The Drowning House (2 page)

In a cardboard box, still unpacked, I found the Cartier-Bresson volume and turned the pages until I came to a photo showing the interior of a once grand Galveston hotel. A sign tacked to the wall reminded boarders to pay their rent in advance. On the landing was an elderly woman, her body shapeless in a flowered housecoat. Darkness poured out of the doorway behind her and rose up from the baseboards, so that her face and body were split into light and shadow.

It was one of several images of Galveston looking sad and shabby, images that had caused controversy when the book was first published. Others were different. Cartier-Bresson had also captured in his photographs the sensuality, the drowsy, self-indulgent beauty of the Island.

That was when I began to think about Patrick. And the Carradays.
The big house where I’d spent so many hours. The questions I’d left unanswered.

I grew up watching the tides, and I know it’s only after change is under way that we recognize it, when the incoming rush catches us unaware, and we hurry to gather our things and move up the beach. Still I ask myself, when? When was there no longer any going back? Suppose I had stayed with Michael, attended the dinner. Could I have become again the woman he loved and married, the Clare who was Bailey’s mother? Could I have made myself give up those other thoughts? And if I had, would everything else have been different?

AT A GAS STATION NEXT TO A PRODUCE STAND
, I parked and waited for sleep, hoping I wouldn’t dream. My dreams were always about falling. Things dropped around me—branches snapped, walls and roofs collapsed, objects of all kinds plunged from the sky. Sometimes I fell—down stairs, off bridges.

When I woke I went to the restroom, splashed my arms and face with water, and drank from the faucet. I dried myself with brown paper towels. I realized I was hungry, and I bought a pint basket of blackberries and ate a few. I’d stashed a half-eaten package of crackers under the front seat, and as I drove south, I finished what was left, swallowing hard and coughing up crumbs.

Past Houston the landscape began to flatten and simplify. There were no more pipe yards or feed stores, no more roadside chapels or ice houses advertising beer and pool. I saw white smoke drifting from the Texas City refineries. An egret lifting itself on leisurely wings. I could feel the presence of the bay and the deeper water beyond.

I thought of Bailey and told myself that the pain of losing her would diminish. That someday I would have the memory without the hurt. And while the sun glinted off passing cars and the breeze whipped around my ears, it seemed possible. I drove faster. Soon I came to the shallow rise that offers the first glimpse of Galveston.

Below was the old causeway, a series of sand-colored arches that skimmed the water next to the higher, modern road. The approaches
at either end had been washed away, so that only the middle stood, rising abruptly from the water, like the spine of some ancient animal whose submerged skeleton had unexpectedly shifted.

Probably there were practical reasons why the old causeway had never been torn down. To me it said something about the Island, marked it as a place where the ideal of progress was complicated by stubborn survivals. A place where you could sometimes see the past running alongside the present.

The surface of the bay was broken only by the creamy trails of pleasure boats. Overhead, clouds hung huge and motionless as mountains. I saw nothing that would have been out of place in a travel brochure. Nothing to explain the feeling I had, like the one you get when the roller coaster leaves the loading platform and starts to move slowly, inexorably, up the first incline. For this was the Texas Gulf coast, the soft, sinking-down edge of the continent, and there wasn’t a real hill for miles.

Chapter 2

NATIVES CALL GALVESTON
“the Island,” as if there were no other. Those who are BOI, born on the Island, take pride in the fact.

My name is Clare Porterfield, but the house I grew up in is known as the Hayes-Giraud house, for the families who lived in it a hundred years ago. Warren Hayes was a successful cotton factor, a man with a barrel chest and sideburns that sprouted in thick tufts. He gave the house to his only child, Lavinia, when she married a doctor, Phillip Giraud, from Louisiana. When my father, also a doctor, acquired it, I think he saw it as his special responsibility.

It was late afternoon when I arrived. The metal plaque was still there by the front gate, displaying the Hayes-Giraud names and the date of construction, 1887. I parked next to the carriage block at the front curb.

Growing up, my older sister, Frankie, and I understood that the house had a life of its own, imperatives that weighed equally with ours. I remember her asking my father when we would replace our ten-year-old Buick.

“Some people buy a new car every year. We paint the house,” my father said with satisfaction. His teeth were stained brown from the pipe he smoked, and he never showed them when he smiled.

My mother, Eleanor, raised her head and gazed out across the garden. “Some people travel.”

Anything found in or around the house was said to belong to it, and the Hayes-Giraud possessions mingled with our own. Sober, homely
portraits of Warren Hayes and his wife, Belle, painted when they were both in late middle age, hung in my father’s first-floor study. When I was small, I tended to confuse them with my grandparents who lived in Ohio. A sightless, vaguely classical, marble bust of a woman discovered in the attic and said to be Lavinia Giraud presided over the front hall. At Christmas, when my parents hosted a gathering for my father’s students, someone invariably penciled in Lavinia’s eyes, giving her a startled look, as though she had come suddenly to life and was dismayed to find things changed.

There was also the chamber pot decorated with cabbage roses that occupied a stand in our bedroom, never, we were warned, to be used.

“Why can’t we use it?” I asked.

Frankie groaned. “Why would you want to pee in a pot?”

I didn’t want to tell her I was afraid to leave our room at night.

When I was growing up, the house was white, with black shutters and a black cast-iron fence in front. My father’s choices. Now I saw that the clapboard walls had been painted a soft green, and the porches, with their pierced-wood trim, stood out in a way they hadn’t before. Delicate patterns of light and shade played over the whole outside. It was now unmistakably an Island house.

I wondered what my father, Anson Porterfield, would have thought of the change. He had been an internist at the local hospital. He did his best to ignore the annual influx of visitors, both the summer people who built costly houses on the beach and the tourist crowds who cruised the seawall. I often asked myself why he had chosen to live on the Island, since he so disliked the seasonal ebb and flow. He had died the previous summer, suddenly, of a stroke. I didn’t return for the funeral. In fact, I hadn’t been back to the Island at all. Not since I’d graduated from high school more than ten years earlier.

It was easy to find excuses—a summer job when I was in college, later a series of opportunities too good to turn down. My mother didn’t press the issue. She visited me occasionally. My father didn’t like to travel.

The front door was unlocked, so I let myself in.

Every old house has its own complex smell—a distinctive combination of aged woods, of generations of stain and varnish, of furniture polish and floor wax. In Galveston, there is also the smell of salt. In 1900, during the Great Hurricane, the flood waters rose to the second story. Whole families drowned together amid the floating furniture.

The bust on its pedestal was still in the front hall, but someone had tossed a crumpled canvas fishing hat onto Lavinia’s head where it rested at an angle, hiding one of her sightless eyes. I stood listening. The house was quiet. I crossed the hall and opened the door to the back lawn.

My mother was kneeling at a flower bed. She wore a man’s white button-down shirt over white jeans—her idea of work clothes. Her hair was twisted up off her neck. As always, she looked cool and unwrinkled, as though she lived in a climate of her own making. I couldn’t remember ever seeing her sweat.

I stopped to watch her, as I used to do when I was small.

Eleanor was different when she thought she was alone. Her face softened and her shoulders settled, as though she had put down something she was carrying. The woman I glimpsed then was a stranger, preoccupied with ideas and feelings she didn’t share with us children, and I wondered what it would be like to know her.

Because the habit was an old one, I waited for a moment in the shade of the overhang. I saw Eleanor sit back on her heels, arch her back, and raise her arms to stretch. She removed a comb, then shook her head, slowly, deliberately, so that her hair fell down over her shoulders and swung back and forth, thick and blond and abundantly streaked with ash.

Why is it we are so reluctant to think of our parents as sexual beings? Even as adults, even when the evidence is in front of us? I reached back to close the door, hard.

At the sound she rose quickly and became her usual brisk self. I saw her glance at the camera I carried on a strap over my shoulder. “Sweetheart,” she said, “you’re here at last.” She leaned down, put her cheek next to mine, and held it there for a moment. It was
what she had always done, not quite a kiss. I felt her breath in my ear and the crisp surface of her shirt. I thought, as I had so many times before, how dissimilar we were.

I am slight, blue-eyed, with unruly hair that reacts strongly to weather. Aunt Syvvie, my mother’s sister, once said that I reminded her of an actress she had seen. “Susan Cabot. She was in the original
Gunsmoke
with Audie Murphy. She played the daughter.”

“Sylvia, no wonder you look exhausted,” Eleanor said. “You’ve been up watching those old movies again.”

“
Gunsmoke
is a classic,” Aunt Syvvie protested. “And it’s true, what I said about her.” She turned to me. “You have such beautiful eyes.”

My mother banged the watering can down on the porch. “Don’t be ridiculous. You’ll give her ideas.” Aunt Syvvie was plump and easily moved to tears. Her small indulgences—movies, magazines with lots of pictures, a bottle of Shalimar with a blue glass stopper—were regularly held up for mild ridicule. Nobody took her seriously.

Eleanor brushed my hair back with both hands and held it while she searched my face. “Such a long drive,” she said. “Are you all right?”

I nodded.

“Frances called.”

My sister, Frankie, was everything I wasn’t—tall, athletic, unafraid.

“Come inside, it’s hot.” Eleanor looked me up and down, and I wondered for the first time in days about my appearance. “You must want a bath,” she said. “But first, something cool to drink.”

She took a green glass pitcher from the kitchen windowsill and snapped off two stems of mint. She cut a lemon into wedges. From a drawer she removed long-handled ice-tea spoons.

She was so precise, her movements so full of intention, that her hands seemed to draw everything in around her. The pitcher of mint, the room with its high ceiling, the garden hastening toward summer all seemed to exist only as the setting for her task. It was deeply restful watching her, like falling under a brief spell of hypnosis.

“You saw they’re remodeling next door?” Eleanor asked. “They
must think they’re in the Caribbean. The colors. Sugar?” I nodded and she set the bowl on the table.

This was a familiar topic. My parents followed the dramas of the old houses—their trials by weather and insects, their prolonged rehabilitations—the way Aunt Syvvie followed the fortunes of movie stars.

Eleanor said, “I should let Will know you’ve arrived.”

It took me a minute to realize who she meant. When I was growing up, he had been Mr. Carraday. In family conversations his last name was always invoked.
They want Will Carraday to back the building restrictions. Will Carraday has bought a new plane
. I knew all about him. Anyone who lived on the Island did. As a child I had spent many hours in the big house across the alley with Patrick Carraday, Will’s son.

Patrick, who had been the brother I never had, then later, something more.

But knowing about Will Carraday was not the same as knowing him. I pulled off a mint leaf and rolled it between my fingers, and as the smell rose up, green and pungent, I was flooded with a familiar ache.

“He wants to talk to you, of course.”

“About the exhibition?”

Eleanor paused. “I suppose.”

It was only after the formal arrangements had been made that my mother had raised the possibility of a visit. She’d chosen her words carefully, never mentioning how long I’d been away from the Island. Never calling it
home
.

“What does Mr. Carraday want to know?” I asked.

Eleanor set her glass down carefully. “Clare, don’t begin this way.”

“What way?”

“Looking for trouble.”

“I’m not,” I said, although it wasn’t really true. Something quivered inside me, like the pivoting needle of a compass. We both knew where it would point.