T. Boyle - San Miguel

At the end of July, on a fine high clear day that brought the mainland so close it was as if the channel were a tranquil little pond you could swim across in fifteen minutes, she found herself on Charlie Curner’s schooner once again. Her stepfather was taking her to Santa Barbara for three days. On business. She was to stay at a boardinghouse for women presided over by someone called Mrs. Amelia Cawthorne and she was not to leave the house for any reason except under her stepfather’s or Mrs. Cawthorne’s supervision. That was the promise she’d made, and what choice did she have? — it was either promise and go or refuse and be left behind. I want your solemn oath, he’d said, and she’d given it, gladly, humbly, with shining eyes and a smile of fawning gratitude. She’d all but curtsied — and would have, would have done anything — except that it might have aroused his suspicions, and she didn’t want that. The fact was that in the past three months her stepfather had been twice to the mainland without her — he’d taken Jimmie the second time, as if to rub salt in her wounds, and she’d been left alone with Adolph and the sheep and a misery so deep and all-abiding she couldn’t get out of bed the whole time and if Adolph complained to her stepfather because he’d missed his three square meals a day she never knew of it. Or cared. So she made a promise, swore it to his face, On my soul, on the Bible, as God is my witness, a promise she had every intention of breaking the moment she was clear.

Mrs. Cawthorne was a large woman, a matron sunk in fat whose husband, a boatwright, had been lost at sea in one of his own creations twenty years past. She had pinched narrow eyes — squinting, always squinting — and a way of claiming all the space in any room she happened to be occupying. The other boarders — there were three — were spinsters in various stages of decrepitude. Her stepfather paid in advance and informed the landlady that he’d be back in the morning to fetch his daughter and take her with him on the rounds of his errands. In the meanwhile — and here he’d given her a significant look before turning back to Mrs. Cawthorne, who stood there in the center of the parlor working one swollen hand in the grip of the other — she was exhausted from the journey and would no doubt want to go up to her room directly after dinner. The landlady had squinted at her, giving her a long look of appraisal. One of the spinsters, ancient, with claws for hands, who’d been napping in an overstuffed armchair by the fire, came awake with a snort and glanced up sharply. Her stepfather said, “Isn’t that right, Edith?” Stupefied — he wasn’t even going to let her look in the shop windows or take her to dinner or his hotel or anyplace at all? — she just nodded dumbly.

In the night she awoke in the dark to a whole symphony of strange noises, of water shifting through the pipes and the house creaking and groaning as the hours chipped away at it, the barking of the neighbor’s dog, a soft hiss from beyond the windows as if a giant were sweeping the streets with a broom made from an upended tree. Her stepfather had given her a single dollar in spending money, as if to say, Let’s see how far you can get on that, but what he didn’t know about, what no one knew about, not even Ida, who’d handed her the envelope, was the bracelet her mother had left her. She had it with her now, wrapped in tissue paper and secreted in her purse. For a long moment she lay listening to the sounds of the house, then she rose from the bed and dressed in the dark.

The suitcase she would leave behind. She needed to be unencumbered, needed to get out, into the streets, and hide herself somewhere until the pawnshop opened, and then she would go there to give over her mother’s bracelet and take money in return. And then what? Then she would start walking — on the road out of town that ran up through San Marcos Pass to Cold Spring Tavern, where she would catch the stage north after it left Santa Barbara, and if anyone should come along the road in a wagon or buggy or on horseback, she would hide herself in the bushes till they passed. It would be a long walk — ten miles, fifteen? — and most of it uphill. But it was nothing to her — all she’d done on the island was walk.

The house was as dark as the inside of a closet, the windows shut tight and the shades drawn. She felt her way along the corridor and down the stairs, spots floating before her eyes in random patterns, straining to see and seeing nothing. There was a rustling, a moan, the faint whisper of one of the old women snoring in her bed behind an invisible door. Shuffling her feet, one step at a time, afraid of stumbling into a chair or table and giving herself away, she read the wainscoting with her fingertips like one of the blind. She bumped into something — wood, cloth there, the coat tree? — and then finally she was at the door. She felt for the doorknob, gripped it, twisted it, but the door wouldn’t open. The latch, where was the latch? She ran her fingers over the smooth wooden plane, feeling for the latch, but there was no latch, only a keyhole, and the keyhole was empty. She was trying to come to grips with that — had the landlady actually locked them all in? What if there was a fire? An earthquake? But there must have been a back door and that couldn’t be locked too, could it? — when there was a noise behind her and the room came to sudden life.

Mrs. Cawthorne, in her nightgown, her feet bare and her expression blank, was standing there at the edge of the carpet, a candle held aloft in a pewter dish. “What’s going on here? Who is it now?” she demanded.

She was a very fat woman, fat and lazy and old, and Edith felt a surge of contempt for her. She said nothing.

The light wavered as the landlady took a step closer, her eyes lost in the dark tumid contours of her face. “Is that the new boarder? Edith, is it?”

“Yes. I was looking for a glass of water. I was thirsty.”

For a long moment the landlady merely squinted at her, breathing heavily, a gasp and wheeze that scratched away at the silence of the sleeping house. Then she said, “There’s a glass and pitcher on the table in your room.” Another silence. “Right next to the lamp.”

* * *

During the course of the next three days, Edith’s stepfather took her out for a meal exactly once, at a cheap restaurant where men with snarled whiskers and bad teeth sat sucking at one thing or another and everything stank of sour milk and chili beans, and he took her to the shops exactly twice, to buy toilette things, cloth for a new dress to replace the ones that were so worn and stained they’d become an embarrassment, and, of course, to lay in supplies at the grocer’s — more sacks of beans, more rice, more flour. Each sack, as the clerk checked it off in his ledger and she stood there at the counter trying to keep from screaming, was a weight drawing her down, another link in the chain she had to drag behind her like Marley’s ghost, dead in life, dead on her feet, dead to the world.

She was up in her room, plotting frantically, when her stepfather came to take her back to the ship. She’d seen no one, seen nothing, and now she was to go back. It wasn’t fair. It was criminal. An insult. Hadn’t Lincoln freed the slaves? Wasn’t this America? For three days she’d watched for her opportunity, even measuring the distance from the second-story window to the nearest tree, but Mrs. Cawthorne was like a watchdog and her stepfather was worse — he was Argus of the hundred eyes, keen to her every movement. Mechanically, she paced from the dresser to the bed, packing her suitcase and listening to the voices rising from below.

“I want to thank you,” her father was saying, and then he paused and she imagined them nodding at each other in satisfaction, the prisoner in her hole and a job well done. “I appreciate your keeping an eye on her.”