Galveston (69 page)

“Oh, I didn't know that. How sad. No wonder she felt compelled to leave. There was really nothing left for her then, was there?”

James and I exchanged glances, both realizing Charles's financial help to the Garrets must have continued beyond his death, and only run out in the summer of 1899.

“Apparently not,” said James. “Well, we'll go now and try to find Nick. We've taken up enough of your time.”

“Oh, I was hoping you'd stay long enough to meet my husband, Bill, maybe have a light dinner with us—leftover turkey. We have tons of it.”

“It's very kind of you,” I said, “but I've waited so long, I'm anxious to get as far with this today as possible.”

“Of course, dear, I understand. I admire you for striking out this way. If your mother had a latent trait of daring that only came to the surface for a short time, you've apparently inherited it, and it is a pretty good legacy to my way of thinking. I wish you luck.”

“You know, her father had more than his share of daring,” said James.

“Yes, I didn't know him, but he must have. Does she remind you of Serena, James?”

“Some, yes. I can see him in her too, though.”

“Yes. She is Serena around the eyes a little, the height, the bone structure. Well, let me know what you learn, won't you? I'll be anxious to hear. And, by the way, we'll be moving to Houston after the first of the year. If you wind up back there, Willa, do let me know. Bill's in warehousing—light and heavy commodities—and he's been negotiating for space along the Houston ship channel. As a matter of fact, that's where we were till yesterday. As soon as the deal is set, we'll be off. There's no future here for that sort of business, if one reads the handwriting on the wall.”

“So I understand,” said James. “Will you regret leaving here?”

“A little. When I was younger, I found the island confining, archaic, you know, all those things that cause impatience in youth. Now I find it peaceful, and perfect for raising children. A person changes with the years …

“By the way, when anyone discusses our leaving, I begin to think of the horrendous job of packing, and I just remembered something I want Willa to have … it'll save me from having to take it. Just a minute.”

She disappeared up the stairs, and came back right away, bearing a small porcelain music box with a dancer on top.

“This is a gift meant for Serena that summer. I'd told her about it in a letter, and was going to give it to her when we returned. She was such a graceful dancer, you know, and as soon as I laid eyes on this in a shop in Italy, I knew she must have it. My daughter has begged me for it time and time again, but somehow I didn't want to part with it, even for her. Here, let's wind it up … there.”

The “Blue Danube Waltz” began, the dancer turned round and round on tiptoe. We all stood there watching, as though expecting the toy to become my mother in the flesh, until finally it wound down and its movement was stilled.

“You must have always had hopes she lived,” I said, taking it from Marybeth.

“I guess I did. Always was an eternal optimist, I suppose,” she said, and her eyes were shining with unspent tears.

“We'll let you know as soon as we learn anything,” said James. “Thank you again for being so kind. You know, we tried to trace your father first, before I located your brother.”

“My parents are dead. After the 1900 storm we moved up closer to Broadway, and that's where they lived out their lives.”

“That beautiful beach place then, the big house, destroyed along with the rest?”

“Obliterated. The pier, bathhouse, everything. We were one of the families who took refuge at the Gresham house up on Broadway. Gresham and my father were acquainted, you know.”

“I'm sorry about your house. I'd have enjoyed seeing it again.”

“Well, at least it taught me a good lesson. Before that storm I thought myself quite invulnerable to bad luck. Guess everyone has to learn that error sooner or later.”

“Yes, I suppose they do. Well then, good day. Merry Christmas.”

As we drove away James said, “We can go by Trinity, though I doubt anyone will be around on Christmas Day. Confound it, we should have found out were he lived before I let him off the phone. Darned inefficient of me.”

“I'll bet that's the only inefficient thing you ever did.”

This exchange set us both giggling as we traveled the short blocks between Marybeth Tracy's house and the gothic reaches of brown brick known as Trinity Church.

There was a lone car out front, and James remarked, “If anyone is here on Christmas, by gosh, it would be Nick. I'll try the door.”

As he walked up I noticed the sky beginning to change. It was taking on that leaden look like the sky in Grady, and I remembered then it had felt chillier as we left Marybeth's than when we arrived. The palm trees around the church were fluttering in the more and more insistent Gulf breeze.

James was pecking the outside of the car window. “Come on in, I just poked my head in and heard organ sounds. It's got to be Nick.”

I walked with him up to the big doors, almost certain this, too, would be a dead end.

The inside of Trinity Church was dark, not at all cheerful though banked with candles and flowers of the season. Why, I wondered, were all Episcopal churches so dark? We walked up into the chancel and waited for Nick to finish his hymn playing. He looked much as I had expected, closely cropped graying hair, rimless glasses, thin lips, pale skin. He was thoroughly engrossed, and didn't realize we were around until he'd stopped to make a pencil mark on the music.

“Excuse me,” said James. “Nick Weaver?”

“Oh, you startled me. Yes, may I be of some service?”

“It's me, James Byron.”

“Oh.”

Then he looked at me and something registered in his eyes.

“This is Willa. We'd hoped you might be free to talk with us. We're still trying to find out who might have helped Serena that day of the fire, and maybe the three of us could put our heads together and—”

“I've already told you my feelings.”

“I beg your most humble pardon,” I said, and pulled out the picture of the Garrets. “If I am indeed a fraud, where would I have managed to pick this up? I also have my mother's dancing shoes and some other things of hers. I can show it all to you if you wish.”

He paused for some moments, then closed his hymn book. “All right, then. We'll talk, if we must. There's a diner around the corner, much more appropriate for conversations of this type than the sanctuary. I'll just get my coat.”

When the steaming coffee had been set before us, James proceeded to work on Nick Weaver in his thorough manner. “I think you know something, but aren't telling. Now, why? Would you deny this girl a chance to know her real mother?”

“Your mother is dead.”

He'd said it so simply, offhandedly as though it didn't matter. I felt as though someone had just dealt me a deathblow with a boxcar full of cotton balls.

James glared at Nick across the table. “Look here, do you still insist she died the day of the fire?”

“Not at all. She lived quite a time after that. I saved her, if you must know.”

Chapter 14

It was stuffy in the diner. My head had begun to ache. “For God's sake, why didn't you tell us on the phone?” I asked.

“I would have been doing you no favor. Your mother was not the woman most people believed.”

“I know more about my mother than you think. I'll appreciate your just telling me the truth now, and leaving your opinions out.”

“She came to me, at my house while I was teaching lessons that day, driving a rig like a maniac. I saw her from the window as she pulled up, and got rid of the students through a back door, before they saw her.”

James cleared his throat and asked timidly, “Was she badly burned?” and I made a tight fist and silently uttered the first honest prayer of my life.

“No. Mostly her hands, from covering her face, but nothing that wouldn't heal with time. But she looked a mess—her hair all askew, her clothes wrinkled, face dirty. I asked her what in the world had happened, but she couldn't seem to talk … just shook her head. First thing, I dressed the burns.

“While I was wrapping her hands, she looked up at me like a little child and said, ‘It's all over, everything's ruined. You've got to help me get away from here.' She admitted she didn't deserve my help, but she said she had no one else to turn to.

“The girl was near hysteria, and I brewed her some tea to get her calmed down. Then she told me the whole sordid story of her and Roman and their little plan to run away, then of the fire in the Seaside Pavilion and how she escaped through the stage door they'd always used.”

“Stage door?” James repeated.

“Yes. Their own private door, from what she said.”

“But her shoe heel was caught—”

“No, it wasn't. She faked that—it was a quick decision, she told me. She realized all at once it would simplify matters all around if everyone thought her dead … and she could hardly have taken you with her. As soon as she was satisfied of your safety, she exited through the stage door and fled.”

“I see. Then where did you take her?”

“Well, I'll tell you right quick, I came very near going for her father.”

“You would,” I said.

“I should have. But she cried, carried on something awful. I was really crazy about her, stupid and foolish as I was. I finally acquiesced and got both of us a connection to Ohio, where my parents lived. I called for a replacement at the organ at the church, and left word for Father Garret my mother was ill and I had to go home immediately. I don't know whether he lived long enough to receive that message. I suppose he did. I've always felt guilty for lying to him.

“We left that night. Nobody saw us. I still harbored a notion she might marry me if I did this thing for her, and straighten up into the girl I'd known before she got fouled up … I don't give up on people easily, you know. I took care of her until you were born. We lived at my parents'. I wrote in a resignation to St. Christopher's and took a position up there in Cleveland at a little church.

“Nothing would do but she have her child. What she would do after that was not discussed much. I tried to get her to give you up for adoption, to sign papers before you were born, but she wouldn't hear of it, nor would she consent to marry me. She just kept saying, ‘After the baby's born we can talk about it, but please now, just let me alone.'

“You can imagine my parents through all this. My mother told friends we had a boarder, and Serena lived in an upstairs room, seldom coming down as she got bigger and bigger. It was unfair enough to have pressed her on them, but it would have been unforgivable to have let anyone see her in her condition. Why, it would have set tongues wagging … my parents would have never lived it down.”

I was not interested in what his parents thought of my mother. What kept running through my mind was all the ways she proved she'd loved me, how I was first choice in her heart, above everything. She would even degrade herself by becoming a virtual prisoner in another's home, who had no real sympathy or love for her at all …

“What then,” James said now, “after Willa was born?”

“There was no ‘after.' She died giving birth to Willa.”

He'd done it again, simply, offhandedly, his statement colliding head on with my flow of thought. I stood up. “Did you give her the best care available; was everything done in her behalf? Did you have some quack come to deliver her because you were ashamed?”

Nick stared at me coldly. “Sit down, young lady, and don't make a scene. You forget, I owed her nothing. She was given every aid possible, I assure you, but she wasn't strong any more. She'd grown thinner and paler from the time we left Galveston, had been ill off and on all that winter.”

“Her heart was broken,” said James pensively. “That's what killed her.”

“Maybe so, if you can imagine anyone's heart being broken over a scoundrel like that fellow she'd taken up with. You know, I did some checking on him after I got back home. Seeing him in Galveston that summer, I was convinced I'd seen him somewhere before. Well, I couldn't get it out of my mind, though I couldn't remember where I'd seen him. I even went to one of the shows at the Seaside Pavilion, just to get a look at him again.

“Finally I had my curiosity satisfied, back in Cleveland. A friend of mine came by one night when he was in town. He'd been at that seminar in St. Louis I'd attended so long ago. We got to talking, and he brought up the subject of the Landauer scandal—it was all over the papers during that seminar.

“As soon as he mentioned it, I knew that was where I'd seen Roman Cruz. Of course, he didn't go by Roman then, and that was what threw me. He went by the name of Roland Cruz—God alone knows which name was for real. Anyway, he was a member of the symphony orchestra in St. Louis, and became involved in a love affair with the wife of the chief symphony patron—Margaret Landauer.

“Boy, when it came to light there were fireworks. Her husband divorced her, and Roman was kicked out of the symphony, and just about run out of town on a rail. Landauer—the husband—was very wealthy, a powerful man in St. Louis. I heard he told Roman Cruz in no uncertain terms to get out of St. Louis, and never come back.”

“Did you tell my mother, when you found out?”

“I certainly did. Wanted to set her straight on him once and for all. But it did no good, of course. She just said she'd never held his past against him, and wasn't about to at that point, even if I was right about it being her Roman, which wasn't for sure anyway. She was impossible to reason with, the further along she got …”

“Go on then,” said James. “You must have given Willa to a state agency in Ohio. Which one?”