Enchanted Islands Read online

  “Are you married, Fanny? Children?”

  I suppose I made a natural spy, because here is where some small part of me took over my faculties. I was jealous of Rosalie, the way I had always been, the way I would always be. I wanted to one-up her, or at least even our status.

  “Yes,” I said, “I’m married. I’m Mrs. Ainslie Conway.”

  Once I said it, I had to marry him, because when you tell a lie to someone you haven’t seen for almost forty years it’s important to see it through. That is honestly how I made my decision.

  “Oh that’s wonderful!” Rosalie said. “Tell me all about him.”

  “He’s very kind,” I said. “And also tall. He’s very tall. We’ve only been married a short time.” I told her I was working as a secretary for the navy, and that Ainslie was an officer. She was sorry that my talents went to waste in secretarial work. I told her I used to be a teacher, and that I liked my job.

  “I need to go find my children,” she said. “But I don’t want to let you out of my sight. And I want you to meet Clarence. Say you’ll come to Shabbat dinner tonight?”

  My shock must have registered on my face. “I know, I know,” she said. “Clarence’s family is religious, and I, well, I’ve grown to like the customs. Don’t laugh, just say you’ll be there.” She handed me a card with her address and discreetly paid the check. Then she handed me a small mother-of-pearl-shafted pen and another card and made me write down my address and telephone. “I’m not losing you again,” she said. She stood and kissed me hard on the cheek, bounding out of the diner like someone half her age.

  I sat stunned. “Would you like anything else, miss?” the waitress asked, obviously anxious to have her table back.

  “No, thank you,” I said. “I just need to sit for a moment.”

  Was I dreaming? Rosalie was living in San Francisco? I shook my head to clear the fog.

  Rosalie. I smiled, finally able to get my legs working again. Rosalie.

  *

  I primped carefully for my night in Pacific Heights. I actually bought a new dress, belted at the waist with puffed sleeves and a yoke collar that drew attention to itself and away from my meager bust. I paired it with my only cloche and the same T-straps I’d been wearing for years. I even rouged my cheeks a bit.

  Though only a mile away, Rosalie’s neighborhood was about as far from my shabby Fillmore apartment as one could get. The house was even grander than I expected. I thought she’d been exaggerating her wealth, but it turned out she’d described it modestly. She lived in a true mansion, at the top of a hill, painted brightly in lavender and aubergine. The grand stone staircase was decorated with flowering vases—hostas, ranunculus, hydrangeas. I climbed the stairs and was surprised when it was not Rosalie who answered the bell I rang but a maid.

  “Mrs. Conway,” she said. “Please come in, I’ll take your coat.”

  My pumps echoed on the marble floor as I followed the woman into a drawing room. In my boardinghouse efficiency, I couldn’t imagine having my own room just for sitting and chatting. The Regency furniture was upholstered velvet, and the ornately carved mantel framed a fire that crackled with warmth.

  Rosalie was making herself a drink at the sideboard. She came up and hugged me, then wiped my bangs, wet from my walk in the rain, off my face.

  “I was worried you wouldn’t come,” she said. “We’ll have dinner and then you and I can chat privately. Melanie, what time is it?”

  As if on cue, the grandfather clock chimed six fifteen.

  “Rosie?” A lumbering step came down the front stairs and a large man stuck his head in the drawing room. “This her, then?”

  “Clarence, meet Frances.”

  Clarence was a formerly thin man whose weight had settled in his belly. He had very little hair left, but what he did have he combed around in a circle to simulate hair. He had a wide bulbous nose and a sharp chin, but it made for a pleasant face, if not exactly a handsome one. He shook my hand vigorously.

  “Kids,” he yelled upstairs. “Let’s go.”

  I heard a rush of footsteps down the stairs, and we all walked into the dining room for dinner.

  Clarence said the prayer over the candles, wine, and bread, and we were served by two different people, one colored and one white, who never let the wine in the glasses dip below halfway. Even the two older children, who were about Rosalie’s and my age when we left home, drank wine. When the meal was over and the plates were cleared, the family sang songs in Hebrew. I recognized some of them from Rosalie’s house in Duluth as classic Zionist melodies.

  Afterward, the children and Clarence disappeared upstairs. Rosalie waited patiently at the entrance to the living room, while the maid turned on the light. I looked at her. “Marriage does funny things, Fanny, as I’m sure you know.”

  We sat, and I could feel the wine show hot on my face.

  “Fanny, did you ever get my letter?”

  I knew immediately the one she was talking about, the apology that I received on the farm in Nebraska. I nodded.

  “Can you ever forgive me?”

  I’d been angry for years. At times, that anger fueled me. Other times it deeply saddened me. Now I looked inside myself, and all that bubbled up was laughter. “Rosie, that was a hundred years ago.”

  “Well, not that long, really.” She looked a little offended.

  “I can’t still be mad at something that happened when we were children. Plus, it meant I got to go to Nebraska and finish school. It’s hard to regret that at this point.”

  “I’m so glad,” Rosalie said. “Every year on Yom Kippur I pray for your forgiveness.”

  I wanted to laugh again. Rosalie used to join me in condemning my parents as superstitious peasants. For her to have found religion in this way made me question if I knew her at all. Of course, I’d changed too.

  “I can explain why—”

  I cut her off. “Rosalie, there’s no need. Tell me instead how you met Clarence.”

  She grew animated and told me a long story, which I didn’t quite follow, about stepping on his glasses while serving as a cigarette girl in a club in Los Angeles. She was animated, waving her arms, and when the story finished, she got up and stood near the door. “Melanie!” she called.

  The maid from earlier arrived. “Yes, ma’am?”

  “Can you light me a cigarette, please?”

  Melanie went over to the console where a small box held cigarettes and a match. She held the cigarette up to Rosalie’s lips and lit the end while Rosalie breathed hard.

  “Do you smoke?” she asked me.

  “No,” I said. When she pulled the cigarette away from her mouth it was ringed with red. How had she managed to keep her lipstick on during dinner? My lipstick always slid off my lips like a dolphin sheds water.

  There was a silence. Rosalie grabbed my hand again, squeezing it to the point of pain. The fire had died down, and the room was dark except for the point of her cigarette. “Fanny,” she said, “I’m desperate not to lose you again.”

  “You won’t,” I said. I had been so lonely, I hadn’t realized.

  “I don’t want us to have any secrets,” she said. I nodded. Yet I already had secrets. “But there are things between us that I want to keep between us. I’m sure you understand.” I nodded again. Her husband must not know about her past. That was fine with me. The less I thought about the past, the better.

  “Do you still see your parents?” she asked. “Are they alive?”

  “Passed away nearly thirty years ago now. My older brother still lives in Duluth, I think, but I haven’t had any letters from him in years.”

  “I’m back in touch with my mother. I know, it seems crazy, but someone sent her Clarence and my wedding announcement and we started corresponding. She actually lives over the bridge now, in Marin. She’s widowed. Not from my father but from her second husband.”

  Will wonders never cease, I thought. “What happened,” I ventured, “to Zeke?”

  Rosalie
’s face was blank for a minute. Then realization swept across it. She stubbed her cigarette out in the ashtray. “Oh good Lord, that was the last time I saw him. Bad things were happening. They were going to get worse.” Her brow furrowed and she looked at her hands. “But then they got better!” I had forgotten how Rosalie was able to clear a mood like sweeping a porch. It was an admirable quality, for those of us who tended to dwell in the land of grudge and funk.

  Rosalie called again for the maid to light another cigarette.

  “Should I build up the fire, ma’am?” she asked.

  “No, that’s all right,” Rosalie replied. “Just let it burn down.”

  *

  That Monday, I marched into Childress’s office the minute I arrived and announced that I would marry Ainslie and go to the Galápagos. I never actually made the decision, but telling Rosalie made it a fait accompli. It was already done; we just had to go through the actions.

  Childress fast-tracked my security clearance and by the middle of the next week, I was Mrs. Ainslie Conway.

  Ainslie and I got married by the justice of the peace at the courthouse in San Francisco. Childress was the witness and the girl down the hall from me at my boardinghouse agreed to come sign the paper in exchange for a meal out. At the St. Francis hotel, where the Office of Naval Intelligence had gotten us a room, we ordered prime rib and drank martinis like we’d lost something in the bottom of the glass. We all got a little sloppy. The girl, I remember now her name was Laura, got friendly with Childress. I watched her squirm on his lap as he pretended to drop an olive down her bodice, and tried not to think of Mrs. Childress, who called sometimes to remind Childress to take his pills or to not forget his doctor’s appointment or to bring something home for dinner, nor of the Childress children, who perched in a photograph on his desk, as red-cheeked and chubby as their father.

  Ainslie held my hand at dinner and occasionally rubbed my knee. He pecked me chastely on the cheek when Laura and Childress got to sneaking kisses. I drank more to quell my worry. What would our marriage night be like?

  In the hotel room, I was as nervous as my first time, as though I weren’t an old lady who was marrying for patriotism instead of love. Ainslie took his time in the bathroom, whistling. I heard the water running and the steam crept under the door and into the room like there was a fire in there. I had to urinate badly, but I didn’t want to interrupt his ablutions. Finally he came out in his underwear and I brushed past him into the bathroom.

  I was nervous that as I peed the sound would be too loud, too revealing, but I needn’t have worried. When I emerged from the bathroom in the hotel’s robe, a teddy underneath concealing my scrawny breasts and slack stomach, Ainslie’s voice was thick with sleep.

  “ ’Fraid I drank too much, pet. We’ll do the marriage bed tomorrow, yes? Neither of us is a spring chicken, hmm?”

  I heard him start snoring not long after, the only night in our marriage that he snored. I wonder now if he was faking it. I feel a pang all over again that he’s not here for me to ask him, like missing a breath.

  *

  I moved into his apartment and every night we shared a bed. Three times in all the years we were together, I counted, we were together as man and wife, and it was fine; perfunctory and surprisingly not intimate. But mostly Ainslie would kiss me on the forehead, cheek, or lips, sometimes put his arms around me. In the two months it took us to get ready to go to the islands, there were three nights when Ainslie didn’t come home. As an intelligence employee, I knew better than to ask him where he’d been. Plus, he’d enter the apartment in a state of abject despair, clothes disheveled, smelling of alcohol and sweat. His color was off and he stumbled straight into the shower, where he would stay for thirty minutes. Then he’d come out, shaved and dressed, his old cheerful self, asking if the coffee was ready. He invariably brought me flowers afterward, as if instructed by men’s magazines.

  Still, I couldn’t complain. I was an old maid. I had never been the pretty one, and age had not been kind to me. It was not surprising that he didn’t want me. I should be grateful that I had a husband at all. Ainslie was kind and pleasant to be around. He made me laugh. He paid attention to me in a way that no one ever had. And it was wonderful to come home and have someone to talk to in the evenings, someone with whom to listen to the radio. I wasn’t worried that we’d lack for things to talk about on the islands. I was looking a tad forward to getting away from the bars that called to Ainslie like sirens. Maybe far from San Francisco he would become my true husband.

  *

  We met daily with Childress (who, after my censorious glances the day after our wedding, was sheepish around me), studying the files that weren’t to leave the secret meeting room. That meant long days in a windowless room that consisted of just a standard-issue table and mismatched chairs, an old projector, and a screen with a rope tied to the ring to pull it down.

  Not long after our union, a commander whose name I no longer remember came to the office to brief us. He had recently been promoted and was unhappy to be stuck with this duty, unenthusiastic about our mission. He spoke in a monotone, barely concealing his contempt. “Look, I don’t go in for shadow tactics. It’s a dirty business,” he said. “Gentlemen do not spy.”

  It was all I could do to hold my tongue and not mention the fact that I was not a gentleman. Perhaps the commander thought it was more honorable to shoot each other? It seemed to me that intelligence gathering was a cleaner way to go about it.

  Here was the current situation as the commander described it: The American government was interested in establishing a base in the Pacific. Strategically, the Galápagos were a jewel—in fact, it’s said they helped turn the tide in the War of 1812. The archipelago consisted of thirty-odd islands, some of which were mere rocks jutting out of the seabed. There were ten major islands and only four were inhabited. Floreana was currently home to at least nine Germans (we were later to find out this number was a bit inflated), a curious coincidence considering the aggression Germany was showing in Europe at the time. Were they as interested in the Galápagos as we were?

  Germany had agents all over South America; they had signed a pact with Japan; they were probably going to invade Poland after annexing Austria. Yes, they were in talks with Chamberlain, but no one actually believed that Herr Hitler would join with the country that so roundly beat his nation during the Great War and sent it into a depression that was only now lifting. Hitler was planning something; we just weren’t sure what it was.

  America’s weakest line of defense was the Panama Canal. Destroy that, and you’ve crippled America by crippling her supply lines. But it was a long trip from Japan to the canal, and the opportunity to get fresh water, muster forces, and organize troops on, say, an uninhabited archipelago just under a thousand miles from the canal, would make the Galápagos an attractive landing spot. Ecuador was distracted by its war with Peru. The Germans or their allies could organize a naval invasion.

  We were to go and keep an eye on the Germans and on the ocean. We would radio in once a week to Guayaquil where our message would be relayed, eventually, to the United States. The commander expected that the message would be “all clear” and that it was a waste of military money to send us all the way to the Galápagos. We were also to see if Floreana might be suitable for an American air corps or navy base.

  Were we sure the Germans were spies? No. Did it seem likely that Germans or Japanese would target the Panama Canal? No. Would the radio signal even reach across the ocean? Yes.

  Our mission was given the code name Pomegranate for no reason that anyone has ever been able to ascertain. We have never even come up with a working theory.

  I’m afraid I agreed with the commander. I wondered if we weren’t being sent there only to give a message to the Germans that we were watching them. I imagined all of us on the side of a hill, binoculars trained at each other, watching each other watch each other through the lenses. Still, orders are orders. Ours were for Ainslie to de
part in six weeks for training at the Office of Naval Intelligence camp in Carmel. There he would receive survival and combat retraining, and I was to join him four weeks later, for basic intelligence training.

  *

  In the following weeks, Rosalie and I spent a good deal of time together, or at least as much time as she could spare. She was incredibly busy—she was on the board of the light opera, she helped out at the children’s school, and she and Clarence had an active social life. Yes, life was not fair; this had been apparent again and again, but still it was a cruel irony that I who had the education and training to appreciate the arts had no time or money to attend, while Rosalie, who could not have cared less, who never finished high school, considered evenings spent at arts and theater galas a burden she had to undertake for her family’s sake.

  She was the old Rosalie, vivacious, fun-loving. She poured all of her drama into her conversation and loved my sardonic wit. Making her laugh felt like winning at a game. She paid for everything. When I protested, she silenced me. “This was the deal, back then. It was my turn. Now it’s yours. Plus, it’s barely even money to Clarence.”

  I wasn’t sure if she loved him or not. She never complained about him, was never reluctant to spend time with him, and if it was a marriage of convenience they both appeared to want nothing more. It was possible that Rosalie had a lover; no one could keep tabs on her socializing—she flitted from luncheon to meeting to social call to tennis practice, and any of those could have been a lie. But I had taken to heart a piece of advice that Ainslie offered: Don’t ask a question you don’t want to know the answer to.

  Since quitting my teaching job, I had spent little time around children. I began to like to spend time with Rosalie’s brood. Barbara and Sylvie were pretty, like their mother, while Dan took after his father, talking a lot and growing red in the face when expounding on a topic he particularly enjoyed discussing, namely baseball and airplanes.

  Barbara was very curious about her mother’s childhood. When she pressed me for information, I gave her some general observations, told about how we met, and about the time Rosalie passed a note to a boy telling him I liked him. Now, I saw how cruel that was, to the boy, who was not well-liked, but then I thought it an excellent prank. I talked about weekends I used to spend with Rosalie at her house, about how good the food was, how tastefully decorated the house was.