Beautiful Wild

by Anna Godbersen

  “It was dramatic, you must admit.” He had a laughing way again.

  She hadn’t really seen him that night, she realized. There was something about Sal that was easy to look through. His long, lean body posed with a sure confidence, his longish dark hair pulled away from his face. But his dark gaze was shy to make contact.

  “It was,” she admitted. “You used to make me so angry. On the ship, that is. In my mind, I called you ‘nobody’ so that I wouldn’t be cut by your judgments.”

  He smiled. “That’s fitting. I am nobody.”

  “Oh, come,” she said. “Don’t be metaphysical. Of course you are somebody.”

  “Your kind of people are always trying so hard to prove you are somebody,” he said with a shrug. “Not me. I go with the current,” he added with such finality that, though she wasn’t sure precisely what he meant, she had no desire to question him.

  “Anyway.” She averted her gaze and dried her palms against her skirt. “What’s this?”

  “It’s our ship.”

  “Ship?” she echoed with mirthless irony. This strange, patched-together raft was nothing like the colossus of the Princess, which, despite the spectacular way it had failed them, still seemed magnificent and stylish, a triumph of oceangoing vessels, in her memory.

  “You don’t think much of it,” he replied, still smiling. “Like you don’t think much of me.”

  “I never said—”

  “That’s all right. I know, it is not impressive like the ships you’re accustomed to. But you know, the people who populated the Hawaiian islands, they came by ships not much larger than this, carved from a single tree, across a greater distance than we sailed on the Princess. All the way from the antipodes—without engines, or a crew of hundreds, on seas that were surely rougher than what we experienced. They knew the currents, and their ships, and the weather, and they survived the crossing.”

  “But there’s no one here now,” Vida said in a small voice.

  “No, I don’t think so. Though what’s on the other side of the island, beyond the ridge, we don’t know. If this place had inhabitants they’d have made themselves known to us by now, for better or worse. But I’ve seen signs that plants were cultivated here by humans—there are trees that grow giant yams. Those must have been transplanted. They aren’t native to this part of the world. Someone brought those here from far away. Not white men.”

  “How do you know?”

  “White men usually leave more signs of themselves, for one thing. And, particularly in the wild, they live by the gun.”

  She shivered at the thought of such distances, of people who would trust their lives to the sea. “Where are they now?” she asked. “The people who brought the yams here.”

  “Who knows. Maybe they continued to the larger islands we now call the territory of Hawaii to join their kin. Maybe they were lost, like us, and just stayed here a time to regain their strength.”

  She nodded. She wanted him to tell her how a person came to know such things, but did not want to betray her ignorance.

  “Come on, we had better go back—Fitzhugh will be wondering where you are.”

  For a moment she thought Sal was going to offer her his arm, but there was none of that. He just passed close enough to her that she felt invited to walk alongside him as they made their way back to camp.

  Through the evening—during the lighting of the fire and the cooking of dinner and the appearance of the moon over the waves—Fitzhugh was busy and Vida watched him. Her earlier tranquility was gone. She had become a little obsessed with how to strike up a conversation with him, how to test what Camilla had said. Then he was there at her side, with an attentive heat that reminded her why his company was sought by so many.

  “Miss Hazzard,” he began very formally. “Would you do me the honor of going on a walk together?”

  He offered her his hand, as though this were the salon of a grand house and he was about to take her for a turn around the formal gardens. Vida—wary of seeming eager—tilted her head, ignored his hand, and said, “If you wish it, Mr. Farrar.”

  “I do wish it.”

  “All right.”

  She walked in the way she had practiced as a younger girl—shoulders square, head high, little steps that made her skirt sway in a feminine way. She did not look at him, yet she felt his presence, how he fixated on the ocean and chewed on what he wanted to say.

  “Yes,” she said at last. “What is it?”

  “I wanted to thank you.”

  “For what?”

  “For being so kind to Camilla. She needs a friend now.”

  “We all do,” Vida said.

  “Yes,” Fitzhugh said. “Yes, that’s true.”

  “Anyway, I wasn’t being kind. I needed her help. That and—I like her.”

  Until that moment, Vida had maintained the cool command that was her customary manner on courtly rambles through the Golden Gate Park; but the knife of envy twisted in her side at this reminder of Camilla’s special importance to Fitz.

  “I admire you, you know. How strong you are.”

  They had moved far enough from the fire that the sound of its crackling was overwhelmed by the gentle waves washing against the sand. The moon was bright as silver; it was almost as bright as the sun. He didn’t say anything for a long time, and Vida’s curiosity got the better of her. She glanced his way. His mouth was bent, and his eyes reflected the glitter of the moon.

  “Are you laughing at me?” she demanded, more surprised than angry.

  “Not because I think what you’re saying is funny. It’s very serious, of course. It’s just that you aren’t afraid to tell the truth. I’m not sure I’ve ever met a girl as determined as you are. I admired that before, too, you know.”

  A moment before, her body had been cool, but now her heart was wild. “You and Camilla—”

  “We have been entangled a long time.”

  “Oh.”

  “We were entangled. Before she was married, but after, too.” Fitz watched her, waiting to see how Vida would react. Though this was only confirmation of what Camilla had told her, still it stung. “I kept telling myself it had to end. And then it kept beginning again. But that was the end of it, in the map room, when you came through the door.”

  “That was the end of it,” Vida said, needing for him to be very clear on this topic.

  Fitzhugh was staring out at the ocean again and she couldn’t catch his eye. “That’s why we were there. I had just told her it was over when you came in.”

  “Why?”

  “Well,” Fitzhugh’s blue eyes met hers and his smile cut a dimple in his cheek, “because I met you.”

  Vida felt woozy and the best response she could manage was a limp “Oh.”

  “Do you understand?” She saw the fire of sincerity in his gaze.

  “Yes,” she said. She was concentrating on breathing normally. She knew what it would be like when his strong hands held her face and brought her mouth to his.

  “Yes.” He tilted his head in agreement. A rueful laugh escaped his mouth. “Things didn’t go the way I thought they would after that. I thought I would begin to court you, on the Princess, as I would have in New York.”

  “Oh.” Why couldn’t she think of another word, of something witty to say? She hoped he would go on talking, even though she sounded so simple and foolish.

  “I would still like to take you out, as I would have in any of those places.”

  “What—here?” Vida threw back her head and laughed.

  “I like hearing you laugh.”

  “Oh, well, keep promising the impossible, I will laugh and laugh.”

  Another man might have cowered at this, but not Fitzhugh. “Good, that’s what I’ll do, then. I plan to take you on a date, like I would in New York. In New York, I’d pick you up at six for a light meal followed by a ride through the park and a show at the opera, followed by a supper and dancing.”

  “Wouldn’t that be charming?” she sa
id, and began the walk back up the beach. The fire was blazing, and the other survivors surrounded its brightness. Although she sensed they were watched, Vida couldn’t make out one figure from another. The only figure she could identify was Sal, on account of his height, and because he stood slightly apart from the rest.

  She offered Fitz the back of her hand to be kissed and then stepped away in the direction of the ladies’ huts. “You can pick me up tomorrow at six, then.”

  Sixteen

  A celebratory mood arrived like a gust of good island weather and, in the heat of the next afternoon, Vida, along with a small band of ladies, set off for the wooded pool to bathe in anticipation of her date with Fitz.

  The promise of romance enlivened the rest of the survivors of the Princess, too, during this, the second week of their residence on a desolate rock in a vast ocean, and the work they had become accustomed to was forgotten in the name of new tasks. The children shrieked and jabbered, the women shushed them and glanced at each other with excited eyes. Dame Edna, too, was alert to the general buzz of anticipation. Vida knew that the gossip columnist’s attention to all the minor proceedings signified the true importance of what was now transpiring.

  Inside, Vida was all aflutter.

  But, she resolved, she must be formidable.

  She must not come across too girlish or silly or swoony.

  And she must look her best.

  Thus she waded into the pool with Eleanor and Miss Flynn, Camilla and the Misses Van Huysen. They pressed cold water to their faces and washed their clothing and let it dry on the rocks. In San Francisco—in any city in the country of her birth—servants would have on such occasions brought her and her female companions painted trays of refreshments, would have perfumed the rooms, would have laid out their jewelry on velvet. Here she gathered with the other young women under the protection of trees, took in the perfume of bark and pollen, and drank from the spray of the little waterfall with cupped hands.

  Everyone wanted to hear a happy story, and Vida very much wanted to tell them one.

  Perhaps this was the reason that she lost her usual firm hold on her emotions and nearly burst into tears when she felt how Eleanor struggled with her hair.

  Vida had braided it in those first hours on the island, and had occasionally retightened the plait, but had not dared to take it all apart for fear of what knots had formed and become permanent. Fitzhugh was “picking her up” at six, however. The whole group of ladies was effervescent with expectation. She wanted to look her best, but some things could not be helped.

  “Oh, say something.”

  “Shhhh,” Eleanor admonished. “Don’t speak now.”

  “It’s awful, isn’t it?”

  “It’s not . . . not awful.”

  Vida glanced toward her lap and saw how her hands whitened into fists, and she felt all achy in her throat. The ache of a little girl in whom sobbing is imminent. But no: she couldn’t disappoint the others by losing control. She flinched back tears. She breathed in the humid air. “I’ll have to cut it, won’t I?”

  “Oh no,” said Miss Flynn, rousing herself from the rock. “No, you can’t do that.”

  “But the tangles are too bad, aren’t they?”

  Camilla came and rested a hand on Vida’s shoulder. “We’ll pull it back and wrap it in a sort of bunlike thing. It’s only hair. It’s your eyes he’ll be looking at.”

  “But it’s hopeless, isn’t it? I’ll have to cut it.”

  “Tomorrow,” Camilla said.

  “Tomorrow—tomorrow I will cut the damn braid off.”

  “But tonight it looks fine, and tomorrow it will grow back.”

  Then Vida braced herself and let Eleanor do her best with strong fingers to make the horsetail of her hair into a big circle above the nape of her neck.

  When she had pinched her cheeks for color and curled the little wisps at her earlobes around her pinkie; when she had asked Camilla one too many times if she really looked all right, if she was sure the sight of Vida wouldn’t turn a man like Fitz to stone; and when she knew that she could not ask again, they walked together as a small flock back to their shelters, situated themselves on the slope of sand by the area that corresponded roughly with the front door of a house back in the city, and waited in that state of feigned inactivity they had often assumed in drawing rooms, posing in anticipation of gentleman callers over cold tea.

  The arrival of Fitzhugh was foretold by a gentle hum of feminine excitement.

  Vida kept her face turned away, her gaze focused on something not quite there.

  “Miss Hazzard,” he declared with the formal baritone a man employs in a ballroom when he is about to ask a girl to dance.

  “Oh, hello, Mr. Farrar,” she replied, and her mouth did the thing it used to do in those same ballrooms, when she was upholding the pretense that this meeting was all very chancy, and that nobody had any idea what was about to transpire. Even though all parties knew precisely what was about to transpire, and there wasn’t the least smidgen of surprise to any of it.

  He was only a few feet away.

  She paused a few more seconds and met his gaze.

  He grinned. “You look well.”

  Vida let her eyelids sink in demurral, the better to keep any rogue smiles at bay. “Don’t let’s exaggerate.”

  He offered her his hand, and she thought that—if they were not performing the ritual of fine young men and women meeting with all eyes upon them—she might have said how lovely he looked, too. He did—it pleased her eyes to look at him, all trim and sunbrowned. His black trousers were rolled as they had been, but he had donned the black jacket that she had not seen since their arrival here. His hair was polished with some sleek stuff—in the dining room of the Princess she might not have noticed this change at all, but here it had a dramatic effect.

  It made the whole ruse seem real.

  “Would you walk with me?” he asked, and pulled her to her feet.

  Together they began to stroll past the little huts, past the watchful crowd, his elbow raised to support her arm, her pace matching his.

  “Did you have a good day?” he asked, and she answered. They conversed like this on and on, with the surface gentleness that had been the tone of all their social gatherings in their former lives. They didn’t say much, for that wasn’t the point of such conversations. Their tone was polite, gentle. When they reached the rocks that separated the long peaceful beach from the little cove, he bent, heaved her up into his arms, and carried her over the rise.

  “I thought we would have dinner,” he said, and gestured at the place down on the beach where a table had been constructed out of two small boulders and a board. A cloth (a cloth that had once been white) was spread over this arrangement, and a metal platter, which she remembered from that early tide of refuse, held it down. The wind billowed the edges, giving it the appearance of the last table at the very end of the Earth. Fitz smiled when he saw how she smiled at this humble attempt. He gestured toward the sky, where the sun was making its downward trajectory. “And after dinner,” he said, “a show.”

  “How lovely.” When he didn’t immediately put her down, she clarified: “I think I can walk from here.”

  They went down into the protected cove, to the smaller beach, where Fitzhugh pulled back a stump for Vida to sit upon. Then he assumed the position opposite her. The eldest of the children appeared with a large banana leaf heaped with cut coconut. He placed the food between Fitz and Vida, did a flourish and a little bow, and swiftly departed.

  Here, as everywhere, this sort of engagement between a male and female of the species followed a well-established formula with predictable timing.

  At first the conversation was light, with almost no meaning. Then began a subtle flirtation, imperceptible to anyone who might have been watching, yet marked by both parties in their altered breath and posture. Vida waited for Fitz to initiate this change—which he did by paying her a compliment that might have been perfectly proper if
bestowed upon a grandmother. (“You have a healthy color in your cheeks” was what he said.) She furthered the flirtation by glancing up and allowing him to hold her gaze just slightly longer than before.

  “I’ve been looking forward to this,” he said.

  “Oh,” she pronounced in a significant tone. She glanced away, forced herself to blush.

  “We’re being watched,” he observed.

  He pointed toward the high rocks that formed a barrier between the little beach and the big one, and she saw that not only the children—who presumably would continue to bring them food as though this were a fancy meal with dozens of courses—but also several of the ladies, and even some members of the crew, were peering at them.

  “That’s all right,” Vida replied. “I am quite used to being watched.”

  “Yes, that is one of the things I first noticed about you.”

  “Oh? I didn’t think you were noticing anything about me at all.”

  “On the contrary.”

  “What else did you notice?”

  “That you had a kind of force. That you were determined. That you could arrive in a room full of fancy people, and chart a course through them the way I might chart a course into an unknown territory.”

  She raised her chin—the better to catch the beautifully blazing light of that hour, and in order to show him her face at its very best angle. “Oh, really? Seems you’ve thought quite a lot about me.”

  “Yes” was his answer, and its simplicity had a weight that a lot of words never would have. It sounded more true than any of the theatrics that had come before.

  “I suppose there’s no reason not to admit that I’ve thought a lot about you, too.”

  “And what did you think about in particular?”

  “What you told me the other night. About what your childhood was like.”

  “Oh, what about it?”

  “A person who is just strong and able without trying is rather boring, don’t you think? A person who has made himself that way by dint of his own will is much more interesting. That’s the kind of person they put in books and songs and things. I’m that way, you know—what nature failed to give me, I decided to make up with my own ingenuity.”