“Maybe he’s just trying it out, seeing what it does to him. Boys do that a lot at school.”
“He’d be a little dumb not to know that by now.” Bertha smiled and shoved her chair back. With one hand she reached for a spoon about to fall off the counter’s edge behind her. Catching it just in time, she carried it with her over to the stove. She cooked in slapdash fashion, stirring pots just before they ran over or slightly after, pouring steaming food into bowls which barely held it. Jumbling spices on her shelves with sauce sticky fingers so the labels were barely legible, selecting each one with judicious pinches, moving lids, adjusting flames, she juggled her way to supper. Her meals were not timed since she seemed to rely on her nose to tell her when various dishes were done, yet food always seemed to be ready when everybody was hungry, and it was marvelous food.
“Celia, hand me those hot pads over there. Never can find them when I want them. And the salt. What did I do with the salt?”
Before I could point it out, her hand landed on the salt cellar.
I set the table and strayed into the living room to find Uncle Mowrey. He was sitting in his chair, his fat legs showing beneath The Wall Street Journal. Because he was an accountant and played the stock market with such success, the men in the family joked about picking up The Journal when Mowrey put it down just to see if he’d underlined anything. He didn’t talk about his investments. In fact since he seldom spoke at all, his silences weren’t threatening; they were puzzling. I’d asked my mother why he didn’t talk, and she said he’d never had much conversation.
Bertha was teaching in Galveston when they met, and the first time he came to Mullin with her he was so quiet Uncle Estes thought maybe something was wrong with him. Around the Chandlers Aunt Bertha continued to do most of the talking.
Now, during my second visit, I wondered again at Mowrey’s long silences. Was he half listening, half wandering in his own world as I’d done as a child? Was he resentful of everybody else’s chatter? Slowly I began to understand that Mowrey depended on Bertha to do the talking in most social situations. She wanted to engage other people while he would only speak about what he knew. If a conversation moved to history, Mowrey might join it. Generally he talked to me about only one subject, Galveston, which he seemed to love more than any place in the world. Bertha once said he’d been planning to leave since he was nine years old but, of course, he never had.
I handed him a gin and tonic she had mixed. He accepted it with a noise made deep in his throat implying thanks, and looking up at me, he lowered his paper slightly.
“Uncle Mowrey, did Laffite really bury treasure here?”
“No one’s sure. That’s why everybody digs.”
“But do you think he did?”
“I don’t know. I think people want to believe it’s there. Pirate treasure … something to hunt for. Kept Emmett busy all that visit.” He smiled. “Laffite. … He’s hard to pin down. Some of the old romancers saw him as a brave buccaneer taking Texas’s side against the Spanish. Others remember Galveston began on uncertain ground…claimed by Mexico, by Spain, by the U.S. And islands were open to pirates. Laffite was the best known. He was a slave trader, something most people forget, and he traded whisky most probably. My guess is he was an opportunist, not particularly loyal to anyone. But people generally overlook that. Usually they remember he was a pirate who hated Spain and painted his house red. I guess we love rascals. They seem to get away with more.”
Bertha called from the kitchen that supper was about ready and told me to holler at Emmett.
I did and when there was no answer, ran upstairs to find him asleep again. He slept on his back, one arm outflung, looking, even while sleeping, as if he could wake immediately like a wary animal on the edge of action.
I thought of my friend Claire who’d dated him. She’d told me, “Emmett’s not for reforming. He kept me out till three drinking bourbon! I don’t like bourbon! I don’t even like to drink. I like drinking with Emmett. The trouble is I can’t trust myself around him.”
Claire wouldn’t go out with him anymore. She was bright, practical, on her way somewhere, not to just anybody’s bed, nor to Emmett’s car’s back seat. Well neither was I, yet I had to admit he was dangerous to me also. Even if I was sometimes furious at him, I was often attracted. And why this had to be, I couldn’t begin to understand. All I knew was I had to avoid giving in. It looked like we’d have to go on living together while Aunt Bertha and I claimed kinship, and he ignored it.
I stood in the doorway and called his name. My fingers fell on the door’s old heavily varnished oak frame, traced the small wooden grooves outlining it. The long twilight filtered through the shutters of the windows behind our two narrow beds divided by a strip of faded rag rug, washed over the white cotton spreads I’d pulled up to cover the pillows that morning. Emmett’s boots stood toe to toe on the floor, his body sprawled aslant his bed, the ceiling fan whirred through the damp air. I saw it all so clearly, saw then that what seemed most forbidden could become what was most desired.
“Wake up, damn it!” I practically shouted at him, at myself.
Bertha seemed surprised when I said I would like to go to mass with her. “Are you sure? It’s all in Latin. You won’t understand a thing.”
“I’ve been to Catholic churches before with friends. I don’t mind not understanding. Look!” I showed her a little white straw pillbox. “I even brought something to put on my head just in case you asked me.”
Face powder clouded around her shoulders as she brushed it off and settled her own red poppy covered hat on top of her frizzy curls. “At least in the Catholic Church, they appreciate hats.” She checked to see if her earrings had been screwed on tight enough by shaking her head. “You’re not to tell anybody in the family. They’ll think I’m trying to convert you.”
“I won’t tell. Anyway … who would ask?”
“I don’t know. Someone will. There’s nothing bigger than family curiosity. I know. I’ve got it myself. Come on if you’re determined to go. I never keep anybody away from church.”
The Church of the Sacred Heart was a great blinding white building topped with a Moorish looking dome and two crenellated towers sprouting fleur de lis at regular intervals. Below a succession of arches outlined the entrance. Since it stood in the midst of tall palms, to me it looked more like a sultan’s palace in a 1940’s Hollywood spectacular than a church.
I was in a slippery state about religion, half scornful, half wondering, a fretful agnostic. Sitting quite still during the mass, I watched the priest and altar boys. Bertha, after handing me a printed translation of the service, had joined the ritual of adoration and supplication, kneeling and rising with the rest of the crowd. The church, white inside as well as out, its stained glass windows—pale blues, grays, greens and pinks—reflected the island’s summer colors. “Harbor the Homeless. Ransom the Captives. Visit the Sick. Clothe the Naked. Instruct the Ignorant. Feed the Hungry. Give Drink to the Thirsty. Bury the Dead.” The windows’ black captions admonished us in clear English under pictures of small people dressed in what seemed to be medieval costumes following those instructions. I particularly liked, “Clothe the Naked.” It seemed so immediate I imagined people carrying extra clothing whenever they went out just in case they found someone naked. Such straight forward, specific commands were strangely Puritan in a Catholic Church. There was not a single direction of the kind I was accustomed to such as, “Love thy neighbor.” At the elevation of the host, I bowed my head yet refused to pray. To do so, I thought, would only be a temporary reaction to the waves of devotion I sensed moving around me. I would not be carried away, could not bend to the church’s mysteries, or to my own needs; balkiness I recognized though I couldn’t understand it.
Studying the backs of people’s heads, I found I was searching for Luis and remembered his St. Christopher medal shining against his throat. How would he look from the back, especially if he had on a jacket? Still wishing vaguely that I might
see him, I followed my aunt out of the cool church and waited for a moment with her under the arches before stepping into steamy sunshine. From the white oleanders, still wet with dew, emanated a smell I had previously associated with funeral flowers. The tall palms growing in front to the left and right of the main sidewalk, would have been a more suitable backdrop for a sheik, his robe flapping in the wind as he strode forward. New mass goers straggled indoors. Without turning I could hear the priest’s voice droning, “In nomine Patris. …” Across the street Aunt Bertha pointed out a huge Victorian house, the Bishop’s Palace.
Her head haloed by the stiff red poppies circling her hat, she took my arm as we strolled down the steps.
“Are you satisfied?” She asked.
“It’s a satisfactory sort of church if you want ritual, I suppose. I don’t know much about it.”
“It pleases Mowrey. This morning when you were still asleep, he went to early mass. You’re Methodist like your parents, aren’t you?”
“I’m not sure now.” I had never said that to anyone, but I kenw Bertha wasn’t going to be shocked.
“Well, we all go though a doubtful time. When I was about your age—younger really—and living in Mullin I heard about hell every Sunday. I got tired of it. Every sermon started with a “Thou shalt not.” Some of those ‘shalt nots,’ the little ones anyway, I was determined to try—to drink, dance, play cards. …” She laughed. “I didn’t know why they have to make so much of little things. And there wasn’t much choice in a tiny place like Mullin. Baptists … Methodists. … There wasn’t a Catholic in town, not one in the area. Mowrey and I got married down here. Our priest has a drink with us when he comes over.”
I wondered what Grandmother Chandler had to say about it, but Bertha only laughed and said she never talked to her about religion any more. “You can’t drag everybody along with you when you go.”
We walked on home to find Uncle Mowrey sitting on the back porch drinking coffee, the Sunday paper all around his ankles. Emmett was gone.
“Didn’t say where he was going,” Uncle Mowrey reported.
“To the beach, I guess,” Bertha said. “There isn’t much else open. Bars are closed on Sundays.”
“Ah, Bertha—” He sighed and by that slight sound, I knew he sometimes disagreed with her. At the same time, it was plain he couldn’t change her habits. It was one of those married people’s sighs. I’d heard my parents make the same sound, half-yearning, half-acknowledging.
I was surprised then when Uncle Mowrey said, “How’s the boy ever going to grow up if you and his mother know where he is all the time?”
Chapter Four
Luis was sitting at about the same place where I’d seen him before. I caught sight of him from a long way off and was glad to know the name of one person in the great blank space of the beach early in the morning. He seemed to be drawing something in a sketchbook; all his attention was bent toward an object I couldn’t see. As I got closer I could watch his hand moving quickly, pausing, moving on.
When I stood beside him interrupting his gaze, he said, “Well, here you are,” just as if he’d acknowledged Emmett or anyone else who came along. Putting his sketchbook aside, he looked up, “Come sit down.”
“In a minute.” I peered over his shoulder to see what he was drawing and found he’d been working on a picture of a water-soaked tennis shoe at the edge of the tide line. Everything seemed to wash up on Galveston’s beaches. Sometimes there were clots of tar tangled in the seaweed, bits of net, cans and other debris.
“All this stuff. … Is it thrown overboard from ships or what?”
“Some of it floats up in the Gulf Stream all the way from Mexico. We get coconuts from beaches there or further south.”
“From your part?”
“No. Guanajuato’s in the mountains, near San Miguel, west a little. It’s a colonial town. The Spanish mined silver there. It’s built on the sides and in the valley of a deep canyon.”
“It must be a lot cooler. Don’t you hate to leave it in the summer?”
“It is beautiful. My father lives here though. I come up to see him.”
“Where does he live?”
“In the Galvez.”
“The hotel?”
“Yes.”
I wanted to ask why, but something about the way he replied stopped me. He didn’t want to talk about his father perhaps. “I think I’ll get in,” I said.
“Watch for jellyfish. They’re out this morning.” He got up. “I’ll come with you.”
I shuddered when the cool water lapped around my ankles but was determined to get wet all over at once so kept moving across the long shallow shelf out to the waves. Luis, much taller, stepped ahead of me. I couldn’t catch up with him until we reached higher water. Even then he was a foot or so away. We rode the waves silently, purposefully, careful of the surf rising and falling, sometimes high, sometimes in quiet slow swells, varying without apparent pattern. It was easier to swim in the Gulf than in the Atlantic. Though cool in the morning when it hit the beach the water stayed fairly warm overnight, and the waves rocked gently.
“Look out!” Luis shouted.
Soft blobs of clear white bubbles drifted by my side. Luis caught me around my wrist with one hand and pulled me over next to him. He let go as the wave receded. Looking back I saw the white shiny mass lifted over a wave just behind us. Shaking a little, treading water, I wished I could be carried back to shore.
“I hate those things.”
“Were you scared?”
“I can’t stand to brush against jellyfish. I don’t think I’d mind the sting as much as I’d mind the feel of them. Slimy!” The possibility of touching one made me shiver again. I started swimming in as fast as I could. Soon the long slopes of sand made it impossible to swim at all. Everyone save the smallest child had to walk a long way to get out of the Gulf.
Once back on the beach lying on a towel in the sun, conscious only of the warmth of the sun on my back and of Luis a few inches away, I forgot about the threat of jellyfish. Sitting up and pulling my feet under me, I looked over at him. His back was smooth and evenly tanned down to his waist; a pale line showed slightly where the elastic gave. Shifting my gaze to the water’s edge, I watched a sandpiper tracking the ragged end of a wave, pecking now and then at pieces of seaweed. Further down the beach a woman began taking food out of a basket and piling waxed paper covered squares on an old army blanket. It was so early for lunch I wondered if she’d brought sandwiches for breakfast. I would like to know her, I thought. I would like to know anybody who preferred sandwiches to eggs and bacon.
Luis was so still he could have been asleep. I turned to him. “Don’t you wish you could live on the beach with nothing but a pot to cook in and a spoon to stir with?”
“Two spoons,” he said as he sat up and pulled the towel across his shoulders. “And an umbrella.”
“You’ve got such a good tan I don’t see why you have to worry about sunburn.”
“It’s inherited,” he smiled slowly. “Partially.”
“Well that’s a help.” I grinned at him and pulled my wildly clipped bangs down over my forehead. “I have to use my hair to keep the sun off, or I’ll have terrible freckles.”
“I’m half Mexican … on my father’s side.”
All I could think of was my father’s reaction after we first met Uncle Blanton whose skin was even darker than Uncle Estes’s or Mother’s. I’d asked if he thought he looked Mexican, and my father had agreed he did. He’d warned me, however we’d better not mention it. Living mainly in Tennessee, I saw Mexicans only as people from Mexico, that exotic unknown country next to Texas. Prejudice against Negroes—I’d known since childhood—filled the air everyone breathed although some of that had worn away during the war. His service stripped my father of much of his. “We all have the same color of blood,” was his final pronouncement on the subject, and I heard it young, years before I came to Texas. I knew he was right, but his view wasn’t
shared by all of the Chandlers or by many of the people we knew in Leon. Although there were few Negroes in Colorado University’s summer school, I’d worked with one who was reporter on the student newspaper and was relieved no one there mentioned his skin color.
Alone with Luis all I could say was, “You’re lucky, you know. We have my father’s side … back for generations, but I don’t know much about my mother’s family. Maybe somebody kept up with them, but nobody I know.” I stopped myself, aware that I’d been chattering idiotically, filling in space in case I’d embarrassed him.
Luis looked at me in an amiable way as if he understood I was trying not to pry. “I don’t mind being half Mexican. It gives me two countries.”
“Don’t you have to choose?”
“Citizenship? Yes. I chose the U.S. But I’ve still got two countries.”
“Sometimes I think I do too. I was born in the South, and moved to the West. My parents decided it was time to try out Mother’s state.
Luis laughed.
The West was still a foreign country, I felt, no matter how long I’d lived there … seven years, long enough for some people, maybe not long enough for me although I knew I felt at home in Galveston. It was a lot like the South because it was old and slightly worn. A lot had happened here; the houses themselves told you that.
For some reason, just as we’d discovered a small likeness I grew wary and wanted to get away. Until then Luis was only a boy, somewhat older than I, that Emmett had met on the beach, someone he’d stumbled across and introduced to me. The idea of simplicity was so seductive. My own life was a jumble, and here was Luis, the American-Mexican with a father he didn’t seem to want to talk about and a mother too, no doubt, and his two countries. Everyone came with something, with strings, with ties. Tony carried all the Gregorys with him everywhere; I knew them in some ways better than they knew themselves though we’d never met. A girl friend gets all sorts of privileged information. Luis’s, I sensed, would be even more complicated than Tony’s. I could have excused myself. I could have left. But I didn’t want to spend the rest of the day with Emmett, nor did I want to be completely alone. A part of me was already running through Bertha’s and Mowrey’s back gate, brushing past the white oleander bush, turning on the hose attached to the oak cistern, rinsing salt off with soft rain water. Then up the steps I would go and into the confusion of Bertha’s kitchen. It would be hot; she’d probably already be cooking, getting something ready for supper ahead of time. I knew exactly what was waiting there. I chose Luis.
Uncertain Ground Page 5