T. Boyle - San Miguel

Herbie took to the baby — they called her Betsy for short — just as he had to Marianne. If he was disappointed in being denied a son yet again, he didn’t let it show. By the time Betsy was able to take hold of the finger he offered and smile up at him, he was as smitten as he’d been with Marianne, a good father, sound and giving and patient. The days settled in. The sky arched high, crept low, the rain came and went, the wind blew from the north. She mixed infant formula on the stove, hung diapers out to dry. She cooked and cleaned and looked after her daughters and her husband. This was life, this was release and joy — not tedium, not tedium at all. Yes. Absolutely. And now they were four, a twofold increase in the population of San Miguel since the census taker had recorded his data in 1930.

One summer morning she was out in the yard with the girls, tending masochistically to her flower garden that was doomed by poor soil, incessant wind and the birds that seemed to have nothing else green to attack for miles around, when she was startled by a ratcheting mechanical whine that seemed to be coming from every direction at once. She looked up, bewildered, and there it was: an airplane circling the house, one man forward, another aft, and both of them wearing leathern helmets and goggles that glinted in the light of a pale milky sun that was just then poking through the mist. As if this wasn’t startling enough, the thing dipped its wings and shot down like a needle toward the sheepcote in back of the house, leveling off just above the ground before circling once more and coming in for a landing. She watched it jolt across the field, the propeller a blur, wheels bouncing over the ruts, the fuselage jerking back and forth as if it were being tugged in two directions at once, and then it lurched to a halt and the two men were climbing down to earth like visitors from another planet.

Herbie was nowhere to be seen — as it turned out, he’d been down on the beach collecting driftwood and was already running at full bore up the road to the house, as startled and amazed as she — and Jimmie was off the island altogether, working for Bob Brooks at his ranch in Carpinteria. She put down the trowel she’d been using to loosen the soil around the withered stems of her geraniums, wiped her hands on her dress, snatched up the baby and took Marianne by the hand, then started across the yard and out the gate to see this marvel up close.

The taller of the men — a good six feet and two hundred pounds, forty years old or thereabout — was smoothing back his hair with one hand and hoisting a satchel to his shoulder with the other. He was dressed in shirt and tie and there were reddened indentations round the orbits of his eyes where the goggles had pinched the flesh there. The other man was Herbie’s size and looked to be in his thirties. He was wearing a leather flight jacket and doing his best to look blasé, as if he’d been landing here every day of his life.

“Elise?” the first man said, coming forward and holding out a hand to her. She shifted the baby and took his hand, giving him a wondering look: how did he know her name?

“Yes,” she stammered. “I’m Elise, I’m she—”

“I’m George Hammond, from Montecito,” he said, pointing vaguely behind her and across the channel. “At Bonnymede? My mother’s a friend of Mrs. Felton.”

Now she was at an utter loss. Ten minutes ago she’d been secure in the knowledge that she was one of only four people on one of the most isolated and forbidding islands in America, part of a tribe, a family, society reduced to its essence, and now she was standing before an absolute stranger — two strangers — in an old rag of a sweater, with dirt on her hands and two oily patches of the same on the front of her dress where her knees had pressed into the earth while she dug in her garden with a hand tool and the children played beside her and her own private clouds drifted overhead. And the stranger was speaking with her as if they’d casually bumped into each other at a charity ball or cocktail party. She couldn’t help herself. “Who?” she said.

“She’s a friend of my mother.”

Still nothing.

“Who happens to be a cousin of your mother — Una, Una Felton? — and who, at the suggestion of your mother, felt that John and I (this is John Jeffries, by the way) might want to stop by and say hello. And to see, well, if everything’s going forward and if you might need anything, that is, if there’s anything that John and I might be able to help you with.”

And now suddenly it came clear. Cousin Una. Her mother. These men with the flattened hair and circular marks impressed round their eyes — they were two missives in the flesh sent here from Rye, New York, that was what they were. Her mother had always been suspicious of Herbie— that Lothario, she called him, that adventurer —seeing their marriage as the classic case of the spinster swept off her feet by a suave ne’er-do-well whose motives would always be suspect, no matter if they were married for fifty years. Her letters had been increasingly strident of late, calling into question her daughter’s judgment, not to mention sanity, in trying to raise babies, her own grandchildren, in a place out beyond the end of nowhere, a dangerous place, isolated and bereft, where anything could happen. And that anything, of course, never incorporated notions of happiness, fulfillment or serenity but exclusively the calamities that befell people living on islands — and she sent on a stream of newspaper clippings in evidence, accounts of people starving in the Hebrides or drowning off Block Island or Martha’s Vineyard or dying of strokes, seizures and in one case an apricot pit lodged in the windpipe, before help could arrive. Her mother was looking out for her. And here were George Hammond and John Jeffries, dropped down from the sky. What could she do but thank them and invite them into the house?

They were seated on the sofa in the living room, the door open wide to the sun and the hearth gone cold because it was high summer now and the weather had warmed into the sixties despite the persistent blow, when Herbie came bursting through the doorway, and it wasn’t at all like the day the Japanese had come. The two men had been minding the children a moment while she went out to the kitchen for refreshments, Marianne playing with a scatter of homemade toys at their feet and the baby laid out on a blanket between them. She’d just set down a platter of sourdough biscuits and a saucer displaying the last of their butter, with a glass of water for Hammond and a cup of hot tea for his companion, and was bending to take up the baby again, already overflowing with gratitude for these amateur aviators who’d braved the wind and fog to bring her secondhand greetings from her mother and a satchel of letters to back them up (not to mention six dozen eggs, a twelve-pound ham and a live turkey hen in a wicker cage), and here was Herbie, a volcano of excitement rattling over the floorboards in his hobnail boots, eager to pump the hands of their visitors and know everything there was to know about them and their insuperable biplane.

Introductions went round. Herbie slipped Dreiser aside and produced the vanilla-scented whiskey, and while Hammond begged off—“Can’t fly cockeyed, you know”—his partner accepted it gladly. There was a moment of silence, all of them watching Jeffries’ face as he first sipped gingerly, then threw back the glass.

“That’s thirty years — and more — in the cask,” Herbie said, pouring for himself now. “You ever tasted anything smoother?”

Jeffries made a show of smacking his lips. “Goes down like water.”

“You don’t mind the scent, the vanilla, I mean?”

“Vanilla? No, not at all. I don’t smell a thing. But then”—and he held out the glass, grinning—“maybe I’d better take another sample, just to be sure.”