Enchanted Islands Read online

“You could learn it,” I said. “Divide and conquer?”

  Ainslie shook his head. “I’m hopeless with languages. Was in France for three years, couldn’t even say ‘please.’ ”

  “Doesn’t seem to be a word you’re too familiar with in English either,” I teased him.

  *

  And then suddenly, we had our orders. We were to ship out in one week from San Francisco, stop at Panama, and end in Guayaquil, where we would have to catch the sometimes-boat (our later name for it) that toured the islands whenever the mood struck its captain.

  When Ainslie told me this, though I’d been calmly awaiting the news for weeks, my throat began to close up and my vision narrowed. I fought to breathe.

  Ainslie came close. “Put your head between your legs.” He forced me over and held me there, stroking my back until my breathing calmed, though there were still bright spots behind my eyes. “I think I had a heart attack,” I said.

  “That was a panic attack,” Ainslie said.

  “I thought I was going to die.”

  “Just your body’s response to stress. Lads had them all the time in the trenches.”

  “But I’m not a lad. And I’m not in the trenches.”

  “No, it’s worse than the trenches, it’s the middle of the ocean. If you weren’t a bit scared I’d be worried about you.”

  “You don’t seem nervous,” I said.

  Ainslie took his pipe out of his mouth. I could see that the mouthpiece was chewed almost through. “Why do you think I took up this habit?” he asked.

  “What if we die?” I whispered.

  “Has to happen sometime.”

  “What if we die of thirst?”

  “Well now”—Ainslie sat back—“that would be unfortunate.”

  “And painful,” I said, thinking of parched cows on the farm too dehydrated to low.

  “We’ll just have to make sure that doesn’t happen, Franny-Lou. Come on, trust me, have I let you down yet?”

  “We’ve only been married three months,” I said. And thought: And still haven’t consummated it. And now we’re going off to a desert island where we’ll be the only two people around for miles, in contact with the world only through intermittent radio transmissions. There will be plenty of opportunities to be let down, I thought. Some have already happened.

  Part Three

  CHAPTER NINE

  Only Childress came to see us off from San Francisco harbor. I couldn’t tell Rosalie about our departure; we were “catching a ride” on an aircraft carrier, the USS Erie, to Panama. Our cabin was right at the waterline; we were lobsters in a tank, waiting to be plucked to serve as dinner.

  The three days passed slowly. Ainslie spent most of his time on deck, contemplating the horizon and chewing his pipe. I spent most of my time trying to keep my lunch down.

  We were accompanied as far as Panama by a navy captain whose name I don’t recall. He and Ainslie discussed the mission, which we faithfully referred to as Pomegranate, over poker every night. They played in the captain’s stateroom, so as not to keep me awake. And sometimes they would get so drunk that Ainslie would stay there, returning in the morning with a headache and a scowl, crawling into his bed and sleeping until lunch.

  Ainslie and the captain had an easy familiarity about them. They’d both served in France where the captain was a commanding officer on the USS Fanning. And so their looks, their small intimacies, the brush of a hand when lighting a cigarette, the clap on the back that lingered just a little too long, were understandable.

  You’ll wonder how I could have been so blind. But in my defense I say that such a thing as you must now suspect had never occurred to me. Yes, I lived in San Francisco, but my little world of female boardinghouses, schoolteachers, and clandestine military offices did not permit more than a passing knowledge of those men. I imagined them to be as obvious as dwarfs, their differences plastered on their faces and bodies. It did not occur to me that they could be as Ainslie was—robust, manly.

  I knew so little about men. If he were overly fond of his fellow officers, well, he’d been through a war, the Great War. It made sense that he should find comfort with those who had similar experiences. Plus we all drank so much then…Now that we were sailing to the ends of the earth, what difference would it make?

  *

  We put ashore at Panama and checked into the Metropole. Ainslie disappeared—he had a briefing to attend with an attaché who had served in Rio.

  I wandered around Panama City. I paid my five cents to marvel at the genius accomplishment of the best of our engineers—the canal—and took a walk down the Avenida Central. I went to the officers’ club for lunch, where I had my last salad for a while, savoring the lettuce and tomatoes. The salad had pieces of bacon in it, and I ate them without a second thought, playing the role of Mrs. Conway effortlessly. Bacon was delicious. Why had I avoided it all these years? As I ate, I looked around. It was a fine day, and the windows were open. You could hear the songs of birds and industry invading the dining room, and men and women sat together, drinking and laughing. In the afternoon, I went shopping, but I was shocked at how high the prices were. In comparison, San Francisco was a bargain!

  I thought about how my life had become such a secret. There was no one in whom I could confide—it was a matter of national security. And a matter of privacy, impossible to violate.

  When Ainslie came back to the hotel that evening to shave and change, he expressed interest in my day, asking me questions about the canal and my lunch. But he volunteered no information in return. I asked him to take me dancing.

  “I would be honored to dance with you,” he said. “We’ll have an intimate dinner you and me, manducemus.”

  “That’s Latin,” I said. “Have you been studying Spanish at all?”

  “Sí,” he said, winningly. Then he kissed me on the forehead and closed the bathroom door to keep the steam in.

  I got dressed in the only nice dress I’d brought. It was dowdy and passé, more suitable for 1918 than 1938, but no one was looking at an old lady anyway. We took a bicycle taxi to a cabaret Ainslie had heard about. The concierge had reserved us a floor-side table where we could watch the bands and the acts while we ate. I’ll always remember that meal. It comes back to me sometimes, especially these days as I choke down the watery paste that passes for food at the Chelonia. I had chateaubriand, and it came in the most beautiful swan-shaped crust, with berries for eyes and braided wings.

  Ainslie had a steak. He took big greedy bites. I made my bites daintier as if to make up for it, using my silverware the Continental way as Mrs. Keane had taught me, placing them down after every bite to take small sips of wine. In this way, Ainslie finished long before I did, and sat back with a satisfied grunt to watch the seventeen-piece orchestra. They played the classics: “Begin the Beguine,” “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” “Heart and Soul.”

  And then the most beautiful foreign woman came to the mic. I suppose we were the foreigners, but her skin was a lovely mocha color I’d never seen before. Her hair was pulled back so tightly that I couldn’t tell if it was curly or straight, and her dress was cut out everywhere it was seemly (and some places it wasn’t). The fabric that was left was shiny as if painted with diamond dust, and the restaurant fell silent as we waited to hear her sing. She exerted a palpable pull on the audience, and as she cleared her throat, a lone fork clanked to a plate.

  She sang a rumba, a sultry piece that had everyone hanging on each phrase. I envied her, oh how I envied her! I’d lived a life where no one noticed me. Here was an example of raw femininity, magnetic power over both sexes. The singer demanded attention and received it, just like that.

  She had a high breathy voice that hit each note with the exactitude of an Indian’s arrow. The music wound around the room. Even those in the far back stopped talking. And she swayed between verses, dancing without moving. When she reached the end of the song, there was wild applause, and she bowed, slightly. I saw that the cutout parts of her
dress were covered with a flesh-colored mesh, the skin smooth underneath. The orchestra began again, and she went around the dance floor asking men to dance. The first turned bright red and hid in his napkin. The second was prevented by a very stern wife. Then Ainslie stood up, his napkin folded neatly as though by its own volition.

  “You’ll be all right, here?”

  I nodded. “Go ahead.”

  Ainslie glided over to the woman, taking her outstretched hand. I have said that he was a gifted dancer, but tonight, with a worthy partner, he took my breath away. His hair may have been thinning and his waist a bit too tiny, but I could see every woman falling for Ainslie. Together, they danced like they’d been practicing for years, and I could see the delight in the singer’s eyes that she’d finally found her equal on the dance floor. He spun her, swung her hips, ending with a dip.

  The room applauded noisily. Some of the men whistled, putting their fingers in their mouths to amplify the noise. When Ainslie bowed and made toward our table, the crowd booed. They wanted more. More of the beautiful couple floating above the floor. More of the cinema stars come to life.

  I gulped down the last of my wine and slid Ainslie’s glass over toward me. I was learning to drink. He liked gin martinis and the taste was acerbic but warming. He caught my eye over an up-tempo waltz and shrugged as if to say: I’m sorry, but what can I do?

  I waved him on with my free hand. And I was fine. Because as much as I wanted to be that woman, that dancer who merged so effortlessly with my husband, I knew that eventually he would sit back down at our table. I would never really know him, I saw now, but I would know him more than these people, and his confidence, our shared secret, grew at the bottom of my chest in a way that I could only describe as love.

  *

  The next morning we caught the ship for Guayaquil, the capital of the Ecuadorian nation. It was to be the last vestiges of civilization as I knew it, and I waved goodbye to land with real tears in my eyes.

  “Cheer up, Mrs. Conway,” Ainslie said. “It’s not so bad.”

  “At least it’s not raining,” I completed the sentence. It was our little refrain, said in sarcasm when things were grim, and often when it was raining as if to console ourselves that things could not get any worse and would therefore have to get better. He put his arm around me and squeezed, briefly.

  Though the commercial ship we were on was large and carried freight as well as passengers, the crossing was rocky and I felt green the entire way. Why do they say a crossing is “rocky”? I would have given my left arm for some rocks to cast ashore on, even if the ship were smashed to pieces. I could have at least been on land then, something stable that didn’t pitch beneath my feet like dice tumbling across the gaming table.

  I was unable to keep anything down, and even Ainslie, solid, iron stomach though he possessed, was a bit puce around the gills. He liked the wind on his face, watching the horizon for signs of land. I, on the other hand, was in the cabin, too weak even to stand, sipping lemon water and eating the occasional cracker for strength. I don’t think we exchanged three words.

  Finally, on the fourth day at sea, the water calmed, and I felt well enough to at least sit on deck and try to let the sun heal some of my weakness. Ainslie joined me with his book, a copy of The Swiss Family Robinson. “Since we’re supposedly inspired by it, I should at least read it,” he said. “Plus, it’s said to be a book one can read multiple times, so it will come in handy when we’ve read everything we’ve brought to the point where we can recite to each other, while juggling, in our sleep.”

  A stronger self would have replied, “I can’t juggle,” whereas the weak reality of Frances merely smiled.

  “Oh poor Franny-Lou,” he said. “You’re not much of a mariner, are you?”

  And I tipped my head over the chair and retched into the bin I’d brought for that purpose; a more emphatic reply I could not have planned.

  *

  The port in Guayaquil was everything one expects from a busy port in a third world country. I was surprised, though, at the quantity of Indians in charge. I had been led to believe that there were few Indians left in the cities. The books I’d read said that they lived up in the hills, or had so intermingled with Europeans that it was difficult to tell which was which. But now I heard the strains of Quechua, which sounds nothing like Spanish, and from captains and gerentes alike.

  Ainslie supervised the unloading of our boxes of provisions, while I sat up by the road with our steamer trunk and three suitcases. I saw the vagrant dogs one hears about nosing around for food, their taut ribs showing, and a little varmint that may have been a mouse or rat or some sort of chipmunk scurrying across the stones. All around there was bustle, freight being loaded or unloaded, people yelling, greeting each other, hurrying to their next order of business. The ships all looked run-down, purchased third-hand long ago and then handed down again. I scanned the docks for the one boat that traveled to the Galápagos, but the San Cristóbal was not in port. Or, rather, I would learn, it was in port, but had no immediate plans to travel. We were to stop by every couple of days to see when the mood might strike Capitán Oswaldo to leave. While I waited for Ainslie, I read my guidebook. It recommended the Tivoly Hotel, which had rooms from fifteen sucres. I marked the page.

  After several hours, when my stomach was telling me it was finally on land and wanted sustenance to make up for the last few days of privation, Ainslie came up from the docks. He walked wearily, one of the few times I’d seen him with anything less than a completely enthusiastic countenance. I was struck by how little I knew of my husband, how much time we’d spent pretending, even to each other.

  He recovered his smile by the time he reached me and set his pipe in his mouth, which always lifted his spirits. He picked up his case and whistled to one of the boys who sat waiting for jobs there. “Ask him to get us a taxi.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “A hotel that’s been recommended,” Ainslie said.

  “By whom? The guidebook says—”

  “Ask him,” he urged.

  I asked him in my pidgin Spanish, which the boy understood, taking up two suitcases that were almost as big as he was. He yelled for two of his friends, who grabbed the trunk between them and hauled it to the road. They looked so small, their skin brown and leathery from the sun.

  The ride they hailed us was not exactly a taxi but rather another friend of theirs who drove what used to be a car and was now four wheels with a rusted hood held together by sailor’s rope. Still, we piled our luggage and ourselves in, and Ainslie handed the boys a few coins. “Did you give them American money?” I asked, for we’d been unable to change currencies before our trip.

  “No, I exchanged some money down at the port.”

  “On the black market?” I was shocked, and worried. We were expected to conduct ourselves with propriety when it came to local law.

  “We’re south of the border now, dear,” he said. “And the rates are better. Hang on for the ride!”

  After we got settled in at the hotel, which could best be described as “adequate,” we were expected to check in at the consulate. The consul had a reputation as an egotistical man, who would take our intelligence presence as evidence that he wasn’t trusted enough to keep tabs on the islands. So we maintained our cover as American civilians who wanted to “get away from it all.” Also, the fewer people who knew about Operation Pomegranate, the easier it would be to keep it secret. Secrets have a tendency to spread in unpredictable ways, like ink on a page.

  Ainslie went to meet with him, but he kept Ainslie waiting an hour and then insisted that he return—he didn’t have the right papers, and then those didn’t contain the right stamp. He was merely exercising his meager power. Ainslie had little else to do, or he would have ignored this pompous man entirely.

  “He reminded me that should we have to be rescued, we’d be leaching resources from the United States, which we must love, of course, less than he does. I had to bite my ton
gue to remind him that I’d been in France during the Great War and lost more for this country than he could ever hope to gain.”

  “His current opinion of the German situation on Floreana?”

  “A colony of utopianists who have fled civilization to prove themselves modern-day Swiss Family Robinsons. He may have something there. Germans do seem particularly susceptible to ideas, do they not?” Certainly Hitler’s rise would indicate that this was true. “They’re antagonizing Poland again, like an older sibling teases the younger one.”

  I nodded. Despite having Polish parents, I knew very little about the old country, not even the name of the village my parents had come from. My father had never spoken of his life—actually, he rarely spoke at all, which is why Ainslie’s talkativeness was both a surprise and a delight.

  The San Cristóbal showed no sign of hurrying to the islands, and we were captive to its whims; there was no other transportation. When I asked when it might leave, I was met with shrugs. Could be days, could be weeks. But an estimate? Ecuadorians don’t estimate, it turns out. So we made ourselves as comfortable as possible for a wait of unknown duration, victims of mañana.

  I would walk down to the embassy every day to see if a telegram or package had come for us. There was usually something weekly from Childress, transmitted in a simple code that I was in charge of transcribing. One of our frustrations was having our orders countermanded constantly. If Childress would tell us to jump, Rear Admiral Holmes would tell us to squat, and then he would get a directive from CNO Admiral Leahy, saying that we should crawl on our bellies like reptiles. As a result, our reaction when receiving most orders was to simply wait until the next week’s came.

  So we busied ourselves readying supplies. In addition to everything we would need for an indefinite stay, we also had to conceal a radio, flares, flags, and weapons. A hunting rifle was easy enough to hide, but it was a serious calculation to decide how much flour to sacrifice in exchange for ammunition. Our stomachs or our lives, which would occasionally amount to the same thing.