The Drowning House (16 page)

“That sounds like a warning.” Ty was still smiling, but I could see that now he was taking me seriously.

I kept my tone light. I could only go so far. “You saw the film,” I said. “This is a dangerous place.”

AFTER THE GREAT HURRICANE
, the Islanders undertook to raise the grade of the entire city, about five hundred blocks. The rescue embraced all construction equally—the iron-front commercial blocks along the Strand, the towered villas, the modest cottages. The
most disreputable, the smallest dwellings took on new importance as relics of the storm.

The Islanders leveed off sections of the city and lifted every building on stilts or blocks while dredges pumped fill into the space below. They raised St. Patrick’s, the three-thousand-ton Catholic church, using hundreds of jackscrews moving a quarter-inch at a time, without ever interrupting services.

Shoeless children perched grinning on the huge pipes that carried the slurry and cheered when it erupted in an explosion of wet sand.

The grand Broadway houses occupied the highest part of the Island. Some were raised, at enormous expense. But in many cases, their owners chose to fill in part of the lowest floor to gain the required three feet. This left spaces like the Carraday’s kitchen, which had originally been the first floor, half underground. Where iron fences survived, they were half buried as well.

Photos taken during the grade raising show houses that seem to float above a swirling sea of fill. Their façades are blank, without expression, like the faces of sleepers.

Neighborhoods and streets disappeared. Gas lines, water pipes, streetcar tracks were torn up and removed. So were trees and lawns and plants. The breeze-borne sounds of passing ships, of bells and shorebirds, full of variety and significance, were replaced by the ceaseless, unmeaning throb of machinery.

In the parts of town where the dredges operated, residents learned to walk to their destinations on narrow planks and trestles high off the ground. The Islanders became accustomed to taking shortcuts through the homes of strangers.

Some of them passed through the Carradays’ front hall. If Ward Carraday was not at home, did those unbidden guests stop a moment to look around? Did they see the lilies in the friezes and ceiling medallions, in the golden brown woodwork of the entryway with its grand staircase, on the glazed Italian tiles in the conservatory?

Did they see the portrait over the mantel? Stella with the lilies at her feet?

Chapter 15

THE HOUSE WAS EMPTY WHEN I GOT BACK
. I poured myself a glass of iced tea and took it out onto the back porch. The sky was so blue it vibrated along the outline of the roof. The heat was just tolerable in the shade.

This was where Patrick used to appear—on our back steps. It wouldn’t be accurate to say he’d waited there for me—he was too full of nervous energy to settle for long. He would arrive, knock or call, walk back and forth a few times, bounce up and down on the balls of his feet, then leave again before I could come out. Often the first thing I saw of him was his retreating back—the dirty yellow soles of his tennis shoes as he jogged off, his shirttail vanishing around a corner.

Once he took me to a shooting range, a long, narrow building that looked from the road like a truck stop, but without windows. Inside, there was a carnival atmosphere. Kids were taking turns popping at moving silhouettes with an air rifle. The real shooting went on behind a soundproof door, where targets of different kinds slid back and forth on metal tracks. One was in the form of a running man, white and featureless, outlined in black, as if a piece had been razored out of the world, leaving behind a blank. Now, when I looked around for Patrick, I saw that fleeing figure everywhere.

I can’t remember a time when we didn’t know each other. What I do recall vividly is the incident, when we were six and eight, that made us conspirators. Patrick came under suspicion, but in fact, he only watched. I was the one who flushed Mary Liz’s platinum-and-diamond horseshoe brooch down the toilet.

I still don’t know why. Did I imagine that I would have a chance to snatch it back, once I had impressed Patrick with my audacity? I didn’t, of course. It sank straight down in the rush of water and disappeared.

The search went on for days. Faline, her hair drawn back in a knot so tight it narrowed her eyes, made a noisy show of turning the house upside down. She took up the rugs, carried them outside, and beat them, removed the cushions from the larger pieces of furniture and slid her slender fingers down inside their seams. She emptied the vacuum cleaner onto the kitchen floor and picked through the dusty contents—buttons and coins and paper clips, the tiny, desiccated corpse of a baby mouse. She lifted the cast-iron grilles that overlay the heating vents and poked a broom into the grime and darkness below. Patrick and I trailed after her, watching the upheaval, careful to hide our delight. Then one afternoon Mary Liz announced that she was tired of eating sandwiches. “I never wore the damn thing anyway,” she said. And as suddenly as it had begun, the excitement subsided.

Asked if we had seen the brooch, we shook our heads. Neither of us ever confessed. So the knowledge of what had happened became a bond between us. Over time there were more incidents.

Why did we do those things? Why did we lie? Was it our response to an adult world that seemed to be full of secrets? Creating secrets of our own?

During the day Patrick would turn up, and no one questioned his presence. At night he’d signal to me and I would slip down to meet him when I saw the light. It seemed right to me that his signal should come from Stella’s room. Stella had resisted authority too. So she presided in spirit over our exploits.

Sometimes they had surprising consequences, like the time we wrapped a dead rattlesnake around the steering wheel of the Buick my father had parked in the alley. I had never seen my father agitated or at a loss for words, but he stumbled and half fell in his hurry to get out of the car. He gave a shout—it was surprisingly high-pitched for so big a man—and the door flew open. But it bounced back, and he
had to push it away again, his feet scrabbling in the dirt. Finally, he fell onto the ground and sat, head bent, a strange, husky sound coming from his throat. Patrick and I watched in silence from our hiding place among the bed of cannas.

My father was sure we were responsible and wanted to punish us. But I could tell from the way her mouth worked when she heard his account that Eleanor was trying not to smile. “Be reasonable,” she said. “It couldn’t have hurt anyone. It was dead.”

My father’s face was red and sweaty over his white shirt collar. “It could have given me a heart attack,” he said. “People die of—”

“Of fright?”

He declined to answer. His flushed face made me think about his blood circulating—not the bright oxygenated red that we see but the dark blood that flows toward the heart. A vein pulsed in his forehead, and I wondered if what he’d said was true, that he might have died, we might have killed him. Eleanor went on folding clothes. I think we were eight and ten.

It was only later that our outings involved anything that was, strictly speaking, illegal.

It was easy, there were any number of unoccupied houses to investigate. There was always someone outside the Liquor Mart who was willing to buy us a couple of six-packs or a bottle of tequila while we waited in the parking lot, leaning against the mural. It showed an underwater scene—dolphins, rays, sharks, all looking like inflatable toys—against an implausible turquoise background. “Sure, they’re mellow,” Patrick said. “They live right around the corner from the liquor store.”

It was there that Patrick kissed me for the first time. There was no prelude. We had been talking and my face was turned toward his. He just bent over, as though the possibility had only then occurred to him. I had seen people kiss in movies, kids at the beach, tourists on the Strand. It was not what I expected. His lips were dry at first, tentative, then moist and slightly salty. Except for the trace of something bitter that I knew must be whatever he was drinking, the taste
reminded me of when I was small, lying facedown on a towel, licking the salt off my own arm. It had that quality of familiarity, of myself coming back to me.

We called our get-togethers “beach parties.” To me they were painful, those gatherings. They confirmed Frankie’s judgment that I didn’t understand the rules. Only being with Patrick made them bearable.

Some couples made out. Others stood nursing cans of warmish beer or drinking shots, trading insults and cultivating an air of defiance. We passed an occasional joint. Every so often, Patrick would produce some single-malt scotch or vintage cognac. I tried everything just often enough to avoid being noticed.

Occasionally, when fall came and the rest of the crowd lost interest in the beach, Patrick and I would go there alone. We’d take a blanket and stretch out together on the cold sand. There were no lights along the shorefront, no trucks or jeeps with their radios on parked above the waterline. The only sound was the tumbled rush of the surf. Patrick lay on his back, a bottle half buried to his right. I fitted myself against him on the other side, my hip against his, my head on his shoulder. I could feel his rib cage moving. Sometimes he would cover us with his jacket, so that the warmth of his body was enough for both of us. I tried to match my breathing to his.

Patrick would circle my wrist with his fingers, flatten my palm against his, and laugh as if the comparison amused him. He knew my size exactly. Sometimes, when we went out at night, I wore his old clothes, shirts and shorts that were too small for him.

Once when we were under his jacket together, he unzipped his jeans and put my hand inside them. I knew what an erection was, how sex happened, but I remember my surprise at the intense heat of his groin, the unfamiliar combination of soft skin and stiffening tissue. I had no idea what to do with it. I fumbled there for a while, then Patrick said, “Too much Laphroaig, I guess,” and rolled over. I knew what he meant, but still it seemed to me that I had failed him. I resolved to listen more closely to Frankie’s lectures, so that the next time, I’d be
prepared. When no next time came, I took that as definitive evidence of my failure. Sometimes I would see Patrick talking and laughing with other, older girls, and I’d flush, jealous and mortified.

After that, we occasionally did a little touching, but that was all. Patrick said to me once, his hand resting on my bare stomach, “This is as good as sex.” I didn’t know how to respond. I knew from what Frankie said that sex was what boys wanted. But Patrick spoke with the authority of a two-year age difference.

Patrick had a lopsided smile and a perpetual tennis tan—tawny arms attached to an unexpectedly white torso that made him look more naked when he removed his shirt than the boys who were uniformly brown. He was wiry, like his father, but taller, with a longer reach that helped his game. I knew he was good enough to travel to tennis tournaments in other places. I had heard Mary Liz say, “Some fancy-pants college like his daddy’s will want him for the team.”

What people said about Patrick was that Mary Liz spoiled him. When he walked out of one of his finals, she shrugged and said he was an athlete. When he lost a game, she said tennis was for sissies. What she didn’t see was that she was gradually taking away his options.

It hadn’t yet occurred to me that it might also be hard to be Will’s son.

Chapter 16

I DECIDED TO GO THAT EVENING
and look for Patrick at Lafitte’s, the bar Frankie had mentioned, a scruffy place near the bottom of the Strand. I knew it by reputation. Lafitte’s had been around for years, changing management occasionally without ever improving. It was not a tourist spot, but it was not a biker bar either. I had been in worse places.

I wondered if I should take my camera. I picked it up and put it down again. I changed into the skirt I’d worn to the party and a pair of dangly earrings I’d discovered at the back of a drawer. I twisted my hair up. I put on lipstick, bracing my arm against my chest to steady my hand. In the end I slipped the Leica into my tapestry bag and slung it over my shoulder.