On the Gulf

by Elizabeth Spencer

  But she did go back, from time to time. She would get to feeling bad about them and then, as two years had gone and thanks to no one up there she was actually making it, with her glow about it all intact as well, she would get to feeling something else. Her very capacity to pull through must have come, in some way, from them. If not, how could she love them still? They had wrecked her little piece of land: it was an accident. The lumber company they had contracted to cut timber off their own property had assumed hers part of theirs. When they’d noticed, they said, it was too late. Timber lost, the man who’d lent against her mortgage wanted out, and worst of all, the beautiful glade was spoiled for the next fifty years. Who had cared enough to keep things straight? When she thought of it, she would knot her fists, nails digging at her palms, wondering: What went with our laughter? Why don’t we laugh any more? And big family-size tears would roll off into her pillow.

  She believed in self-knowledge, even though trying to find it in the bosom of a Mississippi family was like trying to find some object lost in a gigantic attic, when you really didn’t know what you were looking for. Why look at all? she wondered. Most of her traits she’d learned away from them. One was how not to talk all the time. She now retired into silence. It was he who got to talking then, and kept it up, interesting enough, witty enough, certainly happy to be with her, straight on through coffee and dessert and cigarette and out to his car and into the French Quarter where everybody on earth was walking around, even a group of Scots in kilts playing bagpipes. They got pushed apart time and again on the narrow streets.

  “I think people must be wilder down here,” he observed. “Of course, in Chicago when you feel wild you go out and shoot to kill. But for the reasons you have to read the papers, then you don’t know.”

  “I’m sure that nobody you know shoots anybody,” she kindly said.

  “Hate to disappoint you. Some of my best friends—”

  A couple of bars, a couple of drinks later, the evening began to drift around them like the river, broad and lazy; they drove around the park and then out to the lake, watching swans and colored fountains.

  “Why are you living in that ruin?” he asked her, walking along the lake and angling kisses at her, now and then.

  “I’m not. I came back a day early to see you and just went there. I didn’t want Ann and Helen to know you were here, I guess. Those are the girls I—”

  “Oh, I remember. They come out in hair curlers, dragging on cigarettes. You’d think you were still in college.”

  “They do make me feel that way. I stay there because it’s cheap. I really can’t afford anything different.” She hesitated. “Do you have to save?”

  “No, I guess I’ve always been lucky.” A breeze blew. He wound his arm around her waist. She walked along a parapet, holding to his shoulder. “Money’s never worried me,” he confessed.

  “When I came back here after the family wouldn’t see why I wanted this career, I stayed a few days at what you call that old ruin. It really isn’t a ruin, just an old pile of a Victorian residence. Somebody turned it into a hotel. Well, you saw the entrance hall, that great big stairway, so you know what it’s like all over.”

  “That Moorish pin-up on the landing, stripped to the waist and holding a lamp—God, how can you stand it?”

  “I just went there at first because it was near Tulane.”

  “Then you got sentimental about it. Couldn’t wait to get back.”

  “No, it wasn’t that.” They were in the car again and she straightened up, drawing herself free of his arms, sitting away from him, arranging her hair. The gentle haze of alcohol was fading. She said: “I just go there because of Mr. McMillan.”

  “Mr. McMillan? So there is somebody you like.”

  “Nothing like that—not a boy friend.”

  “What then?” He was smiling, both within and without, asking himself, Am I sliding into a lifetime of listening to stories? He must not have felt it such a hardship, this being the third time he’d found himself all the way down here for no other reason than Aline. He’d marked her first as a pretty, still face in a knot of rattling Southerners at the Indianapolis convention, one face in a crowded hotel lobby. What was there about it? A strain pushing up beneath a calm surface—anxiety? desire?—hinted at what might be interesting about her, what tugged his attention to her.

  “Mr. McMillan came from up in Mississippi, too, like me. I never saw him. He had had a whole life in some little town, married this girl everybody expected him to marry as her life would have been ruined, she’d have been nothing but an old maid, if he hadn’t, sent two children through school, cared for both parents till they died, cared for her—loved her, too, I guess—till she died, and then quietly having given all his life up to sixty-odd to doing just what everybody thought he ought to do and being all the time sincere—loving instead of hating, you know—he just calmly came down here and took a room for a night or so at that old hotel and never left.”

  “Then he must be there still. Or did he die?”

  “Yes, he died, just about the time I came myself, though nobody would have mentioned that to a new guest. They had found him one morning after he died in his sleep, and they set about getting a doctor, telephoning up to that town to find out his children’s names and notifying them, finding an undertaker—oh, they did everything without stint. And then the son and the son’s wife came down on the train and went back with the coffin, northward, but nobody followed—just didn’t go, somehow. If the ones left who had known him all along spoke of him, I don’t know what they said. I came in and didn’t know anything had happened, though the first day, once I looked back on it, there had been some sort of commotion, people talking in the TV lounge and others being called aside when they came in from work, into the little office where the switchboard is—it must have been a butler’s pantry back in the old days—and at night a going up and down steps and a knock at certain doors. But I remembered all this later like something that happened while I dreamed. I wouldn’t have noticed that one of the guests had gone for a day or so.

  “I knew when he reappeared only by coincidence, because in the middle of a hot, still September afternoon I had come into that cool old hallway, spacious and dim as a church but freed of everything like duty and being holy. I had got to the desk and was looking around for somebody to ask for the key and for whatever mail or calls there’d been, when the lady who sometimes keeps the desk came out of the switchboard room and looked straight past me, her look went like a bullet, and I saw something like shock or strain on her face, but not either one—you’d have to call it recognition. I turned and there stood an elderly gentleman with nearly white hair whom I’d got glimpses of when I first arrived. He had the air of a traveler returned from a mission and he carried something the size of a box of candy under his arm. He held it out to her. ‘It’s him,’ he said. She looked at it and nodded. It was such a singular thing, so intense. They really didn’t know I was there, were so taken up they couldn’t be conscious of anything beyond their own knowing. ‘It’s Mr. McMillan,’ he said.”

  “In the box?”

  Aline nodded.

  “Cremated?”

  She nodded again.

  “Ashes to ashes,” he remarked, looking out over Lake Pontchartrain, the night having swung close to its deeper hours, noting the distant lights of fishing boats, lonely, solitary with the knowledge of work continued in the forgetfulness of everybody else.

  “He didn’t return to dust or ashes either, not in the long run. Listen. He had let them bury him up there, let them do the whole thing. Then they read the will and found the envelope attached to the will and the letter inside saying what he really wanted. So then they called down to New Orleans, to the hotel. Mr. McMillan had been in the war. Scarcely under the age limit, at the time—thirty-eight or thirty-nine—he could have got out of it without even trying to, but he insisted he wanted to go. He went to Hawaii—Pearl Harbor—on something called Eastern reconnaissance, wh
ich meant, in his case anyway, that he traveled from the Pearl Harbor army base across to ships and took messages from the Army to the Navy and vice versa about what each knew that the other didn’t. He covered the bay over and over, never knowing what information he carried or what effect it had on anybody, what lives were saved or lost because of it, or what file it finally wound up in. But he got to know the bay and he got to know the islands, and he loved it all apparently, though he never talked much about it. Being older than most veterans, he never hung around with buddies when he came home, or joined any of the groups, but when he died, he had quietly decided, he wanted his ashes scattered on that water. It was only a case of finding somebody who would do it for him, as nobody in that little town or in the family would have known what to make of such a request and would have probably decided right away that he was crazy for even asking it, but he asked them to notify the hotel and said that somebody there would take the envelope containing his request and the money for the trip. He didn’t specify who it would be, not even man or woman. He just knew somebody would. And they did. Would you say it was just for a free ticket to Hawaii?”

  “No, I wouldn’t say that. Neither would you. He’d found his own sort, the people he wanted to do things for him, and then they did it. I guess all of life is worth that.”

  The dark had really come down on them. She could barely see his face.

  “Up there where the family was, they didn’t seem to care any more, once the funeral was over. It just became something after the fact, everything being settled for them when they had transferred the property and paid the undertaker. I guess after everything, every single thing, and every person is served, then you can have what you really want.”

  “You sound bitter,” he said. “Why look at the world like that?”

  “From failing, like he did. In a way I envied him. They got through doing all the things about his death that they expected of themselves. Then they saw the will and the letter inside, and the stranger. So they let him be dug up and carted off and burned to ashes and carried away like that—in a little box. And they didn’t care. They didn’t care at all.” She was laughing.

  “Don’t laugh like that. It’s late; you’re tired.”

  Well, that was true, she thought, letting herself be drawn closely in, giving in to the all but strange face whose exact features up to the very reappearance of him that afternoon she could not recall. Mysteriously, his outline took firm life against her; even stranger, it seemed entirely right that it should do so—should be as it was, and more, should be all it intended to be. What is flesh and blood, she wondered, but what it seems right to be close to?

  But when she shut her eyes at last, she heard in her head the silken wash and fall of Hawaiian water, and the night breeze that lay against her cheek was of that climate.

  GO SOUTH IN THE WINTER

  Mrs. Landis came out into the morning sun of the West Indies in bathing suit and robe, seeking her beach chair before the Caribe Hilton in San Juan. She arranged her possessions around her, book and beach bag containing her cap, cosmetics, and wallet, then draped her towel on the back of the chair, and having smeared herself with sun-protective lotion, opened her book and began to read. She soon became sleepy (at the same time as her husband a thousand miles to the north was sleepy also: he suffered from a mild hangover and was disinclined to tackle his income tax). Sun drowsiness was Mrs. Landis’ reason, and she welcomed it; she liked to doze in sunlight.

  A wrangle of voices stirred her from her mood and she looked up. The young Jewish couple she had conversed with the day before were back, complete with baby in sun bonnet. Each time they turned the baby loose it came to her. Sandy, it clambered over her knees, pushed her book out of her hands, examined her face at close range, and seizing her hair by the fistful, shook her with real force.

  “Sonia!”

  Both parents called to her, and the young mother rose to fetch her, detaching her from Mrs. Landis a finger at a time. “She doesn’t hurt, let her play,” Mrs. Landis protested, laughing.

  “She’s got Mrs. Landis mixed up with her grandmother, I think. Don’t you think so, George?” The young mother swung the baby free. “It’s absolutely clear.”

  “Must be: they look alike,” her husband agreed. He piled sand for the baby, who wanted strenuously to go back to Mrs. Landis and now began to cry.

  “Did you see the show last night, Mrs. Landis?” the girl asked. She was dark, interested, relaxed, plump, her hair screwed up behind to keep her neck bare for sunning and swimming, a large floppy native straw hat set forward on her brow.

  “The dancing? Just the beginning. I went up early.”

  “They were good, you know.”

  “Yeah, you shoulda stayed,” the young man said.

  The baby continued to wail and struggle to return to Mrs. Landis. The father held it, like an animal in harness, by the cross straps of its cotton sun suit.

  “I’m here alone,” said Mrs. Landis, “so that makes it—”

  Here the baby’s crying grew strident with demand, and the young couple turned to consult each other. “You’d better take her in,” the wife agreed. The young man got up and carried the child toward the water. Halfway there she noticed the sea and leaned toward it, jumping to get to it faster.

  What was I going to say? Mrs. Landis wondered. “That makes it…” What? She didn’t know. Makes it difficult to be alone at floor shows? In former years she had tried conversations with various strangers—couples, other loners—and sometimes these had worked out pleasantly. Why didn’t she want to do that now? On the other hand, why should she?

  The reasons for doing anything were lacking for her, she reflected, at this particular period of her life. But after all, she’d come there just to drift, to do nothing she didn’t feel inclined to do. She idly recalled the middle-aged divorcé she had some years back allowed to talk his way into her bed. She watched the gulls drift, turn, flap wings, soar, and drift again. On an arm of the beach, far out, the palms blew. The young father was floating his baby in the sea. It flailed arms and legs, making wild splashes, yelping with glee. What a violent child! Mrs. Landis thought, and at the same instant was startled as it leaped so high that, momentarily free of the water, it seemed magnified by a trick of vision into something larger than life, the painting of a baby, huge on a master canvas which contained, as minor objects, trees, sea, and clouds.

  Mrs. Landis wondered if she would be feeling less detached if she were at home. She liked to play bridge but if deprived of the pleasure she would not have missed it much. Volunteer duty at the hospital did not utterly absorb her. She knew that her husband, though retirement had left him with little to say, still needed her. Her children telephoned and visited; her grandchildren wrote; her friends were faithful; and people who got to know her usually liked and admired her.

  Arranging her hair where the baby had pulled it down, she rubbed lotion on her back and along the underside of her arms and legs. Then flattening the chair and balancing her body so as not to tip over, she turned to lie on her face.

  Behind her, the young family were talking, the father having returned with the dripping child fresh from the sea; they were spreading down large beach towels for her to play on. Now they were switching on a transistor radio; Mrs. Landis heard the spiel of selected news items from the States and abroad which would be repeated in more or less the same form all day until around five o’clock, when new releases would be substituted. There went the latest Presidential primary, next came the Middle East, now a new White House appointment, then the latest in scandal and corruption. Mrs. Landis half-dozed.

  She thought of her children, thought of her oldest boy when he was four or five and how she had found she could talk to him, converse with him, as one might to an adult, and how this discovery had been a great delight. In her memory they were walking, the two of them, along a road in Vermont. The fresh June green of maple and beech trees shadowed them; roadside bushes mingled with wild white an
d yellow flowers. The boy walked ahead of her, talking eagerly. His thoughts came out the instant he had them, no self-consciousness to stop or deflect them: what a joy this was! Near the top of a hill, rain overtook them from behind, a tough sudden downpour with a sharp wind. An empty house stood just off the road, so they climbed a fence and ran for it. Here they sheltered, under a porch roof half-fallen in. Lilacs overgrown and unpruned bloomed among the ruins. First lashed about and drenched, the branches then stood still and poured out fragrance; soon the sun came out again. Her son had talked constantly until halfway through the storm when he had finished all he had to say, then closed his mouth in that sudden serious way he was all his life to retain, though that one day it seemed to crystallize forever in her heart’s thought of him. Was it the baby clambering about on her which had brought back all this treasure, at once warm yet inaccessible?