So in addition to her infantile excitement about his messages, there’s also a reaction far worse: the need to prove she’s received them. In a sense, this was why the aquarium was created in the first place, to make his most famous, most accessible theory flesh. Instead of arranging things the traditional way—by species or taxonomic relativity—she’s arranged things by habitat, by place of residence. Things that live together should go together, he once said. And things that live elsewhere should go elsewhere. She’s even taken it one step further. She’s demanded that, with the exception of special temporary exhibits—the one about the Amazon basin, for instance—everything in the aquarium must be indigenous to Monterey Bay. Every animal, every plant, every alga, every fungus. No cheating, except when she permits it.
And it’s not something she will ever question. It’s not a position from which she will ever back down. The problem, however, is that the bay is getting warmer and the skies are getting bluer, and not in a cyclical, El Niño–type way. No, this is something permanent, which means that species from the south—species that would have previously found Monterey unlivably cold—are moving in. The Humboldt squid and the Mola mola: two animals that were once seasonal visitors but now take up year-round aquatic real estate. Accept it, she tells herself. Accept it and move on. But her artist’s eye won’t quite allow it. If everything is embraced, nothing is said. A crowded canvas is proof of an empty mind. There’s a moment at which even the most purehearted tribute becomes an ode not to the person being honored, but to the person doing the honoring. And I’d be honored in return, she tells him, the aquarium’s ambient sound track egging her on, if you’d quote me on that.
14
1940
“AN ANGEL. SHE LOOKS LIKE AN ANGEL IN THAT dress.”
Mrs. Agnelli’s voice was gentle, off-puttingly so. The laugh, however—the one Margot had heard that day at the house—seemed ready to surface at any moment and break the veneer of her goodwill, like the air-raid sirens that had punctuated their last days in Manila.
“Thank you,” Margot muttered. “It’s new.”
She yanked at the skirt. Yesterday afternoon, in anticipation of churchgoing company, her father had taken her to Holman’s, the local department store. She had expected to be able to find something sturdy and anonymous and reasonable, like what the First Lady wore when she was photographed making speeches or visiting disaster sites. The store, however, offered women’s apparel of only one style: lightweight, lace-trimmed frocks so spectacularly ill suited to both Margot’s tastes and the local climate that even Anders had been amused on account of it.
“Now I know why you always wear that sport coat,” he had said, chuckling.
Margot, however, hadn’t laughed. She had suspected it would happen in time—her chest and hips and stomach resigning themselves to a puffier inevitability—but she hadn’t expected it to happen so fast, and now, looking at Mrs. Agnelli, she could imagine the horrors with which it all might progress.
“Speaking of angelic,” her father redirected, “the Mass was sublime. So many kind tributes to your husband.”
“He is ailing, yes,” Mrs. Agnelli admitted, eyes downcast. “But the prayers of our community will lift him up.”
Anders nodded and appeared to contemplate this in silence. Margot, too, considered the service. In the Philippines, the natives had also practiced Catholicism, but a very specific version of it: riotous and colorful and brutally hierarchical, its practices closer to voodoo sometimes than Christianity. On some of the smaller islands, men fought each other for the honor of being nailed to a cross and paraded through the village streets on Good Friday. Here, however, there was none of that. The bread was not quite flesh, the wine was not quite blood. The same was true of the church’s immediate surroundings. The homes of the boat and cannery owners could have been large and showy, but they weren’t. Instead, they were modest and well maintained: stucco beachheads with red-tiled roofs that looked sturdy and immortal against the white sky. Children played calmly on the porches. Street vendors made their rounds. Big, iron cauldrons bubbled in the backyards atop flaming beds of pine, the intestinal lengths of sardine nets tanning within.
“We had hoped to offer up a blessing for your imminent venture,” Mrs. Agnelli continued. “But I’m afraid it slipped Father Paraino’s mind.”
“No matter,” Anders replied. “I’m not superstitious in the least.”
Mrs. Agnelli’s face flickered with distaste before returning to its previous serenity. She was in her prime today: surrounded by her own kind, proud and at ease, her face absent of perspiration, her breathing unlabored. As for Tino, he looked exactly as sharp and fragile as before, especially in comparison to his brothers. All five were just as burly and bulletproof as he had implied, standing open-mouthed behind their mother in order of descending height like an unpacked set of giant Russian nesting dolls.
“Shall we, then? Our girl has cooked a wonderful roast.”
The brothers turned and began to clomp uphill.
“I’ll be glad to accept your hospitality. Margot, however, will be staying behind. She has business with your son. The small one.”
And there it was again: a shadow of distaste. “In that case, I’d like to speak with her first.”
The brothers froze in place and closed ranks around Tino.
“By all means,” Anders replied.
Mrs. Agnelli reentered the church. With a glance in Anders’s direction, Margot followed. Inside, it was quiet and cool, the walls white and bare. Father Paraino was fiddling with something on the lectern. The candles on the altar had just recently been extinguished, wicks still smoking. She remembered the séance in the lab. The broken circle.
Mrs. Agnelli sat heavily on the nearest edge of the rearmost pew. At the noise, Father Paraino looked up, bowed to her, and scuttled out of sight.
“There’s been some trouble,” Mrs. Agnelli began, her voice even kinder than before, even softer.
“I’m sorry about that.”
“Oh, I don’t want you to be sorry. I just want you to help.”
Margot shifted her weight to one foot and then the other, noticing how the dress swished timidly across her knees in response. In a situation like this, it was important to equalize the balance of power. She should be sitting next to the older woman, side by side as equals. But, on account of the space Mrs. Agnelli had chosen to occupy, this was nearly impossible. To join her on the pew, Margot would have to climb right over her or walk all the way around to the other side of the nave and slide down to meet her, both of which were too awkward to even contemplate. So she remained standing and took a small step forward, which ensured that, when Mrs. Agnelli began to speak again, it would be to Margot’s back and not her face.
Mrs. Agnelli giggled as if in understanding, and then continued.
“At first, you see, I thought your father was to blame, but then I realized it was most likely a shortcoming of my own. The truth is, I’m unaccustomed to the company of men. They’re always out on the boats, often for weeks on end, which means they have a different way of seeing the world than we do. A different way of finding satisfaction.”
A rogue sunbeam shot through the stained glass window above the altar, the effect identical to what it looked like when light shone among the leaves and blossoms of the bougainvillea.
“You have six sons,” Margot countered. “All of whom work with you.”
“Yes, but working with someone and feeling bettered by their company are two different things entirely. I’m sure you understand.”
Margot resisted the impulse to look behind her. Mrs. Agnelli produced a short, crackling cough and then resumed.
“And I might be flattering myself, but I like to think that, when I put my full trust in my real allies—my fellow mothers and daughters, the ones who understand life’s bloodiest battles and how to win them—I can see it all much more clearly. Both the big picture and the small one. Or, as your friend Ed Ricketts might say, both the o
cean and the tide pools on its border.”
From where she was standing, she couldn’t see the sacristy, but she could hear a subdued commotion occurring inside of it: chalices clinking, robes shifting on their hangers, uneaten communion wafers being returned to their tins. There was a strange, unpleasant sort of pressure in the air, as if she were about to enter a tunnel. She turned around.
“What’s your question?”
Mrs. Agnelli broadened her smile, her nose crinkling.
“Oh, I have several. The workers he’s hired, for one thing. Not a single Sicilian—or even a Genoan—on his payroll. He’s taken in all the mongrels instead: the Japanese, the Chinese, the Portuguese, the Filipinos, the Okies, all the people that live even lower on the hill than you do. He’s even allowing them to fully unionize, which is something I’ve been fighting against for years.”
“None of that was in the contract. So it’s fully within his rights.”
“Oh goodness! You are clever! No, the real problem isn’t the people he’s hiring or the bureaucratic mess he’s allowing them to make. It’s what he’s not having them can.”
She looked beyond Mrs. Agnelli at the iron-studded front door, biting the insides of her cheeks to keep from smiling.
“You see, my most valuable property sold at a pittance. There’s an absurd surplus of product on my hands, and the biggest buyer in town refuses to buy.” She rose from the pew, the wood creaking. “And unlike you, I don’t find it particularly funny.”
“He isn’t buying from anyone else. He hasn’t done anything wrong.”
“That depends on who you ask.”
“I’m unclear on what you want me to do.”
The sound of a car sputtering down the street outside, the jovial hollers of someone selling ice cream or peanuts. For a moment, Mrs. Agnelli seemed pinned to the floor. Then, without warning, she was smiling and laughing, pitching forward and pulling Margot into a hug.
“I’d like you to think carefully about your own interests. And then tell me what you decide.”
Margot couldn’t see. She was in the tunnel now, and Mrs. Agnelli’s voice was bouncing against the walls and her smell was, too: warm and thick and lovely. Margot held her breath. She tried to move her body but it wouldn’t listen, so she called on her mind. Run, she told it, before it’s too late. But it was just like that first morning in the tide pools: her limbs dead with panic, the unwanted memories rapidly surfacing. The discovery of the fake paintings in the root cellar. The bestowal of the penknife. The ghost-balloon of her mother’s floating, omniscient head. But also something from much further back, from before she was of use to her father, from before she was of use to anyone. A toy made of tin and held aloft on little wheels, its mouth clattering behind her as she pulled it across terrain that was far too rough for either of them to safely navigate.
When the embrace ended, she took a step back and stared at the floor.
“My interests are the same as my father’s.”
Mrs. Agnelli waited for a second or two, lungs rattling. Then she brushed past her, footsteps weirdly silent. “Let me know when you change your mind.”
When she was gone, Margot sat down on a pew across the aisle from where Mrs. Agnelli had sat. She waited for a new noise, a new smell. She waited for the bare walls to suggest a color or a pattern. When she finally went back outside, everyone was gone except Tino, who was still standing on the church steps, just as she had left him.
“I’ll do more sketches,” she said. “But only if you’re still certain we can sell them.”
He considered this and then nodded. “You’re financing an escape, too.”
“No. The opposite.”
He frowned in confusion.
“I’m pursuing some new business,” she explained. “With Ricketts.”
His eyes brightened. “Well, then you were right before. We should start at three dollars apiece. The Woolworth’s on Alvarado will give you a discount on supplies if you purchase in bulk. I get fifteen percent of net.”
“Three seventy-five apiece. You buy supplies. Your percentage is ten.”
“Fine. But no sea creatures. Just people. Portraits on commission.”
“Come on.” She hurried down the steps. “Let’s get started.”
“Right now?” he replied.
“Yes. Unless you can give me a reason to wait.”
15
“YOUR FATHER HAS STRANGE FRIENDS.”
She decapitated Arthur with her eyes and then turned her attention to the real work in progress. Styela: their bodies like little lumps of alien excrement. Since her first encounter with them, they had grown no more appealing to her aesthetically. In a practical sense, however, they had become indispensable. At first, she had considered other, more expensive species: the dogfish, or the red octopus, or Ricketts’s beloved flatworms. But all these creatures had seemed too rare in a relative sense, too labor-and time-intensive, too vulnerable to unwanted scrutiny. The Styela, by contrast, were plentiful and unremarkable and something the lab was extremely eager to divest: so much so that it was only now, as the tenth order had been placed, that someone was thinking to question it. And that someone was Arthur.
“Not his friends,” she snapped. “His associates.”
“Either way, I don’t understand why they need so many of these things.”
“No one expects you to understand anything.”
“Settle down, children,” Steinbeck drawled in a broad Great Plains accent. “Else you’ll get the whip.”
Ricketts laughed and then leaned close to her.
“It’s wonderful, you know,” he confided. “I never could have flushed out so many buyers on my own.”
She fought back a smile and grabbed a bottle of fixative from the shelf above the sinks. Ever since the orders had started rolling in—orders she had placed in another name using the proceeds from her portraiture—it had been like this: his affection more brilliant than usual and aimed more often than not in her direction. Today it was especially obvious. In a subversion of the lab’s usual hierarchy, she—not Steinbeck—had been chosen to stand next to him at the countertop while Steinbeck and Wormy packed and labeled the boxes that Arthur lugged broodingly from the garage to the curb. The message, therefore, was clear. Money wasn’t everything, but it was something. And now, just as Steinbeck had predicted, allegiances were shifting on account of it.
So there was satisfaction: a surplus of it that rivaled the Styela themselves. But there was another feeling, too—a less jubilant one—that resided several layers lower. As she measured out the chemicals and slew each little tunicate in turn, she probed this feeling and stirred it up a bit so that its contents could swirl and separate and make themselves known. She had struggled and she had prevailed. She had proceeded exactly as Anders would have. Why, then, did it feel less than perfectly earned? Why did she suspect there was a better and more admirable way: one that her intellect was too dull or her character too weak to fully discern?
“Well,” Ricketts announced, “that appears to be the last of them. Arthur, you wait for the shippers. Wormy, you update the accounts. John, you tidy up.”
Steinbeck huffed through his nose and slapped a paste-damp shipping label onto a box. At some point, they would figure out the truth. They would realize that her father’s Styela-hungry colleagues were nonexistent and that the money was actually hers. By that point, however, it would all be settled, she reassured herself as she buried the bad feelings even deeper. She would be a fixture inside the lab. She would be essential to Ricketts’s ambitions, a prize within his heart, and the elaborateness of her ruse would be fodder for the best sorts of stories, the best sorts of songs.
“And Margot. Please come with me.”
In the passenger seat of the Buick, she continued to congratulate herself.
From the very first portrait, she knew Tino had been right. There was a gold mine here, and she was just the one to mine it, which is not to say she had proceeded without caution or fo
rethought. Her drawings, in their unaltered state, would not have appealed; they were too ragged, too raw. So she had blurred the rough edges on purpose, she had improved on nature’s design instead of representing it faithfully: a compromise she expected to sicken her. But it didn’t. It was an opportunity, she reasoned, not a surrender. She was giving something to the masses, and they were giving it back. Her inaugural client, for instance—a new mother with a baby less than two weeks old—was so overcome by the exceptional portrait of her subexceptional child that she wept with pleasure and offered Margot three times the agreed-upon fee. An old, mute crone, thrilled with a depiction of her face that made her appear several decades younger, gave Margot a gilt pocket watch that, according to a flurry of unofficial sign language, had been in her family for over a century. Margot thanked her in a Sicilian subdialect, just as Tino had taught her, and then placed the watch into her satchel alongside the penknife. Later that afternoon, she had Tino take both items to the pawnshop on Munras.
“You’re sure about the knife?” he asked, noting the inscription.
“Yes. I’m sure.”
The next Sunday was the same: up and down the hilltop streets, in and out of small, dark, overdecorated parlors, curtains drawn to conceal the net-tanning cauldrons out back, garages open to reveal the chrome-limned shadows of new cars. One of her clients—all of whom were women, most of whom bore a passing resemblance to Mrs. Agnelli—offered her a sip of anise liqueur, which she smelled but didn’t drink. Another client was so satisfied with Margot’s rendering of the suggestive look on her face that she took off her blouse and asked Margot to continue farther south, to which Margot agreed until she reached the breast region and found her pencil frozen in unexpected horror. On the third Sunday, when she ran out of good paper and her last pencil had worn itself to a nub, Tino was dispatched to the store on Alvarado for supplies, and so it went until the sky dimmed and the families gathered for dinner. Alone on the street now, the two of them returned to the steps of the church and stood there for a moment in silence. It was the time of day Margot had always liked least: dusk, everything too sharp, everything too orange, the day’s accomplishments, no matter how grand, withering under the aspersions cast by the sun’s dying light. Nevertheless, the sense of achievement was electric. All these homes. Not only had she been inside them, she had left something of herself within. She had shaped these dwellings in a way that was more than just transactional, in a way that was apparent only to her. Power and possibility and beauty, and this time it wouldn’t be taken from her.
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