DEER MR. AND MISSUS LESTER:
I AM AN OLD MAN SEVENTY TWO YEARS ON THIS URTH LIVING IN NORMAN OKLAHOMA AND I HAVE NOONE TO LOOK AFTER ME. I NEVER DID MARRY NOR HAVE ANY SONS NOR DOTTIRS AND I AM ON MY LONESOME ALL THESE YEARS. I AM STRONG YET AND VIGROUS AND I AM AFRAID TO DIE ALONE. WILL YOU TAKE ME IN TO LIVE WITH YOU AND YOUR BOOTIFUL FAMILY. I CAN EARN MY KEEP BETTER THAN MANY A YOUNGER MAN. PLEASE HEER ME AND SEND FAIR FOR THE BUS TO CAL.
VERY TRUELY YOURS,
MORRIS T. SWENSON
They were silent a moment, the house still, the light pooled on the desk. She could hear the dog’s breathing decelerate into sleep and then the first quavering whisper of a snore. Herbie turned to her. “You’re going to have to answer this one,” he said.
“No,” she said, “I can’t.”
“You have to.”
“I wouldn’t know what to say.”
“Tell him he’s going to have to die alone.”
“Herbie.”
“Or no, tell him we’re lucky, that’s all. Just lucky.”
“And he’s not?”
“Right. He’s not.”
The King of San Miguel
There was no telling how Herbie would react to the news that came to them over the radio. Sometimes, he’d flick it off in disgust, right in the middle of a program, and go stomping and swearing through the house in a rage over the idiocy of the world and the way they were being corrupted by it, even out here. Other times, and this was true of the newspapers too, he would extract a few threads of information from one account or another and weave them into a salvatory scheme he talked up day and night till it began to sound plausible, even to her. His biggest bugbear during this period was Mussolini. When they got news that the little potbellied Italian clown prince had invaded Ethiopia, he’d taken it hard. This was Africa, the continent he dreamed of every time he glanced up at the elephant gun on the wall or took it reverently down to show it off to a visitor, and here the Italians were trying to colonize this huge expanse of it, and for what? he kept asking. To rape it and bleed it and force their will on natives in loincloths? “What next,” he said bitterly, “nomads eating spaghetti carbonara off the backs of their goats? Campari and soda in Addis Ababa?”
He sat riveted by the radio, agonizing over the reports of a modern army equipped with motor vehicles, tanks and machine guns cutting through Haile Selassie’s overmatched forces, whose antiquated weapons belonged in a museum and whose starving horses and blundering mules were shot out from under them and left for the vultures on their black soaring wings. “Spears, they’re using spears, Elise,” he kept saying. “We’ve got to do something. We can’t just sit around and let these people be slaughtered.”
She commiserated, of course, but to her mind the whole business was merely an exercise, a passing phase, another of her husband’s obsessions that would occupy him for a week or two and then fade away as the next arose on the horizon, and she was right, to an extent, but this time he really did try to take action. One afternoon, when they were expecting George to fly in, he called her into the living room and asked her to proofread a letter he’d spent the better part of the morning composing. It was addressed to His Highness, Emperor Haile Selassie, the Lion of Judah, care of the Ethiopian Embassy, Washington, D.C. In light of the fact that the Ethiopian army was outgunned, he was offering his entire arsenal on loan for the duration of the war — or as long as it took to achieve victory — and he further offered his own services as an instructor to drill the emperor’s men in the use of small arms. No matter that the emperor’s men were halfway round the world and she and Herbie could barely afford to get to Los Angeles, let alone New York, the Canary Islands, Gibraltar and points east, Herbie was dead serious and here was the proof of it. She didn’t say a word. Just read through the letter, handed it back to him, and told him how good it was of him to think of it and what a noble gesture it was. George came, the letter went off, and that was the end of that, as far as she was concerned.
There was plenty enough to occupy her — occupy them — without having to worry about the fate of a medieval society she’d barely heard of, an empire nonetheless. World events swept on to other things, Herbie fired off letters to FDR, Will Rogers, Lewis B. Hershey and Father Coughlin in support or protest of whatever was on his mind at any given moment, and the life of the ranch went on. They had more visitors now, and the reporters never stopped coming — and, of course, reporters and visitors alike required feeding and a place to sleep and an expanding portion of the time she needed to devote to other things, like her daughters’ education, for instance. As Marianne and Betsy grew — and reports of them spread — questions arose in certain quarters over the quality of the education they were receiving, or if they were being educated at all. There were letters from various cranks and retired schoolteachers and professors too, espousing one scheme or another, and then finally an official letter arrived from the superintendent of the Santa Barbara schools, reminding them that the law required that all children on reaching the age of five years must attend school. To this point — Marianne was seven and Betsy not quite five — she’d done her best to instruct them herself, sitting them down at the kitchen table on weekdays and teaching them to copy simple sentences out of the children’s books her mother and various friends had sent on, as well as the rudiments of arithmetic, French and geography, but it was far from ideal, considering the distractions.
She showed Herbie the letter from the superintendent’s office when he came in from the yard that day. She watched his face as he scanned the letter and then read through it again, slowly this time. “What do you think?” she said finally, and why did she feel light-headed all of a sudden? Why was her heart pounding? Nothing had been decided — it was only a letter, that was all. An inquiry. “I was wondering if we should send them to the mainland — I’ve been thinking about this for ages, dreading it, really. To boarding school, I mean. I can’t imagine how we’ll afford it, but the fact is we’ve been selfish, we have — and don’t give me that look. We’ve been thinking of ourselves, not the girls — they need schooling like any other kids.”
“What’s wrong with you teaching them? And I can help. With reading, anyway. And math. And French, what about French?”
“It’s not the same thing. They need a curriculum.”
“I’d rather shoot myself than see those girls leave this island. It’d tear my heart out. Yours too. Admit it.”
“But I can’t teach them under these conditions and you know it, what with the pot going on the stove and the dog at the door and the cats… and every time they look up from their books, even Betsy with her coloring book, there’s something going on outside. I can’t keep their attention. Nobody could.”
“In the old days,” he said, trying to make a joke of it, “they used to have itinerant schoolmasters. Ichabod Crane. Maybe we can get him out here. Or no, I guess he’s just a fictional character, isn’t he? And he’d be dead by now, anyway.”
“It’s not funny, Herbie. There are laws, regulations. They could take the girls away from us as unfit parents. And don’t we want the best for them? Don’t we want them to be able to go out and take their place in the world? Someday, I mean?”