The Drowning House (24 page)

So Phillip Giraud had met Stella during the grade raising. The marriage would have been a step down for her. Was that why Ward Carraday objected? Because a man who was merely respectable wasn’t good enough for his daughter? Or did he think she was too young? It seemed unlikely, given the age of his own bride.

“Why did he say no?”

“Why? He didn’t like him. He didn’t like any of them came courting. Planned to keep her for hisself.”

“You mean …” I didn’t know how to express what I was thinking, not to Faline.

She turned and said, “You seen the picture. In the drawing room.
Is that the way a man look at his child?” She gazed around, satisfied. “I’m done here now. What about you? I thought you supposed to be working upstairs.”

I went back through the house toward the garden, thinking about what Faline had said. I wasn’t the only one who thought the relief portrait was peculiar. I’d begun to wonder if it was only because I’d seen the painted original that Ty had found. And having seen it, could no longer separate the two.

I thought again of the photo, Stella’s worn dress and sad, chapped face. This much was certain—Stella had survived the storm. And her life afterward had not been easy.

I asked myself, how does a man look at his child? I remembered the arguments Michael and I had had about Bailey. I remembered too that when he wasn’t busy working he would willingly watch her, play with her. At those times another Michael, open and undefended, was briefly visible. Whatever happened between us, I had never doubted that he loved her.

I thought too about my father, about his fondness for facts and data, his scrupulous attention to historical detail. I remembered him speaking about the bust in the hall, the way his tented fingertips touched and touched again. I recalled all this, and it seemed to me that the same man who had identified thousands of birds, who could distinguish minute differences in their appearance, had hardly seen me at all.

Chapter 21

WHENEVER I TRIED TO CALL UP AN IMAGE
of my father’s face, what I saw instead were the freckles that overlapped his lips and swarmed into his ears, the pale eyes, the tufts of graying red that were his eyebrows. I waited, thinking these distinctive traits would come together for me the way the characteristics of birds—bill shape, leg color, feathers—must have done for him. Like all serious birders, he had kept a life list. He could classify a hawk, silhouetted against the sky, without the help of binoculars.

When I was five or six, the idea had come to me that identifying birds was an important activity, like the practice of medicine, but, since birds were everywhere, one I could take part in. I began paying attention, and soon I could identify a few common species. I tried out my new knowledge on Faline. “Look, there’s a dove.”

“Sure is. Looks like dinner has come right to us. Bring me down a gun out of the upstairs hallway.”

“Faline!”

She shrugged. “People got to eat.”

I was in the back garden when a gull settled on the cottage roof. Flushed with excitement, I ran to tell my father, stumbling, going down on one bare knee in my hurry. I pointed. “A seagull!”

Without raising his eyes from the newspaper he was reading he said, “There’s no such thing as a seagull.”

I stood again and turned to look. There it was, perched on the gable, still as a carving. It had a white breast, a black bead of an eye,
and a red mark on its beak. I squinted, turned away, looked back. The gull was still there.

“I see it.”

“There is no such thing,” he said.

I know now what he meant. “Seagull” is a catchall term not used by people who study birds. There are laughing gulls, Bonaparte’s gulls, ring-billed and herring gulls. More rarely, there are Franklin’s, lesser black-backed, and glaucous gulls. But there are no “seagulls.” In fact, many species of gull nest inland. But as a child I didn’t understand. All I knew was what was in front of me, the evidence of my senses, and this he had dismissed.

It felt like the time I ran into the swinging cafeteria door at school just as the janitor with his trolley started to back through from the other side. It was like lying flat on the streaky green linoleum in the hallway, stunned and gasping, watching the plaster walls move in and out.

Except that I was still in my own backyard, and the green around me was grass. The breeze riffled the edges of my father’s newspaper. His head was still buried. I looked down at my plaid shirt, my shorts, at my knee streaked with dirt and blood. He didn’t seem to see that either.

Years later, I went to the library and checked out a color volume on birds. I studied the plates. There were dozens of species, and the distinctions between them were so minor that it turned out to be more difficult than I had expected to tell
hyperboreus
from
delawarensis
.

As I turned the glossy pages of the book I realized that my father must have possessed a formidable talent for visual distinction. Without conscious thought, he registered primary and secondary feathers, coverts, scapulars, folded and in flight.
The rump is white with faded gray-brown bars
, I read. The rump?
The head is moderately sloped, the brow heavy. The iris is pale yellow, the orb-ring yellow to pale pink
. I wondered what had gone through his mind as he made his notes, added to his list. Had he ever looked at a gull and thought to himself,
The breast is delicately marbled?

At that time, I wanted to believe it. I wanted to find something sympathetic in his determined observation and cataloguing.

In the end, I had to accept the truth. What my father and I saw when we looked at the world was different. He perceived and registered details better than I ever could. But once he had seen and logged a bird, it no longer mattered to him. So he missed the astonishment of the familiar, of the ordinary thing perceived suddenly in a new way. He saw and recorded the features, the type, but missed entirely the flight, the song.

GROWING UP, I HAD ENVIED FRANKIE
. It didn’t occur to me then that the role of favorite might have its own drawbacks. Since our conversation in the kitchen, I viewed her differently. I believed too that there was more to be learned from her.

I called Frankie and told her I wanted to talk. From the silence on her end of the line I knew she was surprised, but she agreed to meet on Friday for a late lunch. When I hung up, my hand was damp, but I felt exhilarated, as if I’d achieved something important.

I met her in the lobby of the condominium where she and Stephen stayed when they were on the Island. It was new construction, but the decor had been carefully chosen to suggest the laid-back raffishness of the old shore—wicker furniture with canvas cushions and inexpensive green plants. Everything was expendable. But the building itself was solid concrete raised up on massive legs. In a storm, the glass walls would blow out and the ocean would pour through and carry everything away. Afterward, someone would hose the floor and sweep up the debris.

The condominium units were all thirty feet above ground. I knew it must make Frankie feel safe. I don’t know why it had the opposite effect on me. I stood looking out at the deck, at the pool rimmed with trailing bougainvillea and the sky beyond. It was overcast, the sun visible only as a bright disk, a white spot like the blind eye of an old dog.

I felt Frankie’s hand on my arm and started. “Oh, you’re here,” I said.

It was her chance to make a routine cutting remark, but she let it pass. She had on tan linen pants and a black shirt with the same pieces of silver jewelry she had worn before. Maybe it wasn’t fair to call it a uniform. She looked like what she was—a competent, educated woman whose vanity was not about her looks.

“I was thinking how different this is,” I said.

“From the house? Yes, it is.” Frankie gazed toward the pool and nodded her approval. “Imagine, before this place went up, there was nothing here except sand and bugs. No history! The condo is just a space that contains the things we need. Beds. Chairs. A refrigerator. It’s nice but anonymous. I love that about it. It doesn’t make any demands. In fact,” she looked at me slyly, “we rent it out when we’re not using it.”

I turned to look at her and Frankie laughed. “You should see your face. Oh, I understand, it didn’t come naturally to me either. Just buying the condo was a production. The two of them wanted us to do over an old house. Research it, of course, find out exactly how the front door looked in 1885, go into debt to some contractor, then live for years with the work itself. Nails on the floor, sawdust in everything. But we have hard jobs! We don’t want to come home to more work. I like being free of all that effort. I don’t want to live what feels like someone else’s life. The life of a person I never knew who died a hundred years ago.”

Frankie’s features were lit with conviction, and for a moment I could see again some of her old brightness. For the first time, I understood that she too had struggled with our parents, that things had not been as easy for her as I had assumed. I was impressed that she had cast off entirely our father’s legacy—the sense of indebtedness to the past that he expressed to us as self-denial. How had she done it?

She went on: “If Eleanor wants to worry about whether she’s got the right …”

“Carriage block,” I said.

“Precisely. If Eleanor wants to deal with all that, let her.”

“Let them, you mean. Eleanor and Will.”

Frankie looked at me. “Eleanor and Will,” she said. “Yes.” She gestured toward the double doors that separated the lobby from the landscape outside. “You said lunch? I’m hungry.”

We walked out to the raised parking area where flags snapped in the wind. It occurred to me that you could drive up to the building, occupy your rooms, swim in the pool, sit on the deck, and never set foot on the sand or in the water. So that the beach was only a distant, cheerful panorama signifying vacation, with no more reality than a postcard photographer’s painted backdrop with its cartoon palm.

I wondered if future generations of visitors, who settled for the view through the big windows or from their balconies, who never floated in the warm ocean or felt the sand against their skin, would behave better. If the seedier bars would lose some of their business and the police would get fewer disturbance calls. I wondered too if these same visitors would see their experience as different from what could be had in any other modest resort. Would they care about the Island at all? About what happened to it?

Frankie regarded the jeep. “That’s Will’s car, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“You’re driving his car?”

“For now. Otis is working on mine.” It had been three days since I’d seen Will, three days since the last time he’d stopped by Stella’s room to talk to me, but I was driving his car. I found I needed that connection.

I started the engine and nosed down the ramp to the beach road. When I shifted into second, the jeep balked and shuddered. Frankie said, “God, you’re a terrible driver,” but she smiled.

It was the kind of thing she’d always said, but it felt different. So did Frankie’s questions. I didn’t resent them as I once would have. Reluctantly, I thought back to what Eleanor had said.
Maybe you two can see each other differently now that you’re adults
.

The restaurant was on the first floor of a converted warehouse
near the factory district. Crystal lights hung from black crisscrossed tie beams. The floor was concrete, the chairs leather and comfortable. “This is interesting,” I said.

“We like it,” said Frankie. “No macrame. No gulls. No concessions to tourism. It’s too far away for the docs and the med students. And the food is really good. The owner is from someplace up north and thinks he’s died and gone to heaven. He’s survived his first winter, so maybe he’ll make a go of it.”

We talked that way for a while, sharing information. A waiter came and took our drink orders. No one listening would have found our conversation noteworthy. No one watching would have known what it meant for the two of us to sit together peaceably over a meal. I noticed that the line of gray along Frankie’s part was gone, and that the color of her hair was more subdued now that she had to choose it. Those reddish glints had always seemed to me evidence of a kind of energy I would never possess. Now I found I missed them.

Frankie laid down her menu. “What about you and Michael?”

I was ready for this question, and prepared to answer. Still, my first reaction was to tell her it was none of her business. I took a deep breath. Then I said, “I think it would have been over for us sooner, but there was Bailey. Something would happen, and we’d fight, but then we’d keep going. For her.”

It seemed to me that Bailey’s death marked the end of that process, not the beginning. For a long time, there had been nothing to suggest we wouldn’t stick it out like so many couples. If Michael had not always been faithful, I had not always been kind, and as long as there was Bailey to consider, we were both prepared to try.

“What are you going to do now?”