by Andrea Lewis
“What about his mom and pop?”
Ruth puts a hand on either side of the baby. “I’m too ashamed,” she says.
“Can you find them?”
“I think so.”
Louis places the money on the table.
“Oh no you don’t,” Ruth says.
“It might help.”
She shakes her head. Closes her eyes as if to see more clearly into the future. Finally she says, “It must be a loan.”
“Okay. A loan.”
“How will I find you?” Ruth asks.
“I don’t know,” Louis says. “How will I find you?”
“I don’t know.”
“So it’s a gift.” Louis pushes the money a little closer.
The woman in the suit appears in the doorway. “All set?”
Ruth scrapes the chair back and pushes herself up.
“Good luck.” Louis offers his hand.
She comes around the table and puts her arms around him, though she must turn sideways to do so. Standing on tiptoe, she kisses the corner of his mouth. “Take care of yourself, Sergeant.”
“Call me Louis, would you?”
“Louis,” she says.
Outside, the driver paces by the cab and looks up when Louis approaches. “Do we take the bed back?” he asks.
“Damn, I haven’t paid you. I just gave her all my money.”
The driver shrugs. “Don’t matter.”
Louis holds up the pelican. “I could pay you with my lucky charm.”
“I can’t take a guy’s lucky charm.” But he takes the pelican anyway and looks at it. “Nice.” He returns it to Louis’s palm. “There’s no charge. I’ll take you back.”
“Could you maybe take me to the edge of town?”
“Which edge?”
“East.”
“Sure.”
As they pull away from the hospital, the driver asks Louis if he saw action in the Pacific.
“Nah,” he says. “I was a cook. Stateside.”
“Glad you made it through, anyhow.” The driver lights a cigarette and offers the pack. Louis takes one and lights it.
The sun is well up now, streaming through the pitted windshield. Louis flips down the visor as they turn east toward the city limits.
8
The Empire Pool
When I was nineteen, my fiancé died. He died for England on May 10, 1943, in a mortar attack southwest of Tunis. For the next four years I stayed home in Cornwall, crying in the bath every morning and kissing Lawrence’s photograph every evening. Then I decided to pull myself together and save the world.
I joined the army of English girls who converted their pre-war romantic desires into post-war committee work. By age twenty-four, I was an old hand. Public hygiene, solid fuel, labourers’ safety. I had studied them all. I wanted to eradicate hunger, sterilize water, and modernize factories. I wanted every refugee in a safe home and every worker in a proper trade union. I volunteered for every committee, congress, and women’s league that came my way, and there was no end to them. I suppose I still wanted to marry and start a family. But with all those thousands dead, it seemed another form of selfishness—like wanting sugar or petrol during rationing—to want a husband all to oneself.
On August 5, 1948, I traveled from Landsdowne, our family estate in Cornwall, to London for yet another conference: the Women’s Congress on the Workplace. London was hosting the Olympic Games that summer. The city would be thick with celebrities, international dignitaries, foreign athletes, and exotic guests.
Before leaving home, I begged my older brother Rodney to come with me and do something useful. But he was too busy becoming a dipsomaniac and running with a crowd he called artists and our father called fruits. Rodney was our sole male heir—a male heir with no desire to carry on the family’s mining interests in Cornwall. So, along with saving the world, it would fall to me to keep the winders and compressors and cassiterite separators of McAuley Tin Works roaring for another generation.
I stuffed a mottled brown cardboard binder in my bag—Copper, Tin, Coal: A UK Survey—and kissed my brother goodbye. Having seen too much American cinema, he saluted me with his morning gin and orange juice and said, “Go to it, Carrington. Knock ’em dead.”
I had adored Rodney my whole life, and now he was simply breaking up. In the war he had done bomb disposal for the Royal Engineers, defusing unexploded mines and bombs from the airfields of England to the bridges along the Rhine. He lost most of his mates in the process. It had shattered his nerves and transformed him from the brilliant, happy lad I grew up with into a cynic intent upon pub-crawls and carousal.
My journey was dreadful. Crowded trains, late connections, unbearable heat. When I arrived at five o’clock that afternoon, London sweltered under a blanket of copper-coloured air. I taxied to the Hotel Alexander, registered, and went looking for my fellow Congresswomen. I discovered two older ladies in a dim hallway, valiantly distributing pamphlets from a table draped with the faded banner of the Women’s Congress on the Workplace. They greeted me with weary smiles, their face powder collecting into creases, their eyes sweetly sympathetic. After fussing through a box of loose papers, they found my committee assignment for the next day. Then they advised me to obtain a cup of tea.
The hotel tearoom was an overly warm octagonal solarium of faintly sooty glass. Red hibiscus and orange bird-of-paradise drooped amidst dense, green patterns of thick leaves. It all made me think of Lawrence. He had studied botany before he was called up. Even from the deserts of North Africa he wrote about plants. Once he sent tiny dried flowers sealed in cigarette-packet cellophane. At all events, I was relieved to sit under a Kaffir lime and order tea and sandwiches.
After a moment or two, I watched a man enter the tearoom. He was perhaps thirty years old, not tall, but conspicuous nonetheless. I imagined him a celebrity of some sort, a Spanish film star or Olympic gymnast from Brazil. I was certain he was not British. Not only because of his light brown skin—the shade and smoothness of which reminded me of the walnut-crème nougat candies I lusted after as a child—but because of his bearing. He was too confident and too filled out to be a Brit in 1948. Since the war, we all had a battered, twitchy, bloodless cast. This fellow was vital, his energy barely contained within his beautifully tailored suit. He appeared at home in the heat and humidity, standing there with the blackish-green fronds of a banana tree arcing over his head.
To my astonishment, his gaze rested on me. I became aware of my good silk blouse sticking to my back. And the train journey had played hell with my hair. The man strode directly to my table, inclined his head in a courteous little bow, and said, “Hi. Are you Miss Carrington McAuley?”
“Yes. Why?” I’m afraid I sounded abrupt. I resented his being good-looking, resented his American accent, resented that dreadful word Hi. Cufflinks of hammered silver peeped from his jacket cuffs.
“Okay if I join you?”
Whatever stunned smile I displayed he must have taken for consent. I was beset with contradictory feelings—wanting him to like me, wanting him to leave, wanting him to be Lawrence.
“Those gals by the banner told me a fellow worker was in here,” he said. “We’ve been thrown together.”
I had no idea what he meant. I was admiring the contrast between his starched white collar and his brown skin.
He pulled a paper from his jacket pocket and recited, “‘Health and Safety Hazards in Rock, Sea, and Underground Mines.’”
“Oh, the committee,” I said. “Yes. My family own the McAuley Tin Works in Cornwall. I’m to represent them.”
“Lucky for McAuley Tin Works.” This should have been the silliest sort of flattery, except he said it with utter solemnity. He introduced himself as Ramiro Delgado. Later I would learn the music of his full name: Jorge Salvador Ramiro Delgado y Cortés. Later I would learn he was thirty-two years old and traced his ancestry back to the Spanish conquistador, Hernán Cortés. At present, I learned he was from Texas. He was
quick to add his parents were born in Mexico. He owned mines in Mexico, Bolivia, and Honduras. Mostly silver, he said, plus some nickel and “a few gems.” He had come to London to see a diver named Joaquín Capilla Pérez, who was competing for Mexico in the Olympics.
I felt trapped beneath Mr. Delgado’s unyielding gaze, like a butterfly in a killing bottle. I unfolded my serviette and couldn’t resist dabbing at my forehead. “Isn’t it like a jungle in here?” I said.
He smiled, showing strong American teeth. “I guess you’ve never been in a jungle.”
The waiter arrived with my tea and sandwich tray. I offered Mr. Delgado a cucumber sandwich. He declined with a slight raise of his blunt fingers. I took one for myself—I was famished—and bit into it. He watched me as though my eating a cucumber sandwich were an amusement he had traveled miles to witness.
I examined the sandwich out of sheer nervousness. “Oh dear,” I said, “they’ve used mayonnaise. I suppose butter is not available.” I never should have said anything so ridiculous if his steady brown eyes hadn’t made me uneasy. Before I could stop him, he held the tray aloft and motioned for the waiter.
“No. Please—” I said. But the waiter had scurried over.
“Miss McAuley wants butter on the sandwiches,” he said.
“No, really, it’s fine.” The tray was already gone.
“Why shouldn’t you have what you want?” he asked, leaning urgently across the table.
“We’re accustomed to it,” I said, rather defensively. “The war. Butter and things. We didn’t have them.”
“That’s over now, isn’t it?”
“Not entirely. And the sandwiches were fine.”
“You should have what you want. That’s important. I mean, for a young lady.”
“No, it isn’t.” I did not like having a man who looked like a prince and probably owned half the metal ore in Central America telling me I should be selfish. “What is important is for people to work together, sacrifice together.”
“Is that why you joined this club?”
“Mr. Delgado, please. It is not a club. It is a Women’s Congress. We are joined together here, trying to repair the damages of war. Terrible damages to our country. Perhaps you don’t understand.”
“Oh, I understand, Miss McAuley. Trust me.”
I had insulted him, which made me feel dreadful. After all, I had spent the war in relative safety in Cornwall, despite losing Lawrence, despite the rationing and the constant reminders: the drone of Spitfires from the RAF base at Perranporth; the concrete anti-tank pimples dotting our lower meadows; the radar station bunker, a square grey castle sitting amidst barbed wire and antipersonnel mines on our bathing beach. What did I know of Mr. Delgado? My quick judgment of him brought back misgivings I often had about my committee work. Perhaps it was, as my brother Rodney sometimes implied, the indulgence of a well-heeled girl, a pointless salve to my conscience because half of Cornwall’s miners were unemployed and McAuley Tin Works could not repair their lives and save them all.
“Forgive me, Mr. Delgado. It’s just that I want to help rebuild England. There is much work to be done.”
He not only paid for my tea, he invited me for supper. I could not bring myself to say yes. It felt disloyal. Disloyal to Lawrence, gone these five years, and disloyal to England as well. Must Americans forever rescue us? I knew we owed them a debt, but I detested their hubris. And I was still angry about the buttered sandwiches. Yes, they had magically appeared, and I had consumed them with a mixture of guilt and bliss. Because they seemed such an extravagance, I had convinced myself they would suffice as the evening meal. Lastly I thought with dismay of the mottled brown binder and its dreary survey of copper, tin, and coal, but I was determined to stay in my room that evening and read it.
Mr. Delgado did not insist. He could have persuaded me. Over the next 26 years I would rarely resist his powers of persuasion. He would persuade me to fall in love with him, persuade me to marry him, persuade me to move to Galveston, Texas, and persuade me to sell McAuley Tin Works—which had been in our family since 1604—for a vast amount of money. But that afternoon, after he escorted me back to reception and exited graciously, I was hoping I could avoid him at the next morning’s meeting.
* * *
Held in the hotel’s basement, in a room with grimy carpets and uncomfortable chairs and a persistent odour of stale, boiled tealeaves, the next morning’s meeting was destined for a bad start. Like so many “women’s conferences” I attended, the drudgery of organizing had been carried out by women and the capricious content of the meetings threatened to be dominated by men. In fact, of the thirty or so people on this committee, I was one of only three women. Mr. Delgado arrived at the last moment, and, in what I considered yet another instance of American audacity, he asked the man sitting next to me in the front row to move so he could join me. The poor blighter nodded and scurried to the back.
One of the older ladies from the day before welcomed us with fluttering heartfelt thanks—she even singled out Mr. Delgado as one of our esteemed American guests—but she had neither the authority nor the gumption to prevent a pushy Australian man from rising and launching a monologue on acid heap leaching of chalcopyrites. Exactly the type of special interest that threatened to take over so many meetings in which the most fundamental objectives had yet to be decided.
Despite the Australian’s pomposity, he had lovely light brown hair, the same colour and cow-licked unruliness as Lawrence’s. I remembered the first time I touched Lawrence’s hair. A springtime day at Landsdowne, hillsides pink with heather, fresh wind off the sea. We were playing croquet on the back lawn when he suddenly dropped his mallet and pulled me into an embrace. He smelled of Pears soap and cigarettes. I was eighteen and so mad for him that when he kissed me, my thought was, “At last I am whole.” A schoolgirl notion, but even now, as the Australian droned on about zinc and manganese, tears stung my eyes.
I pushed aside memories of Lawrence and tried to jot notes for my own monologue on the need for an agenda of broader topics—proper workers’ insurance and workers’ compensation, for example. Before I could speak, another man took the floor and began rambling in an unintelligible Welsh accent about something—bauxite, perhaps.
Completely frustrated, I stood and blurted, “Forgive me, but we are wasting valuable time.” The Welshman stopped. The bright red spot on each of his cheeks grew brighter and his florid nostrils flared. “We haven’t yet set an agenda,” I persisted. People behind me cleared throats and rustled papers. “What about overarching issues like compensation for accidents? Insurance for miners’ families?”
The Welshman was too flustered to speak, but the Australian stood up and took his part. “Madam, this gentleman had the floor.”
“No one has the floor,” I protested. “We’ve not even elected a chairman.”
“Are you saying you want the job?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “I have experience leading discussions of this type.”
He looked out over the audience. “Oh, this girl has experience,” he called out. “Is she the chairman? All in favor?”
No one spoke. I stared at a huge, horrid painting behind the Australian—a sea battle, perhaps Queen Elizabeth’s ships going against the Spanish Armada—wondering if England would ever return to her former glory.
Before the Australian could finish his mock vote, Mr. Delgado stood up. “Wait a minute,” he said. “She has a point.”
“Are you her husband?”
“Of course not. Her family owns mines and so does my family, and we are business associates.”
I admired this answer, even if it weren’t quite true.
“So what are you proposing?” The Australian folded his thick arms.
“The same thing Miss McAuley is proposing. An agenda of topics for all miners, not just certain interests.”
“Make him chairman,” someone called out.
“You don’t need me as chairman,” Mr. Delgado sai
d amiably. “I know for a fact Miss McAuley is perfectly capable.”
Did all Americans lie this smoothly? Was it yet another thing they were better at than Brits?
“Well then, co-chairmen,” the same voice suggested.
And so for the remaining two hours of the meeting, Mr. Delgado and I sat in the front and directed the discussion. Or rather he directed it and I pretended I had an equal voice. A pattern quickly emerged in which my words would be greeted by silence and chilly looks; then Mr. Delgado would rephrase what I had said, as if interpreting from female to male language, with the added weight of an American accent. All the while, wan daylight filtered through the smudged windows at ceiling level, making me somehow angry and sleepy at the same time. When we adjourned at one o’clock, we had managed to draw up a list of urgent topics and a few resolutions. It felt like progress, despite the fact that actual subject matter had yet to be broached. That would take place at our second meeting, the next morning at ten.
After we adjourned, the Australian buttonholed Mr. Delgado and I fled upstairs to the hotel lobby. Whom should I see at the front desk but my brother Rodney. He was leaning over a slate countertop immersed in conversation with the concierge.
When he saw me he cried out, “Carrington! There you are. Excellent!”
“Rodney?”
“I’ve taken your advice.” He gripped my shoulders. “I’ve come to make myself useful. You may tell your little conference that Rodney McAuley is here to set the world right.”
He looked well. Sober, pressed, and combed. His blue eyes were bright and his always-pale skin had some healthy colour to it.
“When did you arrive?” I asked. “How did you travel?”
“My dear, I have connections, as you know. I caught a ride in a wonderful motorcar. Quite extravagant.”
“Whose motorcar?”
“Where shall we lunch?” he asked. “They’ve no more rooms here,” he went on. “God knows where I’ll find—” He broke off and looked over my shoulder, then back at me. “A lovely man is staring at us,” he whispered.