Stranded in Paradise

by Lori Copeland

  The old woman stroked Henry, her eyes misting with unshed tears. “It’s still painful, yet when I look back on my life I see this as one of those defining moments on which life-altering decisions were made. Edgar was called before the committee in Washington, D.C. He didn’t want me to come, and I was busy on a film so I didn’t go. Now I wish that I had. I’d have known what was happening. He never talked about it later, but I knew Marsha Hunt and she told me what happened.

  “Marsha, too, had been blacklisted. She went to Washington with Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, and Danny Kaye. They hoped to generate positive publicity for those trying to defend themselves against those horrible charges, but their good intentions backfired. They had prepared statements that they planned to read when called to witness. But only one was allowed to read his statement. The rest were dismissed from the witness table, almost before they started.

  “Anyway, others had better luck. Lucille Ball’s testimony was so garbled and meaningless that she was allowed to be excused without stigma. That wasn’t like Lucy at all—Lucille was a brilliant woman. If only Desi could have stayed away from the women …

  “Writers like Clifford Odets never wrote again. Others managed to work behind the scenes, using other names, or worked in Mexico and in Europe. The rumor mill said John Garfield’s death was linked to his appearance before the committee. It was an awful time.” Stella shook her head as if to clear away the memory.

  “Many directors kept working but changed their names. Edgar wouldn’t do that. He said he couldn’t pretend to be someone or something other than what he was. He was called before the committee after being named by Jack Warner; we don’t know how that happened. Jack was probably trying to protect his studio. We could never find any real reason for his actions.”

  “It must have been a terrible time for both you and your husband.” Tess stared at the cold cup of tea.

  “Edgar never worked again.” Stella’s trembling fingers wrapped around her coffee cup. “He told the committee that he’d never been to any kind of meeting that could be called communist. I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t sure what was right or wrong, truth or lie. People you trusted turned on friends. You didn’t know if you were next. It was a horrible time.

  “Edgar went into a depression. Nothing I could do or say would draw him out of it.”

  “You … had reservations about your husband’s innocence?”

  Stella’s head snapped up. “I’m sorry to say that I did— at first. There were days, sometimes weeks, when I was confused. Edgar refused to deny or confess anything. He was a man of principle,” she said proudly, “and he expected his actions to speak louder than any statement. We left Hollywood and moved here, to Maui.”

  “Was your husband’s name ever cleared?”

  “Eventually, but it was too late. By then he was dead.”

  Tess cleared her throat to break the rickety silence. “I’m so sorry. It’s so unfair.”

  Stella looked up, her hands resting on Henry’s glossy coat. “Life isn’t about fairness.”

  Tess kept silent.

  “I should have trusted Edgar more; I wouldn’t have missed out on one of the most important things in my life: the ability to help Edgar in his darkest hour.” Her eyes met Tess’s.

  “If God’s so powerful, why doesn’t He just make the bad things go away?” The words materialized from Tess’s mind and she bit down hard on her lower lip.

  “I can’t answer that question. But I do know that time did teach me about faith. Adversity tends to do that; it forces us to sink our roots deep into God’s faithfulness or we’ll surely topple over.”

  “Then God let Edgar be destroyed in order for what? To make your faith stronger?”

  “I don’t know what His purpose was; I will never know until I speak with Him personally. But the experience did make me stronger.”

  “But your husband’s name was cleared too late.”

  “Perhaps. But if it had been cleared earlier, we wouldn’t have moved here, wouldn’t have had those wonderful years together. We’d have kept working day and night, wasting more time on the pursuit of fame and earthly possessions than on being together.” She smiled. “Everything that we work so hard for will either be used up, discarded, or belong to someone else someday. It’s a sobering realization, isn’t it? I think the reason I had occasional doubts was because Edgar and I had taken too little time to get to know each other. Here, in this beautiful paradise, we were given that time. What a precious gift!”

  Tess picked up a throw pillow and held it tightly to her chest. Inside, her emotions churned. What would it be like to trust so implicitly that the outcome didn’t matter? To rest so completely in another person’s—or deity’s—love that the outcome simply wouldn’t matter? Something deep inside her twisted—and ached for such a belief.

  “You find trust very difficult, don’t you, my dear?” Stella gently stoked Henry’s fur. “Once I felt the same, but I wish I could help you know the peace that comes from trust—trusting with all your heart.”

  “Faith and trust weren’t Nelson family values,” Tess admitted.

  “I’m sorry to hear that.” Stella’s features softened. “We can’t pick our parents; we can only become wiser as adults.”

  Tess straightened, pitching the pillow aside.

  “I think I’ll see if Carter needs my help.”

  Stella smiled, reaching for the teapot. “You do that, Dear. Perhaps God has provided this time for the two of you to become better acquainted.”

  14

  “We’ll be dry in here.” Carter opened the door as she ducked into the garage, where stacks of plywood littered the floor. He had managed to get all the boards put up along the back and sides of the house, but the wind made the work difficult, pushing against the plywood as he carried it out. Turning around, his eyes registered her comical attire. Stella had lent her Edgar’s old coveralls. They dragged on the floor by a good four inches, and the seat drooped practically to her knees.

  “They’re not a fashion statement, but they’ll help keep you dry,” the old woman had promised.

  Carter smirked and turned back to his work. He gave a pull on the generator’s cord. It roared to life. After a few minutes he turned it off. “That’s ready, should we need it.” He glanced up at her, then motioned to a paint can on the concrete floor. “Best seat in the house.”

  She took a discarded rag and dusted off the top before she sat down. Dried pink spatters lined the rim of the bucket. Rain hammered the tile roof, but the shelter’s interior felt almost cozy compared to the chaos outside.

  “How’s Stella?”

  “She’s holding up okay. She seems pretty calm about all this.”

  She stared at dark stains dotting the concrete floor. “I don’t understand why she’s treating the storm so lightly. She doesn’t seem concerned about the house, and she knows how destructive hurricanes can be.”

  “Maybe she’s lived through enough storms that she has a sixth sense about the danger—though it’s risky reasoning. Older people feel a need to protect their homes …” his words trailed off.

  Carter sat down on the cold cement beside her. The dampness made dark curls in his hair.

  She found herself staring at him. “Naturally curly hair?”

  Carter’s face turned bright crimson. He leaned to wipe a streak of wet hair off her cheek. The simple, innocent gesture warmed her.

  They listened to the roar of the waves. Then Tess’s halting voice emerged from the fading daylight, “Did you know that Stella’s husband was blacklisted by the McCarthy hearings?” She told him about Edgar, and the injustice that had befallen him and Stella in the late fifties.

  “Edgar was a strong man,” she concluded. “Or maybe he wasn’t. He died too soon still thinking that his name was besmirched.”

  “I imagine that he knows,” Carter said quietly as gusts of wind and rain battered the small garage.

  When she remained quiet, he reached over and tugged h
er pant leg. “You don’t agree?”

  “If you’re implying that he was a Christian so therefore today he is in heaven … I think I’d be a little bitter, if I were Edgar.”

  “And how would bitterness enrich your life?” She shrugged.

  “You’re a tough nut to crack, Nelson. Bitterness destroys you—not the thing or person you’re bitter against.”

  She reached over and yanked his earlobe playfully. “More Christian philosophy?”

  He grinned and lay back, cradling his head in crossed arms. She and Carter fell silent—the nice kind of shared silence that didn’t produce a need to talk. After awhile he said, “I guess I should be out there hammering plywood again. Only four windows to go. Care to help me haul these boards?”

  “I guess not.” She couldn’t see how he was going to get the wood up in gale winds. Carter hummed as he gathered up his supplies for another round of hammering.

  Lulled by the sound of rain striking the roof and the soft timbre of Carter’s voice, she closed her eyes. The camaraderie between them was nice, more than nice. Trusting. She had enjoyed few such relationships.

  Wind snapped a branch and the limb shattered a windowpane. She jumped and scooted closer.

  “What’s wrong—the glass didn’t get you, did it?” Carter shouted above the roar of the storm.

  “No—don’t you have a flashlight?” Darkness was quickly approaching. They had gotten all but this last piece of plywood in place. At least the board would keep out the rain until the glass could be replaced.

  “Yes—somewhere.”

  He scooted around, trying to locate the object. Eventually his hand closed around the aluminum and he crawled back to her. Switching on the beam, he pointed the beam in her eyes. She pulled it out of his hand and directed it at the hole in the glass. “Let’s get this up fast,” she said, grabbing the corner of the piece of plywood and wrestling it into place. Carter quickly pounded nails into the four corners first before adding a few more along the sides. When he was done he looked over at her rain-soaked face. “What’s wrong?” he said, pulling her inside the house.

  “Okay. I’m scared. Happy?”

  “Delirious.” He shifted back to show her a cheesy grin. “What’s not to be happy about? We’re in a hurricane. We’ve had nine days of nothing but whale watching, luau’s, and—hey—did you get your picture taken with the parrot? The one that digs his claws into your shoulder and draws blood?”

  “I missed that.”

  His playfully drew her closer and in a mock conspiratorial whisper and said, “Now tell Carter what Tess is afraid of. Wind?”

  “I hate storms, and no, I … I don’t like wind. I was in a tornado once. I—I can’t stand the sound of wind—”

  “Yeah, well. I don’t like wind, either. But together we’ll ride this thing out.”

  She rested her head on his shoulder and closed her eyes for just a moment. Oddly enough she felt better. Tomorrow she would regret this spurt of idiocy, but right now she was going with it.

  “Have you seen the movie The Perfect Storm?” she ventured.

  He gave her a wry look. “Chatting about The Perfect Storm right now makes about as much sense as United Airlines featuring an airline disaster movie on their transatlantic flights.” He squeezed her shoulders. “We’re taking proper precautions, and now we turn it over to—”

  “God.” Her defensive tone was gone. For the first time in her life she started to believe it. Carter smiled that broad, beaming smile of his.

  “How many children are there in your family?” she asked, suddenly wanting to know more about him.

  “I have an older sister. No other siblings.”

  “I have a younger brother. What’s your favorite dessert?”

  “Cheesecake—with red stuff swirled through it.”

  “Lemon pie.”

  “Lemon pie?”

  “That’s my favorite. School?” she asked.

  “Humm?”

  “Where did you go to school?”

  “High school—Chicago. Graduated from Baylor University in Waco, Texas. Business major.”

  “DePauw; Indiana. Master’s degrees in finance and psychology.”

  He let out a low whistle. “Two? As suspected, you’re an overachiever.”

  “What about your grades?”

  “They were okay. Dean’s list every semester.”

  “Dean’s list is better than ‘okay.’ What kind of car do you drive?”

  “What’s this interrogation all about?”

  “Nothing.” She was suddenly defensive, “I thought since we’ve become part of each other’s lives in the last nine days we should know something about each other.”

  Carter gently released her gaze and pushed to his feet. “We better see what Stella’s up to.” He looked through the small opening he had left in the window. The fury intensified.

  She lifted her voice. “Is it the hurricane?”

  “I’d say.” Carter said. “By the looks of things, the eye isn’t going to miss us by much.”

  “It’s really kicking up out there,” Carter said when he and Tess came into the living room, after going to their separate quarters to dry off. With the storm’s approach, Stella had insisted he take one of the other guest rooms inside the main house so he wouldn’t get doused every time he had to pop into his room. They found Stella sitting peacefully in a chair, feeding Henry pieces of dry Eukanuba.

  Tess shook her head in amazement. Neighbors and business owners had battened down hatches and headed for Up Country days ago. Yet Stella calmly fed her cat tiny pieces of food, indifferent to Nature’s mugging.

  She followed Carter into the kitchen, where he switched on the radio and scanned the range of the dial, looking for up-to-the-minute weather advisories. She bent to listen over his shoulder.

  He frowned. “Will you stop that—you’re putting gray hairs on my head.”

  Stella smiled gently when Tess paced back into the living room. “Rest, Child. Have faith that God is in His kingdom and all is right with the world. ”

  She came to sit down on the sofa. The wind had become a shrieking woman bent on murderous revenge. “Did you have faith?” she asked, trying to take her mind off the storm. “When your husband was accused of being a communist and couldn’t work?”

  Stella smiled. “Not at first. I remembered nights that he was gone to meetings. I assumed they were about scripts. They could have been something else. I never asked. I was selfishly involved in my own career.” She gently lowered Henry to the floor. “You see, I never really completely believed Edgar. Some bit of gossip, a thoughtless word, speculative innuendo always made me think that perhaps he’d fallen in with someone, attended some sort of meeting, maybe had done something innocently that had somehow connected him to the Communist Party. I felt there had to be a ‘reason’ for Jack Warner fingering him as a communist sympathizer.

  “So, I waffled between my husband’s guilt and innocence. But then, I realized there was nothing I could do about any of it, if Edgar were guilty. What was happening was out of my hands. When my husband lost his job, we began to lose possessions—things that had meant much to us. We lost our home in Los Angeles. Friends. I began to lose opportunities. Scripts stopped coming. Worse, the rejection was a cancer on Edgar’s soul.”

  Tess reached for a throw pillow and held it on her lap. “Go on.”

  A smile lit the old woman’s eyes. “God knew what we needed. This house—” Stella’s gaze swept the room, “was my mother’s. When she died, she left it to me. By then Edgar and I had nothing, so you can imagine how much we appreciated getting it.”

  “You’d lost everything?”

  “We lost possessions. But possessions are only things. We lost nothing of value. We still had each another and eventually mother’s house came to us. We both still believed in God.”

  “Was faith enough when Edgar died?”

  “Nothing is enough when you lose the one you love most in the world—not at f
irst,” Stella said gently. “But without my strong conviction that ours was only a temporary parting, I would have died with Edgar.” Stella’s gaze drifted away and she quietly excused herself to go to her room.

  Tess heard Carter switch off the kitchen radio. She got up to rejoin him.

  “This thing is going to get a whole lot worse before it gets better,” he said grimly.

  15

  “… moving offshore now. Dangerous storm … tuned for updates …”

  Wind shrieked as Stella serenely adjusted Henry more comfortably around her neck. “I’ve never left this house in a storm, and I don’t plan to start now. But if you kids would feel more secure, go. Drive to Kula. I have a friend there who would be willing to let you sit out the storm with her.”

  “I think we all need to move to a public shelter,” Carter said.

  Tess could hear a television commentator’s sober voice repeating evacuation instructions. Stella couldn’t stay here—not alone.

  The old woman shook her head. Tess brushed by her and entered the living room. “What’s that pounding sound?”

  Carter inclined his head, and then proceeded to the front door, calling back to her, “Someone’s here.” Air pressure pushed the door in the moment Carter turned the knob. Rain came in gusting blasts. Stella appeared in the hallway, eyes curious. “Fredrick?” Her smile widened when she spotted the rain-drenched couple huddled together on the porch. Both man and woman were stoop-shouldered with wet gray hair peeking out from beneath yellow rain slickers. “Ben! Esther!” she called out. “Come in! Come in! It’s a wonder you didn’t blow away out there!”

  The elderly couple stepped inside the foyer, greeting Stella warmly. The man extended an arthritic hand as rain made muddy puddles on the marble entryway. Stella made the introductions. “Ben and Esther Grantham, this is Tess Nelson and Carter McConnell, my houseguests.”

  Carter shook the white-haired gentleman’s hand. “Tess was just asking Stella if we shouldn’t move to higher ground.”

  The man’s wizened features creased. “It could be more dangerous getting to shelter now than staying put. Esther and I have been through some pretty rough ones. We’d stay at our own place except we’re so close to the shore. The wind took out a big tree in our yard. It crashed into our dining room. We didn’t figure it was a good idea to just let it pummel us.” His gaze roamed the darkened living room. “Looks like you got this place buttoned up tight. Do you mind if we keep you company until the storm blows over?”