T. Boyle - San Miguel

Then — and this was probably the height and culmination of the whole whirling circus that had swept them up whether they liked it or not— Life magazine sent a reporter and two photographers out to the island to document their day-to-day life for the edification of the magazine’s millions of readers. The photographs were first-rate, she had to admit that — Herbie shone and the girls were angelic, though she couldn’t help feeling she looked fat and unkempt in the two that featured her and she couldn’t stop thinking about how they’d be displayed for anyone to see in every drugstore and newsstand and dentist’s office in the country. The thought made her stomach sink. She pictured strangers — men on streetcars, greasy hoboes in stained trousers, mechanics, sailors, drunks — sneering over the photos, maybe doctoring them with beards and devil’s horns or worse. Perverts, even.

The article itself was no different from what had come before, except for some elaboration here and there, but it was the headline, “Swiss Family Lester,” that caught the public’s attention and brought them more mail than all the other articles combined. Herbie couldn’t have been happier. For her part, she laid two pristine copies of the magazine atop the other articles in the trunk of keepsakes and hoped they were the last.

She was in the living room with Herbie one fogbound night, listening to the radio and working through the latest batch of letters addressed variously to the Lesters of San Miguel, to Herbert Lester, Esq., or King Herbert, or simply to San Miguel Island—“fan mail,” as Herbie called it — when the deep booming lament of a ship’s horn cut through the room and brought her back to herself. “Thick out there tonight,” Herbie observed, looking up at her from the puddle of light the lamp threw over his desk.

“Thick in here too,” she said, “with all these letters.” She was seated in the wicker chair, a writing tablet in her lap and a fountain pen poised over the paper, answering what must have been her tenth letter of the night. “Sometimes I wish we’d never let that reporter come out here.”

“Which reporter?”

“The one from the Santa Barbara paper, the first one.”

He was wearing a pair of reading glasses, pushed halfway up his nose. The light of the lamp sparked in them as he turned his head to her and the room seemed to jump and settle again. “What,” he said, “you don’t enjoy writing to Mr. and Mrs. Anonymous every week?”

“No,” she said, “frankly, I don’t. And I wish we’d never started this business.”

He was quiet a moment, the corner flap of the letter he was writing propped up on the arch of one hand. “It’s got to pay off,” he said. “I know it will.”

“In what — all that junk they send us?”

“It’s not all junk — the axe handles, I found a use for them. And Pomo”—at the mention of his name, the dog lifted his head from where he lay sprawled before the fire, then dropped it again—“and Fred the raven.”

“I know they mean well, it’s not that — it’s just that they have a picture of us that isn’t true, isn’t real—”

“We’re not hardworking? We’re not in love? We don’t have the two smartest, sweetest, most beautiful little girls in the world?”

She smiled. “They all make too much of it, that’s what I mean. We’re not special, we’re just like anybody else, only luckier, I guess.”

He lowered his head to look at her over the glasses and she saw how his hair was going white across the top now and saw the gouges beneath his eyes and the damage the sun had wrought on his face. Was he old? Was he getting old? And if he was, then she was getting old too, and once you were old you had to start thinking about what came next. “Lucky, yeah,” he said, “but we haven’t made a nickel off any of this yet. But I’ve got a couple of schools on the line — I’m trying to set up a lecture tour back east, Saint Andrew’s, Saint Paul’s, Yale, Harvard, Princeton, the very best — but I need one of the pieces to fall into place before I can even think of going, and they all plead the same thing, no money, hard times, wait till next term—”

The foghorn sounded again, so close they might have been sitting on the foredeck of the ship itself. “Like soup,” Herbie said.

“I just hope they don’t go aground.”

“They won’t.”

She was going to ask him how he could be so sure, but he distracted her by snatching up a letter from the desk and waving it like a flag. “God,” he said, “you’ve got to see this one,” and in the next moment she rose and went to him and he pressed the single sheet flat on the desk beneath the halo of light. The paper was thin, the script minute, as if indited under a magnifying glass, the characters printed discretely, rigid black letters marching across the page in the way Marianne might have arranged them with her blocks.

DEER MR. AND MISSUS LESTER:

I AM AN OLD MAN SEVENTY TWO YEARS ON THIS URTH LIVING IN NORMAN OKLAHOMA AND I HAVE NOONE TO LOOK AFTER ME. I NEVER DID MARRY NOR HAVE ANY SONS NOR DOTTIRS AND I AM ON MY LONESOME ALL THESE YEARS. I AM STRONG YET AND VIGROUS AND I AM AFRAID TO DIE ALONE. WILL YOU TAKE ME IN TO LIVE WITH YOU AND YOUR BOOTIFUL FAMILY. I CAN EARN MY KEEP BETTER THAN MANY A YOUNGER MAN. PLEASE HEER ME AND SEND FAIR FOR THE BUS TO CAL.

VERY TRUELY YOURS,

MORRIS T. SWENSON

They were silent a moment, the house still, the light pooled on the desk. She could hear the dog’s breathing decelerate into sleep and then the first quavering whisper of a snore. Herbie turned to her. “You’re going to have to answer this one,” he said.

“No,” she said, “I can’t.”

“You have to.”

“I wouldn’t know what to say.”

“Tell him he’s going to have to die alone.”

“Herbie.”

“Or no, tell him we’re lucky, that’s all. Just lucky.”

“And he’s not?”

“Right. He’s not.”

There was no telling how Herbie would react to the news that came to them over the radio. Sometimes, he’d flick it off in disgust, right in the middle of a program, and go stomping and swearing through the house in a rage over the idiocy of the world and the way they were being corrupted by it, even out here. Other times, and this was true of the newspapers too, he would extract a few threads of information from one account or another and weave them into a salvatory scheme he talked up day and night till it began to sound plausible, even to her. His biggest bugbear during this period was Mussolini. When they got news that the little potbellied Italian clown prince had invaded Ethiopia, he’d taken it hard. This was Africa, the continent he dreamed of every time he glanced up at the elephant gun on the wall or took it reverently down to show it off to a visitor, and here the Italians were trying to colonize this huge expanse of it, and for what? he kept asking. To rape it and bleed it and force their will on natives in loincloths? “What next,” he said bitterly, “nomads eating spaghetti carbonara off the backs of their goats? Campari and soda in Addis Ababa?”

He sat riveted by the radio, agonizing over the reports of a modern army equipped with motor vehicles, tanks and machine guns cutting through Haile Selassie’s overmatched forces, whose antiquated weapons belonged in a museum and whose starving horses and blundering mules were shot out from under them and left for the vultures on their black soaring wings. “Spears, they’re using spears, Elise,” he kept saying. “We’ve got to do something. We can’t just sit around and let these people be slaughtered.”

She commiserated, of course, but to her mind the whole business was merely an exercise, a passing phase, another of her husband’s obsessions that would occupy him for a week or two and then fade away as the next arose on the horizon, and she was right, to an extent, but this time he really did try to take action. One afternoon, when they were expecting George to fly in, he called her into the living room and asked her to proofread a letter he’d spent the better part of the morning composing. It was addressed to His Highness, Emperor Haile Selassie, the Lion of Judah, care of the Ethiopian Embassy, Washington, D.C. In light of the fact that the Ethiopian army was outgunned, he was offering his entire arsenal on loan for the duration of the war — or as long as it took to achieve victory — and he further offered his own services as an instructor to drill the emperor’s men in the use of small arms. No matter that the emperor’s men were halfway round the world and she and Herbie could barely afford to get to Los Angeles, let alone New York, the Canary Islands, Gibraltar and points east, Herbie was dead serious and here was the proof of it. She didn’t say a word. Just read through the letter, handed it back to him, and told him how good it was of him to think of it and what a noble gesture it was. George came, the letter went off, and that was the end of that, as far as she was concerned.