They got into a routine, just as she had with Herbie, she managing the household and Jimmie looking after the animals, collecting and cutting firewood, wandering the hills with no discernible purpose because he was a man and that’s what men did. At the end of the week the Hermes brought the mail with another letter from Herbie — the operation had been a success and he’d be home any day now, couldn’t wait, and he’d have something for her — a surprise — and a toy for Marianne too. She read the letter over three times — he was all right, he was well, his spirits high — and she read it aloud to Marianne and pitched her voice to tell her the news: Your daddy will be home soon. Daddy! She didn’t care about the weather, didn’t care about anything except for Herbie, but it was miserable all the same. Rain and more rain. The week dragged by and then it was gone and still no Herbie. Then there was another letter, delivered by one of the local fishermen.
This letter, the third one, caught her by surprise. There had been complications — an infection they were treating with sulfa — but nothing to worry over. If it was up to him he’d have got up and walked out the door days ago, but he had to listen to the doctors and to Bob Brooks too. Bob was insistent and she knew how Bob could be, didn’t she? He had to admit he was weak still — and the sulfa made him feel strange, as if he were hardly there at all, as if he were made of paper and liable to tear, and it seemed to be affecting his vision too so that he couldn’t even read to pass the time — but still she shouldn’t worry and there was no reason in the world for her to make that long trip to see him with the baby, especially in this weather, because he’d be home before she’d even had a chance to really miss him, he promised. She’d see. Don’t count old Herbie out yet.
So it went on. The week became two weeks, became three, then a month. She didn’t know what to do. Every time she made up her mind to pack up and go to him and damn the consequences, another letter arrived to say she should stay put and that he’d be back on the next boat, the whole business nothing more than a hiccup in their lives. She lingered over the bed in their room, gazed at the pictures on the wall, the deck chairs from the SS Harvard, the fireplace they’d built together, and felt that she was the one made of paper.
She was with Jimmie one night in the kitchen — he was good with the baby, dancing her round the room while she did the dishes — and after she put Marianne to bed she sat chatting with him. He was a good talker, though his subjects were limited, and he was unfailingly cheerful, even when he neglected to fill up the woodbox or tracked mud into the house and she had to scold him. He was sitting at the table with a cup of coffee and she sat down across from him with a cup of Postum because she didn’t want the caffeine, not at night. “You know,” he said, “that daughter of yours is a doll, a real living doll.”
“Yes,” she said, “but she’s Herbie’s daughter, you can see that. The energy of that child. She wears me out.”
He seemed to consider this, staring past her and sipping reflectively at his coffee. After a moment he said, “You know, there was another girl out here on the island. Years ago, this was. A real natural beauty. And wild. Wild as all get-out. But she wasn’t a girl, really, more a young woman.” His eyes sank into the memory and then he looked directly at her. “Maybe you heard of her? Captain Waters’ daughter — or stepdaughter, that is?”
She shook her head.
“Inez Deane,” he said, leaning across the table on the pivots of his forearms. “You never heard of Inez Deane?”
“No,” she said softly.
“The actress? She was famous, all manner of famous. And I knew her when I was no more than a boy myself. Edith, her name was then. Edith Waters. You should of seen her.”
Inez Deane
Edith — Inez — had escaped with Bob Ord (“Yes,” Jimmie drawled, forestalling her, “the same Bob Ord, but he was younger then, a whole lot younger, but then who wasn’t?”). She lived with him on his boat two days and a night off Gaviota, where he gave her the money to take the stage north. What she’d given him in return, Jimmie couldn’t say, though he’d quizzed Ord on the subject for close to forty years now and Ord would just get a faraway look in his eyes and say that a lady’s secrets were her own to keep, and a gentleman — and he was a gentleman whether he scraped shit off a rock and sold it to farmers and munitions makers or not — would never tell. The Captain never gave her any money, not a nickel, though her mother had left him something and the ranch too, but she had a valuable piece of jewelry hidden away in her bag or maybe sewed into her hem and when she got to San Francisco she was able to hock it for enough to get her a room and some new dresses and combs and makeup, enough to hold her while she went the rounds of her auditions at every theater there was in town.
“I seen her once on the stage — in Los Angeles, it was. The Burbank Theater. Captain Waters never knew about it, though by that time — it must have been aught-two or somewhere in there — he knew what she’d become, married and divorced and a mother already. I saved the handbill they give you all these years because it was the most remarkable thing I ever seen — I admit I haven’t maybe seen much, but I’ve been to picture shows since and the vaudeville too, and this was the best, truly. She was playing in The Tar and Tartar, the starring part, and it had a whole slew of songs in it. I remember she come out to the front of the stage to sing a duet with Herbert Wilke—‘Let Us Pretend’—you know that song? No? It’s a beautiful air. If you heard her sing it, just once, you’d never forget it. She had an angel’s voice. An angel’s. And I knew her. Right here on this island.”
The night had settled in. The house was quiet, but for the usual sounds, a creak and groan of the timbers, the fugitive gnawing of a mouse under the floorboards, wind — the eternal wind. “How long did she live out here?” she asked. “In the other house, I mean. The old house?”
Jimmie had to think about it. He extracted a cigarette from his shirt pocket, licked it and stuck it between his lips. “Well, she was here in eighty-eight, when her mother was alive still, and that’s when I first met her. And then she come back with the Captain for a stretch — he wouldn’t let her go ashore for fear she’d run off, which is just what happened, of course — and that must’ve been ninety or ninety-one. We were close then because there was just the two of us young people out here. You could say we were playmates, I guess.” He struck a match and lit the cigarette, looking satisfied with himself. “If you catch my meaning.”
“She was your sweetheart then, is that it?”
He looked away, exhaled. A thin smile settled on his lips. “Yeah,” he said, “she was my sweetheart. But once she left here she was on her own and within the year up there in San Francisco she married some actor she was in a play with — or I don’t know if she was in a play yet. I think she started out sewing costumes and the like. But she married him and she had a baby, Dorothy, back down in Los Angeles where they moved so she could be in something at the Merced and I don’t guess she was more than twenty years old at the time. He was no good, though. Didn’t pay his way, is what I heard, one of that type that think a woman’s supposed to be the support of a man, which never would have happened if she’d wound up marrying me, that’s for sure.”