T. Boyle - San Miguel

Of course, the press got wind of it, and everywhere they went they were trailed by reporters and photographers, the Swiss Family Lester treating their progeny to shoes in an actual shoe store and dinner at a restaurant where you sat down and people came up to take your order and serve you, to a tour of the bank and the courthouse, and best of all, to the drugstore for the first ice-cream cones they’d ever raised to their lips. And so what if every drip and lick was recorded for posterity? The girls were their shy and sweet selves and Herbie beamed and strutted and crowed and kept up a patter with the reporters that could have filled the next dozen editions of the newspaper. She made the girls pay for the ice cream themselves — or hand over the coins, that is, a nickel each — because that was part of the lesson too. Yes, there was a world out there beyond the island. And yes, there was ice cream in that world, and yes, my darlings, my daughters, my loves, people paid for things there with pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters.

* * *

And then there was a day, it might have been in 1939 or even 1940, she couldn’t remember, a day of overarching light and gusts so strong they threatened to tatter the flag where it snapped at the pole, when a package wrapped in brown paper and trussed up firmly with half a ball of string appeared as if by magic on the front doorstep. She’d been in the schoolhouse with the girls, drilling Marianne on long division and Betsy on alternating columns of addition and subtraction, and Herbie had been out on one of his reconnaissance patrols to check on the far-flung sheep and sniff out signs of poachers, so no one had seen a thing. Nor had she or the girls heard the gate open and close, and that was because they were absorbed in their lessons. And because of the wind. Which tended to rock the schoolhouse on the pallets that kept it just off the ground while it shot under the eaves with a dull roar that more than once had fooled them into thinking George was coming in for a landing in his new Beechcraft Staggerwing airplane. At any rate — and this had happened before — she concluded that one of their yachting friends must have stopped by and delivered the package, and not finding Herbie and not wanting to disturb the lessons, had stolen away without a word. But why then hadn’t they at least left a note? It was a mystery. As was the package, which Marianne stumbled over when she and her sister raced each other across the courtyard and darted in the door for lunch.

It was addressed to Herbert Steever Lester, Esquire, San Miguel Island, California, U.S.A., and the return address was stamped Ethiopian Embassy, Washington, D.C. She brought it in and set it on the kitchen table, and though she was eaten up with curiosity and the girls kept pestering her to open it, she left it for Herbie — he was the one who’d written the emperor, after all — and made use of the opportunity to give the girls a geography lesson after lunch. Where was Ethiopia? “Right here,” she said, revolving the globe halfway round to show the dark continent and the mountainous wedge of the ancient land on its eastern horn, right across from the Arabian Peninsula. “And you know the Arabian Peninsula, right? Where the Arabs are? Remember The Arabian Nights ?”

Herbie came in looking exhausted. He’d stumbled across the remains of a campfire on the beach at Chinese Point that was so fresh the embers were still glowing, and had searched the entire shoreline, fruitlessly, as it turned out, and he’d gone far out of his way and used up all the water in his canteen so that he had to find a seep just to wet his mouth. He must have fallen too, judging from the fresh wet scab glistening on his left knee. The minute he walked in the door, the girls jumped in his arms, but instead of dancing them round the room as he usually did, he just hugged them to him and dropped them down again, then lifted his head to give her a tired grin. “How about a little splash of whiskey before dinner?” he said. “Will you join me?”

“Yes,” she said, “that sounds nice. Oh, and by the way, this came for you.”

As soon as he saw the package he came to life — or no, he took off like a rocket, every cell and fiber of him alive with excitement. He turned it over in his hands, reading out the return address in a voice of wonder. “What do you think of that, girls — all the way from Africa. You know where Ethiopia is?”

They both nodded impatiently. “Open it, Daddy,” Marianne pleaded, and in the next moment both girls were jumping up and down, chanting, “Open it, open it!”

She brought him a knife and he cut the string and tore the paper away from the box, which was the size and shape of the boxes shoes come in. “What do you know,” he said, mugging for the girls, “Haile Selassie sent me a new pair of shoes.”

Inside there was a letter from the deposed emperor — or one of his subordinates — thanking Herbie for his generous offer and his support for the regime in exile, which only awaited the day when the Fascisti were defeated and the Lion of Judah could return to his rightful throne. No mention was made of the years that had gone by since Herbie had made his offer or of the fact that it was moot now because the Italians were in Addis Ababa and looked to stay for a good long while, but in the depths of the box, wrapped in tissue paper, were two shining gold-braided epaulets, given, the letter said, to grant the addressee royal status in the emperor’s court.

Dinner could wait. Whiskey could wait. There was nothing for it but that Elise had to sit right down, right that minute (well, okay, he would pour the whiskey now, in celebration) and sew the epaulets to the shoulders of his best white shirt. When it was done, he modeled the shirt in the mirror, happy as a schoolboy, and then he drained his glass, filled it again, and took the elephant gun down from its mount, slung it over one shoulder and marched the girls round the courtyard— hep one, hep two —until dinner was on the table and they could sit down and give thanks not only for the food before them but for the wise and beneficent Lion of Judah and his steadfast ally, the King of San Miguel.

Little money had come in, no matter how wide their fame had spread, but when the National Weather Bureau decided to establish a reporting station on the island — to set them up with a two-way radio and instruments for measuring temperature, wind speed and barometric pressure and pay them a wage for sending in reports twice a day on a regular schedule — Herbie jumped at the chance. Ten years back, when they’d first come out to the island, he might have dreamed of buying out Bob Brooks, but the Depression had put an end to that — and to his bid to have Hugh Rockwell step in as silent partner and rescue him. That had been a blow he never fully recovered from, and it had hurt him too that none of his schemes for lecturing or capturing seals or selling the bones of sea elephants ever came to fruition, but he never stopped scraping for sources of income. Now, though, with the twenty-five dollars a week the weather bureau was giving them, for the first time at least they had something coming in that wasn’t dependent on Bob Brooks or Hugh Rockwell or any other millionaire businessman, current or former. Things were beginning to look up. Or at least that was the way she saw it.

Still, they had to get up in the dark every morning, take the measurements and transmit them to a station ashore and then do it all over again at night, seven days a week, without fail, and she wasn’t really at her best that early or that late either — and neither was he. The schedule began to wear on them. One anonymous winter morning, the rain and wind relentless, the house freezing, they both struggled out of bed and right away he started carping at her and she snapped back at him and before she could think they were shouting at each other.