19.
It’s your play,” Ethel reminds me. I look to the plane above us for distraction from our card game. When I was very young, I imagined myself in old age surrounded by foreign artifacts and curios from travel, photographs amid the ruins of primeval cities. I believed I was meant for so much more. But these days I live now are the last evidence that I ever was, these memories of the end.
“You know, in this great big life, I never got to ride a single one of those,” Ethel interjects, watching me watch the plane. “Seventy-five years on this earth and I’ve spent every one of my days in the state of Georgia.”
“Where would you take that plane to if you could?” I ask her.
“Hmm,” she replies. “I think I’d like to hitch me a ride to Phoenix, Arizona.”
I try to imagine the place, dusty and parched beneath an imperious sun, so unlike verdant Lyra, nestled against all this blue.
“I saw a commercial about it just the other day,” Ethel goes on. “The lady in it said it never rains there. Always warm, always blue skies. She looked happy. And ever since I was little, I had these returning dreams that I lived in the desert, and I’d ride across it on my horse, aiming at my enemies with my bow and arrow. I reckon maybe that was my past life.”
“You really believe in all that?” I ask. “In past lives?”
“Oh, sure I do,” Ethel replies. “I seen things and felt things about that. All the church folk pretend they only believe what they read in the Bible, even though they know better.” She squints up at where the plane once was. Her eyes are turning blue with blindness. She follows its sound, though it has long disappeared from view. “I met Elijah before in another life. First time I saw him I knew it wasn’t the first time, if you know what I’m sayin’.”
Ethel lays down a quadruplet of hearts and then a double of sevens from my own stack of cards. “For such a smart girl, you sure give up easily,” she announces of our gin rummy game. This produces no small amount of glee in her, despite the fact that she’s been playing her own divided luck all afternoon.
“So where would you have that plane take you?” she asks.
“Across the ocean,” I say.
“Across the ocean’s not a very particular place, Ms. Elle.”
“To Paris, then,” I say. The yellow Seine sprawls out before me, flooding the stone embankments, dappled with light, carrying a song from bridge to bridge. No one there knew my name, where I’d come from. I could have so simply run away. The gray sky couldn’t bear to be broken by the sun. Paris was composed by un dieu triste. The city held me. Longing had formed every alleyway; any café might harbor Gabriel, obscured by a newspaper, a cigarette in his hands, waiting for me to find him. Isabelle, Isabelle. The dead never die; they just wait for us to walk away from ourselves.
And then Paris is gone. I look askance at the coming night, splattered by the sad color of time.
“So why didn’t you go on over to Paris in the first place?” Ethel asks. “Can’t imagine you were taken prisoner down to Lyra.”
Ethel returns to her impending, glorious gin rummy victory and I return to New York, to that luncheon one thousand years ago, as a snowstorm rolled up the Hudson, when Mr. Ranier first announced he had heard of a mysterious prospect on a tiny island off the coast of Georgia. I was still dressed in the black of mourning for my father. Just days or weeks had passed since I’d become an orphan. Mr. Ranier sat at the head of the table; Simon was at the other end, filling Joseph’s conspicuous absence. The maid scurried around us, trying to achieve invisibility by being present all of the time, pouring us more water, the men more wine, slicing and serving us far more bread than was necessary. Simon’s mother derived pleasure, at these lunches, from seeing the poor girl run ragged—deciding, at the last possible moment, that she required a particular sauce to be paired with the main dish before the meat was cool. On that day she demanded a mustard-shallot velouté, a recipe I hunted for for many years after that lunch but never uncovered. The maid improvised as best she could, but Mrs. Ranier insisted it needed “more tarragon, more salt!” All the while, Simon’s father was furiously criticizing the competition’s saturation advertising. “Diamonds in every stinking daily,” he griped. “Even with the war coming, they really think every Tom, Dick, and Harry is going to run out and buy a diamond for the girl next door before he marches off to die.”
Outside the penthouse windows, the river was still drunk with sunlight. As we were waiting for the tea and dessert, Simon’s father started raving about an undiscovered jewel, a blue sort of diamond, he’d caught wind of down south. “No, no, this is no diamond. Far more stunning than any diamond, I’ve been told!” He was wild-eyed with the idea. “The mother lode is still submerged, just offshore, but there’s an island nearby. The perfect quest for a romantic man!” he shouted at his son.
As he spoke, I noticed that the light in the stone of my own engagement ring had suddenly disappeared. In the distance, through those same windows, the weather moved in a cavalcade of doom steadily north. Soon the storm would be over us, pounding into the roof, disappearing the river. The line between this life and the possibility of another had faded, just as my being there in Simon’s grand dining room prevented my being beside Gabriel inside a rickety shed of cardboard. But Mr. Ranier paid no attention to the tempest, preoccupied by his tales of that beautiful island, where property is a steal, where Simon would put the family name back in the books for good.
“So why hasn’t anyone else beaten us to it, if this site has what you say it has?” Simon interjected at last.
“Because no one else is a Ranier!” his father replied. “You know how you were raised: you can’t be lazy when it comes to innovation. These gems can’t be shoveled. They’ve got to be dug out from beneath a shelf in the sea.”
“How am I supposed to get jewels out of the bottom of the ocean?” Simon pleaded. “Dive for them?”
“Well, you’ve always been a good swimmer!” his father said, roaring with laughter. But he was serious. “Quit your whining and think for a second. They drill oil out of the sand now. Why not jewels from the water?”
“Georgia is rather far away,” Simon said quietly. “And what about my music . . . ?”
“We’re talking about the future!” Simon’s father interrupted, excited. “That’s why we need you. I couldn’t give this project to Joe. He’s got to keep things steady, watch the numbers. You’re the visionary, the creative one. Now you can put that musical . . . nonsense to some practical use.”
The storm was entering its grand finale—a tremendous snow squall had replaced the rain, obscuring the remaining world—but neither Simon nor his father would quit talking. They were wholly transfixed, one by the prospect of money, the other by the pangs of familial betrayal. I shut my eyes, and in my mind’s darkness I had a vision—an image of Gabriel, drowning in the middle of the ocean. But I was an unwise Cassandra, not yet able to interpret what I was seeing, that this image was a truth being presented across space and time. I opened my eyes, in shock, and dropped my cup of tea onto the hard wood of Simon’s dining room floor. Out of instinct, I knelt down beside my seat to collect the shards of china. “Elle, stop that,” Simon’s mother said, slapping my shoulder. “That’s her job.” And indeed the maid was already there, by my side, with her little broom.
The squall passed southward and the sun reemerged, as if those fifteen minutes had been a kind of joke. “Well, like it or not, it’s done,” Simon’s father announced, concluding the lunch. “The deal with my man in Georgia is in place. He’s a Harvard man. Good stock. Name is Clarke. I’m sending you to paradise, Simon! You should be grateful. You’ve always loved the heat. Joseph and I will be stuck shoveling snow while you’re sunning on the beach.” Then he redirected his sermon to me. “And you, Elle Cumberland, you’ll make a fine southern belle. . . .”
With that, we were dismissed. In the wake of the storm, I accompanied Simon on our customary stroll in the park. He walked with his hands behind his back, humming a dramatic melody, five steps ahead of me, swiftly and nervously. Almost jogging to keep up with him, I asked at last if he would like to discuss matters of the future with his fiancée.
“Georgia!” he cried. “Why not Hades? I don’t know a soul there. I won’t know anything about how to live there! How to talk to anyone, for that matter! They speak almost another language.”
“I know someone who could help us down there,” I blurted out foolishly. “He’s a Southerner.” If I could keep Gabriel close to us, I suddenly thought, I might save him from himself. “Won’t we need a bit of help? Well, he’s a jack-of-all-trades. And he’s lived in New York, but he’s from New Orleans, so he can help us settle in. He knows that world.”
“And how do you know this someone from New Orleans?” Simon asked, a look of desperation in his eyes.
“Oh, he’s my . . . cousin. Actually, you’ve met him, only you were never properly introduced. He was in the blue suit at my father’s funeral,” I barely stuttered. “And he’s quite well spoken. You’ll come to love him as much as I do.”
A gust of wind whips my last card from the table, flapping it in my face before it’s carried out to sea. With her foot, Ethel captures the queen of diamonds in the sand. “Well, I suppose you don’t need to tell me why y’all came. Mr. Simon must have heard that blue and shiny legend from old Clarke. He was luring folks into his nasty web in those days, after they got put out in the Depression. Not that Clarke was ever gonna stand by and let someone find blue here before one of his own did. That family’s been down here hunting it since the first Fourth of July. Anyways, Mr. Simon got gems in his eyes. But when he dug, nothing came out. Elijah told him it wouldn’t be easy as one, two, three. After all, Elijah’d been looking all his life, too, thinking he’d beat out the Clarkes, who owned his granddaddy and his granddaddy’s granddaddy. Damn fool, my husband. Still, Elijah knew more than anybody else. But Mr. Simon was always so preoccupied by his associates. Especially that smarty-pants Thomas Green—if you know what I’m saying.”
“Ethel, do you believe there’s something down there?” I ask.
“I’m not saying I don’t. But I sure didn’t go blind from believing in it. Your Gabriel, he was too keen on it. Just like Elijah was. Guess we’ve got a type of man. That night you was married to Simon—I remember it well—Mr. Gabe skipped the fancy party and sat up all night with us in the guest cottage. I told him all the tales I knew. ’Course Elijah kept shushin’ me ’cause didn’t I know the treasure was his to find. But Gabriel kept poking around, looking for more, more, more. That’s where money comes from in the first place, don’t you think?”
Ethel waits a moment, then answers her own question. “That’s right. The more stories there are about something, the more everyone wants a piece of it. That’s how in the old times they decided what was going to be expensive and what wasn’t. How many stories folks told about a thing.”