Uncertain Ground (24 page)

Uncle Mowrey would have hated watching the beach erode. He had known it was happening; at least he didn’t have to witness the result. Late in his life, after retirement, he and Bertha began to leave the island together to travel to warm countries. They took a long cruise to Hong Kong, shorter ones to the Caribbean and the West Indies. They came back, not to Galveston—too damp for their bones—but to San Antonio, to an apartment there. Bertha was through with houses. The Scottish sea captain’s house Uncle Mowrey’s father built was first rented, then willed to Bertha when Mowrey died, willed to Mowrey’s distant cousin when Bertha died, sold finally to someone who cut it up into apartments, tore down the prim iron fence Emmett had caught his boot on, built the steps of raw boards, painted the shutters that nasty mustard yellow, covered the boards and battens with shingles, then left it all to be peeled by wind and rain.

Emmett never took the staircase put together with pegs that Aunt Bertha promised him. She made no mention of it in her will which was just as well; there was no place for it in a ranch house, and I doubt he would have taken the only staircase from a two story house. I smiled remembering its dark wood and narrow treads and how we seemed to be running up and down those steps all month. Standing on the deck of Luis’s beach house, I watched the storm come in. A curtain of rain swept slowly over the sea toward the island.

Edward accepted Luis as he did the rest of my family. He was godfather to both our children. We went to his gallery openings in Mexico City, in Houston and in San Antonio.

For the past five or six years he’d brought Felipe with him when he came up from Mexico. Younger, handsome, no trace of effeminacy about him either, I saw Felipe as part of a familiar pattern, the boy who needed an older man. I thought he might be an artist also but no, he had an antique shop in Guanajuato and another in Mexico City. Sometimes Luis
teased him a little about being a faker, for in Mexico there were factories full of craftsmen reusing old wood in old looking furniture.

“Recycling,” Felipe said. “We have been doing it for years. You Americans are late in this game.”

His English was excellent, much better than my Spanish has ever become.

“I’m sure we have our own fakers,” I told him. I liked Felipe. Other boys had come to San Antonio with Luis. It appeared this one might stay. He had the quickness, the intuitiveness necessary.

In returning to Galveston, they came back to a tourist town. The Balinese Club, the Galveston equivalent of The Stork Club or El Trocadero, had been the city’s little Monte Carlo on the Gulf, its shining palace of the night. Vaguely naughty, always exclusive, it has vanished. When Galveston was cleaned up in the late fifties and all the slot machines tossed into the bay, the Balinese Club was closed along with all the smaller clubs lining Seawall Boulevard. It was used as a nightclub and dinner theater, then sold, and closed again. At the west end of the island a bridge was built sometime in the sixties, a great arc that spans San Luis Pass and takes traffic on down to other beach settlements past Surfside to Freeport. Now West Beach is littered with piles of houses and condominiums.

Downtown the opera house, already a ruin in the fifties, has been reclaimed; its new grandeur may outshine the old. There are no whorehouses on Post Office Street. The sleazy little clubs have been replaced by sleazy bathing suit and T-shirt shops. On the seawall Cal’s place has been taken by a series of guitar players. Like him, no doubt, they come and go with the summer crowds. There are other new museums, one for trains, one that mimics a rain forest. The library is larger. The refurbished Galvez has new owners and an intricate new pool. Many of the Victorian houses I saw in the historic district were saved. Some have been restored while others, like the Mcleans’ house, quietly fall apart.

When Edward and I took the children to the beach one summer we heard a cabdriver say, “Galveston’s too clean now.”

We smiled at each other. His complaint was only an echo of the one Aunt Bertha and Uncle Mowrey used to make to visitors who were charmed by sun and sea and their tales of the wicked past

Galveston holds on and lets go, adapts and survives.

At Luis’s I remained near his deck’s front rail. The rain had blown in another direction. Edward wouldn’t have to drive through it on his way down for the weekend. Other than Felipe, the two of us, and Leslie, who had married and lived on the island still, there was no one who knew Luis had chosen to return.

That he would not say the name of his disease didn’t bother Edward, nor eventually, did his refusal seem incongruous to me. Discretion marked his whole life. Sometimes I wished he’d had the freedom to make himself known, but those who were his friends knew. There was no one to reject him, no one in Galveston save Leslie, and she hasn’t. He wasn’t shocked by imminent death; he has never thought of himself as invulnerable. Of course he wished for a longer time. He has liked his life, I suppose, as much as anyone does. Luis has lived with a certain style, and he has no intention of talking about his coming end to anyone, not to Edward or me, not to Felipe. He may have terrible fears, huge angers. I don’t press him to reveal them, nor does he seem to want to. It is hard, some days, not to rage aloud. So we mourn him already among ourselves while he continues, according to his code, to be a proper man.

I left my seat on the deck and started inside to tell him what a wreck the Mclean house had become, then checked myself. What difference did the ruin of one old house make to a dying man? Better to tell him that the palm tree still lived although the house had been made into apartments and leave it at that. Restoration and ruin were both still evident in Galveston. Even if the natural balance between sea and sand had been destroyed by the seawall—Luis had noticed much of
the beach was washed away—the old Christmas trees thrown on West Beach each year were catching sand which might, one day, pile higher and form dunes. And I could also tell him the ferry still ran its curved route to Bolivar directed by the currents, the tides and the winds, forces which would continue to rule all the earth’s moving shifting ways.

I am grateful for historical information from Gary Cartwright’s
Galveston: A History of the Island
(l991) and from David G. McComb’s
Galveston: A History
(1986).

For insight, my thanks go to Ann Dunlap, who was, from the first, a great source of encouragement, to Carolyn Banks, a fine critic, and to Carol Querolo Bartz, for checking on inscriptions. As always, I am indebted to my husband, Joe Osborn, for his continual interest and patience, and to Edward Simmen, who knew the island better than all of us.