“But wait, wait,” he said suddenly, jumping to his feet and darting across the room to the bookcase, where he’d hidden one of the scored brown vanilla extract bottles of straight Kentucky bourbon behind a book there. She watched him slide out the volume—An American Tragedy—and feel around for the bottle.
“Why Dreiser?” she asked, relishing the moment.
He turned to her, smiling, the bottle in hand. “Because the man knows sorrow and whiskey’s the cure for it,” he said, ready with an answer as always. “Old Theodore, old Ted, he’d drink bourbon at a time like this, don’t you think?” He uncorked the bottle and sniffed. “Even if it smells just the faintest wee little bit like vanilla. But at least this time around”—and here he held the bottle aloft like the trophy it was—“we’ve got something to toast the baby with.”
A pair of glasses. Two fingers for her, three for him. He leaned over the couch to hand her hers and then they clinked glasses. “To Herbie Junior!” he sang out, and drained his glass in a gulp.
She sipped at her portion, savoring it, even as he refilled his own glass, and if she was thinking anything at all it was just this: There’s plenty more where that came from.
The Travel Air Biplane
Elizabeth Edith Lester was born in December, a compact pretty baby with her father’s eyes and her grandmother Sherman’s retroussé nose. This time Elise had convinced Herbie to let her stay on the island till she was well into her eighth month and when she did go ashore it wasn’t to the Whites’ and only briefly to the Brooks’. She’d been unfailingly gracious to the fishermen and pleasure boaters who stopped by the island — it was reflexive, really, part of her nature, the sort of innate generosity of spirit she displayed for anyone, even the Japanese — and now she found her graciousness rewarded in invitations, half a dozen or more of them. There was no need to rent an apartment or to worry over inflicting herself on distant cousins who had their own lives to lead. This time she went where she was wanted, taking Marianne with her and rotating amongst couples she knew, spending a week or two at a time with each of them — social visits that enlivened her and got her back into the swing of things ashore, the radio programs, the daily newspapers, gossip and idle chat and earnest discussions about Fascism in Italy and the threat of war in Spain, and though she missed Herbie and Christmas on the island and was more than ready to come back home once the baby had put on the requisite ten pounds, the hiatus this time hadn’t seemed nearly as stifling as the first time around.
Herbie took to the baby — they called her Betsy for short — just as he had to Marianne. If he was disappointed in being denied a son yet again, he didn’t let it show. By the time Betsy was able to take hold of the finger he offered and smile up at him, he was as smitten as he’d been with Marianne, a good father, sound and giving and patient. The days settled in. The sky arched high, crept low, the rain came and went, the wind blew from the north. She mixed infant formula on the stove, hung diapers out to dry. She cooked and cleaned and looked after her daughters and her husband. This was life, this was release and joy — not tedium, not tedium at all. Yes. Absolutely. And now they were four, a twofold increase in the population of San Miguel since the census taker had recorded his data in 1930.
One summer morning she was out in the yard with the girls, tending masochistically to her flower garden that was doomed by poor soil, incessant wind and the birds that seemed to have nothing else green to attack for miles around, when she was startled by a ratcheting mechanical whine that seemed to be coming from every direction at once. She looked up, bewildered, and there it was: an airplane circling the house, one man forward, another aft, and both of them wearing leathern helmets and goggles that glinted in the light of a pale milky sun that was just then poking through the mist. As if this wasn’t startling enough, the thing dipped its wings and shot down like a needle toward the sheepcote in back of the house, leveling off just above the ground before circling once more and coming in for a landing. She watched it jolt across the field, the propeller a blur, wheels bouncing over the ruts, the fuselage jerking back and forth as if it were being tugged in two directions at once, and then it lurched to a halt and the two men were climbing down to earth like visitors from another planet.
Herbie was nowhere to be seen — as it turned out, he’d been down on the beach collecting driftwood and was already running at full bore up the road to the house, as startled and amazed as she — and Jimmie was off the island altogether, working for Bob Brooks at his ranch in Carpinteria. She put down the trowel she’d been using to loosen the soil around the withered stems of her geraniums, wiped her hands on her dress, snatched up the baby and took Marianne by the hand, then started across the yard and out the gate to see this marvel up close.
The taller of the men — a good six feet and two hundred pounds, forty years old or thereabout — was smoothing back his hair with one hand and hoisting a satchel to his shoulder with the other. He was dressed in shirt and tie and there were reddened indentations round the orbits of his eyes where the goggles had pinched the flesh there. The other man was Herbie’s size and looked to be in his thirties. He was wearing a leather flight jacket and doing his best to look blasé, as if he’d been landing here every day of his life.
“Elise?” the first man said, coming forward and holding out a hand to her. She shifted the baby and took his hand, giving him a wondering look: how did he know her name?
“Yes,” she stammered. “I’m Elise, I’m she—”
“I’m George Hammond, from Montecito,” he said, pointing vaguely behind her and across the channel. “At Bonnymede? My mother’s a friend of Mrs. Felton.”
Now she was at an utter loss. Ten minutes ago she’d been secure in the knowledge that she was one of only four people on one of the most isolated and forbidding islands in America, part of a tribe, a family, society reduced to its essence, and now she was standing before an absolute stranger — two strangers — in an old rag of a sweater, with dirt on her hands and two oily patches of the same on the front of her dress where her knees had pressed into the earth while she dug in her garden with a hand tool and the children played beside her and her own private clouds drifted overhead. And the stranger was speaking with her as if they’d casually bumped into each other at a charity ball or cocktail party. She couldn’t help herself. “Who?” she said.
“She’s a friend of my mother.”
Still nothing.
“Who happens to be a cousin of your mother — Una, Una Felton? — and who, at the suggestion of your mother, felt that John and I (this is John Jeffries, by the way) might want to stop by and say hello. And to see, well, if everything’s going forward and if you might need anything, that is, if there’s anything that John and I might be able to help you with.”
And now suddenly it came clear. Cousin Una. Her mother. These men with the flattened hair and circular marks impressed round their eyes — they were two missives in the flesh sent here from Rye, New York, that was what they were. Her mother had always been suspicious of Herbie—that Lothario, she called him, that adventurer—seeing their marriage as the classic case of the spinster swept off her feet by a suave ne’er-do-well whose motives would always be suspect, no matter if they were married for fifty years. Her letters had been increasingly strident of late, calling into question her daughter’s judgment, not to mention sanity, in trying to raise babies, her own grandchildren, in a place out beyond the end of nowhere, a dangerous place, isolated and bereft, where anything could happen. And that anything, of course, never incorporated notions of happiness, fulfillment or serenity but exclusively the calamities that befell people living on islands — and she sent on a stream of newspaper clippings in evidence, accounts of people starving in the Hebrides or drowning off Block Island or Martha’s Vineyard or dying of strokes, seizures and in one case an apricot pit lodged in the windpipe, before help could arrive. Her mother was looking out for her. And here were George Hammond and John Jeffries, dropped down from the sky. What could she do but thank them and invite them into the house?