by the time I found my way home, and my father was frantic, though not for the reasons you’d think.

  The whole incident should never have occurred, as he reminded me often in the days following. My father had strict rules about our travels: I was never to go beyond the limits of our single square block without him, and Sophie was never to leave the house alone at all, and if I had stayed within those limits, I would never have lost myself.

  But I was twelve, you see, and I was beginning to experience stirrings of rebellion. I thought my father was absurdly overcautious; I thought he didn’t understand how capable I’d grown. I was angry at him, too, for reasons I didn’t want to examine. So one day, when he was busy in his workshop down the street, and Sophie played downstairs with the nice Irish lady who rented our basement apartment, I slipped outside and took the sharp January air into my lungs and set off for a little walk. Just to show that I could.

  I headed west, toward the bustle of Fifth Avenue, and when I reached Fifth I hesitated and turned south. I thought I’d go as far as Madison Square, maybe, and see the famous Madison Square Garden tower, where Thaw murdered Stanford White. And when I reached Madison Square and admired the tower, I thought I might just go down Broadway and see a few of the great dry goods emporia—Lord & Taylor or Wanamaker, which Father would never dream of entering—and I became so enthralled by the shop windows and the lighted displays and the sheer illuminated thrill of Manhattan that I kept on going and going, imagining I could just walk right back up Broadway again, or head east and take the Second Avenue El uptown, and then I realized I wasn’t on Broadway at all, and that the streets were no longer numbered, and instead of lying flat in an orderly, easily understood grid, they sprawled in every possible direction, intersecting at odd angles, creating triangular patches of contested pavement, overrun by horses and delivery trucks and streetcars and people in strange, worn clothes chattering in every possible language under heaven. I was lost.

  Now, any sensible New York City parent would teach his child, if she somehow lost her way amid the hustle-bustle of downtown Manhattan, to find the nearest policeman and ask for help. In our house, things were different. I was never, under any condition, to approach a policeman. A drunk on the corner was preferable to a policeman. I was to avoid speaking to policemen as if they carried an especially virulent strain of typhoid, transmitted by words. If a policeman happened to catch my gaze as I walked along the street, I was to smile absently and turn my face in fascination to the nearest shop window, even if that shop was a morgue.

  And a number of blue-suited members of the Metropolitan Police swiveled their heads and narrowed their eyes at the sight of me, neat and clean and young in my blue wool coat and hat and muffler, my sturdy leather shoes, all worn and plain but well made. I hurried along as if I knew exactly where I was going—you must always assume an air of confidence as you navigate your path through New York City, whatever the neighborhood and whatever your age—and thought, I’ll just keep going until I spot something familiar, a landmark, City Hall or the Brooklyn Bridge, and then I’ll know exactly where to go.

  And then I plowed directly into the chest of a cop.

  He was terribly nice, pepper-haired and blue-eyed. He told me, as he escorted me personally back to my home on Thirty-Second Street, boarding the Second Avenue El at the Canal Street station (How had I missed it? I thought in agony) and getting off at Thirty-Fourth Street, that he had five girls of his own, and he didn’t want to think what might have happened if I’d rounded the wrong corner and ended up on, say, Delancey Street. Next time, as soon as I lost my way, I should head directly to the nearest policeman and ask for help. Would I promise him that? (We were now walking west on Thirty-Second Street, my house only a half-block away.)

  I promised him.

  You can imagine my father’s expression when he opened the door and saw the two of us, Virginia and the policeman. The look of unfiltered terror, which Officer Shea innocently interpreted as a parent’s natural fright.

  Father disguised it quickly, of course, and the policeman went away amid a torrent of thanks. Only when the door was closed at last did Father’s horror find its true node. How much had I told the policeman? What name had I given him? Where had he found me, and did I mention how long we had lived in the city? Did I even realize what I’d done? The danger to which I’d exposed us all?

  I think I managed to answer all his questions without breaking down, but the shame hung over my head for a week. The lesson sank through the pores of my skin and into my bones. Say as little as possible about yourself. Don’t attract attention. Follow the rules. Be self-sufficient. Never, ever ask for help.

  But I think Father learned something, too, about the possible effects of keeping your daughters under lock and key, without the chance to stretch their legs. Because the morning after my little adventure, next to my plate at the breakfast table appeared a folded paper, which—unfurled—turned out to be a detailed map of Manhattan Island.

  All of which, maybe, is apropos of nothing, but I found myself thinking about that awful January afternoon as I drove Hunka Tin—a new Hunka Tin, belonging to the American Army Ambulance Service, but almost exactly the same as the old one, so that I nearly forgot they were two different vehicles—along the road toward the field hospital at Epieds, where the advancing Fourth Division had been sending back a stream of casualties since the end of July.

  The night before, Major Fitzwilliam hadn’t asked me anything more about my father and his extraordinary new fortune. I guessed he was too astonished, or maybe that kind of financial interrogation just wasn’t the done thing between ladies and gentlemen. (Not that social custom likely carried much weight with Samuel Fitzwilliam.) Or maybe it didn’t matter. Money was money, and the means of acquiring it—like children—should be rarely seen and never heard.

  Still. Those silly, awful words kept on repeating in my head, in time with the whining rotation of Hunka Tin’s engine. My father’s a millionaire.

  The news had come from Sophie. Of course. A letter arrived soon after I reported for duty at the new American base hospital in Rouen. I remember how the sun lay high and hot in the pale August sky, and the few men—training accidents, mostly—were drunk and cheerful. They hadn’t seen battle yet. I dropped into my chair in the mess and caressed the envelope. Sophie wrote several times a week, but the letters tended to come in bursts because of the shipping, or not to come at all. Sometimes I had to piece the information together and guess at what was missing. I’d asked her to number the letters, so at least I knew what I didn’t know, but she rarely remembered, or else muddled the numbers because she had forgotten where she was. You would think, with her mechanical aptitude, she would be more methodical. But she wasn’t methodical, not unless she had a machine to focus her mind.

  I didn’t mind. The rush of pleasurable relief engulfed me so entirely, I was only happy to know she was alive. That a letter existed, and so did Sophie. There was only one envelope this time, so I took my time opening it. The windows stood open, allowing a warm draft to shiver the paper, which I held to my nose—as always—in hope of catching some scent of home. Sometimes I thought I found it: the faint smoke of the parlor fire, the honeysuckle of Sophie’s soap. And then it was gone, and I figured the sensation was just my imagination: the smell of hope.

  Darlingest Virgo . . .

  She always started off that way. We were everything to each other, after all.

  It’s been a few days since I last wrote, and I’m sorry for that, but Brigid left us on
Wednesday without any notice at all [naturally, Sophie didn’t specify which Wednesday, and she’d neglected to put either the date or the number at the top of the page] so I’ve had to do all the cooking and cleaning besides my schoolwork. I made a horrible mess of a chicken pie last night—lost track of time, as usual, and the crust nearly broke poor Father’s teeth—but I guess today’s soup isn’t so bad. The agency is sending over a new one tomorrow. A cookmaid, I mean, not a soup!

  So it went. It was morning, and I was about to eat my breakfast, one hand gripping my fork and one hand gripping my letter. There was no more well-stocked sideboard here, no fresh cheese and fresh bread and tender new carrots from the garden Mrs. DeForest had decreed at the château last April. Just canned meat and a sticky, unsweetened porridge. The other nurses had already eaten, and there wasn’t much left.

  I set the fork on my plate and turned the page over.

  But that’s not the most exciting news, oh no! I’ve saved that for last. Brace yourself, my dearest one! Would you believe that we got a letter yesterday, and the Prudent Manufacturing Company wants to license Father’s patent for the pneumatic oxifying drill for its new factory? They’re offering him a dizzying amount of money so he won’t go to a competitor first. He won’t say how much, but I can tell it’s heaps and heaps, because he’s going about the house whistling. Whistling, Virgo! I know you’d disapprove if you were here, but I can’t help smiling. Who knew Father could whistle?

  Now, you must understand something. Since our arrival in New York, after Mama died, we had been poor. Well, maybe poor wasn’t quite the right word. We’d been getting by, mostly on the money and the jewelry that Father managed to bring with him, and the income from renting out the basement apartment. But prosperity? I could hardly, in that summer of 1917, remember what prosperity was like—what it meant to live in a spacious house, smelling of lumber and fresh air and flowers, and watch the lugubrious sea twitch beyond your window. To have lots of pretty dresses to wear, and luxurious lunches you couldn’t possibly finish. Horses to ride, and tennis racquets, and hazy afternoons at the club. Sailing on your own boat. Opulent picnics on a lawn of green velvet.

  But there’s so much difference between prosperity and getting by. We had a cheap cookmaid, it’s true, and Father always managed to scrape together the tuition for the Kingston Girls Academy each year. So we weren’t dead broke. And yet, when I thought of money, there came this idea of finitude. There was only so much money, in a small imaginary pot you couldn’t refill. At the bottom of that pot lay poverty. Lay starvation and misery and humiliation.

  So at first I couldn’t quite fathom the notion of such a great quantity of money—so great, it encouraged Father to whistle—and I set the letter aside. I thought Sophie had been mistaken, or had taken a few facts and daydreamed them into a fortune. But as the weeks and months passed, it became clear that, if anything, Sophie had underestimated the scale of Father’s success. That small imaginary pot of money had grown to a colossal dimension, an infinite dimension. The strangest twist of fate. My father’s a millionaire.

  Only four words. Nothing at all, really, compared with the terrifying scope of what I had revealed to Simon, by the side of the Grand Canal in the gardens of Versailles. Since then, I had taken such care. I hadn’t said any more about the murder or the circumstances of our life in New York—not because I didn’t trust Simon to keep my secrets but because I couldn’t bear the sight of his face when he learned them. The possibility of his doubt, the idea that he might not share my faith in my father. And who would want a woman whose father might be a murderer?

  So I had answered his gentle questions in the way I had been trained—revealing things without really revealing anything. A few small, unimportant details to make him think he understood. Anyway, we didn’t leave much time for talking, did we? On the four occasions we had managed to meet since last August, we wanted only to make love and to sleep—that peculiar, enchanted depth of sleep that comes only after intense physical release—and that was all. We were so exhausted, you see. The war was extracting everything out of us. We had nothing left to give each other, except a peculiar carnal comfort, and silence, and slumber. Precious gifts we could obtain nowhere else.

  We wrote, of course. We wrote as often as we could, but the wonderful thing about letters was that you could choose the subject. You could conveniently forget to answer any questions from his letter, or choose your answer carefully, or write in such haste—We are moving again; I can hear the German shells beating closer—that you couldn’t write everything.

  Until yesterday, then, I thought I was cured, that I had cured myself of this stupid tendency to lay myself bare. To confess such secrets as I could never, ever reveal. I thought I had regained control of my lips.

  My father’s a millionaire. Why?

  My God, it was a sultry day. August in France. The heat was immense, the air full of dust and exhaust and misery, the hot blue sky meeting the ruined, busy earth. I couldn’t hear the distant war boom above the noise of the road, but as I drove, I felt the familiar shock of artillery striking the earth, vibrating the tires and the metal frame, traveling through the steering column and into my fingers. The sensation of battle. The armies were moving now, moving at last out of their trenches and into the shattered woods and the open ground, first the Germans pushing us back through the spring and early summer, and now us returning the favor at last. Fresh American boys in their millions feeding the tide. I squinted at the road ahead, dust-white and rimmed by the splintered remains of the linden trees that had once shaded travelers. It doesn’t matter, I told myself; nothing else matters compared with this.

  But it did.

  Don’t tell anyone, Sophie had begged, in her most recent letter, almost as if Sophie knew that her sister had someone to tell. Father says it’s supposed to be kept secret. But the pneumatic oxifying drill—whatever it was—had proven a smashing success, a complete revolution in a certain specialized section of mechanical design, and some cunning lawyer had made certain that he didn’t sell the patent outright but instead negotiated a series of licensing contracts to several manufacturers: licenses that had already banked a million and a half dollars, with more to come, on and on into the future. (Sophie had only learned this by inadvertently opening a gleeful letter from the lawyer in question, which she thought was a bill from the butcher, since they shared the same last name.) Don’t tell anyone, Sophie had begged, and I had gone and done just that, in a fit of—what? Jealous pique? Wanting to stick it in Samuel’s eye. Wanting to prove myself better, somehow, than Lydia Fitzwilliam, than Simon’s wife, as if money actually made you better than your fellow man. As if the fact of my father’s strange new riches made any difference at all. As if Simon would care how much money I had.

  Because of course Samuel had lied to me. For one thing, I knew Simon had begun the divorce proceedings—he had told me all about the sordid arrangements for the woman in the hotel, and the private detective—and the meeting with his lawyer. The outrage of all four parents at Simon’s apparent perfidy: I found myself almost overcome with a desire to laugh, when I was called on the carpet to explain my appalling behavior. Didn’t I know such things were to be kept discreet?

  For another thing, I knew Simon. His tender concern for my welfare, his anxiety that I might be engaging in something I really didn’t want. You don’t have to meet me like this, Virginia. We can make everything proper. We can wait until the divorce comes through, and get married.

  And of course I had told him that he was ridiculous, that I had no need or desire for marriage, that I was perfectly satisfied with our relations as they stood. That was what I said out loud. What I thought was this: I can’t go on without the hope of seeing you again in a few weeks, a few months: this reassuring contact, this wordless expression of devotion, this intimate physical connection between two human beings that keeps the dread from my window. I cannot stop and say, let us be married before we come together again. Don’t make me stop. Don�
��t make me give everything up.

  And in between those few precious rendezvous, when I woke alone in my cot in the nurses’ hut, I had poured my soul into the war. I had taken on extra shifts, I had volunteered for every special duty, I had filled every possible moment with work. My zeal had won special commendations from the head of the service, who was astonished by what he called my inhuman devotion.

  But that was the easy part. Devotion was easy. Self-control I had in spades. So I couldn’t understand what had possessed me in that café, when the bitter lies of Samuel Fitzwilliam made no difference to my future. I had actually bragged—that was human, perhaps. But what was worse, what was unforgivable, was that I’d exposed such a vital secret about myself. About my father, about my family. Worst of all: to a stranger, a venal man who couldn’t possibly be trusted. Why? What was wrong with me?

  Either Simon’s lying to you, or I am.

  And then: Why would I lie? Why, indeed.

  Was that it, then? Had Major Fitzwilliam actually wedged some kind of chisel into my outrage, producing a crack of doubt?

  I remembered my father’s stricken face as he opened his front door to discover his missing daughter on the stoop, in the company of a grim-browed officer of the New York Metropolitan Police. Before me the road curved ahead, hot and shimmering in the August sun, choked with dust from a train of supply trucks up ahead. I eased back the throttle to give myself a little more room, because the German bombers were getting desperate now, trying anything, dropping ordnance in full daylight on the Allied supply lines.