San Miguel

by Boyle, T. C.

  Jimmie

  “He’s going to be fine,” Jimmie said, flinging boxes ashore as she stood huddled beneath the umbrella with Marianne and the rain drove down till it was hard to distinguish the air from the water. “I guess he called Bob Brooks the minute he got in with Dick here and Bob come up from Los Angeles in his car and took him to his own doctor, not the VA—he don’t trust the VA because they’ll just put you off—and the doctor said he needs an operation soon as possible.” He looked up from beneath the brim of his hat and gave her a ragged smile. “So Bob put me on the boat and I’m to stay and help out till Herbie can . . .” he trailed off, intent suddenly on digging through the inside pocket of his sheepskin jacket. “Here,” he said, thrusting a letter at her. “It’s all in here.”

  Dick Graffy was helping unload things, but Margot was already in the dinghy, her face set and shoulders hunched beneath the slicker her husband had wrapped round her. Elise clutched the letter in her hand, struggling with herself. All she wanted was to tear it open, but she had Marianne in her arms and she was trying to work a finger in against the seal and balance the umbrella on her shoulder all at the same time. And Margot was watching her. And Dick. And Jimmie. She wanted a moment’s privacy, a moment to herself to absorb the news and defuse the terror that had seized her the instant she saw that it was Jimmie in the dinghy and not her husband. Finally, she turned her back on them, set Marianne down in the wet sand, in the rain, and slit open the envelope.

  Dear Elise:

  My diagnosis was correct, according to Dr. Morrison, Bob’s man, and I’m to go into the hospital so they can remove the metal fragments that showed up on the X-ray machine. You’re not to worry. I’ll be home as soon as I’m able. In the meanwhile, know that I love you and Marianne and will miss you every minute until I’m back with you on the island.

  Your Loving Husband,

  Herbie

  P.S. Be sure Jimmie sees to the horses and the sheep if I’m not back by the time the shearers come. And remember to disconnect the blades on the windmill for the water pump if we get a gale so the mechanism doesn’t wind up destroyed. Let Bob pay the shearers. And send Jimmie out for wood; I don’t want to get back and tear out my stitches swinging an axe.

  If I’m not back by the time the shearers come. That was the phrase that leapt out at her: they weren’t due for a month yet, six weeks even. How could he possibly be gone that long? What was this operation? What was it exactly? What were they going to do to him?

  “Elise.” It was Dick Graffy. He was right there, right beside her, the rain darkening his blue cap till it might have been black, and he was holding out his hand. At her feet, Marianne scrabbled in the sand, already wet through, and she took Dick’s hand and released it and canted the umbrella over her daughter all in the same motion. “We’ve got to be going,” Dick said. “We’re way off schedule as it is. The bank, you know. It’s my millstone.” He laughed. “And Margot’s anxious to get back. As you can imagine.”

  “I understand,” she said, so distracted she could barely summon the words. “I’m sorry for all the trouble we’ve given you—”

  “No need to be. I’m only glad God put us here to help. And don’t you worry, your husband’s going to be fine, better than ever.” He glanced at Jimmie, who was piling up the supplies on the dune at the crest of the beach. “And we’re leaving you in good hands, I know that.”

  She thanked him then, the emotion coming up in her so suddenly she had to turn away for a moment. “You’re a saint,” she said. “And please come back, both of you, when we can have you to dinner and make you comfortable.”

  “We’ll do that,” he said, turning to walk back to the boat.

  She raised a hand to wave to Margot, then bent to lift the baby and see what she could bring up the hill before the rain carried everything away. She never did see if Margot waved back.

  * * *

  If it was strange to find herself a married woman living under the same roof with a man who wasn’t her husband—or unconventional, maybe that was a better word—she tried not to let it affect her. Because it was temporary and necessary and Jimmie was a hired hand—and he was old too, almost like a grandfather. Anybody stopping by—and this wasn’t exactly Times Square—wouldn’t have thought a thing of it.

  They got into a routine, just as she had with Herbie, she managing the household and Jimmie looking after the animals, collecting and cutting firewood, wandering the hills with no discernible purpose because he was a man and that’s what men did. At the end of the week the Hermes brought the mail with another letter from Herbie—the operation had been a success and he’d be home any day now, couldn’t wait, and he’d have something for her—a surprise—and a toy for Marianne too. She read the letter over three times—he was all right, he was well, his spirits high—and she read it aloud to Marianne and pitched her voice to tell her the news: Your daddy will be home soon. Daddy! She didn’t care about the weather, didn’t care about anything except for Herbie, but it was miserable all the same. Rain and more rain. The week dragged by and then it was gone and still no Herbie. Then there was another letter, delivered by one of the local fishermen.

  This letter, the third one, caught her by surprise. There had been complications—an infection they were treating with sulfa—but nothing to worry over. If it was up to him he’d have got up and walked out the door days ago, but he had to listen to the doctors and to Bob Brooks too. Bob was insistent and she knew how Bob could be, didn’t she? He had to admit he was weak still—and the sulfa made him feel strange, as if he were hardly there at all, as if he were made of paper and liable to tear, and it seemed to be affecting his vision too so that he couldn’t even read to pass the time—but still she shouldn’t worry and there was no reason in the world for her to make that long trip to see him with the baby, especially in this weather, because he’d be home before she’d even had a chance to really miss him, he promised. She’d see. Don’t count old Herbie out yet.

  So it went on. The week became two weeks, became three, then a month. She didn’t know what to do. Every time she made up her mind to pack up and go to him and damn the consequences, another letter arrived to say she should stay put and that he’d be back on the next boat, the whole business nothing more than a hiccup in their lives. She lingered over the bed in their room, gazed at the pictures on the wall, the deck chairs from the SS Harvard, the fireplace they’d built together, and felt that she was the one made of paper.

  She was with Jimmie one night in the kitchen—he was good with the baby, dancing her round the room while she did the dishes—and after she put Marianne to bed she sat chatting with him. He was a good talker, though his subjects were limited, and he was unfailingly cheerful, even when he neglected to fill up the woodbox or tracked mud into the house and she had to scold him. He was sitting at the table with a cup of coffee and she sat down across from him with a cup of Postum because she didn’t want the caffeine, not at night. “You know,” he said, “that daughter of yours is a doll, a real living doll.”

  “Yes,” she said, “but she’s Herbie’s daughter, you can see that. The energy of that child. She wears me out.”

  He seemed to consider this, staring past her and sipping reflectively at his coffee. After a moment he said, “You know, there was another girl out here on the island. Years ago, this was. A real natural beauty. And wild. Wild as all get-out. But she wasn’t a girl, really, more a young woman.” His eyes sank into the memory and then he looked directly at her. “Maybe you heard of her? Captain Waters’ daughter—or stepdaughter, that is?”

  She shook her head.

  “Inez Deane,” he said, leaning across the table on the pivots of his forearms. “You never heard of Inez Deane?”

  “No,” she said softly.

  “The actress? She was famous, all manner of famous. And I knew her when I was no more than a boy myself. Edith, her name was then. Edith
Waters. You should of seen her.”

  Inez Deane

  Edith—Inez—had escaped with Bob Ord (“Yes,” Jimmie drawled, forestalling her, “the same Bob Ord, but he was younger then, a whole lot younger, but then who wasn’t?”). She lived with him on his boat two days and a night off Gaviota, where he gave her the money to take the stage north. What she’d given him in return, Jimmie couldn’t say, though he’d quizzed Ord on the subject for close to forty years now and Ord would just get a faraway look in his eyes and say that a lady’s secrets were her own to keep, and a gentleman—and he was a gentleman whether he scraped shit off a rock and sold it to farmers and munitions makers or not—would never tell. The Captain never gave her any money, not a nickel, though her mother had left him something and the ranch too, but she had a valuable piece of jewelry hidden away in her bag or maybe sewed into her hem and when she got to San Francisco she was able to hock it for enough to get her a room and some new dresses and combs and makeup, enough to hold her while she went the rounds of her auditions at every theater there was in town.

  “I seen her once on the stage—in Los Angeles, it was. The Burbank Theater. Captain Waters never knew about it, though by that time—it must have been aught-two or somewhere in there—he knew what she’d become, married and divorced and a mother already. I saved the handbill they give you all these years because it was the most remarkable thing I ever seen—I admit I haven’t maybe seen much, but I’ve been to picture shows since and the vaudeville too, and this was the best, truly. She was playing in The Tar and Tartar, the starring part, and it had a whole slew of songs in it. I remember she come out to the front of the stage to sing a duet with Herbert Wilke—‘Let Us Pretend’—you know that song? No? It’s a beautiful air. If you heard her sing it, just once, you’d never forget it. She had an angel’s voice. An angel’s. And I knew her. Right here on this island.”

  The night had settled in. The house was quiet, but for the usual sounds, a creak and groan of the timbers, the fugitive gnawing of a mouse under the floorboards, wind—the eternal wind. “How long did she live out here?” she asked. “In the other house, I mean. The old house?”

  Jimmie had to think about it. He extracted a cigarette from his shirt pocket, licked it and stuck it between his lips. “Well, she was here in eighty-eight, when her mother was alive still, and that’s when I first met her. And then she come back with the Captain for a stretch—he wouldn’t let her go ashore for fear she’d run off, which is just what happened, of course—and that must’ve been ninety or ninety-one. We were close then because there was just the two of us young people out here. You could say we were playmates, I guess.” He struck a match and lit the cigarette, looking satisfied with himself. “If you catch my meaning.”

  “She was your sweetheart then, is that it?”

  He looked away, exhaled. A thin smile settled on his lips. “Yeah,” he said, “she was my sweetheart. But once she left here she was on her own and within the year up there in San Francisco she married some actor she was in a play with—or I don’t know if she was in a play yet. I think she started out sewing costumes and the like. But she married him and she had a baby, Dorothy, back down in Los Angeles where they moved so she could be in something at the Merced and I don’t guess she was more than twenty years old at the time. He was no good, though. Didn’t pay his way, is what I heard, one of that type that think a woman’s supposed to be the support of a man, which never would have happened if she’d wound up marrying me, that’s for sure.”

  She tried to picture it, the young girl, the actress, who’d once lived out here with all the space in the world, abandoned and living in a bleak walkup apartment like the one they’d had to rent after Marianne came, streetcars clattering past the window, drunks shouting in the streets at all hours. A baby to take care of. And no parents to turn to.

  “What happened to the baby?”

  He shook his head. “That’s a sad story.”

  “She didn’t die, did she?”

  “No, no, she didn’t die. Or not then, anyway. Edith—I mean, Inez—left her with a woman in Los Angeles and went back up to Frisco. ‘See if you can’t find someone to adopt her,’ is what she told her, “cold, just like that. And that was the strangest thing—like begets like, I guess—because Edith herself was adopted, you know. Nobody knew who her parents were. Mrs. Waters adopted her before she married the Captain when she was just an infant, but then, and I’m sorry to say it, to give up her own daughter like that is what I’d call a hard case.

  “Of course, and I followed this in the newspapers when it all come out, Dorothy, who I guess must of resembled her mother—pretty, that is, very pretty—got adopted not by just anybody off the street but a certified millionaire in the oil business. And then he got divorced and when he died—it was just two years after that, when the baby was only three or four years old—all the money went to her, to Dorothy. Millions. Can you believe it?”

  Jimmie rose and crossed to the stove to pour himself another cup of coffee, then sat back down at the table and dumped enough sugar in it to make the spoon stand upright. He winked at her. “I like it sweet—never could get enough sweet things all my life, though it’s been hell on my teeth. But you only live once, right?”

  She nodded. Sipped at her Postum, which tasted like what it was, scorched grain with hot water added, a taste she didn’t really like—a taste nobody could like, except maybe C. W. Post himself when he was alive. Awful stuff, really. But if she had a cup of tea—or coffee—she’d be awake all night long, worrying over Herbie.

  “Edith was no dummy, though,” Jimmie said, blowing the steam off his coffee and rooting around in his shirt pocket for another cigarette. “She got herself a lawyer and sued the old wife, the divorced one, for custody of her daughter—little Dorothy, who she wouldn’t of even recognized if she didn’t have a picture in front of her. But she was the mother, and I guess, from what the papers said, she put on the performance of her life in that courtroom, and in the end she got her daughter back, no strings attached—but plenty of money. A thousand a month. Which is more than I’ve seen in my entire life—and a whole lot more waiting for when Dorothy grew up and came into her inheritance.

  “No, she was sharp, a real trader. When the Captain died in nineteen-seventeen, she went ahead and sued the estate for the money her mother had left for her and her part of the ranch too and she won that case against the Captain’s brother and his son from his first marriage.” He lit, drew in, exhaled. “Edith. She married three times, did you know that? And every one of them a divorce. I know all her names by heart, Edith Waters Walker Basford Burritt, and of course the one that made her, Inez Deane.”

  “Is she still living?”

  He had the coffee at his lips, the cigarette clenched in the corner of his mouth. His eyes were drawn down to slits against the smoke. “Last I heard. She’s up in B.C. someplace, Victoria, I think it was, sitting on a pile of money. Her daughter’s dead, though. Dorothy. Never made it out of her teens.”

  “She didn’t—there wasn’t any foul play involved, was there? Anything irregular, I mean?”

  “No,” he said, looking up sharply. “Edith wasn’t like that. Once she had her daughter back she would’ve raised her up like anybody else, like you with your own daughter. It was the influenza took her.”

  They sat there a moment in silence, contemplating the escape of one daughter and the death of another, contemplating life and the island and the narrowing path they were all on, everybody alive, then Jimmie pushed himself up with a sigh. “I guess I better be heading off to bed,” he said through a yawn, “because there’s always work to do—and you know when Herbie comes back he’s going to lay into me if anything’s amiss.”

  “Yes,” she said, “that’s a good idea. I’ll put out the lamp here.” And then she was on her feet and moving, and if for the past hour she’d been able to forget about Herbie and where h
e was and the vacuum in her life that was opening inside her till there was hardly anything left of her, it all came rushing back in the instant she switched off the lamp and the house fell into darkness.

  Eighty-Six Proof

  When he did finally return, a little more than a month after he’d limped down to the boat supported by Dick Graffy on one side and her on the other, Herbie was his old self from the minute he walked in the door, no change detectable in him but for the paleness of his skin and the softness of his hands. She’d been busy with something, deep now into the marooned life and its daily demands, and hadn’t noticed the Hermes cruise into the harbor. He’d walked undetected up the road with one of the Coast Guard men, both of them carrying rucksacks crammed with supplies—and not just staples, but treats: liverwurst, Neufchâtel, soda crackers, pâté, fresh milk, eggs, a white paper sack of éclairs fresh from the bakery, as well as a doll for Marianne and a marcasite brooch for her—and she hadn’t known he was there until the door swung open and he called her name. It was a transformative moment, a moment out of a novel she’d long ago read and couldn’t place, she turning to the door, Marianne looking up from her coloring book at the table, Jimmie somewhere out in the yard and Herbie, with his mile-wide grin and his arms spread open, rushing across the floor to her.

  They had a celebration that night, the Coast Guard man prevailed upon to stay though he was wanted back on the ship. But why not invite the whole crew up, Herbie kept insisting until it was done and they were a party of nine for a dinner that started with pâté and crackers and drinks all around from the bottle Herbie had brought back with him and ended with fresh-brewed coffee and éclairs. When Marianne had been put to sleep and the men had left and Jimmie gone down to his room, Herbie took her to the bedroom and made love to her with all the quick-breathing urgency of a man starved for it, his hands like a stranger’s hands, soft and uncalloused, but his body so familiar it was like an extension of her own. They were lying there under the comforter, thinking their own thoughts, her head propped on his shoulder and a candle guttering in the dish on the night table—awake and dreaming, both of them—when he broke the silence. “You haven’t even asked to see my scar,” he said.