Now he was dead, though, and her perspective was collapsing. She wanted to call out into the night, to summon the secretary back to the house, to ask him to stay awake in the kitchen, shooing away ghosts while she slept. She knew, however, that her shouts would produce only echoes, and the last thing she wanted was to hear her own voice, especially when she knew it would be tinged with the most useless kind of panic. So she closed the door and reentered the cabin. Evolution despised emotion, which explained so much about life and those who lived it successfully. Now, though, it was as if the film were being shown backward, legs devolving into fins, lungs into gills. It wasn’t pain and it wasn’t fresh, but it was as unpleasant as anything she could ever remember feeling, which was why she allowed herself the queasy liberty of finding her father’s tiny, pine-paneled bedroom, of lying down on his bed, of taking a sip from the bottle of brandy the secretary had left unfinished. The view from his coffin, she realized, must look similar to what she was seeing now: wood on the ceiling, wood on the walls, wood all around.
She spent the next day wandering the landscape, acclimating herself to the thin air and the way the tree line seemed hand stitched on the mountainsides. Then she began to work alongside the secretary to liquidate his estate. There was the subdivision and auction of the hemp fields just outside of Steele, North Dakota; the disbandment of WXRP, a radio station that broadcast one-man comedy hours from a lighthouse on the coast of York, Maine; the emancipation of nearly three hundred sled dogs in Cripple, Alaska. When the transactions were complete and the funds had been transferred, she read the telegrams with a cold eye before crumpling them in her fist and tossing them into the pines, wishing the news they contained were meant for someone else.
Soon there was only one remaining task: the resolution of a trademark dispute concerning the aborted cigar company in the Philippines.
“I’d be happy to press forth,” the secretary said, “and notify you when everything has been resolved.”
“No,” she replied after a moment of deliberation. “I’ll manage this one myself.”
She gave the secretary his last paycheck. Then, for the sum of fourteen hundred dollars, she booked a seat on a DC-4 from San Francisco to Manila.
On the plane, which was different in every way from the cargo ship that had once taken her and Anders in the reverse direction, she tried to prepare herself. It would be upsetting, most likely, to see Manila again after eight long years, to witness the near total destruction she had read about in the papers. But the shock of actually arriving there, of seeing animals in the rubble fight for what she hoped was not a human bone, was terrorizing and instructive in a way she never could have foreseen. She learned the manner in which her own tragedies compared or did not. She learned the completeness with which landscapes could dematerialize and reconfigure. She learned how to take reliable refuge in smoke and drink, lighting cigar after cigar, pouring glass after glass of lambanog, the local coconut wine, as she wrote and received her telegrams from the lobby of the Manila Hotel, which, although it had been torched by the Japanese upon their retreat, remained partially open for business. When her correspondence had been read and attended to, she would roam the broken city and see something that, for the first time in nearly a decade, she could imagine wanting to understand.
So she did her homework. First, she returned to the manor and the mango orchards or, rather, to what was left of them. The manor was now a pile of bombed-out masonry. The fountain in the courtyard was dry and filled with soldierly remnants: condoms, cigarettes, machine-gun cartridges. The orchards were cratered and patchy, the surviving trees visibly disappointed by the burden of continuing to fruit.
“Where,” she asked one of the locals in an ugly mixture of English and what little Tagalog she remembered, “is your most beautiful bay?”
The journey from Manila to Donsol took two days by bus. In Donsol, the beach was littered with what looked like fishing shacks but that on closer inspection turned out to be ticket kiosks for sightseeing trips into the outer bay.
“Butanding,” one of the tour guides explained.
She didn’t understand but bought a ticket anyway. Minutes later, they were afloat, just her and the guide. Their brightly painted pontoon boat was little more than a canoe with wings. It was late afternoon. Her legs and back still ached from the bus’s hard, tiny seats; her stomach still wobbled from the twisting country roads. The light was slanted, tropical, the beach fluttering like a white ribbon in the distance. When she saw the huge shape in the water below the boat, she thought she was hallucinating until the guide began to yell and smile.
“Pagsisid!”
She looked down at the water again. The shape was coming closer now, its size four times that of the boat, its darkness punctuated with thousands of white dots, its rearmost section tipped with what looked like a gigantic scythe. The guide shoved two objects in her direction: a pair of goggles and a curved length of bamboo with a rubber mouthpiece on one end.
“Pagsisid!”
This time, there was an accompanying pantomime. He donned the goggles and snorkel. He steepled his hands and thrust them forward. Dive. Nodding, she rose to her feet, the boat rocking beneath her. She stripped down to her underclothes and took the gear from him. Without thinking twice, she jumped.
And later, she would learn the names: whale shark, Rhincodon typus. She would acquire an exhaustive knowledge of its habitat, diet, and life cycle. Despite the promise she had made to herself after drawing the portrait of Tino’s father, she would begin to sketch again: the whale shark rendered over and over in pencil and pen and charcoal and crayon, whatever seemed to best memorialize its massive, philanthropic shape. On that first day in Donsol, however, she did none of this. She drew nothing and she learned even less. Instead, she simply hovered above the whale shark and allowed its current to pull her, its toothless mouth funneling untold trillions of plankton, its company so quiet and natural that when darkness fell and her time was up, the guide had to catch her by her bra strap and physically drag her back on board.
That night, in a borrowed hammock beneath a balete tree, she remembered Monterey.
To do so was a delayed act, foreign and fragmented, so she approached it carefully and with the buzzing of the insects as a buffer. Her father, during his remaining years, had never alluded to those last days, so she had been forced to piece it together on her own, which had left her with the following conclusions. Tino, first of all, had been good on his word. After learning of her pregnancy, he had gone to his mother armed with Margot’s offering: the photographs of Anders and the whore. But instead of taking the payment in good faith, instead of offering her assistance and discretion, Mrs. Agnelli used the information to her advantage. While Margot had sat in the lab waiting for Ricketts to return, Tino’s mother had gone up the hill and blackmailed Anders, who, fearing for his reputation and, to a lesser extent, that of his daughter, saw no choice but to finally admit defeat and return the cannery in exchange for his rival’s silence. After this, they’d stayed in Monterey for only one more day: long enough to finalize the transaction and to prepare for a hasty departure. On the train out of town, there were no words of either accusation or apology. It was only when they arrived in San Francisco that her father managed a sour smile and an assurance that things would rectify themselves in due course.
“But I want to end it now,” she told him. “It needs to be over.”
“You’re too far along for that, I’m afraid.”
For the duration of her pregnancy, she was confined to a room at the Sir Francis Drake: a hotel that, although only a dozen years old, already seemed haunted by the same ghosts as the Del Monte. When she began to fight, to endanger herself, there were sedatives and threats and then a span of gray stillness as she watched with hatred and disbelief as her belly grew. She counted the days until the mercy of the expulsion, until the rest of her life could rise up in the spirit of a new hollowness. The birth was a question of bright lights, the tang of an unkno
wn narcotic, forceps, and darkness. If Ricketts was partially responsible for this, she told herself, it was only in the way that God is partially responsible for hell.
As for the child, it was stillborn, which came to her as a relief and to Anders as an inevitability. No one told her what was done with the body, but she had her suspicions: a fire as wet and prolonged as the one that had consumed her mother, a notion that, for the next near decade, dragged her down like leaden weights, her depression unshakable and misunderstood.
She never worked alongside her father again. In fact, she rarely saw him. As soon as she was physically able, she was packed off to a Catholic boarding school in Marin that was as pointless as it was well landscaped. The same was true of Wellesley, to which she was admitted two years later. For the most part, the college’s academic instruction was a sideshow to the core curriculum in the domestic and social arts. When the monotony became too much, she got permission to enroll in art history courses at a nearby men’s college. There, she gravitated immediately to the study of the Precisionist school: an obscure sect of Western industrialism whose strict lines and robust coloring made her feel as though there were still things in this world to both fear and accomplish.
And then there was the publication of Steinbeck’s book, the one about Cannery Row. She read it in her dorm room one night the way one might watch a bloody roadside scene: fleetingly and through the psychic equivalent of half-closed fingers. Did she recognize Ricketts and his predilections? His musings? His triumphs? His failures? Of course. But in erecting this monument to his friend, Steinbeck had done something unintended. Instead of creating a facsimile, he had created a hybrid. Half Christ and half satyr, in Steinbeck’s own words. To Margot, however, it wasn’t quite so mythic. She saw Ricketts’s head with Steinbeck’s ears attached to it; Ricketts’s shortness transformed into Steinbeck’s height; Ricketts’s vitality reduced to stasis, to an invisible cage that allowed Steinbeck to own him and watch him forever. She wanted to tell someone about it, to announce her discoveries to a like-minded contemporary, but she had no intimates. The girls at school thought she was morbid and odd. And she knew they were right.
Then, mercifully, her formal education was at an end. Upon graduation, she secured an unpaid apprenticeship in document restoration at the Fogg Museum in Cambridge and a room in a boardinghouse on Kirkland Street. The loneliness was so instant and intense that she began roaming the museum after closing time in search of imaginary company, which she eventually found in the form of a chalk drawing by Georges Seurat. It portrayed a nameless, faceless woman hunched over a blank-paged book, an easel in the background like a hangman’s scaffold. Some nights, she would pretend to be this woman. Some nights, she would pretend it was her mother and distribute blame accordingly. Either way, she was always careful to leave the museum in time to make the boardinghouse’s curfew, and when she slept it was without dreams or the half-waking visions that often preceded them, her life as blank and cold on the outside as it was within. Her father, she knew, was still living out west—in Nevada, the territory being claimed by gamblers and showmen—and there were times when the notions of geographic distance and inherited pain seemed to roll themselves up like two sides of the same map. More than once, she considered writing a letter to him that sought to confess the true scope of her childhood agony and the formative fallout of it, to solicit a reply that would acknowledge his own parallel experience. But months and years passed and no such letters were received or sent, and she came to the conclusion that heartbreak, instead of drawing people together as most shared experiences did, forced them even further apart, everyone confined to his or her own private cell of untranslatable despair.
On the evening of March 20, 1948, the night of Toscanini’s all-Wagner television debut, she was informed of her father’s passing. She had gone down to the boardinghouse’s common room to see the concert on-screen. The seventy-year-old landlady clanked in on her crutches at the precise moment in act 3 of Die Walküre in which, had they been watching the actual opera and not a televised special, the curtain would have risen to reveal the mountain peak and Brünnhilde’s sisters, gathered in preparation for the funerary jaunt to Valhalla. And the landlady’s whisper in Margot’s ear sounded like something Wagner himself had scripted: the death of a god, the world rent asunder, a robed chorus howling at the justice of it.
Now, in the hammock beneath the balete tree, she breathed in the wet air and blew at the stars as if they were candles. She had known the memories would be painful, and they were, but not nearly as much as she had expected. If anything, they seemed like remnants of a very bad dream: disconnected, surreal pieces of a larger, subconscious whole. It was illogical, furthermore, to believe in payback, but here it was: the glow of what a spiritual person might have deemed a blessing. So she stayed in Donsol. She visited the whale sharks every afternoon. She learned to adjust her buoyancy so that her belly grazed their rough, speckled backs. The hammock gave way to a thatched hut on risers beneath which lived a rooster who woke her at exactly four A.M. each morning, which she didn’t mind one bit.
On her tenth and final morning in Donsol, she rose at the first squawk and went outside to find a telegram nailed to her front door. The telegram was from her father’s secretary and typed out on Manila Hotel stationery. Pursuant to Anders’s death, it read, a probate court in Monterey had recently unearthed the deeds to two properties within the city limits: the house on the hill and a reduction plant on Cannery Row, both of which would remain in jurisdictional limbo until someone came to town to settle matters in person.
She folded the telegram and reimpaled it on the nail. Then she went down to the beach and sat on the sand. It was still mostly dark, the sun not yet risen. The ticket kiosks were still shuttered for the night, unmanned. She went into the water up to her knees and then returned to the hut, lit a cigar, took a puff from it, and stubbed it out on the boards beneath her feet. She poured a cup of lambanog and nursed it as the shoreline began to come to life, and by the time the chatter of the tour guides began, her decision had been made. She packed her things. She wrote a letter to Tino Agnelli. And, after running five miles to the nearest telephone, she reserved a seat on the next DC-4 out of Manila.
23
SHE ARRIVED IN SAN FRANCISCO ON A DAMP, WHITE afternoon, a flask of lambanog tucked into the waistband of her new skirt.
She spent one sleepless night at the hotel across the street from the Sir Francis Drake and then boarded the four o’clock southbound Del Monte Express, the same train that had once taken her and Anders down the coast and back up it again. The parlor car was empty save for herself and the waiter, who kept mostly to himself as the train rattled through the artichoke and lettuce fields. The banquette on which she sat had peeling leather and loose bolts. The velvet draperies across the cloudy windows looked as though they had been both shelter and sustenance to several generations of moths.
“I think you’ll barely recognize it,” the waiter speculated at one point. “Everything’s so different down there since the war.”
She smiled at him but said nothing. She had drained the flask hours ago and had since consumed several beers, not because she wanted to blunt her mind, but because she wanted it loose enough to consider things objectively. She had left the Philippines full of conviction, certain the telegram had provided as close to marching orders as she was likely to get. But now that they were creaking across the Monterey County line, the grayness of Elkhorn Slough and Moss Landing appearing through the windows like something that had been breathed onto the glass, she was met with the delayed realization that she didn’t really know why she had come. The transaction, certainly—a meeting with the Agnelli scion, a signing of papers—but it would be more than that. It had to be. And so the beers kept coming, and by the time they reached Monterey, she was drunk enough to expect to find her father waiting for her on the station platform, ready with words of caution and regret. Instead, she was greeted by a teenage porter who helped her into a hired
car before handing her a small, stiff note card with the Agnelli name on the letterhead.
She read the note and put it in her pocket.
“The Hotel Del Monte, please,” she told the driver.
“The what?”
“The big one near the—”
“Oh, that place hasn’t been a hotel in years. It’s a postgraduate school now. For the navy.”
She looked out the window, at the black tumor of the resting train, its doors still open.
“To the neighborhood on the hill, then,” she replied. “The one where the cannery workers used to live.”
At the small white house, she paid the driver twice the customary fare and allowed him to unload her bag.
Then she stood outside for a while before entering, looking at the bougainvillea. The last time she had seen it, the plant had been little more than a skeleton of ash, the victim of a rich woman’s myopic wrath. In the past eight years, however, it had regenerated itself into something twice as lush and expansive as before, and at the sight of its pink flowers, she became wary of something she couldn’t name.
Monterey Bay Page 19
