“It’s my pastime, my secret vice. I come down now and then to see what’s in port. My father sailed into Galveston Bay on a ship he’d watched being built in Glasgow. Now I come and stand on shore.” With one arm he pointed to the warehouses, the decayed buildings, the docks. “I stand here and watch the place rot.” He shook his head slightly.
“Come.” He waved us over to an open door. “Look in there. What do you see?”
I searched the dark interior of the warehouse behind us. More than half of it was empty. Against the dockside stood bales in orderly rows with metal bindings gleaming faintly against protective burlap covers.
“Cotton,” I said.
“That’s what made Galveston. Cotton. We had a good natural harbor, one we’ve made even deeper.”
“But you’ve got cotton still.”
“Very little compared to what used to be here. There’s the channel to Houston now. People used to say it would never work, no one would want to go that far inland. But they did. Now the trade’s gone, has been gone for years. Galveston’s hardly a port any more. Now it’s the place the whole state runs off to when they want to do what they can’t do at home. It’s a fine place to raise cain. We’ve got the medical school and a good hospital, so it’s a fine place to be sick. But it’s no place to do business. You can go downtown and look at more empty buildings.” His voice dwindled away. He looked over at the ship again.
“I planned to get a ship here … when I retired, I guess. I wanted to leave from this harbor and to come back here, to come into homeport. I don’t know if that will be a possibility. I’ll probably have to get in a car and drive over to Houston if I want to go anywhere on a ship.” He ducked his head.
I ducked my own. It was embarrassing to hear a quiet man talk so much. It was a little like overhearing something I wasn’t supposed to know, and at the same time, I couldn’t think of any encouragement I could give him. It was hard to think of something cheerful while standing in the middle of ruin.
“Don’t ships still leave from here?” Aunt Bertha, in need of a traveling companion, had taken Mother on a cruise to Cuba in the twenties. She still spoke of dancing with the ship’s officers on moonlit decks. The trip had made her a hopeless romantic about traveling anywhere by sea. If she’d been there, she would have talked about how much fun catching a freighter bound for a foreign port would be, an idea my father discouraged whenever she voiced it.
Uncle Mowrey smiled faintly and said cruise ships still sailed from Galveston but not often.
“You’ll go someday,” I promised lamely.
He nodded, took off his glasses, and wiped his forehead again. “Yes … I’ll go.” He turned away from us taking slow, short steps, stopped, then said if I meant to come home for lunch to bring Luis.
He couldn’t come. He had to meet his father.
Mowrey went on to his car. We followed at a distance.
“He’s sad, isn’t he? An old man with a dream.”
“I don’t know,” said Luis. “He’s not so terribly old. He’s still got his wife, and he can travel. My father won’t go anywhere. I’ve tried to get him to come back to Mexico with me. He refuses to. He’s afraid if he dies there, no one will bring him back here and put him beside my mother. That’s all he wants, he says, to lie in a grave beside her. While he waits he gambles. It makes no difference to him whether he wins or loses. It’s just something for him to do. Last year he sold our house and moved to the hotel, the Galvez. It’s close to the Balinese Club. I stay at the beach house. I hate being closed up in a hotel, but it’s what my father wants. All he has to do is walk across the street to the club, and when the night is finished, he comes back again. They all know him there. They know his routine, and everybody does exactly as he wants. The maids don’t sweep the hall where his room is till after noon. He can’t stand the sound of vacuum cleaners. When he goes downstairs to eat, the headwaiter makes sure he gets his favorite waitress, the one that doesn’t talk much.” He stopped abruptly and stared up at the sky as if he were searching for the exact position of the noonday sun.
“Can’t anything be done?”
Luis bent down so close I could see a flicker of pain in his eyes. “Nothing! I hate all the closed doors and dark corridors. He might as well be living in a mortuary. What can I do about it? Nothing! I come to see him. I wait with him a few weeks. I leave. When this month is over I’ll leave him again. I can’t stay here with him and force another kind of life on him when he wants to die.”
His anger washed over me like a sudden wave I hadn’t seen rising. I felt like a child crying for the moon, for all the ice cream I wanted, for everything to be all right. Headed toward the car, we’d stopped at the end of the wharf where there was no shade. The warehouse’s metal siding reflected heat. A stench of rotting fish and dank water rose in the still air. Sweat ran down our faces, glistened on our necks, wet our backs. Hot, shaken by Luis’s insistence on hopelessness, I swayed on my feet. I’d never heard him be so vehement. He sorrowed over the loss of his mother and his brother. He would shake his head over Emmett’s failings. But his father’s refusal to go on with his life made his voice harsh and his facial muscles harden into a reproving mask.
“Are you okay?” His voice softened.
“I just felt funny for a minute. I didn’t mean to— I guess I shouldn’t have asked—”
“It’s all right. I get … I get mad because there’s nothing else I can do. That’s all.”
The guard waved at us from the door of his shack. “Go now,” he shouted in Spanish. “Take your girl to a cool place. She’s too young and tender to stay out in the sun.”
I pulled a beach towel over the hot leather seat. I should have eaten more breakfast. Hunger was making me dizzy. I slid back in the seat watching Luis down shift gears as we rattled across the railroad tracks.
When he dropped me off at the Mclean house I ran up the steps two at a time, slipped quietly around the umbrella stand and through the hall’s welcoming darkness. At the door just outside the alcove to the dining room, I peeked in to find Uncle Mowrey, his newspaper already open before him. In another corner Emmett sat glaring at his boots, one heel balanced on the toe of another. Aunt Bertha came in from the kitchen to put plates on. The chandelier tinkled in the door’s quick draft.
“My Lord!” A plate rattled on the table as she put it down. “You scared me half to death.” She came over to me and stopped short. “Child, your eyes look like two holes burned in a blanket. You’ve got to watch the sun down here!” She gave me another appraising look. “Come. Take these plates.”
When we sat down Emmett pulled out my chair for me, then stepped over to my side, shoved his hands in both pockets and brought them out full of quarters.
“Finally found me a machine that pays off.” He grinned, and I imagined him standing in front of slot machines all morning, standing in dark rooms in front of whirling pictures of fruit—apples, oranges, lemons, cherries.
“You got to kick them now and then.” He began piling quarters in symmetrical heaps in front of his own plate.
Forgetting my disgust at the rotting fish smell by the wharf, I speared cold pink shrimp with a fork and dipped them in red sauce.
Uncle Mowrey consulted his pocket watch, snapped the lid of it shut making a tiny final click, sighed and began eating lunch.
It was like that all month. I’d leave the house, learn something appalling, return and it would be as if nothing had happened. Aunt Bertha’s serenity could be easily shattered by Emmett’s various disasters—as it was the first time he came home drunk from the rodeo—yet whatever the trouble was, it was absorbed, overlooked, or else, soon forgotten. Perhaps it was because Mowrey and Bertha were older than our parents and, at the same time, we had the privileged standing of visitors. Our parents had to worry about our ordinary lives and their future hopes for us while Bertha and Mowrey weren’t inclined to discipline in the first place. Aunt Bertha might worry about Emmett, but she hadn’t tattled to h
is parents. In his case, she chose to be indulgent. As for mine, I’d had long lessons in how to act in other people’s houses. Manners, I’d been taught, meant accommodating others. There were times I wished I wasn’t the one required to suit everybody else. My brother talked back to our father, got in fights at school. He might be punished, yet he was often silently pardoned and so was Emmett, Mr. Trouble himself wearing noisy boots. I watched him, kept quiet, and minded my manners. But I was tired of doing it sometimes. Why did boys get to be the difficult ones?
One afternoon late Emmett told me, “I found myself a little low-stakes game.”
I couldn’t imagine anybody playing cards all afternoon, mainly, I guess, because I didn’t like sitting around in a darkened room fiddling with pieces of cardboard, but when I said so Emmett only gave me a scornful look
“Poker is a damn fine game!”
“Where are you getting the money?”
“I win sometimes, Celia. God damn!” Glancing toward the open kitchen door he lowered his voice and cocked his head in that direction.
I nodded. There was no need to tell Bertha and Mowrey everything.
So far my own rebellions had been the same small ones of the girls I’d grown up with in Leon. We smoked, sometimes we stayed out too late. The girls we knew who’d resisted their parents most got pregnant. We had no intentions of doing the same. At the university I drank. Jane’s crying drunk wasn’t the first one I’d ever seen. I’d eventually decided drinking night after night was ultimately silly. The results were always the same; I’d have a hangover compounded by nausea and a headache every morning. And I saw what sometimes happened. Patricia, one of my roommates, had a steady boyfriend, Henry Cale, who used to pick us up and take us to class in his car full of beer cans—there were so many of them rolling around on the floor they fell out when the doors opened. He had already flunked out, gone home to his little town in East Texas, gone home to have nothing to do but drink. I hoped his parents were able to help him. When I asked Patricia, she only shook her head and said she didn’t know.
“Celia, Henry … he’s— I tried to get him to cut down some. He’s a lost cause if I ever saw one!”
“Can’t he be sent somewhere, you know, some place that will—”
“Yes, but he has to want to go.” She shook her head again, and in a week, began dating other boys.
Now and then I thought of Henry Cale driving us down the drag with all his empty beer cans clanking. And I wondered still if he ever did quit drinking.
After lunch a few days later I asked Aunt Bertha if she’d seen Luis around Galveston before I’d brought him to the house.
“I knew his mother, Maxine. His older brother, the one who was killed in the war … Ricardo, we called him. Ricky … was one of my best students.
“I didn’t know you taught.”
She lifted a handful of wet silver from the hot water and dropped it quickly on a dishtowel to drain. “I came down here from Mullin to teach school. That’s how I got away. I taught the fourth grade. After Mowrey and I married, I quit teaching.”
“So … Ricky—”
“Everybody knew him. He was a lovely boy. Handsome. Popular. Played football when he got to high school.”
“And Luis?”
“I’d quit teaching by the time he came along.”
Drying the silver, sliding the wet knives through the towel, I could almost feel evasion in the kitchen. It was as if some kind of ground fog drifted between me and Aunt Bertha.
“Their father— You know him too?”
She let the water out of the sink, then rinsed her hands carefully under the tap. “We all tried to help him after Maxine died, introduced him to other women. He wouldn’t have anything to do with anybody except one old friend of hers. This friend of mine, Eleanor Phillips, lived in the Galvez too. Mowrey said I was meddling. I guess I was. I got Eleanor and Alberto together for dinner here. He spent the whole evening talking about Maxine as if she’d come through the door any minute!”
I laughed when she gestured toward the kitchen door.
“Retired men!” She picked up a dry towel to help me with the glasses. “I don’t know what I’ll do with Mowrey when he retires! Alberto Platon has nothing to keep him busy. He was a cotton factor and had to retire way early. Not enough to do here.”
“So … Luis … do you know if he has a girl in Galveston?” I finally asked what I’d been hoping to find out.
“I doubt it. He lives in Mexico most of the time, doesn’t he?”
The fog I’d almost seen before thickened and billowed between us. I finished polishing glasses and began pushing a towel round and round a plate trying to remember what my father had said about Randy Wells, the guy all the girls in Leon dated and never married. “Something wrong with his hormones.” If that was true, it one of the kinder ways of putting it. Most of the words we had—“queer,” “fag,” “fruit,” “fairy,” “homo,”—were meant to hurt. Was Bertha trying not to say one of those?
I dropped the plate and made a lot of apologies while standing above it noticing the flower pattern still evident circling its edges. It was old china, everyday stuff, Aunt Bertha said. It had belonged to her mother-in-law. She was glad to get rid of it. Now she had a good excuse to buy some more sooner. I picked up the fragments. The subject was changed. Bertha and Mowrey would take us to the Balinese Club on the weekend, on Saturday night.
“Mother told me about it. She loved going.”
“Did Emmett bring a coat and tie?”
“Aunt Earlene packed one I think. He won’t like wearing it.”
“I know. I’d just like to see him properly dressed once while he’s here.”
Nothing was mentioned about getting him a haircut. Bertha might tell him to do it. She knew making Emmett go to a barber was beyond me.
Nothing more was said about Luis either. I wasn’t sure she knew what I was asking, and I couldn’t question her outright. She was agreeable, but she was older, and perhaps she preferred to avoid the problem altogether. I told myself I was being unreasonable. After all Bertha traveled and, for God’s sake, she lived in Galveston. She’d spoken of him kindly. There wasn’t a hint of disdain in her voice. She’d been truly glad to see him when he came to the house. I still couldn’t ask her. There was nothing effeminate about him. There hadn’t been anything effeminate about Randy Wells. He’d kissed all the girls, kissed us all goodbye. And what about Emmett? He was the one who’d met Luis first, and he hadn’t said anything. The only fault he’d found with Luis was he was half Mexican. “Meskin,” that was what he’d said. Half or whole, it was all the same to Emmett.
Chapter Six
Because of you the sun will shine, the moon and stars will say you’re mine, forever and never to part. Be-cause of yo-o-u.” The voice on the record wailed on while I tried to lead Emmett around the back porch. Against the wall the white wicker chairs sat like a row of fat old ladies interrupted by stands of Boston fern. The straw rug had been rolled up, and at the edge of it Aunt Bertha watched with the portable phonograph at her side.
“Emmett, try to lead.” I was tired of the lesson. All morning Aunt Bertha and I had been trying to teach him how to dance.
“If youall will just change that moony record and get some real music, I’ll lead you right off this old porch.”
While we were in high school I’d seen him two-stepping around in Leon’s VFW Club where the men drank whisky from bottles wrapped in paper bags outside and in the honky-tonk-beer-cafe in McGregor, our nearest wet town, where everybody drank beer inside. Since we’d both gone off to college, I hadn’t seen him on any kind of dance floor for a while. He was so stiff-legged and draggy now I wondered if he’d taken Doris Lacey dancing anywhere in the past year. I thought nobody forgot how to dance. It was like bicycle riding. Once you knew, you knew. Emmett clumped around as if he’d never known, and his only excuse was he couldn’t two-step to Because of You. Surely somebody had taught him more than that, if not his mother, t
hen Doris or one of the whole string of girls he’d dated before meeting her.
Aunt Bertha had already told him this was the only halfway new record she had. “It’s not going to do you any good to learn how to keep time with something like Alexander’s Ragtime Band, is it?”
“Could you?” He asked as if he really thought she might get up and show him. He was ready for any excuse to stop.
“Maybe I could and maybe I couldn’t. I’d need your Uncle Mowrey, and it wouldn’t hurt if I was twenty pounds lighter and ten years younger. The point is you’ve got to know how to dance to this kind of music. They don’t play western songs out at the Balinese Room. I don’t know what they teach you up at that cow college, but you ought to learn to dance to civilized music.”
“Cow college!” Emmett howled and dropped my hand. “Why do people who don’t know anything about A&M—”
Aunt Bertha grinned. “Texas Agricultural and Mechanical. I know that much.”
I backed away from him laughing. Though my university was A&M’s oldest rival, I knew real loyalty to his school wasn’t behind his anger. He certainly wasn’t a member of the ROTC corps whose giant marching formation of the school’s initials across the field in step behind the band playing the Aggie War Hymn brought students and alumni screaming to their feet. Emmett hated uniforms and drills. He went to A&M only because he had to go somewhere. College kept him out of Korea. His mother meant for him to finish. Somehow, just by doing that, she felt he would put aside his cowboy tendencies. Uncle Estes, as far as I could see, neither agreed nor disagreed with this plan. He seemed to be waiting to see what happened. He wasn’t in the least like my father who was usually impatient. Estes, my father said, was a good trader.
I asked him what he meant. His opinions about people were important to me although his ways of judging others were sometimes strange. To him one of the boys I’d dated “looked funny out of his eyes.” Though he was a nervous boy, I ignored this remark; on the whole my father usually was a fair judge.
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