T. Boyle - San Miguel

So it went on. The week became two weeks, became three, then a month. She didn’t know what to do. Every time she made up her mind to pack up and go to him and damn the consequences, another letter arrived to say she should stay put and that he’d be back on the next boat, the whole business nothing more than a hiccup in their lives. She lingered over the bed in their room, gazed at the pictures on the wall, the deck chairs from the SS Harvard, the fireplace they’d built together, and felt that she was the one made of paper.

She was with Jimmie one night in the kitchen — he was good with the baby, dancing her round the room while she did the dishes — and after she put Marianne to bed she sat chatting with him. He was a good talker, though his subjects were limited, and he was unfailingly cheerful, even when he neglected to fill up the woodbox or tracked mud into the house and she had to scold him. He was sitting at the table with a cup of coffee and she sat down across from him with a cup of Postum because she didn’t want the caffeine, not at night. “You know,” he said, “that daughter of yours is a doll, a real living doll.”

“Yes,” she said, “but she’s Herbie’s daughter, you can see that. The energy of that child. She wears me out.”

He seemed to consider this, staring past her and sipping reflectively at his coffee. After a moment he said, “You know, there was another girl out here on the island. Years ago, this was. A real natural beauty. And wild. Wild as all get-out. But she wasn’t a girl, really, more a young woman.” His eyes sank into the memory and then he looked directly at her. “Maybe you heard of her? Captain Waters’ daughter — or stepdaughter, that is?”

She shook her head.

“Inez Deane,” he said, leaning across the table on the pivots of his forearms. “You never heard of Inez Deane?”

“No,” she said softly.

“The actress? She was famous, all manner of famous. And I knew her when I was no more than a boy myself. Edith, her name was then. Edith Waters. You should of seen her.”

Edith — Inez — had escaped with Bob Ord (“Yes,” Jimmie drawled, forestalling her, “the same Bob Ord, but he was younger then, a whole lot younger, but then who wasn’t?”). She lived with him on his boat two days and a night off Gaviota, where he gave her the money to take the stage north. What she’d given him in return, Jimmie couldn’t say, though he’d quizzed Ord on the subject for close to forty years now and Ord would just get a faraway look in his eyes and say that a lady’s secrets were her own to keep, and a gentleman — and he was a gentleman whether he scraped shit off a rock and sold it to farmers and munitions makers or not — would never tell. The Captain never gave her any money, not a nickel, though her mother had left him something and the ranch too, but she had a valuable piece of jewelry hidden away in her bag or maybe sewed into her hem and when she got to San Francisco she was able to hock it for enough to get her a room and some new dresses and combs and makeup, enough to hold her while she went the rounds of her auditions at every theater there was in town.

“I seen her once on the stage — in Los Angeles, it was. The Burbank Theater. Captain Waters never knew about it, though by that time — it must have been aught-two or somewhere in there — he knew what she’d become, married and divorced and a mother already. I saved the handbill they give you all these years because it was the most remarkable thing I ever seen — I admit I haven’t maybe seen much, but I’ve been to picture shows since and the vaudeville too, and this was the best, truly. She was playing in The Tar and Tartar, the starring part, and it had a whole slew of songs in it. I remember she come out to the front of the stage to sing a duet with Herbert Wilke—‘Let Us Pretend’—you know that song? No? It’s a beautiful air. If you heard her sing it, just once, you’d never forget it. She had an angel’s voice. An angel’s . And I knew her. Right here on this island.”

The night had settled in. The house was quiet, but for the usual sounds, a creak and groan of the timbers, the fugitive gnawing of a mouse under the floorboards, wind — the eternal wind. “How long did she live out here?” she asked. “In the other house, I mean. The old house?”

Jimmie had to think about it. He extracted a cigarette from his shirt pocket, licked it and stuck it between his lips. “Well, she was here in eighty-eight, when her mother was alive still, and that’s when I first met her. And then she come back with the Captain for a stretch — he wouldn’t let her go ashore for fear she’d run off, which is just what happened, of course — and that must’ve been ninety or ninety-one. We were close then because there was just the two of us young people out here. You could say we were playmates, I guess.” He struck a match and lit the cigarette, looking satisfied with himself. “If you catch my meaning.”

“She was your sweetheart then, is that it?”

He looked away, exhaled. A thin smile settled on his lips. “Yeah,” he said, “she was my sweetheart. But once she left here she was on her own and within the year up there in San Francisco she married some actor she was in a play with — or I don’t know if she was in a play yet. I think she started out sewing costumes and the like. But she married him and she had a baby, Dorothy, back down in Los Angeles where they moved so she could be in something at the Merced and I don’t guess she was more than twenty years old at the time. He was no good, though. Didn’t pay his way, is what I heard, one of that type that think a woman’s supposed to be the support of a man, which never would have happened if she’d wound up marrying me, that’s for sure.”

She tried to picture it, the young girl, the actress, who’d once lived out here with all the space in the world, abandoned and living in a bleak walkup apartment like the one they’d had to rent after Marianne came, streetcars clattering past the window, drunks shouting in the streets at all hours. A baby to take care of. And no parents to turn to.

“What happened to the baby?”

He shook his head. “That’s a sad story.”

“She didn’t die, did she?”

“No, no, she didn’t die. Or not then, anyway. Edith — I mean, Inez — left her with a woman in Los Angeles and went back up to Frisco. ‘See if you can’t find someone to adopt her,’ is what she told her, “cold, just like that. And that was the strangest thing — like begets like, I guess — because Edith herself was adopted, you know. Nobody knew who her parents were. Mrs. Waters adopted her before she married the Captain when she was just an infant, but then, and I’m sorry to say it, to give up her own daughter like that is what I’d call a hard case.

“Of course, and I followed this in the newspapers when it all come out, Dorothy, who I guess must of resembled her mother — pretty, that is, very pretty — got adopted not by just anybody off the street but a certified millionaire in the oil business. And then he got divorced and when he died — it was just two years after that, when the baby was only three or four years old — all the money went to her, to Dorothy. Millions. Can you believe it?”

Jimmie rose and crossed to the stove to pour himself another cup of coffee, then sat back down at the table and dumped enough sugar in it to make the spoon stand upright. He winked at her. “I like it sweet — never could get enough sweet things all my life, though it’s been hell on my teeth. But you only live once, right?”

She nodded. Sipped at her Postum, which tasted like what it was, scorched grain with hot water added, a taste she didn’t really like — a taste nobody could like, except maybe C. W. Post himself when he was alive. Awful stuff, really. But if she had a cup of tea — or coffee — she’d be awake all night long, worrying over Herbie.