Great Big Beautiful Life(48)
It’s not dissimilar to why I started writing, or why I still do it. Not just the pursuit of some clinical truth, but the need to understand a person, make sense of what’s at their very core, closest to their heart.
To present that, clearly, truthfully, and to preserve it.
Across the water, the sun inches higher. Brilliant gold ripples toward me, bouncing across the choppy surface of the waves.
Then red, orange, white, pink. If the cool, moody tones of morning represent promise and potential, then these are that of hope, of a dream being realized.
The colors, it occurs to me, of the tiny mosaic on the side table in my rented bedroom.
* * *
? ? ?
“I suppose we should back up,” Margaret shouts over her shoulder at me.
She has to shout to be heard over the roar of the airboat as she guides it through the murky reeds behind her property. She’s letting me record today, but transcribing the recording later is going to be a nightmare with all this ambient sound, and I suspect that dousing ourselves in bug repellent before we boarded was also a fool’s errand, because the mosquitoes seem to be taking our precautions as a challenge rather than a deterrent. I’ve slapped four off me within the first ten minutes.
“It might be easier if we stopped for a while,” I shout.
“What?” Margaret shouts, proving my point.
“It might be easier if—” She cuts the propeller, and the sounds of the marsh swell to replace it. Dropping my voice to a more reasonable volume, I say, “Could we just drift for a little bit while we talk?”
“We’ll get eaten alive,” she says.
“Just for a little bit,” I say.
She adjusts her sun hat and sprays some more repellent on her arms.
“Do you take the boat out often?” I ask.
“Fairly often,” she says. “I find some of the best trash here.”
She hefts a net up from the base of the boat. “Bottles, plates, mugs, you name it. It’s my favorite spot to scavenge.”
“What about the beach?” I say. “Do you go there often?”
“We don’t have much of an offseason,” she says. “So occasionally, sure, but mostly I just let Jodi bring me back whatever she finds there.”
“Does she go often?” I ask, more out of personal curiosity than anything.
“Loads,” she says.
I think about my new mosaic, Nicollet, and how much the sunrise over the water reminded me of it. I guess sunrise over a beach is just one more thing Margaret gave up. The question is why.
“So now that we’ve talked about your great-grandfather and your grandfather, I was thinking we could talk about your dad,” I say. “Frederick Ives was born in…” I glance through my notes.
“In 1904,” she supplies, a second before I find the same number in my barely legible handwriting. “And his sister, Francine, was born the next year. And like I told you earlier, my grandfather was initially determined to give his children the freedom and ease that his own strict childhood had lacked. They more or less ran wild as kids, and then Gerald abandoned them for Hollywood when they were teenagers.”
“Right.” It’s going to be tricky to keep all of this straight. The book will need a family tree up front, with dates, for easy reference. “So, Frederick is 1904, Francine is 1905, and then Ruth Allen is born in secret in…” I check my notes. “Nineteen twenty-eight or twenty-nine?”
“I’m not sure which,” Margaret confirms. “They flubbed her birthday by a few months, I’m sure, just to make the lies more convincing.”
“And then they all end up living together. Gerald; his wife, Rosalind; and his sister, Gigi. Gigi’s adopted daughter, Ruth—who’s actually Gerald and Nina’s biological daughter—plus Gerald’s older children, Francine and Frederick, your father, who are…twenty-six and twenty-seven at that point?”
“Sounds about right,” she agrees.
“So before the whole family reunited, what were Francine and Frederick up to in San Francisco?” I ask.
“Still running wild. Their mother spent most of her time invested in various philanthropic efforts—this was during the Great Depression after all—but neither her son nor daughter had much interest in work of any kind, so they’d become known eccentrics, spending their estranged father’s money like it was a contest. Francine was obsessed with showing dogs and horses—at one point, she owned over twenty dogs and fifty horses.”
“Dear lord,” I say. “If I could whistle, I would.”
Margaret chuckles at this. “She had a dozen trainers on retainer but was also constantly firing and replacing them. She also, if my father is to be believed—which is a rather large if—treated them like a stable of lovers. She was constantly ‘falling in love,’ hiring the objects of her eye, then falling out of love and eventually firing them or driving them to quit.”
“Yikes,” I say. “That sounds like…”
“A lawsuit waiting to happen?” She snorts a laugh, then unscrews the cap on the bottle of water at her feet, taking a long glug. The sun is high, and I’ve become drenched through in sweat without noticing it happening.
I open my bottle too and chug, then swipe the sweat from my eyes. “And your father, he was…?”