Uncertain Ground

by Carolyn Osborn

  It was time, I saw on the car’s clock, to go back to the house where Luis lay dying of the disease he would barely name that was nonetheless evident in his emaciated body.

  He’d gone to Edward for diagnosis and Edward had told him, then came home to tell me. “It’s AIDS. He doesn’t want to know it.”

  “He’s not going to want us to do anything either.”

  Edward nodded.

  “We could look after him here.”

  We have a comfortable house with empty bedrooms on a quiet street in San Antonio. Our children are grown and gone, but Luis would not come and stay with us, so I tried another way, knowing it was foolish, knowing I still wanted to make the offer.

  “We could take you to Paris. I could go with you if you like. Edward could join us for awhile. You’ve always wanted to go, and it’s so beautiful.”

  Too thin already, having problems with his eyes, he smiled and refused. He wouldn’t go back to Mexico either. He’d kept the beach house in Galveston.

  “I don’t know how many hurricanes it has weathered.”

  He knew a doctor there. His friend Felipe would look after him.

  “In Galveston it doesn’t matter. So many of the people I knew there are dead already. People with … with this … don’t live in Mexico.”

  He said it so wearily I knew he’d made up his mind much earlier to come back home to die. Ironically AZT was so much cheaper in Mexico. His friends there would supply him. He had a little money, just what he’d saved, and his inheritance from his father who left him the beach house.

  Luis hadn’t been back to Galveston but once or twice since his father died. He never liked his stepmother. However Louise Finley did keep his father company; a few weeks before she and Mr. Platon married he moved out of the hotel into her apartment. Later they bought one of the new condominiums just being built on the island. Somehow she got him to give up gambling. Still Luis wouldn’t like her. No matter what she did, he found fault. Louise was one of those women who had never learned how to cook. The first time Luis visited them after they married he was enraged to discover Alberto eating crackers and cottage cheese at odd hours. She’d waited until she quit working to travel, so she and Alberto were frequently gone on long cruises. Aunt Bertha and Uncle Mowrey were once on the same ship with them to Hong Kong.

  “Afloat in a sea of champagne dotted with islands of caviar,” Luis commented.

  Although his father had lived like a wastrel for almost three years, and Luis hadn’t cared in the least, he was contemptuous of any sign of luxury in Louise’s and Alberto’s lives. His usual tolerance deserted him. He couldn’t trust Louise. He didn’t want another mother.

  I thought Alberto knew this, for he made him executor of his will, a way of letting Luis know what happened to his estate. As usual he didn’t seem to care though he admitted he needed money as much as anyone.

  Louise Finley was left the condo and a small trust fund, which went to Luis when she died. Beside receiving the beach house, he inherited the duty of taking care of his father’s bequests. Alberto left a number of small personal gifts to various people. One was a pair of gold cufflinks, which were to be given to Frank, the doorman at the Balinese Club.

  “I looked all over town for him, or for someone who knew him, but he couldn’t be found,” Luis told me.

  By the time Alberto died, Galveston had become a different city.

  Driving to Luis’s I watched a storm gathering over the Gulf. Gray clouds choked the sky. Waves rose high and fell greedily sucking at what was left of the sand, reaching over the granite boulders piled at the foot of the wall. Built to protect Galveston, the seawall blocked the natural action of waves against the island. The ramp we used to drive down to reach West Beach now dropped directly into water. The city has been saved, but the beach eroded daily, more obvious just before a storm when the wind driven waves rise against the wall. Sea and sand became a choppy mass broken only by red flags violently whipping on poles at the ends of drowned jetties. The wind carried seaweed’s sharp medicinal smell. Far out, close to the horizon, a thread of lightning dangled against the gray sky.

  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 ea
ch 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.

  About the Author

  Carolyn Osborn graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a B.J. degree in 1955, and an M.A. in 1959. She has won awards from P.E.N., the Texas Institute of Letters, and a Distinguished Prose Award from The Antioch Review (2003). Her stories have been included in The O. Henry Awards (Doubleday, 1991) and Lone Star Literature (Norton, 2003), among numerous other anthologies. She is the author of several collections of short stories, including: A Horse of Another Color (University of Illinois Press, 1977), The Fields of Memory (Shearer Publishing, 1984), and Warriors & Maidens (Texas Christian University Press, 1991). The Book Club of Texas published an illustrated, specially bound edition of her story, The Grands (1990). In 2009, she received the Lon Tinkle Award from the Texas Institute of Letters.

  Acknowledgments

  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.

  Wings Press was founded in 1975 by Joanie Whitebird and Joseph Lomax, both deceased, as “an informal association of artists and cultural mythologists dedicated to the preservation of the literature of the nation of Texas.” Publisher, editor and designer since 1995, Bryce Milligan is honored to carry on and expand that mission to include the finest in American writing—meaning all of the Americas—without commercial considerations clouding the choice to publish or not to publish.

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  —Stephen Harrigan, author of The Gates of the Alamo

  Carolyn Osborn captures beautifully what it would have been like to be young, restless, confused, sunburned, maybe-in-love-and-maybe-not on Galveston Island in the long-ago nineteen-fifties. This is a timeless novel about a timeless place.

  —Naomi Shihab Nye, Chancellor, Academy of American Poets

  With calm, descriptive elegance, Uncertain Ground paints both the conflicted restlessness of 20-year-old Texans in 1953, sprung south to the island for a month, and the haunting ever-shifting shore of what we do and don’t know, what we can or can’t ask or understand. Osborn has an alchemist’s gift.

  —Rosa Shand, author of The Gravity of Sunlight

  Carolyn Osborn’s Uncertain Ground is a gripping evocation of the island of Galveston—its pirate-haunted, never-quite-domesticated habits threading through its history, its elegance, and its façcLade of middle-class culture. The book is an equally successful resurrection of the young of the post-WWII decade, recreating the vulnerable, “uncertain” emotional wilderness of that era. Once in Osborne’s grip, her characters don’t allow you to escape.

  —Jan Reid, author of The Hammer Comes Down (with Lou Dubose)

  Uncertain Ground is tight, touching, and funny—a wonderful cast of characters matching wits and sorrows in a special time and place.

  —Annette Sanford, author of Crossing Shattuck Bridge and Lasting Attachments

  Uncertain Ground is an insightful probing into young adult minds. Set against the background of the not always calm Gulf of Mexico, the novel’s lilting rhythms carry the reader from one adventure to another.