The Drowning House (8 page)

That was when Leanne, stiff-legged, began to tilt backward in her too-small shoes. She must have been steadied on the way up by the presence of the crowd. Now there were just the three of us, everyone else had gone on, and there was nothing between her and the floor below but the hard angles of the stairs.

The space around us seemed to contract suddenly into tight focus. I saw Leanne’s left hand fly up, saw her reach for the banister and miss. Her eyes widened and I heard the sound of something shattering and I knew her glass had flown backward and landed in the front hall. Then, as quickly as it had begun, it was over. Tyler Henry was there, his hands on her waist. He walked her down.

Harriet Kinkaid patted my arm. “Don’t worry. She’ll be fine. They ought to warn the unsuspecting about the planter’s punch. Those old recipes are lethal. Most of us can’t drink the way they did. Our ancestors.”

She touched my cheek. “The hair. The eyes,” she said. “I would have known you anywhere. I used to see you when you were a little thing, going around with your Brownie camera. The one Will gave you. You were an interesting child.”

She turned to face the second-floor landing. “I’d better move along now if I’m going to stay with the others.” She grasped the stair rail and began to work her way up, a pull on the banister, a push with the stick. She looked over her shoulder. “Maybe you’ll come and visit me one day,” she said. “I’ll show you
my
house. I believe you’ll be entertained by the contrast.” She laughed again.

Alone on the landing, I thought about the way a pinhole camera reconstructs an entire scene through the smallest aperture. Trees, buildings, figures materializing out of the tiniest dot of light.
Your Brownie camera. The one Will gave you
. Harriet Kinkaid had pricked a hole in time. Through it, the past, complete and undimmed, came flooding.

Chapter 7

HAVE YOU EVER DISCOVERED YOURSELF
in someone else’s snapshot? Felt that small shock of surprise? You might have forgotten that the photo was ever taken. But there you are—your face unbecomingly flushed, your arm draped around the neck of a man who smiles foolishly at your breasts. Closer inspection reveals that your hem is hanging.

Some people would say that the photo shows the truth. That the camera doesn’t lie. But it does—a fact I recognized from the time I looked through the viewfinder of the Brownie 127, clicked off a picture, and left my sister, Frankie, out of it.

It was Easter Sunday when I found the camera in a nest of green cellophane grass at the foot of a jelly palm in our back garden.

Typically Frankie and I each received a small gift to mark the holiday, often a crystallized sugar egg trimmed with colored icing. Through an opening in one end you could see a suite of ducklings or the profile of a rabbit. Frankie used to pry the hardened icing off her egg with a nail file until there was nothing left but its gritty skin. Then she’d go after whatever was inside. I wanted to keep mine intact so I tried to hide them from her in the chaos under my bed. She always found them.

We were not regular churchgoers, but I knew what heaven was, and in my mind it had something to do with that white stillness and the way it enclosed the tiny distant rabbit.

Of course the scene inside the egg never changed. I remember thinking that the camera was similar. I had never handled one before,
and I did not understand at first that the images that streamed past the viewfinder were mine to choose.

That same year Eleanor had bought white straw purses for Frankie and me. They were made to look like baskets, with a hinged lid and wicker hasp. Frankie and I were outside, dressed and ready to leave for Easter Sunday dinner, when Eleanor saw me. “Not the camera, Clare,” she said. “You might lose it.”

“No, I won’t.”

“Ridiculous present for a child that age,” said my father. “Clare, take it in the house.”

It was quiet inside. I walked toward the stairs, but at the last minute, I slid around the corner into the kitchen. Standing behind the door, I opened the basket and jammed the camera in. In my hurry, I pushed the lid down too hard, and the raffia hinge broke.

The list of things I had unintentionally spoiled was already long—clothing and objects torn, stained, and broken.

I returned to the car, carrying the basket carefully in both hands, holding it closed. No one noticed anything. Not until we were seated at our table, and a waiter, thinking to be helpful, lifted it off my plate by the handle, and the purse came apart. I tensed, waiting, but my mother was oddly quiet. I wasn’t punished.

At no time was there any mention of Will. Not then, not later.

My first photos were of a chair. The seat, the back slats, from in front, from the side. I discovered that the act of photography alters the most straightforward objects, perhaps permanently. That something once observed and photographed, from a certain angle, is never the same again. I was less interested in things like flowers and sunsets that grew or altered naturally. Their eventual transformation was to be expected.

No one saw any merit in what I was doing, although it was tolerated like most childish enthusiasms. “The things she photographs,” my father said. “Look at this. What is it? Appears to be a manhole cover.”

My mother murmured something in response.

“Well,” he said, “eye of the beholder, I suppose.” From under
the porch, I listened and recognized myself for the first time.
The beholder
.

Eventually I moved on to more complicated subjects—tree branches, the grille of the family Buick, the pattern left by a tire tread in the sand. Then, finally, people. Faline, kneading pastry dough. Patrick, disappearing around a corner. My early shots of my mother mostly show her back—the curve of her spine, the zipper running down between her shoulder blades, a line of liquid metal.

When I was old enough to leave the house at will, I would find and observe certain Islanders—a girl my age with a clubfoot in a round black shoe, the old man who worked at the newsstand, who would sometimes take out his teeth and set them on the counter. “I can’t believe they want to be photographed, not like this,” Eleanor said.

“They do. They’re friends,” I said. It was a lie—I was not good at making friends.

The one I sought out constantly, made excuses to visit, was the cashier at the bait shop. He had the pale eyes and scorched hair of a fisherman, and he was missing a hand. I used to hang around the shop examining the lures, and sometimes I would buy mud minnows that I later released into the storm drain, just so I could observe him and the wizened knob of his stump.

Growing up, I believed I was deficient in a way that I couldn’t identify precisely and that this explained my failure to fit in with my family. It was something inside, not visible, a matter of character or outlook, I thought. And for that reason, hard to come to terms with. But here was a man whose defect was plain to see, and it didn’t bother him at all. I stared as he matter-of-factly measured out the bait shrimp, made change, his sleeve rolled comfortably above the elbow. I hoped that if I studied him long enough, I might learn his secret.

Chapter 8

THE NOISE OF THE PARTY FILLED
the Carraday house. Outside, night was gathering in the long fingers of the oleander hedge. In the rose garden, draped tables held silver bowls heaped with glittering cracked ice and pink shrimp and silver platters of oysters. There were piles of blanched asparagus and darker green bottles of champagne. Slowly, I made my way down the buffet. Someone spoke my name and I turned. It was Tyler Henry. “What’s good?” he asked.

“Everything.”

He leaned over my shoulder as I served myself. “What’s that?”

“Mud bugs.” He looked blank. “Crawfish.”

“And I thought Texans only ate steak.”

“There’s barbecue over there if you want it. But this isn’t really Texas, it’s the Free State of Galveston.”

“Meaning?”

“It’s different. You can see it, can’t you?”

“I can hear it,” he said. “You don’t talk like a Texan. Will doesn’t either.”

“My parents are Yankees. Will went to school in Connecticut. But it’s true, people here don’t talk like other Texans.”

“What about Mary Liz?”

“She’s from Oklahoma.”

Ty smiled. “Obviously, it’s more complicated than I thought.”

“Hollywood has a lot to answer for,” I said. I lowered my voice. “I hope you won’t pay too much attention to Mary Liz. To what she said.”

“You mean that I’m Will’s boy?” Ty winced, but it was mostly for
show. “Well, it’s not so far off. My title is director of special projects, but basically I handle whatever Will doesn’t feel like doing.”

“Is that a good thing?” I asked doubtfully.

“Yes, in fact. What he tells people is that I’m in charge of all the really exciting stuff. He’s been very gracious. He’s introduced me to everyone.”

I took a piece of bread and put another on Ty’s plate. “So how do you like the Island?” I asked. “Are you disappointed? No range, no cattle to speak of, no cowboys, no rodeos. Was that what you expected?”

“I don’t know what I expected,” Ty said. We walked together across the freshly mowed lawn. Ty held a white folding chair for me and we sat down. Over his shoulder I could see the terrace where Will and Eleanor stood. When Patrick arrived, he would have to come and find them.

“I did see some cattle near where I’m staying,” Ty said.

“That’s not a real ranching operation. It’s a tax deduction. The land will be sold to a developer before long.” I shook out a napkin. “There are coyotes though. You can see them on the beach at night, if you’re patient.”

“You’re not talking about …”

I shook my head. “It’s easier to cross the border farther south. On Padre Island, there’s a visitor center that probably sees about thirty people a year. That’s where the road ends. From there all the way to the Port Mansfield ship channel, sixty miles or so, there’s nothing.” Nothing, I thought, except the hot wind bending the sea oats. The air mysteriously charged, full of the sound you hear when you stand too close to power lines.

I realized Ty was looking at me expectantly. I was flattered. It had been a long time since anyone had shown that kind of interest in what I had to say. I went on. “It’s pretty desolate. So, yes, it’s a drop spot. Marine scavengers camp there. And drug runners.”

“Any of that go on here?”

I shrugged. “Galveston is busier, so people are more cautious. But it’s a port city. If you stay on the Island long enough, eventually you recognize the look. Guys with serious tans and the kind of
clothes you’d have a hard time remembering or describing. Rubber flip-flops and two-hundred-dollar sunglasses. They’re always alone. They always sit near the exit.” How many times had I heard Faline tell Patrick, “You stay away from those fellas.”

The breeze rustled the massed palm fronds above us. Patches of bark rose and fell too so that the whole length of each tree seemed to be moving. Ty looked up. “Coyotes and palm trees.”

“Like nowhere else.”

“You called it the Free State.”

“That started during Prohibition. Galveston supplied about half the country with illegal liquor. After repeal, it was gambling. There’s a nightclub out on one of the piers that was pretty famous then. Every so often the Rangers would try to stage a raid. But before they could get to the end of the pier, the band would strike up ‘The Eyes of Texas’ as a warning and the slot machines would fold back into the walls.”

Ty put his fork down. “You’re kidding.”

“The red-light district was famous, too. The fanciest whorehouse in town was right in back of the Artillery Club. You’ve seen the Texas Heroes Monument?”

“I have?”

“It’s in the middle of Broadway. You have to drive around it.”

Ty grinned. “I seem to recall a column …”

“With a figure on top? It’s Victory, pointing toward the San Jacinto battlefield. The old joke was that she was directing visitors to the brothels.” I sat back, feeling excited and a little giddy from so much talking. A waiter offered a wrapped bottle and I raised my glass.