San Miguel

by Boyle, T. C.

  Introductions went round. Herbie slipped Dreiser aside and produced the vanilla-scented whiskey, and while Hammond begged off—“Can’t fly cockeyed, you know”—his partner accepted it gladly. There was a moment of silence, all of them watching Jeffries’ face as he first sipped gingerly, then threw back the glass.

  “That’s thirty years—and more—in the cask,” Herbie said, pouring for himself now. “You ever tasted anything smoother?”

  Jeffries made a show of smacking his lips. “Goes down like water.”

  “You don’t mind the scent, the vanilla, I mean?”

  “Vanilla? No, not at all. I don’t smell a thing. But then”—and he held out the glass, grinning—“maybe I’d better take another sample, just to be sure.”

  And so they drank a second round and Herbie recounted the tale of the ship going down and the miracle of the cask revealed in the sand. “I had Bob Brooks—he’s the man I work for here, do you know of him, millionaire from Beverly Hills?—bring me a bunch of five-gallon tins when he came out with the shearers. It took the two of us the better part of three nights to siphon off the whole business and haul it up to the house, and believe me I was careful to keep the thing covered up with kelp and a couple shovelfuls of sand—and to erase our tracks too. All I could think was that somebody else’d get to it before we could drain it. Not only the shearers—they’ll drink anything—but the hired man here, because if you don’t dole out the booze with him he’ll drink till he drops down blind. But you know how hired hands are, I’m sure.”

  This last was addressed to Hammond, who just gave him a smile and nodded his head. The fact was, as they were later to discover, George Hammond didn’t know the first thing about hands, hired or otherwise. Servants, yes. A Japanese gardener. A chauffeur. But he was no rancher—he was independently wealthy, living with his wife and mother at his mother’s estate on the ocean just east of Santa Barbara, where he’d constructed his own airstrip. He had one passion only, and that was for aviation.

  “So tell me about your aircraft,” Herbie said. “It’s a real beaut.”

  “Well, thank you. I like it, I do, but I’m looking for something with a bit more oomph, if you know what I mean. Took us what, John—just over forty minutes to get here? We can do better than that.”

  “It’s a Travel Air, isn’t it?” Herbie had pulled up a stool and was sitting kitty-corner to the couch. She sat across from him in the chair, supporting the baby on one shoulder, and if she could foresee the fog coming down and their guests having to spend the night—or even two nights, three—so much the better. Marianne was crabwalking round the floor, clacking her blocks together, as excited by the company as her parents were, and she kept clacking them till Herbie leaned down and told her to hush.

  “That’s right,” Hammond was saying, “two hundred twenty horsepower, and that’s fine, don’t get me wrong, but I’ve got my eye on something bigger—a Cabin Waco or maybe even one of the new Beechcrafts. Do you know the Beechcraft?”

  Herbie didn’t. But he was all ears and she could see what he was thinking: Forty minutes to shore and that was too slow? With an airplane, their whole world could open up, no more waiting for the cattle boat or the Coast Guard or a passing fisherman or Bob Brooks to send supplies once a month if they were lucky. They could have some of the things the outside world had to offer, things they’d done without, things to make life easier. A phonograph. A radio. A generator for electricity. Travel Air Biplane. Cabin Waco. Beechcraft. She repeated the exotic names silently to herself, almost as if they were an incantation, though she couldn’t have known what she was wishing for.

  The fog did come down that afternoon, the sun gone before they knew it, the hills swallowed up and the harbor erased so completely you wouldn’t have known they were on an island at all—they could have been anyplace, a field in Nebraska, a mountaintop in Tibet, Fifth Avenue with all the plugs pulled and the traffic swept off to the moon. Everything was soft and gray, the fog so dense you couldn’t see the plane from the front door. And with the fog came the quiet, ambient sounds muffled and nothing moving beyond the windows, all the world reduced to the room they were sitting in. Hammond—George—opened up once he saw that they wouldn’t be leaving till morning, if then. He sampled Herbie’s whiskey, regaled them with stories of what was going on in Santa Barbara society and in Los Angeles and beyond and John Jeffries had his own stories to tell while Herbie leaned forward to interject and magnify and urge them on, flying from one subject to another, never happier. She served lamb stew at the table in the kitchen. Marianne fell asleep in her arms. And afterward, because the chill had come back now and no denying it, Herbie built a fire and they sat around talking, the four of them, till the gray deepened by degrees and finally gave way to a starless night.

  Christmas

  Christmas that year was a wonder. For the first time ever they had a tree—the girls’ first Christmas tree, festooned with strings of popcorn and figurines of colored paper, with a tinfoil angel perched on top—and there were store-bought toys and catalogue things too. The tree might have been scraggly and lopsided and no more than three feet high, not at all the kind of thing she remembered from her girlhood, when the whole family would go out into the stripped and silent woods with the horses and drag back a perfectly proportioned spruce eight or ten feet tall, but it was a tree, the only tree on an island that had none. She wouldn’t have thought it would make such a difference, the sight of it there on a piece of white felt draped over a stool in the living room—and the smell of it, of pine sap and the stiff fragrant needles—but it did. Just that. Just the tree. It brought back a cascade of memories—and created them too, the future memories. For her and Herbie and the girls.

  They had George Hammond to thank for it. He’d become a fast friend, flying out weekly, sometimes twice a week. He brought them eggs, milk, fresh greens. Delicacies from his mother’s garden parties, squab, cold cuts, bakery bread, the cheeses she couldn’t get enough of. Once news got around of what they were doing on the island—pioneering, that is, living like the first settlers in a way that must have seemed romantic to people inured to the grid of city streets and trapped in the cycle of getting and wanting and getting all over again—people began to deliver things to Bonnymede expressly so that George could take them out to San Miguel in his new Cabin Waco and lighten the burden for the Lesters. It was amazing in its way—they were gaining notoriety just for drawing breath in a place that fired the imagination, already undergoing the transmutation into myth the press would later work on them, she the devoted and intrepid wife whipping up gourmet fare on a woodstove, Herbie the wounded war veteran withdrawn from society and seeking peace in nature, the girls growing into their depthless blond beauty in primordial innocence while the rest of the world churned with its hates and factions and the hard knocks of experience.

  As Christmas grew nearer, Herbie took to calling Hammond Santa George, the bringer of gifts and good tidings. He’d split the boon of his whiskey with Bob Brooks, fifty-fifty, because Bob was the lessee, after all, and he wanted to be fair, but there were gallons of it hidden away in the storeroom—enough to last years, and no more parceling out pennies to have Brooks add a bottle or two of the cheapest rotgut to the grocery list. Oh, no. Herbie was possessor of the finest stock in all the islands and up and down the coast too. So when George flew in two days before Christmas with the tree and an armload of presents—and a Christmas goose to replace the turkey that had fallen victim to the foxes before it had its chance to appear on a platter—Herbie concocted a holiday punch so potent it ensured that George would have to spend the night if he downed so much as a cupful. And he did, of course. And she did too. They sang carols before a snapping fire, took turns reading “’Twas the Night Before Christmas” and Dickens’ Christmas stories aloud to the girls, and then went out to hand-feed the goose in its cage in the yard while Herbie clucked over its fate.

  “Well,
it’s fat enough, George,” he said. “Fat and prime.” He was holding the flashlight, the goose giving back the reflected light in the pans of its eyes as it cocked its head to pick up the sound of their voices. Overhead, the stars leapt out in a mad white display. She felt the punch massaging her veins. It was cold. She thought of the sheep out there in the darkness beyond, huddled, with their legs folded under them. Christmas. It was Christmas on the island.

  “You don’t think I’d bring you a scrawny one, do you?”

  “No, not Santa George. You’re the—the best friend I ever had.” Herbie’s voice had run off the tracks, thick with its freight of whiskey and something else too, something maudlin and overworked. “Except maybe Bob Brooks.” A pause, the night pouring down, the goose snatching at the light, trying to get a fix on them. “And Elise. Elise, of course. Finest woman alive. Aces. Aces all the way. Don’t you agree, George? Isn’t she aces?”

  “Yes, sure she is.”

  “And you—I mean it—you are the most generous, the most—”

  “Herbie,” she said as gently as she could, “don’t you think we’d better go inside?” And she tried to make a joke of it: “For the goose’s sake? She’s got a big day ahead of her come Tuesday. She’ll need her sleep, won’t she?”

  “Her beauty rest.”

  “Her beauty rest, yes.” She laughed. And George, good sport, joined in.

  “But that’s not a goose at all,” Herbie put in, his voice thick, congealed into a kind of sobbing bray. He’d had too much to drink, maybe they all had, because it was Christmas, almost Christmas, and they were celebrating. “No goose,” he said, louder now, an edge of sudden anger slicing through him.

  “What do you mean?” George said. They were all three following the beam of the flashlight to the animal’s cocked head and the firm golden lockbox of its beak.

  “It’s a gander,” Herbie burst out. “Can’t you see that? Look at the size of him. Look at that neck. A gander’s no goose. A gander’s a—a, a gander!”

  * * *

  George couldn’t stay for the holiday—he was due back at Bonnymede to celebrate the occasion with his family, which was only understandable. In the morning, though the winds were volatile and threatened to flip the Cabin Waco before it could get off the ground, George hopscotched down the runway, found the air under his wings and was gone. She and Herbie stood there, arm in arm, and watched the plane recede into the sky. They had their tree and their presents—he would surprise her with a phonograph and three records, including a recording of Beethoven’s piano pieces as interpreted by a thirty-one-year-old Chilean genius, across the cover of which he’d written Für Elise in his neat rounded hand—and the greater gift of their daughters, who would awaken on Christmas morning to see what Santa had brought them. And they had the goose too—the gander—which snaked out his neck and hissed and honked round the courtyard, master of all he surveyed and destined to lead a long and prosperous life as Herbie’s special pet, while she poked the coals in the oven and laid on wood to stoke the temperature to three hundred seventy-five degrees, just right for leg of lamb.

  Swiss Family Lester

  The years scrolled by, 1935, ’36, ’37, ’38, the outside world canting toward the conflagration to come, tension ashore, tension at sea, Tojo’s troops in Shanghai and Hitler eyeing the Sudetenland. In the Lester household, there was tranquility. The phonograph brought the strains of civilization to a place where no music had been heard in all eternity but for the erratic strumming of a sheepman’s guitar or the rasp of an Indian’s rattle over a crude campfire, and she and Herbie and the girls listened over and over to the Beethoven till it was so worn it began to sound as if it had been recorded in the midst of a bombing raid. The next year she added Borodin’s Second String Quartet and Mozart’s Requiem to her thin shelf of recordings, though Herbie claimed he could barely stand to listen to them, the music made him so sad. Still, it was pleasant to sit there during the evenings and hear something other than the wind while they played cards or read aloud before the fire—and besides, wasn’t sadness, the ability to feel and feel deeply, what made us human? And joy, joy of course. She had the “Jubilate” for that.

  The radio came next. Or rather, the generator to produce the electricity to make the radio something more than just another piece of furniture. Her mother, still worried over them, always worried, had sent the radio, a big glistening Zenith Tombstone model George managed to fly over in his plane, but it was mute until the generator began to turn and the first tentative squeaks and squelches of the forgotten world cohered in the mellifluous tones of an announcer’s voice, which came clear so suddenly you would have thought he was there in the room. Marianne nearly jumped out of her skin, staring wide-eyed at the fabric-covered mouth of the speaker, not quite believing there wasn’t someone hidden inside, while Herbie maneuvered the aerial and fine-tuned the dial like an impresario. She made popcorn and they all sat round this new marvel, transfixed, while dinner went cold and the sun faded from the sky, unseen and unappreciated.

  All in all, it was a mixed blessing. On the one hand, they were glad for the broadcast concerts and the programs they gathered round to listen to each night—Amos ’n’ Andy, Flash Gordon, Major Bowes’ Original Amateur Hour—but on the other hand, the news of the world came at them relentlessly, infecting them like some new kind of plague. Like it or not, they were part of the world now, drawn in almost against their will. Herbie began to fret over things happening halfway around the globe, the news bad, exclusively bad, bad all the time. She tried to tune out the announcer’s voice, her fingers busy with her knitting, her mind wandering, but her ears wouldn’t let her. And then there was the racketing blat-blat-blat of the generator that annihilated the silence of the yard so that she could barely tolerate going outside when the electricity was in use. Which, fortunately, wasn’t very often—the generator devoured coal oil, and coal oil not only cost money they didn’t have, but it came in fifty-gallon drums that had to be hauled up from the beach behind the steaming haunches of Buck and Nellie.

  Then the first reporter—Richard Blakely, of the Santa Barbara News-Press—introduced himself by way of a letter contained in the canvas mail pouch George Hammond had got in the habit of bringing out to them each week. He was a friend of the Hammonds and had heard of the “wonderful things” they were doing out there on the island, things the subscribers to the paper “would certainly be interested in,” and he wondered if he might not come to visit them for a few days with the notion of interviewing them for a feature article in the Sunday edition, which, as they no doubt knew, was the most widely read issue of the week. Herbie slit open the embossed envelope with his penknife, careful to preserve it intact, then unfolded the letter and read it aloud while she and George, seated comfortably at the kitchen table, looked on. She could tell from the welling of his voice and the way he tried to give life to the reporter’s stale phrases that he was excited by the prospect. “Great news!” he concluded, handing her the letter. “Just what I’ve been hoping for—a little publicity. What sort of man is he, George?”

  “Oh, he’s on the up-and-up. Very amenable.”

  “Nice guy?”

  “Yeah, nice guy.”

  “So what do you think, Elise? Ready to roll out your Sunday best and cook up an island feast for the fourth estate? I’ll butcher a lamb. And set out the lobster traps. And George can bring us some more eggs—right, George?—so you can make one of your extra special deluxe chocolate layer cakes for him, show him what island living’s all about—”

  She was silent a moment, Herbie leaning forward to retrieve the letter and fold it reverently back into the envelope. George sat across from her, hovering over his coffee cup and wearing a benign smile. She felt the first stirrings of something she couldn’t name, a kind of superstitious tension, as if she were a girl all over again and going out of her way to step on every crack in the sidewalk to see what th
e fates had in store for her. “I don’t know,” she said finally. “But truthfully? If you want to know, I don’t think it’s such a good idea.”

  “Not a good idea?” His face took on a look of incredulity. “What do you mean? We’re going to be in the papers—we’ll be famous.”

  She shrugged. “That’s what I mean.” A look for George. “We’ve got all the society we want right now, what with the friends we’ve made from the yacht club and people coming out almost every week it seems, in good weather, at least. Do we really want more of them? Strangers trooping up here at all hours, bursting in on us as if we were put here solely for their amusement, and then, of course, we’ve got to be courteous to them no matter what. Or those boys in the powerboat taking target practice on the seals, when was it, a month ago? You really want more of that sort of thing?”

  He looked hurt, astonished. “No,” he said, insisting now, “no, you’re crazy. Publicity’s good, the best thing that can happen to us. It means money, Elise”—and here he turned to George to make the characteristic gesture, thumb and first two fingers rubbed together over an open palm—“and money’s been in short supply lately. I made twenty-five dollars for that lecture I gave to the Adventurers’ Club, don’t forget. And I’ve got feelers out to the museum and the colleges down in Los Angeles too. People are fascinated by what we’re doing out here, Elise, they are. They just wish they could live like us, live free, I mean. Isn’t that right, George?”