The kitchen depressed her.
It was a combination of things. For one, the walls were painted a battleship gray and the plaster ceiling was so smoke-stained that it approached the same color. All that gray made it gloomy, even when the sun shone obliquely through the window over the sink. The propane stove was another problem: it was old and crochety and you couldn’t get it lighted without an effort. It was better than the one in the living room, though, the old wood-burner; that one smoked like crazy when the wind shifted and began baffling around the lighthouse tower and down into the kitchen chimney. They had had to open the first-floor doors and windows to air the place out, which of course robbed the first-floor rooms of most of their heat.
But the kitchen… it was still the worst room. The well water that came out of the taps had a brackish, mineral taste; they’d have to buy bottled water in Hilliard tomorrow. The refrigerator made funny humming, rattling noises, as if it were about to break down-or explode-at any second. As for the pantry, it wasn’t even attached to the kitchen; you had to go down three steps and through a small cloakroom to get to it, which made it inconvenient and not much good for anything except as a storeroom for bulk supplies. But at least it had an outside door, so you didn’t have to trundle the supplies through the kitchen and cloakroom.
And then there was the other well, the abandoned one under the trapdoor in the pantry floor. One of the early keepers, a man named Guthrie, had sunk the well in 1896 on open ground a short distance away from the original building; it was slightly less than twenty feet deep. When the next keeper took over in 1911 he had built the pantry as an addition and cut the trapdoor to give access to his water supply. (Jan knew all about this but had neglected to tell her beforehand.) The well had long since dried up, and once that happened it had been used as a refuse dump for a while. Jan had shone a flashlight down inside it to reveal rocks and scrap metal and God knew what else. Rats, for all she knew. She had a horror of rats.
Well, there wasn’t much she could do about the pantry-except to put up more shelves, maybe, and make sure the trapdoor stayed shut-but the kitchen itself would have to be dealt with. There was no way she was going to live here a full year surrounded by all that dingy gray. Repaint the walls, and either paint or replaster the ceiling, depending on whether or not she could get the smoke grime off. Put some color in, some of the Metropolitan Museum posters she’d brought.
…
She smiled wryly, aware of the fussy domesticity of her plans. Here they were at the beginning of their big adventure, and all she could think about was painting the kitchen.
But was it going to be an adventure? she thought wistfully. At the moment it seemed no more exciting than a child’s vacation at the seashore. Well, perhaps that was appropriate. Often when she thought about herself, she felt as if she were a mere child; felt that nothing real had ever happened to her, nothing that constituted a test of her mettle. Everything in her adult life-after a bit of initial career and romantic disappointment-had been too easy. And she herself had remained untouched by life, growing from a pleasant, smiling child into a pleasant, smiling woman with few problems.
True, Jan had remained in love with her, hadn’t tired of her or outgrown her. But sometimes she wondered just how much good she really was to him. There was a dark, brooding side to his nature that she didn’t really understand and in which she couldn’t share; there were problems he encountered with which she couldn’t help. If she had experienced more, lived more, felt more, wouldn’t she have grown in step with him? Or was she one of those people who were condemned to forever exist in the shadowland between childhood and adulthood?
Weighty questions, Ryerson, she told herself. Too weighty to be thinking about tonight. Fussy domesticity suddenly seemed a better subject, and she began to contemplate the rest of their living quarters.
They were habitable enough. No, she might as well be fair: they were more or less comfortable. Along with the kitchen, cloakroom, and pantry, the ground floor was comprised of the living room and one large bedroom. The bedroom had two good-sized windows facing seaward, and since it offered the most natural light, they had agreed she should use it as her studio. The second floor consisted of a bathroom and two bedrooms-the largest of which they would sleep in, the other use for Jan’s study. Above that, built into a bubble-like niche in the tower, was the lightroom, where the keepers had stored cleaners, polishes, and supplies for servicing the light. There was even a barrel of sand in there, for use in the event of fire.
One drawback was the small hot water heater-only thirty gallons, barely enough for one of Jan’s protracted showers-but that wouldn’t be a problem. She’d taken cold showers for years, had gotten to like them when they’d been living on the back of Beacon Hill in Boston, in a building that lacked heat of any kind, including hot water. But the main drawbacks to the rooms and their arrangement were the drab white walls, their chilliness-small propane heaters were the only source of warmth in the bedrooms-and the enclosed inner stairway that took up part of the living room and led upward to the second floor and then through the tower into the lantern room. But she felt she could live with all of these too. If the dingy white color in the bedrooms and living room became too oppressive, she could always talk Jan into helping her paint them, along with the kitchen.
She finished drying the supper dishes-she and Jan had always taken turns with the domestic chores-and glanced up at the ceiling and thought again that she would have to get out the Ajax and 409 and see how much of that accumulation of grime would come off. But not tonight. She was so tired her legs felt achey. Some preliminary cleaning; Bonner was not much of a housekeeper. Unpacking. Finding places for things, rearranging other things. Making up the four-poster bed; setting out towels. And she had only just scratched the surface. A move like this was no summer vacation lark; it was a transplanting of an entire household, the same sort of upheaval you went through when you made a permanent move.
She thought of their big mock-Tudor house in Palo Alto and wondered when she would see it again. Not until Christmas, at the earliest- if they decided to go home for the holidays. But the house was in good hands: her cousin June was dependable and conscientious-you couldn’t ask for a better house-sitter.
Alix went into the empty living room. Jan had gone upstairs after supper; she wondered what he was doing. Whatever it was, he was being quiet about it. Curiosity took her up to the second floor. In the hallway that skirted the curve of the tower wall, she called his name. But he wasn’t in their bedroom or in his new study; his answer came echoing down from above.
“Up here. In the lantern.”
She went back to the stairs. The hollow of the tower was like a speaking tube: from the lower floors you could hear clearly when someone spoke from the lantern room in a voice not much louder than normal, and the same was true vice versa. Not even the constant muttering of the wind affected the acoustics inside.
The two flights of stairs leading up to the lantern were steep, creaky, and worn to a shine in the center of each riser. Just above the second-floor landing you had to pass through a metal trapdoor, hinged open and fastened that way with a hook; the reason for the trap, Jan had said, was so that men working in the lightroom and the lantern above wouldn’t disturb their family members below. A pair of low-wattage electric bulbs, one on the wall halfway up each flight, did little to dispel the damp gloom. Climbing, she thought it was a good thing neither of them would have to do this every day-Jan especially, with the extra weight he was carrying. She wondered again if she could get him to diet while they were living here. Probably not. Well, maybe she could at least talk him into doing aerobics with her. She had started working out a couple of years ago, after her second miscarriage, and had kept it up because she knew it was good for her, kept her own weight down. And it was better than tennis or racquetball, the big “in” sports back home, neither of which she had ever been any good at. Too uncoordinated: all arms and legs, with an uncanny knack for stumbling over her own feet. Anyhow, lifting a book was the second most strenuous exercise Jan ever indulged in. “I’d prefer to have my heart attack screwing or reading quietly in a chair,” he’d said more than once. A sedentary Viking…
There was a three-foot-square opening in the floor of the lantern room, but no trapdoor there. Dusky light showed above it; it must be about eight, close to dark outside. She climbed through the opening. Yes, almost nightfall. Through the lantern windows she could see that the sun had set and there were hints of violent reds and purples among the clouds massed on the horizon.
Jan was on his hands and knees to one side of the massive light, using a flashlight to do something she couldn’t see. He said, “Be with you in a minute,” in a distracted voice.
She moved closer to the light. It fascinated her-its size, its intricate construction. A First Order Fresnel, Jan had told her, built in Paris in 1872 by the firm founded by Augustin Fresnel some fifty years earlier. A beehive of glass prisms set in brass-more than a dozen bull’s-eyes, around which other triangular prisms were placed-it measured fourteen feet in height and six feet in diameter, and weighed better than three thousand pounds. The hand-polished prisms were capable of taking all the light that struck the inside surfaces of the glass and redirecting the rays into one flat beam that could be seen more than twenty miles at sea. The lenses were rotated by hand-wound clockworks powered by means of a descending weight. It was the clockworks, she saw, that Jan was examining with his flashlight.
The huge lens took up most of the space in the lantern room. The enclosure was decagonally shaped, each of its sides constructed of heavy iron-plate for the bottom two and a half feet, then of window glass some thirty inches by thirty-six inches set in narrow metal sashes topped by six incbes of metal. The metal parts and the floor were painted a dark red color, faded and peeling now in places; the window sashes were a dull white, as was the domed ceiling. On the north side, set into the metal a few inches above the floor, was a door that reminded Alix of an oversized pet-door. This led out onto the catwalk-a railed metal deck three feet wide and built at a slight downward angle, so as to shed rainwater. The thought of having to walk about out there, exposed and unprotected sixty feet above the ground, with that harsh wind pummeling her body, gave Alix a sharp pang of vertigo. She didn’t mind heights when she was enclosed like this, or up in an airplane; but out in the open, where one false step could send you plummeting… no, thank you.
Jan straightened up finally from behind the lens and switched off his flashlight. The twilight had begun to deepen so that shadows obscured part of his face.
She asked him, “Something wrong?”
“Clockworks don’t look good. Bonner could have at least come up here once in a while with cleaners and polishes. It’ll take me weeks to put the lens in working order.” He shook his head in annoyance.
“Aren’t there inspectors?”
“Not for out-of service lights. No one with any expertise has inspected this one in at least three years. It’s a crying shame. I told Channon that, for all the good it did.”
“Channon? Oh, the assistant to the State Parks administrator.”
“Right. He’s also on the Advisory Committee on Historic Preservation, which claims to be satisfied that the light is being maintained and cared for in an acceptable fashion. Channon’s an idealist; he’s convinced there’ll be both state and Federal funding to complete restoration by the end of next year.”
“Don’t you think he’s right?”
“No,” Jan said flatly. “I don’t.”
She wasn’t sure she shared his pessimism. He was such a fanatic on the subject of lighthouses, and such an ardent conservationist, that impatience and anger at the slow-grinding wheels of bureaucracy made him cynical. Other lighthouses along the rugged four-hundred-mile Oregon coast-and along the California and Washington coasts as well-had been restored and turned into historic monuments; some of these were still working lights. There was no reason to believe the same thing wouldn’t eventually happen to the Cape Despair Light, even if the lens itself remained dark. It was a matter of funding, that was all. The National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 had saved it from deterioration and ultimate destruction when it had been abandoned by the Coast Guard in the early sixties, after more than a hundred years of continuous service. (It had been rendered more or less obsolete in the thirties, however, when a powerful radiobeacon was installed at Cape Blanco, not far down the coast-a beacon that could be picked up by ships as far as two hundred and fifty miles out to sea. The Coast Guard, which had inherited it after the U.S. Lighthouse Service was disbanded in 1939, maintained it as a standby station until the cost of manning and operating it became prohibitive.) Once the state of Oregon had assumed control of the light, a grant from the Department of the Interior’s Historic Conservation and Recreation Service, coupled with funding obtained by the State Historic Preservation Officer, had resulted in partial restoration and the appointment of a full-time caretaker. The Federal grant and most of the state funds had been exhausted three years ago, and budget cuts had prevented the acquisition of additional monies. But it was only a temporary setback. Private conservation groups within the state were working to raise funds that, they had been promised, would be matched by another Federal grant and by state allocations. Channon’s prediction that within fifteen months the necessary funds would be available to complete restoration, pave the three-mile access road, establish tourist facilities, and turn the outer reaches of the cape into a state park struck her as likely to come true.
Jan had moved over to one of the west-side windows and was rubbing his eyes-probably because they were strained from the long drive. She hoped he wasn’t having one of his headaches. She stepped up beside him and looked out to where the clouds moved restlessly across the horizon, their underbellies stained the colors of saffron and tarnished gold by the sunset’s afterglow. “Don’t worry, love,” she said, slipping her arm around his waist. “It’ll work out.”
He was silent for a moment, and she sensed a preoccupation in him. Finally he said, “I hope so.”
“Meanwhile, there’s your book. Number-one priority, remember?”
“Our book.”
That pleased her more than anything else he might have said at the moment, and she sensed he was back with her. She hugged herself closer to him. “Your brilliant prose, my stunning illustrations. How can it miss?”
He laughed softly and she felt him relax again. He began to massage the small of her back with his knuckles-a caress that never failed to excite her. “Nice up here this time of night,” he said. “Quite a view.”
“It’s beautiful.”
And it was. The colors were gone now on the horizon; the sky was gray-black where the clouds moved, a deep lavender-black in the clear patches. Far out to sea, the running lights of a small ship glistened in the twilight. Closer in, the offshore rocks, some of them as large as two-story buildings, stood above the dark, heavy sea in ominous silhouette. And down below, some two hundred feet away at the base of the headland, the wind-roiled surf churned against the shoreline rocks and sent up fans and geysers of faintly luminescent spray.
To the south, the cliffs fell away to narrow driftwood-strewn beaches and a ragged line of breakers that stretched far into the distance. The wooded slopes of the Coast Range rose to the east, like great blotches of India ink spilled in irregular patterns down the lower half of the sky. Inland to the northwest, from this height, Hilliard Bay was visible beyond the inner headland; the lights of the village bloomed in the gathering darkness.
“Beautiful,” she said again. Then she said, “Don’t stop. I like that, the way you rub my back.”
“I know.”
“Mmm, yes, that’s nice.”
“Any minute now, you’ll start purring.”
“I’m already purring.”
He turned her body against his and kissed her. He knew how to kiss, soft-mouthed, urgent and gentle at the same time; she had never known any man who kissed better than Jan. The heat that his rubbing had kindled in her grew and spread. She ran her fingernails along the side of his jaw, rotated her hips provocatively, and said, “Mm,” in her throat when she felt his arousal. It had been almost two weeks since they’d last made love, what with all the preparations for the move. Too long. Much too long.
At length he broke off the kiss. “Why don’t we go down and christen our new bed?”
“That’s a fine way to put it,” Alix said, but she took his hand and they moved across to the open trapdoor.
Downstairs, in the living room, the telephone rang.
It had a loud bell and the acoustics of the tower allowed them to hear it plainly. Jan said, “Damn. Your father, I’ll bet. He always did have a fine sense of timing.”
“Could be somebody else.”
“Your father,” he said. “You’d better go answer it.”
“All right. Wait for me in the bedroom.”
“Just don’t be too long. I’m pushing forty, you know; I can’t maintain an erection as long as I used to.”
“Hah,” she said, and kissed him quickly, and hurried down the three flights of stairs to the living room. She was puffing when she picked up the receiver and said hello.
Her father’s voice said, “Alix? That you?”
“Yes, Dad, it’s me.”
“You okay? You sound out of breath.”
“I’m fine. We were up in the lantern.”
“The what?”
“The lantern. Top of the tower where the light is.”
“What were you doing up there?”
“Jan was checking the lens.”
Matthew Kingsley chuckled. He considered Jan’s enthusiasm for lighthouses-as well as his scholarly vocation-whimsical, on a par with becoming a poet or running off to join a traveling circus. In Matthew’s world, real men didn’t teach-they worked with their hands, built, accomplished tangible tasks. He himself had been a twenty-year career man in the Navy, had flown missions in the Korean War, and then had gone on to make a name-and a small fortune-in the aerospace industry. Now he was a successful politician: congressman from California’s influential Eleventh District for the past eight years, and a strong contender for the next gubernatorial nomination. Matthew seemed genuinely puzzled by his son-in-law’s passion for the classroom and books; but at the same time he was fond of Jan, so what few criticisms he voiced took the form of mild and good-natured kidding.
“Well,” he was saying, “just as long as you kids are having a good time.”
“Is that why you called-to see if we’re having fun?”
“Just wanted to make sure you’d arrived safely and are on your way to getting settled. I have a personal interest in this venture, you know.”
There was a note of pride in her father’s voice; he’d been remarkably successful in the complicated matter of getting them permission from the Oregon State Parks Department to live in the Cape Despair Light for a year. And he was genuinely pleased to have been of help; Matthew liked using his influence to help others (although he seldom used it in his own behalf).
He’d have been hurt if he knew her gratitude was mixed, that she feared his help in the matter had been obtained at some cost to her marriage. Years before, when Jan had learned-after the fact-that his father-in-law had been directly responsible for his appointment to the Stanford faculty, he’d been angry and resentful. And once that storm was over, they’d mutually decided they would never again allow Matthew to use his influence on their behalf.
Why, then, had Jan broken their vow and gone to her father behind her back to ask for this enormous favor? At first she’d thought it had to do with her own plans to enter into partnership in a Los Angeles graphic arts firm next year. Although she would be establishing the Northern California branch of the company, the work would entail a lot of traveling to L.A. She’d asked him if that was his reason, and he’d said of course it was: “You won’t have time for lighthouses after you become a big executive.” But he’d said it so readily that she wondered then if it wasn’t just a convenient excuse, if there was some other explanation for the puzzling urgency of his request to her father. When she’d tried to question Jan further, he’d become closed off and unreachable, unable or unwilling to talk to her about it.
Her father was saying something. She said, “I’m sorry. Dad, what was that?”
“I said, everything is all right, isn’t it?”
She hastened to reassure him it was, gave him a brief description of the lighthouse, and promised to call him and her mother when they were more settled. After the conversation ended, she sat on the lumpy, overstuffed couch that, along with two equally lumpy chairs and a couple of end tables, comprised the living room furniture. It was dark beyond the small windows; she peered out at the night, thinking about her family and her home, about Jan’s drop-everything need to start writing his history of lighthouses that had brought them so many miles from all that was familiar.
But she didn’t sit there for long; there was nothing to be gained by brooding. Besides, Jan was waiting upstairs. And tonight he was all she really needed.