Enchanted Islands Page 11

  When the letter came back to me marked “No Such Resident,” I was sad I hadn’t written immediately. Regret washed over me the way it always did in the aftermath of an impetuous action. Where had she gone? I hoped to New York. Or California. But this was back when people disappeared, when America was a vast swath of uncharted territory, and people were like pebbles tossed into the ocean.

  Perhaps I wanted to continue to disappear, and that’s why I moved to San Francisco when I graduated. Or maybe it’s just because that’s where I got a job, as a newly minted English teacher, diploma still fresh off the press.

  *

  I was a fourth-grade teacher for almost ten years, then a seventh-grade teacher for five, a teacher of English to Oriental immigrants’ children for a dozen more. During that time, I lived in an apartment in the Fillmore with two other women. They got married, and I found two others to live with me, and when they, too, got married I decided that it was too much trouble and I moved into a boardinghouse near the school where I was then teaching.

  Each year the students stayed the same while I aged, incrementally but undeniably. The girls in the boardinghouse left to get married, or to move back home, their fun in the big city done. I was courted a few times, and a few times thought that maybe I’d get married, but it never worked out, and then I got used to being who I was, and it was too late to find someone.

  Most Friday afternoons, after school let out for the week, I would go to the cinema, to clear my mind of the children’s problems and the politics of elementary education. There was a theater halfway between school and my house, and I could make the showing at five fifteen. I remember there was a Chinese man outside who sold grapes, a strange enough cinema snack that I always bought them. He had a jug of water that he’d pour over the grapes to clean them before he handed them to me, wrapped in harsh brown paper.

  I never cared what I saw. They changed reels each Wednesday, so it was always something new. I was fond of adventure films, films in which animals appeared, and films set in Europe. I was less interested in the romances or comedies. They promised something false, something silly. I looked for Rosalie in the faces of the extras and the bit players. During the credits I’d look for her name, half hoping that I might see it. But I never did.

  Milestones came and went with the suddenness of summer rain showers. My father died, and I sent more of my money home to my mother. My younger brother hurt his leg on the streetcar, and I sent a little more. And then my mother died of influenza and the money order I sent got sent back and I lost track of my siblings without realizing it. My thirtieth birthday took me by surprise. Not so my fortieth, which I had dreaded for so long that its actual occurrence was not nearly as bad as the anticipation.

  One summer I took the train back to Nebraska to visit Mrs. Keane. There was a younger version of me doing my job. When we won the right to vote, I sent Mrs. Keane a card and it was this girl who wrote me back, a form letter thanking me for all my hard work for the movement.

  My fiftieth birthday found me wanting a change. I had started to find the children irritating rather than endearing, and colleagues noticed I was burned out. I was sick of teaching the same thing every year, each new class simply a variation of the previous ones. I found the immigrants’ lack of English annoying; my patience was razor thin. So I gave my notice and began to circle jobs in the want ads of the San Francisco Chronicle, the way I had done all those years ago in Chicago.

  I applied for a number of secretarial jobs, including one that only vaguely described its purpose. I must have come across as discreet, for they hired me, and after only six months I was given basic security clearance and found myself working for the Twelfth District Office of Naval Intelligence.

  It sounds like a glamorous job, but like all secretarial jobs it was mostly typing up reports and documents, answering phones, taking messages, and sending people on errands. My ability to read and not absorb communications served me well. I remained legitimately ignorant of what was going on. We had a small satellite office inside a nondescript office building downtown, a dingy back suite that had a heavy unmarked door. This suited me just fine. No real responsibilities, no one counting on me.

  I have always been a rather quiet person, content to observe rather than participate, and my reticence grew with age so that by the time I reached my early fifties, an age at which women stopped being noticed, I blended into the scenery as neatly as a camouflaged iguana.

  *

  Ainslie had trouble opening the door. He was carrying a standard-issue briefcase, his hat in one hand and a large military duffel in the other. My first impression was that he was tall, incredibly tall, with a wide, matinee-idol mouth. His hair was pomaded neatly in place. He set the briefcase down to push the door. I wanted to help him out, but sometimes military men get embarrassed when a woman shows them how things work. Finally he pulled on the door and knocked the briefcase over. He tried to hold the door open with his leg while he reached for his case, but apparently he had never been to our outpost office before or he would have known that our door—reinforced iron-paneled—was notoriously heavy, and it closed on him.

  I left my desk and gave the door a heave-ho with my meager body weight. Ainslie had bent to pick up his case, and like a Keystone Cops routine, I banged him in the head. His first words to me were, “Ouch, Lordy, that smarts.”

  I was horrified to see that a bright red welt was forming rapidly on his forehead, but he smiled. Everyone who has met Ainslie remembers his eyes, preternaturally focused and shiny, and he turned them on me while rubbing his forehead.

  “Quite the bunker here.”

  He left the duffel in the hall and accepted my arm to take him to a chair. I mumbled apologies and said I’d send the boy for ice.

  “If you could send him for some liver instead, that’ll keep a lump from forming.”

  Right then, Director Childress came from his office. “Connie!” he said, extending his hand. “How the hell have you been?”

  Ainslie shook his hand, pumping it hard. “Can’t complain. I was fine until your girl here coldcocked me.”

  Childress looked at me with surprise and confusion. I could feel my face turn red.

  “Sir, I’m sorry, I—”

  But Childress laughed. “Good old Connie can take it, can’t you, Lieutenant Commander?”

  “I don’t know, sir, she’s got Kraut aim.”

  They went inside Childress’s soundproof office. I opened our fortified entrance and pulled in his duffel. It weighed more than it appeared to, and it was all I could do to drag it inside. I kicked off my heels and bent over to pull it. I was thus engaged, my hind region high in the air, when Ainslie stuck his head out.

  “The boy back with the meat yet?”

  I straightened up hurriedly. “Sorry, I was just…”

  Ainslie’s forehead knot was a bright clown’s nose above his eyes. “Let me know when it gets here.”

  “Yessir,” I said.

  Their meeting ended before the boy got back. Ainslie and Childress emerged, without the briefcase, and said their goodbyes. Ainslie slung the heavy duffel over his shoulder and, pretending to be afraid of my lethal force, took his leave. Not five minutes later, the boy came in with a piece of liver, which I ate for dinner that night, though I hate organ meat.

  *

  I thought nothing more of the handsome man who came to the office until the following week when Childress called me into his sanctum sanctorum. I brought my steno pad, my constant companion. Childress motioned with his chubby hand for me to sit. His office had no windows and curiously it always smelled of paste. He usually had a fan going to circulate the air, as he was always sweaty, and his hair swirled with its oscillations. It blew cold on my ankles.

  “I have a strange proposition, Miss Frank.” (I had kept my assumed name.)

  I began to write the sentence down until I realized he was addressing me. I looked up. “There is an assignment…it’s a strange one, and it requires a certain kind
of person. Well, a female kind.”

  I couldn’t imagine what he was about to ask me.

  “Do you remember that man named Conway last week? The one you hit with the door?”

  “I’m so sorry, sir. It was an accident. I was just—”

  “It’s not about that. He’s…well, I can’t tell you until you have the appropriate clearance, but let’s just say he does some shadow work for us.”

  It is a testament to my ability to disassociate myself from my work that I wasn’t sure what he was talking about.

  “He’s been assigned to a rather remote post, and part of his cover requires that he arrive with a wife.”

  My first thought was that Childress was going to ask me to find someone to marry Conway. I thought about the girls in my boardinghouse. There might be one on the second floor who would be appropriate. I didn’t know much about her. Would she pass the background check?

  Childress was waiting for some kind of response. “I can look around,” I said. “But surely he can find his own wife. He’s very handsome.”

  Childress cleared his throat. “Yes, well, he’s a confirmed bachelor, and we need someone who will remember that the first duty is to the country rather than to some sentiment. It’s sentiment that compromises, every time. Or greed, I suppose. Greed and sentiment. We thought that you might consider it, Miss Frank.”

  “Consider what? I’m sorry…”

  “Marrying Conway and accompanying him on his mission.”

  I believe my jaw actually flopped open. My throat went dry.

  “You have the clearance, no ties that I can see to anything or anyone in particular in the Bay Area. You are highly capable…And you said that you lived on a farm, so you’re self-sufficient.”

  The proposal was so preposterous that I couldn’t even articulate the reasons why I couldn’t go.

  “It’s Floreana, one of the Galápagos Islands, in case you were wondering.”

  I had heard of them, of course, in relation to Darwin and his famous finch, but they might as well have been on a different planet for all I knew about their location and topography.

  I was unable to muster the appropriate muscles to produce speech; even my brain was paralyzed.

  “Pacific, off the coast of Ecuador. I have a map here somewhere.” Childress began halfheartedly looking through the piles on his desk. He gave up after two piles. “It would just be for twelve months or so. Then you can come back here and get the marriage annulled and all will be as it was. Are you all right, Miss Frank? You look like you’re in pain.”

  Throughout my life people have told me that when I’m not actively managing my features they screw up into a rictus. My brow furrows, my eyes narrow, and my nearly invisible lips retreat into the safety of my mouth. I can only assume I was wearing this expression now. I felt, as Ainslie liked to say, flummoxeled, a combination of flummoxed and frazzled.

  I nodded, my tongue large in my mouth. I tasted, peculiarly, pennies. Looking at my reaction now, I understand that it was so extreme because I knew already that I would accept the mission. Still, Childress gave me two weeks to think about it, and arranged for me and Ainslie Conway to get together to discuss the nonclassified part of the arrangement.

  Childress gave me a file folder that contained the following information (supplemented by a trip to the library and a 1935 South American Handbook).

  The Galápagos, formerly known as Las Islas Encantadas, or the Enchanted Isles, are an archipelago formed by volcanoes about six hundred miles west of the Ecuadorian shore. They were the nationless playground of whalers and buccaneers until Ecuador annexed them in 1832. Darwin paid his famed visit in 1835. Still, they served mostly as a service station for passing ships in search of protected bays in which to repair ships, take on fresh water and coal, and capture tortoises (this can’t have been good sport, for the tortoise’s reputation for pokiness is well deserved, but they could live for months without water and provide fresh meat for those at sea). There were no more tortoises on Floreana, I was disappointed to learn; the sailors and pirates had eaten them all. The few that escaped were decimated by the introduced goat and rat population. Supposedly, also, pirates buried treasure there, though none had yet been found, so this must have been a romantic fantasy. Then the islands were the site of a penal colony, a coffee plantation (whose owner was so cruel to his employees that they killed him), various fisheries that failed, and occasional mutineers put ashore as punishment. It did not sound promising.

  There were four inhabited islands, and we were to live on the southernmost of these: Floreana, a round island with two protrusions like fox ears. The first permanent European residents of Floreana were the Germans Dr. Friedrich Ritter and his partner, Dore Strauch. An odd pair, Ritter was an ascetic, a strict vegetarian, and by all accounts a taskmaster. He met Dore when she was his patient. They soon became lovers, though they were both married. Ritter had contrived his own philosophy, a mixture of Nietzsche and Kant and Ritter that emphasized self-sufficiency. Dore was an acolyte. The Galápagos seemed like the perfect place to test their theories, so they sat both their families down and convinced their respective spouses to unite just as Dore and Friedrich were uniting. And apparently the arrangement worked out.

  The doctor was short, grouchy, and surly. Dore was subservient and of equally bad humor. I have known my fair share of vegetarians in my life, and there is something about those who choose to forgo meat when it is available that creates a particular type of misanthrope. Friedrich and Dore had no teeth; they had them pulled before leaving the Continent to avoid dental problems. Why would vegetarians need teeth?

  They had been on the island about five years when Margret and Heinz Wittmer arrived. Margret was pregnant at the time, and they had with them Heinz’s son from his first marriage; the boy had rheumatic fever, which caused poor eyesight.

  Margret’s account of their arrival can be read in her book, Floreana, which in its own way is as redacted as mine. Much of it is her attempt to exonerate herself and her husband from the charges of murder.

  Apparently there was no love lost between Dore and Friedrich and the Wittmers, though they shared a common language. Friedrich refused to help them, though he did eventually tend to Margret after she gave birth. She failed to deliver the placenta and would have died of septic shock had he not intervened.

  In October 1832, an Austrian baroness arrived with her three lovers: an Austrian, a German, and an Ecuadorian who soon left the island. A diva in search of a stage, she established herself with the intention of starting a luxury resort. She told wild stories of her absent husband, a count, and their lavish lifestyle before she decided to travel the world.

  The baroness was the worst kind of neighbor—she stole from the other colonists, and convinced stopping ships that they need not leave any extra supplies for the other residents. She beat Lorenz, the weakest of the lovers, savagely. He often escaped to Friedrich and Dore’s in tears, begging for help. One day he arrived saying that the baroness and her German lover had left on a boat. No one ever saw the boat, and no trace was ever found of either of them. Did Lorenz murder them, finally driven to the brink by his mistreatment? Did Friedrich dispatch them with his bag of apothecary tricks, sick of their meddling? Or did the Wittmers do it? Maybe the baroness and her lover met with an accident, or maybe they actually did catch a ship that no one ever saw. Who knows?

  But it was these kinds of antics that drew the attention of the press and the military. What were all these Germans doing on an island in the Pacific? And more were arriving. Add to that the fact that Friedrich died of meat poisoning (some vegetarian!) less than a year later and you have a real whodunit.

  The report on the disappearances, I saw, was signed by Allan Hancock, whose name was familiar as an oil baron and amateur scientist. I wasn’t aware he was working for the government. Included were a copy of his ship’s log, with several photos of the sailors dressed as women and Roman gods to celebrate his first trip across the equator. “The Po
llywogs and King Neptune” read the caption.

  As for Floreana, the log showed several pictures of the deceased in livelier times (pun intended). I studied the baroness’s house for a while. It was a scene from Mutiny on the Bounty, palm trees and gracefully draped platform beds and chairs. There was a rug on the ground, and the baroness was smiling, thin-lipped. In other photos, Hancock was holding a large iguana by its tail, and in still another he was laughing with Friedrich while Dore pet her donkey, Fleck.

  I am never one to shy away from a challenge, and reading about the Galápagos I was being issued one. “You can’t make it here,” the literature said. “You are old and not up to the task.”

  “I’ll show you,” I said to myself. “I have homesteaded in Nebraska and joined the gold rush in San Francisco. A few brambles on an island don’t scare me.” Let it be known that I lived on a long-established farm in Nebraska and was half a century too late for the gold rush. The only panning I did was to search for a decently punctuated sentence among my students’ papers. If you’re going to have an imaginary debate, however, you might as well embellish the facts.

  I will not deny that the idea of spending more time with matinee-idol Conway was a tick in the pro column. Yes, I was north of fifty, and though literature stops recording desire once the decrepitude of thirty sets in, real life does not immediately follow suit. I knew him not at all, but I liked the cut of his jib, as they used to say.

  It is also worth remembering that I tend to make decisions impetuously where drastic life changes are concerned. It has always been a feature of my personality. Some would compliment me on my devil-may-care attitude. Others might disparage it as myopia and insanity. They would both, of course, be correct.

  *

  He was very, very handsome. After a separation, I was always struck breathless by his beauty as if seeing him for the first time. He was less intimidating sitting down, though the second he saw me, he stood and kissed me on the cheek, which made me blush. Luckily the supper club was dark enough that no one could see.