Then it was dark, a comfortable dark with stars coming up in tiers, and a quarter moon hung outlined in haze. The tiller throbbed gently in Errol’s hand and the lubber line on the compass rested quietly on his course of 180 degrees. It seemed that since his boat went in the water all things were sweeping him gently toward this destination. The hours slipped by until the loom of Key West lit the southwestern sky in a pale glow, calling for a “cocktail,” a cause for celebration even Errol found suspicious. He might have felt misgivings.
Sails had to be trimmed again as he beat his way past the sea buoy and up the ship channel toward the bright skyline of the city. He didn’t feel he had time to go all the way around Tank Island to get to Garrison Bight. Instead, he sailed on until he broke out into the Atlantic, and then broad-reached up Smathers Beach before turning in toward the desalinization plant and a dismaying number of bright lights and even automobile traffic. Dropping the mainsail, he lashed it to the boom and crept up the channel under the jib and mizzen between small anchored boats backlit on black water. Spotting an empty slip, he dropped the jib and mizzen and glided very slowly to the dock. As he stepped ashore to secure the yawl, he suddenly felt frightened, but the feeling passed. He was briefly without momentum, a situation efficiently solved by one of the beers. Furthermore, last call was still hours away.
He kept inhaling deeply, surprised after his long absence at the familiarity of Key West night air, the particular humidity, the scent of more flowers than occur in nature, salt water, and faint indications of humanity: tobacco, perfume, automotive exhaust. It was a perennial aroma occasionally subsumed by a single smell, new house paint or Sunday-morning vomit. All in all, it made his heart ache.
Key West seemed a most appealing landfall. Old-timers used to tell him that before the aqueduct and plentiful fresh water, the place was a kind of gooney-bird island, not much greenery and plenty of exposed caprock and coral. Now it was as lush as Hawaii, an easier sell.
The bartender had a deeply fissured, weathered face, a gold chain around his neck, de rigueur before Key West went literary; also, solidarity with the Cubans. He returned with Errol’s drink.
“I quit drinking over eleven thousand days ago,” said the bartender, whose name was something to do with dog: Coon Dog, Hound Dog, Blue Dog—Errol forgot. “And it was no mistake.”
Dog-something seemed to be studying Errol, probably remembered Errol no better than Errol remembered him. Errol clearly recalled that the bartender drove in one day from Boston about a quarter century ago with a blue-eyed dancer he was very proud of and who wasted no time in absconding with one of the entrepreneurial hippies, a corrupt prep-school boy from Columbia, South Carolina, who was restoring a conch house.
“What about that Natalya? You still see her?”
“That was quite long lasting, wasn’t it? No, I haven’t seen her in ages.” Natalya was from New Orleans, a beautiful girl with thick auburn hair who reminded everyone of Gene Tierney. She had a genuine New Orleans–Brooklyn–southern accent. She was languorous and virginal, with a promise of depravity so instinctive in New Orleans girls that it must have been devised by their ancestral mothers. Some logged feverish turns in town before going home, marrying Tulane doctors, and raising little magnolia aristocrats to replenish the Garden District. But Natalya was different from all the others; she and Errol had been engaged to be married. He hadn’t cared about anything else at all. He stood beside his stool and said, “Well, I suppose.”
“Nice seeing you.”
“Same.”
“You remember West Coast Anita?”
“I remember Anita.”
“There were two Anitas, Anita and West Coast Anita.”
Errol was anxious to go. Looking toward the door, he asked, “Which one had the flag in her tooth?”
“West Coast Anita.”
“What about her?”
“Anita stayed too long at the fair. She had an out-of-body experience in the Turks and Caicos, and they had to take her down on the beach and shoot her.”
Errol said, “I must be missing something.” He counted out his tab on the bar. “Well,” he said, “I’m off to see Florence Ewing.”
He didn’t know why he was not cordial to Dog-something, one of those citizens you can’t quite remember, though he tells you that you and he go way back. Perhaps it was the sense that one was about to be drawn into something or discover that one had failed to recall a debt. A group strode in, three women and a man with low gray bangs who cried out, “But wait: right after the car crash, we come in with the Japanese flutes!” The women were awestruck as he swept his arm toward the table he had selected for them. One, forefinger to a dimple, hung back, contemplating the flutes in her imagination.
Night Dog! That was it!
From here he could see shrimp boats between the buildings on Lower Caroline Street. He and Raymond had backed the old ketch in here one winter to pull out the Vere diesel that had turned into a half ton of English rust in the bilge. They’d built a gallows frame of old joists they got when the Red Doors Saloon was remodeled, and all the wallets fell out of the walls from a century of muggings. They lifted the great iron lump on a chain fall and swung the dead engine to the fish docks. Thenceforth, they sailed her without the engine. She went that way into Havana, but Raymond was not aboard.
Florence Ewing lived on Petronia Street, a street frequently in the Key West Citizen for scenes of mayhem; but this was the more sedate upper Petronia, now part of a district renamed by realtors the Meadows, a tremendous leap of the imagination. Florence was born in the house over eighty years ago, and Errol’s every hope was pinned on her being still alive.
She had gone to sea with her father, a turtle captain, when she was eleven and could still describe the Moskito Coast of Nicaragua in detail. By sixteen, she was a chorus girl in New York; she married at seventeen back home and stayed married for over sixty years to her physician husband. A precondition was that they never leave the Petronia house. Dr. Ewing, an Alabaman and a sportsman, struggled with this, turning the old carriage house into a kind of dominoes hall for his cronies, building a stilt shack past Mule and Archer Keys where he fished and played cards on weekends in his old Abaco launch. He delivered thousands of Key West babies, who stayed until the tourist boom pushed them up A1A to the mainland; some were even his own, begotten on lissome Cuban teens. When Raymond Fitzpatrick and Errol Healy went into partnership, they lived around the corner from Florence; and during some of the fraught hours of their business life, Errol found himself being quietly counseled by the very sensible and spiritual Florence Ewing. You could say they became close, cooking meals for each other or watching Johnny Carson. And it was not a matter of an old widow needing company. Errol needed the company; Florence was wholly self-sufficient. Errol was cautious about imposing on her, though he supposed he must at times have tested her patience. He never went there high, more consideration than anyone else got, and he tried to keep the more outrageous ladies from battening onto her and declaring her a role model. He didn’t know how she created such peace. Others noticed and sought her out; they believed she had the power to sanctify and heal those who had lost hope. He marveled that she didn’t run them all off or even judge them or, just once, tell them she was too tired. They were her subjects. For some she was an oracle; for a few a last chance. She had learned forgiveness and discovered its mighty power.
He made the trek from the bar in the fragrant early evening, taking enough time to gaze upon the laundromat still lifes, those all-night getaways where girls of yore rode the tumblers and fornicated on the washing machines. Notions and grocery stores still open were nevertheless somnolent. Here and there among the renovated houses miraculously a few remained tumbledown as before, with gutted refrigerator kingfish smokers in the backyard. Many of the houses were tall and attracted the eye, making you look upward at a sky that let you know that you were surrounded by the sea. Elsewhere, rainwater cisterns had been converted into atmospheric soaking tubs, le
aves and rotting fruit were made to disappear, and services created to secure the things bound to fail when the city was astonished by some intrusion of nature, such as a storm. Life sometimes tested absentee owners. When, after a half year, remembering the fresh air and clean linens, the truce with vegetation, the ringless tubs and toilets, the owners returned to find fetor and mildew, the inconvenienced rats and fleeing roaches and bellicose fighting chickens who had moved into the lap pool, there was seldom anything so untoward as a demand for return of caretakers’ fees. Slaves of their own vacations, the owners began by negotiating.
He cut through a lane behind the library on Fleming to gaze at a house where Natalya’s friend Frances Mousseau had lived, working on a romantic play, a gnomish tale of Cajun high jinks set in the Atchafalaya Swamp. Errol thought Frances, a racist Creole from Plaquemines, too dull witted for passionate folly; nevertheless, upon learning she’d been disinherited, she jumped off an ocean liner. Had a passenger watching the moonrise from a cheap cabin not seen Frances go by his porthole, her absence might never have been noticed. While characteristic notions of the day included a dreamy version of suicide, Frances was quickly forgotten.
Errol walked to Fleming, where he had lived with Natalya and Raymond, at least one Anita, and a few others, sharing the rent and parceling out all the small rooms. He remembered believing this lack of privacy was assurance that his love for Natalya would remain undisturbed. But Natalya could make men find original ways to hurt themselves, even his late, great best friend Raymond. Holding the iron railing, he looked up at the old house, which had become a bed-and-breakfast, Fronds, with a sign in front: NO CHILDREN. NO PETS. In that house, Errol felt all he had left behind.
There was still light in Petronia, brighter along Georgia, and indeed in the garden at Florence’s house someone was toiling late, a middle-aged man in khaki pants and work shoes whom Errol did not recognize. The grounds were in ominously poor shape. Though infinitely polite, Florence had always gotten a lot of work out of her people, some of whom were of remarkably little account, reverting to their torpid ways as soon as they left her.
When Errol told the gardener that he had come to see Miss Ewing, the man stood back from him uneasily.
“She’s in there.” He was inhospitable but could not have known how much Errol had riding on this. “And who are you?”
“An old friend from Fleming Street.”
He gave this some thought. “You want to go in, go in.”
“Yes, of course.” So he went up the steps, and on the gardener’s peremptory “Don’t knock; she can’t get to the door,” he let himself in. He felt shaky.
Except for the soaring lines of the old shipwright’s staircase and the few glints of a high chandelier, he couldn’t see much of anything. Just this was enough to make him feel quieter as his soul expanded safely into Florence Ewing’s sanctum, the house that turtles built, furnished from wrecks, including a grand piano made of African mahogany, said to have killed a man as it came aboard. Here, nearly a century ago, Florence was delivered by a black midwife from Great Inagua who, she claimed, taught her to conjure, a tale the young people made her tell again and again. Compared with the conventional mummery with which they had arrived, conjury held great attraction. Florence owned dozens of lacquered boxes, little private containers of silver and enamel that could furnish coveted storage for secret things, and sometimes she made gifts of them. Secrets were everything in Errol’s circle, and they all worked at suggesting they were full of them. It was not for everyone and especially not for Errol and Raymond, who made a handsome living transporting souls from Cuba, their earnings disbursed not by driving big cars or hiring interior decorators but rather by throwing banquets.
Dividing the foyer from the living room was an old theater flat with a great big moon sparkling on an empty sea that created an obstruction to direct entry. Errol called out, “Florence,” and got no reply. There was a blue spider with a body shaped like a pentagram lowering itself slowly on a single strand of silk; from afar came the sound of a ship signaling the harbor pilot. He stepped around the theater flat and wondered why he had waited so long. He felt weightless as he gazed, soaring and uncertain, at the ghostly figure of his redeemer.
The living room had become her bedroom, and the chandelier that Errol had glimpsed from the other side was seen to hang over her bed, an old gas-burning model that had been converted to electric and was now a garland of mostly expired little bulbs. He remembered best her big ormolu bed, formerly on the second floor, a table beside it supporting a water pitcher, a vase of anemones, and several small bottles. Florence was propped against many pillows and covered by the palest-blue counterpane. The room was fresh and the bedclothes looked buoyant and clean; someone must be looking after her. Errol wished he could have slipped in beside her, to begin pouring out his heart in crazy familiarity, to detach himself completely from his own story and watch it sail out into the air like a ribbon.
As he entered she gazed at him with eyes that were opalescent. He greeted her and told her who he was. She said nothing, and he drew up the only chair, one so straight-backed and uncomfortable that he wondered if she ever had visitors. Florence had grown so very old, with a diaphanous quality of something about to turn to powder. Yet she was as elegant as an ancient Spanish altarpiece. Errol almost wished some of the others were here, especially Raymond Fitzpatrick, of whom she was so fond. Or even Natalya, whom Florence disliked; here they could have all finally come clean. The last time Florence spoke to Natalya, she told her that she saw right through her, and Natalya gave her no chance to elaborate. Florence smiled until Natalya got up and left.
It didn’t seem to matter that neither of them spoke. Errol was fascinated that he could slip back into Florence’s house and feel that the fabric of consolation had never been torn. He decided then and there that he would just talk, just pour it out. He was far too desperate to do it conversationally, and she looked as though she might not have the strength. She could always ask him to stop, but it had been a long ride and he needed to talk.
“Florence,” he said, “I’ve been gone a long time.” He could see her eyes sharpen somewhat, and he wanted to get the mechanical tone out of his voice. “I moved up to Canada for a while.” That reminded him: there used to be a number of French Canadians around town, Separatists in Speedos, who told the girls they’d planted the mailbox bombs in Montreal. It was a very effective line and kept the bulk of the Separatists out of inclement weather. “Now I’m in citrus. I’m responsible for four huge groves in Hendry County, frost-free high ground, the best. Natalya and I split up quite a while ago.” He’d mistakenly thought this would induce a reply. “She’s up in New Orleans, three beautiful kids. They all swim. Remember how crazy Natalya was about swimming? Jumping off the White Street Pier? And remember Jackie L. Dalton? Used to play his songs for you on the guitar? He’s a huge hit, just huge, got his own jet plane.” He caught himself mimicking with his hand the jet plane flying through the sky. “Fills big stadiums,” he added weakly.
For an instant his head was empty. Then he wanted to talk again.
“Those days seem so long ago. But that’s nothing to you, is it? Not when you’ve seen Cay Sal from the deck of a schooner. Really, I think all of us were just pitiful, just homeless and pitiful. Didn’t know anything. Worse came to worst, declare yourself a carpenter. There was that awful song, ‘If I was a carpenter and you were a lady,’ started all that mess. Then some people couldn’t get out of it, and after they left here they couldn’t ask you, so a lot of them took off more or less empty-handed. It wasn’t your fault and I don’t know what you got out of listening to all that, and here you are doing it again and I’m starting to feel better already. I’ll be honest with you; I had to come here. In a way, it’s my last chance. I said to myself, Miss Florence Ewing will not permit me to go on like this.
“I didn’t really move to Canada, I just said that. I didn’t move anywhere. I moved my body several times but nothing else mo
ved. I was like that four-hundred-pound lady bouncer at the Anchor they called Tiny. We were there a thousand times and nobody ever saw Tiny move. I’m kind of like old Tiny, but in my case the body is the only thing that did move. Let me clear that up: I went to Canada, I went to Red Deer, Alberta, but it just didn’t work out, and anyway Canada won’t let me back in. It’s not like I meant to mislead you about that.
“By the way, it’s sure nice nobody smokes in here. I can smell all that longleaf pine just like the day your granddad nailed it up. When you used to get us to do a little work around here, we’d run into those gumbo-limbo joists and break our tools and you’d just laugh. I think me and Raymond pretty much covered that old turtle route in that black Nova Scotia ketch we had together, a real little ship. We probably saw as much of the tropics as anybody.”
He looked off to one end of the room where the tall windows had darkened and a breeze lifted the long curtains. The four live bulbs in the chandelier were little help and Errol was at the point of thinking Florence had passed away.
“That last trip, coming across the stream in a northern gale, a big wave took Raymond right off the helm and away. I came up for my watch and there was no one at the wheel. Not a soul.” He delivered a hearty laugh, but there was a scream buried in it. “I realize there are plenty of people who said it didn’t exactly happen that way, and I hope you believe me. But I got the boat home, got her tied up at the desalinization plant, and walked to Natalya’s house. She wasn’t there. She wasn’t going to be there. Well, what do you know about that, Florence? I’ll bet you imagined you were through with all that. I kind of wish you’d answer me or say something. I’ll bet you figured we had used you about up. Surprise, surprise. You know what? Just goes to show you, Raymond is the legend we all knew he would be. I can tell you that I have failed to make—uh, to make an appropriate accommodation. I am a drunkard and I really felt I better get back down here for a little visit, see what you had to say about all this, help a person more or less sort of stand it.”
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