Galveston (26 page)

“If I hadn't realized what had happened by that time, I would have known by the stricken look on your face and your mention of him when I saw you later that day and took you on a picnic. It was pretty evident.”

“Yet still you married me.”

“I knew Damon had a way with women, how he trifled with their feelings, how winning he could be. And I loved you a great deal.”

“And you didn't guess about the baby?”

“The possibility crossed my mind, I assure you, especially when I began to put two and two together about your stubbornness in seeing that new doctor, and in hiring Helga. But I couldn't be sure. Then when the baby arrived at eight months, I suspected again, even though Helga declared it to be early. She made such a point of it that I was even more suspicious. In fact, I was just about convinced it was Damon's child.”

“Is that why you were so anxious to see if I'd agree to name him after you?”

“Yes.”

“How have you lived with me all these years, knowing—?”

“The baby's death in the crib changed my mind. I thought maybe its coming into the world early kept it from being strong enough to survive. It certainly was logical, and I wanted so much to believe it was really mine and that you loved me. I guess I convinced myself all my old suspicions were groundless.”

“I see.” I looked out across Avenue L at the peaceful houses and the trees and bushes, just beginning to turn on their spring colors. The day looked so full of promise, almost as though it wanted no part of my desolation inside. “Are you going to leave me?”

He was silent a moment, took a puff on his pipe, then said, “No, Claire, I'm not.”

I went inside then, and up to bed, while Charles sat smoking his pipe on the porch. I was aware again of how tired I was. My body ached and felt sticky as I lay down upon the sheets and fell asleep. And then the dream began.

Charlie was in his crib, surrounded by a ring of fire, and I was trying to get to him, but my feet moved as though I were walking through molasses. I reached for him, my body bent almost double toward him, and then I realized something was holding me back. It was Charles, pulling me from him, laughing and kissing my neck. I awoke sometime later, lying in a pool of blood.

Almost nightly from that day I have dreamed the dream again, in one form or another. Once my baby was on a raft out in the sea and I was swimming to him, my legs held back by lead anchors that would, when I looked behind me, become Charles's hands around my ankles.

Once he was lost down in a bucket at the bottom of a well, and I was turning the handle, trying to pull him up. I turned with all my strength, then when I had him almost to the top, Charles cut the rope and the boy Charlie disappeared again down into the bottom of the well.

My days became a labyrinth of images and fantasies, when often I did not know whether I was awake or dreaming again. And one day Doctor Hutchisson came at Charles's urgent call, and after looking at me, told Charles, “Surgery, as soon as the bleeding spells let up again, and her strength returns,” then looked at my pleading eyes and said, “No, I'm sorry, no more children. It's out of the question.…”

I bled three times in that few weeks, each time in greater amounts and longer than the time before. And I kept taking the vile pain medicine, kept taking it …

Chapter 8

Black evening shadows now play on the houses and street, and next door Janet Garret's very private porch is dark as a tomb. Somewhere in the distance a lone dog gives a deep and mournful howl. Down the block in an upstairs window, someone lights a lamp.

Now let me tell you how it was this morning.

There was early rain, just enough to set the grass to glistening and the trees aweep. This was to be christening day for the child Donnie Garret. I awoke without the bleeding, yet the effects of the medicine still lingered far through the day.

Charles awoke before me and put the coffee on. We do not talk together very much lately, but practice at being polite, like actors in a play. We haven't discussed the mayor's race since the night Janet gave birth to Donnie, and I still believe Charles is keeping from me his true reasons for backing out. Yet I would not press him, for it is important that we keep up the front, leave our image of contentment intact, if for no other reason than if we did not, we should be laughed out of town as two frauds. Someday, I will find out the truth. One has only to await the proper moment.

Charles has reoccupied his old office, the one in which Ruth typed papers for him that summer long ago. He rarely mentions Pete Marlowe, and once, a week or two ago, when I passed him and Faye on the street, Pete tipped his hat politely but did not bother to speak, and the air was dry in the absence of the friendly southern drawl. Faye pretended not to have seen me at all.

Lucien Carter, I hear, is moving his business to Houston. He refused to run for mayor in Charles's place, and the incumbent, winning by a landslide vote over the other contenders, has been reinstated for another term in city hall.

We are back, then, to the kind of day-to-day existence we lived when first we moved to Avenue L, or at least we were, until this morning.

I was dizzy as I dressed, and knew I should not have taken that extra dose of the pain medicine last night before going to bed. Three cups of morning coffee had helped almost none in removing the haze brought on by it, and my ability to reason quickly was affected. One must understand this before I tell about Janet.

Rubin took Serena to Sunday school at nine o'clock, and Charles went along to serve as usher for early service. At half-past ten I left the house to fetch Janet along with the boy. Charles had left Gypsy hooked to the rig out front, and I was given responsibility for getting the new mother and son to the church by eleven. By then the sun shone brilliantly and felt good against my face, but did not clear the fog curled around my mind.

Ten steps down and twelve up.

On Janet's steps my foot caught in a sliver of wood dislodged from the rest and curled up, no doubt from having been wet and dry, and wet and dry, so many times. I looked at the piece of wood, and thought how easy it would be for someone to trip on it and fall down the stairs.

I rang the bell and Janet, with unusual promptness, appeared. “Come in, I'll just be a moment,” she said. After the sunshine outside, the house was dark. The Garret house has always been dark. Janet was cheerful this morning, wearing a white muslin dress trimmed in lace, a gift from Rubin especially for today's occasion. She wore white kid shoes and a white tulle veil as well. I had never seen her look better: more full of promise.

Janet stopped in front of the hall mirror to adjust her hair beneath the veil. “Listen to Donnie cooing there in the crib,” she said. “I think he wants his Aunt Claire to hold him.”

I walked to the crib and picked up the child, the first time since the night he was born. His face no longer reminded me of the face of my son Charlie. He was changing already, would look like her and Rubin. Janet was still at the mirror, fussing with a defiant wisp of hair.

“When did it happen?” I asked her.

“What?” she said, turning round to face me.

“When you got home from Virginia? Is that when? It counts up right, you see … what happened in Virginia that made you come home and take Rubin into your bed, or had he always slept there?”

“Claire, what's the matter with you today? You're not talking sense. Here, don't hold Donnie so tightly. I think I'd better take him. We can walk to the church and you can go back to bed. You don't look well.”

She started toward the front door. “He never loved you,” I said, and followed her. “You know, of course, he's always pretended so as not to hurt you.”

She was then just at the door, and turned around to face me. “I don't know what you're talking about—how absurd.”

“Not so much … you know that I would have been more suited to him than you. Don't you know he must have felt the same? I think you did, even before you went to Virginia. You could see it, couldn't you? So you invited him into your bed finally. That's what happened, isn't it? When you got back, you decided you'd better start acting like a wife?”

“Claire, you're acting insane, you—”

She was backing through the door now, and I was moving toward her, only awaiting her answer, that was all.

“Is that the way it happened?” I asked again, this time louder than before because I had to know the truth at least about one thing I had counted on. She was shaking her head and backing up. She had the boy clasped firmly in her arms. I walked dumbly toward her and she kept backing away; she looked frightened as an animal who sees the barrel of a gun.

I think she realized she'd reached the precipice just before she fell, for she shot me a look of horrified surprise, then was tumbling, tumbling down the twelve stairs. She knocked her head against the post at the bottom, then lay there in a heap. Donnie had flown from her arms and lay several feet distant in the yard. I looked at the child, then at her. Blood was pouring from her head and spoiling one shoulder and sleeve of the white muslin dress.

I looked across the street, and up and down the block, trying to assess the situation before me, to penetrate the fog. No one was within sight, and I knew I was well hidden by her giant oleanders along the porch. I stepped back through the door, waited a moment, then came out again, shouting. I must not have it looking as though I had anything to do with her fall. After all, I never laid a finger on her, or the child.

People began to appear. Something must be done. I shouted for someone to get Doc Monroe. I ran from the porch and boarded the rig, and whipped Gypsy into a furious gallop all the way to the church. And later, as Rubin and Charles came back with me I told them how it had happened. That Janet was in a rush, running late, and I'd gone upstairs to get a handkerchief for her. She'd apparently started down the stairs and tripped on a loose sliver of wood. Poor, poor dear. We must be hopeful she will be all right. I took Rubin's hand in mine to comfort him.

Doc Monroe took Janet in his flatbed wagon to the infirmary. Charles rode up front with him and I rode beside Rubin in the back. He wept and cradled her head in his arms. Once he looked at me and said, “She told me early this morning perhaps we ought not to try and do the christening today. She had a feeling about it, she said …”

“Yes, Janet is very intuitive, and of course earlier it rained.”

I looked down the length of her long, thin body to her feet. The white pointed-toe shoes poked out from the dress, shifting from right to left now and then as the wagon bumped along.

This evening they have said the child is dead, and Janet probably will not last the night. Poor dear … she should have been more careful of the stairs.

Serena

June 1, 1899–September 8, 1899

Chapter 1

Six o'clock, still dark.

I wish the dawn would hurry. Maybe when the jacinth-colored sky rolls up outside my bedroom window, I can borrow some of its calm. So much can happen in the final six hours, and until Roman and I are safely on the train speeding for New York, I won't be able to fight off the fear which grinds at me like a wheel rolling against the sand. No matter how thoroughly planned, there is risk in running away, and we may have enemies here …

Only yesterday I told Roman, “I wish we could leave today; I don't know how I can make it through another day.”

And he said, “Don't be a little idiot, darling. It's all fixed. King's given the go ahead for you to travel with the band. Our tickets are for tomorrow's train; I've rented a rig to carry us to the station—the one with the biggest brougham top I could find, so you'll be well hidden from view. How could anything go wrong?

“The only danger is in your having a sudden attack of Sunday school morals, and backing out.”

He was teasing again, as he does when he wants to dispel my worries. I laughed a little and nodded, and let him take me the way I love to be taken, for I'm as hungry for him as he is for me. And this, more than all his raillery, made me forget my fears for a while. But that was yesterday, and he was there, and this is today and I am alone, and the fears creep back again like little gnomes who make sport of poking at me with tiny pitchforks … oh, Roman, I am trying to be as brave as you, yet when happiness is this close, it's difficult not to imagine something will snatch it away.

How silent is a street in morning, before the houses awaken.

I can look out across Avenue L and see a light here and there, in upstairs windows mostly: husbands rising to go to work, wives padding around sleepily in house robes, the smells of coffee making and breakfast cooking soon to rise in the air. It is a day like any other for everyone on the block except me, and although in a few minutes I, too, will softly make my way down the stairs and put the coffee on for Dad, I will only be going through the motions of routine, trying not to betray myself by serving oatmeal with shaky hand or answering morning-time questions too quickly. “How did you sleep, Nan? Going to the beach today? Paper come yet?”

Six hours, six hours.

I suppose I may never see this house or this street with its arbor of oaks, or even Galveston again. The band contract wasn't renewed for next summer at the Seaside Pavilion, so wherever they are playing, it probably won't be around here. Hearing the verdict about the contract had at first elated me, for it seemed to work so well with my hopes and plans. Yet now I can't help being a little disappointed. Surely by next summer I would have been able to gather the courage to own up to everything. Of course I owe no explanation to anyone except Dad, perhaps, and Mother, who wouldn't understand anyway. James already knows the whole story of this summer, and even if I owed him an explanation, it would be unnecessary. He is but fourteen years old, yet understands better than anyone else.