The Drowning House (21 page)

It wasn’t really a history but a collection of biographies. Most of
the entries were accompanied by an oval studio portrait. In the index I looked up “Carraday” and found the gold-bordered text.

Ward Carraday began his enterprise in a humble manner. For many years he operated a dry goods establishment. He remained a bachelor, living frugally in quarters situated above his business until the age of forty, when he wed Adelaide Stussy, a schoolteacher twenty-four years his junior
.

Over time and as his means permitted, he expanded his holdings. At his death, he possessed a residence of rare comforts, among them a French chandelier and the first piano west of the San Pedro River
.

It was his habit to turn his head when speaking to give his right eye the advantage, because his left orb had from birth a tendency to wander. Perhaps for this reason, he was not inclined to the pleasures of society, but kept to his home and family
.

There was no photo of Will’s grandfather.

I heard the sound of conversation, then a pause, and Will approaching. Was he going downstairs? Away? Would he pass by without saying anything? He put his head in the door. “I promised you a drink. Would you like to join us for a few minutes? Only if you want to, of course.”

I closed the book and followed him. In the hallway, the walls were lined with more photos. I realized that there was nothing in the house—no painting, no photograph—that wasn’t in some way related to the family. Nothing that might be, for a child growing up there, a window into any other world.

Mary Liz was smoking a cigarette in a long, black holder. “Come in, come in,” she said waving it so that a thin contrail of smoke drifted above her. She was on a chaise, her wasted legs, as always, covered. “Sit, will you, I dislike people looking down at me.” She gestured toward a sofa filled with pillows. “I understand you’re interested in old things. Damned if I am.” She laughed harshly. “Never expected I’d be one myself. Animal has an accident like mine, you put it down.”

Faline came in carrying a tray with a chilled bottle, a variety of
glasses, and a bowl of ice. “Nobody around here feels sorry for you. Not one bit.” She set the things out. “Now, you got everything you want? You think I might go and see to my husband?”

“Don’t let her fool you,” Mary Liz said. “She doesn’t have to be here, fetching and carrying. She could have made something of herself. She had three semesters at the College of the Mainland.” Mary Liz looked at Faline appraisingly. “Now it’s too late. She’s getting to be an old woman. Cords in her neck.” She reached for the loose skin under her own chin and laughed again, a raucous sound that shook her chest and shoulders and then became a cough.

“All right,” Faline said, “I’m leaving now. You going to have to survive without me until tomorrow.”

“We’ll be fine,” Will said. “Thank you.”

I moved a few of the pillows, trying to make room for myself on the edge of the sofa.

“So here you are,” said Mary Liz. “Without the camera, for once. And here I am, the captive audience. Well, are you going to pour her a drink or not? And me, while you’re at it.” She raised her glass toward Will and rattled the ice. Her thin, iron-colored hair stood up from her head, as though it had been freshly coiffed. “You’re not a sorority girl, are you,” she said.

I was momentarily confused.

Mary Liz inhaled deeply and a tube of ash fell onto her lap and scattered. She brushed it onto the floor, and repeated her comment, slowly, as though it were the language I hadn’t understood. “You don’t have to say so, I can tell. I was the same way. I hated those sorority girls with their charm bracelets.”

Will opened a cabinet. “The selection up here is limited, I’m afraid,” he said. “Is white wine all right? It’s that or bourbon, and you don’t strike me as a bourbon drinker.”

“That’s his way of saying he thinks you’re more sophisticated than I am.”

Will handed me a glass of wine.

“I was reading about Ward Carraday,” I said.

“Jesus. Ugly bastard.”

“My grandfather.” It seemed to me that Will’s manner changed then and became more formal, more like the way he had been with his guests. “You must have found the book with the biographies,” he said. “I haven’t seen it in years. The family had an opportunity to participate, which they refused. Then, when it was published, they didn’t like the result. There never was a picture. My grandfather always said he didn’t want to be photographed. Well, you can understand why. The eye. It gave him a strange look. Angry.”

“It was more than a look,” said Mary Liz. Her gaze rested on me as she swallowed and gave a sigh of satisfaction. “They called him the Old Goat. He liked them young. Christ. I don’t know who was worse—Ward and his teenage bride or Franklin with his face like a bankruptcy lawyer. You’ve heard the story about the horse?”

Will looked hard at Mary Liz.

“I think she ought to hear it,” she said. She put her glass down with emphasis. “I think she ought to know something about the Carraday family. I think it’s appropriate. Don’t you?” She was talking to Will, but her eyes never left mine. She seemed to want to hold me there, the way a predator fixes its quarry. “Ward Carraday was trying to unload a wagon, wanted to bring it right up to the door. Horse wouldn’t back to suit him. He lost his temper. Got down, tore a board off the back. A board with nails in it. He beat the horse to death in the street. Left it lying there until someone complained.” She smiled, her lips narrow, vivid. “They were tough old boys in those days, and even they couldn’t stomach it.”

I glanced at Will. “It may have happened,” he said. “Or something like it may have happened. Time goes by, and those old stories take on a life of their own.”

Mary Liz drew on her cigarette, exhaled at the ceiling. “It was your daddy, Franklin, told me,” she said. “He saw it happen.”

“He was a child.”

“Nice thing for a child to see.”

I felt myself slipping off the edge of the sofa. I glanced at my wine.
The room was warm, already the glass was misted over. I reached for it and felt the moisture run under my fingers. I hoped I wouldn’t drop it.

Mary Liz removed her cigarette from its holder, stubbed it out, and returned the empty holder to her mouth. “Will doesn’t really like to talk about his folks,” she said. “Does that surprise you? You’ve seen him give the tour. The truth is, he’d like to believe he just sprang up out of nowhere. But he doesn’t mind hearing other people’s stories. They all do that here, repeat other people’s. You know the Moodys?”

I nodded. Mary Liz went on. “You know William Moody formed the Cotton Exchange way back when? He had an interesting system. A farmer would bring in his crop, Moody’s cotton hands would weigh it and take ten pounds off each bale as an allowance for water. After the cotton had sat around on the dock for a few weeks getting heavier in the humidity, the state inspector, who was in Moody’s pocket, would weigh it again. His figure was the price the buyer would pay. Moody kept the difference. Will doesn’t mind talking about that.” She sucked on the empty holder, and it made a whistling noise.

“M’Liz,” Will said, and his voice held a clear note of warning.

“You’re the one wants her to see all that old stuff. You think it will stop there? You do, you’re a goddam fool.”

“The exhibition is about the photos. That’s all. Clare’s a professional. She knows that. She’s not going to go digging up old gossip. And as far as Colonel Moody is concerned, in fairness, it was a muckraking reporter who made those accusations, and he had his own agenda.”

Mary Liz turned to me. “Don’t you just love the way he talks? ‘In fairness. An agenda.’ I think that was what made me fall in love with him, when I was young and foolish, the way he talks. It wasn’t something you heard a lot in Bend, Oklahoma. We all have our own
agendas
, Will. You do. She does. Oh yes, she does. She’s after something, I just don’t know what it is yet. Maybe she doesn’t either.”

I was tired of the two of them talking as if I weren’t there. “Why do I have to be after anything?” I asked.

“Because it’s how you are. How you’ve always been. I’ve watched
you your whole life, you and Patrick both. I probably know as much about you as you do. Maybe more. Maybe a lot more.” She tilted her head and looked at Will thoughtfully.

“What do you know about me?”

“I know that even when you were a little-bitty girl you were into everything. And that you are persistent as hell.”

I wanted to ask about Patrick. But I hesitated. Harriet had been kind. I couldn’t count on Mary Liz for that. Would she confirm, scornfully, that Patrick didn’t want to see me? I didn’t think I could bear it. Instead, I changed the subject. “Tell me about Stella,” I said. “What happened to her? Did she leave the Island? Or did she drown in the house, the way people say?”

Mary Liz laughed once, a sound like a dog barking, then stopped suddenly. “Good for you, get to the point. We can do with a little more of that around here. You want me to tell her?” she asked. “Or will you?”

Will’s head was turned toward me, but his gaze passed me by. When he spoke, his tone was carefully neutral, but his jaw was set. It made him look, for a moment, a little like his father. “There’s a stone in the old city cemetery. Stella’s buried there. With her mother and father.” He turned away and busied himself with the drinks tray.

But Mary Liz was right. It would take more than a little coolness to deflect me. “So the part about Stella’s hair getting tangled in the chandelier?”

“There was a woman found like that,” Mary Liz said.

“It wasn’t Stella,” Will said. Then he stopped.

Suddenly I felt an unexpected urge to take Mary Liz’s side. Why didn’t Will want to know more, or discuss what he did know? Why had he never examined Stella’s belongings himself? “Why didn’t you ever look through her photos?” I asked. “Why did you wait so long?”

Will sat down. He crossed one leg, then uncrossed it. Then he said, “I told you, I think, that I wanted you to be the first. Because of your interest in photography. Your career. And this seemed like the right moment. But I guess you could also say I was just lazy.”

It’s commonly said that Galveston’s climate, the heat and humidity
that produce luminous pastel skies, drains people of energy, making it easy for the Colonel Moodys of the world to have their way. The Islanders claim this laziness, boast about it even. Who, after all, would want to be a hard-bitten, grasping Moody? Doing nothing was laudable, if you believed that was the only choice. Was that what Will believed? His face was impassive, except for the muscle working in his jaw.

I stood up and looked for a place to put my glass. It was still half full. Will reached over and took it from me, but his eyes didn’t meet mine.

I remembered then how I had felt growing up, that there was a conversation going on around me that I didn’t understand, that passed me by and never acknowledged my presence. It came flooding back, the sense of exclusion, the obscure feeling of shame that accompanied it.

“I think I’ll get back to the photos now,” I said.

In Stella’s room, I grasped the chair I had been sitting in and shoved it clumsily toward the window. It was heavy and required several attempts. When I was done, sweat was starting along my hairline. But I experienced a satisfaction out of all proportion to the task. I stacked the two photo albums on a small table nearby.

It seemed that no one wanted to think about Stella except me. I knew what it meant to be ignored. Was that one of the reasons I felt drawn to her? Because her family had chosen to forget her? Because her life had been turned into a series of quaint vignettes for tourists to enjoy?

I at least didn’t have to settle for that version of Stella’s story. The evidence was in front of me, if I could only understand it.

We imagine people in the past as different from ourselves. We see their clothing—all those layers—and confuse it with the bodies underneath. We see how upright they are in their formal photographs, forgetting that the women wore corsets, that men and women both were strapped to a wooden backboard for support. We picture them as simpler beings.

But people don’t change in any essential way. Time passes, conventions
are thrown aside, clothing is discarded—how did they endure it in the heat? Underneath, things are not so different. Sweat. Nerves. Desire. All the feverish complexity of emotion.

I thought about Stella’s father, Ward Carraday, gone all day at his office on the Strand. In the evening, unwrapping a cigar at the Artillery Club, trading anecdotes, drinking a slow glass of whiskey. Then one more.

It’s astonishing how he can make it last. Stella’s mother, ill or unhappy—it amounts to the same thing—lies stretched across a chaise in a room where the blinds are drawn. From time to time, she measures out a spoonful of liquid from a brown medicine bottle. She calls in a tired voice for ice to refresh the compress on her forehead, ice that has to be chipped from a block in the kitchen and carried up three floors, quickly, before it melts. She calls for her daughter, but Stella pretends at first not to hear. But her brother is a child. Only Stella can prepare the ice and fix the compress exactly the way her mother wants it done.

Stella is seventeen, restless, preoccupied. Without noticing, she strips the leaves from the potted ferns, pulls the ribbons off her best hat. She never reads anymore, not even the issues of
The Ladies’ World
that slide from her mother’s bed onto the floor. She is impatient. She wants to begin the only narrative that matters, the story of her real life. Soon she will shed the house and its inhabitants—these people she hardly knows—like a husk. She feels it. Every day she dresses her hair differently. She polishes her nails with a silver buffer until they shine. She tucks a lily into the waistband of her dress. She feels sorry for her mother, whose gown is soiled and whose fingers tremble, but she is tired of running up and down stairs fetching ice.

Leaving her father’s office, she sees the young architect, who fails to tip his hat. She is old enough to understand what has made him forget himself. From the corner of her eye, she watches him pause and look back.