Uncertain Ground (18 page)

“Chicken.”

“That’s me.”

“Mad?”

“Listen! I’m scared of lots of things, of seas too high, water too rough, jellyfish, people who drive too fast! I have a right to be scared!” I shouted at him, at anyone nearby.

“Okay, okay, Celia. What else is there to do here beside playing poker with your cousin?”

I ignored his sneer and talked him into wading in the surf with me. He had already adamantly refused to swim in the Gulf. “It’s dirty,” he kept saying.

I looked at him standing on the shore, his pants legs rolled up, a city boy unhappy outdoors.

“It’s only sand. The slope is so gentle the waves stir it up as they come in and deposit it again when the tide is higher. Look, the last little wave is clear.”

“It’s looks dirty.” There was a petulant tone to his voice. His face was flushed with heat and sun. Just briefly in the harsh light, I saw him as a truculent little boy digging his heels in the sand and refusing to get wet mainly because some adult, his mother or his father most likely, wanted him to. It seemed he couldn’t finish growing up, and as much as I hoped he might someday, I couldn’t believe it would happen anytime soon.

He trudged over the sand to his car to reach in the back seat for a bottle of Scotch he’d left there in a sack. He held it out toward me.

I shook my head. I didn’t want a drink. It was eleven in the morning on a clear, bright day. I’d had enough to drink the day before. Tony was never far from a bottle of something.

I couldn’t truly understand him, nor could I help him. He wasn’t helping me. When I went off to college— really some years before that—I’d sworn not to marry before finishing. I’d seen enough girls staying home with babies. No one I knew went on to college after a shotgun wedding. Abortions were illegal; they only took place in stories. And in every one of them I’d read, the girls bled to death or died of a terrible infection. Most of all, I didn’t want to have to marry anyone. Continually pulled between wanting Tony and worry over getting caught, my stomach remained in a coil. I still couldn’t eat much; I could hardly sleep at all. Both nights he’d been there I had tried the couch and the floor.

Later that afternoon he drove me back to the house. The two of us sat in his car under the palm tree looking at each other.

“You never loved me,” he said, his voice bitter, his face taut.

All I could say was, “I did.”

I
n the mornings
Emmett slept later and later. I became the restless one. I’d avoided seeing Luis when Tony was in town and now found myself usually on my own. Perhaps Luis had discovered someone else to spend time with; perhaps he’d begun to paint all day. For the first time in years, I had whole days to myself. I began to leave the house early for exploratory walks in the neighborhood before the sun got too hot. Going east I paused to stare through the dark windows of small Italian grocery stores where dim lights showed rows of vegetables—zucchini, tomatoes, lettuce—with stalks of yellowing bananas swaying over them. Young mothers were out pushing their babies in strollers. An old man carrying a newspaper in a neat roll under one arm must have been hurrying home to read it. For a block or so I was followed by various stray dogs who invariably deserted me for familiar whistles. In the afternoons I sometimes found refuge in the Rosenberg, Galveston’s library. It had a faint sweet smell of old wood mixed with floor wax and the same sort of furniture polish used by all the libraries I’d known in all the places I’d ever lived.

I checked out
Kon-Tiki
and
From Here to Eternity
and read them together alternating between the voyage and the tragedy mixing fact with fiction, delight with doom. In the library I found old pictures of people walking through the city on boards ten feet high in the air. “The Raising of Galveston,” a large caption read. Too low, always in danger of flooding, the whole city had been raised. Houses, even churches, divided into sections behind dikes, were jacked up, so everyone moved on high boardwalks to enter their homes. In the old sepia-toned pictures the walkways looked so narrow that the little stick figures of people suspended on them seemed in danger of falling every moment. I could see the wavering lines of sewers, water, and gas raised also.

“But what made the ground rise?” I had to ask Uncle Mowrey.

“It was all part of a plan. They dredged wet sand from the harbor’s channel, moved it through canals cut through the island, then pumped it out on land. Water from the sand drained away. The island rose.”

To me it was almost magical. How did they, I wondered, ever get everyone to agree to suspend their houses, their whole lives like that?

“They didn’t have to,” said Mowrey. The 1900 storm did it … built the seawall, raised the city too.” Abruptly he fell into silence again. He liked passing on bits of information, but I found I had to ask precise questions.

It must have been something more, I thought, something more than the storm … people’s stubbornness, pride … a will to resist that made them search for a way. Of course their homes were there, and so were their livelihoods. I’d seen hundreds of people move during the war. That was different; those were temporary shifts, or so most of them believed, so I had believed when the war began. Those who’d stayed in Galveston after the storm— Weren’t many of them immigrants, people who had already chosen to make one great move? Had they simply decided, once they were settled, to stay put? Whatever their reasons, they had been determined to live on higher ground.

I’d walk carrying my library books to and from the Mclean’s looking for signs of the raising but never found any. The landscape had been completely replaced. All the trees had died in the sand they pumped in. New trees and gardens grew on soil hauled from the mainland. So here was Galveston, once an island with only three trees on it, now covered with acres of greenery.

Always I was drawn back to the seawall across Broadway past the Church of the Sacred Heart, past the Bishop’s Palace and Lucas Terraces with its shell-shaped window boxes, past the little cottages raised high on piers to the sometimes brown-gray, sometimes gray-green Gulf. The part of the beach that lay
parallel to the Mcleans’ was lined with souvenir shops and hung with swags of net holding dried starfish. Giant conch shells collected, I supposed, from remote islands lay stacked in curling heaps around steps and doors. These were particularly beautiful. Perhaps I thought so because they were familiar. A conch shell stood gathering dust on top of a bookcase on the landing of the stairs at Grandmother Henderson’s house. My father showed me how to hold it to my ear and listen for the sea’s roar. On clear days the heaps of conches with their pink and orange spirals shimmered. I watched children holding them to their ears, recognized the smiles coming to their faces while their parents waited silently, delighting in passing on an old secret.

My own parents had given that secret to me. What else had I been taught? Don’t take candy from strangers, don’t get into cars with strangers, don’t be afraid of policemen— So many don’ts. So many instructions, all of them parts of an old set of cautions handed down every generation the same way
Mother Goose
rhymes were repeated and the gift of the sea sounding conch was given.

Mother taught me the nursery rhymes, gave me a
A Child’s Garden of Verses,
read the Greek myths to me as well as the fairy tales; she’d shown me how to tie Kenyon’s shoes and zip up his jacket, how to make a bed and set a table. She’d shown me how to ride a bicycle too since my father was in the army by the time I got one. What about all the things I couldn’t remember being taught like how to hold a knife and fork or to dress myself? So much forgotten.…

Kenyon had just as many lessons too. What was keeping him so unhappy for so long? Was it my father’s disciplined rule, his demand for obedience and grades, not even good grades anymore just passing grades, that drove Kenyon to sullen withdrawal and near failure? How odd that my father could accommodate any amount of eccentricity in his friends but couldn’t allow the least deviation in his son. Yet he spent time with him, taught Kenyon to hunt, took him on fishing trips to the mountains, found him summer jobs, worried about him all the time.

Kenyon was smart enough and strangely patient with animals. He’d found a crow with a lame leg, bound it up, trained it to light on his arm, but once it was well, he wouldn’t return the bird to the cage he’d built. The raccoon he wanted to tame used the toilet bowls to wash his paws in. Mother couldn’t stand that. He taught our father’s bird-dog how to shake hands and to fetch the evening newspaper. The bird flew off, the raccoon went back to the river bank, the bird-dog, chasing the paper which landed in the street, was run over. Kenyon joined the track team, the only team he was ever on. He was good at running. He’d outrun the cops who came after him for flinging horse apples from the roof at people leaving the football stadium in Leon.

There was no knowing the sources of his wildness. Emmett could be just as wild … just as self-destructive, and in contrast to my father, Uncle Estes, like a lot of farmers and ranchers during the war, never left home. Boys would be boys, he must have said that or something like it as he rode off to check the cattle.

Neither he nor my father could talk about their feelings. My father tended to anesthetize his with alcohol. Estes took the distant path. Amiable, detached, he was there, and he wasn’t there. In that family Earlene was the one with feelings on the surface. Among the Chandlers, women cried and carried on all they pleased. They sorrowed with you and for you, and they comforted. Aunt Bertha, I guessed, was waiting, knowing she’d be needed.

Luis, except for his worry about his father, seemed more carefree. Certainly he was calmer than Emmett or my brother.

When I told him so, he laughed.

“No, I’ve just got a different set of problems.”

I’d begun to sense he was right, but—other than his father’s prolonged mourning—I couldn’t understand what they were, nor could I ask outright. It was too bold a question, too prying. I dawdled along the beach holding my sandals in my hand sighing over things that couldn’t be said. There were mysteries everyone carried with them, and whatever Luis’s were, they remained his.

Standing on top of the seawall by the souvenir shop, I stared at the swimmers and sunbathers spread out on the gray-brown sand below. No cars were allowed on this part of the beach. Umbrellas and floats had to be rented. Cold drinks could be bought from vendors. People arrived with nothing on but bathing suits, sandals, and shirts. Most carried towels, lotions, books, sunglasses. Down on West Beach where cars were allowed some families planted poles, erected tents, and, when everything had been unlocked and put in place, recreated houses without walls where their dogs ran gleefully in and out. Whether they went to little trouble or a lot everybody got tanned or sunburned during the day and went home with a little sand in their shoes. They were all unknown, unnamed to me, and in that private yet public place, to each other, and all of them were playing peaceably at the water’s edge, or so it appeared from the top of the seawall.

A little boy dressed in blue shorts and a red striped shirt ran in front of me pushing a stroller.

“Wait, Henry!” called a young woman in a white uniform behind him.

He waited till she caught up with him then climbed in the stroller backward so he was facing her.

I laughed. I could stand on top of walls, lean over balconies, look out of towers, but I couldn’t remain at a distance long. There was always something, or someone who caught my eye; a woman passing by in a yellow hat so large it flapped around her face, a boy whistling a tune I recognized. Even the most naked of bathers had some distinguishing mark; an old lady going in the water wearing her pearls just as Bertha wore hers when she went swimming because, she maintained, it was good for them to return to their natural element, a man whose eyebrows met in the middle of his forehead, a small girl about nine proudly wearing a new two-piece swim suit although she had no reason to wear anything on top. I saw them all and wondered about them as I would probably wonder about strangers the rest of my life.

Luis found me there. Bertha had told him she thought I was at the beach, so he’d come to search for me.

“What are you doing here this late in the day? Don’t you know you’re too young and tender to stay out in the sun?” He smiled as he repeated the phrase used by the old guard we’d seen at the wharves.

It was as if we’d spent all the days before together. I noticed he usually reacted this way. Absences were barely acknowledged, excuses seldom made. Life flowed on; he and his friends would eventually catch up. Then everything would go on as it had before. Luis might sometimes say he missed me, but the fact that I was present was more important.

Early one morning Leslie came by with an extra bike she’d borrowed on a carrier with hers. We went riding west toward San Luis Pass, past the farms, past a couple of old camps on our right, a few beach houses on our left. She stopped at the road to Luis’s.

“You want to go down and see him?”

“No. He paints a lot at night, sleeps late most mornings. It’s only nine now.”

“You like him, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Everybody seems to.”

I sensed she was being careful not to say too much. She was looking directly at me, her eyes on my face, so I admitted I didn’t know about him, not yet.

“The thing is— Nobody really knows him since he’s only here in the summers, and he spends so much time by himself or with his father—”

“I met him the other night at the Balinese. He can’t seem to give up his grief, can he?”

“I guess. Everybody just watches him gamble. That’s what he can’t give up. It’s strange. People here— Here everybody bets on horses maybe, plays the slots a little. There’s always a poker game going on. Nobody plays like he does.
Even the Maceos have tried to discourage him.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No. It’s the truth. My father told my brother they talked to him.”