The Elementals (10 page)

The sun shone directly through the window, illuminating a portion of the room brilliantly, and leaving the rest obscure. India’s own black shadow of curiosity stretched across the floor, like a startled residue of the room’s last inhabitant.

Through the open doorway into the hall, she could discern faintly the banister of the staircase leading down to the first floor.

India was fascinated. Peering now into the room’s obscurities, she saw the marks of passing time’s casual violence. The mirror in the shaving box had cracked, and a sliver that had fallen onto the dresser reflected a spot of sunlight onto the side wall. One of the picture wires had snapped, and a corner of the broken frame lay just within her sight on the far side of the bed. A severe line of red dust lay upon the matting just underneath the hanging spread where the fringe had rotted. But the room was marvelously intact. It was with a look of bewilderment that she turned back to her father.

“India, what is it?” he asked, disturbed and displeased.

“Luker, you’ve
got
to come up here and look, it’s—”

The fleur-de-lis by which she still held herself upright in the shifting, sinking sand snapped off in her grasp. Gasping, she fell forward into the dune. Her hands and knees sank into the sand, and she stared surprised down at her father, who had not moved upward to help her. “See what I mean?” he said. “Come down.”

She tried to stand, but on the incline she could not get firm footing. Her feet had disappeared beneath the sand, and when she struggled to lift them out, she accidentally shoved her right foot through one of the lower panes of the window.

The notion that part of her was now actually inside that miraculously preserved bedroom frightened India. Something that had hid along the wall, just out of her sight, would now grab her leg and pull her through the window. Something that—

She jerked her foot back through and scrambled away.

“India, what happened?” hissed Luker.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, sitting back in the sand and sliding downward a few inches. She straightened the coolie hat, which had been knocked askew. “I broke one of the panes in the window, I didn’t mean to, I—”

“It’s all right,” said Luker. “But did you cut yourself?”

She drew out her bare foot and turned it this way and that. “No,” she said, herself surprised to find no blood. The windowpane must already have been loose, and the slight pressure of her foot added to that exerted by the sand had simply imploded it into the bedchamber.

“Come down,” said Luker. “Come down now, there’s no point in getting tetanus on your first day here. I have no—”

He stopped suddenly at some sound that India had not heard.

“It’s the jeep,” he said, “the others are here. Come on down now.” He tossed her sandals back up to her and jogged away around the dune and back to the other houses.

India picked up her sandals out of the sand, carefully maintaining her balance on the slope. But instead of going back down directly, she turned and walked up to the casement again. She declined to take to herself Luker’s unreasoning fear of the third house.

With a little tremor, she looked through the window again, and simply seeing that the room was unchanged was a reassuring comfort. The pane had broken into several large pieces on the matting, and even as she watched these were covered up in a little mound of sand that poured through the aperture. When she moved her foot no more than an inch, the sand spilled faster. She felt guilty that it was by her clumsiness that the room had been violated at last by the sand, which heretofore had been confined to the first floor. Who knew?—if it had not been for her stupid foot, the sand might have raised itself inch by inch outside the window and completely covered it over without ever finding substantial entrance. The room which before had been perfect was now on its way to destruction—and by her carelessness. Her temptation now was actually to kick in a second pane, and had she not feared injury, might well have done so.

She looked over the room again. If it was going to fill with sand, why shouldn’t they get the things out of it? She suspected that it was fear and not respect for private property that had kept Luker from appropriating the marvelous things that were in this room—and probably in the others too. Turning away, she resolved to suggest that they get everything valuable out of the house before it was entirely taken over by the dune. That ruby-glass carafe and tumbler on the night table would do very well by
her
bed on Seventy-fourth Street.

Through the window, she stared at the carafe, thinking of home, and wondering how long it would be before she returned there. The sand hissed through the opening in the window and piled higher on the floor. A little funnel appeared in the sand between India’s feet; experimentally she took the ribbon from the brim of her hat, untied it, and dangled it above the hole. She dropped it lower, and it was sucked into the funnel. The draw was surprisingly strong, and the silk slipped out of her fingers. She stared through the window, and saw the ribbon spill onto the top of the mound that was forming on the rush matting. It was as if the room had become an enormous hourglass, slowly to be filled with sand; she watched fascinated as the ribbon was covered. So close was her attention to the hiss of sand on silk that she did not attend to the other slight noise in the room but when she looked up suddenly, it was to see the door to the center hallway being drawn carefully shut.

Chapter
8

Luker lay at full length upon his mother’s great mahogany bed, and would have fallen asleep if Big Barbara had not talked at him ceaselessly as she unpacked her bags. Small piles of her underclothes were stacked on his chest and thighs awaiting distribution into their proper drawers. Big Barbara’s bedroom had no view to speak of: a triangle of the Gulf out the side window and the Savage house to the back. It got the morning sun.

Luker said, “You made it just in time. The tide had started to come in. I thought maybe you were going to have to hold off until tomorrow.” The light outside was beginning to change color and intensify.

“No,” said Big Barbara, “there wasn’t more than a foot of water cutting us off, and I believe Leigh would have built a raft to get over here tonight.”

“I didn’t know she was so anxious.”

“She’s anxious on Dauphin’s account. She’s hoping that being out here will help him get over poor Marian’s dying.
And
that business at the funeral. Mary-Scot’s got the nuns for consolation, but Dauphin’s just got us. Now, Luker,” she said, leaning against the dresser to push two drawers closed at once, “I know why
Dauphin
decided to come to Beldame, but what I want to know is what made
you
rise up and come down to Alabama. I know Marian Savage wasn’t one of your favorite people in the world, and truth to tell, darling, you weren’t one of hers.”

“I used the funeral as an excuse to come to Beldame.”

“You didn’t need an excuse to come to Beldame. I’ve been begging you for years to come back down here and stay with me, and bring India. And Dauphin and Leigh have been begging too. Luker, you haven’t been to Beldame since you were here with
that woman
in ’
68
. And you know what she said to me then? She said—”

“I don’t want to know. I don’t want to talk about her.”

“I just wish I could believe that woman was dead! A photograph of her headstone would make your mother a happy woman, Luker! A happy woman!”

“No, she’s not dead, she . . .” Luker turned his face against the pillow in a yawn.

Big Barbara rolled him back over. “Luker! Don’t you tell me that you’ve seen her!”

“No. I don’t know where she is.”

“Good,” said Big Barbara, “there aren’t enough days in hell for that woman . . .” She vindictively snatched her brassieres off Luker’s chest and pushed them into the top drawer of the dresser. “Good!” she said again, “that’s all done. Now, why don’t you run down and make me a drink and we’ll go over and see how Dauphin and Leigh are doing.”

“No,” said Luker.

“No what?”

“No, I’m not going to get you a drink.” For this he opened his eyes and looked at her.

“Well,” she said cautiously, sensing that something was up, “I’ll have to get it myself. Do you want anything?”

“No.”

“Luker—”

“Barbara, there’s no liquor in the house. I didn’t bring any down.”

“Luker, I set out the box, it was right in the laundry room, ready to go in the trunk. How you could have missed it, I
don
’
t
know.”

“I did see it. But I didn’t pack it—on purpose.”

“Well,” said Big Barbara, “then I just hope that Dauphin had the good sense to put it in the Mercedes, I—”

“Dauphin didn’t bring it either,” said Luker. “Barbara, Beldame just went dry, by vote of the populace.”

“I didn’t vote!”

“It didn’t matter. Majority would have gone prohibition anyway.”

Big Barbara had seated herself at the vanity and now talked to her son’s reflection in the mirror. Luker had sat up on the bed.

“
That
’
s
why you’re here,” said Big Barbara softly. “
That
’
s
why you’ve come to Beldame, isn’t it—to be my keeper.”

“That’s right.”

“You could have had the decency to tell me, Luker.”

“You would have tried to wiggle out of it.”

“Of course I would have, and you should have given me the chance!”

“No,” said Luker quietly. “Barbara, you’re an alcoholic. And you won’t get help. I know Leigh’s already talked to you and Lawton’s talked to you, and if Dauphin weren’t so goddamned polite, he would have talked to you too. But you wouldn’t do anything about it and every night you’d come in and fill yourself up to the dotted line with booze—”

Big Barbara turned away from the mirror. “Luker,” she pleaded, “I wish you wouldn’t—”

“I tell you, Barbara,” said her son, “of all the problems that you can make your friends and your family deal with, alcoholism is the most boring. It’s got nothing to recommend it. And
you
’
re
particularly bad. When you drink you start talking, and there’s nothing that’s going to shut you up. You tell things that ought not be told, you tell them to
anyone
and you embarrass everybody. And I tell you, Barbara, when you’re full of booze, it’s hard to love you.”

“And
so
,” said Big Barbara, “you’ve brought me down here to work the miracle cure. You’re going to take the leather straps off your bags and tie me to the bed, and then you and India are going to run over to the next house hoping that you can’t hear me screaming!”

“If that’s what it takes.” Luker shrugged. “Barbara, if you go on drinking, you’re going to be alive for about five more years, and most of that time you’re going to be sicker than Marian Savage was. You’re a fool to drink the way you do. I don’t know why you do it.”

“I do,” snapped Big Barbara. “I drink because I like it.”

“I like to drink too,” said Luker, “but sometimes I put the bottle down before it’s empty. Barbara, you didn’t drink this way when Leigh and I were little.”

“That’s when I started though,” said Big Barbara, “when you and Leigh were little.”

“Why? Why did you start?”

“Luker, when I got married, I was just a sweet little Southern girl, and I had never even been north of the Mason-Dixon line. I had two children and a happy marriage. Lawton used to like to go fishing, and I liked to drink. I had three reasons for drinking. Two children were the first two reasons, and the third reason was I liked to
go off
. About six o’clock every evening, I’d be sitting out on the patio among the magnolias and the gardenias—gardenias all in bloom and stinking to high heaven!—and I’d be thinking, ‘I won’t have a drink’ and then you or Leigh would come up and say ‘Mama—’ and I’d say, ‘Oh, Lord, got to get me a drink’ and I’d run in the house. Then by seven-thirty, I’d be off somewhere else, I’d have gone away . . .”

“But I grew up,” said Luker, “and Leigh grew up. And Lawton stopped fishing ten years ago.”

“Oh, but Luker—I still like to go off . . .”

“Going off’s great,” said Luker. “It’s a lot of laughs, but Barbara, you don’t have control over it any more!”

For a minute, Big Barbara McCray sat very still and tried to control the anger she felt against her family for their high-handedness in this matter. Giving up drink had become, since her daughter and husband had begun to speak of it, an itching responsibility; but Luker, by tricking her out to Beldame without an ounce of spirits, had deprived her of the glory attendant upon voluntary renunciation.

She could not in fact be angry with Luker, for she knew how little he liked to be away from New York—and how much of an effort it must have been to coax India down to Alabama for some indefinite period. He came then entirely for love of her; but Big Barbara’s frustration and dread of the coming days and weeks—when she was already nervous because it was six o’clock and she hadn’t tasted scotch since noon—necessitated some outlet for her resentment.

“It was Lawton,” she said at last, “who asked you to come.”

“Yes, he did. But I came because of you, not because of him. You know that.”

“I do,” said Big Barbara grimly, “but I am furious with Lawton for going about it like this. You know why he did it, don’t you?”

Luker didn’t answer.

“I’ll tell you why he did it. He did it because he didn’t want me embarrassing him during the campaign. He didn’t want me passing out with my face in a plate of chicken salad at a church picnic. He didn’t want to see me carried out of a bar on a stretcher—”

“Barbara, that’s exactly what happened last week. How do you think I felt when Leigh called me up—in the middle of a dinner party—to say that you were in the Mobile General detox? That didn’t make any of us happy.”

“That wasn’t because I was drinking. That was because I had just heard that Marian had died. Lawton doesn’t care about me. It’d be fine with him if I would just lock myself in the closet and tilt a bottle down my gullet. He’d say, ‘Oh, sure, that’s fine. She’s having a great time in there, don’t nobody go in and disturb her when she’s having such a great time!’ That’s what he thinks. He thinks I’m a liability to his campaign. Like that representative from Kansas whose wife beat their two-year-old to death a week before the last election. She was a liability to him and he lost. Lawton makes me furious. That man wouldn’t be anything if I hadn’t pushed him! I
still
have to watch him! I was the one who taught him not to talk about hog butchering in front of the vice-president’s wife! That man wouldn’t be
anything
without me today, Luker. We wouldn’t have doodlum-squat in the bank! On the day you were born I said to Lawton, ‘Lawton,’ I said, ‘
fertilizer is the wave of the future
.’ And he listened to me then! Oh, back then, on the day you were born, he would still listen to what I had to say! He went out and bought a fertilizer company, and
it has just rolled in
. If it weren’t for that fertilizer company, he couldn’t run for Congress. Without that fertilizer company he couldn’t run to catch a bus!”