Monterey Bay(62)

On her tenth and final morning in Donsol, she rose at the first squawk and went outside to find a telegram nailed to her front door. The telegram was from her father’s secretary and typed out on Manila Hotel stationery. Pursuant to Anders’s death, it read, a probate court in Monterey had recently unearthed the deeds to two properties within the city limits: the house on the hill and a reduction plant on Cannery Row, both of which would remain in jurisdictional limbo until someone came to town to settle matters in person.

She folded the telegram and reimpaled it on the nail. Then she went down to the beach and sat on the sand. It was still mostly dark, the sun not yet risen. The ticket kiosks were still shuttered for the night, unmanned. She went into the water up to her knees and then returned to the hut, lit a cigar, took a puff from it, and stubbed it out on the boards beneath her feet. She poured a cup of lambanog and nursed it as the shoreline began to come to life, and by the time the chatter of the tour guides began, her decision had been made. She packed her things. She wrote a letter to Tino Agnelli. And, after running five miles to the nearest telephone, she reserved a seat on the next DC-4 out of Manila.





23





SHE ARRIVED IN SAN FRANCISCO ON A DAMP, WHITE afternoon, a flask of lambanog tucked into the waistband of her new skirt.

She spent one sleepless night at the hotel across the street from the Sir Francis Drake and then boarded the four o’clock southbound Del Monte Express, the same train that had once taken her and Anders down the coast and back up it again. The parlor car was empty save for herself and the waiter, who kept mostly to himself as the train rattled through the artichoke and lettuce fields. The banquette on which she sat had peeling leather and loose bolts. The velvet draperies across the cloudy windows looked as though they had been both shelter and sustenance to several generations of moths.

“I think you’ll barely recognize it,” the waiter speculated at one point. “Everything’s so different down there since the war.”

She smiled at him but said nothing. She had drained the flask hours ago and had since consumed several beers, not because she wanted to blunt her mind, but because she wanted it loose enough to consider things objectively. She had left the Philippines full of conviction, certain the telegram had provided as close to marching orders as she was likely to get. But now that they were creaking across the Monterey County line, the grayness of Elkhorn Slough and Moss Landing appearing through the windows like something that had been breathed onto the glass, she was met with the delayed realization that she didn’t really know why she had come. The transaction, certainly—a meeting with the Agnelli scion, a signing of papers—but it would be more than that. It had to be. And so the beers kept coming, and by the time they reached Monterey, she was drunk enough to expect to find her father waiting for her on the station platform, ready with words of caution and regret. Instead, she was greeted by a teenage porter who helped her into a hired car before handing her a small, stiff note card with the Agnelli name on the letterhead.

She read the note and put it in her pocket.

“The Hotel Del Monte, please,” she told the driver.

“The what?”

“The big one near the—”

“Oh, that place hasn’t been a hotel in years. It’s a postgraduate school now. For the navy.”

She looked out the window, at the black tumor of the resting train, its doors still open.

“To the neighborhood on the hill, then,” she replied. “The one where the cannery workers used to live.”





At the small white house, she paid the driver twice the customary fare and allowed him to unload her bag.

Then she stood outside for a while before entering, looking at the bougainvillea. The last time she had seen it, the plant had been little more than a skeleton of ash, the victim of a rich woman’s myopic wrath. In the past eight years, however, it had regenerated itself into something twice as lush and expansive as before, and at the sight of its pink flowers, she became wary of something she couldn’t name.

Inside, she found everything much as they had left it. Many of the other houses on the block had been abandoned and looted and given over to nature, but theirs hadn’t. The horsehair sofa was still inappropriate and cumbersome, the dust in its crevices as thick and white as frosting. A sheaf of her father’s papers was still in the wastebin beneath the kitchen table, a sherry bottle was still hidden in the cabinet above the sink. She drank what little was left and then spent the next hour finding things to clean. She tied a handkerchief around her mouth and beat the sofa with a broom. She scrubbed the grout between the bathroom tiles. She polished the door handles. She mopped the linoleum until she could see her own warped reflection in its surface. When the entire house was tidied to her satisfaction, she collapsed onto the sofa, too tired to sleep. But she slept anyway and, for the first time in years, dreamed. She dreamed she was exploring her father’s cannery by flashlight, its beam slipping across the barren walls like a yellow snake. There were no conveyor belts, packing lines, retort baskets, or boilers. No blood or oil or water underfoot, nothing that evoked the bio-efficient, almost intestinal quality of a fish cannery at work. Instead, there was a building as empty as it was cavernous, the floors swept clean.

When she was done looking at the cannery from the inside, she looked at it from the outside. She walked out a door and onto a narrow catwalk above the water that led from the main body of the cannery to the pump house. The ocean was angry, spitting and thrashing, punishing the shore with sets of closely spaced waves. The crescent moon was orange and blurry behind the fog. In its light, she could see Ricketts sitting on the edge of the catwalk, his feet dangling toward the water. She switched off the flashlight and sat down next to him, their legs swinging back and forth in near synchronicity. It felt good at first, but then it didn’t. She considered withdrawing her sketchbook. Her satchel, however, was empty except for her father’s penknife, and she could hear noises behind them, a crowd gathering on the street outside.