by Boyle, T. C.
* * *
Richard Blakely appeared a week later, swinging open the door of the Cabin Waco and hurrying across the blistered stubble of the lower pasture, George, laden with the mailbag and half a dozen packages, bringing up the rear. The reporter was young, younger than she would have thought—not much more than thirty—and he wore a double-breasted suit with exaggerated shoulders and he used so much pomade on his hair it shone like neon from all the way across the field. He hadn’t even got to the house before the questions started in: How did they like the isolation? Weren’t they ever bored? What about the movies—didn’t they want to go to the movies? Or shopping. What about shopping? He heard they had a radio now—how was that? Amos ’n’ Andy? Oh, yeah? That was his favorite too. But what was that noise? Seals? Was that the seals?
He was thin and slump-shouldered, he wore a little dandy’s mustache and had the habit of winking his right eye—or was it a tic?—when he asked questions, and for the next three days he never stopped asking them. She barely knew what to say—and he was underfoot the whole time, except when Herbie took him out to show him over the island, an expedition he didn’t seem particularly enthusiastic about, before or after—but Herbie matched him syllable for syllable, and the two of them chattered on from breakfast until late into the night when she excused herself and went off to bed with Richard Blakely’s voice ringing in her ears: Really? Only twelve hundred in the flock? Is that because the place was overgrazed in the past? Is that the reason for all these sand dunes? What about the sandstorms? Tell me, what are they like?
The article, which George flew out to them the Sunday it appeared, was titled “The Happy Family That Rules a Kingdom.” In it, she was described as “the Queen of the realm, dressed in a gingham skirt and a white pullover she’d spun from the wool of the very sheep her husband kept watch over in the lorn and lonely meadows of the misty isle far from shore.” Herbie read it aloud, crowing over one phrase or another, as proud as if he’d written it himself, and he read it to the girls too, though the little one could barely make sense of it and Marianne only perked up when he got to the phrase “. . . and their pretty young daughters, the princesses of the sceptered isle, are as fair and sweetly innocent as the diminutive heroines of their own fairy tale.”
George had thought to invest in three copies, two of which Herbie laid carefully in the trunk of keepsakes in the bedroom before taking his scissors to the remaining copy. He cut out the entire article, including the hazy photograph of the four of them posed at the front gate with dazed eyes and fixed smiles, and thumbtacked it to the kitchen wall just below the calendar from the Remington Company that depicted a vigorous-looking man in a flannel shirt cleaning his gun while his faithful retriever looked wistfully on.
* * *
That story opened the floodgates, not only on the central coast but throughout the state and across the country too. The Associated Press picked it up and syndicated it nationwide so that her parents and her two brothers and two sisters found it laid out on the table when they came down to breakfast in their households back in New York. Her mother wrote her immediately, on the rebound, all hint of complaint replaced by a glow of reflected pride (“Perhaps you have made the best decision after all, and I was just too blind to see it”) and she heard from people who hadn’t written in years, distant cousins, forgotten acquaintances, her roommate from her days in the flat on East Seventy-second Street, who wrote to say she’d like to come for a visit. There were more reporters, more stories. The headlines vied with one another for attention—“Eight Years in Solitary”; “Couple Rules Lonely Island as Absolute Monarchs”; “War-Torn Veteran Turns Back on Society to Find Peace in Solitude of Isolated Kingdom”—but the stories were all more or less the same.
Still, people couldn’t seem to get enough of them. The way Herbie saw it, they were only getting their due, because they were special, singled out, anointed, above and beyond the run of the common wage slaves out there, but she didn’t see it that way at all. To her, the whole uproar was nothing more than a case of escapism, people beaten down by the Depression and fearful of the coming war and only wanting to rest their eyes and let their minds roam free over the idyll the papers presented, all the sweat and toil and scraping and scrimping conveniently left out of the scenario.
Letters began to pour in (care of George Hammond, Esquire, Bonnymede), letters from utter strangers who wanted to advise them, congratulate them, criticize them, move in with them, and with the letters came unasked-for gifts. Steamship lines sent them framed oil paintings of ships at sea, magazines sent free subscriptions. There were Coleman lanterns, a butter churn, a pair of axe handles, a peanut butter jar of assorted screws, hand-knit mittens, sweaters and caps, a braided throw rug, a year’s supply of Wrigley’s gum. Patiently—at first, anyway—she answered each of the letters, no matter how odd or unctuous they were, and sent thank-you notes in acknowledgment of the gifts, which began to accumulate in the toolshed to the point where you could hardly get in the door there anymore. And every time the flood seemed to subside, another article would appear and it would rise all over again.
Kate Smith featured a tribute to their pioneer spirit on her radio program and the actress Jeanette MacDonald heard it and sent them a cream-colored puppy named Pomo in token of her admiration and solidarity, the first of a whole menagerie of pets people shipped via boat or dropped off personally. The gander—they called him Father Goose—soon had plenty of company, including a trained and very vocal raven Ed Vail personally handed her on stepping off the Vaquero one afternoon and a series of cats people misguidedly gave them (or abandoned on the beach), despite Herbie’s prohibition against them. But then you couldn’t very well give a kitten back once the boat had pulled out of the harbor or wrench it from your children’s arms either, and so there were cats on the island again and the mice just had to suffer. (“I’ll shoot them all,” Herbie muttered, but then she came in one night to see him sprawled on the couch with the white Persian the girls had named Mr. Fluff asleep in his lap, and he never mentioned the mice again. As a subsidiary benefit, things quieted down in the pantry in the dark of night, when Mr. Fluff made his rounds.)
Then—and this was probably the height and culmination of the whole whirling circus that had swept them up whether they liked it or not—Life magazine sent a reporter and two photographers out to the island to document their day-to-day life for the edification of the magazine’s millions of readers. The photographs were first-rate, she had to admit that—Herbie shone and the girls were angelic, though she couldn’t help feeling she looked fat and unkempt in the two that featured her and she couldn’t stop thinking about how they’d be displayed for anyone to see in every drugstore and newsstand and dentist’s office in the country. The thought made her stomach sink. She pictured strangers—men on streetcars, greasy hoboes in stained trousers, mechanics, sailors, drunks—sneering over the photos, maybe doctoring them with beards and devil’s horns or worse. Perverts, even.
The article itself was no different from what had come before, except for some elaboration here and there, but it was the headline, “Swiss Family Lester,” that caught the public’s attention and brought them more mail than all the other articles combined. Herbie couldn’t have been happier. For her part, she laid two pristine copies of the magazine atop the other articles in the trunk of keepsakes and hoped they were the last.
She was in the living room with Herbie one fogbound night, listening to the radio and working through the latest batch of letters addressed variously to the Lesters of San Miguel, to Herbert Lester, Esq., or King Herbert, or simply to San Miguel Island—“fan mail,” as Herbie called it—when the deep booming lament of a ship’s horn cut through the room and brought her back to herself. “Thick out there tonight,” Herbie observed, looking up at her from the puddle of light the lamp threw over his desk.
“Thick in here too,” she said, “with all these letters.” She was seated in the wicker chai
r, a writing tablet in her lap and a fountain pen poised over the paper, answering what must have been her tenth letter of the night. “Sometimes I wish we’d never let that reporter come out here.”
“Which reporter?”
“The one from the Santa Barbara paper, the first one.”
He was wearing a pair of reading glasses, pushed halfway up his nose. The light of the lamp sparked in them as he turned his head to her and the room seemed to jump and settle again. “What,” he said, “you don’t enjoy writing to Mr. and Mrs. Anonymous every week?”
“No,” she said, “frankly, I don’t. And I wish we’d never started this business.”
He was quiet a moment, the corner flap of the letter he was writing propped up on the arch of one hand. “It’s got to pay off,” he said. “I know it will.”
“In what—all that junk they send us?”
“It’s not all junk—the axe handles, I found a use for them. And Pomo”—at the mention of his name, the dog lifted his head from where he lay sprawled before the fire, then dropped it again—“and Fred the raven.”
“I know they mean well, it’s not that—it’s just that they have a picture of us that isn’t true, isn’t real—”
“We’re not hardworking? We’re not in love? We don’t have the two smartest, sweetest, most beautiful little girls in the world?”
She smiled. “They all make too much of it, that’s what I mean. We’re not special, we’re just like anybody else, only luckier, I guess.”
He lowered his head to look at her over the glasses and she saw how his hair was going white across the top now and saw the gouges beneath his eyes and the damage the sun had wrought on his face. Was he old? Was he getting old? And if he was, then she was getting old too, and once you were old you had to start thinking about what came next. “Lucky, yeah,” he said, “but we haven’t made a nickel off any of this yet. But I’ve got a couple of schools on the line—I’m trying to set up a lecture tour back east, Saint Andrew’s, Saint Paul’s, Yale, Harvard, Princeton, the very best—but I need one of the pieces to fall into place before I can even think of going, and they all plead the same thing, no money, hard times, wait till next term—”
The foghorn sounded again, so close they might have been sitting on the foredeck of the ship itself. “Like soup,” Herbie said.
“I just hope they don’t go aground.”
“They won’t.”
She was going to ask him how he could be so sure, but he distracted her by snatching up a letter from the desk and waving it like a flag. “God,” he said, “you’ve got to see this one,” and in the next moment she rose and went to him and he pressed the single sheet flat on the desk beneath the halo of light. The paper was thin, the script minute, as if indited under a magnifying glass, the characters printed discretely, rigid black letters marching across the page in the way Marianne might have arranged them with her blocks.
DEER MR. AND MISSUS LESTER:
I AM AN OLD MAN SEVENTY TWO YEARS ON THIS URTH LIVING IN NORMAN OKLAHOMA AND I HAVE NOONE TO LOOK AFTER ME. I NEVER DID MARRY NOR HAVE ANY SONS NOR DOTTIRS AND I AM ON MY LONESOME ALL THESE YEARS. I AM STRONG YET AND VIGROUS AND I AM AFRAID TO DIE ALONE. WILL YOU TAKE ME IN TO LIVE WITH YOU AND YOUR BOOTIFUL FAMILY. I CAN EARN MY KEEP BETTER THAN MANY A YOUNGER MAN. PLEASE HEER ME AND SEND FAIR FOR THE BUS TO CAL.
VERY TRUELY YOURS,
MORRIS T. SWENSON
They were silent a moment, the house still, the light pooled on the desk. She could hear the dog’s breathing decelerate into sleep and then the first quavering whisper of a snore. Herbie turned to her. “You’re going to have to answer this one,” he said.
“No,” she said, “I can’t.”
“You have to.”
“I wouldn’t know what to say.”
“Tell him he’s going to have to die alone.”
“Herbie.”
“Or no, tell him we’re lucky, that’s all. Just lucky.”
“And he’s not?”
“Right. He’s not.”
The King of San Miguel
There was no telling how Herbie would react to the news that came to them over the radio. Sometimes, he’d flick it off in disgust, right in the middle of a program, and go stomping and swearing through the house in a rage over the idiocy of the world and the way they were being corrupted by it, even out here. Other times, and this was true of the newspapers too, he would extract a few threads of information from one account or another and weave them into a salvatory scheme he talked up day and night till it began to sound plausible, even to her. His biggest bugbear during this period was Mussolini. When they got news that the little potbellied Italian clown prince had invaded Ethiopia, he’d taken it hard. This was Africa, the continent he dreamed of every time he glanced up at the elephant gun on the wall or took it reverently down to show it off to a visitor, and here the Italians were trying to colonize this huge expanse of it, and for what? he kept asking. To rape it and bleed it and force their will on natives in loincloths? “What next,” he said bitterly, “nomads eating spaghetti carbonara off the backs of their goats? Campari and soda in Addis Ababa?”
He sat riveted by the radio, agonizing over the reports of a modern army equipped with motor vehicles, tanks and machine guns cutting through Haile Selassie’s overmatched forces, whose antiquated weapons belonged in a museum and whose starving horses and blundering mules were shot out from under them and left for the vultures on their black soaring wings. “Spears, they’re using spears, Elise,” he kept saying. “We’ve got to do something. We can’t just sit around and let these people be slaughtered.”
She commiserated, of course, but to her mind the whole business was merely an exercise, a passing phase, another of her husband’s obsessions that would occupy him for a week or two and then fade away as the next arose on the horizon, and she was right, to an extent, but this time he really did try to take action. One afternoon, when they were expecting George to fly in, he called her into the living room and asked her to proofread a letter he’d spent the better part of the morning composing. It was addressed to His Highness, Emperor Haile Selassie, the Lion of Judah, care of the Ethiopian Embassy, Washington, D.C. In light of the fact that the Ethiopian army was outgunned, he was offering his entire arsenal on loan for the duration of the war—or as long as it took to achieve victory—and he further offered his own services as an instructor to drill the emperor’s men in the use of small arms. No matter that the emperor’s men were halfway round the world and she and Herbie could barely afford to get to Los Angeles, let alone New York, the Canary Islands, Gibraltar and points east, Herbie was dead serious and here was the proof of it. She didn’t say a word. Just read through the letter, handed it back to him, and told him how good it was of him to think of it and what a noble gesture it was. George came, the letter went off, and that was the end of that, as far as she was concerned.
There was plenty enough to occupy her—occupy them—without having to worry about the fate of a medieval society she’d barely heard of, an empire nonetheless. World events swept on to other things, Herbie fired off letters to FDR, Will Rogers, Lewis B. Hershey and Father Coughlin in support or protest of whatever was on his mind at any given moment, and the life of the ranch went on. They had more visitors now, and the reporters never stopped coming—and, of course, reporters and visitors alike required feeding and a place to sleep and an expanding portion of the time she needed to devote to other things, like her daughters’ education, for instance. As Marianne and Betsy grew—and reports of them spread—questions arose in certain quarters over the quality of the education they were receiving, or if they were being educated at all. There were letters from various cranks and retired schoolteachers and professors too, espousing one scheme or another, and then finally an official letter arrived from the superintendent of the Santa Barbara schools, reminding them that the l
aw required that all children on reaching the age of five years must attend school. To this point—Marianne was seven and Betsy not quite five—she’d done her best to instruct them herself, sitting them down at the kitchen table on weekdays and teaching them to copy simple sentences out of the children’s books her mother and various friends had sent on, as well as the rudiments of arithmetic, French and geography, but it was far from ideal, considering the distractions.
She showed Herbie the letter from the superintendent’s office when he came in from the yard that day. She watched his face as he scanned the letter and then read through it again, slowly this time. “What do you think?” she said finally, and why did she feel light-headed all of a sudden? Why was her heart pounding? Nothing had been decided—it was only a letter, that was all. An inquiry. “I was wondering if we should send them to the mainland—I’ve been thinking about this for ages, dreading it, really. To boarding school, I mean. I can’t imagine how we’ll afford it, but the fact is we’ve been selfish, we have—and don’t give me that look. We’ve been thinking of ourselves, not the girls—they need schooling like any other kids.”
“What’s wrong with you teaching them? And I can help. With reading, anyway. And math. And French, what about French?”
“It’s not the same thing. They need a curriculum.”
“I’d rather shoot myself than see those girls leave this island. It’d tear my heart out. Yours too. Admit it.”
“But I can’t teach them under these conditions and you know it, what with the pot going on the stove and the dog at the door and the cats . . . and every time they look up from their books, even Betsy with her coloring book, there’s something going on outside. I can’t keep their attention. Nobody could.”