Her attempt at humor fell flat: he wasn’t even listening.
“It’s a killer, that’s all,” he said. “And I’ve never—” He broke off then, turned and bolted across the beach to the road, where he never stopped churning his legs, leaning into the grade and running as if he were crossing the tape in the hundred-yard dash — except that this was the mile-and-a-half dash. And all of it uphill. She called out his name, bleated it, but it was no use — he was already gone.
Half an hour later — and she hadn’t known whether to stay put or follow him up the hill, finally opting to stay in the hope she could intercept him on his way down and talk him out of it — he was back, racing across the sand at a dead run, the gun slung over one shoulder and his yellow oilskin flapping behind him. She’d been sitting in the lee of a jagged boulder, her eyes fixed on the road, the blanket folded beneath her and the remains of the picnic packed away in the basket. As soon as she saw him she sprang up, waving her arms, but he ran right past her as if she didn’t exist. By the time she reached the place where the boat was he’d already dragged it across the beach by its painter and shoved it out into the foam of the surf, wet to the waist and hoisting himself up over the stern to snatch at the oars even as a breaker tossed the boat and the oars grabbed and he pitched forward into the next wave. The wind blew sand in her face and she had to turn her head and shield her eyes. When she looked up again he was a hundred yards out, the whitecaps beating round him and his hair flailing at his scalp.
For the longest while she watched him, mounting higher up the beach and finally partway up the road to keep him in sight, the boat all but lost in the blinding shimmer of the sea. Soon he wasn’t much more than a speck on the horizon, out beyond Can Rock, Middle Rock and the huge dun wedge of Prince Island. She was cold. She found a place out of the wind, wrapped herself in the blanket and cleared a spot where she could sit braced against the rocks, wondering whether she should go back up to the house for her coat — and the binoculars. The binoculars would certainly help, because he was so far out now she could barely see him, and the killer whale, if it was there at all and she fervently hoped it wasn’t, had faded away to invisibility.
Of course a killer whale wasn’t a whale at all, but a dolphin, a toothed dolphin some thirty feet long and twelve thousand pounds in weight, a thing that preyed on the biggest whales in the sea — the blue whale, even, the largest creature in the history of the world. The encyclopedia, which she’d consulted the night Herbie had first told her he’d seen an orca in the harbor, said that they went for the lips and tongue, tore the tongue out — the tongue that alone was bigger than her husband and his rowboat combined. They were savage. Implacable. Killers.
Suddenly she was angry. What was he thinking? Was he crazy? Even if he did manage to shoot the thing, then what — he could hardly expect to tow it back, could he? One man, in a rowboat, in a sea like this? He was impulsive, irresponsible. An hour before they’d been sitting on a blanket celebrating the biggest news of their lives, of her life, anyway, and now he was out there risking his neck without a thought for her or the baby either. The wind keened. She folded her arms across her breasts, pulled the blanket tight round her and stared out to sea at the speck that had become nothing now, that was gone. Outrage beat at her. The cold infuriated her. What would she do without him? What would her life be then, the life that hadn’t even begun till she answered the bell and opened the door of her apartment in the crowded churning city to see him standing there grinning up at her in his wing collar and bow tie and with the ends of his mustache freshly waxed? Bonjour, madame. Or is it mademoiselle? Enchanté. Hurt yourself out here and you were hurt forever.
It was nothing she wanted to think about, a nightmare, a cauchemar. Furious, she turned her back on the sea, on him, and started up the long road to the house.
Marianne
If Marianne had been a boy she would have been named Herbert, after her father, but also after Elise’s father and her older brother too: Herbert, the most natural name, the only name, for a male baby. But this baby was female and before Elise had left for the mainland to stay first with Bob Brooks and his wife (who was also expecting) in their big house in Beverly Hills and then with a cousin in the San Fernando Valley, she and Herbie had agreed on Marianne, in the remote eventuality that she gave birth to a girl. Or at least Herbie kept insisting on its remoteness. When she reminded him that the chances were evenly divided, fifty-fifty, he waved her off. “Little Herbie’s going to help me dig that new septic field and shoe the horses and work right there beside me when we haul the provisions up from the beach and the wool on down. And he’s going to learn to shoot before he can walk.”
A girl, a boy, in the long run it wouldn’t really matter to him — she knew that — and she was secretly pleased when the doctor, holding out the newest human being in the world to her as she came out of the fog of the ether, announced, It’s a girl. Herbie wasn’t there. Hadn’t been there for nearly two months now, so nervous he’d insisted on putting her on a boat to the mainland at the end of her seventh month. If he’d all but ignored her the day of the orca (which still breathed and swam and devoured seals as far as she knew), he’d grown increasingly solicitous as her breasts grew heavy, her abdomen swelled and her clothes shrank till she spent half her time sewing new seams in her dresses, skirts and blouses. He helped with the housework, made her sit in the evenings with her feet up on a stool, pressed his ear to the ball of her stomach — her womb — to hear the baby moving inside her, full of plans, infinite plans, but nervous too. Or not just nervous — terrified that the baby would come prematurely and it’d be left to him to deliver it. “If only Bob had thought to build a hospital out here,” he kept saying, his quick grin jumping to life, “we’d have nothing to worry about. Should I write him and complain?”
She missed him terribly during those last two months. At the Brooks’ there were servants and she fell into a reverie of the household she’d grown up in, where her father kept a staff of seven, but servants were a thing of the past, of another life in another place, and she felt uncomfortable intruding in any case. With the Whites — her cousins in the Valley — she felt even more ill at ease. She insisted on helping with the cooking and clearing up, doing laundry, making up her own bed and such, but she was moving slowly now and felt tired all the time, and she didn’t want to be a burden, especially not to a cousin she hardly knew. And there was noise. Automobiles everywhere, people crowding the markets, the ceaseless chatter of the radio. When Herbie blew through the door of her room at the Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles four days after Marianne had come into the world, all she could say was, “Take me home.”
But it wasn’t as easy as all that. Herbie had brought Jimmie back to the island and left him temporarily in charge because there was no other option and he needed urgently to get home and put things in order, but the doctor was adamant: the baby was not to leave the mainland until she reached a weight of ten pounds or he wouldn’t be held accountable. Ten pounds, that was the limit, the threshold, the inflexible line that kept them chained to shore. Herbie found them an apartment, and what choice did he have? It was a small place, two rooms, a furnished walkup on a busy street ten minutes from the hospital. He burned with energy, impatience, his face gone soft for the baby and hard for her, as if it was her fault they were imprisoned here. He was the one who’d married her, hadn’t he? He was the one who’d put his organ in her. He was the one.