Monterey Bay(59)

But then it was opening day and she wasn’t a god anymore. She wasn’t untouchable or vengeful or brave. In fact, she could barely approach the aquarium without panicking, much less go inside of it. So for the first few weeks, she did everything remotely. She attended meetings by phone. She wore out her fax machine. She had someone bring her the daily security tapes so she could watch them at home. She watched the fish and waited for them to give her courage. But, in the end, it was the people who convinced her. The looks on their faces. The fire in their eyes. They all understood exactly what she meant. They had all broken through.

So now what more is there to do? In the years since his death, she hasn’t been shattered, she hasn’t been chaste. He always hated old women, their bad smells and their thin lips, and she does, too. Tonight, however, she will share a bed with someone far better looking than she, far younger, and it’s not on account of her beauty, which existed for only five months: from November 1939 through March 1940. What matters are her accomplishments and the strength of character that enabled them, although sometimes she wonders. She wonders about the women, both old and young. She wonders what her mother would have said. She wonders about Wormy. She imagines the face of her father’s first love. She considers the acts of Giana Agnelli and aches with understanding. She never wanted to join their ranks and still doesn’t. But that doesn’t mean she would object to them joining hers. Follow me down the stairs, she would say. Watch your step. And then they would work side by side to empty the china hutch, place the jars on the garage’s dirt floor, and arrange the specimens however they damn well pleased.





22


    1948




A LEAP YEAR THAT SEEMED, FOR ONCE, TO DESERVE the extra day. An entire nation gripped by a sizzling postwar enthusiasm, endless cocktails and endless car rides, huge vehicles grinding through countrysides that were just now being chopped up into the staging grounds of modern suburbia.

The death of Anders Fiske, therefore, felt poorly timed on many levels. He would have been able, Margot reasoned, to harness this new dynamism in surprising and productive and potentially revolutionary ways. But his life was cut short in Colorado Springs when he choked to death on a bison steak that had been raised on a plot of grassland he had purchased in prescient anticipation of both a booming alternative-meat market and his impending retirement in the mountains; and this was how she found herself at his grave site with only his recently hired secretary for company, the Rockies looming at their backs like guests that had been invited to the funeral but hadn’t particularly wanted to come.

Later that night, the secretary joined her in the mountain cabin in which her father had met his end.

“You’re the boss now,” he said. “If you want to be.”

“I don’t,” she replied.

“So we’ll sell it off?”

“Yes, I think that’s best.”

She let the secretary finish his brandy, then showed him out. She watched the road until he disappeared from it, the door open to the darkness and cold, the landscape’s jagged miraculousness even more jagged and even more miraculous on account of the Milky Way’s prophetic presence overhead. She shivered. For a moment, she wished for her old clothes: the ones she had worn as a child, the sturdy trousers and stiff collars and woolen sweaters that had done such an exemplary job keeping out the elements, or at least camouflaging her physical response to them. But she hadn’t had the luxury of such things for quite some time. As counterintuitive as it seemed, living apart from her father’s supervision had required her to become more fragile—more feminine—not less, as if calling attention to her weaknesses made them harder for strangers to exploit. There was also the fact, jarringly realized, that the imitation of power is not the same as its acquisition. So it had been skirts and blouses for nearly eight years now, even the occasional dress. Clumsily, at first—sleeves too short, waistlines too loose, proportions all askew—but then her freshman-year roommate at Wellesley had doled out a morsel of sartorial charity, and soon she was passing for normal and then some. The way she looked was not only important; it was malleable. It could be as carefully planned and executed as the pictures she had once drawn, and she began to see herself in precisely this context: as a project not unlike the ones her father pursued.

Now he was dead, though, and her perspective was collapsing. She wanted to call out into the night, to summon the secretary back to the house, to ask him to stay awake in the kitchen, shooing away ghosts while she slept. She knew, however, that her shouts would produce only echoes, and the last thing she wanted was to hear her own voice, especially when she knew it would be tinged with the most useless kind of panic. So she closed the door and reentered the cabin. Evolution despised emotion, which explained so much about life and those who lived it successfully. Now, though, it was as if the film were being shown backward, legs devolving into fins, lungs into gills. It wasn’t pain and it wasn’t fresh, but it was as unpleasant as anything she could ever remember feeling, which was why she allowed herself the queasy liberty of finding her father’s tiny, pine-paneled bedroom, of lying down on his bed, of taking a sip from the bottle of brandy the secretary had left unfinished. The view from his coffin, she realized, must look similar to what she was seeing now: wood on the ceiling, wood on the walls, wood all around.

She spent the next day wandering the landscape, acclimating herself to the thin air and the way the tree line seemed hand stitched on the mountainsides. Then she began to work alongside the secretary to liquidate his estate. There was the subdivision and auction of the hemp fields just outside of Steele, North Dakota; the disbandment of WXRP, a radio station that broadcast one-man comedy hours from a lighthouse on the coast of York, Maine; the emancipation of nearly three hundred sled dogs in Cripple, Alaska. When the transactions were complete and the funds had been transferred, she read the telegrams with a cold eye before crumpling them in her fist and tossing them into the pines, wishing the news they contained were meant for someone else.