Enchanted Islands (16 page)

I was jolted out of sleep one night by a pounding on the door. At first I thought it was the wind; spring in San Francisco was not kind, and it had been raining for what felt like years. I got up and put on a dressing gown. It was full, deep night. I was too asleep even to wonder who it might be.

“Aunt Fanny, please open up.” Rosalie's older daughter, Barbara, stood at my door, her hair flat, her eyes red. “I'm sorry,” she said.

“What are you doing here? Come in.” I ushered her inside. “What on earth?”

She burst into tears. “It's Momma. We had an enormous fight. You know how she can be.”

I did, but I said nothing, handing her a tissue. “A fight about what?”

Barbara looked at the tissue, folding and unfolding it. “A boy,” she said.

“Oh.” I was relieved. For a moment I'd worried that something was really wrong. I do have a tendency to expect the worst. “I'll make tea,” I said. I set the kettle on to boil. I've always disliked tea, but I kept a few bags around for guests.

“She found me with a boy. And I know it's wrong, that we shouldn't have been together without someone else around, but we were only kissing. And she went just crazy. She hit him with her pocketbook and screamed things at me…I don't even know what some of them mean.” Barbara was crying quietly now. “And Pat left and now he'll never talk to me again. And I love him.”

I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. The kettle began to rattle and I stood up to turn it off before it whistled.

While I made the tea, Barbara told me a long, dramatic story. Some afternoons she took Sylvie to the playground, and she and this boy would arrange to meet to talk. Then they began to hold hands. Then they would sneak off to kiss behind the gazebo. On this day, Rosalie stopped by the park. Sylvie, though sworn to secrecy, easily gave Barbara up when pressed and Rosalie found them.

I held my cup between my hands, letting it warm them. “What do you think she was most angry about?” I asked.

“I don't know.” Barbara looked at her teacup. “I'm almost sixteen.”

“Practically halfway to the grave,” I said.

“Don't poke fun, Aunt Fanny.”

“Sorry,” I said. “Seriously, what do you think? Was it that you left Sylvie alone? That the boy isn't Jewish? That you were sneaking around?” I took a small sip of the tea and encountered uninspiring flower water. I put the cup down.

“It seemed to be…” Barbara paused. “Like she was angry at Pat. But it wasn't his fault. I wanted him to do it.”

I thought I knew, though I had no training in psychology, what Rosalie was angry at. We had never spoken of what I saw at her house, what happened to her. But how could it not have affected her? It had affected me, and it hadn't even happened to me.

“Your mother had a difficult time growing up,” I said carefully. “I think she wants to spare you that.”

“She just wants to make sure I never have a beau, that I never grow up.”

“Maybe that's part of it. I'm just saying, it's complicated.”

Barbara began to cry anew. “I can't live without him. I love him.”

“I seriously doubt that you won't live without him,” I couldn't help but say.

She picked up her teacup; liquid sloshed over the side onto the table. We both watched it spread. I put the kitchen towel on top of the wet.

“Why are you taking her side? You know how she is. She's selfish. She doesn't care about anybody but herself,” Barbara said.

It was true that Rosalie was selfish. But I had enough sense not to tell her daughter that. “She loves you.”

“Hah,” Barbara scoffed.

“You know that's true,” I said.

Barbara looked down, admitting I was right. “I'm sorry I spilled the tea. I hate tea.”

“I hate tea too,” I said. I smiled. “I have always hated tea.”

“Me too!” Barbara said. “It's like someone put grass in water.”

“How about some milk and honey?” I asked. “That always makes me feel better. And I tell you what, because you're almost sixteen, I'll put a bit of brandy in it too. You can sleep here. Does anyone know where you are?”

Barbara shook her head.

“Do you want me to call or do you want to?”

“You, please,” Barbara said. “Thank you, Aunt Fanny.”

Later, I watched her as she slept in my bed. She still slept like a child, face slack and innocent. When I crawled in beside her, she stirred and moaned but did not wake. I lay there for a while, watching the streetlights make shadows on the ceiling until I fell asleep.

A week after he left, I received the following letter from Ainslie:

Dear Mrs. Elmer Ainslie Conway,

Greetings from this golf resort, where I am forced to hit the links day in and day out. You may say to yourself, oh, poor Ainslie, stuck on a golf course, but I tell you, madam, it's maddening here.

Instruction began with an introduction to the concept of hitting a ball with a club. Having mastered that complicated task, complete with a question-and-answer period, we were taught how to tell one club from the other, but since the manufacturers were kind enough to print their number on the side, it doesn't exactly take a surgeon's skill.

Now, I'm no Gene Sarazen, but this is not my first time around the links. I'm better than your uncle George. Speaking of Uncle George, how goes it at the homestead? Hope you're keeping busy; don't knit me too many sweaters. How is Rosalie? I hope you two aren't plotting to take over the universe. I wouldn't put it past you
!

I'm getting my three squares, but you can hardly call this living. Your dinnertime conversation will be most welcome next month, for I have fallen into a pit of humorless garden snakes at the pro table. Apparently reading while you eat is considered rude, you were right. I have had to resort to my most low-down, dirty tricks: telling moron jokes.

Why did the moron cut off his fingers? So he could write shorthand.

Why did the moron panic when he swallowed the thermometer? He thought he would die by degrees.

Have I told you these? If not, it is a testament to my affection for you. Do you see what I'm reduced to? Hurry by, April, and bring my Frances to me! One note: When you see me, please don't say, “I forgot how tall you are.” Everyone always feels the need to remark upon my height after a separation, and I'm never sure how to answer. “I forgot how short you are”?

Honest to Frances, I'm bored out of my mind here. Ah, the exciting life of a

[Here the censor had left his mark]

Please hurry, and bring diversions.

Well, here's my tee time. I must shoulder once again the burden of my bag of clubs and seek to avoid sand traps and water hazards
.

Yours in abject misery, awaiting with impatience the arrival of my bride,

Ainslie

I had no idea what the metaphors meant, but the subtext was unmistakable. This was a waste of his time, teaching him things he already knew. I would have been better served taking his place; I knew nothing of intelligence other than what I read in spy novels. I took a slew of them out of the library to study up, but they were of little help. His letter made me miss him, his ability to find the humor in any situation.

When it was time to join Ainslie, I put the apartment in order and took the train down, saying goodbye to Rosalie before I left. Embarrassingly, I had never been to Carmel, though I'd lived nearby for nearly thirty years. I stepped off the train to a fragrant breeze. No wonder people came here for vacation—it smelled of frangipani and bougainvillea and salty sea air, unlike San Francisco, which always smelled vaguely of mold and fish.

The porter took my suitcases off the train and I stood there for five minutes until Ainslie came careening to a halt in front of the station.

He called a cheerful hello and left the car running while he came over to me and picked up my suitcases one in each hand. Then he remembered himself and put them down to give me a peck on the lips and a hug.

“
Willkommen
, Fräulein. Okay, that's the only German I've learned. That language is terrible. Like people clearing their throats at each other. Tired? Hungry?”

I was learning that Ainslie went through periods of excitability. On some level, it was a welcome contrast to my plodding personality, a characteristic that had only grown more marked the older and more set in my ways I got.

“Always tired, never hungry,” I said.

“We're a pair. I'm always hungry and never tired.”

“And so between the two of us we'll lick the platter clean?”

Ainslie laughed. He took me on a tour of downtown Carmel. The main street was out of a storybook—the fairy village of an eight-year-old girl's dreams, all undulating shingled roofs and swaying Dutch doors. Chimneys stacked haphazardly, stucco walls, and half-timbering added to the effect, along with perfectly pruned azaleas and shrubbery; the signs announced the houses' names in druid script. Comstock houses, Ainslie said these were called, after the gnome who built them. Outside the town center, mission architecture took over with its putty-smooth walls and red roofs. We drove a bit up the coast and inland to an old golf resort. There was a man at the entrance inside a small guard booth. He came out to check his clipboard, but then saw that he knew Ainslie.

“This the missus then?” he asked.

“Frances,” I leaned over Ainslie to give him my hand to shake.

“My mother's name was Frances. Welcome to Clifton.”

We drove up the long driveway. It was shaded by palm trees and topped by a grand clubhouse in the neoclassic style. “That's HQ,” Ainslie said. “Headquarters, that means.”

“That much spy lingo I know,” I said.

“You've been reading Maugham?” Ainslie joked.

“Let's just say my library card has been spending a lot of time with Ashenden.”