She never worked alongside her father again. In fact, she rarely saw him. As soon as she was physically able, she was packed off to a Catholic boarding school in Marin that was as pointless as it was well landscaped. The same was true of Wellesley, to which she was admitted two years later. For the most part, the college’s academic instruction was a sideshow to the core curriculum in the domestic and social arts. When the monotony became too much, she got permission to enroll in art history courses at a nearby men’s college. There, she gravitated immediately to the study of the Precisionist school: an obscure sect of Western industrialism whose strict lines and robust coloring made her feel as though there were still things in this world to both fear and accomplish.
And then there was the publication of Steinbeck’s book, the one about Cannery Row. She read it in her dorm room one night the way one might watch a bloody roadside scene: fleetingly and through the psychic equivalent of half-closed fingers. Did she recognize Ricketts and his predilections? His musings? His triumphs? His failures? Of course. But in erecting this monument to his friend, Steinbeck had done something unintended. Instead of creating a facsimile, he had created a hybrid. Half Christ and half satyr, in Steinbeck’s own words. To Margot, however, it wasn’t quite so mythic. She saw Ricketts’s head with Steinbeck’s ears attached to it; Ricketts’s shortness transformed into Steinbeck’s height; Ricketts’s vitality reduced to stasis, to an invisible cage that allowed Steinbeck to own him and watch him forever. She wanted to tell someone about it, to announce her discoveries to a like-minded contemporary, but she had no intimates. The girls at school thought she was morbid and odd. And she knew they were right.
Then, mercifully, her formal education was at an end. Upon graduation, she secured an unpaid apprenticeship in document restoration at the Fogg Museum in Cambridge and a room in a boardinghouse on Kirkland Street. The loneliness was so instant and intense that she began roaming the museum after closing time in search of imaginary company, which she eventually found in the form of a chalk drawing by Georges Seurat. It portrayed a nameless, faceless woman hunched over a blank-paged book, an easel in the background like a hangman’s scaffold. Some nights, she would pretend to be this woman. Some nights, she would pretend it was her mother and distribute blame accordingly. Either way, she was always careful to leave the museum in time to make the boardinghouse’s curfew, and when she slept it was without dreams or the half-waking visions that often preceded them, her life as blank and cold on the outside as it was within. Her father, she knew, was still living out west—in Nevada, the territory being claimed by gamblers and showmen—and there were times when the notions of geographic distance and inherited pain seemed to roll themselves up like two sides of the same map. More than once, she considered writing a letter to him that sought to confess the true scope of her childhood agony and the formative fallout of it, to solicit a reply that would acknowledge his own parallel experience. But months and years passed and no such letters were received or sent, and she came to the conclusion that heartbreak, instead of drawing people together as most shared experiences did, forced them even further apart, everyone confined to his or her own private cell of untranslatable despair.
On the evening of March 20, 1948, the night of Toscanini’s all-Wagner television debut, she was informed of her father’s passing. She had gone down to the boardinghouse’s common room to see the concert on-screen. The seventy-year-old landlady clanked in on her crutches at the precise moment in act 3 of Die Walküre in which, had they been watching the actual opera and not a televised special, the curtain would have risen to reveal the mountain peak and Brünnhilde’s sisters, gathered in preparation for the funerary jaunt to Valhalla. And the landlady’s whisper in Margot’s ear sounded like something Wagner himself had scripted: the death of a god, the world rent asunder, a robed chorus howling at the justice of it.
Now, in the hammock beneath the balete tree, she breathed in the wet air and blew at the stars as if they were candles. She had known the memories would be painful, and they were, but not nearly as much as she had expected. If anything, they seemed like remnants of a very bad dream: disconnected, surreal pieces of a larger, subconscious whole. It was illogical, furthermore, to believe in payback, but here it was: the glow of what a spiritual person might have deemed a blessing. So she stayed in Donsol. She visited the whale sharks every afternoon. She learned to adjust her buoyancy so that her belly grazed their rough, speckled backs. The hammock gave way to a thatched hut on risers beneath which lived a rooster who woke her at exactly four A.M. each morning, which she didn’t mind one bit.