The Drowning House (14 page)

I heard footsteps upstairs. I took the folder with me and walked outside to where the station wagon was parked down the street.

There was no sidewalk in the sense that most people understand it. Smooth concrete might extend for thirty feet, only to erupt suddenly where old, broken slabs thrust upward like the prows of sinking ships, the spaces between them lively with weeds. There were stretches of homemade pebble aggregate pocked with bits of colored glass. There were places where the sidewalk disappeared, where you made your way through moss and dirt on stepping-stones. It was only after I had lived in other places that I understood how eccentric this mixture of surfaces was and how expressive of the Island’s intractability.

Few tourists were out. Mostly I saw people going to work at the same kinds of jobs that exist everywhere. The women had their hair under control—pulled up or back and secured against the wind. The men wore real shoes and carried briefcases.

I thought then of my father and the Island summer, how he disliked and ignored it. As far as possible, he kept to his regular routine, even wearing the same clothes—the long-sleeved dress shirt, the bow tie, the suit jacket (in the summer it was seersucker, in the winter solid dark blue) he carried over one arm. He had nothing but contempt for the tourists with their bursts of uncontrolled behavior, their perplexing inability to swim.

Every year, there was either a drowning or a dramatic rescue. My father was indifferent as to which. “They understand that this is an island, surely. Why do they go into the ocean if they can’t swim?” he would say. He ridiculed the pamphlets distributed by the sheriff’s department. “Listen to this. This really is what it says: ‘Water may contain oxygen, but it’s not usable by the human respiratory system.’ Do people have to be told that they can’t breathe water?”

Drowning was something he explained in detail to us, his daughters. We knew about oxygen starvation and panic. We also knew that many near-drowning victims had been interviewed about their experience. “Do you know what their last thought usually is?” my father would ask. He would pause and scrape the bowl of his pipe with an instrument especially designed for that purpose, giving us plenty of time to consider. “They are ashamed. They are ashamed at having been stupid enough to drown.”

THE LIBRARY THAT HOUSED THE PHOTO ARCHIVE
was only a few blocks away. Built in the years immediately following the Great Hurricane, it was solid but mournful. The carved stone wreaths above the windows had a memorial air, as though the architects couldn’t help thinking about that autumn when cremation fires all along the Island burned so high they were visible from the mainland and the wind carried with it charred bits of bone and singed hair.

I went inside. The once generous rooms had been divided by fiberboard partitions, the original furniture replaced by a few armless chairs that were geometrically shaped to discourage lingering. Everything that was new assaulted the scale and purpose of the original space. It was as though the building had been overrun by a race of smaller, meaner people.

I took the elevator to the third floor, where a glass wall marked off the special collections. Behind the glass, a couple of archivists moved back and forth in silence like fish in a tank. Broad wooden tables awaited anyone interested in viewing the holdings. They were all vacant.

If the man seated at the reception desk saw or heard me, he didn’t let on. “Hello,” I said. “I’m Clare Porterfield. I’m here to see the photo archive.”

He was writing on a yellow legal pad. Looking up, he said, “Oh yes. You’re from New York.”

“Actually, I’m BOI,” I said. “I grew up here. The gallery, Beckmann-Robler, where I show, is in New York.”

“Oh,”
he said, “where you
show
.” His tone was carefully calibrated, not quite derisive. His expression didn’t change. “Which photos do you want to see?” His twill jacket was not too tight exactly, but it lacked the ease a real flesh-and-blood person would require. He stood then, and I saw that his pants also were tailored as though for a figure that would never run or sprawl or even eat a heavy meal. He made me think of a mannequin in a department-store window, the old-fashioned, unconvincing kind whose fingers were fused together.

He opened a drawer and took out a clipboard with a printed sheet on it. The date, May 25, 1990, was handwritten across the top. “You have to sign in first. Then you have to request them by box number.”

I took the clipboard and filled in my name and Eleanor’s address and phone number. I lifted the top sheet and looked underneath at the one from the day before. And the day before that. There were no other names. “I’ll take boxes one through four,” I said.

He shook his head again. Somehow I knew he was enjoying himself. “You can view one box at a time.”

I took a deep breath. On the sheet, I wrote “Box 1.” I handed him back the clipboard. “So,” I said, “what’s next?”

He nodded toward the first of the tables, the one nearest his desk. Clearly, he meant to keep an eye on me. Given the absence of other visitors, it wouldn’t be difficult. “You are required to wear gloves when you handle the materials,” he said. “I’ll get them. But first, you’ll have to check
that
.” He pointed at my Leica. His fingers were white, tapered, perfectly normal.

My hand went instinctively to the camera. “Where?” I asked.

“Downstairs. There are lockers.” His face seemed to brighten at the thought of my having to retrace my steps.

It’s funny that the same set of traits that makes you a difficult child—a stubborn refusal to cooperate, a failure to grasp the niceties of social exchange—are the ones that enable you to succeed as an adult in a profession, like mine, without many rules. I planted my feet on the gray carpet. “No,” I said.

He listed a little, as though he’d stepped on something sharp and sat down in his chair.

“Is there a problem?” A woman strode through the glass door. She turned to me. “Ms. Porterfield?” If she hadn’t so clearly been in charge, I would have wondered what she was doing there. No crocheted sweater, no glasses attached by little rubber loops to a chain around her neck. Her short hair was stylishly cut. And her tailored dress would have been just right in a corporate office. She looked at her colleague reproachfully. “We’ve been asked to extend every courtesy.” She turned to me. “You don’t need to sign in. Where would you be most comfortable?” I chose one of the middle tables, not too near the reception desk, not so far away that the mannequin would think he’d made an impression.

The librarian’s name was Gwen. Thanks to Will, she said, I would have access to all the photo files, as many as I wanted at one time. A place to hold out the pictures I was reviewing. A cataloguer assigned
to me for the duration of the project, to fetch and carry, to replace those images I no longer wanted.

It seemed to me that she used Will’s name more often than necessary, and that when she did, her face lost some of its professional polish and took on an irritating, dazzled look. As she talked, she stroked the bare, lightly tanned skin of her upper arm.

For each acid-free cardboard box there was an index, but it was of limited use since there was no way to tell whether an image was any good without actually looking at it. I glanced quickly at the contents of one box, then another, and as I did, I felt a ripple of excitement.

The Island’s love affair with itself went back well over a century. There were photos of all kinds—portraits, architectural images, interiors, landscapes, street scenes, beach scenes. There were aerial photos and shots taken from the water. There were even a certain number of self-conscious and mostly silly art photographs. And of course there were the images dating from the days and weeks after the Great Hurricane.

I moved through the prints quickly until one caught my eye.

It showed a group of ranch hands leaning against a fence. They were young, still in their late teens, their faces soft. Their clothes had the look of hand-me-downs. Half of them wore not boots but plain lace-up shoes. Two of them were black. Their hats were articles of use, uniformly worn and shapeless. There were no horses in the photo. The horses they rode would have belonged to the family that owned the land. Probably the same family that owned the land today. I thought of my conversation with Ty. What the photo showed was not what you saw in movies.

I worked for about an hour, setting aside half a dozen photos.

Then I came to an image of someone, a boy it seemed, lying on a blanket at the edge of a gravel path. His face was hidden. Only his body in dark clothing was plainly visible. One of the boy’s pants legs was rolled up to reveal a slim white calf and the unprotected sole of his bare foot. I looked back at the box for identification. It was labeled, simply,
DOMESTIC
. I turned the photo over. There was nothing on the back. I looked at it again. Why didn’t it show his face?

In a famous photo from the Depression, a child, not much more than a baby, lies on a pair of thin pillows, his face and upper body covered by a flour sack. The child’s right foot is wrapped in a bandage. Is he breathing, or not? Asleep, or dead? The image doesn’t tell you. It’s only when you know that the boy is napping, that the flour sack is there to keep the flies away, that you finally exhale, gratefully.
He’s alive
.

What if the facts were different? If you knew that the flour sack was a makeshift shroud? It would be another photo entirely.

I could look again and again at the boy in the grass, and still not know for certain what I was seeing. I put the print aside. I told myself that his pose was just that. A pose. Part of a game.

But my heart was jolting in my chest. I must have moved abruptly. The man at the desk looked up. I stood, jostled my way out of the heavy chair, and made for the door. He got up too. “You’re leaving? Are you coming back?”

I nodded. I knew he wanted me to tell him what to do with the piles I’d made, the notes spread across the table.

“When?”

If I’d been able to speak, I would have told him I had no idea.

Outside, I walked without paying much attention to where I was going. What mattered was putting distance between myself and the thing I couldn’t bear to see.

I walked quickly, but it was almost noon and the air was heavy, tropical. I could feel the heat of the pavement through my sandals. I began to sweat, and I slowed my pace.
Breathe
, I told myself. With each block the crowd grew, and I realized I was approaching the Strand. I thought with relief that it would be easy to lose myself there.

Once the Strand had been Galveston’s business district, the biggest center of banking and finance between San Francisco and New Orleans. Now it was a busy tourist site, and the brick and cast-iron buildings housed restaurants and stores. Streetcars rang their bells as they swung around corners. Open carriages ferried customers to and from the parking lots.

Most of the exteriors remained much as they had been a hundred
years ago. The decline in the Island’s fortunes had, paradoxically, saved the old buildings. Now the chief thing the Island produced was new versions of its colorful past for the entertainment of summer visitors.

In the places where the high-Victorian architectural detail had been lost, the surfaces had been cleverly painted with faux moldings and cornices. None of the sightseers seemed to notice any difference. Glassy-eyed, they surged along the broad sidewalks or collapsed onto the deep curb where they sat, dazed with humidity and shopping.

The Strand catered to everyone. There were shops selling rare maps and ship models that took years to build. And there were noisy, barnlike spaces that smelled of stale beer and ganja and offered the kind of souvenirs you find only at the beach.

Chief among these were items decorated with shells—now mostly imported from the Philippines and dyed unnatural colors or lacquered to a high, synthetic gloss. As always, I was struck by the terrible ingenuity of these things—the night-lights with their eerie radiance, the planters in bizarre shapes.

There was also that category of objects that surfaces persistently in resort towns everywhere. The T-shirts emblazoned with the same unfunny tag lines that have distinguished them for years. These came in tiny sizes, as well as XXL, and it depressed me to think of children being made to wear them. There were ashtrays that encouraged guests to
SMOKE DOPE!
and ceramic mugs shaped like breasts with red-tipped nipples you could drink from. I always wondered what the purchasers did with these things when they got home, since I never saw them anywhere else. Probably they disappeared quietly along with the maps and brochures that had seemed so indispensable just days before.

The Strand was a hodgepodge of tastes, everything tossed together, and it occurred to me that the display along the street was like the beach, where the waves deposited, along with tiny, perfect lightning whelks, aluminum cans and used condoms.

I let myself be carried forward by the crowd. The doors of the shops were open, and as I passed by different things spilled out—loud
music, the odor of spicy food. Every so often, I encountered a welcome gust of chilled air. I stopped and fanned myself.

Up the street a little way I saw a familiar head of silvery hair. Today it was arranged in a long braid that swayed when Harriet Kinkaid walked. I remembered her friendliness, her laugh. She had encouraged me to visit her. I saw her go into a store and hurried to catch up.

The air inside was thick with the too-sweet smells of potpourri and candles. At a table, some vacationers were exclaiming over the merchandise. One of them waved something and called out to her friend. “It isn’t any bigger than my hand,” she said.

The woman was holding a shoe, one of a dozen or so that were part of a display. Most of them were decorative only. But the one she was holding was an antique, what we would probably call a boot, with a double row of eyelets and laces up the front. It was made of kidskin, softened a little with age. The dainty, curved heel was slightly worn. It was small, but too narrow, surely, for a child.