Galveston (60 page)

“To Willa and Rodney, to be put toward something you'd
really
like to have, from just Maybelle. Thank you for letting me be in your wedding.”

“Just” Maybelle. Was this an illustration of a newfound sense of independence from her overbearing parents? Had she saved the money on the sly, determined to outdo the garish hall mirror given us by her family and chosen, of course, by Velma?

Poor Maybelle. Was she even now washing her hair for tonight, or checking the seams in the wine velvet creation she'd made to wear?

Maybelle would be staying home tonight, a vicarious bride-not-to-be … Suddenly sad for her, I carefully smoothed out all the bills, and replaced them neatly inside the bag, then leaned back. I took this finding of money as a sign, as though I were doing just what I ought to by running away. Of course the money was really only half mine—and now that I'd deserted Rodney at the altar, none of it was mine and would have to be returned. However, I could worry about that later, sometime when there was nothing else to worry about …

The Galvez sun parlor is a bright, rectangular room. Most of the furniture, grouped around magazine tables and lined up along the deep windows for the view, is white wicker and very comfortable for enjoying the sea breeze.

Across the room there are mahogany writing tables and chairs, and big pots of ferns between the supporting pillars reaching to the high ceiling. I was alone there that day except for one old man who'd fallen asleep reading the Galveston
Daily News
, a few chairs down. How delicious, I thought, to be able to fall asleep when one wanted to, with no worries, no cares.

I crossed the room and picked up a telephone directory, almost sorry to do it for I expected disappointment even before I opened it to the beginning of the
B
's. Byerly, Byers, Bylee, Byron. A. C., C. B., C. L., R. T. That was all. No James and no J. R. or J. Randolph. I closed it. It all seemed unreal I should be boarding a train today—if possible—for Grady, a place I'd never known of any ties with, had never seen or even passed through on other trips. What did they do in Grady? Lumbering? Mining? Was it a dead town after all this time, victimized by lack of industry coming into it, like so many others? Was it like Galveston—a little sleepy, slow-paced, easy?

I closed my eyes and let the breeze cool my face. Across the street was the famed seawall, a seventeen-foot-high bulwark, curving down to the beach. While here in 1912, my mother and I had descended the stairs dissecting it, and tread the sandy beach below. She'd kept well covered, to protect her delicate skin. I had been less inhibited, and built sand castles that rarely stood beyond one day's visit, and had to be rebuilt the following day.

So much of those days on the beach with Mother came back now. We were here three full days and two nights while Dad stayed holed up in meeting rooms at the Galvez. And when dinner was held in the evening, Mother would attend with Dad and there would be a lady to sit with me, to take me to the dining hall to eat.

Whenever we went on trips and stayed in hotels, I always wrote letters to my real mother, and mailed them at the hotel desk myself because I didn't trust my adopted mother to mail them for me. I wonder where they all went? Had the hotel clerks smiled indulgently after I'd gone, later handing the letters to Mother on the sly, thinking they were intended for her because they were addressed simply, “To Mother”?

It was at the Galvez, I believe, that I wrote my last letter. None had ever been answered, and I had attained the age of twelve: for me, the age of total cynicism.

I'd questioned Mother more extensively than ever during our trips to the beach. I suppose I'd reached the point of desperation, when I felt I must demand answers to the questions which haunted me.

Still, she was evasive, hiding her face behind the big sun hat. Yes, I came from Ohio. No, she didn't know my real parents, only that she was assured they were both dead. No, she didn't recall the name of the agency, and anyway, understood it had been burned to the ground some years later, all records housed there destroyed. No, there was no way of finding out anything. No. No. No. No …

“And, Willa,” had said my adopted mother, “I'm tired of answering questions. Don't ask me any more.”

“Excuse me, ma'am, luncheon is served.”

It was the waiter, and I blinked at him, wondering for a moment where I was and what he was talking about.

As I followed him into the dining room, now beginning to fill with other luncheon guests, I noticed the hands of the clock on the wall were pointed at twelve-fifteen and remembered I was to have had lunch with my father at twelve-thirty. He'd asked me about it earlier in the week, and I'd told him I'd go with him if there was time, but after all I was probably going to be busy the day of the wedding.

“Please, Willa,” he'd said, “promise me?”

“All right,” I'd told him then, figuring this little show of sentimentality was probably meant to be his way of smoothing over all the years when he had had no time for me. As the waiter set the plate before me in the Galvez dining room, I thought, Well, too bad, Pop, Willa couldn't make it. You should have asked me long, long ago …

The lunch, which tasted even better than I had remembered from 1912, gave me a false sense of well-being as I gathered my bags once again and started out; yet it took only a fruitless inquiry at the post office (suggested by the waiter, who'd sort of taken me under his wing) to dampen my spirits all over again and convince me I was wasting my time. James Byron might even have been killed, like so many others in the 1900 storm, as suggested by one postal clerk (why had I not thought of that?). It was logical enough, six thousand people gone, and those left busy shoveling bodies out to sea in an effort to rid themselves of the stench, the danger of disease. Oh, please, please, don't let James Byron have been one of those banished from the island at the end of a shovel …

I boarded the train fifteen minutes before departure time at two-thirty, and in the space of time it took to travel across the bay toward the mainland, I thought seriously about dropping the matter and going home. It would have been relatively easy at this point. Mother and Dad and Rodney and everybody else would have been wondering where the hell I'd been, but perhaps they hadn't given up on me yet, canceled out all the wedding arrangements. Everyone would be so relieved I'd returned, all would be given in a matter of moments. I might still be sitting in the dressing room at the church tonight, the co-ordinator from The Fashion pulling on my gown, adjusting the veil, with Mother standing by in tears (Mother always cries at weddings) and wearing her rose-colored lace dress, her wide-brimmed hat and long beige gloves with rhinestone buttons.

On the other hand, the wedding seemed less and less real as the train sped out of Galveston, and the task at hand took on more importance with each moment. If I gave up now, I might never have another chance.

The last thing I remember seeing were the big supporting arches of the new causeway, just beginning to take shape, rather like the arches of a monastery of ancient times, seeming almost to sway with the motion of the water below. I fell asleep then, and slept until we pulled into Union Station, where I was already ticketed on the Sante Fe leaving at four-fifteen for Grady.

The big deserted vault that had been Union Station the night before, now teemed with people pacing briskly about, each with a special purpose by the looks of them. I bought a copy of the
Ladies' Home Journal
, a magazine I rarely read, and sat down with it, holding it close to my face lest anyone should come by who might recognize me. There was a small boy sitting next to me whose mother had given him a package of Adams California Fruit gum, no doubt to appease him into shutting up. He was busy cramming every stick of it into his greedy mouth at once, and while his chewing and staring were no bother to me as I passed the few minutes between trains, I was irritated to feel the suction of one discarded stick of gum under my shoe when I got up to leave, and, already frustrated at the necessary time wasted between trains, the wondering if anyone might see and recognize me, I turned angrily on the little wretch and said, “You little pest, you'll make me late for my train.”

His mother, heretofore engrossed by some article in the
Chronicle
, slapped down her paper and gave me a stare that would cool a hot stone. I hurried to the lounge, cleaned my shoe, then literally ran to the train car, where the conductor was already seeing people up the stairs, my shoe sticking to the pavement slightly with every step. Oh hell, I thought, anyone with any sense would give it up and go home. Yet I knew, of course, that I would board the train, calmly walk to the dining car and request some ice for cleaning my shoe, and wait out the day and a half between here and Grady.

In winter the sky darkens early. On that day it first turned pink and blue, before shading into one solid drape, void of all color, and I watched its process through the train window, oddly depressed.

I had always been alone, yet never felt it quite so acutely until that moment. All ties had been severed. Should I ever want to return home and make peace with my parents, they might well choose instead to disown me. After all, they were to be credited for providing well for me, if nothing else, and this episode for them might have been the breaking point after all the years of misery they'd suffered. While I still felt I was not to be blamed for the way things happened—after all, I didn't
ask
to be adopted, did I?—I was all too aware that as things now stood I had nothing—not love, not security, not even my own bed to sleep in.

And Rodney … well, at least he was a devil of a lot better off for my having exited his life. He could always put the Heights house on the market again, or find someone else, someone steady and reliable like Rosemarie, and bring his happy blushing bride to see the fanlight and the undercroft. She at least would far better appreciate the house of his dreams than I had, not because I hadn't liked the house as much as he, but because she would be willing to give herself to marriage in every way, when I was not. I should miss the real estate office, though. Maybe wherever I wound up, I could find a job in another such place. Maybe, maybe if Mother was really alive, or even Father, I could start a brand-new life with one or both of them, twenty years late but willing to forgive the past and forget what I'd been cheated of.

What if, on the other hand, I did find out all about my parents, and though they were now dead the truth of them was a hateful thing to learn? How many times had I threatened Mother Frazier as a child that when I was big enough I would run away and find my real mother? It must have been as often as she clashed with me over something I was being forbidden from doing.

And there was always the small chance that what had been told me by Susan Baxter when I was ten years old was correct. Susan's family lived next door to us for nine years, before we moved to Montrose. She and I were near the same age, though she was just enough older to dangle her superior years in front of me from time to time, and we used to play together.

One day we were playing jacks out on the front porch. I had had a quarrel with Mother that morning, and was taking out all my spite by speaking horribly of her under my breath to Susan. “I hate that woman,” I said. “She isn't really my mother, and when I grow up I'm going to run away and find my real mother, and live with her.”

Susan had rolled her eyes and said, “You sure are stupid, Willa Frazier. Don't you know if your mother had wanted you, the Fraziers wouldn't have got you in the first place?

“Besides, she's prob'ly a prostitute. That's what my mother says.”

“What's a prost—you know, that word?”

“Prostitute. Don't you
know?
Mother says it's a lady who sells herself to men for their pleasure. Mother says she prob'ly didn't have the heart to have an operation to get rid of you when she found out you were coming, so she just gave you away when you were born cause you had no place in her life.”

I wasn't sure what she meant by her statement, but I could tell by her expression it was a terrible slur against my mother, and I wouldn't stand for it. I picked up all the jacks and threw them at her face, cutting one of her eyes so badly she later had to be taken to the emergency room at the hospital, and told her I'd never speak to her again, and she better get off my porch.

Of course, shortly after that, I learned exactly what Susan Baxter had been talking about, and this knowledge nagged at me no matter how much I tried to deny it. Up to that time my mother had remained untarnished as an angel in my sight, but the sheer logic of what Dotty Baxter surmised was something one had to reckon with. It might have been true. Of course it may not have been that at all, probably wasn't, and yet …

I had to economize on that train ride, the first time I had ever done so in my life. I didn't rent a sleeping compartment, and slept instead in my train chair, which wasn't so uncomfortable except the upholstery was a bit scratchy against my neck. I ate a candy bar for supper rather than a meal in the dining car. Food on a train is atrociously expensive, and besides, it always tastes terrible.

I slept through the night, and awoke the next morning facing a heavy, leaden sky, so different from that of the day before that it was startling to behold, as though the world had gone blank overnight. We were still a long way from Grady, and the conductor told me we had just passed through Heddings. I was unfamiliar with this area of the country, as much as with Grady itself. The train seemed always to be cresting a hill, or descending a valley, and the trees along the route hung sadly by, bereft of any foliage or personality.

This would be a long day, perhaps the longest yet, for there would be a four-hour layover in Olmada and a train change there. Other stops on the route would be few and short, and I probably wouldn't even deboard because it looked so cold outside and the steam on the inside of the chilly window brought home the fact we were moving into a different sort of climate, one less friendly.