All three branches of Chestra’s family exhibited the physical characteristics that I’ve come to associate with wealth, particularly from the previous century: tall, confident smiles, good teeth, glossy hair, athleticism, and bone structure that contained at least some of the elements we associate with health and beauty.
Women in the Dorn branch possessed more of the classic attributes than most. They were uncommonly attractive. Nellie Kay Dorn was among the most beautiful of all. I’d recently touched my fingers to her headstone: BORN 1868, DIED 1934.
It could be a social maxim: beautiful people attract power, power attracts the beautiful and powerful. I wasn’t surprised, therefore, to find photographs of celebrities Arlis Futch had mentioned while describing the small, sociable place that was the Sanibel area in earlier times.
There were several photos of the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. In one, she wore a flapper’s hat, her intelligent eyes aware of the incongruity. Another was labeled: Edna two days after fire, Palms Hotel. She looked exhausted—I remembered Arlis saying a manuscript she’d been working on had been lost. Marlissa’s blond lover, I noticed, was in the background of a third photograph. The poet was smoking a cigarette. He was holding a beach towel.
In separate photos, I found two celebrities whom Arlis hadn’t mentioned. One was New York playwright and novelist Mary Roberts Rinehart. The writer was posed in front of the house she and her son had built on nearby Cabbage Key; another was taken on a beach with members of the Engle and Dorn families.
The second celebrity was industrialist Harvey Firestone, the tire millionaire. I’d read that Firestone, Ford, Edison, and Lindbergh had all been friends, and remembered something about them collaborating on a search for synthetic rubber. Prior to World War II, most natural rubber came from the Pacific Rim, controlled by Japan, so the project was vital. Many of the plants Edison had tested in his Fort Myers laboratory were grown or collected locally—some from barrier islands, including Sanibel.
Rinehart and Firestone. Add two more powerful names to the mix.
There were more shots of Charles Lindbergh, some with his wife, Anne, both showing congenial smiles, their hands always linked in some way, like two islands that had joined as one. Celebrity was a weight. So was tragedy. They had experienced both—their eyes were armor-plated.
Union boss John L. Lewis was on the wall. With his bushy eyebrows, he resembled the crabby old guy on 60 Minutes, and looked about as much fun. There were other celebrities: Clark Gable, the boxer Max Baer, Danny Kaye, Raymond Burr, actress Patricia Neal—not unexpected in an exclusive hideaway like Sanibel Island. There was a photo of a tough-looking guy in a flight suit posing with several Dorn and Engle girls, all beauties. It was captioned: Gen. Jimmy Doolittle, Page Field, 1941, before bombing Tokyo.
Page Field was where Arlis had worked guarding POWs. Doolittle had trained there?
Marlissa Dorn’s German lover wasn’t in the background of this photo. But he was in several others—usually a vague figure, part of the scenery, but always aware of the camera’s presence.
Sanibel Island, World War II. The perfect place to seed a Nazi intelligence agent.
22
We crossed the porch into a chorus of wind and surf, the tree canopy writhing above us. It was a black night, but the sand trail was luminous through bare trees. The trail glowed white in the darkness as if saturated with sunlight from years in the tropics.
“I have only one flashlight. I’m sorry.” Chestra had changed into slacks, and a white blouse that snapped like a sail until she got her jacket on. She’d handed me a rain slicker as we went out the door and I was carrying it under my arm as I followed.
“Do you do this often?”
“What?”
I had to yell to be heard above the wind. “Do you…do you have some kind of shelter? Is that where we’re headed?”
“Shelter …Why?” It was impossible to hear so close to the beach, and she laughed the question away.
Chestra may have had a flashlight, but she didn’t use it. She seemed to know exactly where she wanted to be and was in a rush to get there. The storm was rolling in from the mainland—cumulus towers flickering to the east—as clouds sumped cooler air off the water, fueling volcanic updrafts with a black Gulf wind. It’s not unusual for sea and storm to interact in opposition. The woman had to lean toward the beach as she walked, one hand out to steady herself against the wind.
The trail narrowed as we crossed a dune of sea oats and cactus, trees behind us, ocean ahead. There were no stars, no horizon. The sea was a vague, unsettled darkness. Shoreline was defined by sound; whitecaps by the faint fluorescence of breakers as waves sailed shoreward, ridge after slow-rolling ridge. They made a keening hiss, accelerating as they bottom-shoaled, and then imploded—boom—before their mass was suctioned seaward, a formless volume reforming.
The rhythm was respiratory: flowing, then ebbing. Implosions were steady as heartbeats. It was as if something was alive out there, a huge and breathing darkness inhabiting a void that was the Gulf of Mexico.
“This is why I usually come in October!”
“What?”
Chestra waited for me to draw closer. “This is why I come to Sanibel during hurricane season. I have the beach to myself, and the storms are magnificent!”
We were on the beach, walking toward Sanibel Lighthouse, waves to the right, trees and a boardwalk on our left. On the horizon, storm clouds were mountainous lanterns that flared internally, discharging in random disorder. Ahead, the lighthouse turret strobed as precisely as a metronome: flash…flash—ten-second pause—flash…flash. Each frail burst was absorbed by darkness, diffused by wind.
“Do you feel that? Wait!” The woman held her hand up, and stopped. She tilted her head as if trying to identify an unfamiliar sound.
“Feel what?”
“The wind off the ocean. It’s dying.”
Darkness seemed to slow its respirations as my senses tested.
She hooked her arm into mine, a gesture so natural I didn’t notice for a moment. “The storm,” she said. “It’s nearly here.”
A squall cell moving seaward siphons air from the Gulf until just before it hits. The transition is prefaced by a momentary calm, then a gust of cold air as wind direction reverses. That period of calm is a dangerous time to linger in an open area because the storm, only minutes away, is preceded by a low-pressure wall that’s supercharged with electricity.
She was right. The sea breeze had calmed. We were standing on a base of silicone, within spray’s reach of a saltwater conductor. Hard to imagine a more precarious place. “It’s coming, all right,” I yelled. “We need to find cover.”
She was facing the storm. “Not yet. Just a little longer. Please?”
“Chessie”—a balloon of chilled air enveloped us—“this is crazy. We have to go now.”
I winced as a searing light bleached the world of color. A simultaneous explosion darkened it. A wall of wind followed, gusting cold from the east, and I felt the first fat drops of rain.
“Go ahead, Doc. I’m fine. This is what I love to do!”
In another cannon burst of electricity, I saw her face—she was smiling, skin pale as snow, and her eyes were closed.
Our arms were still linked. I tugged and stepped away, hoping she would follow. She didn’t. It was pouring now.
“Chess!”
“I’m okay. It’s what I want!”
Air molecules sizzle when torn from adhesion by electricity. Their glow is a zigzag schematic of the voltage that obliterates them. Air sizzled now as lightning bracketed us, positive and negative ions rejoining in thunderous strokes. A lightning bolt, when grounded through human tissue, is five times hotter than the surface of the sun. It cauterizes as it wounds—in one side, out another. The hole is darkened by exploded blood cells.