Uncertain Ground (23 page)

Aunt Earlene hugged me and said, “I’m so glad you’re back.” She had on a spicy smelling perfume and a beautifully tailored brown linen dress. As usual she could have been in downtown Dallas.

Emmett rolled his eyes skyward.

The train clanked noisily, wheezed steam, and surged away. No one had gotten aboard.

We’d come home. The comforting banalities waited. Yes, Uncle Estes was back from Kansas. Of course it hadn’t rained a drop. They had drilled two new water wells at the ranch. My brother, Kenyon, had started a job as a cowboy at the livestock auction barn just west of Leon. He would be busy, Mother told me, driving livestock from the unloading corral to holding pens to the arena and doing the whole thing again in reverse.

It would be dusty and could be dangerous. Kenyon was going to have to deal with a lot of stubborn, often frustrating animals. He’d probably have to help feed and doctor too. The list of his duties seemed to please her, so I assumed we wouldn’t have to worry much about Kenyon for a while. This didn’t mean we were relieved of worry forever. Kenyon wasn’t grown yet. It took him years. I changed careers, became a nurse, married a doctor, and had two children before he left home.

Wasn’t it hot! Mother said it. Somebody had to. None of us ever got tired of complaining about the heat. Walking through the station’s open doors, I scanned the parking lot for the Laceys’ pickup. It wasn’t there. Mother kept talking about how many days of over a hundred degrees weather they had endured. I glanced back at Emmett and heard him say he needed the car. Earlene started to speak, looked like she’d swallowed something that went down wrong, and stopped herself.

“Can’t Aunt Martha carry you home, Mother?”

Mother and Aunt Earlene both acquiesced quickly even though it meant Mother would drive to Mullin and back, a hundred-mile trip by the time she got to the ranch, and forty more to get back to Leon, a drive she swore she wouldn’t mind. I admired their willingness. Both of them knew where Emmett was going, and as different as they were, Mother and Aunt Earlene were determined to be helpful. I’d noticed this before; I understood their resolve now.

Emmett threw a suitcase in the trunk of each car. He got in his, started the motor and punched the button automatically rolling the windows up, sealing in the air-conditioning, sealing himself away from us in his mother’s tan Buick which was almost the same color as the caliche topped country roads. I was sealed in also with Mother and Earlene both sitting up front. Earlene stared at the place where her car had been parked as if she couldn’t quite believe Emmett had already come and gone. Cool air whooshed through the car. Transported from train to car like perishable vegetables being shifted from one refrigerated place to the next, Emmett and I had traveled through a third of Texas like a couple of heads of lettuce without knowing how the wind smelled, and if we had, we would have been exhausted by the heat. The contrariness of desires—Emmett no longer needing me just as I was beginning to enjoy him, the wish to be in Galveston as well as knowing we had to come home—struck me so that I sighed aloud.

Mother asked, “Well?”

And Aunt Earlene asked, “What has he done now?”

Since her question was easier, I said, “He sent Doris a postcard saying he’d be in today.”

Small red spots appeared on her cheeks. “You mean to tell me he actually wrote to her?”

“Yes.”

“Oh … well!” Earlene tried to smile, but her lips were so pursed together it fizzled out. “Martha, did you ever get a postcard from Emmett?”

Mother shook her head. “I hardly know what his handwriting looks like, or Kenyon’s either for that matter.”

“He still has to ask Doris, Aunt Earlene. He just didn’t want anybody telling him he had to.”

“I already told him!” Earlene snapped. The red spots spread across her cheeks.

Mother drove quickly out of Temple. After we’d gone through Leon and reached the highway toward Mullin, Earlene relaxed a bit and began telling us about wedding plans.

She and Mother were debating about alcoholic and nonalcoholic punch when I decided to take off my stockings. I unhooked my garter belt, pulled it off, and peeled off the nylons. Then I stretched out on the back seat. There was nothing to hold anybody’s attention on the road to Mullin, nothing to look at except yellowed dried pasture land, tired trees and, infrequently, a small white frame house set back from the road a little. On the whole it looked like lonesome country to me, a place no one would want to come to unless they had lived there always or owned land. I was bound for cities. The country around Leon and Mullin held no charms for me. Just looking at it made me thirsty.

I was nearly asleep when Earlene snagged on the question of allowing any alcohol at all.

“I don’t think Estes would like a dry wedding.”

Mother said she was sure my father wouldn’t.

This problem kept Earlene occupied until we got to the ranch house where we found the driveway crowded with painters’ trucks. Uncle Estes appeared from behind one of them looking
more than ever like an aging movie star—his wheat-colored hair just beginning to gray—walking off the set to welcome his fans.

“I’m having the interior walls painted,” Earlene explained as we picked our way around ladders and buckets.

The cement sidewalk was too hot for my bare feet. I had to run to the porch.

They had started painting over the living room walls and when it was finished the rest of the rooms looked too shabby to Earlene, so all of them had to be done.

“Of course Estes thinks I’m crazy, but it had to be painted sometime, and with a wedding coming on—”

Estes patted her on the back and said it was all right with him. He let her do what she pleased and seemed to enjoy the results. If he’d returned to find the house burned down, he would have surveyed the blackened remains and said, “Well, I guess we’ll have to build another one,” and they would have. He was a natural builder. Beginning with his father’s small ranch, he’d expanded to others. Estes spent weeks on the road selling cattle in Kansas, checking on stock, and overseeing ranches he’d leased in South Texas, Colorado, and New Mexico. Someday all this would be Emmett’s. Someday he would, if Earlene got her way, be like his father all over again only better. She’d already lost. Emmett was made of different stuff and he still had a lot of wildness to wear out.

When we were on the road back to Leon I finally asked, “What’s the matter with Earlene? She talks about a wedding like she’s the mother of the bride instead of the groom. You know as well as I do, as well as Earlene does, that the bride’s family throws the reception. Won’t the Laceys, if Doris will marry him, have to decide on stuff like alcohol in the punch?”

“Oh Celia, making plans for everybody helps keep her busy, and she needs to be busy just now. For her, I think, everything’s fallen apart. She’s trying to paste it all together again.”

“But if they marry—”

“Celia, what do you mean ‘if’?” Mother spoke as if it wasn’t really a question, as if she too thought Emmett should marry.

“Doris wouldn’t talk to Emmett. She’s … I don’t know exactly— Proud, I guess. Maybe she doesn’t intend to marry or to keep the baby. Aunt Bertha thinks she should go to a home and—”

“Isn’t that just like Bertha! She’s lived in Galveston too long, forgotten what it’s like up here, forgotten how people think about things. The Laceys will want Doris to marry Emmett.”

“All right, Mother. Suppose they do. They still might want to make a few plans of their own. Or maybe Doris and Emmett would like to get married quietly by a J. P. ”

“Promise me, Celia, you won’t even mention that possibility to Earlene. She’s simply got to have this wedding!”

I made the promise, and it was an easy one to keep. Emmett didn’t come home that night. He picked up Doris and drove to the border in his mother’s car. They were married in Laredo. He sent his parents a wire from Mexico. “Doris and I married last night. Uncle Blanton and Alex witnessed. In Monterey. Be here a week.”

It was like him not to have invited Aunt Ellen and Marie. They probably would have wanted to change their clothes for the ceremony, and he wouldn’t wait. Or perhaps Aunt Ellen would have called his mother. By the time I saw the wire, it was all crumpled up. Earlene, angry, almost hysterical, had Estes drive her into Leon so she could show it to us.

Uncle Estes only grinned and said, “I never could imagine Emmett in a big church wedding.” By then, Earlene had started the painters to work on the outside of their house. She needed a change, Estes decided, and took her off to the Colorado ranch for awhile.

Aunt Bertha’s fears were unrealized. The marriage lasted. Doris and Emmett had a daughter and two sons. We see them seldom, especially since they moved to one of the ranches in New Mexico while my husband and I live in San Antonio.

I
climbed back
into my car. All morning I’d been drifting about the neighborhood around the Mclean house as I had when I was there in fifty-three. I’d walked to the seawall and back and around many blocks nearby, straying almost as far as the library. Now, sitting in front of the house, I remember that I’ve lived in many houses before and since. And I’ve returned to look at several only to discover again it’s merely momentary nostalgia that makes anyone wish either places or people would remain the same.

After I left the island that summer I changed careers twice, studied nursing, finished college, became a teacher briefly, moved to San Antonio. In the summers between, Leslie and I traveled to England and France and Italy. Later Edward Greenlee, the doctor I married in fifty-six, and I went back to France, on to Spain, and to Russia when the cold war was over. After our son and daughter were born, we rented houses abroad, old places in old countries, and made our journeys to them on foreign streets with names we had to learn how to pronounce, a contrast to the alphabetically named streets of the older part of Galveston.

I’d located the house intuitively. Now, for the first time, looking up at the street sign on the corner, I realized it was different. The whole area had become a historic district, and when it did, the name of the Mclean’s street evidently was changed to an earlier one. How odd to realize a part of a personal past, a familiar loved place, has become public history.

It was time, I saw on the car’s clock, to go back to the house where Luis lay dying of the disease he would barely name that was nonetheless evident in his emaciated body.

He’d gone to Edward for diagnosis and Edward had told him, then came home to tell me. “It’s AIDS. He doesn’t want to know it.”

“He’s not going to want us to do anything either.”

Edward nodded.

“We could look after him here.”

We have a comfortable house with empty bedrooms on a quiet street in San Antonio. Our children are grown and gone, but Luis would not come and stay with us, so I tried another way, knowing it was foolish, knowing I still wanted to make the offer.

“We could take you to Paris. I could go with you if you like. Edward could join us for awhile. You’ve always wanted to go, and it’s so beautiful.”

Too thin already, having problems with his eyes, he smiled and refused. He wouldn’t go back to Mexico either. He’d kept the beach house in Galveston.

“I don’t know how many hurricanes it has weathered.”

He knew a doctor there. His friend Felipe would look after him.

“In Galveston it doesn’t matter. So many of the people I knew there are dead already. People with … with this … don’t live in Mexico.”

He said it so wearily I knew he’d made up his mind much earlier to come back home to die. Ironically AZT was so much cheaper in Mexico. His friends there would supply him. He had a little money, just what he’d saved, and his inheritance from his father who left him the beach house.

Luis hadn’t been back to Galveston but once or twice since his father died. He never liked his stepmother. However Louise Finley did keep his father company; a few weeks before she and Mr. Platon married he moved out of the hotel into her apartment. Later they bought one of the new condominiums just being built on the island. Somehow she got him to give up gambling. Still Luis wouldn’t like her. No matter what she did, he found fault. Louise was one of those women who had never learned how to cook. The first time Luis visited them after they married he was enraged to discover Alberto eating crackers and cottage cheese at odd hours. She’d waited until she quit
working to travel, so she and Alberto were frequently gone on long cruises. Aunt Bertha and Uncle Mowrey were once on the same ship with them to Hong Kong.

“Afloat in a sea of champagne dotted with islands of caviar,” Luis commented.

Although his father had lived like a wastrel for almost three years, and Luis hadn’t cared in the least, he was contemptuous of any sign of luxury in Louise’s and Alberto’s lives. His usual tolerance deserted him. He couldn’t trust Louise. He didn’t want another mother.

I thought Alberto knew this, for he made him executor of his will, a way of letting Luis know what happened to his estate. As usual he didn’t seem to care though he admitted he needed money as much as anyone.

Louise Finley was left the condo and a small trust fund, which went to Luis when she died. Beside receiving the beach house, he inherited the duty of taking care of his father’s bequests. Alberto left a number of small personal gifts to various people. One was a pair of gold cufflinks, which were to be given to Frank, the doorman at the Balinese Club.

“I looked all over town for him, or for someone who knew him, but he couldn’t be found,” Luis told me.

By the time Alberto died, Galveston had become a different city.

Driving to Luis’s I watched a storm gathering over the Gulf. Gray clouds choked the sky. Waves rose high and fell greedily sucking at what was left of the sand, reaching over the granite boulders piled at the foot of the wall. Built to protect Galveston, the seawall blocked the natural action of waves against the island. The ramp we used to drive down to reach West Beach now dropped directly into water. The city has been saved, but the beach eroded daily, more obvious just before a storm when the wind driven waves rise against the wall. Sea and sand became a choppy mass broken only by red flags violently whipping on poles at the ends of drowned jetties. The wind
carried seaweed’s sharp medicinal smell. Far out, close to the horizon, a thread of lightning dangled against the gray sky.