Tourmaline Read online

  On the table in front of me I’ve set out the faded deed I found among my father’s papers last month when I was helping my mother get ready for a yard sale. The deed names my father as owner of five hectares of Elban land. I flatten the worn creases with my thumb. Though there are many signatures and a stamp on the last page, the claim is worthless, local officials have already informed me. Why, then, don’t I just turn around and go home?

  The woman I lived with for seven years called two weeks ago to tell me that she is getting married. When I invited her to come to Elba with me, she laughed, her tone one of easy fellowship, as if she’d just chucked me on the shoulder.

  This is my first visit back to the island since the mid-1950s, and though I’ve only been here for three days I’m already looking forward to returning again soon. I consider myself lucky to have the liberty and resources to travel. My brothers agree among themselves that I’m indulging in nostalgia and remind me that there are better ways to spend my money.

  Our father had been to Elba himself during the war and stayed long enough to play football on the beach and swim in the tepid sea. Based on his firsthand experience, he could assure us that the sun always shines on Elba, wildflowers bloom year round, Elbans will give away the jackets off their backs, and pirates know it is a good place to bury stolen treasure.

  Where on earth is Elba? we wanted to know. It is an island not far from the coast of Italy, our father said. Napoleon once reigned in exile there.

  Where is Italy? we asked while we watched our parents pack for the journey. Who is Napoleon? What is exile?

  Forty-three years later, I am like a blind man feeling my way through a house that has appeared repeatedly in my dreams. I recognize everything, though nothing is familiar. Much has changed, of course. When I came here with my family, Elba was still dependent on its mining industry. Now it is an active tourist resort. It is just after the high season, and the island seems tranquil to me, but it is overrun in summer, people say. I have been warned to stay away from the main centers of Portoferraio and Porto Azzurro during July and August. Hotel reservations should be made far in advance, expect traffic jams, don’t bother with the crowded beaches at Bagnaia and Procchio and Marciana Marina, forget about getting into the Villa Demidoff or hiking to the top of Volterraio or riding the Monte Capanne cable car. Better yet, avoid Elba altogether and go to Corsica.

  The soft breeze of the scirocco. The rustle of palm fronds. Piping of a nightingale. Two girls riding bareback on the same brown horse. The granite cap of Monte Capanne shining like snow in the distance. Dust rising behind a jeep as it climbs a cart road to Buraccio and disappears beneath the holm oaks. Mouflons grazing on the grassy slope of Monte Calamita.

  The war might be continuing elsewhere, but it is over on Elba, and the American soldiers are leaving. Mementos are traded. The Americans give the Elbans matchbooks and dollar bills. The Elbans give the Americans quartz crystals and polished hematite. My father comes away with a small chunk of a dusky mineral tinged at the center with blue, identified for him later as tourmaline, which he will carry back to New York and sell to a jeweler for twenty-five dollars, telling himself as he walks away from the shop that he’d just made the best deal of his life.

  The Casparia

  ABOUQUET OF RED BALLOONS BROKE FREE FROM A VENDOR on the pier and fell upward through the haze as the ship’s whistle blew its deafening farewell. Our cat yowled in her cage. From the deck below someone threw a cap into the water. We noticed one old woman dressed in black linen blotting tears with the remnants of a tissue, but the other passengers cheered and waved at the dispersing crowd.

  It was all so splendid that we never stopped to miss what we were leaving behind. We were heading out to sea on a ship so huge it dwarfed the tankers in the harbor. We watched the city’s skyline shrink to nothing. Our father looked more pleased with himself than ever, and we shared with him the sense that we were at the start of an adventure far grander than anything we would have allowed ourselves to imagine.

  While our parents lingered at the rail, we explored the maze of upper decks and corridors. Everywhere we went, there were doors we weren’t supposed to open and pranks easy to devise. We snuck into the kennel and fed a puffed, nervous poodle a handful of the saltines our mother had given us to forestall seasickness. Through straws we’d found in a deserted saloon we blew paper peas at passengers dozing in deck chairs. We let Meena the cat roam free in our cabin, though after Nat pushed her from the upper berth, she took refuge in the shower, where she deposited four neat little turds for the steward to discover when he came to deliver fresh towels.

  We were traveling first class, an extravagance paid for with borrowed money. To our father, luxury was a deserved reward. To our mother, luxury was an awkwardness, and the wealth of her fellow passengers seemed an amusing secret which she could only fail to guess, while surely they would see right through her to the truth of our prohibitive debts. We were living a sham life onboard the Casparia, and Claire told herself that she’d participate in the ruse only because it was temporary.

  From the bow we watched the hull split through colliding waves. From the leeward deck we saw sun pillars shining on the horizon. From the promenade at the stern we watched seagulls soar, dip toward the wake, and then wheel around in what we presumed was defeat and head back toward land. We felt sorry for them. We wished we could have collared the birds and pulled them along on leashes.

  I picture my parents that first evening sitting in oversized chairs in the ship’s grand dining room, Murray veiled by the smoke of his cigarette, Claire holding herself stiffly, elbows pressed against her sides, fingers clutching the edge of the table as the passengers traded introductions. Beside her was a man named Walter Fugle, a retired banker with a round belly curving neatly inside his three-piece suit, a round, bald head, and a round face tipped with a shaggy white goatee. Teresa Fugle, a seventy-year-old woman with hair tinted an odd, rusty red, sat opposite, with Murray on her right. At the end was the fifth passenger at the table, a young engineer from Ohio, whose name Claire would go on to forget.

  My brothers and I had been fed earlier. Thanks to the indulgent Italian stewards, we were free to roam around the dining room in search of fun. Or my brothers roamed while I toddled after, losing them, finding them, and losing them again.

  Claire says she doesn’t remember how the conversation began. Probably with idle chat about the menu followed by an exchange of information concerning work and home. At some point Murray wanted to talk about the glorious island of Elba. “Able was I…” Walter Fugle joked. Murray shot back defensively, “Go ahead and laugh, but I tell you, life there will cost you next to nothing.” Mrs. Fugle asked if Elba was close to Capri. The Fugles had been to Capri. They’d thought it lovely, though inconvenient. But Mrs. Fugle was wondering about the weather for tomorrow. Her husband wanted to talk about storms. Claire recalls that it was the engineer who turned the conversation to the subject of great ships lost at sea.

  Walter Fugle said he’d had a gardener long ago who had been a crew member on the Carpathia, the ship that had made the forced draft run to rescue the Titanic’s survivors. The engineer explained that if the Titanic had hit the iceberg head-on, the bulkheads would have saved it. Mr. Fugle and the engineer moved into a more heated discussion about the disaster, while the others at the table listened. The engineer mentioned the Normandie, which had caught fire and capsized in the Hudson in 1942. Mr. Fugle spoke of seeing the burned-out hull of the Morro Castle off the Jersey coast. Murray, to prove his own knowledge, reminded them that the Lusitania was sunk with just one torpedo.

  The engineer asked if anyone at the table had ever heard of the Eastland. Walter Fugle had a vague memory of it. No one else knew anything about the ship. The engineer offered to tell the story — a story my mother can still recount almost word for word.

  The Eastland was an excursion steamer taking two thousand passengers from Chicago across Lake Michigan — this was in the summer of 1915 —
and she was being loaded at her pier on the Chicago River between LaSalle and Clark Streets when a deckhand noticed she had a list. The passengers were told to move to the other side. The ship resumed an almost even keel, and more passengers were allowed to board. Then a woman screamed and slipped on the tilting deck. That’s when people on land noticed that the ship was listing again, and they watched in horror as the great ship slowly rolled and capsized. Hundreds of people, mostly women and children, lost their lives, the engineer said, adding that a salvage diver went insane after investigating the submerged parts of the steamer.

  The group sat silently as a waiter cleared their plates. Teresa Fugle asked to see the dessert tray before choosing her main course. Walter Fugle suggested a game of rummy after dinner. Claire wondered aloud how many people were onboard the Casparia.

  “Nearly two thousand,” the engineer said.

  “Are there enough lifeboats onboard for two thousand passengers?” Claire asked.

  The engineer said yes indeed there were enough lifeboats on-board, and he reminded Claire that people were more likely to die in their own bedrooms at home than on a ship. “The most dangerous thing you can do…” The engineer paused to sip his water. “The most dangerous thing you can do in your life is to get out of bed in the morning.”

  “All the more reason…” Murray began. But Claire’s attention had shifted. She started to rise from her chair and called to Nat, who had been skipping between the tables and right then slammed into a steward’s elastic belly. The steward stepped back, his full tray wobbled, the china clattered, the crystal chimed. Conversations stopped abruptly as everyone turned to watch. But the steward, an experienced seaman, nimbly steadied the tray and marched into the galley without a word. When the doors swung closed behind him, the room exploded in applause.

  “What happened?” Nat asked, running up to the table. “You’re famous,” Murray said.

  “You’re stupid,” Patrick said.

  “What did I do?”

  “Nothing at all, son,” Walter Fugle said. Nat took a few hop-skips and climbed onto Claire’s lap; but Mama’s lap belonged to me, and I began to cry because Mama was my mama, no one else’s mama, and Nat was a big fat —

  “You have charming boys,” said Mrs. Fugle. Her husband squawked with laughter and Mrs. Fugle tilted her head and smiled at Claire, her expression conveying something close to pity for the poor woman who dared to pose as a first-class passenger.

  Later, Claire imagined meeting Teresa Fugle’s ridicule with a cold stare. At the time she’d been flustered and could do no better than join Walter Fugle in weak laughter, but afterward she wished she’d been icy and dignified. A woman should always have an extra supply of dignity on hand, especially a woman in our mother’s position, lacking as she believed she was in background. She felt as if she’d come to an elegant party dressed in a cheap gingham sun-dress — a charming dress, and she was the mother of charming children.

  In our cabin Nat and I fell asleep before Claire had finished reading us a story. While Harry and Patrick whispered in the top bunk, Claire cleaned her face with cold cream and lazily brushed her hair. She turned out the overhead light and shed her dress — not a gingham dress, not cheap, just an inappropriate light polka-dot rayon that would have been more suitable for a secretary heading off to work. She slid naked between the cool sheets.

  Murray had stayed in the saloon to play cards with the Fugles. One more round, he’d said, though Claire expected he’d play for another hour or two. She wanted to be awake when he returned. Once she was certain all of us were asleep, she turned on her bedside lamp to read. She started the novel her sister had given her that morning — Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun. “Four individuals, in whose fortunes we should be glad to interest the reader…” She read and reread the first page, pondering the images: the swooning marble Gladiator and the Lycian Apollo, women hanging out their wash in the sun, the Alban Mountains, the great sweep of the Colliseum. She let her mind wander and found herself picturing white sheets billowing on a clothesline strung over a street.

  “Side by side with the massiveness of the Roman Past, all matters that we handle or dream of nowadays look evanescent and visionary alike.” Claire read on. She was half asleep when Murray lay down beside her, still fully dressed in his suit, the smell of cigarettes overpowering the lingering fragrance of Claire’s own perfume, signaling to her that he’d been among friends and had enjoyed himself. She liked the smell of his cigarettes. She liked the way his body on top of the bedspread tightened the covers around her. She yawned so he’d know she was still awake. He floated his hand lazily along her shoulder.

  “I wish we didn’t have Teresa Fugle at our table,” she whispered. “I could tell she’d gotten your goat. He, on the other hand —” “He seems decent.”

  “He’s a cheat. Took me for five dollars.”

  “You placed bets?”

  “It was his idea.”

  He stroked her lips and dipped his fingertips into her mouth. She tasted brandy, salt, tobacco. He withdrew his hand, traced the curve of her chin. She tried to forget that Murray had lost at cards. She asked herself how much she was prepared to lose and for a moment felt only a surge of dejection, until she remembered the sum: five dollars. Maybe she didn’t mind if Murray lost a little money at cards now and then. He may not have had much winner’s luck, but he didn’t play often.

  She rolled over and locked her mouth against his and began unbuttoning his shirt. He peeled her free of the sheet, followed with his open hand the rise of her hip, moved in a smooth familiar spiral around her thigh.

  Later that night Patrick was woken by the wind shushing against the thick glass of the porthole. He put on his glasses, which he’d left hanging on the headboard of his bunk, and peered into the night. A creamy brown halo surrounded the moon. The mist had thickened; stars were visible only as occasional glitter behind the haze. And as though in reflection, whitecaps sparked across the water and then disappeared, folded back into the darkness. Patrick says he remembers this like it was yesterday.

  Harry says he remembers playing miniature golf and Ping-Pong. Nat says he remembers our parents tossing him between them in the pool. He remembers his shrieks echoing off the metal roof. Patrick remembers the sink in our cabin overflowing because Harry forgot to turn off the water. Harry insists that it was Nat who left the water running.

  The voyage from New York to Genoa took a week. But somehow we became convinced that while the ship was surging forward, the ocean was flowing backward and we were going nowhere. We didn’t mind. If we’d been offered the choice, we would have stayed on the Casparia forever, and forever looked forward to reaching Elba.

  After breakfast we’d go to the rec room. After lunch we’d go to the pool. After the pool our parents would take us to the nursery, and our father would play cards with the Fugles while our mother claimed a deck chair for herself and read until someone came by and engaged her in conversation.

  Usually it was the engineer from Ohio who would pull up a chair. He was eager to talk, and when he learned that our mother had never before taken an ocean voyage, he was eager to tell her what he knew. It turned out he knew a lot. He explained the tug of the Gulf Stream and the constituents of salt. He explained how bromine could be extracted from the sea and used to make ethyl gasoline. Magnesium hydroxide could be filtered and used directly as milk of magnesia. Uranium could be extracted, and silver, and even gold. According to the engineer, a troy ounce of gold is found in every eight million tons of sea water.

  Whenever the engineer sat down in the chair beside her, our mother would close her book and listen politely, because that’s what she’d have done with anyone. He seemed trustworthy. And he was more interesting than she’d expected him to be. She found herself intrigued by his mix of information and disclosure, and she looked forward to their conversations.

  He said he planned to go first to Florence and spend a week there seeing the sights. Then on to Venice for another wee
k, and then to Turin, where he would serve for three months as a site planner — a field dog, he was called — for an expanding textiles mill. He’d return to the States by December and spend Christmas with his brother’s family in Ashville.

  He mentioned his ex-wife only once, when he spoke about selling his house in Cincinnati the previous spring. He didn’t mention any children, and Claire didn’t ask. He complained about his insomnia and confessed that late at night he’d sneak to the pool and swim alone in the dark. He said that sometimes, leaning against the rail, he’d feel close to overwhelmed by the desire to dive into the sea. He spoke about the responsibilities of his job and the inspirations of travel.

  As the days passed, the afternoon meetings between our mother and the engineer became routine. She would arrive on deck first, and he’d appear within ten minutes. He was pleasant, she thought. Perhaps a bit pedantic. The knowledgeable engineer from Ohio. She listened to him. She looked at him. Each day she looked at him more closely — at the delicate curl of his nostrils, the slight peak of his upper lip, his long lashes, the pinhead pupils in his eyes, the spray of dandruff on his shirt. She noticed that his breath smelled of peppermint, and the thumbnail on his left hand was a bruised purple. She was about to interrupt him — he’d been talking about Darwin, Darwin and pigeons — and ask him what he’d done to his thumb. But just then Mrs. Fugle came up to complain about the breakfast, from the soupy eggs to the cardboard bacon.

  Claire and the engineer murmured in agreement. Mrs. Fugle settled in a chair beside the engineer and tilted her hat to keep the sun out of her face. Claire let her thoughts drift away from the conversation for a few moments. She experienced the kind of peace she associated with waking up from a good dream.

  She decided that she’d misjudged Teresa Fugle. And the engineer from Ohio — was there anything he didn’t know?