Cocoa Beach Read online

  “The way a butcher cares for his pieces of meat.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “It shouldn’t be, but it is. It’s the only way to get along, you see.”

  “I don’t think that’s true.”

  “Because you haven’t been here long enough. Believe me, once you’ve seen enough chaps minus their limbs or their faces or guts, that’s the worst, entrails hanging from a gaping hole in what once was a nobly intact human abdomen . . .”

  He stopped talking. Stopped walking. I stopped, too, and turned my head, pulse racketing. His eyes were stark and gray, his skin was gray. But that was just the light, the feeble light from the lantern I held at my knee.

  “Forgive me,” he said.

  “There’s no need.”

  “It’s the wine, I suppose. One should never obey one’s impulses after drinking a bottle of wine.”

  “You said it was a glass or two.”

  “I might have been modest.”

  How strange. He wouldn’t look away. I wanted to look away, but it seemed rude, didn’t it, turning my eyes somewhere else when he held my gaze so zealously. As if he had something important to say. In fact, I couldn’t move at all, even if I wanted to. Like a nocturnal animal caught in the light from the kitchen door. My knuckles locked around the lantern, my cheeks frozen in shock.

  “You should rest,” I said softly. “You shouldn’t be out like this.”

  “I might say the same of you. Shall we go in together?”

  “Of course.”

  He reached forward and took the lantern from my hand. My fingers gave way without a fight. Shameful, I thought. He lifted his elbow as well, but I ignored that. I ignored all of him, in fact, as we walked silently toward the entrance of the château, through which the great had once streamed, the ancient de Créouvilles in all their glory, shimmering and laughing, and now it was just wounded soldiers, common men, nurses and doctors in bleak clothing. I ignored him because I didn’t know what to say, I didn’t know what to do. When he opened the door for me, I stepped through and sped for the staircase.

  “Miss Fortescue?”

  “Yes?” Breathlessly, without looking down. Hand on the bannister. Under my foot, the stair creaked noisily.

  “My room is in the west wing.”

  “Yes.”

  “So I suppose it’s good night.”

  The word night tended upward, like a question to which I was supposed to know the answer.

  I said, “Yes. Good night.”

  The Kingston Academy girls knew I was different from them. Girls always do. I was too afraid to speak to anyone—too afraid I would say something I shouldn’t—so I sat by myself on that first day and didn’t say a word.

  There was one girl. Amelia. She was the ringleader, the girl everybody listened to. “Let’s play the husband game,” she said when we were outside in the small courtyard after lunch, and everybody wrote something on a piece of paper and put it inside the crown of Amelia’s hat, and when they drew out the pieces of paper and read the words aloud, they were the names of boys, and the name you drew was the name of the man you were going to marry. Henry, John, Theodore, George. The girls all giggled when they read the names, as if they actually believed in it, and I sat there on a wooden bench next to the brick wall of the courtyard—there was a cherry tree growing feebly nearby, I remember that—and I hoped no one would notice me.

  But Amelia did. That was why she was the ringleader; she never missed a thing. She came up to me, and her brown eyes were like keyholes, small and well guarded. “Pick a name, Fortescue,” she said, shaking the hat. “That is your name, isn’t it, Fortescue?”

  I now know she only meant the question rhetorically, but at the time I quaked in panic. Because my surname wasn’t Fortescue, was it? I was really Faninal, unique and infamous. I shook my head at Amelia and said No, thank you.

  Well, Amelia wouldn’t stand for that, not right there in front of the other girls. You couldn’t allow any petty rebellions. The new girl always had to be put in her place.

  “I said, pick a name, Fortescue!” She rattled the hat again, right in my face, and again I refused, and her eyes, which had been keyholes, became tiny slits. “All right. If you’re too scared,” she said, and she picked a piece of paper from the hat and read out the name, and everybody—all the girls—burst into hysterical giggles.

  I sometimes wonder if I should have obeyed Amelia. Would everything have taken a different path? Would I have become like the other girls, and my old Faninal life dissolve harmlessly into my past? Would I have entered into the Kingston universe, the ordinary female universe, in which pretty dresses hung like stars and marriage was the gravity that held everything together?

  Or would I have remained stranded on my bench, while the other girls went to parties, met boys, discovered dark corners, were kissed and fell, unafraid, into love?

  Except for Mrs. DeForest, who had a grand suite in the west wing, the nurses slept in a row of narrow bedrooms, like nuns in a convent. Mary’s door was closed and dark, and Hazel’s. We were all so exhausted after so much excitement.

  And me. Virginia Fortescue. I climbed into bed at last, trembling and aching, incurably awake, my nerves shot through with some kind of foreign stimulant I could not identify.

  She is absolutely essential.

  I stared at the gilded ceiling and thought, over and over, I have certainly not fallen in love; that is impossible.

  Chapter 5

  Dixie Highway, Florida, June 1922

  We’re rushing down the highway in the blue Packard, Evelyn wedged happily between us, suitcases lashed precariously into the rumble seat, and I’m laughing at some joke of Clara’s, laughing and trying to keep the Packard straight on the road, which is soaked and slick from a morning downpour.

  “Miami Beach is just heavenly,” Clara’s saying, “just endless fun. I know all the right people, too. They think I’m a proper aristocrat, and they’ve fallen all over themselves to make my acquaintance. There’s nothing an English accent won’t get you, in American society. I suppose there’s some tremendous meditation there on republicanism and human nature, but I haven’t got the brains for it this morning.”

  “Have you been there often? Miami Beach?”

  “Oh, back and forth, really. Samuel goes to Miami on business, and I won’t be left by myself in dull old Cocoa, not if you paid me. I’ve done enough of that all my life! Being left behind.”

  “What kind of business?”

  “Heaven knows. Banks, I suppose. Or estate agents. Everybody’s buying land in Florida these days, you know. Oh, look! There’s the ocean. Isn’t it dazzling? You couldn’t pay me to return to England, either. For one thing, there aren’t any men left, and you’ve got heaps of strapping young fellows here. To be perfectly honest—you don’t mind if I’m perfectly honest, do you?”

  “I don’t think I could stop you.”

  “Well, as I said, to be perfectly honest, I was rather shocked to discover that you were still married at all. To Simon, I mean. That you hadn’t divorced him and married someone else. Some devastatingly attractive Yankee chap. You can’t have lacked for admirers.”

  The Packard’s wheels slip in the mud, and I use this momentary distraction—righting a motorcar on a treacherous road, a nimble skill I still possess, thank God—to think of a suitable reply. When the Packard’s running straight and smooth once more, I squint briefly at the sun and say, “Not really. I didn’t go out. I was too busy with Evelyn.”

  “But your sister! Surely your sister must have wanted to go out. Didn’t you chaperone her, or something like that? I think I read she had a suitor.”

  “Read where?”

  “Why, in the papers, of course! How do you think we discovered where to find you? Your father’s trial occupied all the headlines. I’m afraid I devoured them shamelessly. You were such a mystery to us, after all.” She pauses and turns to me. “I hope you don’t mind? I couldn’t very well not look. I’m
not that noble.”

  Unlike the sloppy road, the sky is blue and clear, the sun white against the windshield. Not so hot as yesterday, either, though it’s only nine o’clock in the morning. Plenty of time for the heat to build, plenty of time for the tropical air to move in like a well-cooked sponge. For now, though, I’m enjoying the coolness of the breeze on my neck, the tiny goose bumps that raise the hair on my arms. I glance in the rear mirror, almost as if I’m expecting another car behind us, and say, “Then I guess you probably know more than I do. I haven’t looked at a newspaper in five months.”

  “Really? Don’t you want to know what people are saying?”

  “Not at all.”

  “But your father! My goodness! Aren’t you curious to know what becomes of him now?”

  I glance down at my daughter, nestled between my right leg and Clara’s left. Her soft head is already drooping against my ribs, her eyelids heavy and inattentive. The honeysuckle smell of her hair drifts upward into my throat. I turn a few inches to make absolutely sure my sister-in-law can hear my words over the engine.

  “A court of law has just convicted my father of the crime of capital murder, Clara. So you’ll forgive me if I really don’t give a damn what becomes of him now.”

  Two hundred miles and seven hours later, I point the Packard eastward along a narrow causeway, according to Clara’s confident directions. The afternoon sun glitters joyfully on the water around us. To the left, a pair of oval islands slumber in the sunshine, too perfect for nature.

  “Isn’t it clever?” Clara says, standing up on the floorboards, clutching the top of the windshield. The draft whips her bobbed hair about her cheekbones. “Carl’s dredging the bay to make beaches and islands. Just wait until you see the hotel.”

  “Who’s Carl?”

  “Carl Fisher, of course. He’s an absolute genius. He’s the one developing all this.” She makes a sweeping arc of her right hand, taking in everything spreading out before us: the oval islands made of dredged sand, the long strip of palms and mangrove and building plots on the barrier island beyond. “Miami Beach,” Clara says dreamily, and closes her eyes.

  “I don’t see any beaches.”

  “Those are on the other side, facing the ocean. The hotel’s right over there, along the bay, so you can watch the speedboat regattas right from your window. Or moor your yacht out front!” She laughs.

  “If you’ve got a yacht, of course.”

  “Even better if it’s someone else’s yacht, though. That way you haven’t got to take care of it, or remember to pay your staff.”

  “Crew.”

  “Yes, of course. Crew!” She laughs again and sits down, pulling Evelyn onto her lap. “You’re going to love Miami Beach, darling girl. We’ll take you to the casino first thing tomorrow.”

  “The casino?”

  “Oh, it’s not that kind of casino. At least, not by daylight. It’s a bathing casino. Lovely beach right on the ocean. Swimming pools. It’s heavenly. If I were going to build a mansion, I’d build it right here in Miami Beach. On the ocean side, I think, so I can watch the waves arrive from across the world.”

  I don’t know if I agree with her. In the first place, I wouldn’t want to live in a mansion—too much grandeur, too much trouble—and in the second place, the ocean’s such an unreliable neighbor, isn’t it? Noisy, wet, tempestuous. Apt to spit up storms and unwanted visitors on your doorstep, without warning.

  But my eyes and my shoulders are drained by the long drive in the sun, and I don’t possess the strength to argue, or really to speak at all. I grip the Packard’s large steering wheel between my hands—the white cotton gloves gone gray with dust—and concentrate what force remains on the slim, straight causeway before me, until our wheels roll onto dry land once more, and Clara points me left, up a wide and unhurried avenue, toward the Flamingo Hotel.

  An elephant browses the lawn outside the hotel entrance.

  “Look, there’s Rosie!” Clara exclaims. She hoists Evelyn onto her lap—much hoisting has been done this day—and points one graceful finger toward the beast, while I attempt, between astonished gapes, to keep the Packard in a straight line for the hotel entrance. If I’m not mistaken, a pair of golf bags hangs on a yoke from Rosie’s shoulders. Evelyn squeals and throws herself against Clara’s restraining hands.

  “Why on earth do they keep an elephant?” I ask.

  “For fun, darling! My goodness. Haven’t you ever heard of fun? There are two of them, actually. Elephants, I mean. Carl and Rosie. They do children’s birthday parties and caddy for the golfers and that sort of thing. Better than being cooped up in a zoo or a circus, I should think.”

  Evelyn wants to stop the car and say hello to Rosie. I tell her we’ll meet the elephant later. My daughter’s face is brown from the sun, and she’s full of spirit after being cooped—in the manner of an elephant in a zoo, I suppose—inside the narrow front seat of a Packard roadster all day. Our several stops at fruit stands and service stations seem only to have fueled her excitement. She exclaims at the palms lining the drive, the red-suited bellboys scrambling to meet us, and as I steer the car to the curb at the grand portico entrance, I think, Maybe this trip has been good for her. Maybe Florida is good for her.

  Maybe little girls should have a chance to see the world a bit, while they’re still young enough to see it in wonder.

  “Now then,” Clara says, when the last of the room service dinner is cleared away and Evelyn’s bathed and put to bed. “Where shall we go tonight?”

  “Go?”

  “Yes. Go. Go out, Mrs. Fitzwilliam, because you can’t tell me you’re actually in mourning for my brother, God rest his villainous soul.”

  “No, of course not. But—”

  She wags a finger. “But nothing! Of course, the winter season’s long over, so there’s not nearly so much going on. But the casino will be open, and I know a dashing little place up the coast—”

  “You must be joking. Who’s going to look after Evelyn?”

  “Evelyn?” She looks to the connecting door.

  “Yes. My daughter. We can’t just go running off like that and leave her alone.”

  “But why not? She’s sleeping, isn’t she?” Clara’s delicate face is a picture of puzzlement. Brows all bent, lips all parted.

  “She might wake up, and then what?”

  “Can’t we just—well, lock the door?”

  “If there’s a fire?”

  “Oh, for God’s sake. There won’t be a fire. Even if there is, look at all this marvelous water! They’ll have it out in a flash.”

  I laugh, a little weary, and sink onto the settee. “Clara. I don’t mean to be rude, but I can see you’re not a mother.”

  “Well, if I were, I shouldn’t be so frightfully dull about it as you are. Children need to learn a little independence, don’t they?”

  “She’s not yet three years old.”

  “Well!” Clara sits, too, in a ripple of accordion-like pleats, atop the armchair before the desk. Or rather she perches, right on the edge, like a bird about to take flight, and I think again how unexpectedly young she looks, though she must be in her late thirties. I can’t remember exactly how old. Her skin is so fresh and unlined, her hair so dark, her brows so crisp. She doesn’t wear any cosmetics, except for a bit of lipstick, now smudged, as if she doesn’t know how to blot. Maybe it’s a cream she uses, or maybe it’s a trait she’s inherited from some fortunate ancestor. Maybe it’s her good spirits. I’ve heard good spirits make all the difference.

  “Yes. Well.”

  “What a nuisance. I suppose we’ll have to stay in, then. I don’t suppose your scruples will allow us to roam so far as the hotel restaurant?”

  “No.”

  “The tea garden?”

  “Even worse. It’s outside.”

  “The lobby?”

  “Maybe for a minute or two, to collect messages or leave instructions.”

  “My goodness. How reckless. Well, then.” S
he springs back to her feet and dusts off her hands. Her dress floats around her narrow little figure. “You leave me no choice.”

  “You’re not going out alone, are you?”

  “I might, if I were here by myself. In fact, I rather believe I would.” She pauses. Bites her lower lip. Gazes upon me with remorseful huge eyes. “Oh, rats! Look at you. I can’t lie. Very well. To be perfectly honest, I’ve already done so, on frequent occasion.”

  “Here? In Miami Beach?” I glance out the nearby window at the yacht basin below, where perhaps a dozen golden-lit pleasure craft bob like apples in a barrel. Our suite occupies the seventh floor, at least a hundred and fifty feet from the nearest boat, and still I can hear the trails of mad, giddy laughter, the drunken song rising upward to drift through the crack in the window. “Do you think that’s wise?”

  “Of course it’s not wise. Goodness me, no. But you never have any fun if you’re wise. You never get the chance to live, and why did we go through all the trouble of surviving that awful war and everything else, if we don’t mean to live?”

  How my throat fills with bitter words. I can taste them at the back of my mouth, flavored with experience. Because the opposite of wisdom is folly. Because when you’re foolish, you get hurt. When you abandon your good common sense for the sake of your impulses, you find yourself in trouble.

  But Clara doesn’t wait for me to answer her question. Her face has gone aglow, like the lights strung along the decks of those yachts in the harbor below. As she turns for the door, she continues in her confident, modern voice. “But this time I’m here with you, dearest, and I’d never abandon a sister to an evening of stultifying boredom, just for the sake of my own amusement. No, no. As the saying goes, If Mohammed won’t go to the mountain . . .”

  “What are you doing?”

  Clara pauses before the door, tilting her chin in a martyred pose. “I’m off to collect a mountain for you, my darling. Or at least a bottle of champagne, which is just as difficult in this strange Puritanical teetotal nation of yours.”