The Styx (17 page)
“Yes, well, I do enjoy the swimming. But then I would have to remove this lovely dress,” she said, again employing the coy smile and using her off hand to gesture down along her delicate waist and long skirts. He went silent. Perhaps he was envisioning it.
“I believe the boat is up on the ramp at the company dockage,” he said. “It may indeed be under guard by the watchman, but it shouldn’t take any time at all to fetch it.”
So now they were out on the water, the oar locks creaking gently as Foster rowed without haste onto Lake Worth. Marjory had situated herself in the bow at a half turn, looking out at the lights of the Poinciana, keeping track of their progress north so she would know when to guide her “beau” to shore and a rendezvous near the old dredge wharf by nine o’clock.
“The stars are so beautiful tonight,” she said. “Perhaps if we get farther north out of the glare of the hotel they will be even brighter.”
Foster quickened his pace.
“They are beautiful but much colder than the sparkle in your eyes, Marjory.”
Demurely, she turned her cheek away with a smile. Where did he come up with these lines? Was there a cheap magazine like the Farmer’s Almanac of trite phrases men studied to woo the women they hoped to impress?
Foster waited a few beats, letting the work of his silver tongue do its duty. Surely she was enjoying his company. Hadn’t she touched his arm just so? Hadn’t she had a grand time dancing in his grasp? Her suggestion of the boat ride was certainly proof that her feelings had changed toward him.
“Frankly, Marjory, if I may, I wasn’t sure that after our last meeting I would have the pleasure of seeing you again.”
“I do apologize if you took my attitude in the wrong way,” she said, recalling that the last time they’d been tossed together by a lady friend of her father’s it had been a disaster. She had taken umbrage at Foster’s braggadocio of why men were superior to women in any field of outdoor pursuits such as game hunting or fishing. Her father did not have the time to deflect young Foster’s perilous line before Marjory had challenged him to a fishing contest aboard Captain Connelly’s deep sea yacht. The next day, Marjory pulled in the largest swordfish of the outing, and then she added insult to injury on the return by announcing at about the one mile marker from Palm Beach Island that she was overheated and was going to swim the rest of the way to the beach. Infuriated by Foster’s smiling dismissal, she stared him directly in the eye and then stunned three of the four men aboard by removing one layer of her overclothing, mounting the rail and then diving like a true professional into the aqua water. It took several minutes for her father to convince the captain that Marjory was an excellent swimmer and would probably be back in their hotel suite long before they made dockage.
She had not seen Graham Foster since. But she knew he had access to a rowboat.
As they moved easily to the north, Marjory now listened with half an ear to her companion’s monologue about the subject he was most familiar with—himself—and the other half on the night sounds along the lakefront. An owl called its kaweek, kaweek from a hunting perch somewhere in the water oaks on the island shore. A splash off to the west, but not more than thirty yards away, gave truth to the fishermen’s tales that large tarpon did indeed feed in the nighttime waters of the lake. Marjory turned away from Foster to check on their progress to the dredge dock, and as they drew near turned on her charm once more.
“Might we just drift a bit, Graham? I so love the quiet here and the stars truly are a wonder.”
Foster stopped rowing and talking. He had been facing back toward the receding lights of the Poinciana, turned and saw her view of the blackness to the north and was, at least for a moment, transfixed by the sight of the constellation Virgo hanging low in the sky and the star field around it dipping down to the horizon.
“You do have the constant touch of the dramatic that follows you,” he said. It was perhaps the first statement of truth she’d heard from him, and she felt a twinge of regret at what she was about to do. But the feeling did not stop her. She slid forward to the edge of her seat, moving closer to him. He reacted as she knew he would to the subtle invitation, shipped his oars and matched her movement until their lips met.
When he pressed, she retreated.
“Oh, my, Graham,” she said, feigning breathlessness. She reached out to clutch both sides of the boat as if to steady herself. “I, I…oh, my.”
Now her right hand went to her throat, though she knew in the darkness he would not see the lack of any sort of blush to her skin.
“I do believe I’m becoming quite dizzy. You have taken me by surprise.” She looked at him with that learned woman’s technique of peering up with the eyes while keeping her chin low. Foster did not move; he was still leaning forward, frozen in an awkward pose.
“Not unpleasantly,” Marjory added. She then looked about, as if unfamiliar with where exactly they were. “Could we possibly go ashore here? The lack of solid ground beneath my feet is quite, umm, unsettling.”
Foster settled back in his seat as if commanded and reached for the oars.
“Absolutely,” he said, scanning the shore line and picking up the obvious dark outline of the dredge dock. “I apologize, my dear. My intentions were honorable and I did not mean to cause you to swoon.”
The slightest touch of bravado was in his voice. A man taking responsibility for his manliness, thought Marjory. Ha! All her previous inklings of guilt disappeared.
“Just there.” She pointed to the dock. “Could we go ashore there?”
Foster pulled the last few strokes and beached the bow onto the rim of wet mash that served as the shore. Without hesitation he removed his shoes, rolled up his pants cuffs and got out to push the rowboat higher onto solid ground so Marjory could get out without soiling too much of her gown. He took her arm, and they walked up to high ground while she breathed deeply and appeared to be gathering herself.
“My,” she said again, using a word she rarely uttered when she was not in the company of people she wished to socially impress or to con into thinking she was weak. “I’m not sure what came over me. But I’m certainly better now.”
“Are you sure?” Foster said, looking into her eyes but again injecting that touch of overconfidence and double meaning into his voice.
McAdams noted the question was lacking in true concern and she showed her confusion with a questioning face.
“I mean are you sure that you don’t know what came over you?”
Now he was smiling. Did he really think his kiss had caused her to swoon? She turned her face away, hoping it was taken as a blushing moment instead of a mild chagrin. Men, she thought, and then without looking up she took his arm and turned south toward the hotel.
“There is a path made by the workers. Can we walk together back to the hotel?”
Foster looked back once at the rowboat, and she read his hesitation.
“Surely everyone knows whose boat she is and will not dare to move it.” She squeezed his arm just so. “And it was been such a wonderful night. Let’s not let it end so soon.”
As they walked arm-in-arm through the brush along the lakeshore, McAdams knew that she would not see the baseball player and the young woman even if they were close by. But she did hear the unfamiliar trill of a bird she knew was not native to the island, the whistle low and sounding too much like a pigeon from Brooklyn to be real. Foster made no reaction to the sound; he was again listening to himself. As McAdams moved more quickly down the path and away from the dredge dock, he was again expounding.
“Mr. Flagler has certainly done a marvelous job with the hotel and the beginnings of the town on shore. Business has doubled since his arrival, and that means at the very least a doubling of my own trade.”
McAdams was perplexed at where he was going with such conversation and afraid she was losing his focus. He was looking out on the lights of the Poinciana and the approaching paths of the manicured lawns and golf course. He stopped and turned to her.
“I will be a rich man,” he said, the statement full of what was not being said. He grasped her other arm and pulled her closer.
Damn, she thought. I’ve gone too far. He’s actually going to propose to me.
“I will inherit my father’s steamship business and be set for life. The more people who hear about the beauty and climate of this place, the more we’ll ferry them and their necessities for building and living here. There are plans to widen and deepen an intracoastal waterway that for the next one hundred years will be the major transportation line to the very tip of Florida. People will forever flock to our boats.”
Foster turned his head just so, waiting for her to raise her face to his. “You can be part of all that, Marjory.”
“Why, Graham Foster,” she said, much louder than his romantic whisper. She freed her arms, planted all ten fingertips into Foster’s chest and pressed him back. “Aren’t you just the forward thinking one? And a bit too forward in other ways I might add.”
She stepped back, turned toward the hotel and began to walk.
“By the way, if you intend to inherit Florida’s transportation world with your steamships, you should have a conversation with my father when he arrives on the island tomorrow. I do recall on his last trip he talked of some fellow named Ransom Olds who was interested in coming to Daytona Beach, where he said people were sure to go absolutely ga-ga over his new invention called the motor car.”
L
OOK
at yourself, lad!”
Harris had come forward to the train engine landing, where Byrne had stationed himself ever since the dynamite fiasco some three hours before. Byrne followed the order, looked down at himself and noted that he was indeed covered with soot and coal oils, even though he thought he’d positioned himself out of the stream of smoke and ash.
“We’ll be pullin’ into West Palm soon enough, and before we cross over to the island you’d best be lookin’ smart, son.
“Go on back and change into something clean, if you’ve got any. Mr. Flagler is entering his domain and I promise you you’re going to be damned embarrassed to be in the company of such opulence lookin’ like a coal peddler.”
Byrne headed for the caboose. Harris cut his eyes at the engineer and fireman who were equally soiled and gave them a shrug. “No offense, men.”
Within the hour Byrne was stationed at his place on the rear platform. He’d brushed his coat, inspected his shirts and picked the one with the least dirt around the collar and polished his brogans with Harris’ boot black. By now he was used to the movement of the train and could feel it slowing as they eased into the populated area of West Palm Beach, if you wanted to call it populated. Byrne had poked his head around the corner to look forward several times, thinking that at some point he’d be able to see a skyline of the city but was disappointed each time by the continued flatness of brush and scrub pine and the seemingly endless tangle of green. Soon, off to the east he picked up the reflection of water, a lake that Harris would later call Lake Worth. To the west they passed several acres of cleared land and rows of crops that his mentor would tell him were pineapple plants. Byrne had seen the fruit once in New York when a street merchant had somehow gotten a load of the oblong, prickly looking orbs and made a show of whacking at the individual husks with a machete while guaranteeing “such sweetness and juicy flavor like you’ve never imagined in your lives.” Byrne noted there was a crude sort of sprinkler system spewing water over the crops, which led him to believe there would be plumbing in the city. He would be proved wrong.
A dirt road began to parallel the tracks, starting as little more than a two-rut wagon trail and then turning into a hard, flat roadbed and then improving, if you could say that, into a surface tamped down with a strange, shell-like crust. As they entered the town proper, a few two-and three-story wooden buildings sprouted on the side streets with signs like O.W. Weybrecht, The Pioneer Hardware Store and E.H. Dimmick, Druggist. But many of the businesses were in tents or carts not unlike old Mrs. McReady’s outside his New York tenement.
The train slowed and with the familiar hiss of the steam brakes came to a full stop. Byrne was about to hop down to take position on the ground outside Flagler’s car when Harris appeared at the door.
“Not yet, lad. They’re switchin us onto the island spur. Just the hotel guests in the last two cars, the parlor car and Mr. Flagler’s number 90. The rest of the lot’ll stop at the station in town and then be headin’ south to Miami.
“We’ll take you down that route in the future, Mr. Byrne. For now the boss needs us here,” Harris aimed his exaggerated nod off to the east. When he disappeared inside Byrne stepped over to the other side of the platform and looked toward the lake. In the hard sun he could see an enormous gleaming white structure rising up alone on the opposite shore. He determined she was at least seven stories, with huge mansard roofs at either end and a broad cupola at the middle. It was no doubt the Royal Poinciana, but it looked out of place along the flat horizon of blue lake water and low green shrub. Byrne hadn’t seen anything since Washington, D.C. to compare, and as he looked down the side of the train cars, he spotted several of the upscale passengers leaning out of their windows and pointing. They were apparently joining in his simple astonishment. The train began to move again, this time curving along a spur and then up onto a bridge that was taking them across the lake, the grand hotel growing larger and more impressive with each turn of the wheels.
