Enchanted Islands (17 page)

We drove past the first tee and down a hill. There was a chain stretched across the road here, and two guards with pistols in their holsters. They waved Ainslie through, unhooking the chain so we could pass.

On what used to be the third fairway (I knew because the sign announcing it as a par five was still visible) there were a series of prefabricated huts. “Here's ours.” Ainslie pulled up to one that was indistinguishable from its neighbor. He got my bags out of the car while I went inside.

It was small but serviceable, a kitchenette, a two-person table, and a sofa, with a bathroom to the left and a bedroom to the right. True to his nature, Ainslie hadn't decorated, except, I noticed, for a portrait of me on the nightstand table, which touched me.

“Home sweet home,” Ainslie said behind me, and I shuddered with the chill of what we'd jumped into. It hadn't seemed real when we were in San Francisco, but now I saw that I had joined my lot to this man I barely knew.

Ainslie looked at his watch. “Perfect timing,” he said. “We can make the first seating for dinner.”

That night Ainslie announced, “I don't want to wake you with my snoring. I'll sleep on the sofa.”

I wanted, indeed, I expected us to continue to occupy one bed, even though we weren't together in that sense, and his announcing that he was going to sleep on the couch stung. I told myself that he was under stress, that now that we were with people who understood the circumstances under which we got married he didn't have to pretend. Ainslie was fond of me, found me amusing, but wanted to make it clear that while we were married, we were not man and wife.

My basic-intelligence instructor was named Mr. Fox. This was not his real name. He could have told us his name; we were not actually undercover at this point, but he wanted us to get used to answering to names not our own, if need be. We changed our names weekly. I chose Beatrice Dante for my first week. No one noticed the reference.

My other classmates were young recruits. Two of the women worked as secretaries like me and there was another woman whose qualifications seemed to consist merely of her beauty. I don't love meeting new people, so avoiding intimacies with them was not a hardship. But I could see how some of the more extroverted participants were surprised to come up against a wall of loneliness.

That first week, we went over basic intelligence training. Most of it was common sense, but there were several matters of standard tradecraft that intelligence officers had to follow, most of which involved the amount and methods of communication, basic signal encoding, and strategies to get people to trust us. I learned how to recruit an asset—find their weakness (usually a woman or a child) and either exploit it or offer to help it.

I won't deny that some of it was useful and interesting (though I never had much use for disguising my appearance), but the majority was deadly dull and not applicable to my situation. I would presumably never have to shed a tail in a city or create and execute a drop.

The second week we moved on to communications, where I learned Morse code, various military acronyms that I promptly forgot, and basic radio technology. As it turned out, I was completely useless with all things electronic. I could never diagnose or repair a radio, no matter how often I was shown its basic circuitry. I just fundamentally didn't understand how electricity could transport sound. I also had to be shown how to turn on and operate each new radio I encountered, the logic of the knobs and buttons opaque to me. But once I was familiar with them, I was very quick at sending the Morse code messages. “Well done, Miss Austen,” Mr. Wolf said at the end of the second week.

“Do they have any idea you're taking your code names from literature?” Ainslie asked when I arrived back at our bungalow.

“None,” I said. I set my notebook on our kitchen counter. “You could come in and call yourself Bill Shakespeare and no one would bat an eye. It's like the perfect cover.”

“Was it Shakespeare who said, ‘You'll never go broke underestimating the ignorance of intelligence trainees'?” Ainslie said, lighting one cigarette off the remnant of the other.

Week three was physical training. I, now called Mrs. Shelley, had to laugh. I was fifty-five years old. My fellow participants refused to spar with me (thank goodness). Instead, I learned how to make a knife out of bone, how to target the solar plexus, how to drive the nose into the brain, how to put out eyes, and how to disable a man (take a guess).

Week four was survival training. Here was where Mrs. Alcott really shone, according to Mr. Buck. I learned how to shoot (though not how to aim), how to determine which berries could be eaten, how to make and tie ropes and create shelter. I knew from my time on the farm how to turn a rabbit from a living creature into a meal. I wasn't bad with snares, and I won my colleagues' admiration with my squirrel-skinning abilities. I am uncommonly quick at it. It's funny when you find an aptitude where you don't expect it.

It was the closest thing to a honeymoon Ainslie and I had. On Saturday nights we would go with the other officers and their wives to the Pines, get tight, and dance until midnight. There was always a passable band, and oh, how Ainslie could dance! No matter his partner, he made her look as graceful as Ginger Rogers, his footwork effortless, his carriage erect.

We laughed and laughed, and I fell a little in love with him on those nights. Or in love with the image of him: dashing, popular, carefree. I knew they whispered behind our backs, wondering about the age difference, the personality difference. I tried not to let that bother me.

In the evenings, we played cribbage, or spite and malice, or worked on our cover stories. The trick was to get them close enough to the real thing so as to be able to remember them, to tell stories about childhood. That's what tripped people up. They were unwilling (unable) to recount past exploits, and that made people suspicious of them. I was a farm girl from Nebraska, he a veteran of the western front.

A couple of times, I heard him sneak out the door. I wondered whom he was going to meet—girls from down the road, who sold themselves to officers, or some more permanent girlfriend who had followed us down here. I never found lipstick or cologne on his clothes, but I knew he had to be somewhere at night. I wasn't jealous, or rather not too jealous. He should be allowed to carry on with his former life.

It was at the officers' mess that I ate pork on purpose for the first time. My mother never served it and Mrs. Keane never served it. It wasn't a conscious avoidance on my part and not a religious conviction. It just didn't seem like food, the way you wouldn't eat horse (though people do—French people, I think).

But Ainslie had noticed my eating around the ham at supper, and that night he came into the bedroom where I was studying German grammar.

“Franny-Lou,” he said. I don't know where he got this nickname from, but sometimes he called me endearments. “You have to eat the meat that's on your plate.”

“I don't eat pork,” I said.

“You mean Frances Frank does not eat pork; Frances Conway certainly does.”

My chest opened up wide. “I don't think I can do it,” I said.

He sat on the edge of the bed, leaning on one arm on the other side of my outstretched legs. “Franny, you've signed up to be an actress. Think of yourself as playing a role.”

I opened my mouth to protest.

“It makes no sense, dear, for me to have married you, as…different as we are. We need to be as unassuming as possible, and that means blending in with the crowd. So jettison this preference and embrace your life as Frances Conway.” He kissed my forehead, stood up, and then paused, thinking about saying something.

“There are things we keep to ourselves, Frances, things that are embarrassing or compromising. If people were to find out, they would have leverage over us. We want to avoid being leveraged at all costs. I've found the best way to do that is to not think about what you're giving up. Pretend it was never part of you. It's like a rebirth that way.”

I had the feeling he was convincing himself of something, but before I could say anything else, he left the room.

Ainslie took up pipe smoking at that juncture as well as his cigarettes. I didn't mind it. It actually smelled rather good, and it was comforting to enter an empty room and know that Ainslie had been there not so long ago. He took to it avidly, though, and I worried he would miss the tobacco once we got to the islands. Surely it would be hard to find.

In keeping with our cover story, we were allotted $500 to buy items to take with us. Supposedly Ainslie had been sick with tuberculosis, hence our stay in Carmel and subsequent desire to partake of the salubrious air of the islands to further heal him. I was a schoolteacher, but had left for the term to take care of my husband. Our savings had dwindled, and so, in the spirit of our pioneer forefathers, we decided to pull a Swiss Family Robinson and civilize the jungle.

But what to get for $500? To last a year? We would need everything from pots and pans to roofing materials, pounds of provisions, shovels, axes, a shotgun, cups and plates, silverware, clothing…Plus we had to pay for our passage.

We began to make lists, an activity in which both Ainslie and I liked to engage, and then switched and began to cross out frivolous items. Even so, the lists stretched on and on. We cut tents, camp beds, timber, fencing, but still we had more than our meager budget would manage. Plus we were restricted by weight, and the radio we had to bring was a brick. “Can't the government say you're an heir to the Rockefeller fortune or something?” I asked.

Ainslie laughed. “If only.”

Try as I might, I couldn't make the budget stretch. I took money out of my savings account and bought a few of the things I considered essential: makeup (why?), a mirror, muslin, two different sizes of frying pans, sandals, and a few of the things Ainslie couldn't live without, such as lifeboat matches (for lighting pipes, not fires), a carpenter's square, fishhooks. We needed precisely none of this, as it turned out.

Since we did not know when we would be deployed, we waited in Carmel. “Don't learn too much German,” Ainslie said. “We can't know too much when we get there.”

“Don't worry,” I said. “It's a beast of a language, and even if I do learn it, I can always pretend to understand less than I do.”

“Try Spanish,” he said. “After all, it is a Spanish-speaking country.”

“You could learn it,” I said. “Divide and conquer?”

Ainslie shook his head. “I'm hopeless with languages. Was in France for three years, couldn't even say ‘please.' ”

“Doesn't seem to be a word you're too familiar with in English either,” I teased him.

And then suddenly, we had our orders. We were to ship out in one week from San Francisco, stop at Panama, and end in Guayaquil, where we would have to catch the sometimes-boat (our later name for it) that toured the islands whenever the mood struck its captain.

When Ainslie told me this, though I'd been calmly awaiting the news for weeks, my throat began to close up and my vision narrowed. I fought to breathe.

Ainslie came close. “Put your head between your legs.” He forced me over and held me there, stroking my back until my breathing calmed, though there were still bright spots behind my eyes. “I think I had a heart attack,” I said.

“That was a panic attack,” Ainslie said.

“I thought I was going to die.”

“Just your body's response to stress. Lads had them all the time in the trenches.”

“But I'm not a lad. And I'm not in the trenches.”

“No, it's worse than the trenches, it's the middle of the ocean. If you weren't a bit scared I'd be worried about you.”

“You don't seem nervous,” I said.

Ainslie took his pipe out of his mouth. I could see that the mouthpiece was chewed almost through. “Why do you think I took up this habit?” he asked.

“What if we die?” I whispered.

“Has to happen sometime.”

“What if we die of thirst?”

“Well now”—Ainslie sat back—“that would be unfortunate.”

“And painful,” I said, thinking of parched cows on the farm too dehydrated to low.

“We'll just have to make sure that doesn't happen, Franny-Lou. Come on, trust me, have I let you down yet?”

“We've only been married three months,” I said. And thought: And still haven't consummated it. And now we're going off to a desert island where we'll be the only two people around for miles, in contact with the world only through intermittent radio transmissions. There will be plenty of opportunities to be let down, I thought. Some have already happened.

Only Childress came to see us off from San Francisco harbor. I couldn't tell Rosalie about our departure; we were “catching a ride” on an aircraft carrier, the USS
Erie
, to Panama. Our cabin was right at the waterline; we were lobsters in a tank, waiting to be plucked to serve as dinner.

The three days passed slowly. Ainslie spent most of his time on deck, contemplating the horizon and chewing his pipe. I spent most of my time trying to keep my lunch down.

We were accompanied as far as Panama by a navy captain whose name I don't recall. He and Ainslie discussed the mission, which we faithfully referred to as Pomegranate, over poker every night. They played in the captain's stateroom, so as not to keep me awake. And sometimes they would get so drunk that Ainslie would stay there, returning in the morning with a headache and a scowl, crawling into his bed and sleeping until lunch.

Ainslie and the captain had an easy familiarity about them. They'd both served in France where the captain was a commanding officer on the USS
Fanning
. And so their looks, their small intimacies, the brush of a hand when lighting a cigarette, the clap on the back that lingered just a little too long, were understandable.

You'll wonder how I could have been so blind. But in my defense I say that such a thing as you must now suspect had never occurred to me. Yes, I lived in San Francisco, but my little world of female boardinghouses, schoolteachers, and clandestine military offices did not permit more than a passing knowledge of those men. I imagined them to be as obvious as dwarfs, their differences plastered on their faces and bodies. It did not occur to me that they could be as Ainslie was—robust, manly.

I knew so little about men. If he were overly fond of his fellow officers, well, he'd been through a war, the Great War. It made sense that he should find comfort with those who had similar experiences. Plus we all drank so much then…Now that we were sailing to the ends of the earth, what difference would it make?

We put ashore at Panama and checked into the Metropole. Ainslie disappeared—he had a briefing to attend with an attaché who had served in Rio.

I wandered around Panama City. I paid my five cents to marvel at the genius accomplishment of the best of our engineers—the canal—and took a walk down the Avenida Central. I went to the officers' club for lunch, where I had my last salad for a while, savoring the lettuce and tomatoes. The salad had pieces of bacon in it, and I ate them without a second thought, playing the role of Mrs. Conway effortlessly. Bacon was delicious. Why had I avoided it all these years? As I ate, I looked around. It was a fine day, and the windows were open. You could hear the songs of birds and industry invading the dining room, and men and women sat together, drinking and laughing. In the afternoon, I went shopping, but I was shocked at how high the prices were. In comparison, San Francisco was a bargain!

I thought about how my life had become such a secret. There was no one in whom I could confide—it was a matter of national security. And a matter of privacy, impossible to violate.

When Ainslie came back to the hotel that evening to shave and change, he expressed interest in my day, asking me questions about the canal and my lunch. But he volunteered no information in return. I asked him to take me dancing.

“I would be honored to dance with you,” he said. “We'll have an intimate dinner you and me,
manducemus
.”

“That's Latin,” I said. “Have you been studying Spanish at all?”

“Sí,”
he said, winningly. Then he kissed me on the forehead and closed the bathroom door to keep the steam in.

I got dressed in the only nice dress I'd brought. It was dowdy and passé, more suitable for 1918 than 1938, but no one was looking at an old lady anyway. We took a bicycle taxi to a cabaret Ainslie had heard about. The concierge had reserved us a floor-side table where we could watch the bands and the acts while we ate. I'll always remember that meal. It comes back to me sometimes, especially these days as I choke down the watery paste that passes for food at the Chelonia. I had chateaubriand, and it came in the most beautiful swan-shaped crust, with berries for eyes and braided wings.

Ainslie had a steak. He took big greedy bites. I made my bites daintier as if to make up for it, using my silverware the Continental way as Mrs. Keane had taught me, placing them down after every bite to take small sips of wine. In this way, Ainslie finished long before I did, and sat back with a satisfied grunt to watch the seventeen-piece orchestra. They played the classics: “Begin the Beguine,” “Ain't Misbehavin',” “Heart and Soul.”

And then the most beautiful foreign woman came to the mic. I suppose we were the foreigners, but her skin was a lovely mocha color I'd never seen before. Her hair was pulled back so tightly that I couldn't tell if it was curly or straight, and her dress was cut out everywhere it was seemly (and some places it wasn't). The fabric that was left was shiny as if painted with diamond dust, and the restaurant fell silent as we waited to hear her sing. She exerted a palpable pull on the audience, and as she cleared her throat, a lone fork clanked to a plate.

She sang a rumba, a sultry piece that had everyone hanging on each phrase. I envied her, oh how I envied her! I'd lived a life where no one noticed me. Here was an example of raw femininity, magnetic power over both sexes. The singer demanded attention and received it, just like that.

She had a high breathy voice that hit each note with the exactitude of an Indian's arrow. The music wound around the room. Even those in the far back stopped talking. And she swayed between verses, dancing without moving. When she reached the end of the song, there was wild applause, and she bowed, slightly. I saw that the cutout parts of her dress were covered with a flesh-colored mesh, the skin smooth underneath. The orchestra began again, and she went around the dance floor asking men to dance. The first turned bright red and hid in his napkin. The second was prevented by a very stern wife. Then Ainslie stood up, his napkin folded neatly as though by its own volition.

“You'll be all right, here?”

I nodded. “Go ahead.”

Ainslie glided over to the woman, taking her outstretched hand. I have said that he was a gifted dancer, but tonight, with a worthy partner, he took my breath away. His hair may have been thinning and his waist a bit too tiny, but I could see every woman falling for Ainslie. Together, they danced like they'd been practicing for years, and I could see the delight in the singer's eyes that she'd finally found her equal on the dance floor. He spun her, swung her hips, ending with a dip.

The room applauded noisily. Some of the men whistled, putting their fingers in their mouths to amplify the noise. When Ainslie bowed and made toward our table, the crowd booed. They wanted more. More of the beautiful couple floating above the floor. More of the cinema stars come to life.

I gulped down the last of my wine and slid Ainslie's glass over toward me. I was learning to drink. He liked gin martinis and the taste was acerbic but warming. He caught my eye over an up-tempo waltz and shrugged as if to say: I'm sorry, but what can I do?

I waved him on with my free hand. And I was fine. Because as much as I wanted to be that woman, that dancer who merged so effortlessly with my husband, I knew that eventually he would sit back down at our table. I would never really know him, I saw now, but I would know him more than these people, and his confidence, our shared secret, grew at the bottom of my chest in a way that I could only describe as love.

The next morning we caught the ship for Guayaquil, the capital of the Ecuadorian nation. It was to be the last vestiges of civilization as I knew it, and I waved goodbye to land with real tears in my eyes.

“Cheer up, Mrs. Conway,” Ainslie said. “It's not so bad.”

“At least it's not raining,” I completed the sentence. It was our little refrain, said in sarcasm when things were grim, and often when it was raining as if to console ourselves that things could not get any worse and would therefore have to get better. He put his arm around me and squeezed, briefly.

Though the commercial ship we were on was large and carried freight as well as passengers, the crossing was rocky and I felt green the entire way. Why do they say a crossing is “rocky”? I would have given my left arm for some rocks to cast ashore on, even if the ship were smashed to pieces. I could have at least been on land then, something stable that didn't pitch beneath my feet like dice tumbling across the gaming table.

I was unable to keep anything down, and even Ainslie, solid, iron stomach though he possessed, was a bit puce around the gills. He liked the wind on his face, watching the horizon for signs of land. I, on the other hand, was in the cabin, too weak even to stand, sipping lemon water and eating the occasional cracker for strength. I don't think we exchanged three words.

Finally, on the fourth day at sea, the water calmed, and I felt well enough to at least sit on deck and try to let the sun heal some of my weakness. Ainslie joined me with his book, a copy of
The Swiss Family Robinson
. “Since we're supposedly inspired by it, I should at least read it,” he said. “Plus, it's said to be a book one can read multiple times, so it will come in handy when we've read everything we've brought to the point where we can recite to each other, while juggling, in our sleep.”

A stronger self would have replied, “I can't juggle,” whereas the weak reality of Frances merely smiled.

“Oh poor Franny-Lou,” he said. “You're not much of a mariner, are you?”

And I tipped my head over the chair and retched into the bin I'd brought for that purpose; a more emphatic reply I could not have planned.

The port in Guayaquil was everything one expects from a busy port in a third world country. I was surprised, though, at the quantity of Indians in charge. I had been led to believe that there were few Indians left in the cities. The books I'd read said that they lived up in the hills, or had so intermingled with Europeans that it was difficult to tell which was which. But now I heard the strains of Quechua, which sounds nothing like Spanish, and from captains and
gerentes
alike.

Ainslie supervised the unloading of our boxes of provisions, while I sat up by the road with our steamer trunk and three suitcases. I saw the vagrant dogs one hears about nosing around for food, their taut ribs showing, and a little varmint that may have been a mouse or rat or some sort of chipmunk scurrying across the stones. All around there was bustle, freight being loaded or unloaded, people yelling, greeting each other, hurrying to their next order of business. The ships all looked run-down, purchased third-hand long ago and then handed down again. I scanned the docks for the one boat that traveled to the Galápagos, but the
San Cristóbal
was not in port. Or, rather, I would learn, it
was
in port, but had no immediate plans to travel. We were to stop by every couple of days to see when the mood might strike Capitán Oswaldo to leave. While I waited for Ainslie, I read my guidebook. It recommended the Tivoly Hotel, which had rooms from fifteen sucres. I marked the page.

After several hours, when my stomach was telling me it was finally on land and wanted sustenance to make up for the last few days of privation, Ainslie came up from the docks. He walked wearily, one of the few times I'd seen him with anything less than a completely enthusiastic countenance. I was struck by how little I knew of my husband, how much time we'd spent pretending, even to each other.

He recovered his smile by the time he reached me and set his pipe in his mouth, which always lifted his spirits. He picked up his case and whistled to one of the boys who sat waiting for jobs there. “Ask him to get us a taxi.”

“Where are we going?”