T. Boyle - San Miguel

She was silent a moment, Herbie leaning forward to retrieve the letter and fold it reverently back into the envelope. George sat across from her, hovering over his coffee cup and wearing a benign smile. She felt the first stirrings of something she couldn’t name, a kind of superstitious tension, as if she were a girl all over again and going out of her way to step on every crack in the sidewalk to see what the fates had in store for her. “I don’t know,” she said finally. “But truthfully? If you want to know, I don’t think it’s such a good idea.”

“Not a good idea?” His face took on a look of incredulity. “What do you mean? We’re going to be in the papers — we’ll be famous.”

She shrugged. “That’s what I mean.” A look for George. “We’ve got all the society we want right now, what with the friends we’ve made from the yacht club and people coming out almost every week it seems, in good weather, at least. Do we really want more of them? Strangers trooping up here at all hours, bursting in on us as if we were put here solely for their amusement, and then, of course, we’ve got to be courteous to them no matter what. Or those boys in the powerboat taking target practice on the seals, when was it, a month ago? You really want more of that sort of thing?”

He looked hurt, astonished. “No,” he said, insisting now, “no, you’re crazy. Publicity’s good, the best thing that can happen to us. It means money, Elise”—and here he turned to George to make the characteristic gesture, thumb and first two fingers rubbed together over an open palm—“and money’s been in short supply lately. I made twenty-five dollars for that lecture I gave to the Adventurers’ Club, don’t forget. And I’ve got feelers out to the museum and the colleges down in Los Angeles too. People are fascinated by what we’re doing out here, Elise, they are. They just wish they could live like us, live free, I mean. Isn’t that right, George?”

* * *

Richard Blakely appeared a week later, swinging open the door of the Cabin Waco and hurrying across the blistered stubble of the lower pasture, George, laden with the mailbag and half a dozen packages, bringing up the rear. The reporter was young, younger than she would have thought — not much more than thirty — and he wore a double-breasted suit with exaggerated shoulders and he used so much pomade on his hair it shone like neon from all the way across the field. He hadn’t even got to the house before the questions started in: How did they like the isolation? Weren’t they ever bored? What about the movies — didn’t they want to go to the movies? Or shopping. What about shopping? He heard they had a radio now — how was that? Amos ’n’ Andy ? Oh, yeah? That was his favorite too. But what was that noise? Seals? Was that the seals?

He was thin and slump-shouldered, he wore a little dandy’s mustache and had the habit of winking his right eye — or was it a tic? — when he asked questions, and for the next three days he never stopped asking them. She barely knew what to say — and he was underfoot the whole time, except when Herbie took him out to show him over the island, an expedition he didn’t seem particularly enthusiastic about, before or after — but Herbie matched him syllable for syllable, and the two of them chattered on from breakfast until late into the night when she excused herself and went off to bed with Richard Blakely’s voice ringing in her ears: Really? Only twelve hundred in the flock? Is that because the place was overgrazed in the past? Is that the reason for all these sand dunes? What about the sandstorms? Tell me, what are they like?

The article, which George flew out to them the Sunday it appeared, was titled “The Happy Family That Rules a Kingdom.” In it, she was described as “the Queen of the realm, dressed in a gingham skirt and a white pullover she’d spun from the wool of the very sheep her husband kept watch over in the lorn and lonely meadows of the misty isle far from shore.” Herbie read it aloud, crowing over one phrase or another, as proud as if he’d written it himself, and he read it to the girls too, though the little one could barely make sense of it and Marianne only perked up when he got to the phrase “… and their pretty young daughters, the princesses of the sceptered isle, are as fair and sweetly innocent as the diminutive heroines of their own fairy tale.”

George had thought to invest in three copies, two of which Herbie laid carefully in the trunk of keepsakes in the bedroom before taking his scissors to the remaining copy. He cut out the entire article, including the hazy photograph of the four of them posed at the front gate with dazed eyes and fixed smiles, and thumbtacked it to the kitchen wall just below the calendar from the Remington Company that depicted a vigorous-looking man in a flannel shirt cleaning his gun while his faithful retriever looked wistfully on.

* * *

That story opened the floodgates, not only on the central coast but throughout the state and across the country too. The Associated Press picked it up and syndicated it nationwide so that her parents and her two brothers and two sisters found it laid out on the table when they came down to breakfast in their households back in New York. Her mother wrote her immediately, on the rebound, all hint of complaint replaced by a glow of reflected pride (“Perhaps you have made the best decision after all, and I was just too blind to see it”) and she heard from people who hadn’t written in years, distant cousins, forgotten acquaintances, her roommate from her days in the flat on East Seventy-second Street, who wrote to say she’d like to come for a visit. There were more reporters, more stories. The headlines vied with one another for attention—“Eight Years in Solitary”; “Couple Rules Lonely Island as Absolute Monarchs”; “War-Torn Veteran Turns Back on Society to Find Peace in Solitude of Isolated Kingdom”—but the stories were all more or less the same.

Still, people couldn’t seem to get enough of them. The way Herbie saw it, they were only getting their due, because they were special, singled out, anointed, above and beyond the run of the common wage slaves out there, but she didn’t see it that way at all. To her, the whole uproar was nothing more than a case of escapism, people beaten down by the Depression and fearful of the coming war and only wanting to rest their eyes and let their minds roam free over the idyll the papers presented, all the sweat and toil and scraping and scrimping conveniently left out of the scenario.

Letters began to pour in (care of George Hammond, Esquire, Bonnymede), letters from utter strangers who wanted to advise them, congratulate them, criticize them, move in with them, and with the letters came unasked-for gifts. Steamship lines sent them framed oil paintings of ships at sea, magazines sent free subscriptions. There were Coleman lanterns, a butter churn, a pair of axe handles, a peanut butter jar of assorted screws, hand-knit mittens, sweaters and caps, a braided throw rug, a year’s supply of Wrigley’s gum. Patiently — at first, anyway — she answered each of the letters, no matter how odd or unctuous they were, and sent thank-you notes in acknowledgment of the gifts, which began to accumulate in the toolshed to the point where you could hardly get in the door there anymore. And every time the flood seemed to subside, another article would appear and it would rise all over again.

Kate Smith featured a tribute to their pioneer spirit on her radio program and the actress Jeanette MacDonald heard it and sent them a cream-colored puppy named Pomo in token of her admiration and solidarity, the first of a whole menagerie of pets people shipped via boat or dropped off personally. The gander — they called him Father Goose — soon had plenty of company, including a trained and very vocal raven Ed Vail personally handed her on stepping off the Vaquero one afternoon and a series of cats people misguidedly gave them (or abandoned on the beach), despite Herbie’s prohibition against them. But then you couldn’t very well give a kitten back once the boat had pulled out of the harbor or wrench it from your children’s arms either, and so there were cats on the island again and the mice just had to suffer. (“I’ll shoot them all,” Herbie muttered, but then she came in one night to see him sprawled on the couch with the white Persian the girls had named Mr. Fluff asleep in his lap, and he never mentioned the mice again. As a subsidiary benefit, things quieted down in the pantry in the dark of night, when Mr. Fluff made his rounds.)