Genealogy: a novel

by Mae Wood

  He takes a spin on the grass, providing the women with a preview of his fancy footwork to come. The soft ground gives way under his feet. His heart is in his throat, his stomach in his shoes, all of him plummeting to the sea below.

  By Providence, fate or pure luck, Elliott lands on a rocky ledge, his fall broken by a clump of shrubs.

  The sounds from the clamoring sea below and his friends shrieking above wash over him as he lies on his hard bed of smashed plants. He turns his ankles, then his wrists, then kicks his legs, and pulls his arms into his body and finally shifts his head upward to the heavens, thanking God for this moment, for his breath refilling his burning lungs, for his life.

  “Elliott!” The cries above coalesce into frantic calls of his name.

  “Ladies, back, please stand back,” barks Joseph above the fray.

  “Here! I’m down here,” Elliott answers when he has finished his prayers and his breath has fully returned to him.

  “Hold on!” shouts Joseph. “I’m coming down! Fetch rope! Saunders, Petry! Run to the house and fetch rope and have the servants bring out something to act as a stretcher in case he’s badly injured.”

  “I can move!” calls Elliott to his would-be rescuers. “I’m just over the edge a bit. No need for anyone to come down. Just throw a rope over. I could probably climb up, but I’m afraid the ground will give way again.”

  “Ladies, back. Please. Back!” Joseph’s voice again. “A dozen feet from the edge at least and I’d prefer it if you were at the house. Penny, I mean you.”

  “I’m sure we’d both prefer a lot of things,” she retorts, and even in his precious predicament Elliott smiles at Penny’s sass.

  Presently a rope is thrown over, and with the last rays of daylight fading, Elliott hoists himself up a few feet before he is hauled up by his friends.

  By electric light and torches, the party crosses the strait and returns to the city. Joseph, Lewis, and Elliott arrive at home as the church bells toll eleven, all of them drunk. Elliott especially so. After his fall, the first drink was to steady himself. The second drink, to celebrate. And every drink afterward was in sorrow. How wrong he’d been just yesterday, when he thought he and Alice were eternal. They were mortal and he’d walked away from her.

  Once alone in his bedroom, he crawls under the mosquito netting that drapes over his bed and turns on his electric reading light. But tonight is not for reading. Even if his brain were not swimming and eyes were not crossing from drink, there is only one thing he wants. So he spends time with her the only way he can.

  Alice, my love,

  I was so wrong. So perfectly, irrevocably wrong. I should have not gotten on that steamer without you by my side. Have I ruined it all?

  We are not timeless. We are temporary and I’ve ruined this gift of you, and I, by not taking what was offered and clinging to it and clutching it tight with all of my being, I am now on the brink of losing everything. I’ve been circumspect before, but it’s nearing midnight and I’m drunk and I no longer care for what is proper. I only want what is right and that’s you.

  We were at Penny Powell’s today and playing croquet and I stepped too close to the edge of a cliff and the ground gave way under my feet and I fell. By some miracle, I landed on a small ledge about a dozen feet down rather than a hundred feet into the waves. Four feet to the right and five feet to the left and I would be in the belly of the sea now instead of writing you this letter. I wouldn’t have the chance to right my great wrong.

  Come with me, Alice. Stay with me, explore with me, journey with me. Marry me. Because when the ground gives way under my feet again, I don’t want to have been the man who sent you pink roses, too afraid to buy the red ones that I wanted to give you. I don’t want to be the man who worked so long to prepare the perfect place for you that he spent all of his life waiting. I’m sick of waiting. Beyond full of it. Without you I am hollow.

  I want to be the man with you, who gets to hold you in his arms, who receives your smiles and laughter and companionship and love.

  Have I scared you off with my honesty? I don’t give a whit for propriety. I don’t have time for it. I am here. So are you. And in this little brief and wild existence, we should be together.

  Mark the days, Alice. Count them. Because in April I will come to you and this time I shall never say good-bye. I remain, forever as I have breath, your loving,

  Elliott

  Seven

  Elliott

  January 1917

  At home, summer would have turned into fall, fall into winter, and winter into spring. But in the tropics the seasons are marked by rain. Elliott longs for the rainy season to begin, but it won’t for months. This year’s dry season brought the relief of cooler temperatures, and hopefully the rains will bring relief from the outbreak of cholera that haunts the city’s outskirts before it intrudes on their lives.

  Elliott and Joseph promenade Penny and Leah around the city one evening, chatting and laughing on their way to enjoy drinks on the men’s veranda by the shore.

  “And the acting! It’s so, well—it’s enthusiastic,” Penny gushes as they stroll.

  “You’re being kind, Penny,” chides Elliott, marveling that she’s chosen this otherwise unremarkable moment to bite her sharp tongue.

  “Pah!” she replies, clutching her hand around the crook of Joseph’s elbow.

  “Tomorrow begins three nights of La Bohème. Sugar, I think we should go. Front row. Honor their enthusiasm with our own,” says Joseph to her.

  “La Bohème!” exclaims Leah. “That’s something I’d like to see.”

  “That’s something I’d like to see performed by another company,” says Penny.

  Elliott chuckles under his breath.

  “I’ve only heard it in recordings,” says Leah. “Have you seen it, Elliott?” she asks, her happy brown eyes dancing for him as they wander from Penny and Joseph’s embrace to Elliott’s face, her real question never asked.

  He should offer her his arm, as it is polite, but he keeps his distance from her. This outing was only undertaken after begging from Joseph about how Penny wouldn’t be allowed out to the theater if it were just the two of them, that he needed another couple to appease her parents, and that Elliott could work on his Italian. Of course Elliott objected that Italian sung by a traveling troupe of middling Portuguese performers was probably not the most authentic of accents, but he relented when Joseph promised to buy dinner before the show. There may be only one Penny who mattered to Joseph, but every penny mattered to Elliott. Every penny got him that much closer to being able to provide for Alice. Twenty pesos ill-spent were twenty pesos that would not buy her art supplies, food for her table, or a roof under which she could paint and breathe and laugh with him.

  “No, I haven’t.” His answer does not welcome further inquiry from her and also does not confess the truth. Elliott has only heard Puccini performed once—the traveling production of Tosca that they just watched. And even with his provincial background, he agrees with Penny’s assessment. To see it some day with Alice, performed in Paris or Milan or Prague or even San Francisco? That would be worth every penny. Because while Alice might agree with Penny’s assessment, her criticism would not be so cutting.

  They approach the men’s house, expecting to find it empty, as Lewis is traveling in the more southerly islands for business, but the houseboy remains on duty, far after his expected hours.

  “Excuse me, sirs,” he says, handing Elliott an envelope as he quickly greets them before hurrying away. “I am leaving.”

  Elliott tears open the envelope, quickly reads the letter, and looks to Joseph, knowing that whatever fun his housemate had planned with Penny is now entirely ruined.

  “Lewis has contracted cholera,” Elliott tells the group. The women gasp, hands over their round, open mouths, their eyes wide in a world lit by a few electric lamps. “He’s in the hospital. Struck down while on his way back from Cebu.” He repeats the letter’s facts, trying to force t
he worry from his mind because he knows there is nothing he can do for his friend.

  Cholera has lurked on the edges of their consciousness for months. It has been mostly confined to the poorer parts of the city, those filled with natives and not those traveled by expatriates. But their houseboy? The men who transport them on boats and bullock carts as they go about their lives? The women who cook their food? They are invited into their lives and houses every day. A few weeks ago an older Irish woman succumbed, and the club mourned her passing with a wake. But to their set, it was a novelty. Drinks and songs and tales through the long night. Cholera and death were things that happened to others. Not something that would happen to them.

  “We will walk you both home,” says Joseph. His competence that often is so well hidden by his jokes and leisure rises to the surface. “Come now, girls.” He places Penny’s hand on his arm and with a surefooted stride that Elliott tries to match, they return Penny and Leah to their families.

  “Should we learn to cook and clean and care for ourselves?” Elliott asks Joseph on the walk home. “Because I did most all of my own chores while in Ann Arbor. I’m not scared of hard work, and as long as we coordinate, we can probably eliminate much of the contamination risk from encountering others.”

  “And go to the market ourselves? Draw our own water? Shutter your business? No. We will go on as normal and pray for a happy outcome.”

  As February rolls in, a gaunt Lewis returns to the house. Propped up in a teak chair on the veranda, he greets his friends with a bright smile and with a porter at his side. Lewis wastes no words. “I’m leaving.”

  Elliott and Joseph begin to chatter in response and Lewis silences them with a raised hand. “Now, look. It’s been in the works for a bit, but with this cholera business and the situation with the war, the company is moving up the timeframe. I’m being moved to Tokyo and will be number two for the entire Oriental division.”

  Elliott examines his friend, sunken and tired from the travails, not believing a bit of it. That this shell of a man could even travel to Japan, much less run a division of a company as large as Standard Vacuum. “Really?” he asks.

  “Yes, that’s the plan. But first I will head back to the States for a bit. Not only to fully recover, but to meet with the San Francisco office and perhaps head to New York, but for now it’s San Francisco.”

  “That’s a long journey,” Elliott says, again swallowing his concern.

  “It is. And I’ll be recovering here, and I hope—” He pauses and a lightness enters his eyes. “Joseph, would you mind excusing yourself?”

  “That’s rather forward of you, don’t you think?” Joseph teases as he taps the arm of his chair, rises, and leaves them alone.

  “Now that we don’t have the government’s eyes and ears on us, I have a proposition for you.”

  “The government?”

  “Well, did you honestly think he was a wealthy gadabout who decided to land in Iloilo? Iloilo,” Lewis repeats with slight disdain.

  Elliott feels gullible because he’d believed just that. “He’s a spy?”

  “I think that’s too strong of a word. I think he’s part of an advance team of sorts, sent to shore us up just in case the Germans and their U-boats show up in the Islands.”

  “Fooled me,” Elliott admits. Because if he’s going to admit anything, confess anything, it’s to Lewis and no one else. “What about this proposition?”

  “I want to offer you a job.”

  “A job?”

  “Yes, well, specifically my job. You’ve got a way with people and figures. It’s mainly papers, and the travel is simply to maintain relationships with our customers. No serious sales are done. Especially since right now with the war, we’re pretty much the only game in Asia. You’d keep the house, have a nice salary with plenty of pocket money. Might even be enough for you to comfortably buy my Rambler when I leave. I’ll sell it to you whether you take the position or not.”

  “I don’t need a car,” says Elliott, tempted by the idea, but knowing that even a simple used car would be hundreds, if not thousands of pesos.

  “An oilman can’t be seen with a horse and buggy, or even worse in a bullock cart. It’s that simple. And you’re smart enough to know that.”

  “I’m heading back to the States in a few months,” Elliott says, the real reason for his objection on the tip of his tongue.

  “To collect a bride, no doubt,” says Lewis, cutting him off with a knowing smile. “But I won’t be leaving until I’m strong enough for the journey, and it doesn’t look like I’ll be leaving tomorrow,” he says, gesturing up and down his thin frame with a lazy hand. “Doctors say I’ll need a month at least. That puts us at March or the beginning of April, and if memory serves,” Lewis’s voice takes on a teasing tone, “that’s your timetable to leave for Seattle regardless of this offer. To be frank with you, Elliott, Standard Vacuum is an amazing opportunity to show your stuff. I know you dream of opening a local bank here, but that will tie you here forever. And what if the Islands do gain their independence? How likely will they be to show you and all of us the door? Standard Oil will open doors for you. Let’s say that your Alice doesn’t much like the tropics? You can move to a position in Siberia or Iowa or even in the same building as Rockefeller and Archbold themselves. No one can say no to New York City.”

  Maybe he’s right, thinks Elliott. New York always has been a dream of his, to one day see it, but not at the expense of missing Alice a second time. “As tempting as that is—” He begins to explain how it won’t matter where he can take Alice in the future if he cannot first get to Alice this spring and make her his wife.

  “And here’s what I can do to sweeten the deal,” Lewis continues, ignoring Elliott’s interruption. “I told Robert, my boss, about you and your Alice, and since he knows about my current situation, you’ll accompany me to San Francisco as my not-quite-a-nursemaid, and meet some folks, and then be free to collect your Alice from Seattle on your way back to Iloilo.”

  “The store—” Elliott begins.

  “We have plenty of time for you to find a buyer.”

  “It isn’t mine to sell,” Elliott admits.

  “You’re wearing me out, old friend,” Lewis says, rolling his shoulders to find a more comfortable position in his chair. “I was at least expecting your usual ‘We will see,’ but I’m not even getting that.”

  “We will see,” says Elliott, giving in to Lewis because he sees the exhaustion in his friend’s face, but not the deathly pallor that was once there.

  “That’s all I’m asking.”

  That evening Elliott writes his uncle, seeking guidance, seeking permission, and seeking prayers for Lewis’s recovery. He isn’t sure what to do and for the first time since meeting Alice, he feels adrift. Should he sell his family’s business? Hire someone to run it for him? He owes his uncle so much and the thought of selling the pharmacy brings Judas Iscariot to his mind. Elliott betrayed his family once by leaving seminary. They forgave him that, but would they forgive him this? He can only ask and await a response in his post office box.

  In March, Lewis is strong enough to take slow walks around downtown, their houseboy on his heels in case he needs assistance. And with Lewis’s improvement, Elliott’s time to decide whether he will take the position with Standard Vacuum or continue to chart his own course is coming to a close.

  Cholera still rages in the poorer quarters of the city, but Lewis’s brush is the only impact Elliott feels and, as he waits a response from his uncle, his thoughts are taken with concerns far from the Islands. The tall letters on the tops of newspapers that shout the daily death toll give way to tall letters screaming about war. About how the Germans are declaring open season on all vessels sailing under the United States flag. About how Germany is luring Mexico to bring war to the Americas. The days slowly build to an announcement of the inevitable declaration.

  Dear Alice,

  It’s happened. The nightmare at the edges of our dreams
, threatening to swallow us whole, has become real. We are at war. And here I was, already packing my trunk to return to you. Now we wait to find out what our future holds.

  If I could come back to you, I would leave today. And I will as soon as I can make arrangements.

  I received word today from my uncle Otto that he and my aunt are staying stateside and not returning. She doesn’t want to be on the next Lusitania, and the comforts of home and family are sticky webs from which they do not long to escape. And with that, the store is mine. To run it, to sell it. Half of the proceeds from any outcome are to go to them, now back in Indiana. Until I can make up my mind which path to take, and then follow it, I’m here. And you are there.

  There is an opportunity that I want to discuss with you, so I’ll do it on paper and hope you agree with whatever conclusion I come to in this little chat of ours.

  My friend Lewis has offered me his position with Standard Vacuum. It’s the Asian arm of Standard Oil. Lewis is being promoted and will be moving to Japan. I’d be taking his place and running the Philippine division. It’s not the bank. But it’s Standard Oil. The world would be our oyster, Alice. I could take different positions and move through the company while we explore the world. But most importantly, it would bring me back to you.

  If I take the position, the plan is that I will accompany Lewis to San Francisco for some meetings, after which I will be free to come to you in Seattle, and when you are ready, we can leave for Iloilo. And if Iloilo isn’t to your taste, then we can live in Manila. If you want a taste of British life, we can live in Brunei. If you’d like to learn French, we can be based out of somewhere in Indochina within a few years. The world at our fingertips.

  If I don’t take the position, I will continue to work to expand the business here. I am close to being able to sell off the pharmacy portion and focus on the other aspects of the business, and I have confidence that I will be offered a position with the newly opened bank branch here, if I only ask after the opportunity. I’m doing well. We’re doing well, Alice. I’m seeing good returns and expect the growth will continue, even with the war. In fact, with the war expanding I expect other sources of capital may be harder to come by and our own position may improve.