At the moment of our leave-taking, there was a silvery flash of metal step, behind it was the larger flash of the passenger car; the smell of steam and diesel mingled in Galveston’s humid morning air. And there was an indefinable sadness, one I knew from all the other times I’d left places no matter how old I was, no matter whether I’d liked it or hated it. Emmett called my name. Aunt Bertha beckoned to me. I turned to Luis and knew then, knew by the slightly formal way he hugged me, that he preferred men. I’d probably known it for sometime. This came to me so definitely that I searched his face for a moment as if to memorize it and to remember that this entirely desirable man always would love and be loved by other men.
Emmett and I sat on the scratchy seats side by side and waved to our aunt and uncle. Luis waited behind them a little.
“You seeing him again?” he asked.
“He says he’ll come up to Austin this fall.”
“He’s queer, you know.”
I nodded. Emmett had seen him in a bar one afternoon with a boy. They hadn’t come in together but they left together.
“I don’t know what it was about them. They just looked at each other a certain way maybe. They drove off in an Austin Healey.”
“Red?”
“Yeah. But if you knew—? Why did you keep on seeing him?”
“I like him. He’s good company.”
He shook his head. “I didn’t figure him out for a while myself. I don’t guess Aunt Bertha knows. Once that woman gets a notion about anything. …” He threw his head back as if shaking off all her arguments, “I’m going to get married!”
“Emmett, where’s your hat?”
“Gave it to Jane.” He grinned.
We crossed the neck of the bay sliding by the old causeway as we passed it on the new one and were on the mainland once more. The train picked up speed. Other passengers, steadying themselves by holding onto the tops of seats as they swayed in the aisle, smiled down on us benevolently like we were a pair of newlyweds on our way home from our honeymoon. I would have minded when we rode down to Galveston. It made no difference now.
Later that afternoon while the sun scorched the drought bitten fields and the air-conditioned train wound its way northwest through transparent waves of heat, he went to sleep at last. His head rolled from side to side on the white square of cotton covering the seat’s back. I pulled him toward my shoulder. By the time we hit the next to last stop, he woke up and rubbed his eyes. Taking my hand, he turned it palm up, studied it for a little, then let go. His eyes flickered shut again.
“Better wake up. They’ll be there when we get in.”
When he opened his eyes once more, he looked at me as if we’d met in a dream, and he didn’t quite know who I was yet, as if he’d been dreaming of some time long before we’d ever gone to Galveston.
“What? Who?” He shook his head. A white line showed above his collar where the barber had trimmed away his dark hair. The first haircut he’d had all summer left him looking vulnerable. He was twenty, going on twenty-one, and for the moment, tamed.
“My mother and yours. They said they would meet us.”
“Christ!”
“Don’t you remember?”
“Well, yes, but I want to see Doris first. I wish we could go right on to California or wherever the hell this train goes. And I know we can’t. Mama’s going to tie into me.” He looked out the window. “Country’s gone to hell. We haven’t passed over a river with water enough to matter. I’ve been looking at the ocean so long I nearly forgot about the damn drought.”
Like all the Chandlers, he talked about the weather when he wanted to evade a touchy subject. I’d thought he was determined to marry. Maybe he was only trying to talk himself into it. What was a baby to him after all? The world was full of young girls and their bastard children. There were whole institutions devoted to them, a place in Austin, a Catholic home near the hospital west of campus, and another one in Ft. Worth where unmarried pregnant girls were sheltered. I’d walked by the one in Austin plenty of times and wondered what those girls’ lives were like. I supposed those were the homes Aunt Bertha had talked about, and there were others, no doubt. If they chose to, the girls could give their babies up to some well-educated, financially able couple dying for a child.
By this time though I’d begun to believe Doris Lacey wouldn’t choose to give up her child. She was a country girl still, and a senior in Mullin’s small high school, but she was bright and spirited. Emmett swore she was bent on college even if she had to wait tables. She’d been riding in the barrel races for several years when Emmett took up bronc riding. I’d asked her once what she thought of his riding. She’d laughed and said he might learn how to stick to something, and if he couldn’t, he’d learn how to fall off. His family could worry about his safety. Doris narrowed her gaze, watched him ride and took him to the doctor who wrapped his chest when he cracked a rib. She wasn’t a person who wasted time wringing her hands.
“Emmett, I can’t really imagine Doris giving up her baby. On the other hand, she could just go away somewhere, stay with a relative and have it.”
“In secret?”
“Oh Lord, Emmett! Women must have been doing that forever!”
“Maybe. I don’t know. I have to see Doris. I want to see her. It’s Mother. She’s always said I’d get somebody pregnant, or break my neck riding, or wake up in jail, and there’d be hell to pay.”
His summing up of Aunt Earlene’s assessment of him didn’t sound quite like her. It was a little raw. Maybe those were the fates that Emmett had warned himself against.
The train slid to a stop at the familiar red brick depot. My mother and Aunt Earlene were waiting in the shade of the doorway. I waved at them. They didn’t see me at first. Aunt Earlene craned her neck looking for Emmett everywhere. He was right behind me bumping our suitcases against the seats.
When we emerged from the train a smothering blanket of heat fell over us. I had the same impulse Emmett had earlier. If only we could have gone on and on and never gotten off, never come back, never come back to all the life that was waiting for us there, back to Kenyon’s problems, to my father’s impatience, to the little heap of worries families seemed to accumulate. All of these were underlined by the persistent Texas summer which wouldn’t let up till sometime late in October. Inland heat was a force I always wanted to escape. It was only slightly cooler in Galveston, however we generally had a sea breeze. In Leon air-conditioning was the only relief. Though we had some in church, there were no high ceilinged rooms with fans in anyone’s house in town. Except for some of the buildings around the square, the courthouse, the remnants of a log jail and three or four houses, there was nothing particularly old in town. My parents had brought me there. The university had already taken me away. I’d gradually left little by little, semester by semester. I’d been going to Tennessee, to Colorado, to Mexico and coming back every summer. The impulse to go on was only that of someone who hasn’t finished traveling. I would take it up again later.
Aunt Earlene swooped toward Emmett with her arms outstretched like a great hovering bird waiting to enfold him.
Emmett bent his head to kiss her cheek.
My mother kissed me then stepped back, “You look like two gypsies. You must have lived in the water. Did you have a good time?”
I was immensely grateful she didn’t ask about Tony Gregory. After a while I would tell her; she knew this wasn’t the right time.
She was wearing a green and white checked dress with a short sleeved green jacket that she often wore on shopping trips to Waco. If she went anywhere with Earlene, their unspoken rivalry compelled her to dress up.
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 h
er 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.
Chapter Twelve
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.
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