Monterey Bay (21 page)

Then, mercifully, her formal education was at an end. Upon graduation, she secured an unpaid apprenticeship in document restoration at the Fogg Museum in Cambridge and a room in a boardinghouse on Kirkland Street. The loneliness was so instant and intense that she began roaming the museum after closing time in search of imaginary company, which she eventually found in the form of a chalk drawing by Georges Seurat. It portrayed a nameless, faceless woman hunched over a blank-paged book, an easel in the background like a hangman's
scaffold. Some nights, she would pretend to be this woman. Some nights, she would pretend it was her mother and distribute blame accordingly. Either way, she was always careful to leave the museum in time to make the boardinghouse's curfew, and when she slept it was without dreams or the half-waking visions that often preceded them, her life as blank and cold on the outside as it was within. Her father, she knew, was still living out west—in Nevada, the territory being claimed by gamblers and showmen—and there were times when the notions of geographic distance and inherited pain seemed to roll themselves up like two sides of the same map. More than once, she considered writing a letter to him that sought to confess the true scope of her childhood agony and the formative fallout of it, to solicit a reply that would acknowledge his own parallel experience. But months and years passed and no such letters were received or sent, and she came to the conclusion that heartbreak, instead of drawing people together as most shared experiences did, forced them even further apart, everyone confined to his or her own private cell of untranslatable despair.

On the evening of March 20, 1948, the night of Toscanini's all-Wagner television debut, she was informed of her father's passing. She had gone down to the boardinghouse's common room to see the concert on-screen. The seventy-year-old landlady clanked in on her crutches at the precise moment in act 3 of
Die Walküre
in which, had they been watching the actual
opera and not a televised special, the curtain would have risen to reveal the mountain peak and Brünnhilde's sisters, gathered in preparation for the funerary jaunt to Valhalla. And the landlady's whisper in Margot's ear sounded like something Wagner himself had scripted: the death of a god, the world rent asunder, a robed chorus howling at the justice of it.

Now, in the hammock beneath the balete tree, she breathed in the wet air and blew at the stars as if they were candles. She had known the memories would be painful, and they were, but not nearly as much as she had expected. If anything, they seemed like remnants of a very bad dream: disconnected, surreal pieces of a larger, subconscious whole. It was illogical, furthermore, to believe in payback, but here it was: the glow of what a spiritual person might have deemed a blessing. So she stayed in Donsol. She visited the whale sharks every afternoon. She learned to adjust her buoyancy so that her belly grazed their rough, speckled backs. The hammock gave way to a thatched hut on risers beneath which lived a rooster who woke her at exactly four
A.M.
each morning, which she didn't mind one bit.

On her tenth and final morning in Donsol, she rose at the first squawk and went outside to find a telegram nailed to her front door. The telegram was from her father's secretary and typed out on Manila Hotel stationery. Pursuant to Anders's death, it read, a probate court in Monterey had recently unearthed the deeds to two properties within the city limits: the house on the hill and a
reduction plant on Cannery Row, both of which would remain in jurisdictional limbo until someone came to town to settle matters in person.

She folded the telegram and reimpaled it on the nail. Then she went down to the beach and sat on the sand. It was still mostly dark, the sun not yet risen. The ticket kiosks were still shuttered for the night, unmanned. She went into the water up to her knees and then returned to the hut, lit a cigar, took a puff from it, and stubbed it out on the boards beneath her feet. She poured a cup of
lambanog
and nursed it as the shoreline began to come to life, and by the time the chatter of the tour guides began, her decision had been made. She packed her things. She wrote a letter to Tino Agnelli. And, after running five miles to the nearest telephone, she reserved a seat on the next DC-4 out of Manila.

SHE ARRIVED IN SAN FRANCISCO ON A DAMP, WHITE
afternoon, a flask of
lambanog
tucked into the waistband of her new skirt.

She spent one sleepless night at the hotel across the street from the Sir Francis Drake and then boarded the four o'clock southbound
Del Monte Express
, the same train that had once taken her and Anders down the coast and back up it again. The parlor car was empty save for herself and the waiter, who kept mostly to himself as the train rattled through the artichoke and lettuce fields. The banquette on which she sat had peeling leather and loose bolts. The velvet draperies across the cloudy windows looked as though they had been both shelter and sustenance to several generations of moths.

“I think you'll barely recognize it,” the waiter speculated at one point. “Everything's so different down there since the war.”

She smiled at him but said nothing. She had drained the flask hours ago and had since consumed several beers, not because she wanted to blunt her mind, but because she wanted it loose enough to consider things objectively. She had left the Philippines full of conviction, certain the telegram had provided as close to marching orders as she was likely to get. But now that they were creaking across the Monterey County line, the grayness of Elkhorn Slough and Moss Landing appearing through the windows like something that had been breathed onto the glass, she was met with the delayed realization that she didn't really know why she had come. The transaction, certainly—a meeting with the Agnelli scion, a signing of papers—but it would be more than that. It had to be. And so the beers kept coming, and by the time they reached Monterey, she was drunk enough to expect to find her father waiting for her on the station platform, ready with words of caution and regret. Instead, she was greeted by a teenage porter who helped her into a hired car before handing her a small, stiff note card with the Agnelli name on the letterhead.

She read the note and put it in her pocket.

“The Hotel Del Monte, please,” she told the driver.

“The what?”

“The big one near the—”

“Oh, that place hasn't been a hotel in years. It's a postgraduate school now. For the navy.”

She looked out the window, at the black tumor of the resting train, its doors still open.

“To the neighborhood on the hill, then,” she replied. “The one where the cannery workers used to live.”

At the small white house, she paid the driver twice the customary fare and allowed him to unload her bag.

Then she stood outside for a while before entering, looking at the bougainvillea. The last time she had seen it, the plant had been little more than a skeleton of ash, the victim of a rich woman's myopic wrath. In the past eight years, however, it had regenerated itself into something twice as lush and expansive as before, and at the sight of its pink flowers, she became wary of something she couldn't name.

Inside, she found everything much as they had left it. Many of the other houses on the block had been abandoned and looted and given over to nature, but theirs hadn't. The horsehair sofa was still inappropriate and cumbersome, the dust in its crevices as thick and white as frosting. A sheaf of her father's papers was still in the wastebin beneath the kitchen table, a sherry bottle was still hidden in the cabinet above the sink. She drank what little was left and then spent the next hour finding things to clean. She tied a handkerchief around her mouth and beat the
sofa with a broom. She scrubbed the grout between the bathroom tiles. She polished the door handles. She mopped the linoleum until she could see her own warped reflection in its surface. When the entire house was tidied to her satisfaction, she collapsed onto the sofa, too tired to sleep. But she slept anyway and, for the first time in years, dreamed. She dreamed she was exploring her father's cannery by flashlight, its beam slipping across the barren walls like a yellow snake. There were no conveyor belts, packing lines, retort baskets, or boilers. No blood or oil or water underfoot, nothing that evoked the bio-efficient, almost intestinal quality of a fish cannery at work. Instead, there was a building as empty as it was cavernous, the floors swept clean.

When she was done looking at the cannery from the inside, she looked at it from the outside. She walked out a door and onto a narrow catwalk above the water that led from the main body of the cannery to the pump house. The ocean was angry, spitting and thrashing, punishing the shore with sets of closely spaced waves. The crescent moon was orange and blurry behind the fog. In its light, she could see Ricketts sitting on the edge of the catwalk, his feet dangling toward the water. She switched off the flashlight and sat down next to him, their legs swinging back and forth in near synchronicity. It felt good at first, but then it didn't. She considered withdrawing her sketchbook. Her satchel, however, was empty except for her father's penknife, and she could hear noises behind them, a crowd gathering on the street outside.

“Quick,” he said. “The knife.”

But the parade was already upon them, the hill ablaze with lanterns, the saint's waxen face glowing within the confines of her bower, a book in one hand, a human skull in the other. Tino Agnelli was at the head of the procession. Arthur was behind him, his head shaved bare. Her father was last in line, walking slightly apart from the crowd, coatless despite the gathering cold. The air was full of smoke.

“Inside,” Ricketts said, taking her arm. “Before it's too late.”

They ran back into the cannery. She leaned against him. For the first time, she noticed the vast difference in their heights. He was so short, he could fit his head snugly beneath her chin without bending or crouching.

“I did a bad job, Wormy,” he said, reaching for her forehead.

And when he reopened the scar with the knife, the cut wasn't made on her skin. It was made on the seafloor beneath her, the earth splitting itself along a famous fault line: the one that, according to centuries of seismological fantasy, would break California free from the rest of the jealous landmass and send it floating off into the night.

The next morning, she walked to the wharf.

The waiter in the parlor car had been wrong. The town was still recognizable, but disappointingly so, like a beautiful woman
without her makeup. It was only when she reached the doorway of the old Agnelli warehouse that things took a more hopeful turn. Unlike the rest of Monterey, this building had thrived since her departure. The single window had been scrubbed clean, the corrugated metal walls painted white, a crimson awning stretched over the entrance. Inside, there was no darkness, no statue, no sardine cans, no henchwomen. Instead, it was bright and tidy and outfitted in a way that was clearly meant to evoke the Agnellis' homeland but looked like a caricature of it instead: ropes of garlic sagging from the rafters, a gaudy mid-Crucifixion portrait of Jesus and the Virgin Mary staring down at her in gory benediction, tables covered in red-and-white-checked tablecloths, candles weeping streams of wax onto basket-bottomed Chianti bottles. The barman awoke with a jolt when he heard her enter. As for Tino, he was there just as he had promised in his note: sitting at a large table near the kitchen, flanked by his brothers, his chin in his hands as if presiding over the world's most anticlimactic Last Supper.

She studied him before approaching. Like the town itself, he had been eroded by the intervening years, but not necessarily disfigured by them. The primary difference was his nose, which was a good deal longer and narrower than she remembered and more emphatically wide nostriled. He had taken to wearing his dark hair slicked back from his forehead, which, in addition to highlighting the sharpness of his features, made the prematurely thin patches around his temples look as if they had been
spray-painted there. He was still impossibly slim and spotlessly dressed. Even in this moment of what she assumed to be repose, he looked coiled and skeptical, thrumming with the exact same quiet, dissatisfied energy he had possessed as a boy.

When he saw her, he raised his small, bony hand in the resigned manner of a forcibly dethroned potentate. She waved back.

“You received my correspondence,” he said as she reached the table, the brothers tracking every inch of her approach.

“It's a restaurant now,” she replied.

“To feed all the tourists.”

A lone cannery whistle blasted in the distance, its sound fuzzy and dilute, as if it had traveled across the distance of years instead of the distance of physical space. In her memory, Tino had been someone she had once known well, but now that she was actually in his presence again, she realized her mistake. She had never really known him at all. She had once put her future, and her father's, in the hands of a stranger.

“Tourists?” she asked. “But the town's a disaster.”

“Interestingly enough, they seem to like it that way.”

One of the brothers said something in Italian. Tino glared at him and stood.

“Come,” he said to Margot, gesturing at an empty table in the restaurant's farthest corner. “So we won't be interrupted.”

“Thank you. I'm fine right here.”

Tino shrugged and reclaimed his seat. Margot sat across from
him and removed a box of cigars from her handbag and offered one to each of the brothers in turn. When all of them declined, she selected one for herself and lit it.

“Thank you for agreeing to this,” she said, taking a puff and trying to summon an unburdened smile. “The location you suggested is certainly appropriate, even if the hour is unusual.”

“Habit, I guess.” His eyes traced the smoke as she exhaled it. “It was my mother's custom to eat with the crew after the night's haul. I continue to honor the tradition, even though there's nothing much left to can.”

“Where is she?”

“She passed away. Shortly after your father.”

“I'm sorry to hear that.”

“You are?”

“I don't suppose I could get a beer.”

“Of course.”

He nodded at the barman and made a series of quick gestures. The barman filled a glass, and when he brought it to her, she took the longest sip she could manage without gulping or coughing.

“You've changed,” Tino said. “Rumor had it you were the only one who ever went to Ricketts's lab and didn't emerge blind drunk.”

“I emerged pregnant. Which was probably worse.”

Tino swallowed. The brothers traded glances.

“You've changed, too,” she continued. “I wouldn't have expected you to want to take the helm.”

“Oh, life is less about what one wants, I suppose, and more about what one is willing to accept.”

“It was your mother's plan all along,” she guessed.

“I suppose it was.”

“And you're still willing to buy?”

“My family owes you at least that much, even though the reduction plant is barely worth the land it stands on anymore.”

“It's gotten that bad?”

“It has. During the war, the government took over and then bled us dry. Requisitioned our boats for shore patrol while simultaneously forcing us to meet impossible quotas. Evacuated some of the poorer Italians and all the Japanese. When the sardines disappeared, most of the canneries went under, but we were able to stay open because we switched over to squid.”

She looked down at the table. The squid boats from Anders's childhood. Orange sails. Women in the night water wrestling the heaving nets to shore.

“Are you all right?” he asked. “You look ill. Let me walk you home.”

“I'll be fine.” When she drained her glass, another one arrived as if by magic, full to the brim. “Let's discuss our terms.”

“Whatever you think is fair.”

“Market price. Minus expenses.”

“For both the house and the reduction plant?”

“That's right.”

“I'll have my lawyer draft something. You'll have it by this evening. I'm sure you're eager to move on.”