The Transformation Read online

  Marion remembered how she had looked forward to the grand ball that marked the Hotel’s opening. She had decided to wear her green costume, which was Jack’s favorite: a sleeveless, crossover bodice of satin, a swishing bustle, and a train that spread and rippled like seaweed. She had waited in her underthings and Jack came to her with his cut-throat razor. Lifting first one arm and then the other, she stood very still—a dancer who has forgotten the next step—and he shaved her. “Now don’t move,” Jack said when he came to the little hollow level with her breast. “Don’t blink. Don’t breathe.”

  As they were crossing the river and approaching the finished building it seemed like a dream to her, this glittering structure rising up before them with its keyhole-shaped windows, its gingerbread latticework, its silver crowns. And everywhere there were women wrapped in silk and velvet and brocade, with aigrettes and stars in their hair, or diamond crescent moons as sharp as those poised on the minarets. Bows and feathers sprouted from their shoulders, and fringes of jet shimmered as they moved, and their trains whispered to each other of wealth and style and rank. The men wore full dress too, and as they led their partners up the steps their swallow-tail coats flicked in the warm breeze like snakes’ tongues. Carriages lined the cobblestone paths, and car upon car of guests arrived in Plant System trains that hissed right up to the Solarium. Many more rail-cars were backed up for miles as the thousands of guests flowed into Tampa. There were fairy candles all along the crushed-shell walkways, and the live oaks and the palmettos, now clipped and shaped, were strung with Chinese lanterns. After an orchestra brought from New York gave a concert in the Music Room, there was dancing in the domed Dining Room. The guests whirled beneath the carved mahogany galleries and the friezes of palms and tropical flowers, their feet picking out the patterns of waltzes, lancers, schottische, and the new Tampa Bay Hotel Galop. Now and then Marion caught sight of Mr. and Mrs. Plant, he with his waxed mustaches and his contented smile, she moving like one of his large and luxurious rail-cars through the throng.

  When Marion grew breathless from dancing, Jack took her outside to where the minarets shone under the moonlight, as bright as the rustling river. He showed her the wine cellar he had made, with its bottles set into the curving walls. “Above ground, you see, because the land is so low,” he said, and Marion agreed that it was indeed innovative. She did not ask whether Tampa flooded often; tonight she had no wish to think of danger. She allowed herself to be led along the shell-strewn paths that glimmered before them like a trail of breadcrumbs, happy to listen to Jack identifying the guava trees, the fruit and palm trees imported from Jamaica and the West Indies, the roses and oleanders, the mangoes, papayas, pineapples, and bamboos.

  All too soon it was time to leave, and Jack was farewelling his colleagues who would be returning to their homes in the north—the plumbers and electricians, the stonemasons, the carvers.

  Over the next few weeks, when she went into the town center, Marion saw the wives of these men buying valises for the trip home, or souvenirs to remind them of their stay in such an odd little place: stuffed birds, snakeskin coin purses, alligator handbags held shut with wizened claws. Many purchased commemorative items from the Hotel itself, and she imagined the tea parties back in Chicago or Seattle or Los Angeles. “If you examine the bowl of your spoon,” they would instruct their guests, “you can see the Hotel built by my husband.”

  Marion decided to buy one or two small things for her family, although they were not the sort of people who gave gifts without good reason. She went to Lafayette Street, where Mr. Stuart sold his Florida Curiosities, and as she was browsing the coral rings and brooches for something for her mother, and regarding a wood-stork positioned just so in its crown-of-thorns nest, she heard a woman saying, “Don’t you have any bigger ones?” The woman was standing back and frowning at a stuffed panther that Mr. Stuart had lifted onto the counter.

  “The Florida ones don’t grow any bigger than this, ma’am,” he said, dusting the cat’s bared teeth with his finger. “There are some others in the window, if you want to take a look.”

  The woman went out to the street and peered in through the glass for a moment, then began pointing to the panther she wanted to inspect. “No,” she said through the window, her mouth exaggerating the shape of the word. “That one, with the longer whiskers—no, to the right, the right, no, that one, to the right.” Mr. Stuart stood behind his window, picking up four different panthers until his hand alighted on the correct one. “Yes!” mouthed the woman, and clapped her hands together, as gleeful as a child at a puppet show.

  Marion could not wait to leave Tampa. “My mother wants us to bring her a box of navel oranges,” she said to Jack that evening. “And look what I bought for her. It’s coral, to ward off the evil eye.” She held the little brooch up to him, and he put his book aside and looked at it and nodded, then gazed at her hands as she began to wrap it in a sheet of tissue. “Put your finger here,” she said, circling the tiny package with ribbon, and Jack pressed down on the knot. When she pulled the ends tight, however, she caught his finger, and they had to start all over again.

  “I’ve been thinking,” he said. “Maybe we shouldn’t be in such a rush to get back to Detroit. There’s little work to be had there.”

  Marion paused and the ribbon loosened again, the gift opening itself. “There’s none here, though, now that the Hotel is finished.”

  “Not for bricklayers, no,” said Jack. “But there are other possibilities.” Some of the men he had worked with were staying on to grow oranges, he said, and they made it sound so promising that he had started to research the subject. He held up his book: Treatise and Hand-Book of Orange Culture in Florida, by the Reverend T. W. Moore. “‘Florida certainly has a bright future before her if her sons are wise enough to labor for that future,’” he read aloud. “‘In her broad acres there is ample room, not only for her natural and adopted sons, but for the hundreds of thousands of their fellow-citizens to whom they extend a hearty invitation to come and occupy with them these generous expanses, this genial climate, and this vast wealth, enough for all, and quite as good as can be found this side of Heaven.’”

  Marion looked at her husband. He was smiling at her, wanting her to be as delighted with his scheme as he was. “You’d better tell me all the details,” she said.

  They would purchase the old grapefruit grove neighboring their property and would clear the land between their house and the water’s edge. Citrus fruits rather than brick and stone would make their fortune: there were acres of wild oranges just waiting to be transplanted into orderly rows. The Indians had spread them right across Florida hundreds of years before, when they had eaten the fruit and dropped the pips, and if Marion saw a cluster of trees she could be certain it had grown from the seeds of a single orange consumed on that spot, so fertile was the soil. And the Port of Tampa was just at the end of the peninsula, not ten miles away. Before the end of winter Jack would graft the sour wild oranges with their sweeter cousins, and within two or three years each acre would yield thousands of fruits, and eventually each of their seven hundred trees would be bearing between one thousand and three thousand oranges, perhaps more. In the meantime, they would earn a little from the older grapefruit trees. There was no end to the possibilities for profit. They could make orange-blossom honey if they bought some hives, and in Europe the extracts from the citrus were as valuable as the fruit itself. No part was wasted: essential oil was distilled from the rinds, the leaves, and the tender shoots, and the most exquisite perfumes were manufactured from the flowers. The orange was a beautiful plant, he said, and could seduce the sternest heart; he had heard of an officer who, during the war, was ordered to destroy all the orange trees in a Florida town, but one grove in particular was so lovely that instead of razing it he picketed his men there.

  Jack was looking at her. Marion thought of the soldiers camped beneath the dark, fragrant leaves, and she imagined them reaching up and plucking the sweet fruit and o
pening it with their swords. She did not wrap the coral brooch for her mother, but kept it for herself.

  Soon citrus groves filled all the land between the house and the river. Jack set them out with his bricklayer’s precision, measuring the grid with his brass set square, calculating the distance between trees as if he were building a house, where the misplacing of a single stone could set the whole structure out of true. Marion even saw him placing his spirit level on the soil and watching for the bubble of air to settle in the middle like a tiny eye. He planted a tree below their bedroom window as a present for her, so she would have something pretty to look at. He had budded it himself, he said, but that was true of every tree in the grove. Marion could not understand why he paid it such special attention, why he examined the blossoms every day once they appeared, comparing one with another, closing his eyes and sniffing the flowers in turn. It made her think of a game she and her sister had played as children: one blindfolded the other, then, wordlessly, presented her companion with a number of familiar substances to be identified—nutmeg, apple, raw potato. It was curious how foreign the most ordinary things could seem, and how wrong one could be.

  “Wait and see” was all Jack would say when asked about the tree.

  And then, when the fruits appeared, Marion had to look twice to convince herself of what she saw: glinting through the leaves, speckling the branches in equal abundance, were both oranges and lemons. And she thought perhaps it would be successful, their sandy grove, for Jack, it appeared, could work miracles.

  She liked to watch him from the house. Through the rows of trees she caught glimpses of him irrigating the dry ground, pruning, checking the humming hives for honey, spraying the fruit with a brass pump that was green with poison. The blades of his plow left patterns between the trunks, great thumbprints on the soil.

  On the day of the 1893 hurricane, when much of Florida was suffering while Tampa remained untouched, her baby arrived. It was born white and cold, and she learned she would have no others, and that was a second death. Over the following weeks she tried not to dwell on it, tried to think of another outlet for her energies, as the doctor advised—many women found charity work very rewarding, he said, and there were plenty of people all over the Southeast without a roof over their heads, their possessions and loved ones lost to the storm. Marion could not feel sorry for those souls, nor even for the nineteen thousand dead. She wished the hurricane had struck Tampa, torn the entire town from its brackish roots. Then her child might have lived; it might have had the air blown into its lungs, the color shaken into its cheeks.

  Jack nursed her with soft rice puddings and mild broths—things she had not known he could make—and he dug a little grave beneath the two-fruit tree so that the child would be close to them at night. Although there was no marker—for there had been no baptism, no name bestowed—Marion noticed that he never walked on that small piece of earth. And she loved him.

  Once, when a moderate frost fell, he and all the other local growers fired their groves, burning logs between the trees throughout the chilly night. The dark trunks and crowns were silhouetted against the flames, and now and then Marion caught sight of Jack’s face, alight with purpose, as proud as Mr. Plant when he had opened his Hotel. Jack looked up to her lit window and waved. There was no reason to fear the drop in temperature; it would make the oranges sweeter. The fragrant smoke rose above the river.

  However, at the end of 1894 a severe frost came, and no amount of firing could stop the fruit from freezing on the trees. The temperature fell to eighteen degrees in Tampa, and Jack’s first real orange crop was rendered useless. Every young grove in the area was ruined, with only the older trees surviving.

  “We still have the grapefruits,” said Jack. “We’ll just start over with the oranges.”

  By the end of a mild and wet January the more mature trees were beginning to grow again, putting out new shoots, and by early February they were showing their first spring flush. The sap was up and the bloom had begun to form, and Jack no longer stood and stared at the empty grove, which now afforded a clear view across the river to the Tampa Bay Hotel.

  Then, in the second week of February 1895, an Arctic blizzard surged into Tampa, whipping the sandy streets into a haze and making the wires wail. The temperature fell fifty-five degrees in less than twenty-four hours, and the rising sap froze in the trees. All through the night Marion and Jack listened to bark splitting open, branches cracking, and in the morning, on top of their bedroom water pitcher, there lay a disk as thick as window glass. All the earth was white, and all the trees were webbed with frost, and when Marion went to the kitchen she found the eggs frozen and burst from their shells as if they were hatching birds of ice.

  Jack was twenty-seven when he died. It was the day after the freeze, and they had worked until nightfall to try to pick the frozen grapefruits. Marion did not have the heart to tell him that it would be impossible to juice them; with so many growers in the same situation, the market was flooded already. When he failed to return to the house for dinner she took a lantern and went to look for him, her feet crunching across the fallen bark as if she were walking on shells. Even the bees were dead in their hives, caught on the cold bricks of honeycomb. The only thing to survive the freeze was the two-tone tree; perhaps, Marion thought, it was sheltered by the closeness of their house. Jack would know.

  She found him in the packing house, slumped over a pile of ruined fruits as if trying to gather them to himself, to throw his arms around the icy globes. The doctor said it was a massive hemorrhage in the brain, but Marion could not help thinking that his blood had simply frozen, expanding until something cracked.

  Some ruined growers abandoned their properties, leaving equipment in their barns and plates on their tables. Marion’s mother urged her to come home to Detroit, but when Marion looked across the stripped grove and saw the Hillsborough flowing past the house and down to the heart-shaped bay, she remembered how she used to swim in it when she first came to Tampa, and how, once, Jack had leaned into the water and caught her ankles in his hands. He held them for a moment until she slipped away again, and that night he told her that her feet were as soft and cool as the belly of a trout. And on the other side of the river, clearer now, was the Hotel. Marion had half-expected it to vanish in the freeze, had imagined Jack’s careful brickwork crumbling, the icy towers shattering and falling. She had never quite believed in it, had always suspected it could be swallowed by the water, the land reverting to swamp and scrubby palmetto and undergrowth. Despite the loss of many of his finest tropical specimens, however, Mr. Plant’s guests still strolled his garden paths and the rickshaws still carried them around the grounds and the pleasure boats still ferried them up and down the river. She heard Jack saying, “We’ll take a parlor suite there. You will walk on carpet fit for royalty, and admire yourself in the Louis the Fourteenth mirror, and sit on the throne chair of Marie Antoinette and on the sofa of Queen Victoria.”

  She would stay, she told her mother.

  Now, in February of 1898, she stood at her window, brushing her hair and occasionally catching the scent of orange blossom. It mingled with the smell of the tobacco rolled in West Tampa and in Ybor City. The Hotel and the cigar factories had transformed the town, and Marion’s house was now very well situated. The land where Jack’s groves had stood had provided her with a handsome sum when she sold it, and a number of fine homes had been built there. After the freeze all growers were offered free seeds from the railroad company, and many had sown crops of potatoes, tomatoes, and celery. Marion had never considered this option. The reason for Henry Plant’s altruism was obvious: he needed fruit and vegetables to freight north so his railroad would make money. Once in a lifetime the great freeze may have been, but Marion would take no more risks. She invested the proceeds from the sale of the land—most shrewdly, her bank manager said as he eyed her fine silk costume and plumed hat—keeping just enough garden for a small vegetable patch, some rosebushes, and the two-fruit t
ree, now fifteen feet tall. It afforded some shade at the hottest times of the day, although the branches sagged with the weight of the fruit in winter, and she had to prop them with boards to prevent them from breaking. She could never use all the oranges and lemons. Some she made into marmalade and some into juice, and some she used in cakes or simply peeled and ate, but most she gave away or left to rot on the ground, the skins turning chalky, sending up little puffs of dust if touched. From her bed the glossy leaves filled the window and rattled when the wind blew, and sometimes she could believe that the groves were still there, their lines converging to triangles when seen from above, arrowheads pointing at the house.

  She had no wish to take another husband. The neighbors greeted her when she passed them on the street or saw them at the store, and for the last three years Miss Harrow, a lady’s companion from New York who had lost her intended to the seminary, had lived with her. One was rarely isolated in Tampa.

  In her hands the silver-backed brush glittered and flashed in the setting sun as if sending a coded message. Fortune Street was still, quiet; even the river was soundless. There were cherubs on the beaten back of the brush, plump babies with clouds of hair, wings like stubby fingers. Now and then Marion paused and ran her hands over their cool little faces, then plucked the pale strands from the bristles and fed them into the mouth of the crystal hair-receiver on her dressing table. When it was full she would smooth them into a single length and add them to the skein she kept wrapped in silk in her top drawer. And when the skein was fat and fine, she would take it to Monsieur Goulet, the wig-maker, and have it woven into a hair-piece indistinguishable from the hair on her head.