The solution — or at least the beginnings of it — came in the form of a gift from Ed Vail. He’d come up to the house one evening for dinner after helping Herbie unload supplies from the Vaquero, and somehow — maybe because she couldn’t get it out of her mind — the conversation shifted from the weather, conditions at sea and people they knew in common to the letter from the school district and how upset it had made them. “What you need is a schoolhouse,” Ed said, pausing over the lamb chops he was always happy to see when he came for dinner on their island, because, as he liked to say, I’m up to here with beef. He held the moment, then took up his knife and fork and began cutting. “I’ve got just the thing for you.”
The next time the Vaquero came round, there was a brightly painted structure dominating the foredeck. From a distance it looked to be a second wheelhouse, though that was impossible — this was a working boat, as she well knew, and the deck was needed for sheep and cattle. When she got closer, she saw what it was — a wood-frame playhouse, white with sky blue trim and a narrow door that must have been no more than five feet high. The whole thing wasn’t much bigger than the toolshed and it had to be partially dismantled to get it off the boat and up the hill, but she was thrilled with it. Ed had built it for his own children, now grown, and it was a regular little house, with windows cut in the exact center of each of the walls, and a sturdy peaked roof. Herbie set it in the middle of the courtyard, beside the flagpole, up which he ceremonially raised the Stars and Stripes once the schoolhouse was anchored in place, and then he went out to the barn and came back with Buck and the sled and the three-hundred-fifty-pound bronze ship’s bell he’d dug out of the beach the year before, frame and all.
The girls, who’d been slamming in and out of their new schoolhouse as if they were on holiday (which they were, at least for the time being: she’d have to see to desks, maps, a globe and a chalkboard to make the conversion complete), stopped in their tracks when Herbie led the horse through the gate. “What’s that for?” Marianne asked, pointing to the bell, and Herbie, sweating from the effort though the day was windy and overcast, made as if he didn’t know what she was talking about.
“What do you mean?”
“That,” she said, coming up to touch a tentative finger to the brass shell while her sister held back as if it might erupt with a life all its own.
“Oh, that?” Herbie said, as if he’d just discovered it there on the sled. “That’s your school bell. And you know what a school bell is for?”
“No.”
“So you never have an excuse to be late. Or your sister either.”
After that, they kept regular sessions, eight to twelve and one to four, with an hour off for lunch, following the curriculum — and the texts — the school district sent out to them, and Elise made sure to test her pupils and send in the results as required at the end of each term. Though she didn’t have a teacher’s credential, the school district waived the requirement, considering the special circumstances of the arrangement, and the San Miguel Island school, with its enrollment of two, was officially sanctioned for business.
The biggest problem? Neither of the girls knew anything of the outside world and so they were forever interrupting their reading with questions about things anyone else would have taken for granted. (“Mother, what’s a coin? Mother, what’s a car? Mother, what’s a pig? Is it a kind of sheep?”) There were illustrations in the encyclopedia, of course, and the pictures she cut from magazines and tacked up on the walls, but there was nothing like doing and seeing — they’d never laid eyes on a tree, either one of them, or maybe Marianne had, but she would have been too young to remember — and so, the following summer, at the end of their first school year, she got Herbie to ask Bob Brooks and Jimmie to stay on for a few days after the shearers left so they could take the girls to Santa Barbara. On vacation. Summer vacation. It was high time they expanded their horizons, that was the way she saw it, and if they came across three-story buildings, street crossings and stop signs or the railway with its locomotives and the passenger cars clanking behind, automobiles, bicycles, the market and drugstore and all the rest, so much the better.
Of course, the press got wind of it, and everywhere they went they were trailed by reporters and photographers, the Swiss Family Lester treating their progeny to shoes in an actual shoe store and dinner at a restaurant where you sat down and people came up to take your order and serve you, to a tour of the bank and the courthouse, and best of all, to the drugstore for the first ice-cream cones they’d ever raised to their lips. And so what if every drip and lick was recorded for posterity? The girls were their shy and sweet selves and Herbie beamed and strutted and crowed and kept up a patter with the reporters that could have filled the next dozen editions of the newspaper. She made the girls pay for the ice cream themselves — or hand over the coins, that is, a nickel each — because that was part of the lesson too. Yes, there was a world out there beyond the island. And yes, there was ice cream in that world, and yes, my darlings, my daughters, my loves, people paid for things there with pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters.
* * *
And then there was a day, it might have been in 1939 or even 1940, she couldn’t remember, a day of overarching light and gusts so strong they threatened to tatter the flag where it snapped at the pole, when a package wrapped in brown paper and trussed up firmly with half a ball of string appeared as if by magic on the front doorstep. She’d been in the schoolhouse with the girls, drilling Marianne on long division and Betsy on alternating columns of addition and subtraction, and Herbie had been out on one of his reconnaissance patrols to check on the far-flung sheep and sniff out signs of poachers, so no one had seen a thing. Nor had she or the girls heard the gate open and close, and that was because they were absorbed in their lessons. And because of the wind. Which tended to rock the schoolhouse on the pallets that kept it just off the ground while it shot under the eaves with a dull roar that more than once had fooled them into thinking George was coming in for a landing in his new Beechcraft Staggerwing airplane. At any rate — and this had happened before — she concluded that one of their yachting friends must have stopped by and delivered the package, and not finding Herbie and not wanting to disturb the lessons, had stolen away without a word. But why then hadn’t they at least left a note? It was a mystery. As was the package, which Marianne stumbled over when she and her sister raced each other across the courtyard and darted in the door for lunch.
It was addressed to Herbert Steever Lester, Esquire, San Miguel Island, California, U.S.A., and the return address was stamped Ethiopian Embassy, Washington, D.C. She brought it in and set it on the kitchen table, and though she was eaten up with curiosity and the girls kept pestering her to open it, she left it for Herbie — he was the one who’d written the emperor, after all — and made use of the opportunity to give the girls a geography lesson after lunch. Where was Ethiopia? “Right here,” she said, revolving the globe halfway round to show the dark continent and the mountainous wedge of the ancient land on its eastern horn, right across from the Arabian Peninsula. “And you know the Arabian Peninsula, right? Where the Arabs are? Remember The Arabian Nights?”
Herbie came in looking exhausted. He’d stumbled across the remains of a campfire on the beach at Chinese Point that was so fresh the embers were still glowing, and had searched the entire shoreline, fruitlessly, as it turned out, and he’d gone far out of his way and used up all the water in his canteen so that he had to find a seep just to wet his mouth. He must have fallen too, judging from the fresh wet scab glistening on his left knee. The minute he walked in the door, the girls jumped in his arms, but instead of dancing them round the room as he usually did, he just hugged them to him and dropped them down again, then lifted his head to give her a tired grin. “How about a little splash of whiskey before dinner?” he said. “Will you join me?”