by RA Williams
It still didn’t work on her, of course. But these days, she rejected with a smile. The years in academia had turned her less flippant. More quotidian. Her old school chum, Titch Blaine-Howard, called her ‘Everest with willowy legs’.
Not only did suitors suffer the humiliation of never summiting her icy peak but none even reached base camp. She couldn’t give up her private obsession with halcyon love. There was no antidote for the self-torment she kept locked inside.
America fared ever worse. In the midst of the Great Depression, family fortunes were wiped away. Bankers leaped from office windows. Farmers’ fields dried up, forcing entire communities to move west in search of greener pastures. The exhibition of recovered artefacts from Skipper Henrikson’s wreck, which had afforded St Dunstan’s science institute international notoriety, was threatened with termination by a court injunction from the fascist Spanish dictator, Franco. What began with such promise could now shutter the school and bankrupt the Annenberg family.
Worse yet, too many years had got behind her since she last found a lead on Balthasar’s identity. It made her heart heavy, like the thick morning mist in Bloomfield Hills when it sunk down into the dales. ‘Damn,’ she groaned quietly. ‘Yeah,’ she continued with a sigh, reminding herself that, on the bright side, the Volstead Act had been repealed, and everyone was free to get as drunk as monkeys again.
Ascending the broad stairs leading away from the athletic field, she entered the south lobby of the academic building, the lights in its high ceiling all dimmed during the summer months. It wasn’t until then that she realised she had worked up quite a sweat.
Tucking her sunglasses into her valise, she climbed the spiral stairs up from the lobby, stopping beside Diogenes holding his lantern.
‘Still looking for an honest man?’ she asked him. He always remained quiet.
As too did Balthasar Toule, his clues swallowed up as the years rolled into each other.
Entering the ethnology vestibule, she found Hattie humming a Cole Porter tune before a whirling table fan, windows cast wide, hoping for the slightest breeze.
‘Morning, Hattie,’ she puffed, beating a path to her office. It was as hot as Honduras inside, sallow amber light filtering through the drawn curtains. She wasted no time throwing them back and opening the windows.
‘Tea?’ offered Hattie.
‘Iced this morning,’ replied Elle, eyeing the lofty stacks of unopened mail on her desk.
‘Shall I get cracking on those?’ Hattie asked, pausing from her retreat to the door.
‘Nah. Until they’re opened, there’s no more bad news.’
‘I hope you’ll find a student assistant to help me out during the new school year?’
‘Slowing down, are we?’
‘Absolutely not. I just need a little extra assistance these days.’
Elle smiled, thinking. ‘Remember Charlie?’
‘How could I forget him?’
‘He was sort of nicely gormless. Would tackle any task assigned him, be it grading papers or shovelling the snow off my front porch.’
‘Am I insufficient to your needs?’ Hattie’s tone suggested she was only half joking.
‘Hattie.’ Elle put her hands over her heart, feigning adoration. ‘You are my rock.’
‘Uh-huh,’ she replied. ‘And Charlie’s a man. Young and slightly feckless, but a man nonetheless. You only have to smile that great big smile of yours and men will join the Texas Rangers if you ask them. That’s your gift. I have to promise to change a student’s marks to get them to sharpen a pencil for me.’
‘How long since Charlie graduated?’
‘Must be six years now.’
‘Six years,’ Elle repeated, surprised by how many years had come and gone since her last clue to the enigma that was Balthasar Toule. ‘Where does the time go?’
‘The way of Prohibition.’ Before Hattie closed the door, she added, ‘I’ll get some ice for your tea.’
As she leaned against her desk, Elle’s eyes shifted from the unopened mail to the tennis balls sitting in her stuffed bookcases. She took one off the shelf and twirled it in her fingers, long ago having lost track of which was which. Didn’t much matter; both came from Titanic.
She browsed her shambolic collection of souvenirs: books on subjects of interest to nobody but her, a clay pot shaped like a breadfruit propping up a photograph of Elle with Skipper Henrikson on Adel, her doctorate degree in a cracked frame, Dr Mauss’s ‘The Gift’, her Titanic lifebelt, a postcard of Utila Island from Gunny Schadowski, and the ledger Dougie Beedham had given her. Bits and bobs from a joyless life, displayed on dusty shelves.
You’ve a long, dark road ahead of you. Twenty-four years on, that road had got her nowhere. Her salad days gone, with no more clues to Balthasar’s whereabouts since a cold rainy night in 1929, when presumably he and his adjutant had paid her a visit to retrieve his talisman.
Putting the tennis ball back on the shelf, she lifted an envelope from the top of the pile of morning mail; an official-looking letter from Headmaster Bowie, her nemesis. He was a clever sort. Biding his time, he had tolerated Daddy’s little girl’s lectures on Spring-heeled Jack and endless papers on Crimen predation, awaiting the moment when being the daughter of Franklyn and Louise Annenberg was no longer relevant. She tossed the letter into her rubbish bin.
The intercom buzzed.
‘Eleanor,’ said Hattie from the vestibule. ‘Your father is here.’
‘Uh-oh.’
Shortly after, Hattie entered the room carrying a silver tray balancing two glasses, a crystal decanter of tea and a rattling ice bucket. Elle’s father trailed behind.
‘Hello, my darling daughter.’
The years had not diminished her father’s bonhomie. At seventy-eight, he remained modest yet optimistic, dressed in a bespoke Panama suit. Unbuttoning his jacket, he slipped it off, and kissed her on the cheek.
‘Hot today.’
‘Thermometer heading north of ninety degrees, Father.’
He laid the jacket across the back of his old armchair and mopped his brow with a hanky.
‘Iced tea?’ she asked, adding chipped ice to a tall glass.
‘Delighted. I’m parched,’ he replied.
Glancing through her shelves, he innocently took down the hard-bound black ledger, reading the gold lettering stamped into the cover. ‘US Commerce Committee Investigation into RMS Titanic. Wherever did you get this, Eleanor?’
‘Dougie Beedham.’
Her father pulled a face, suggesting he didn’t immediately recollect him.
‘Steward Beedham.’
‘Ah, of course.’
After pouring tea into her own glass of ice, she took a sip. It was only then that her father drank from his. Ever the gentleman. ‘You never thought to mention it before?’
‘Life got in the way. Mr Beedham owned a hotel on an island off the Honduran mainland. I told you.’
Her father shrugged, before handing back the ledger.
‘You know what’s funny. He became so frightened of the sea he wouldn’t so much as put a toe in.’
Removing his pocket watch, her father popped the clasp, revealing its face.
‘I was wearing this that night. Checked the time just before I was going to leap overboard. Steward Beedham happened by, in a flimsy collapsible. Do you know what crossed my mind? “I hope it doesn’t get wet”.’
He smirked, winding it.
‘Can you imagine a sillier thing before dying than saying, “I hope it doesn’t get wet”?’
He choked out a sad little laugh. ‘I use it every day. Every day.’
He turned from her to look at her collection of knick-knacks.
‘I don’t look at it to remind me of Titanic. I look at it when I wonder what time it is. It’s just a watch. A watch attached to a chain I tucked into my vest pocket one regrettable night.’
‘Do you ever feel guilty our family survived unscathed, when so many others didn’t?’ she asked.<
br />
He turned to her. ‘If you’re asking me if I would feel less guilty if you or your mother had drowned, the answer is no.’
‘Why did you stop by here so early?’
‘Why? Your mother and I miss you, Eleanor. We worry about you,’ he said, face austere. ‘We’ve hardly seen you since you moved out of the main house and into your little pied-à-terre.’
‘Father, are we going to have our annual “If you’re not careful you’ll end up a lonely drunk woman who gets eaten by her twenty-five cats” lecture?’
‘Eleanor, I don’t give a hoot if you die an eighty-nine-year-old spinster.’ Giving the knees of his trousers a tug to preserve their shape, he sat in his old armchair. ‘My only want for my daughter is her happiness.’
She smiled. Sitting on the armchair’s ottoman, she laid a hand on her father’s. ‘When I was a little girl, your hands swallowed me up. I knew so long as I held on to you, I was safe.’
Elle knew the purpose of her father’s visit, and there was no sense rushing what would inevitably be a bad ending.
‘I gave you and Mother a hard time when I was a teenager. In case you didn’t already know, I love you both a lot.’
Her father smiled. ‘Mother’s greatest worry was that she was raising a Republican.’
Elle laughed, genuinely. It felt nice to let go for a moment.
‘I have seen what wealth did to the children of my friends,’ he continued. ‘Running around all hours of the night drunk, injecting themselves with enough solution of cocaine to kill a horse. I’m pleased your mother and I raised a daughter of the world, and not a victim to it.’
Elle hugged him. She hadn’t had a hug in ages.
‘Have you begun the syllabus for your courses this term?’ he asked.
‘Not yet,’ she said. Then, standing, she pushed the stack of post to the side, perching on the edge of her desk, readying herself for the executioner’s axe. ‘Why?’
‘This morning, I received a telegram from Ribs Wimbourne.’
‘Ribs?’ she replied, recalling how she had knocked him from Titanic’s deck into a lifeboat. ‘How is he?’
‘Promoted to commodore. On loan from the Royal Navy. Using his diplomacy skills to get us out of trouble.’
‘Are we in trouble, Father?’
‘Ah, the insular world of academia. We’re in the depths of the Great Depression, its end nowhere in sight. St Dunstan’s has lost half its students.’
Elle stood, thinking it was time to have a last smoke before the axe fell. She removed a cigarette from a silver box on her desk and lit it. She held the box open by its hinged lid for her father, who took one and gave it a sniff before putting it to his lips.
‘There was once a five-year waiting list for a membership at my golf club. Now they can’t give ’em away for five bucks. And five bucks isn’t worth what two bucks was.’ Lighting his cigarette and inhaling, he coughed.
‘How long has it been since you had a gasper?’ she asked, leaning against the windowsill, blowing her smoke outside.
‘Had more than a few of late,’ he said, breathing in deeply. ‘I can name on each finger and toe the friends I prepped with, giants of industry, who’ve gone bankrupt and lost everything.’ His smoke found its way lazily to the open window. ‘Our problems don’t amount to a hill of beans.’
‘Is St Dunstan’s in jeopardy?’
‘Do you remember when I sold our steel mills to Henry Ford?’ he asked, clearly dodging her question.
‘Soon after Titanic sank.’
‘December of 1912. Two months before the 16th Amendment was ratified, legalising income tax. Was just dumb luck I sold off my biggest assets before I would have to have handed over the lion’s share of the profit to Uncle Sam. As it was, we held on to a hundred per cent of the sale price.’
Elle almost dreaded to ask. ‘And now?’
‘Your mother.’
‘Mother?’ she replied. It wasn’t the answer she had expected.
‘The prudent one,’ he said with a nod. ‘Her family.’
‘The bankers? I thought they caused this mess in the first place.’
‘Bankers from the Old Country. They saw the warning signs before the rest of us. Mother saw to it that most of our assets were divested overseas before the crash. Diamond speculation in Amsterdam, whiskey distilleries in Londonderry, cork factories in Palafrugell.’
‘Pala-through-hell?’ she asked.
‘Palafrugell. It’s in Spain. Catalonia, technically. I’ve never been there.’
‘Oh,’ Elle replied, knowing now where her father was steering the conversation. ‘The fascist dictator, Franco.’
‘It’s already been decided,’ he said, his sober tone disheartening.
‘No,’ she said, and stood from the sill, throwing her cigarette butt out the window. ‘You can’t do this to St Dunstan’s.’
‘If I don’t, there won’t be a St Dunstan’s next semester.’
‘The escudos from the exhibit? That’s what Franco wants, isn’t it? Gold.’
Father nodded. ‘There’s a civil war in Spain. Germany is siding with the fascists. Catalonia is Republican, and the Soviets are siding with them. Ribs struck a deal.’
‘A deal?’
‘I have a lot of Americans managing the cork factories. The Germans agreed not to bomb Palafrugell.’
‘You’re bribing them?’
‘Bribery is such an ugly word. Ribs negotiated a settlement. A half-million in gold.’
‘You’re taking St Dunstan’s gold escudos?’
‘Half, actually. Your escudos are worth a bit more these days.’
She stared at him, mouth agape. ‘Half?’
‘Well, yes,’ her father replied, as if he were talking about the price of milk. ‘I’d offer Franco the gold fillings from my teeth if he would accept them, but he wants the escudos. A matter of pride. He claims you committed predation in acquiring them.’
‘Predation?’ she replied. For her, it had an entirely different meaning.
‘Plunder. If it makes you feel better. These escudos, they’re Spanish. Therefore, they’re property of Spain.’
‘Never mind Spain committed predation themselves when they looted the Aztec Empire.’
‘I remain outside political intrigue. Gives me heartburn. Franco wants a half-million in gold. Your coins are worth a cool million these days. We hand half the coins to Franco’s fascists, and Spain drops their court injunction against St Dunstan’s. The Germans agree not to bomb our factories in Catalonia. The other half-million you keep.’
‘And the exhibition that gave St Dunstan’s respectability? Is it gone?’
‘I’m afraid there is more to it.’
Before she could ask, her intercom buzzed again.
‘Eleanor? Your mother is here.’
As her mother entered, Elle’s father stood up. Mother’s presence was a bit like watching Moses part the Red Sea.
‘Louise.’
‘Ah, shit,’ Elle said. It was serious when her father didn’t call her mother Weezy. It all made sense now. ‘I’m to be struck off, aren’t I?’
‘Eleanor, you don’t help your cause with that language,’ her mother tut-tutted, sitting in the chair newly vacated by her father.
‘It’s true, isn’t it – I’m to be fired?’
‘I’ve spoken at length with Headmaster Bowie—’
‘I knew it,’ Elle said, and she went to the window, the air in her office suddenly stifling. ‘He bided his time well.’
‘Shut up, Eleanor.’
When Mother said ‘shut up’, you shut up.
‘On the contrary – he was against firing you.’
‘Then why?’
‘This dealing with a fascist dictator,’ said her father. ‘President Roosevelt thinks it smells bad.’
‘The President of the United States told you to fire me?’
‘His Secretary of State, actually,’ he replied to her.
‘Wonderful. Who’s goin
g to hire me after this?’
‘You’ve become notable.’
‘Notable? A highly strung heiress with peculiar theories, making deals with fascists in the midst of a depression. “Notable” isn’t the word I’d use.’
‘Mother has an idea.’
She looked to her mother. ‘Oh? I bet it’s a doozy.’
‘We have friends, many of whom owe us favours. Your Aunt Anna is a patron of the Institut für Archäologie Berlin,’ her mother said.
Elle pushed the books and mail aside on her desk. ‘I need to sit. My world is coming unstitched.’
‘The museum assisted us greatly in acquiring artworks,’ said her father.
‘We have assurances that a position in their ethnology department is available to you,’ her mother continued. ‘You’ll be able to continue your research. The Germans, no doubt, will be charmed by your oeuvre. Abstruse is all the rage in Germany these days.’
‘So is bashing in Jews’ heads.’
‘We’re rich Jews,’ replied Mother. ‘There will be no head bashing.’
‘You’re passing your daughter from one nationalistic dictator to another?’
‘Roosevelt assures me America will remain isolationist. There is a significant American community in Berlin. You’ll be offered diplomatic privileges and spared from public ignominy,’ her father said. ‘I’m sorry, Eleanor. I know you’ve worked very hard to make St Dunstan’s science institute what it is today.’
‘It’s just for a few years,’ said her mother.
Removing his pocket watch, her father checked the time. ‘Secretary of State Hull will want this news right away.’ Approaching Elle’s mother, he kissed her on the cheek before turning to Elle. ‘It’s only temporary, Eleanor. Just until the dust settles over this deal with the fascists. Once this has died down, you can return to your position.’
Straightening her father’s jacket lapels, she planted a kiss on his cheek. ‘I know you’ve done what you think is best for St Dunstan’s.’
Before walking out the door, he offered Elle a weak smile. ‘I’m not sure my best is nearly enough.’