“Yes,” she said, “that sounds nice. Oh, and by the way, this came for you.”
As soon as he saw the package he came to life — or no, he took off like a rocket, every cell and fiber of him alive with excitement. He turned it over in his hands, reading out the return address in a voice of wonder. “What do you think of that, girls — all the way from Africa. You know where Ethiopia is?”
They both nodded impatiently. “Open it, Daddy,” Marianne pleaded, and in the next moment both girls were jumping up and down, chanting, “Open it, open it!”
She brought him a knife and he cut the string and tore the paper away from the box, which was the size and shape of the boxes shoes come in. “What do you know,” he said, mugging for the girls, “Haile Selassie sent me a new pair of shoes.”
Inside there was a letter from the deposed emperor — or one of his subordinates — thanking Herbie for his generous offer and his support for the regime in exile, which only awaited the day when the Fascisti were defeated and the Lion of Judah could return to his rightful throne. No mention was made of the years that had gone by since Herbie had made his offer or of the fact that it was moot now because the Italians were in Addis Ababa and looked to stay for a good long while, but in the depths of the box, wrapped in tissue paper, were two shining gold-braided epaulets, given, the letter said, to grant the addressee royal status in the emperor’s court.
Dinner could wait. Whiskey could wait. There was nothing for it but that Elise had to sit right down, right that minute (well, okay, he would pour the whiskey now, in celebration) and sew the epaulets to the shoulders of his best white shirt. When it was done, he modeled the shirt in the mirror, happy as a schoolboy, and then he drained his glass, filled it again, and took the elephant gun down from its mount, slung it over one shoulder and marched the girls round the courtyard—hep one, hep two—until dinner was on the table and they could sit down and give thanks not only for the food before them but for the wise and beneficent Lion of Judah and his steadfast ally, the King of San Miguel.
Bluer
Little money had come in, no matter how wide their fame had spread, but when the National Weather Bureau decided to establish a reporting station on the island — to set them up with a two-way radio and instruments for measuring temperature, wind speed and barometric pressure and pay them a wage for sending in reports twice a day on a regular schedule — Herbie jumped at the chance. Ten years back, when they’d first come out to the island, he might have dreamed of buying out Bob Brooks, but the Depression had put an end to that — and to his bid to have Hugh Rockwell step in as silent partner and rescue him. That had been a blow he never fully recovered from, and it had hurt him too that none of his schemes for lecturing or capturing seals or selling the bones of sea elephants ever came to fruition, but he never stopped scraping for sources of income. Now, though, with the twenty-five dollars a week the weather bureau was giving them, for the first time at least they had something coming in that wasn’t dependent on Bob Brooks or Hugh Rockwell or any other millionaire businessman, current or former. Things were beginning to look up. Or at least that was the way she saw it.
Still, they had to get up in the dark every morning, take the measurements and transmit them to a station ashore and then do it all over again at night, seven days a week, without fail, and she wasn’t really at her best that early or that late either — and neither was he. The schedule began to wear on them. One anonymous winter morning, the rain and wind relentless, the house freezing, they both struggled out of bed and right away he started carping at her and she snapped back at him and before she could think they were shouting at each other.
“It’s you,” he accused. “It’s all your fault. And why I ever let you talk me into this shitty weather job, I’ll never know.”
“Me talk you into it? You were the one who couldn’t stop going on about how it was like picking money off a tree—”
“I don’t care, I want to quit.”
“And what about the money?”
“To hell with the money. I say we write Billy Rose — or no, go ashore and wire him, wire him right this minute, today — and tell him we accept his offer.”
“We’ve been through that already.” Billy Rose was one of the impresarios of the San Francisco Exhibition and he’d wanted to fly them up there to be his guests onstage for a limited engagement, the Swiss Family Lester arrayed for everyone to see while Billy Rose teased out the jokes about sheep and islands and cooking on a woodstove, then turned to Marianne to mug and wink and lean in close and ask, “You like any of the kids in your school, honey?” while the crowd howled and the dollars poured in. They’d both rejected it, as they had the offer from Movietone News to make a newsreel feature, because they both—both—agreed that they wouldn’t want to subject the children to that kind of poking and prodding and cheap commercialism.
“I don’t care. I want to wire him.”
“No. Absolutely not.”
“It’s a chance to make money, maybe big money—”
“No.”
“Who are you to tell me no? I’m the authority here, I’m the King of San Miguel, not you. You’re not the one they all want to come see, you’re not the one they interview — it’s me. Me. And I’ll do as I damn please, whether you like it or not.”
She had a cold, she was irritable, her nose was dripping and her head ached, and Marianne, running a low-grade fever, had kept her up half the night. She wasn’t herself and she should have left it there, she knew it, but she couldn’t. “Stop fooling yourself,” she shot back, “we’re the king and queen of nothing, it’s a joke,” and her voice wasn’t even her own — it was somebody else’s, somebody strident and heartless. “Are you kidding me? We’re as broke as we were when we got here — what do we own besides your guns and my books and the clothes on our backs? And we’re at the mercy of Bob Brooks, who could close this operation down tomorrow if he wanted to — and you know it.”
He was leaning over the bedside, lacing up his boots, his hair mussed, his shoulders slumped, his every motion jerky with anger. The stove had gone cold. The house smelled of ash, cats, something gone rotten in the walls. She was at the bureau, wondering what to wear (not that there was a lot of choice: she tended to wear the same thing every day, skirt, blouse, sweater, support hose and flat shoes), when all at once he jumped to his feet, snatched his white shirt off the arm of the chair and shook it in her face till the epaulets blazed in the light of the bedside lamp. “I’m king,” he shouted, “whether you want to admit it or not. And Bob Brooks would never in his life even think of doing anything to hurt us and if he ever did that’s just all the more reason to wire Billy Rose right this minute and get on that airplane.”
They never quarreled. Or hardly ever. It set a bad example for the children, for one thing. She could read his moods, play to him, wait him out. And more often than not she gave in to him. But not this time. Not where the children were involved. The rain grew suddenly louder, as if they were hearing it broadcast over the radio and someone had turned up the volume. “No,” she said.