Abashed, Zaga promised her sister that the next time she felt like giving money away she would keep her family in mind.
Zaga would not have said she knew Dr. Sepulveda well: during their afternoons in the hotel lounge she learned only the barest facts of his life. He was a widower, he had three grown sons. He had an apartment in Santiago and, during the ski season, a suite of rooms at the Hotel Portillo, which he received in exchange for his services as hotel doctor. He didn’t ski but he loved the mountains, and he said he enjoyed the hotel’s cosmopolitan clientele.
He didn’t ask Zaga any more questions about her life and he seldom talked about himself, but he was a pleasant companion, full of interesting tales. In 1835, he told her, his great-great-grandfather had shown Darwin around what existed of Santiago and had helped with arrangements for Darwin’s journey over the Portillo pass. “They were friends,” he said. “These stories have come down through my family. I still have first editions of the journals Darwin published.” The last Darwin story he told her, on the day before the blizzard ended, was the most unusual.
“I’ve never been able to get this story out of my mind,” he said. As he spoke he took a small black camera from his leather bag. On the Beagle, he said, the ship that had carried Darwin and his companions around South America, “—on that ship were three Fuegians, natives of Tierra del Fuego who’d been away from their home for years.”
FitzRoy, the Beagle’s commander, had made an earlier visit to Tierra del Fuego, during which some Fuegians had stolen a whaleboat from him. In retaliation, FitzRoy had taken two men and a young girl hostage. Later he added a little boy, whom he bought from his family for the price of a pearl button. The Fuegians seemed happy aboard the ship, and FitzRoy took the four of them back to England with him.
Dr. Sepulveda cradled the camera in his left hand as he explained how one of the men had died of smallpox while the other, whom FitzRoy had named York Minster, survived. The girl, named Fuegia Basket, thrived, and so did the boy, called Jemmy Button after his purchase price. “They learned a good deal of English,” the doctor said. “They adopted English dress and were quite the wonder of London for a while. The queen met them and gave Fuegia Basket a ring.”
But the Fuegians weren’t happy, the doctor said, and FitzRoy was no longer sure that he’d done the right thing in taking them from their native land. And so when he set off on his second voyage—the one on which Darwin was present—he carried the Fuegians with him, along with a missionary and a huge store of goods donated by a missionary society. He had hopes that Jemmy and Fuegia and York might teach their tribes to welcome Englishmen. Then a shipwrecked sailor or a passing stranger might not have to fear for his life.
“Darwin was quite a young man then,” the doctor said. “Your age, maybe a little younger—twenty-three, twenty-four. He found the Fuegians very interesting and was particularly fond of Jemmy Button, whom he describes as sweet-tempered and amusing. He expected a great reunion when they finally came on Jemmy’s tribe, but the tribe was hostile and unwelcoming. Jemmy, who had forgotten how to speak his own language, had changed so much that his family hardly recognized him.
“FitzRoy’s crew unloaded the gifts of the missionary society and showed the members of Jemmy’s tribe how to use a shovel and a hoe,” Dr. Sepulveda said. “Then they packed up and went off to do some botanizing. They left Jemmy behind, along with the missionary and York and Fuegia. A few weeks later they returned to find the gifts demolished and scattered among the tribe. York and Fuegia were all right, but Jemmy was miserable and the missionary, who was terrified, gave up his plans and sailed off with the Beagle when it left again.”
The story made Zaga restless, as did the camera glinting darkly in Dr. Sepulveda’s hand, but he seemed compelled to go on talking. In his journal, the doctor said, Darwin recorded his suspicions that Jemmy would have been glad to rejoin the ship along with the missionary. He’d been civilized, he noted; perhaps he would have liked to retain his new habits.
A year later, when the Beagle returned to the area, a canoe headed out to greet the ship. A long-haired man wearing nothing but a scrap of sealskin was washing the paint from his face while a woman paddled. No one recognized the man until he hailed FitzRoy and Darwin, and then they saw that this ragged stranger was the Jemmy they’d left, plump and clean and clothed, all those months ago.
He still remembered the English he’d learned and he told FitzRoy and Darwin that he was very happy now. He had plenty to eat, he had found a wife, he liked his family. And although York and Fuegia had run away with the few belongings his tribe hadn’t already taken, he claimed to be content.
Jemmy gave FitzRoy an otter skin and Darwin a pair of spearheads. Then he returned to his canoe and paddled away. When he reached the shore he lit a bonfire. The last sign Darwin saw of him was the long and wistful column of smoke outlined against the horizon.
Dr. Sepulveda paused and sipped his coffee. In the Andes, he explained, Darwin had mused on the story of Jemmy Button, and so had he. Before Zaga could smile, he held the camera in front of his face and clicked the shutter: “For your baby,” he said. He gestured toward her waist and spoke a few words in Spanish; perhaps he addressed her child. Then he said, “Think of that. Jemmy Button: captured, exiled, re-educated; then returned, abused by his family, finally re-accepted. Was he happy? Or was he saying that as a way to spite his captors? Darwin never knew.”
Zaga imagined how she might look through his lens, surrounded by wealthy skiers from France and Spain, California and Brazil. Small, slight, insignificant. Ill-bred and poorly educated. “Are you happy?” she asked the doctor. He replied, “Are you?”
Despite her promise to Marianna, Zaga continued to give money away. It was a fever that came over her. It was a burning in her fingertips, which could only be relieved by writing checks. She gave money to the Girl Scouts, the Boy Scouts, the Shriners, Kiwanis. Her money seemed like a dead skin, and the more she shed the better she felt. “Visit lawyer,” she wrote on her list of things to do. “Set up college funds for the kids.” But meanwhile she gave to political candidates, medical research foundations, slim girls in jeans begging funds to save the whales. Her list was still by the phone when Rob called. It was the first time she’d heard from either him or Alicia since her move.
“How are you doing?” he asked her. “How do you like your new place?” As if her efforts to mother him had worked, as if they were actually close. He told her how his job was going and then said he had a friend who very much wanted to meet her. His name was Nicholas Bennett; Joel had known him and had thought the world of him. Nicholas had something he wanted to discuss with Zaga. Would she see him? She said she would.
A week later she met Nicholas for lunch in the museum cafe. He was tall, as he’d said over the phone, and lean and dark-haired; he was younger than Zaga, with interesting planes between his cheekbones and the crisp line of his jaw. When she spotted him at his table in the corner he rose to greet her.
Over a salad of ripe pears and Roquefurt he offered his condolences and told her how much he’d admired Joel. For an hour she waited to learn why he’d wanted to speak to her, but instead the conversation eddied pleasantly around Joel and common acquaintances and the situation at the museum. “You were right,” Nicholas told her. “To give them the funds. Joel would have wanted those paintings hung properly.” Zaga had two glasses of Chardonnay and when Nicholas asked her about her family she told him more or less the story she’d told Dr. Sepulveda years ago.
Nicholas said, “Really?” and smiled at her. His teeth were white and charmingly uneven. By the time he finally, casually, mentioned what must have been his real purpose in seeing her, she had entirely lost sight of the fact that he wanted something. The light coming in through the high, arched windows was gentle and everyone else had left the café. Nicholas was absurdly young, he was barely thirty. She was not so much attracted to him as she was warmed and flattered by the image of her younger self she saw in his eyes. He
explained how he’d recently purchased the rights to an excellent new drug.
He was starting up a company to market it, he said. A few people, some savvy investors, would be helping him get started; once the drug hit the market and the stock went public the profits would be staggering. As she listened to him, she thought how she still had too much money sitting in dead investments instead of building something new and vital. By the time the first tired museum-goers had wandered in for afternoon tea, she had convinced Nicholas to let her invest with him.
“I couldn’t let you do that,” he said at first. “There’s some risk involved, I’m not sure Joel would have approved.” He was bashful, reluctant; he dragged his feet and nearly blushed.
“Joel’s dead,” she said. “It’s my decision.” Even then, she may have understood what was bound to happen.
He brushed her hand and said, “I wouldn’t feel right.”
“Please,” she said. “I insist.”
That night, alone in her clean bed, she dreamed of Dr. Sepulveda. In his white shirt and silk scarf and elegant pleated pants he led her outside the hotel and around the lake, where they met three mules loaded with blankets and food and cooking utensils and hardware. There was a mare with a bell around her neck, but she was not for riding: she was the madrina, Dr. Sepulveda explained, the steady mother who led the mules. Dr. Sepulveda wrapped Zaga’s feet in enormous boots and then led her to a pass between the peaks.
The two of them stepped quietly in the wake of the surefooted mules, the mules followed the horse with the bell, the horse followed a silent man whom Dr. Sepulveda did not introduce. Up they went, and up and up, moving effortlessly through the lightly falling snow. They crossed a snowfield interrupted by columns of ice, and they passed a horse frozen head down in one of those columns with its hind legs stretched stiffly skyward. From behind the column, dressed in the hide of an animal, Jemmy Button appeared. Three condors dotted the sky between him and Aconcagua.
The horse represented her inheritance, Zaga decided when she woke. Frozen, useless; she had done the right thing in freeing it up. Dr. Sepulveda had told her a story of how Darwin had seen such a horse and described it in his journal, but she could no longer remember how the horse had come to its fate.
Six months later, when Nicholas’s company went under, Zaga was left with so little that she could no longer afford the maintenance fees for her lovely condominium. “I was investing the money for the children,” she told her siblings. “I wanted them to have more for college.” If they knew she was lying, they didn’t call her on it. By then they were treating her as carefully as if she were sick.
She rented her condominium to a pair of brokers she could hardly tell apart, and she moved into the first floor of a three-story row house within walking distance of two of her brothers and not far from the house where she’d grown up. Marianna, after her initial rage, found the apartment for Zaga; she also found Zaga a job as a receptionist for a pediatric dental practice.
The waiting room there was always full and Zaga learned that she was good with children—much better than she would have thought after her experiences with Rob and Alicia. The children called her by her first name and drew stars on her hands with felt-tipped pens. She hung the drawings they made for her on the wall above her desk.
At night, when the office emptied and the dentists drove off in their new cars toward the area she’d abandoned after nineteen years, she walked home through the crowded neighborhood. Her family began, slowly and tentatively, to invite her to Sunday dinners and birthday parties and confirmations and school plays. When they took her aside, one by one, they all asked the same questions.
“How did you lose Joel’s money?” they asked. “What could you have been thinking?”
She could not explain that it had nothing to do with thought. It was the buzz, the rush, the antic joy of flinging her old life to the winds. She was abashed by her final loss, adrift and upset—and yet there was also the fact that she had not felt so content in years. Every trace of the life Joel had given her was gone, and she had nothing left to live on but her wits. She knew that what her family really longed to know was why she couldn’t have given the money to them. I would have, she wanted to say. If I’d known what I was doing. But even their resentment could not shatter her sense of relief. Even her stepchildren couldn’t make her regret what she had done.
Rob and Alicia came to visit her four months after she’d moved into her new apartment. It took them that long to agree on a day when they could both find the time, and when they arrived they were hot and exasperated and two hours late.
“We got so lost,” Alicia said as she flounced in the door. “Unbelievable, these streets—how does anyone find their way around here?”
She was thirty-four, still flamboyant, now completely blond. She set down her purse and walked through Zaga’s rooms, which ran in a row from front to back: the kitchen just inside the door, then the living room, then the bedroom. The bathroom was off the kitchen and had no shower, only an old, deep tub with a rubber nozzle that Zaga used for rinsing her hair. Alicia stared at everything in the three small rooms—weighing, Zaga thought. Judging, as she always had—and said, “Do you really have to live like this?”
“Alicia,” Rob said, but Alicia would not be stopped. She wandered across the linoleum, from the old gas stove to the window propped open by a book, and when she looked at Zaga her puzzlement seemed genuine. “What happened to all the good furniture?” she said. “What happened to everything?”
Zaga explained that she’d sold much of it and left the rest in the condominium for her tenants, but she could tell that Alicia did not believe her.
“Are you living like this just to make us feel guilty?” Alicia said.
“Alicia,” Rob said again. But then he looked around glumly and added, “You ought to sue that bastard.”
Zaga refrained from reminding him that he had sent Nicholas her way, and that, after she’d given Nicholas the first check, Rob had called her and had seemed pleased and horrified in approximately equal parts. Now he said, “I wish you hadn’t trusted him so much.”
He had, Zaga knew, lost a fair amount with Nicholas himself. But in his eyes she read his conviction that she had lost everything. In his townhouse he hid his TV and VCR in a nineteenth-century French armoire that had passed to him through more generations of family than she could bear to remember. He was searching the room for some trace of his father and failing to find the smallest thing, and she couldn’t explain to him that the objects she’d shed were no more meaningful than the donations the British missionary society had sent to Tierra del Fuego with Jemmy Button and his companions. Still, occasionally, she thought about the equation Dr. Sepulveda had seemed to suggest between Jemmy’s life and her own.
Beaver hats and white tablecloths and soup tureens and pants; a complete set of dishes painted with flowers and little trays for tea. How FitzRoy’s crew had laughed when they’d opened those crates on Tierra del Fuego! And how strange it had been, Dr. Sepulveda said, when the boat’s crew returned to visit Jemmy the first time. The dishes were smashed, the vegetable garden trodden into the mud. The fancy clothes had been torn into strips that waved gaily from heads and wrists.
“I heard you’re working,” Alicia said.
“For some dentists,” Zaga replied. She offered nothing more. She had planned to bring them with her to a family barbecue, but after a few more minutes of awkward conversation they exchanged a glance and then made excuses and left. She changed her clothes and went to Marianna’s by herself.
“They got to my place late,” she explained to Marianna. “Then they had to leave early.”
Marianna was holding Timothy’s youngest daughter in her lap, watching the rest of the children spread mustard on sausages and potato salad on paper plates. “Why’d they bother coming at all?” she asked.
Zaga remembered how miserable she had been in Portillo, caught in the hot beam of Rob’s and Alicia’s eyes. What had sh
e expected to find in that place? Ease and elegance, manners and wisdom, a past she could share with her husband. She had never considered how isolated she would be. But Joel had been out on the slopes with his children, and when he returned he alternated between describing their thrilling runs and pressing Zaga to come outside. She didn’t feel well enough, she’d said. Whenever she’d alluded to her pregnancy, Rob and Alicia had looked at the walls, the floor, the snow.
“It’s good that you’re pregnant,” Dr. Sepulveda had said. Was that the afternoon he took the picture, or another, earlier one when she asked about his wife and he said quietly that she was dead? In the lounge, when she’d been driven to ask him her last question and he’d responded with one of his own, she’d refused to answer him. She’d risen and said goodbye and left the hotel without seeing him again. But before that, he had said, “A baby with Joel’s money and your looks and character, born into Joel’s world—a child like that might do anything.”
But she had lost the baby. Afterwards, she had wanted to move; her grief had been outrageous, excessive, and she’d told Joel that the sight of the house where she’d lost their child was unbearable to her. She had been hysterical. She had blamed the long flights, the altitude of Portillo, the injections with which Dr. Sepulveda had cured her of soroche. She had blamed Joel for the pleasure he’d taken in skiing and Rob and Alicia for the way they’d stared at her barely thickened waist.
She had written to Dr. Sepulveda, remembering his pointed tales but forgetting the image of her he held captive in his camera. What did you mean by those stories? she’d scrawled. What am I supposed to do?
He never answered, or she believed that he’d never answered. For years she’d imagined him baffled by her failure to understand that the link between her and Jemmy Button was specious, only a surface resemblance: Jemmy had had no choice. But she had always seen that, as clearly as she could see her lost child in the toddler Marianna held in her lap. She had simply not known what to do with the knowledge.
Ship Fever Page 9
