was belowdecks just at that moment, but he was on the ship!”) Mrs. Lear loved her house, she loved Mare Island, and she was as comfortable with the navy as most people were with their immediate families. When Margaret exclaimed at the row of enormous houses, with their porches and porticoes and assiduously tended gardens, she said, “What do you think the navy is for? It is for cheap labor!” And then she laughed. And it was true. Every time Margaret looked around, it seemed, something was being done for her by a young man—he was washing her windows or cutting her shrubs or mowing her grass or carting away her rubbish.
Mrs. Lear had lived all over the world and served strange things for tea—no cucumber sandwiches for her; rather, oranges, grapefruit, artichokes, oysters, tortillas, cheese made from goat’s milk and sheep’s milk that she had learned to like in Algiers and bought on her weekly trips by ferry to San Francisco. She would eat the egg of any bird, just to see what it tasted like. She enjoyed a certain sauce that was made of hot peppers, the hotter the better, and she had plants full of tiny, pointed, jewel-like red peppers that she showed Margaret but wouldn’t let her touch. When the boys tumbled down the stairs, she laughed. When they ran in the front door and out the back, she laughed. When they rolled around on the grass, punching and fighting one another, she laughed. When they called out to her from the upper windows of the house, turning the heads of passersby, she laughed. There was nothing too strange or too lively for Mrs. Lear, which led Margaret to believe that a life in the navy was far more stimulating and less serious than life in Missouri.
Andrew very much liked the Lear boys, and took them up the hill after supper to look through the telescope at the observatory before they smoked their last cigarettes and went to bed. And the Lear boys were unfazed by Andrew. When Hubert or Martin came over, Andrew would instantly call out, “How many inches is four meters?” and then time the child until he worked it out. Or he would come out of his office into the parlor and say, “All right, boy, my wagon is being pulled by my horse at a walk. I’m taking a hundredweight of pears to Napa. Each pear weighs four ounces. Every hundred yards, I throw a pear out of the wagon. It’s fourteen miles to Napa. How many kilograms of pears do I have when I get there? And how many pears?” He would not let the poor child leave the house until he had done this problem.
He didn’t mind that the Lear boys were allowed to run about, to jump on and off things, to swing on ropes from trees. Or that they walked the railings of the big porch as a matter of course (including up and down the stair railings), improving their balance—a boy with a naval future had to perch like a squirrel and climb like a monkey. They rolled their own firecrackers with newspaper and black powder. They wandered away and came back soaking wet from swimming in the bay, reminding him of swims in the Missouri River with his own brothers. And the Lear boys were never disrespectful. They “ma’am”ed and “sir”ed everyone as a matter of course, snapping upright and not quite saluting. More than once, Margaret was walking down the street and heard a greeting float out over her head—it was Hubert or Dorsett, balanced on the railing of one of the second-story balconies. As soon as the child saw her, he would shout, “Evening, ma’am!” and nod politely, no matter what he was doing. Andrew considered it ideal that the boys loved explosions of all sorts, which they called “ordnance.” And that Theodore lived for the cranes in the shipyard. Marital relations, Margaret came to understand, were meant to reproduce this happy chaos, a return, for Andrew, to the boyhood he remembered, and for her, perhaps, the resurrection of a childhood she had missed.
One day, Mrs. Lear said, “You could have knocked me over with a feather this morning. I was in the nursery, looking at plants, and I heard Mr. Burgle speaking German to someone, who spoke right back to him, easy as you please, and who should I see but Captain Early! Ja and nein and auf den Bergschrund and I