“They have colleges for colored girls.”
“I don’t want to go to college. I never want to leave this place. I wish nothing would ever change,” I say, but the sun is sinking lower. The crabs scuttle toward the tide line to feed. The day is fading.
Isabelle scoffs. “Not me. I’ll see things and learn things and travel around the world.” The scent of freedom is ambrosia in her mouth now. Since Madame Benoit is stricken with illness, there is no one to confine Isabelle. She is free, like the wild ponies on these Outer Banks.
But the ponies won’t swim out to sea when they cannot sight the opposite shore. Isabelle will.
I look over my shoulder toward the bones of the ruined ship in the distance. I think of Isabelle’s dead brothers, those young men who were gone before Isabelle and I were old enough to understand it. I think of what can happen when one sets off into the world, seeking adventure. I yearn for her to remain. “If that ship yonder had stayed in harbor, it wouldn’t be wrecked on the beach, now would it?”
Isabelle dips sideways in her step, her shoulder bumping mine so that I stumble into the tide. “If that ship had stayed in harbor, it couldn’t serve its purpose.”
We say no more about it. Isabelle throws the reins over the horse’s withers and snatches a handful of his mane to swing on board like wild Indians at the picture shows. I swing up behind her, and when we give the horse his head, he canters homeward along the sand, eager for our day’s adventure to end.
I think on Isabelle’s words now, Father, as I sit at my window, watching the moon take the sun’s place overhead. I suppose I thought that you had answered my prayers in bringing me here, but now my mind is filled with ships and bones.
You are not a God of endless harbors. Harbors are for stagnant sails and barnacled wood, but the sea . . . the sea is fresh rain and cleansing breeze and sleek sails. You are a God of winds and tides. Of journeys and storms and navigation by stars and faith.
You send the ships forth to serve their purpose, but you do not send them forth alone, for the sea is yours, as well.
Be close to the sailors, Father. Wherever your tides may lead them.
Your loving daughter,
Iola Anne
CHAPTER 18
I DREAMED OF IOLA’S LIFE, of the things I’d read and the scenes I’d imagined. I’d learned so much about her the night of the storm and in the two days since. I’d barely slept, lying awake after I went to bed each night, then finally rising, tiptoeing from the cottage, and spiriting across the lawn, Iola’s house seeming to wait for me, its peaks and chimneys an angular shadow wrapped in a blanket of moon and stars. The house was a prayer box in itself, the keeping place of a woman’s thoughts and dreams and secrets. Of who she was.
Now, on this third night, my dreams were filled with letters, words on scraps of paper washing up with the tide as I walked along some distant shore. Mist-covered dunes hid prayer boxes of all shapes and sizes —wooden, silver, decorated, brown cardboard, glass. Tangled in strands of salt grass, treasures waited —a rosary, a bit of sea glass, a tiny bottle found nearby the carcass of a shipwreck, a small starfish, a photo of Iola and Isabelle taken standing by a miniature hippopotamus at the 1940 World’s Fair. Along the frame at the bottom, the text read, Billy, the famous pygmy hippo once owned by President Coolidge. The story floated through the mist, a scrap of words. Iola spoke to me as I slept, her voice that of a seventeen-year-old girl slowly discovering the world outside the island and the orphan school, through travels with Isabelle.
. . . and such wonder all around us! There are no words for these many amazing things. I sat with Isabelle in moving chairs at the General Motors pavilion, as we slowly circled Futurama, a tiny vision of what is to come. The world of 1960 will be beautiful, communities carefully arranged for commerce, fine living, and ease of transportation. The tiny buildings in the City of the Future are sleek and white, joined by grand roads that run like ribbons from here to there, their transfer points fanning out in spirals like the leaves on summer clover. Atop the city buildings, landing pads await autogiros and helicopters. I try to imagine such a place as this one, people sailing the air like a sea.
“Look at the roads!” Isabelle gasps. “One day, we’ll climb into an auto and travel all the way to California without stopping.” She squeezes my hand, her eyes wide as we pass by a circular airport where a tiny dirigible waits at a hangar. “Imagine it, Iola! All of us driving autos wherever we wish to go. Even the women. A car for every house!” When Isabelle comes home to the island, she pleads with Old Rupert to let her drive the car. “We won’t need a ferry! We’ll ride a dirigible to the island and be there in the blink of an eye.”
I lean close and whisper, “Even the coloreds, do you think?” In my mind, I hear Maman hiss, Keep them bright eyes down, Miss High-Tone. You might talk like them convent sisters, but you still a colored girl.
“Ssshhh, Iola Anne!” Isabelle’s lashes flash wide. We both know that I’ve been passing on this trip. People see two college girls, Isabelle in her sweater and me alongside. No one is the wiser, but neither Isabelle nor I have spoken of it. Maman sent me along to watch after her, and back home, Maman and Mama Tee and Old Rupert are fretting up a storm that we’ll make it back safe before Monsieur comes to Benoit House. With Madame dead and buried, he has no place else to be.
I fall quiet in my seat as we circle round and round that miniature city of the future. I wonder, Father, in that future city is there a tiny colored girl who no longer keeps her eyes down?
“Stand up straight, Iola Anne,” Isabelle says as we stroll along afterward, past the pavilions of Poland and Czechoslovakia, which have not reopened this year due to the war in Europe. Isabelle looks the other way, hooks her arm in mine, and passes by a woman handing out leaflets about knitting sweaters for the British soldiers. “It’s bad enough we have to hear of it in the papers over and over again,” she complains. “If it weren’t for the war, I could finish my art education in France this last term, but who knows when I’ll ever go anywhere, once Papa comes home. I’ll never learn to drive an auto now.”
“You will. In 1960, everyone will have them,” I say to cheer her. “Just think of all those roads!”
We laugh and go along, playing our game of Let’s Pretend together. We are two college girls, cousins out to the fair. No one notices, but I wonder, Father, are you angry with me? Sister Mary Constantine taught the sins of omission, long ago. I have become an omission.
At a dance for European war relief, a blond-haired soldier boy purchases a paper rose and asks if I might dance with him.
Isabelle whispers in my ear, “Don’t say anything. Just go,” pushing me away, her face as buoyant as her tumble of strawberry curls. “Go dance.”
The soldier boy will leave soon to join the war effort. His parents are French, his grandparents engaged in the struggle against terrible forces. When the first dance is over, he smiles and whispers, “Such a beautiful face.” He asks if he may write to me. I tell him that my mother would never approve of it.
“Then we have tonight to dance,” he says, and my mind swirls and my feet are winged. Never have I lived a moment like this one.
There is no anathema tonight. . . .
I dreamed of Iola dancing with her soldier, their images floating featherlight against the sky, around them a world running headlong from the horse-and-buggy era toward a society of family cars, commercial airlines, and cross-country interstates. Everything was changing, and as Isabelle’s world opened, Iola’s was opening as well. But she was playing a dangerous game. There were laws governing such things.
Guilt followed Iola on the train home the next day, the newly acquired weight growing heavier and heavier as the train steamed south.
I know the wickedness of temptation, its sly and clever ways, the sweet taste of what is forbidden. I think to myself, What would Sister Mary Constantine say?
I know I must never do this thing again.
I know I must not write letters to this soldier boy, pretending to be what I am not. No good could come of it.
But still, I wonder. Could he love me if he knew?
Forgive me, Father. Forgive my weakness. Forgive my wondering.
Bring me to those beautiful shores of home and let me content my feet in the soft sands of all that you have prepared for me. Let me be thankful for all that you have given, neither hungering nor thirsting for what is not my cup.
Your loving daughter,
Iola Anne