July 8, 1932
Victory Ralston had always been embarrassed by her name. When the Life magazine reporter had spoken to her this afternoon, she could see him measuring her up, using Victory as the yardstick. It sounded like she should be riding in on a horse while carrying a flaming sword. At school, she used her middle name. Marie. A much better name. A real name, not the concept of winning .
She was glad that Life magazine thing was over. The whole thing made her self-conscious, all the photos they'd had to take out on the lawn. Now she was just trying to read her book, but everyone upstairs was being too loud.
All the Ralston children were well educated and multilingual, more or less fluent in German and French, with passable academic understanding of several other languages. To keep them on their toes, their father regularly had all the books in their library switched out. Sometimes they could read in English, but they might come down to find that only Greek was available. No one liked this except Unity. Unity was the linguist. She sat there now, with eight copies of The Wizard of Oz in front of her. Their father would regularly give her a new copy in a different language, setting her the challenge of trying to learn a bit of it. Along with a dictionary and a few books of grammar, she would use The Wizard of Oz as a baseline text, moving back and forth between various versions, comparing the languages, trying to break the code of how this new one used its symbols to communicate ideas. Today it appeared that she was trying to learn Russian.
"They're drunk again," Victory said to her sister. "Earlier than usual."
Unity nodded in reply, her eyes still on Oz.
"I don't care except I can't read," Victory went on, looking up at the ceiling.
As Unity was not having this problem and did not seem overly interested in her plight, Victory pushed herself out of her chair. She made her way to the tiny room behind the library where her brother Benjamin was at his easel in the process of copying a still life painting.
"They're starting early tonight," he said, delicately adding an edge of silvery blue to a flower petal. "It's like they're trying to get caught."
Benjamin's little studio had originally been a large toy closet. It had been given to him when he became serious about painting, as a storage space for his canvases and supplies. More and more, though, he hid away in here, copying Dutch masters by the light of the single window.
"It's really good," Victory said, standing by his shoulder to admire his work.
"It's all right," Benjamin said, squinting at the brushstroke he had just applied.
"I can barely tell the difference."
"Well, don't tell that to Jan Davidsz de Heem."
"I'll do my best. When did he die?"
"Around 1680," he said.
"Oh, then no promises."
She looked around at the various prints that Benjamin had collected. The Dutch loved to paint mundane objects back in the 1600s. Flowers. Bread. Oysters. Cheese. Rotting vegetables.
"Why do you think they were so interested in painting these sorts of things?" she asked.
"Because they could—technical mastery. But they were also statements. Ars longa, vita brevis."
Art is long, life is short.
She envied Benjamin's painting; that he had something he could make that took his entire concentration. He was unbothered by the noise upstairs. When he painted, he was gone, off to a place he built stroke by stroke. She could tell he wanted to get back to it, so she drifted up the circular stairs, the ones carved to look like a tree. They opened into the studio that occupied the entirety of the top floor. William was at the piano in the corner of the room, his face flush and slick with sweat. He was playing Debussy, a piece that rattled and thundered through the room, that sounded like ten pianos playing at once. Clara was wearing a deep-maroon bathing suit with a white belt. Her copper-colored hair was heavy with sweat and clinging to her head like a shining helmet. Her bare feet pounded the floor. With every twist and bend she poured everything out of herself while wringing the music dry. It was almost frightening to watch her dance, like she had so much life in her that it was trying to get loose from her body, and she was wrestling it to keep it in.
Or she was drunk. Bit of column A, bit of column B.
Benjamin, William, and Clara all had ways of letting things out—on canvas, on keys, on the floor and in the water. Victory, Edward, and Unity had more academic interests. They had no outlet, no way to sweat it out, to pour it out. So sometimes, like Eddie did now, they poured it in. He was flopped on the floor on the far side of the room, drinking from a bottle full of brown liquid.
When William came to the end of his piece, Clara collapsed onto the floor, her face running with sweat.
"Pass it over, Eddie," she said.
Edward peeled himself from the chair and handed the bottle to Clara, who took a long swig. Clara held the bottle out to Victory, who shook her head.
"You don't know what you're missing," Clara said. "This is good.... What do you think this is? Whiskey?"
"Rotgut," Eddie said. "The finest rotgut."
Alcohol was illegal because of Prohibition—and Phillip Ralston believed the stuff was poison, so even if it became legal to drink, there would be no liquor on Ralston Island. He was naive enough to believe that his staff and family felt the same, and that they would never seek it out. What he didn't realize was that there was no need to go anywhere—the booze came to them.
Where they were, in the middle of the Thousand Islands, was the great booze battleground. Canada was only a mile or so away from the mainland shore, and sometimes only a few yards away on another island or section of the river. Ralston Island was on the US side, but only just barely. All the islands in the St. Lawrence were a middle zone—a place between nations, and in some ways, worlds. Prohibition existed in some parts of the water, but drift another moment or two, and your cocktail was perfectly legal. This was why some islands were known basically as cocktail bars. More important, this was why bootleggers used this stretch of river as one of their main highways to get alcohol into the United States. Half the boats that went by during the day were loaded with it; all the boats at night were.
Some bootleggers took crates of booze out into the water and dropped them overboard, weighted down with bags of salt. As the salt dissolved, the crates rose and small boats would collect them as they bobbed to the surface. Sometimes when being chased, the bootleggers simply threw the stuff overboard. There was probably more booze in the river than fish. Clara simply swam out and grabbed some free-floating bottle, or she'd linger in the water with a silver dollar hidden in her swimsuit and buy one off a passing boat.
When you obtain free-floating alcohol in often unmarked bottles, you never quite know what you're getting. Sometimes it was weak and tasted like water with old nickels in it; other times, you got something like burning honey that warmed you all the way down and helped you melt into the sound of the lapping water. It was usually the first one.
"Go on, Vic," Eddie went on. "It'll put hair on your balls."
Clara cackled at that. Victory shrugged. Eddie always said stuff like that to try to be shocking, but Victory took a practical view of the human body and was not fazed.
"If I had testes," she said, "I think it might have the opposite effect, as alcohol is a depressant. There's interesting research going on in Chicago right now on bovine testicles from the stockyards. Father was telling me about it."
"She's raised you cow balls," Clara said. "Your move, Eddie."
"I'm going to go and piss off the roof," he replied.
He clambered out the window. William took this as a sign to leave the piano and the room. Victory and Clara remained behind, Clara flat on the ground, her chest heaving as she recovered her breath and took another swig.
"You can't drink all summer," Victory said.
"Can't I?"
"Come on..."
Clara rolled onto her stomach and turned herself to face her sister.
"Come on, what? What else is there to do? I should be in dancing school, in New York. Instead, I'm here, dancing around the room. Doing the same thing, every goddamn day. No visitors. So yes, Victory, I am going to drink all summer, and if you had any sense, you would too."
She punctuated this with a long swig and a grimace.
"Looks tasty," Victory said. "Seems fun."
"So go sit with Unity and talk about the health benefits of yogurt and the importance of good breeding. She loves that stuff."
"She's trying. We're all trying. It's nice here."
This budding argument was interrupted by a loud rustling noise from outside, following by a heavy thud.
"There goes Eddie," Clara said. "That one sounded solid."
At a certain point in the night, Eddie would piss off the roof, then climb down the trellis on the side of the playhouse. He usually made it, but sometimes didn't. He hadn't broken a bone yet, but the summer was young. As the caretaker, the one interested in medicine, Victory was generally the person who picked up the fallen.
"I'm just saying," she said as she got up, "there's no point in getting drunk every night. It's not good for you."
"And I'm saying," Clara replied, "that something about this place has to give. We're not here because this is good for us. We're here to be controlled."
In later years, the few she had, Victory Ralston would think back on these words of Clara's. At the time, she put the remarks down to Clara's elevated sense of drama—her big emotions, wild swims, feverish dancing. But they had not been idle remarks. They were the key to everything, and she had missed their meaning.
Victory would never forgive herself for this oversight, right up until the moment, some ten years later, when the bomb fell from the London sky and made her a part of it.