Uncertain Ground Read online

  “Do you really mind going?” I asked Emmett when we’d taken seats in the diner.

  “No. Doris will be there when I get back. The funny thing is, Cousin, we’re on our way to Sin City.”

  I laughed. He sounded so much like he’d just finished a long trail drive and was looking forward to liberty. Post Office Street in Galveston was well known as the biggest red light district in Texas. There you could buy mixed drinks across the bar when people in the rest of the state were carrying their whisky bottles around in obvious brown paper sacks and joining spurious private clubs in order to drink cocktails away from home. Gambling was another public pleasure. The whole state had evidently agreed that Galveston could be the one open city.

  “They’ve got slot machines everywhere, and I’ve already got plenty of change,” said Emmett. He raised his glass of water. “Here’s to a fine time!”

  I raised a glass to meet his but as I drank from it I could barely pretend to agree. It seemed entirely unlikely that I’d stand much of a chance of steering Emmett away from Post Office Street, bars, and slot machines. On the other hand, I didn’t want to believe I was altogether responsible for him since Emmett was, I felt, already beyond anyone’s control.

  After lunch we spread out. Emmett was so big he could easily take up two seats. The Santa Fe carried wheat from Kansas, cotton from the high plains, and sulfur from towns on down the line, but only a few passengers that day. No one raised cotton around Leon or Temple any more, and not many people seemed to be on their way to the Gulf just then. Across the aisle from Emmett I watched him fall asleep calmed by the rhythm of the wheels clacking. I remained awake envying him his ease even if he was snoring. I’d taken the train back to Tennessee to visit my father’s relatives often in the summers. A book could usually overcome repetitious landscape, so I read my way through northeast Texas and most of Arkansas each time. Now I was headed southeast, and my accumulated worries, including how Emmett and I would get along, could be suspended by someone else’s story. But I let the book slide. The first time I went to Galveston kept coming to mind.

  We’d almost floated in. The moment we crossed the causeway linking the island to the mainland and hit Broadway, water began rising in the car floor. Dumped by a storm that had just passed over the island, water rocked around the floorboard. Kenyon and I sat together on the back seat, both of us scared, our feet tucked beneath us. He poked me in the ribs as the water sloshed against the car’s doors. I poked him back. Neither one of us said a word, nor did our father. But he would. I could feel his temper rising like the water. Our mother smiled at us over the back of the seat.

  “I thought you said there was a sea-wall here, Martha.” Our father’s voice, though terse, was clearly accusing.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “Galveston floods so easy. It’ll go down in a little while.”

  I looked out the window to an old cemetery where graves, sheathed in stone, had been raised above ground. Gray water lapped against their marble sides so they seemed to rock like awkward boats in an uneasy harbor. All the world was asway. I nudged Kenyon who made an awful face by opening his mouth, turning his lips down on both sides, and widening his eyes. His pantomime terror mirrored our fears and mocked them. The graves, I noticed, sat higher than we did.

  “I didn’t know it was going to rain. Did you, Will?” Our mother’s voice was patient yet firm. He could blame her if he pleased, but the weather was not her fault. After all the seawall was for seawater. This was plain old rain.

  I could remember only a little about that first trip. The rain did stop before we got to the Mcleans’ house. Sun broke through while we were still driving down Broadway where the center strip was covered with pink oleanders, glistening with water. We turned the corner by a white towered multidomed Catholic Church that looked, I first thought, like something out of the Arabian Nights. Once we were off the boulevard the rain subsided. Down the street a few blocks from the church was the Mclean house.

  Dazzling white, two-story frame—the shingles were added later—its long green shutters covered the downstairs windows keeping the interior dark and cool, protecting those who lived there and keeping their secrets. One tall palm, that postcard emblem of sunny tropical places, stood on the corner. Sitting on top of low brick piers, the house was supported also by ships’ timbers, the concealed reminder of its builder, Mowrey Mclean’s father, a Scottish sea captain. It had weathered high winds, floods, hurricanes and the 1900 storm.

  There was a one-story frame house in need of a coat of paint next door; it was so covered by oleanders that the need wasn’t too evident. Across the street another much larger house with a set of four columns, also surrounded by shrubbery and palms, showed its weather worn boards more obviously. That was the way Galveston neighborhoods in the older part of town looked, a surface mixture of rich and poor, but just as often, I supposed, of enterprise and negligence, of diligence and procrastination. People could be careless about paint in Galveston, partially because salt air attacked everything indiscriminately, partially because individuality was understood in this seaport city in some way it wasn’t in a small town.

  The first visit was brief, only a weekend. What I kept of it mainly was memories of the rain, the house, a few parts of its interior and the novelty of walking five blocks to the beach with Kenyon, Mother, and my aunt Bertha—fat, cheerful, middle-aged, her olive skin already quite wrinkled, not pretty but lively. Five years older than Mother, her good humor matched her inclination toward bossiness. Both she and Mother were wearing old saggy bathing suits, which they laughed about saying they belonged to “the rough stone ages.” They had both bought their suits years before the war began. That was the way everyone divided time then, before and after the war and no one asked which war.

  We made that trip almost a year after we’d moved to Texas. Now, seven years later I was twenty, getting ready to begin my sophomore year in college. For a month I would be living with two people I didn’t really know. As for Emmett, I barely knew him either. Well, I’d become accustomed to living with strangers before. At school I’d had to get to know roommates, and of course, I wouldn’t be rooming with Emmett.

  Since late afternoon, we’d been staring out at the flat green coastal plain, surrounding the tracks. Now and then we saw white egrets balanced on cattle backs or a lone heron fishing. Even before the train crossed the railroad bridge over the bay, before smelling salt air and glimpsing the undersides of gulls flying, before the porter came through our car almost singing Gal-ves-ton, I pictured the Mclean house waiting for us.

  Chapter Two

  Two days after we arrived, after I’d spent half a morning strolling around the neighborhood and an hour writing a long letter to Tony Gregory, I wandered into the living room of the Mclean house where no one ever seemed to go. On the dining room wall behind me were two separately framed birds’ nests where stuffed bluebirds hovered over tiny powdery white eggs in nests, one bird and three eggs per nest, a strange precision. Why would anyone want to arrest that particular moment under glass twice? There was nothing like those birds in any of the other family houses. My Grandmother Henderson’s living room in Nashville almost rattled with carved walnut leaves. There were some sort of birds’ talons on her bathtubs, but there were no stuffed birds. As far as I could tell, useless things appealed to Bertha. Out in the hall a hat rack and umbrella stand held five hats nobody wore, and although I’d been told it rained often in the afternoons, there were no umbrellas.

  In the living room marble-topped tables and fat globular oil lamps, now converted to electricity, crowded the spaces between chairs, couch, and rectangular patches of oriental rugs. Against one wall stood a secretary with top shelves full of narrow leather-bound books behind glass. The spines were upright, their gilt letters unblemished; apparently neither Aunt Bertha nor Uncle Mowrey nor any of the Mcleans preceding them had ever touched a one. They were there obviously because they fit the shelves. The titles were familiar; The Poetry of Robert Burns,
Three Plays, Wm. Shakespeare, The Lady of the Lake, Scott, the same kind of well respected unread books that everybody in their generation seemed to have. A figure of a dog of mystifying breed, something that could have been an ashtray shaped like a pair of hands with empty white palms uplifted, roses made of paper and cotton somewhere in Mexico, and a cut-glass bowl of terribly fake red cherries were scattered about the room.

  All these things seemed to have particular places as if permanence might bring order to the whole assortment. I looked down at three tightly draped buxom ladies who supported a marble table top on their heads and laughed. The ladies were, at least, useful. Like my Tennessee grandmother, the Mcleans accumulated things and apparently never rid themselves of any object they ever owned no matter whether they had bought or inherited it.

  I jumped when Aunt Bertha stuck her head in the doorway, the rest of her almost disembodied in the dark hall.

  “What are you doing in there?”

  It wasn’t an unfriendly question; she was simply curious.

  “Just looking. You’ve got a lot of antiques.”

  “Mostly Mother Mclean’s passed down to Mowrey with the house. You like antiques?”

  I didn’t. I longed for the spare lines of modern Scandinavian design, for light, not for rooms darkened to save Victorian furniture’s patina and the oriental rugs’ colors. I wanted open, uncurtained windows I could see the world through.

  “Mother does.” I said.

  “But you?”

  “Some. I’m used to them.”

  She didn’t press further. “I’m going upstairs for a nap. Summer afternoons make me drowsy.”

  I’d been surprised by her cheerful reference to Mother Mclean. Mother thought of her otherwise. “Mean … penny pinching. She wouldn’t pay for a maid when she could have well afforded to, and she kept Bertha working in that house like she was a slave.” Once free of her mother-in-law, Bertha didn’t seem to mind keeping her furniture. Perhaps she’d looked after the household so long everything seemed like her own by the time the old lady died.

  I eyed the copper colored chandelier with its daffodil shaped shades reflected in a long gilt-framed mirror that faintly distorted images. Wary of seeing myself pulled out of shape in the darkened room, I kept away from the mirror. It wasn’t like a fun house mirror, although I didn’t like the way they turned people into freaks either. Aunt Bertha’s mirror pushed eyes further up into foreheads, elongated noses. Remembering my first visit’s reflection, I knew it would nudge familiar features vaguely askew and this was more threatening than a fun house mirror; it merely hinted at the grotesque and provoked fear of what else might be lurking. Dreading that possibility, I began to search for something more reassuring.

  Since we’d lived in Nashville near relatives, their things had become so familiar I’d almost stopped seeing them, but the houses of my Texas kin held sets of clues, suggestions about unknown people with unknown characteristics. Aunt Earlene, I’d noticed seemed to revere Jensen silver, or anything else she might buy at Neiman-Marcus. Like Mother and Aunt Bertha, she prized antiques. Uncle Estes who had little interest in objects other than guns and saddles, did like old straight chairs with cowhide seats. He was permitted to keep one in the kitchen.

  Keeping my back to Bertha’s mirror, I picked up a book of pictures of French cathedrals. There was the angel I liked, the smiling angel of Rheims, holding stone robes so lightly that they seemed made of silk, making a joyful proclamation: Catholicism is the true religion. I’d given the book to Aunt Bertha and Uncle Mowrey for Christmas. Had they ever done anything more than idly turn pages as I was doing? For most of Mother’s family, newspapers were enough. She and Earlene read house magazines, the big glossy ones with pictures of totally clean, totally unobtainable rooms where everything matched beautifully or clashed stylishly, a perfection neither one of them really hoped to achieve. Perhaps they just liked knowing such rooms existed somewhere. Estes thumbed through Time occasionally. None of them read like my father, Kenyon, and I. All of us lived with our noses in books. My father swore he couldn’t go to sleep without reading something first. Next to us, Bertha hardly read at all. That was one reason I’d chosen a picture book—that and the Catholicism. The Chandlers were Methodists except for Bertha who’d become a Catholic when she married.

  “Scotch Catholics, all the Mcleans were,” Mother said. “Mama nearly died when they married.”

  I knew about religious conflicts in the South. I hadn’t thought they had moved to Texas. According to Mother when she was a girl, Granny Chandler hadn’t approved of drinking, dancing, card playing, and Catholicism. I felt she had a weak sense of sin. What about killing and rape and dropping atom bombs?

  Granny must have given up on Mother since she and my father drank at home, in other people’s houses, at the Ft. Hood’s Officer’s Club where they also danced. Card playing was definitely acceptable. Women met with others at bridge clubs all over town. As for Catholicism, in Leon it was generally left to a few Anglos and the Mexican population. A small group of them clustered around an equally small church on the east highway near the outskirts of town.

  I had never gone inside that church. I doubted anybody else I knew had either.

  Granny Chandler, a pleasant, round-faced lady in her seventies, stayed in Mullin safely removed from the wickedness of Galveston or Leon. She’d been a frontier sort of woman, one who lived in a place not really ready for settlement till after the Civil War. The Comanches had roamed freely around there, a fact Emmett told me with great pleasure. He was so dark-skinned he might have been part Indian himself.

  Though Granny had forbidden Aunt Bertha to join the church, the rest of the family, both her brothers and her sister, seemed to ignore the Mcleans’ religion. Amazed at the strength of old prejudices, I remained curious. I could, I suppose, ask her how she felt about becoming a Catholic; however, I was too unsure about how she’d react, and I would never have waked up anybody to ask such a question. She was napping by now beneath a dried palm cross tacked on the wall above her headboard. Even if she were given to abrupt questions herself, she’d be too upset over losing her nap to give a clear answer. I could imagine her rising up hollering, sitting straight up in bed, a plump middle-aged woman multiplied nine times by triple mirrors on each of the three dressers stationed around the room. Across from her bedstead was Uncle Mowrey’s.

  She slept happily surrounded by her nest of dressers, a chair, and a small daybed. Too small for me or for Emmett—unused except as a catchall for Bertha’s treasures—the daybed was covered with bits of frayed tapestry that might become pillow covers if she ever got around to making them, boxes of last year’s Christmas decorations, a clutter of costume jewelry, and an amber rosary that had been blessed by the pope.

  “It got broken anyway,” Bertha sighed, then laughed.

  The day we arrived, she led us to our part of the bedroom, a double-sized space since the sliding doors which would have ordinarily made two bedrooms had been pushed wide open.

  I saw then that she meant for Emmett and me to sleep on the twin beds straight across from hers and Uncle Mowrey’s.

  “We all need the draft.” Bertha pointed to the tall front and back windows, the only one without curtains in the house.

  “You want us both here?” I was so surprised I asked out loud. I’d expected a room of my own. Why couldn’t Emmett have slept on the couch downstairs? That was the way Kenyon and I had slept when we first visited. Now Emmett had to have the only other bed in the house, one next to mine separated by a narrow strip of rug and Bertha’s supposed supervision. Uncle Mowrey, slightly deaf already, wouldn’t have heard an approaching bomb, and he was, I thought, generally so unnoticing he wouldn’t see somebody tap dancing naked in front of him.

  “Well, Celia, after all, you are cousins.” She smiled as if she had said the most ordinary thing.

  Emmett grinned, hung a few things in the closet, and dumped this suitcase under the bed. He’d been living out of it most
ly ever since. I’d emptied mine into one of the dressers and the closet. I wanted to slam the door when I finished, but Aunt Bertha was waiting on her side of the room so I didn’t. I was still unhappy in that bedroom with Emmett. I had to make sure he wasn’t around or go to the bathroom to dress and undress. And when I walked out, I had to make sure I had enough clothes on. At home I could wander around in a slip or pajamas. Not here. At the first sight of my blue-flower-sprigged shortie pajamas Emmett had given me a mock leer, just enough of one to let me know he was watching. When I added a robe, he stood by his bed wearing only a pair of drawstring pajama bottoms and laughed. Despising being made to feel too prim, I pulled the robe off and got the leer once more. When I got into bed, I turned my back on him. A flush broke over my neck and down my shoulders as if I were standing under a warm shower. I rolled over and threw my pillow at him. He wouldn’t give it back.

  “I’ll have to ask Aunt Bertha for another one,” I whispered.

  He laughed and tossed it toward me as if he’d planned to all along, and for that moment, I wasn’t an equal. I was only about ten-years-old and at the mercy of a slightly indulgent, much older boy.

  I needed a place to be by myself, a room with a door I could shut. Kenyon and I had shared a bedroom until I was six. Since then, except for the semesters away, I’d had a room of my own. Emmett and Uncle Mowrey both snored. So did Aunt Bertha sometimes. So did I maybe. I didn’t know. My roommates at the university hadn’t complained so far.

  We’d only been in Galveston two days. The first I spent mainly at the beach only four or five blocks away. I hadn’t minded being there alone with the low waves, the gray-brown sand, the huge light blue sky that turned almost white at noon. So much of my life I’d spent visiting old people’s houses—especially Grandmother Henderson’s in Tennessee during the war—waiting for time to pass, waiting for my father to come home, waiting to grow up. Granny Chandler’s in Mullin was the one we often visited on Sundays now. It smelled different, not of soot, old wood, lemon oil, and medicine I remembered. Granny Chandler’s smelled of gas fires and a whiff of decay I associated with talcum powder and earth. I wanted to escape all those smells, the darkness of those old houses, to be outside, to be alone.