The Drowning House (20 page)

“It’s not for the exhibition,” I said. I paused, then I added, “He’s a sophisticated man.”

I could see the idea registering. If she objected to the photo, refused to let me use it, and I told Will, what would he think of her? That she was naïve, provincial? Her features took on a clenched look at odds with her usual poise.

“If I do show it,” I said, “sometime in the future, here’s what will happen. There will probably be a title. But it won’t identify you. And the people who see it will be interested in photography, not library science.” I smiled in a way I hoped was reassuring.

“Well.” She took a jacket off a coatrack, put it on, and straightened the lapels. “Since you tell me it’s a good picture.” She gathered some things from the desk and checked her watch. “I have a meeting downstairs,” she said.

I wondered how long she had been in Galveston. Where she had come from and what she had left behind. Clearly she was good at moving on. I thought then that Gwen was probably the sort of person Michael needed, someone who could part with pain or anxiety as easily as she took off her shoes. Already she had let go of the awkward present and was anticipating a time when she might want to claim the photo. Of course she didn’t care about her office. It was only temporary. For now, what mattered was Will’s good opinion. And therefore mine.

I remembered how she had gazed at his picture, the way she’d lifted her chin toward him, her lips and thighs parted. I had never intended to show Will any of that.

I went back to my table. Next to the photos was Ty’s folder. I’d forgotten all about it. When I opened it, what struck me first was the color. There was so much that was already familiar from the relief
portrait of Stella—the figure of the girl, slim but rounded, the clinging folds of her dress, the hip-shot pose. But the effect was different. Everything that was cool in the ersatz bronze of the relief was warm in the painting—the girl’s red lips, the blushing skin of her neck and breasts, and above the bodice of her dress, just visible, the rosy arc of one nipple. The image was plainly erotic. I noticed that, in the painting, the pitcher was broken.

I thought of Ty offering it to me, then of someone else—Eleanor perhaps—finding it and throwing it away. I thought of the young architect, Henry Durand, offering it to Stella’s father. I felt uneasy, as if the body being passed around were my own. Why had Ward Carraday chosen to portray his daughter in that way? Of course, the relief was less overtly sexual than the painting. I wondered if Stella had ever seen the original.

I went back to examining and sorting.

It must have been around four when I felt something like a change in the atmosphere. There was a murmur of voices, and the glass door opened. It was Will. As usual, there were several people following him, but he smiled and held up one hand in what was clearly a gesture of polite dismissal, and they fell back.

He crossed the room, his step springy, his face full of the conviction that he was welcome wherever he was. I don’t know what he saw in mine, but it wasn’t what he’d hoped for. He stopped and put his hands in back of him. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I didn’t intend to interrupt you, but I couldn’t help myself.” He looked down at the images I’d been considering.

“This box is mostly shots of the municipal water board. And so on. Not very exciting,” I said. His face fell ever so slightly, and to my surprise I found myself wanting to encourage him. “There is this, though.” I pulled a print out of a pile I had made earlier.

The photo showed the approach to a trade show in some kind of public space. At the curtained entrance was the marble bust of a woman in fluttering drapery, her hair piled on her head, her sightless eyes as smooth and white as two hard-cooked eggs. A banner above identified her as “The Spirit of Progress.” The print was grainy, but
I had recognized the piece immediately as the sculpture in our front hall at home, the bust that was supposed to be a portrait of Lavinia Giraud. I pushed the photo toward Will.

He sat down, leaned forward, and placed both hands on the table, as if he meant to give all his energy to the act of observation. After a moment, he threw his head back and laughed. “Well I’ll be darned.”

“Did you know?” I asked.

“I hadn’t a clue.”

“My father wouldn’t have thought it was funny. He was very serious about our house and its history.” As I said it, I understood how silly it sounded, how unimportant the Hayes-Giraud house and its associations must seem to Will.

He seemed not to notice. “Really?” he said. “I try not to take any of that too seriously.”

“My father did.”

Will said gently, “You know, family history’s full of twists and turns. With these old houses, it isn’t always easy to tell where things came from.”

I said, “My father didn’t believe the stories or listen to hearsay. He always wanted proof.” That was how he had represented himself to us—as the provider of facts.
Believe what you want
, he would say when we resisted the gift he offered, the bitter, improving truth.
They are ashamed at having been stupid enough to drown
. Now it appeared that he had engaged in willful self-deception. The bust wasn’t a portrait. It had nothing to do with our house or its past.

Will was looking at me expectantly. “I said, I wonder if you’d like to come and have a drink with us?”

“Are you asking for a progress report? Because I’m not prepared to give one.”

Will smiled. “No, nothing like that. Actually, I have some photos at home I’d like you to see. Most of them from the last century. Family photos. In Stella’s room. I’d like you to be the first.”

I felt my cheeks flush. His offer was generous, and I had been rude. But Will seemed prepared to ignore it. “I saw your car in the lot. You can follow me. Or I can give you a lift. If you’d like?”

I nodded.

“You’ll ride with me? Good. Someone can come back later for the station wagon. Now. I’ll go around the corner to the museum. You can meet me when you’re ready.” And Will left, fading away gradually behind the glass door. Something about the sight of him disappearing made my breath come quicker.

My concentration was gone, but I made myself sit for fifteen minutes, shuffling prints, leafing through the notes I’d taken, before I began to gather my things. Then, with all the dignity I could muster, I went after him.

The museum consisted of objects that had somehow become the property of the library—ships’ compasses, family Bibles with brass clasps, Mardi Gras masks. Its content was not so different from what Sally had accumulated at her shop, except that the individual items were more effectively lit and laid out next to little texts that explained their importance. I had a photo in mind: the mannequin from the desk, standing next to one of the displays, looking as if he had stepped out of a case.

Will was regarding an old ledger, its pages covered in black, spidery script. The card next to it identified it as Ward Carraday’s. “Shall we go?” Will asked. It wasn’t really a question, more a polite way of letting me know what he wanted to do.

We rode down in the elevator. “You look like a teenager,” he said, nodding at the old windbreaker I’d found in a closet and was wearing in the air-conditioning. It was much too big. I knew what he meant—a girl wearing her boyfriend’s jacket as a way of advertising their relationship. But I hadn’t had a boyfriend, I’d had Patrick, which was different. Will had seen us together often enough, before we were sent away. Thinking about it brought back my feelings of resentment. “That was a compliment,” Will said. “You’re glaring at me.” I pushed my hands deeper into the pockets.

Outside was the convertible, the two-seater I had seen in the garage, parked in a loading zone. A meter maid was at work down the street, but there was nothing on the windshield.

The air was still and heavy, full of the charged awareness that precedes
a storm. I looked at Will and knew what he was feeling—the curious mixture of fear and longing that is the legacy of the Great Hurricane. If you’re an Islander, you carry the thought of it with you, like the invisible layer of salt that collects on the skin.

“I can put the top up,” Will said. “Or we can try and beat the rain. What do you think?”

He opened my door, effectively answering his own question. As he drove, he continued the conversation, with only sporadic help from me. But Will seemed not to notice when our dialogue faltered, and that gave me confidence. His attention felt like a fixed thing, as solid as a well-built wall.

He pulled the car into the garage. We walked toward the house, then he said, “Wait. I have something to show you first.” He quickened his step and went into the rose garden.

I followed him to where he was standing. The flowers, growing in clusters, were full and soft. He slid his fingers under a blossom and turned its face toward me. I remembered my father saying
some kind of aesthete
. A few drops fell, but Will paid no attention.

The sky grew gray and a light came on next door. Eleanor would be alone in the house. I wondered if she knew we were together. Will reached out and touched another rose. Was that how he looked at her, touched her face? The thought was both irresistible and painful.

There was a whoosh of wind and all the flowers stood up straight, then bent low and swayed. Then the first rush of real rain came, and with it the smell of baked clay off the hot ground, so strong it seemed to color the air. For a moment, we stood still. There were drops in his hair and on his eyelashes too. The shoulders of his shirt began to darken. When he gave a shout and ran for the house, I was right behind him.

I followed Will up the broad stairs to Stella’s room. I had been there before, of course, with Patrick, but those had been brief visits, flying raids. Now I would have time to investigate at my leisure. It felt strange to be encouraged to go through someone else’s belongings, something I had been told all my life not to do. “The photos are
mostly in scrapbooks,” Will said. “And there are some old letters and postcards. I don’t know if those will interest you.” Down the hall I heard Mary Liz clear her throat laboriously.

I looked around, trying to see past what I recognized. The wallpaper was cream-colored with a pattern of stylized lilies. But the furniture was all ponderous Eastlake mahogany—a half tester bed with brass bars that would have supported mosquito netting in the days before air-conditioning, a bureau whose marble top had yellowed like old soap. The ensemble seemed to belong more to the master suite than to a young girl’s room. I wondered if it had been recycled when the house was built—another one of Ward Carraday’s odd economies.

Will opened a drawer and left it so that the contents were partially visible. Then he turned a key in the wardrobe. “I hope you will come and go as you please.” He paused and smiled almost shyly. “The way you used to.”

I thought of the trouble Patrick and I had caused together in and around the house and wondered how much Will knew about it. He had never quizzed us or threatened punishment, but one day he called us both into the kitchen and said gravely,
You are not to make work for Faline
. Did that mean he knew we had put the remains of our uneaten sandwiches down the laundry chute? Dripped honey between the keys of the piano? I felt suddenly ashamed. I turned away so he couldn’t see my face and walked toward the window. The shower was already over, chasms of sunlight slanted down through the clouds.

Will said, “I never minded, you know.”

I stood looking out at the lawn. The house was so large and thickly constructed it seemed to swallow sound. As the silence settled around me, I felt Will’s gaze on my back. I knew he was waiting for me to speak. But it was too late for childish confessions, and I didn’t know what else to say. I closed my eyes and leaned my forehead against the glass, needing to feel its hard smoothness.

“Well, I’ll leave you to it,” he said. “Faline is here during the day, of course, but I’m going to give you a set of keys so you can stop by whenever. In the evenings, if you want. Mary Liz is usually upstairs.
She enjoys company, if you’d like to say hello.” His damp shirt gave off a starchy smell. I heard the sound of the keys on the bureau top, then his footsteps going away down the hall.

I opened my eyes. I was used to looking out my own window toward the Carradays’, to seeing the big house looming over the alley. Now I understood that the view looking back was different—it took in three properties. The Carradays’ second story was substantially higher, too, so that everything below seemed smaller.

I pulled out the first drawer of the bureau. As Will had said, there were a number of albums. One, covered in faded silk, had a title,
My Trip to Paris
. Inside were souvenir postcards depicting tourist sites—the Arc de Triomphe, the Eiffel Tower. I removed it and set it aside.

Next was a notebook of drawings, mostly in pencil. Careful studies of flowers, a crab, a broken sand dollar. I riffled the pages. I noticed that toward the back of the album, everything became smaller. The last few pages were so densely covered they were almost black.

Underneath the notebook was a hardcover volume bound in cracked leather and embossed, and on top of it a kid glove, stained with age. I picked up the glove and smoothed it against my palm. It seemed so little, I wondered if it had shrunk. I thought again of the shoe I had seen in the shop on the Strand. I knew that we were all of us healthier and larger than the Islanders of a hundred years ago. Our feet and hands were bigger. The idea should have been encouraging, but I found myself thinking unaccountably of the way farm animals, steers and hogs, are raised to set records for size.

Down the hall a door opened, and I heard Mary Liz’s voice: “… bother to talk to me about it. You’ll do what you want anyhow. Jesus Christ. A grown woman, and I’m never alone in my own house. There’s always someone. You, Faline, Otis, Patrick. You think I don’t hear him sneaking around?” The door closed again.

The glove had left a partial outline on the book’s faded binding. No one had thought to disturb these things for years. The book’s title was
A History of Galveston
. Holding it carefully in both hands, I settled into a nearby armchair.