Easter Island (10 page)

“All right,” said Elsa.

Alice paused, as though she didn’t trust this concession. Then slowly, she stepped toward Elsa. “I’m going to be Rodney,” Alice said, eyes aglow, tucking a curl behind her ear. She straightened her nightgown, as though nervous, as though she really were Rodney, or another boy, asking to approach Elsa.

“Ready?” asked Elsa.

“Ready.” They were still several feet apart.

“Do you want me to come toward you?” Elsa asked. “Or shall you come toward me?”

Alice hesitated.

“Rodney came toward me.”

Alice sprung to the balls of her feet. “All right. All right. Elsa, close your eyes.”

“I’m closing my eyes.”

In the darkness, Elsa waited, listening to the hush of crumpled cotton, a slight sigh as Alice released the shadow of a mysterious thought into the night, and then the gentle creak of the floorboards beneath Alice’s feet. Alice’s warm breath bathed her face, and her lips, plump and moist, touched Elsa’s and withdrew. Then the lips returned, more confident, nestling against her own. A soft humming began and Elsa could feel the sound waves thrum through her cheeks. It was no different, she thought, from what she had done with Rodney. And it was a truer kiss. Gentle, loving. Her life had been full of such private, intimate concessions to Alice. As a child, Alice sometimes begged Elsa for a small taste of her chewed food; when Elsa began menstruating, Alice panicked when she found a drop of blood in the washroom and insisted Elsa show her where it had come from. Of these moments, Elsa told no one.

When Alice finally pulled away, Elsa opened her eyes. A wide grin lit Alice’s face.

“Did you like that?” she asked.

“I’ll have hundreds of kisses,” said Alice.

“Thousands, Allie.”

Elsa unclasped her dress in the dark room, poured herself a glass of water for the bedside. When they were both finally beneath their covers, Elsa whispered good night.

“Thousands,” mumbled Alice.

Then Elsa blew out the candle and pressed her cheek against the cold pillow.

After two weeks of floating aimlessly, a brief rain at last loosens from the sky. They all seize a bowl or cup and clamber on deck to catch the meager spray, their tongues lapping at the drops. Within minutes, however, the sky revokes its gift, offering instead another blast of heat, tinged now with oppressive humidity. Edward unbuttons his collar and steps below to check the stores. Moments later he returns with a look of concern. “We shall all halve our rations until we know we’ll make Recife in time.”

“What about Pudding?” Alice demands, gripping the gunwale to pull herself up. “He is supposed to have fresh water two times a day! Isn’t that right, Elsa? I’ve always given him water two times a day.” She squints at the sun with indignation.

Kierney, crouched on the foredeck, rolls his eyes and drinks the last of his rain-filled cup. “There’s a hierarchy at sea, Miss Pendleton. And birds, even birds who can say
superior
, ain’t at the top of it.”

“Pudding can have his water twice a day,” Elsa says. “It will be fine, Allie. For goodness’ sake,” she announces to the boat. “We are not going to run out of water.”

“I’ve seen it happen,” says Kierney. “You name the disaster, and I’ve seen it.”

“We shall be fine,” states Edward. “This is merely a precaution.” He turns to Alice. “The bird may take from my ration.”

For the first time, Elsa feels anxious. Could they really run out of water? She scolds herself for drinking too much, washing too liberally. She sets aside what’s left of her day’s ration for Alice. She can manage.

But the next morning when Elsa steps on deck, the small hairs on one side of her neck seem to tingle. The mysterious language she has been learning for months, the silent script of breezes, is now being written on her skin. As the cool air letters itself along her neck, Elsa calls below, “Allie, come quick! I think we’ve a trade wind coming.” By noon, the boat bounds away, tightening at all sides with new life.

In Brazil, they call in Recife, Bahia de Todos Os Santos, Cabral Bay, and Rio de Janeiro. With each anchoring there are visits from harbormasters, customs officers, and doctors. Ashore, Edward visits the consul and searches for the latest copies of the
Daily Graphic
and
Spectator.
Elsa arranges for fresh mutton and vegetables from the port chandlers. The boat provisioned, she and Alice stroll through the harbor, nibbling on a fried fish wrapped in newspaper, Alice’s feet dragging beneath her long skirts in their usual forgetfulness. Elsa loves these late afternoons, exploring the maze of shops and stalls and shanties bathed in the golden glow of tropical sunset. And at all times, she carries her notebook, now thick with information for the expedition.

She is pleased that Edward is allowing her to contribute. He seems to recognize to what lengths her father went teaching her science and history, and he often consults her:
Elsa, do you recall in what year Brazil became a republic?
She is hoping that, even though she lacks research experience, on the island he will permit her to help excavate, or interview, or detail the customs of the natives. But as they sail farther south, as she is constantly called on to cleat a line or find provisions or look up the Portuguese phrase for “clean bill of health,” as Alice is given the chore of mending sails, it becomes clear he will have no choice but to enlist her full capacities. He
needs
help.

Elsa knows Edward did his research in Africa alone. For two years he trekked from the coast to the interior, established a camp, recorded data on Kikuyu marriages, births, deaths, initiation rites. He catalogued medicinal herbs, hunted lions and leopards, collected and analyzed primate fossils—all without a single colleague. That was fifteen years ago; he was forty. Once he was also an excellent sailor. He even crewed for Sir Thomas Johnstone Lipton—five-time contender for the America’s Cup—a fact he now slips into their deck conversations with embarrassing frequency. But each morning as he pulls himself up the steps to the deck, wiping his brow, he looks somehow diminished, as if his body has betrayed his ability. In his younger days, he often sailed single-handed, and at a glance he knows what should be done—
clip the gaff, run the jib, turn downwind.
Sometimes, it even seems he can see his younger arms stretched before him, winching and cleating, phantom limbs. But always he passes along the task.

“Eamonn, let’s set the outer jib. And, Elsa, would you mind tightening the main?”

“Not at all.” Elsa cranks the winch with ease. Her arm muscles have hardened these past few months; her palms are now callused. “Are you feeling all right?” she asks.

“Excellent. Perfect. I’m in tip-top shape.”

“Because if you wanted to work belowdecks, Edward, I’m sure we can manage things up here.”

Her solicitude seems to hurt him, as if he imagined his few boasting words might, after all these months, have won her attention. He stares at the horizon. “As the captain, everything is my responsibility. I like to keep watch here, to look after things. In another few weeks, Elsa, you will be able to sail this schooner. You’ve become quite the mariner. It’s wonderful. I hadn’t expected it. That is not to say I did not think well of you, I admired all your abilities, but the life of the sea is not for everybody. I simply, well—” He halts; this half-compliment is tripping him. “What I mean to say is: You mustn’t concern yourself with me.”

In late August they reach the coast of Uruguay. They are again becalmed, slowed to thirty miles a day, drifting south on the Brazil current. They tack endlessly to no avail. On several occasions, when the current stills, they even drift north. From the hold wafts the odor of spoiling meat and oranges and fish. The boat has taken on a swarm of mosquitoes, and each evening, as they light the oil lamps in the cabin, there follows a frantic smacking and swatting, the burlesque of which might quell some tensions were it not for the threat of malaria. At bedtime, Elsa begins administering quinine.

During these windless weeks, everyone grows edgy. Edward, in particular, grows curt with the crew. While he is above deck late at night, Elsa can hear Kierney complaining to Eamonn.

“Perhaps if Captain Beazley and his wife shared a cabin he wouldn’t be hollering at us so.”

“Ah, clam it, Kierney. Drifting like this’ll make a saint testy.”

“Aye, but a saint would at least get a little squeeze from his wife.”

“The captain’s a gentleman,” says Eamonn. “That’s all, Kierney. You just dunno what that word means.”

“Gentleman. Lady. You can call it whatever, Eamonn. But if that’s what the moneybags call marriage, you won’t be seeing me trying to get meself into no aristocracy.”

Eamonn laughs. “You’ll be too busy trying to get yerself into a wife!”

“Shut up.”

As Elsa lies in the dark, listening to them, she thinks Kierney has, in fact, hit on the source of Edward’s agitation. Not the arrangement itself—Edward seems as willing as she is, given the circumstances, to postpone sharing a bed—but having a crew there to witness their arrangement, to judge it. Privacy vanished the moment they stepped on the boat. Surely Kierney and Eamonn, whom Elsa suspects spend their nights ashore rum-drunk with prostitutes, look down on Edward. A wife who sleeps with her sister—to them, it must seem ridiculous. And it doesn’t help that in Rio, the consul’s sister, partially deaf from a severe case of tonsillitis—“You see, dears, it makes no difference to me if someone is speaking Portuguese or English or Bantu!”—assumed Elsa and Alice were Edward’s daughters. Despite protestations and clarifications, in the haze of her deafness and several brandies she insisted that Elsa had Edward’s same lovely cheekbones.

To pass the slow days, Elsa and Alice sprawl across the bow for fish-spotting contests. Alice exaggerates incessantly.
How many sharks, Alice dear? Fifty? Well, I hope we don’t fall in.
They watch the occasional sea turtle glide by, and once in a while, when they pass through a shoal, a flying fish leaps aboard, sending Alice into hysterics. She giggles at the fish’s side fins thumping the deck, until, the creature’s distress beginning to alarm her, she finally tosses it back to the sea.

The cape pigeons also delight Alice. Edward hands her shreds of meat to throw to them and crouches behind his photo box to take several photographs of the birds. Then, with evident pleasure, he takes one of Alice, her arm extended over the gunwale, a smile stretched across her face as a gray speckled bird dives before her.

Alice and Elsa wear broad hats on deck, tie scarves about their heads when the wind is strong, but already their skin has darkened. At night Elsa rubs almond oil into their hands and arms and necks; they drift to sleep beside one another in a haze of salt air and marzipan.

At Buenos Aires, they meet supplies and letters from England. A week later, they put in briefly to water at Bahía Blanca—where native women make Elsa presents of penguin eggs and seashells—and then at Puerto Deseado. The tropical heat dissolves, replaced by clear and breezy days. But farther south, as they approach Patagonia, it grows colder; porpoises tumble about the bow, seals slither alongside. Two albatross, their wide white wings suspended in a gentle arc, wheel and circle about the stern, silently following the boat.

The patent log bobbing behind them registers speeds of six knots, but their sense of motion slows as daylight stretches interminably with summer’s approach. Elsa and Alice prepare breakfast at three
A
.
M
.—dawn. When they retire at ten
P
.
M
., the sun still cuts through their cabin window. And late into the night Pudding stumbles dizzily on his perch.

“Are you sick, Pudding? Are you sick?”

“Good Alice. Bird superior. Bird. Bird.”

“Allie,” says Elsa, rising from the bed. “I think Pudding needs to sleep.”

“Oh, no, Elsa. He’s cross. I was watching the other birds and he thought I forgot all about him. But I didn’t, Pudding, I didn’t.”

“Look, Allie,” says Elsa as she drapes a shawl over the cage. “He just needs the dark so he knows to rest.”

Only Alice sees this as concealment; she rises every few minutes to peek behind the shawl. “Pudding,” she whispers, “where are you, Pudding?”

In bed at night, unable to sleep, Elsa thinks: Darkness is now like a blanket too small to cover one’s entire form. You try to wrap yourself safely within, but daylight still finds a naked spot toward which it creeps.

The daylight is misty-gray, foglike, shrouding the landscape in constant haze. Its damp chill reminds Elsa of London. So far away now. They have been at sea eight months, and it will be years before she sees England again. St. Albans’s clock tower, its Roman walls, the narrow streets where she cycled, her father’s house. For the first time, she misses home.

Farther south, antarctic breezes tear through the cabin. Elsa dresses Alice in gaiters and a second pair of bloomers. At night, they cuddle close, their teeth chattering into each other’s ears.

“Cooollddd,”
Alice says in the darkness.

Elsa presses her mouth to Alice’s neck and releases a slow, hot breath. Alice giggles. Elsa finds a spot on Alice’s scalp and blows again. Elsa can feel the steam collect on her own lips. Alice squirms with delight.

“I’m your very own stove,” Elsa says.

Alice suddenly flips over. “Alice is a stove too.” Her eyes flicker with excitement. “Hot, hot, hot!” she squeals. Her lips stretch into an exaggerated yawn and find their way to Elsa’s neck. The blast is hot and moist. Then there is brief suction, a cold tickle on Elsa’s neck as Alice nestles her lips on the gulf of skin and breathes in. This must be what mothers feel, Elsa thinks, when they listen to the breath of their infants. The sound soothes her.

Then, on the night of October tenth, Kierney shouts below, “I see the light of Cape Virgins!”

They have arrived at the Straits of Magellan. Elsa knows enough of sailing now to realize how difficult they will be to pass—a long, narrow, zigzagging path of roiling ocean. Max had called the straits a seaman’s greatest adversary. “Scylla! Charybdis!” he said. “Odysseus was fortunate he did not have to sail through the Straits of Magellan!”