Still, people couldn’t seem to get enough of them. The way Herbie saw it, they were only getting their due, because they were special, singled out, anointed, above and beyond the run of the common wage slaves out there, but she didn’t see it that way at all. To her, the whole uproar was nothing more than a case of escapism, people beaten down by the Depression and fearful of the coming war and only wanting to rest their eyes and let their minds roam free over the idyll the papers presented, all the sweat and toil and scraping and scrimping conveniently left out of the scenario.
Letters began to pour in (care of George Hammond, Esquire, Bonnymede), letters from utter strangers who wanted to advise them, congratulate them, criticize them, move in with them, and with the letters came unasked-for gifts. Steamship lines sent them framed oil paintings of ships at sea, magazines sent free subscriptions. There were Coleman lanterns, a butter churn, a pair of axe handles, a peanut butter jar of assorted screws, hand-knit mittens, sweaters and caps, a braided throw rug, a year’s supply of Wrigley’s gum. Patiently — at first, anyway — she answered each of the letters, no matter how odd or unctuous they were, and sent thank-you notes in acknowledgment of the gifts, which began to accumulate in the toolshed to the point where you could hardly get in the door there anymore. And every time the flood seemed to subside, another article would appear and it would rise all over again.
Kate Smith featured a tribute to their pioneer spirit on her radio program and the actress Jeanette MacDonald heard it and sent them a cream-colored puppy named Pomo in token of her admiration and solidarity, the first of a whole menagerie of pets people shipped via boat or dropped off personally. The gander — they called him Father Goose — soon had plenty of company, including a trained and very vocal raven Ed Vail personally handed her on stepping off the Vaquero one afternoon and a series of cats people misguidedly gave them (or abandoned on the beach), despite Herbie’s prohibition against them. But then you couldn’t very well give a kitten back once the boat had pulled out of the harbor or wrench it from your children’s arms either, and so there were cats on the island again and the mice just had to suffer. (“I’ll shoot them all,” Herbie muttered, but then she came in one night to see him sprawled on the couch with the white Persian the girls had named Mr. Fluff asleep in his lap, and he never mentioned the mice again. As a subsidiary benefit, things quieted down in the pantry in the dark of night, when Mr. Fluff made his rounds.)
Then — and this was probably the height and culmination of the whole whirling circus that had swept them up whether they liked it or not—Life magazine sent a reporter and two photographers out to the island to document their day-to-day life for the edification of the magazine’s millions of readers. The photographs were first-rate, she had to admit that — Herbie shone and the girls were angelic, though she couldn’t help feeling she looked fat and unkempt in the two that featured her and she couldn’t stop thinking about how they’d be displayed for anyone to see in every drugstore and newsstand and dentist’s office in the country. The thought made her stomach sink. She pictured strangers — men on streetcars, greasy hoboes in stained trousers, mechanics, sailors, drunks — sneering over the photos, maybe doctoring them with beards and devil’s horns or worse. Perverts, even.
The article itself was no different from what had come before, except for some elaboration here and there, but it was the headline, “Swiss Family Lester,” that caught the public’s attention and brought them more mail than all the other articles combined. Herbie couldn’t have been happier. For her part, she laid two pristine copies of the magazine atop the other articles in the trunk of keepsakes and hoped they were the last.
She was in the living room with Herbie one fogbound night, listening to the radio and working through the latest batch of letters addressed variously to the Lesters of San Miguel, to Herbert Lester, Esq., or King Herbert, or simply to San Miguel Island—“fan mail,” as Herbie called it — when the deep booming lament of a ship’s horn cut through the room and brought her back to herself. “Thick out there tonight,” Herbie observed, looking up at her from the puddle of light the lamp threw over his desk.
“Thick in here too,” she said, “with all these letters.” She was seated in the wicker chair, a writing tablet in her lap and a fountain pen poised over the paper, answering what must have been her tenth letter of the night. “Sometimes I wish we’d never let that reporter come out here.”
“Which reporter?”
“The one from the Santa Barbara paper, the first one.”
He was wearing a pair of reading glasses, pushed halfway up his nose. The light of the lamp sparked in them as he turned his head to her and the room seemed to jump and settle again. “What,” he said, “you don’t enjoy writing to Mr. and Mrs. Anonymous every week?”
“No,” she said, “frankly, I don’t. And I wish we’d never started this business.”
He was quiet a moment, the corner flap of the letter he was writing propped up on the arch of one hand. “It’s got to pay off,” he said. “I know it will.”
“In what — all that junk they send us?”
“It’s not all junk — the axe handles, I found a use for them. And Pomo”—at the mention of his name, the dog lifted his head from where he lay sprawled before the fire, then dropped it again—“and Fred the raven.”
“I know they mean well, it’s not that — it’s just that they have a picture of us that isn’t true, isn’t real—”
“We’re not hardworking? We’re not in love? We don’t have the two smartest, sweetest, most beautiful little girls in the world?”
She smiled. “They all make too much of it, that’s what I mean. We’re not special, we’re just like anybody else, only luckier, I guess.”
He lowered his head to look at her over the glasses and she saw how his hair was going white across the top now and saw the gouges beneath his eyes and the damage the sun had wrought on his face. Was he old? Was he getting old? And if he was, then she was getting old too, and once you were old you had to start thinking about what came next. “Lucky, yeah,” he said, “but we haven’t made a nickel off any of this yet. But I’ve got a couple of schools on the line — I’m trying to set up a lecture tour back east, Saint Andrew’s, Saint Paul’s, Yale, Harvard, Princeton, the very best — but I need one of the pieces to fall into place before I can even think of going, and they all plead the same thing, no money, hard times, wait till next term—”
The foghorn sounded again, so close they might have been sitting on the foredeck of the ship itself. “Like soup,” Herbie said.
“I just hope they don’t go aground.”
“They won’t.”
She was going to ask him how he could be so sure, but he distracted her by snatching up a letter from the desk and waving it like a flag. “God,” he said, “you’ve got to see this one,” and in the next moment she rose and went to him and he pressed the single sheet flat on the desk beneath the halo of light. The paper was thin, the script minute, as if indited under a magnifying glass, the characters printed discretely, rigid black letters marching across the page in the way Marianne might have arranged them with her blocks.