They had George Hammond to thank for it. He’d become a fast friend, flying out weekly, sometimes twice a week. He brought them eggs, milk, fresh greens. Delicacies from his mother’s garden parties, squab, cold cuts, bakery bread, the cheeses she couldn’t get enough of. Once news got around of what they were doing on the island — pioneering, that is, living like the first settlers in a way that must have seemed romantic to people inured to the grid of city streets and trapped in the cycle of getting and wanting and getting all over again — people began to deliver things to Bonnymede expressly so that George could take them out to San Miguel in his new Cabin Waco and lighten the burden for the Lesters. It was amazing in its way — they were gaining notoriety just for drawing breath in a place that fired the imagination, already undergoing the transmutation into myth the press would later work on them, she the devoted and intrepid wife whipping up gourmet fare on a woodstove, Herbie the wounded war veteran withdrawn from society and seeking peace in nature, the girls growing into their depthless blond beauty in primordial innocence while the rest of the world churned with its hates and factions and the hard knocks of experience.
As Christmas grew nearer, Herbie took to calling Hammond Santa George, the bringer of gifts and good tidings. He’d split the boon of his whiskey with Bob Brooks, fifty-fifty, because Bob was the lessee, after all, and he wanted to be fair, but there were gallons of it hidden away in the storeroom — enough to last years, and no more parceling out pennies to have Brooks add a bottle or two of the cheapest rotgut to the grocery list. Oh, no. Herbie was possessor of the finest stock in all the islands and up and down the coast too. So when George flew in two days before Christmas with the tree and an armload of presents — and a Christmas goose to replace the turkey that had fallen victim to the foxes before it had its chance to appear on a platter — Herbie concocted a holiday punch so potent it ensured that George would have to spend the night if he downed so much as a cupful. And he did, of course. And she did too. They sang carols before a snapping fire, took turns reading “’Twas the Night Before Christmas” and Dickens’ Christmas stories aloud to the girls, and then went out to hand-feed the goose in its cage in the yard while Herbie clucked over its fate.
“Well, it’s fat enough, George,” he said. “Fat and prime.” He was holding the flashlight, the goose giving back the reflected light in the pans of its eyes as it cocked its head to pick up the sound of their voices. Overhead, the stars leapt out in a mad white display. She felt the punch massaging her veins. It was cold. She thought of the sheep out there in the darkness beyond, huddled, with their legs folded under them. Christmas. It was Christmas on the island.
“You don’t think I’d bring you a scrawny one, do you?”
“No, not Santa George. You’re the — the best friend I ever had.” Herbie’s voice had run off the tracks, thick with its freight of whiskey and something else too, something maudlin and overworked. “Except maybe Bob Brooks.” A pause, the night pouring down, the goose snatching at the light, trying to get a fix on them. “And Elise. Elise, of course. Finest woman alive. Aces. Aces all the way. Don’t you agree, George? Isn’t she aces?”
“Yes, sure she is.”
“And you — I mean it — you are the most generous, the most—”
“Herbie,” she said as gently as she could, “don’t you think we’d better go inside?” And she tried to make a joke of it: “For the goose’s sake? She’s got a big day ahead of her come Tuesday. She’ll need her sleep, won’t she?”
“Her beauty rest.”
“Her beauty rest, yes.” She laughed. And George, good sport, joined in.
“But that’s not a goose at all,” Herbie put in, his voice thick, congealed into a kind of sobbing bray. He’d had too much to drink, maybe they all had, because it was Christmas, almost Christmas, and they were celebrating. “No goose,” he said, louder now, an edge of sudden anger slicing through him.
“What do you mean?” George said. They were all three following the beam of the flashlight to the animal’s cocked head and the firm golden lockbox of its beak.
“It’s a gander,” Herbie burst out. “Can’t you see that? Look at the size of him. Look at that neck. A gander’s no goose. A gander’s a — a, a gander!”
* * *
George couldn’t stay for the holiday — he was due back at Bonnymede to celebrate the occasion with his family, which was only understandable. In the morning, though the winds were volatile and threatened to flip the Cabin Waco before it could get off the ground, George hopscotched down the runway, found the air under his wings and was gone. She and Herbie stood there, arm in arm, and watched the plane recede into the sky. They had their tree and their presents — he would surprise her with a phonograph and three records, including a recording of Beethoven’s piano pieces as interpreted by a thirty-one-year-old Chilean genius, across the cover of which he’d written Für Elise in his neat rounded hand — and the greater gift of their daughters, who would awaken on Christmas morning to see what Santa had brought them. And they had the goose too — the gander — which snaked out his neck and hissed and honked round the courtyard, master of all he surveyed and destined to lead a long and prosperous life as Herbie’s special pet, while she poked the coals in the oven and laid on wood to stoke the temperature to three hundred seventy-five degrees, just right for leg of lamb.
Swiss Family Lester
The years scrolled by, 1935, ’36, ’37, ’38, the outside world canting toward the conflagration to come, tension ashore, tension at sea, Tojo’s troops in Shanghai and Hitler eyeing the Sudetenland. In the Lester household, there was tranquility. The phonograph brought the strains of civilization to a place where no music had been heard in all eternity but for the erratic strumming of a sheepman’s guitar or the rasp of an Indian’s rattle over a crude campfire, and she and Herbie and the girls listened over and over to the Beethoven till it was so worn it began to sound as if it had been recorded in the midst of a bombing raid. The next year she added Borodin’s Second String Quartet and Mozart’s Requiem to her thin shelf of recordings, though Herbie claimed he could barely stand to listen to them, the music made him so sad. Still, it was pleasant to sit there during the evenings and hear something other than the wind while they played cards or read aloud before the fire — and besides, wasn’t sadness, the ability to feel and feel deeply, what made us human? And joy, joy of course. She had the “Jubilate” for that.
The radio came next. Or rather, the generator to produce the electricity to make the radio something more than just another piece of furniture. Her mother, still worried over them, always worried, had sent the radio, a big glistening Zenith Tombstone model George managed to fly over in his plane, but it was mute until the generator began to turn and the first tentative squeaks and squelches of the forgotten world cohered in the mellifluous tones of an announcer’s voice, which came clear so suddenly you would have thought he was there in the room. Marianne nearly jumped out of her skin, staring wide-eyed at the fabric-covered mouth of the speaker, not quite believing there wasn’t someone hidden inside, while Herbie maneuvered the aerial and fine-tuned the dial like an impresario. She made popcorn and they all sat round this new marvel, transfixed, while dinner went cold and the sun faded from the sky, unseen and unappreciated.