4.
I question whether Madera realizes that this is the loneliest of activities—going on about myself to myself, morning after morning. It would be better if there were someone I could call, someone I could meet for tea, someone with me to say Mmhmm or Huh or Oh, my! But at a certain point in an old person’s life, those people we might like to waste an entire afternoon with have either crossed to the other side or lived so long absent from our lives that they might as well be dead.
There were so many girls I might still know, girls I knew in New York, ones with whom I’d go ice skating, girls who sat beside me in French or Latin at Hunter College High School, and we’d go on and on and on about whom we might marry and where we might marry and what we might wear to marry, and then once we were all married we would exchange letters, just a few, until time was the only thing that passed between us. Oh, true, there were women in town here on Lyra whom I’d meet weekly for tea at Tilly’s; we’d speak of holidays, our plans for them, who was coming and what we would cook, holidays that were still months away. When one had passed, we’d start talking about the next. Thanksgiving and then Christmas, Christmas and then New Year’s, New Year’s and then so much emptiness. For a time, I was very popular on the island. My diary was full from Monday to Friday with lunches, lunches that lasted for hours. Those women—what were all their names? It doesn’t matter now. Never did we exchange one true word. And yet we squandered so much of this life together.
One woman’s face from that ancient Rolodex materializes from my memory, and yet I could swear it was only the once, in that lonely initial winter on Lyra, that I ever encountered its owner. The first brush of cold was not so devastating as it had been in New York, when come October the heat left overnight, without hesitation or regret. Lyra was kinder. It stayed light later and warmed almost to summer during the day. But Gabriel had just died, and so it was inexplicably cold. And I was pregnant with my first child, so I felt frigid even beneath the blazing sun. The world was gutted; all I could see were its dark parts. Was it the eccentric aspect of the stranger herself that implanted her face so firmly in my mind, or the spell of time from which she arose? I do not know if memory works like the planets and stars in space: the heavier a season, the more time slows around it.
There was snow that year, and the dunes were a wonder against the dark-blue Atlantic. All the magnolia leaves dropped, the palmettos were murdered by frost, and the moss was subsumed by icicles. We were accused by some of having brought the north and its weather with us. This woman was one of them, that day in December, just sitting down with me like a guest on one of our chairs on the beach, where I had come to hide over my lunch.
“Don’t reckon we’ve ever met,” she said casually, as if I were the one trespassing on her property.
I was too young or too sad or too shy or too lonely or mostly too curious to consider reprimanding her. “Can’t I get you anything?” I asked. In her lap, she clutched a red picnic basket and an umbrella.
“Oh, no, ma’am.” She shook her head dramatically. “Up here, you’ve got the best view of the ocean in all the island. You know that? I’m content to just look at it.”
“Doesn’t it look the same here as anywhere else?” I asked.
“You can’t see how it shows its face right here?” she replied.
“What face are you referring to?” I asked.
“The ocean’s,” she said. “Look closely. You can see, between the swells, that the ocean is dreaming something nice.”
“I’m sorry, Miz . . .” I said, waiting for her to fill in the rest of her title, but the woman never offered a name. “I don’t believe I understand.”
The woman was mad, certainly, but she did not frighten me. I wanted to hear her go on and on, deeper into that dimension which did not quite resemble our own, but rather the realm of a child’s imagination. And she did go on and on, her voice mingling with the hush of the sea, until, unbelievably, hours had passed, and spurred by a polite glance at my watch, I was forced out of the reverie her tales had sewn around me. “. . . so many of ’em drowned after gazing down into the depths at the ocean gems. It’s because you can see the beginning of the whole universe in those stones.”
“I’m so very sorry,” I broke in. “It was nice chatting with you, but I must finish up here and get ready for our guests.” Joseph, Simon’s brother, was arriving that evening.
She ignored this and trained her gaze back toward the ocean. “Prettiest things you ever saw, but you gotta swim into the deep deep to really see ’em. And then it gets too hard to come back. No one ever comes back. Why would you want to come back here after you’ve looked into the eyes of God?”
“I wouldn’t know,” I said, standing and wiping the sand from my skirt to emphasize my departure.
“You do know” was all she said, her eyes like an owl’s, dramatic, unblinking.
Moments later, I was greeting Joseph’s wife, Deborah, whom I had not yet met. “My husband always said Simon was the melodramatic type,” she cooed as she gazed around our home. “But will you take a look at all this?”
Before I could answer, Deborah held her left hand up beside my own. Her engagement ring featured a diamond three times the size of the one Simon had given me. “Now, Elle, dear, which one do you think catches the light more?” She chuckled conspiratorially. “Sometimes I wonder whether I married my ring or my husband!”
Deborah was a beauty queen, from one of those New England families that struck gold the moment they set foot on Plymouth Rock. She was busty where I wasn’t, red-haired and cat-eyed, and had a dancer’s posture. Since childhood, I had always been reprimanded for slouching. “You mean to say you only have one maid here?” she went on. “But how do you ever keep it clean? I should send you one of ours. They never know what to do with themselves. They hate working, these people. You have to make them do it.”
The conversation went on this way, on that same day that I’d learned of the ocean’s capacity for dreams. Up in her room, as they settled in, Deborah rang the bell for Ethel’s assistance every twenty minutes. I had not yet used it once. I was never trained in the ancient art of making others do what you can just as easily do for yourself.
“I hope you don’t still feel you got the short end of the stick being sent here,” Joseph said to Simon that night at dinner. Simon’s brother had sturdy hands and a broad chest from playing quarterback in his youth. Simon had never performed anything more athletic than a brisk walk. Joseph’s suits were perfectly tailored to him; Simon’s jackets devoured his frame. Still, Joseph was the sort of man who by age forty would grow fat. His voice was like that of a petty king, with the haughty command of one who considered himself the most important person at any table. “It’s quite the opportunity. You know, I felt a little sore when Father proposed it to you instead of me.”
“The weather is good for me.” Simon regarded his brother with a gaze that mere mortals reserved for their gods.
“So they say. Couldn’t tell from tonight, though. It’s colder than New York.”
“The property is nice, isn’t it?” Simon asked.
“A real jewel in the jungle,” Deborah chirped. Joseph cast a glance her way for the first and only time that evening, a look that meant Shut that pretty, fatuous mouth.
“You’re starting to speak like one of them, Simon. Is there anyone here who’s educated enough to talk numbers?” Joseph asked when he was finished silently humiliating his wife.
“I meet with the mayor of the island now and again. Educated at Harvard. Elle’s not much for it. She’s never worried herself about these things.” Simon giggled. Now we were even, Deborah and me.
“Ain’t that the fellow we bought this swamp from? You and Father are always too impressed by these Ivy League types,” Joseph replied, throttling Simon’s mirth. “In my experience they’re know-it-all good-for-nothings. Surprised an island this size even has a mayor. Why, you should be the mayor, given the charity we’re doing employing all these people during a war. What’s he call himself again?”
“Clarke. Old family, around these parts,” Simon replied.
“And how is it going—the prospect?” Joseph asked, swatting away a bug that had become caught in a flying pattern around his face.
“Very promising,” Simon said. “We’ll be drowning in it in no time.”
Joseph pounded Simon’s back as if the mosquito had just landed there to meet its death. “We better be. We’re getting murdered in diamonds. Can’t believe those damn South Africans have got every gal in heat for them with one little shred of ad copy. But they’ll get tired of diamonds once the war’s over and their husbands are lavishing them on their French whores, too. A good American wife’ll want this blue, this blue—”
“Wonder?” I offered, but everyone seemed to have temporarily gone deaf. “If you’ll excuse me,” I said, to obliterate my attempt at poetry, “I feel as though I’m going to be ill.”
One nice thing about being a mere woman in my day was that one only had to threaten to feel faint or nauseated when one wanted to be discourteous. This was even easier while pregnant. As I got up from the table, they all expressed their tired hope that I was carrying a son. But she would be a girl.
I left the miserable party and snuck out through the service door into the yard. A storm had recently passed over Lyra. Its lightning had shorn the oak, and left the woods skeletal. But on that night there was no weather. The beach chair where my strange visitor had sat hours earlier, with her red picnic basket, was still and empty, deserted. The full moon was up and cast over the ocean, and I looked upon its glowing surface to see if I might glimpse any of its dreams. All I saw was a golden road into the black.
“When are you lost in now, Elle?” Simon asks. Suddenly I find we are sitting in the garden. It is no longer 1941. A newspaper is in my husband’s lap. His front page is turned to me. The headlines: a blizzard in May, bombs kill scores in Haifa, a stock market collapse, a new virus born in the streets of Hong Kong. The fountain chokes, but no water falls from its spout. I ask if Elijah will ever fix it.
“You mean old Elijah, Elijah?” Simon looks at me peculiarly.
“What other Elijah is there?” I ask. I do not know what I have said wrong, so I tell Simon he’d better quit chewing his gum like a cow.
“It’s better than smoking, Elle. The scientists say that kills you in a multitude of ways.” I look down to find a cigarette in my hand.
“Since when have I cared about science?” I ask half facetiously.
“You used to love your astronomy books,” he says. Then he turns the newspaper up to his face again. “No longer, I suppose. . . . I’ve always been fascinated by it.”
“Well, it got you nowhere good, following Joe around. All those facts and figures,” I say. “That’s what that batty woman on the beach told me to watch out for. She was like a prophet. She had those owl’s eyes.”
“Say, Elle, maybe it’s time you got a little shut-eye?”