“It’s dinnertime,” said Odessa. “Ever’body’s inside at the table. That’s why you don’t see nobody. Nobody’s outside at twelve o’clock.”
Even Foley, a town that advertised a population of three thousand souls, appeared deserted when they drove through. Certainly there were cars parked downtown, and Odessa claimed to have seen faces in the bank window, and a police cruiser turned a corner two blocks ahead—but the town was unaccountably empty.
“Would you be out on a day like this?” said Odessa. “You got sense you stay inside where it’s air-conditioned.”
Experimentally, India rolled down her window a little: heat bellowed inside and seared her cheek. The thermometer on the Foley bank had read 103 degrees.
“Good God!” said India. “I hope it’s air-conditioned where we’re going.”
“It’s not,” said Luker. “India, when I was little, and we were coming to Beldame every summer, we didn’t even have electricity, isn’t that right, Odessa?”
“That’s right, and it don’t even work all the time now. You cain’t depend on that generator. We got candles at Beldame. We got kerosene lamps. That generator—I don’t trust it. But child, we got a whole drawerful of paper fans.”
India glanced ruefully at her father: to what sort of place was he taking her? What advantages could Beldame have over the Upper West Side, even the Upper West Side in the most miserably hot summer imaginable? Luker had told India that Beldame was every bit as beautiful as Fire Island—a place that India loved—but Fire Island’s inconveniences were only picturesque and quaint. India suspected that Beldame wasn’t civilized, and she feared that she would be not only bored but actually uncomfortable. “What’s the hot water situation?” she asked, thinking that a fair standard by which to judge the place.
“Oh, it don’t hardly take no time to heat up on the stove,” said Odessa. “Got high flames on the stoves at Beldame!”
India asked no more questions. From Foley to the coast was little more than ten miles. The fields gave out and were replaced by a weak-willed stubby forest of diseased pine and scrub oak. In places the undergrowth, thick and brownish and uninteresting, was plotted in white sand. White sand now and then blew across the road, and dunes of white sand rose in the distance. Over a little rise the Gulf of Mexico became visible. It was opalescent blue, the color that the sky ought to have been. The foam that broke at the top of the nearer waves was gray in comparison to the white sand that shouldered the road.
Gulf Shores hove suddenly into sight: a vacation community with a couple of hundred houses and a dozen small stores and conveniences. All the buildings were green shingled and gray roofed, and all the screens on all the windows were rusted. Even if there were few persons actually in residence there now, in the middle of the week, the place at least maintained the illusion of being crowded, and India allowed her hope a little space to rise. Then, as if on purpose to deflate that meager hope, Luker remarked that this stretch of Gulf coastline was known as the Redneck Riviera. He turned off at a sign that read Dixie Graves Parkway, on to a ribbon of asphalt that was sometimes lost beneath a film of white blowing sand. Gulf Shores was put quickly behind them.
On both sides of the road rolled soft white dunes, with here and there a handful of tall stiff grass or a clump of sea roses. Beyond on both sides was blue water; but only on the left side were there breakers. Odessa pointed to the right. “That’s the bay. That’s Mobile Bay. Mobile’s up there—’bout how far would you say, Mr. Luker?”
“About fifty miles.”
“So you cain’t see it,” said Odessa, “but it’s there. And”—pointing to the left—“that’s the Gulf. There’s nothing out there, nothing at all.”
India felt certain of it.
They came to another community, this one with only a couple of dozen houses and no stores at all. Tons of crushed oyster shells that had been laid out over the sand formed the driveways and yards of the houses. Only a few houses were not boarded up, and the place seemed to India the last stage of desolation.
“Is this Beldame?” she asked uneasily.
“Law, no!” laughed Odessa. “This is Gasque!”—this said as if India had mistaken the World Trade Center for the Flatiron Building.
Luker pulled into the lot of a gasoline station that had evidently been closed a number of years. The pumps were of a type that India had never even seen before, slender and round with red glass caps that made them look like bishops on a chess board. “This place is closed,” she said to her father. “Are we out of gas?” she asked miserably, wishing all the while that she were standing on the corner of Seventy-fourth Street and Broadway. (How clearly she could see it in her mind!)
“No, we’re fine,” said Luker, pulling around behind the station. “We’ve just got to change cars, that’s all.”
“Change cars!”
Behind the station and attached to it was a small garage. Luker got out of the Fairlane and pulled open the unlocked door. Inside were a jeep and an International Scout. Both vehicles had Alabama plates. Luker took a key that was hanging from a hook just inside, climbed into the Scout, and backed it out. “I want you to help transfer everything, India,” said Luker, and reluctantly, sullenly, India stepped out of the air-conditioned car. In a few minutes all their bags and the boxes of food that had been packed in the trunk and back seat of the Fairlane were piled in the back of the Scout. The Fairlane was put inside the garage, and the door closed again.
“Well,” said India, when Luker and Odessa had climbed into the front of the Scout, “where am I supposed to sit?”
“You get your choice,” said Luker. “You can stand on the running board or you can sit on Odessa’s lap. Or—you can ride on the hood.”
“What!”
“But if you ride on the hood, you’ll have to hold on tight.”
“I’ll fall off!” cried India.
“We’ll stop for you,” laughed Luker.
“Goddamn you, Luker, I’d rather walk, I’d—”
“Child!” cried Odessa. “What was that word?”
“It’s too far to walk,” laughed Luker. “Come on, here’s a towel. Put it up on the hood and sit on it. We won’t be going fast, and if you slide off, just be sure you don’t get caught under the back wheels. I used to love to ride on the hood! Leigh and I used to fight to see who got to ride on the hood!”
India was fearful of scraping her feet if she stood on the running board and sitting in Odessa’s lap was an unthinkable indignity. When Luker refused to leave her there and make a return trip to pick her up, she leaped angrily on to the hood of the Scout. After she had arranged herself on the towel Odessa handed her, Luker drove away from the gas station onto the Gulf beach.
The sensation of riding on the hood of the Scout was not, after all, unpleasant, despite the blowing white sand that crept beneath India’s clothes and lodged beneath her eyelids. Even behind her sunglasses she squinted in the glare. Luker drove slowly, just along the high tide line, and now and then broad arcs of foamy water crept under the tires. Gulls and pipers and four other kinds of birds India couldn’t identify fled at their approach. Crabs scuttled away, and when she peered over the fender she could see a thousand tiny sinkholes in the wet sand, where shelled creatures breathed. Fish leaped in the nearer waves, and Luker, whose voice she could not hear over the heavy surf, pointed away in the distance where, beyond a light green line that must have been a sandbar, a school of porpoises frolicked. In comparison to this, the shore of Fire Island was dead.
They rode on toward the west for perhaps four miles. After Gasque was behind them they saw no more houses. The thread of the Dixie Graves Parkway was occasionally visible, but no cars traveled on it. India turned and shouted through the windshield: “How far is it?” Neither Luker nor Odessa answered her. Her hand touched the hood of the Scout and she jerked it away, burned.
Luker turned the Scout sharply, and India had to scramble not to slide off. A wave larger than the rest broke against the fr
ont fender, dousing the hood and India. “Feel better?” shouted Luker and laughed at her evident discomfort.
With the inside of her sleeve, which was the only part of her clothing that had escaped wetting, India wiped her pouting face. She wouldn’t turn around again. In only a few minutes, the sun had dried her. The sound of the waves, the delicate rocking of the Scout, the rumble of the engine beneath the hood, and most of all the heat that engorged all creation in that lonely place hypnotized the girl until she had almost forgot her anger. Luker blew the horn, and she jerked around.
He pointed ahead, and mouthed the word Beldame. India leaned back against the windshield, not caring if she blocked his vision, and stared ahead. They crossed a small damp depression of wet sand and clay, shell-littered, that looked rather like a dried riverbed, and proceeded onto a long spit of land, no more than fifty yards wide. On the left-hand side there was the Gulf, with gulls and flying fish, and porpoises in the distance; but on the right was a narrow lagoon of green motionless water and beyond it the much wider peninsula that was traversed by the Dixie Graves Parkway. On this narrow spit they traveled another quarter of a mile, and the little lagoon on the right grew wider and seemingly deeper. And now before her, she saw a group of houses: but not houses such as had been built at Gulf Shores and Gasque—those little shingled shoe boxes raised on concrete blocks with rusting screens and dried-out roofs. These were large, eccentric, old houses such as appeared in coffee table books on outré American architecture.
There were three of them she saw now; three solitary houses arranged at the very end of the spit. They were large, tall, Victorian structures weathered a uniform gray, with angular verticalities and hundreds of scraps of unexpected wooden ornamentation. As they drove closer, India saw that the three houses were identical, with identical windows placed identically in their façades and identical cupolaed verandahs running around three identical sides. Each faced a different way. The house on the left looked toward the Gulf, the house on the right toward the lagoon and the peninsula of land that snaked out from Gulf Shores. The third house, in the middle, looked toward the end of the spit, but its western view was evidently blocked by the high dunes that had formed there.
The houses were placed at right angles and backed onto an open square of shelled walks and low shrubs. Except for this vegetation, all was white sand, and the houses stood foursquare on the undulating surface of the shifting beach.
India was entranced. What mattered intermittent electricity, what mattered washing her hair in cold water, when three such splendid houses composed the whole and entirety of Beldame?
Luker pulled the Scout up to the shrubbery shared by the three houses. India jumped off the hood. “Which one is ours?” she demanded, and her father laughed at the excitement she could not hide.
He pointed to the house on the Gulf. “That’s ours,” he said. He pointed to the house directly opposite it, on the little lagoon, “That’s Leigh and Dauphin’s place. The water is called Elmo’s Lagoon. At high tide, you know, the Gulf flows into St. Elmo’s and we’re completely cut off here. At high tide, Beldame is an island.”
India pointed to the third house. “And whose is that?”
“Nobody’s,” replied Odessa, as she lifted one of the boxes of food out of the Scout.
“Nobody’s?” asked India. “It’s a wonderful house—they’re all wonderful! Why doesn’t anybody live there?”
“They can’t,” said Luker, with a smile.
“Why not?”
“Go round the front and see,” he said, pulling the first of the bags out of the Scout. “Go round and take a look, and then come back and help Odessa and me unpack.”
India stepped quickly along the paths in the common ground, what Luker called the yard, and now she saw how closely the sand dunes at the end of the spit had encroached upon the third house. Something made her hesitate to mount the steps up to the verandah, and she skipped around the side. She stopped short.
The dune of white sand—blinding now that the sun shone glancingly off it directly into her eyes—did not merely encroach upon the house, it had actually begun to swallow it. The back of the house was intact but sand had covered the entire front of the house to a line well above the verandah roof. The dune slid gracefully along the verandah, and had trapped an oaken swing that hung in chains from the ceiling.
India crept around to the other side of the house. It was the same there, though the sand began at not so high a point, and its slope to the bare ground was gentler. She longed to go inside the third house to see whether the dune continued within the rooms in the same gentle curves, or whether the walls and windows had held against the sand. Would she be able to stand before a window and look through the glass into the interior of the dune?
She hesitated at the corner of the verandah. Her curiosity was intense: she had forgot all her animosity toward her father for bringing her to this godforsaken place.
Yet something kept India from mounting the steps of the verandah; something told her not to peer into the windows of that house where no one came to stay; something held her even from pushing her toe into the last grains of white sand that had spilled from the top of the dune onto the bare ground at her feet. Luker called her name, and she ran back to help him unload the Scout.
CHAPTER 6
After the Scout was unpacked, India went room by room through the house that belonged to the McCrays. Thinking of the frigid decorator-opulence of Big Barbara’s house in Mobile, she was surprised by its homely but well-grounded taste. Luker explained that the vacation house had been refurnished when they bought it in 1950 and, except for replacing upholstery, cushions, and draperies, which quickly rotted in the salt air, it had been untouched since then. All that was lacking to India’s mind was carpets on the wooden floors, but Luker said that it was impossible to keep carpets clean when sand was being tracked through the house all day.
The first floor of each of the houses of Beldame consisted of three large rooms: a living room that ran the length of the house along one side, and, opposite this, a dining room at the front and a kitchen at the back. The single bathroom had been made out of a corner of the kitchen. On the second floor four bedrooms were set into the corners, each with two windows and a single door opening onto a central hallway. A narrow staircase descended to the first floor, and an even narrower set of stairs led up to the third. This top part of each house was a single narrow room, with a window at either end, which had always been made over to servants.
India was given the second floor bedroom that at the front looked out over the Gulf and from the side provided an entrancing view of the destructive dune that was devouring the third house. It contained a double bed of iron with brass insets, a painted vanity, a chifforobe, a wicker writing desk, and a large standing cupboard.
While India was unpacking, her father wandered into the room; he sat on the edge of the bed and loaded film into his Nikon.
“Which room did you take?” asked India.
“That one,” he said, pointing at the wall she shared with the other bedroom at the front of the house. “That’s been my room since ’53. Big Barbara has the one catercorner from this, next to me.
“So,” he said, lifting the camera and quickly taking a couple of photographs of his daughter as she stood before the open suitcase, “how do you like Beldame?”
“I like it very much,” she said quietly, and meant him to understand more than that.
“I thought so. Even if it is the end of the world.” She nodded. “That’s very New York of you, you know.”
“What is?” she asked.
“Unpacking your suitcase first thing.”
“Why is that such a New York thing to do?” she asked defensively, pausing between the suitcase and the dresser.
“Because when you’re finished you’ll snap it shut and stick it under the bed—these houses don’t have any closets, I suppose you’ve noticed—and you’ll say to yourself, ‘Well now we can get down to business!�
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India laughed. “That’s right. I guess I’m thinking of Fire Island.”
“Yes,” said Luker, “but we’d be at the Island for only two or three days at a time—turn to the right a little, you’re in shadow. God only knows how long we’re going to be here. And in case you haven’t noticed, I should point out that there’s not much in the way of diversion at Beldame.”
“It’ll be worse for you than for me”—she shrugged—“at least I’m not old enough to get horny . . .”
“I’ll be all right,” said Luker. “I’ve been coming here all my life, at least up until you were born. That woman—as Barbara calls her—that woman and I came here once, part of our honeymoon, and she hated the place and said she would never come here again. We only stayed long enough to conceive you.”
“What? You think that happened here?”
Luker shrugged. “I think so. That woman and I screwed around a lot before we were married, of course, but then she was on the pill. On our honeymoon she went off it—she didn’t tell me that, of course. And when I found out, we had this huge fight and then didn’t have sex again for like two months—so the timing’s about right for you to have been conceived here.”
“You’re also saying I was a mistake, aren’t you?”
“Of course, you don’t really think that I wanted a child . . .”
“But it’s so weird then,” said India.
“What is?”
“That I might have been conceived here and this is the first time I’ve been back since.”
“I don’t imagine that you remember a whole lot about it.”
The Elementals Page 6