She remembered the day when the alligator waddled out of the canal behind their house and snapped up her cocker spaniel puppy. Her father had come running from the house with a baseball bat — and also a pistol — but by the time he reached the shrieking Toni the gator had dragged the puppy into the water. That, after all, was how it killed the dog; it drowned it.
She remembered her mother and father driving her to the rail at the bow of the boat while they landed a lunging, snapping shark on the stern deck. Her father had brained the shark repeatedly with his baseball bat, but even after it was quiet it was still dangerous, they said; and Toni had to cling to the bow in terror that it would come to life and do to her parents what the gator had done to her dog.
She learned to swim before she was three. They had a pool behind the house. Sometimes you had to drive off the big birds before you could use the pool. Her mother bought chicken necks and hand-fed them to herons and pelicans, with the result that the Maxim family had more birds than other people had, which did not endear them to their neighbors. Her father built a chain-link fence around the backyard, so no more gators could come, and Toni's next puppy thrived. She called her Pupp'l, and so the dog remained, even when she was old — Pupp'l.
The next boat was a forty-one-foot offshore twin-diesel fishing cruiser, which they called Maxim's. On Maxim's they could stay at sea an entire weekend. Toni loved that boat. It had a galley and a head, and when she was tired she could nap in her own bunk. The fisherman who hooked a big one would shift into the rotating fighting chair in the cockpit and sometimes fight a fish for more than an hour. That was exciting.
Even Pupp'l went to sea. It was Toni's duty to clean up after her.
Toni was eleven when she caught her first big fish, a four-foot mackerel, and thirteen when she caught her first sailfish. The sailfish was mounted in the den.
Dr. Jean Paul Maxim was a handsome, personable man, a psychiatrist. Toni observed early that a psychiatrist made a lot of money, that Dr. and Mrs. Maxim were well off, even among people who lived along the Fort Lauderdale canals. It was much later before she figured out what a psychiatrist did to make that money. Later she would tell that and add a quip that she still didn't understand it.
Her mother, Blanche Maxim, was a formidable woman with sun-tanned skin and sun-bleached hair, cold pale-blue eyes, and large prominent teeth.
Toni did not go to the public schools. Her parents sent her to a girls' school called Seaview Academy. In her high school years she became an editor of the school newspaper and yearbook, a member of the drama club, and president of Le Cercle Français. She played basketball and tennis.
In at least one way, Antonia was an odd girl at Seaview. Her parents remained married. She was one of few girls who had both parents at home. Then that oddity evaporated. She had heard the arguments around the house. But she was surprised when, at fourteen, she found herself being interviewed by a kindly blue-haired woman with great thick eyeglasses, who asked her whether she wanted to live with her mother or her father.
What Toni wanted — Later, when she thought of it from a more mature perspective, she recalled a child's brutal cynicism. What she wanted was to continue to sleep in her own room, with Pupp'l, to swim in her own pool, and to go cruising on Maxim's. That meant living with her father, and that is what she chose.
She had no sense of guilt about her choice; and later, when she might have thought that way, she understood that in fact her mother had been relieved. Blanche had had a ten-month affair with a Miami lawyer before Dr. Maxim found out. The lawyer, as Toni would learn in the course of visits with her mother, was contemptuous of psychiatry and offshore fishing. His own tastes, which her mother now proclaimed were her own as well, ran to golf and tennis.
Within a year Dr. Maxim married another tall, tanned, sun-bleached blonde named Morgana, who admired his boat and said she loved his daughter and his daughter's dog. She seemed sincere. She extended herself to become a friend to Antonia, and Toni accepted her. The exchange of mothers, after the initial shock and curiosity, was not painful.
3
When Antonia was fifteen years old, her years of innocence, the simplicity of loving Pupp'l, swimming in a backyard pool, and fishing off Maxim's, going to school at Seaview, and beginning to take an interest in boys, with nothing more troubling to worry about than the mysteries of trigonometry, came to an abrupt end — on December 7, 1941.
She had been interested in the war, of course — enough interested to have thumbtacked a National Geographic map of Europe on her bedroom wall and to push in red and white pins to mark the advances and retreats of armies. But it had all been remote, thousands of miles away. Within a few days of December 7, Maxim's was lifted from the water and trucked to a warehouse, where it would remain for — a term she learned to hate — "the duration." Worse — On a night in January she woke to the sound of a distant rumble and a dull red glow on the eastern horizon. A tanker had been torpedoed by a German U-boat, not twenty miles off the coast, in waters the Maxims had fished twenty weekends a year. It was too easy to say the war had come home. It had come into their very yard.
The beaches were closed. National Guard soldiers patrolled them day and night, stretching barbed wire and building barricades against raids by Nazi commandos. Fort Lauderdale was certain to be bombed or attacked by submarine-home commandos, and the town had to be prepared. Her father was summoned to a hospital, where he trained as a member of a Civil Defense medical emergency team. Her stepmother practiced as an emergency telephone operator at the Civil Defense communications center. When they went to these training exercises, Antonia was left alone in the house — as she would be if a raid happened. What was more, she was left behind heavily curtained windows — blackout curtains — and could not see what was happening outside. She switched off all the lights in the house and climbed through a trapdoor onto the roof, where many nights she sat alert and worried. Twice more she saw ships blow up off the beach.
Everything in life was in suspension for "the duration." She did not resent it. She was a patriotic American. Yet — Yet she realized she was losing an important part of her life. It was a little enough sacrifice, but it was real. For instance, her father had promised her he would buy a new car when she was sixteen and would give her his old Plymouth station wagon. Now he could not buy a new car, or buy enough gasoline to drive this one much.
She was introduced to sex about the same time, that is, when she was a little short of seventeen. Two boys somehow had accumulated enough gas to take two girls out into the Everglades in a big old dark-blue Packard. They parked, and the couples took turns walking along the road and looking at the flowers and wildlife, leaving the back seat of the car to the other couple. Half an hour, each couple promised the other. Toni was intoxicated by the feelings the experienced young man could induce in her, and she went further with him than she had intended.