Enchanted Islands Read online

  “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.”

  We drove past the first tee and down a hill. There was a chain stretched across the road here, and two guards with pistols in their holsters. They waved Ainslie through, unhooking the chain so we could pass.

  On what used to be the third fairway (I knew because the sign announcing it as a par five was still visible) there were a series of prefabricated huts. “Here’s ours.” Ainslie pulled up to one that was indistinguishable from its neighbor. He got my bags out of the car while I went inside.
/>   It was small but serviceable, a kitchenette, a two-person table, and a sofa, with a bathroom to the left and a bedroom to the right. True to his nature, Ainslie hadn’t decorated, except, I noticed, for a portrait of me on the nightstand table, which touched me.

  “Home sweet home,” Ainslie said behind me, and I shuddered with the chill of what we’d jumped into. It hadn’t seemed real when we were in San Francisco, but now I saw that I had joined my lot to this man I barely knew.

  Ainslie looked at his watch. “Perfect timing,” he said. “We can make the first seating for dinner.”

  That night Ainslie announced, “I don’t want to wake you with my snoring. I’ll sleep on the sofa.”

  I wanted, indeed, I expected us to continue to occupy one bed, even though we weren’t together in that sense, and his announcing that he was going to sleep on the couch stung. I told myself that he was under stress, that now that we were with people who understood the circumstances under which we got married he didn’t have to pretend. Ainslie was fond of me, found me amusing, but wanted to make it clear that while we were married, we were not man and wife.

  *

  My basic-intelligence instructor was named Mr. Fox. This was not his real name. He could have told us his name; we were not actually undercover at this point, but he wanted us to get used to answering to names not our own, if need be. We changed our names weekly. I chose Beatrice Dante for my first week. No one noticed the reference.

  My other classmates were young recruits. Two of the women worked as secretaries like me and there was another woman whose qualifications seemed to consist merely of her beauty. I don’t love meeting new people, so avoiding intimacies with them was not a hardship. But I could see how some of the more extroverted participants were surprised to come up against a wall of loneliness.

  That first week, we went over basic intelligence training. Most of it was common sense, but there were several matters of standard tradecraft that intelligence officers had to follow, most of which involved the amount and methods of communication, basic signal encoding, and strategies to get people to trust us. I learned how to recruit an asset—find their weakness (usually a woman or a child) and either exploit it or offer to help it.

  I won’t deny that some of it was useful and interesting (though I never had much use for disguising my appearance), but the majority was deadly dull and not applicable to my situation. I would presumably never have to shed a tail in a city or create and execute a drop.

  The second week we moved on to communications, where I learned Morse code, various military acronyms that I promptly forgot, and basic radio technology. As it turned out, I was completely useless with all things electronic. I could never diagnose or repair a radio, no matter how often I was shown its basic circuitry. I just fundamentally didn’t understand how electricity could transport sound. I also had to be shown how to turn on and operate each new radio I encountered, the logic of the knobs and buttons opaque to me. But once I was familiar with them, I was very quick at sending the Morse code messages. “Well done, Miss Austen,” Mr. Wolf said at the end of the second week.

  “Do they have any idea you’re taking your code names from literature?” Ainslie asked when I arrived back at our bungalow.

  “None,” I said. I set my notebook on our kitchen counter. “You could come in and call yourself Bill Shakespeare and no one would bat an eye. It’s like the perfect cover.”

  “Was it Shakespeare who said, ‘You’ll never go broke underestimating the ignorance of intelligence trainees’?” Ainslie said, lighting one cigarette off the remnant of the other.

  Week three was physical training. I, now called Mrs. Shelley, had to laugh. I was fifty-five years old. My fellow participants refused to spar with me (thank goodness). Instead, I learned how to make a knife out of bone, how to target the solar plexus, how to drive the nose into the brain, how to put out eyes, and how to disable a man (take a guess).

  Week four was survival training. Here was where Mrs. Alcott really shone, according to Mr. Buck. I learned how to shoot (though not how to aim), how to determine which berries could be eaten, how to make and tie ropes and create shelter. I knew from my time on the farm how to turn a rabbit from a living creature into a meal. I wasn’t bad with snares, and I won my colleagues’ admiration with my squirrel-skinning abilities. I am uncommonly quick at it. It’s funny when you find an aptitude where you don’t expect it.

  *

  It was the closest thing to a honeymoon Ainslie and I had. On Saturday nights we would go with the other officers and their wives to the Pines, get tight, and dance until midnight. There was always a passable band, and oh, how Ainslie could dance! No matter his partner, he made her look as graceful as Ginger Rogers, his footwork effortless, his carriage erect.

  We laughed and laughed, and I fell a little in love with him on those nights. Or in love with the image of him: dashing, popular, carefree. I knew they whispered behind our backs, wondering about the age difference, the personality difference. I tried not to let that bother me.

  In the evenings, we played cribbage, or spite and malice, or worked on our cover stories. The trick was to get them close enough to the real thing so as to be able to remember them, to tell stories about childhood. That’s what tripped people up. They were unwilling (unable) to recount past exploits, and that made people suspicious of them. I was a farm girl from Nebraska, he a veteran of the western front.

  A couple of times, I heard him sneak out the door. I wondered whom he was going to meet—girls from down the road, who sold themselves to officers, or some more permanent girlfriend who had followed us down here. I never found lipstick or cologne on his clothes, but I knew he had to be somewhere at night. I wasn’t jealous, or rather not too jealous. He should be allowed to carry on with his former life.

  It was at the officers’ mess that I ate pork on purpose for the first time. My mother never served it and Mrs. Keane never served it. It wasn’t a conscious avoidance on my part and not a religious conviction. It just didn’t seem like food, the way you wouldn’t eat horse (though people do—French people, I think).

  But Ainslie had noticed my eating around the ham at supper, and that night he came into the bedroom where I was studying German grammar.

  “Franny-Lou,” he said. I don’t know where he got this nickname from, but sometimes he called me endearments. “You have to eat the meat that’s on your plate.”

  “I don’t eat pork,” I said.

  “You mean Frances Frank does not eat pork; Frances Conway certainly does.”

  My chest opened up wide. “I don’t think I can do it,” I said.

  He sat on the edge of the bed, leaning on one arm on the other side of my outstretched legs. “Franny, you’ve signed up to be an actress. Think of yourself as playing a role.”

  I opened my mouth to protest.

  “It makes no sense, dear, for me to have married you, as…different as we are. We need to be as unassuming as possible, and that means blending in with the crowd. So jettison this preference and embrace your life as Frances Conway.” He kissed my forehead, stood up, and then paused, thinking about saying something.

  “There are things we keep to ourselves, Frances, things that are embarrassing or compromising. If people were to find out, they would have leverage over us. We want to avoid being leveraged at all costs. I’ve found the best way to do that is to not think about what you’re giving up. Pretend it was never part of you. It’s like a rebirth that way.”

  I had the feeling he was convincing himself of something, but before I could say anything else, he left the room.

  *

  Ainslie took up pipe smoking at that juncture as well as his cigarettes. I didn’t mind it. It actually smelled rather good, and it was comforting to enter an empty room and know that Ainslie had been there not so long ago. He took to it avidly, though, and I worried he would miss the tobacco once we got to the islands. Surely it would be hard to find.

  In keeping with our cover stor
y, we were allotted $500 to buy items to take with us. Supposedly Ainslie had been sick with tuberculosis, hence our stay in Carmel and subsequent desire to partake of the salubrious air of the islands to further heal him. I was a schoolteacher, but had left for the term to take care of my husband. Our savings had dwindled, and so, in the spirit of our pioneer forefathers, we decided to pull a Swiss Family Robinson and civilize the jungle.

  But what to get for $500? To last a year? We would need everything from pots and pans to roofing materials, pounds of provisions, shovels, axes, a shotgun, cups and plates, silverware, clothing…Plus we had to pay for our passage.

  We began to make lists, an activity in which both Ainslie and I liked to engage, and then switched and began to cross out frivolous items. Even so, the lists stretched on and on. We cut tents, camp beds, timber, fencing, but still we had more than our meager budget would manage. Plus we were restricted by weight, and the radio we had to bring was a brick. “Can’t the government say you’re an heir to the Rockefeller fortune or something?” I asked.

  Ainslie laughed. “If only.”

  Try as I might, I couldn’t make the budget stretch. I took money out of my savings account and bought a few of the things I considered essential: makeup (why?), a mirror, muslin, two different sizes of frying pans, sandals, and a few of the things Ainslie couldn’t live without, such as lifeboat matches (for lighting pipes, not fires), a carpenter’s square, fishhooks. We needed precisely none of this, as it turned out.

  Since we did not know when we would be deployed, we waited in Carmel. “Don’t learn too much German,” Ainslie said. “We can’t know too much when we get there.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “It’s a beast of a language, and even if I do learn it, I can always pretend to understand less than I do.”

  “Try Spanish,” he said. “After all, it is a Spanish-speaking country.”