The Drowning House (38 page)

I have a biography, an official history of my own. It doesn’t mention my family or the Island, and when I read it, it seems to me like an account of someone else’s life. I have a new agent too, a young woman with spiky hair who looks at me as if I frighten her and never calls me anything but
Ms. Porterfield
. Jules went to prison when it was discovered that he had appropriated several unsold paintings from an artist’s studio. Security cameras in the building showed him entering and leaving not once, as he had claimed, but twice. One day, during the trial, as he stood on the courthouse steps with his lawyer, he called me over and asked if I wanted to take a photo. I said yes. “Good girl,” he responded. “Always the pro.”

Eleanor never had to face a trial. A grand jury ruled that Will’s death was accidental. On the Island, it was the only possible outcome. After Will’s funeral, Eleanor received the guests who came to express their sympathy at the Carraday house. In a black silk dress, her hair neatly arranged, she presided over the food and drink in the dining room. Mary Liz sat in the conservatory as usual. It was very much an Island event.

And for a time Eleanor remained part of Will’s former circle. Then gradually that tide went out, and she was left to herself. The Carraday house now belongs to the Historical Society and is open daily for tours. I think about the lines of visitors moving through the rooms and up the stairs, fanning themselves with colorful brochures, about how different the experience must be without Will there to greet them, to press their hands and lead them on, envious and trusting.

I wonder if Eleanor even sees the crowds gathered in what used to be Will’s rose garden. Her view is unobstructed. The hedge of oleander and the garden itself are gone, replaced by a wide walkway and a parking lot outlined with red reflective disks. The property teeters on the edge of shabby. The tourist season is short. There is a gift shop in the garage.

My mother possesses her own kind of certainty. I don’t believe regret is in her emotional vocabulary. Perhaps the closest she ever came was the clothes, Frankie’s and mine, hanging in her closet, reminders of a time when she still believed she and Will might have a life of their own together. I think about those years. I see her bedroom, the glowing lamp, the silver-topped jars laid out in its light. The flowers she appropriated. It still surprises me that passion leaves behind no visible trace.

Frankie used to call Eleanor selfish. Now the word she uses is
unnatural
. As if even she has to concede that the scale of an obsession counts for something. We ate dinner together recently when she came to the city for a medical conference. In her forties, Frankie has become the mother of twin boys. I think being the only woman in the family has changed her. Something has. She laughs easily, she has an
assurance that has nothing to do with professional success. I suppose what I am trying to say is that she is happy.

“Show me,” I said, as we sat together comfortably under a red paper lantern. And she got the snapshots out, a whole expanding plastic file. The two boys appeared together in every image, as though, after so much anxious waiting, their doubleness still amazed and delighted her. Two redheads in the sandbox, in the pool. She has answered her own question.
Is that what parents do?

“Did you get the things I sent for their birthday?” I asked.

“You spoil them,” she said, but her voice was tender. She sounded like a woman in love.

I see her joy and I pray that the charm will last, that she will never wake and listen for a cry that doesn’t come, or stumble in the dark to an empty bedroom, or bend down, aching, to feel for a remembered wisp of breath.

When I think of Bailey, I remember that last year before the ad campaign, how she loved to run. It seemed she was always running—sliding on the wood floor, on the linoleum, dodging the furniture. At the grocery store, dashing ahead of me along the aisle. On the street, vanishing around a corner. Circling back to reassure me. She will always be a little ahead of me now, but I tell myself that she is there, just out of sight for a moment. That one day I will catch up.

Frankie and Stephen sold their condominium. Of our house and the Island, Frankie says she has put it all behind her, as if the experiences of those years, the nights we spent in our shared room, could be gathered together and placed here or there like the contents of a box. Like the boxes Harriet Kinkaid gave away. So the work of remembering has passed to me. Along with the stories, mine and Stella’s.

I could claim to have discovered what Harriet didn’t tell me in the photos I found, in the notebook and the album that I left hidden. But the truth is, it was there all along, in the Carradays’ drawing room, for anyone to see. Henry Durand knew what had happened to Stella, but he was young and an outsider. There was no one he could confide in. So he told the story in the only way possible. It was Henry, I’m sure, who persuaded Ward Carraday to commission the relief portrait.
Who set the image of Stella between the carved, hairy legs of a goat on the fireplace mantel.

I imagine that Ward Carraday drew the line at the broken pitcher, that he wanted it new and intact. Why would a man like him pay for an image of something broken? Henry Durand had to find another way to represent Stella’s lost innocence. So he instructed the artist to add the lilies, symbols of purity, crushed at her feet.

His audience knew Ward Carraday’s reputation. And they knew the language of flowers. Henry Durand must have hoped they would understand and sympathize when he and Stella ran away together. But he didn’t know the Island. Or Ward Carraday. Of course she was brought back.

I was more fortunate. I understand that I have Eleanor to thank for that.

Mary Liz died not long after Will. It may have been coincidence, coming so soon after the shooting. Or it may have been one more proof of the mysteriousness of marriage, evidence that despite all I knew and observed, she and Will were bound in some way I would never understand.

I went into a bookstore yesterday. As I was checking out, the clerk asked me if I’d found everything I wanted, and I thought of Will, of the way his questions always seemed to mean more than other people’s. What I thought next was
I don’t know what I want until I see it
. See it and seize it, with my Leica. No comforting vision like my grandmother’s guides me.

But there are images burned into my retina. Patterns. Bars of light and shade through old broken blinds, squares of carpeted floor. The black banding on a gull feather, a freckled hand holding a feather. The hands of the man I called my father.

He looked to history to explain things, to provide a precedent. Did he tell himself that my history, the fact that I was not his child, justified the things he did to me? He talked about facts and the truth, while he rearranged both to suit himself. In the end, for all his protests, he was an Islander.

Growing up, Frankie tried to know him. I tried too, for a time, to
find a way into his world. Neither of us ever discovered the thought, the elusive act of imagination, that could show us the way or explain him to us.

I believe I know what Patrick was doing at Saint Vincent de Paul. Not long after I left Galveston for the last time, the
Daily News
ran a small article saying that Father James McAvity had been recalled from the parish and disciplined for creating a “situation” with the INS. Of course I can’t be sure. The success of what they did—they would have called it providing sanctuary—depended on secrecy, something Patrick enjoyed.

Most people in Galveston probably still think of Patrick as an idle drunk who was bound to kill himself in a car sooner or later. But I believe Will knew what he was doing. That the knowledge was part of the complicated system of moral reckoning he used to justify to himself his different roles.

Eighteen months later, on a winter morning before daybreak, Patrick’s car went off the Galveston causeway. The rising sun would have melted the thin coat of ice in a couple of hours. But he couldn’t wait.

Ty called me once after he left the Island. More than a year had passed; whatever professional stature he might have lost on the Island, he seemed to have regained. His voice was the voice of a banker I didn’t know very well, and our conversation was strained. He said, “I shouldn’t have told you.”

“That wouldn’t have stopped it happening. You were right. About everything.”

“I hope you know I don’t take any pleasure in it.”

Ty’s prediction came true. Whatever was supposed to result from Will’s last meeting, the outcome that would have resolved everything, or at least postponed the inevitable, never arrived. There was a civil judgment, a federal investigation. I saw the headlines, but I didn’t read more. The process felt unstoppable, unavoidable, like the largest storm you can imagine, and in its way as necessary.

Every so often I get a postcard from Faline. The last one was a picture of an old-fashioned general store with a couple of pickups parked out front. The caption read,
DOWNTOWN ACACIA
. On the back
she wrote, “Does it look to you like we need a golf course?” I always write back. Sometimes I send photos. They are worth a lot of money now, and I’m glad to have someone to give them to.

I don’t think about the Island. Except when I’ve been too much alone. Or when I’ve attended an opening and listened to people talk and laugh. Or when I’ve walked for hours with my Leica under my jacket. When a sudden gust of hot air from a grate takes me by surprise, or the mist-covered moon appears, close and glowing, between two buildings.

Then I recall the summer nights, the heat that lay along the Island like another stretched-out body, the old-house air, the taste of damp wood and salt and aged lacquer in my throat. And it confronts me, the fact I can’t escape. That air with its distinctive aftertaste oxygenated my blood, gave me breath.

In dreams I draw the salt breeze into my lungs, and my heart hums in my chest, the beats so quick they run together. I feel my bones grow lighter and I spread my arms.

I understand the wind in a new way, sensing its contours. Above the shaggy crowns of the palms, my field of vision explodes, and I see everything, all at once—the beaches and the brick-paved streets, the trash cans in the alley, the pointed spire of a church. A man watching. He stands in the yard behind his house, a white house with a porch. He raises one arm as if to stop me.

But I settle into a current and ride it higher, an ordinary bird, not one anybody would notice. I wing past the windows of the rooms where children play and read and fight and at night sleep undisturbed, to the water, the brown sand, the long lines of foam. I rise easily past the haze, into the blue, the sweet beguiling blue, that promises everything.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the generous friends who read and commented on early versions of this novel: Nisi Hamilton, Peggy Rhoads, and Marie Seidl. I owe a special debt of gratitude to those who persisted through multiple drafts: Faye Jones, Gail Siegel, and Lauren Silberman. I’m grateful also to Farnoosh Moshiri and the members of the Inprint Writing Workshop who read and commented on two chapters.

Photographer Mary Day Long kindly answered technical questions and reviewed the passages related to photography. Any errors that remain are my responsibility. Peggy Bush, who not only read several versions of the manuscript but also speared fish while I took notes, deserves a trophy.

Finally, my deepest appreciation goes to my daughters, Genevra and Francesca, the lights of my life, who have contributed in so many ways; to Nan Talese, the best of the best; to Ronit Feldman, wise beyond her years; to the stellar marketing and publicity team at Doubleday; and to my extraordinary agent, Mollie Glick.

***

Anyone interested in learning about Galveston’s colorful past must begin with David McComb’s
Galveston: A History
(University of Texas Press, 1986) and Gary Cartwright’s
Galveston, A History of the Island
(Atheneum, 1991). First-person accounts of the Great Hurricane and its aftermath can be found in
Through a Night of Horrors: Voices from the Galveston Storm
, edited by Casey Edward Greene and Shelly Henley Kelley (Texas A&M University Press, 2000).

The Galveston That Was
(MacMillan, 1966), by Howard Barnstone, features Henri Cartier-Bresson’s images of the island, including the old woman in the boarding house. She is not identified.

About the Author

Elizabeth Black was born and raised in Providence, Rhode Island, and now lives in Houston, Texas. The Drowning House is her first novel.

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