The Elementals (8 page)

They rode on toward the west for perhaps four miles. After Gasque was behind them they saw no more houses. The thread of the Dixie Graves Parkway was occasionally visible, but no cars traveled on it. India turned and shouted through the windshield: “How far is it?” Neither Luker nor Odessa answered her. Her hand touched the hood of the Scout and she jerked it away, burned.

Luker turned the Scout sharply, and India had to scramble not to slide off. A wave larger than the rest broke against the front fender, dousing the hood and India. “Feel better?” shouted Luker and laughed at her evident discomfort.

With the inside of her sleeve, which was the only part of her clothing that had escaped wetting, India wiped her pouting face. She wouldn’t turn around again. In only a few minutes, the sun had dried her. The sound of the waves, the delicate rocking of the Scout, the rumble of the engine beneath the hood, and most of all the heat that engorged all creation in that lonely place hypnotized the girl until she had almost forgot her anger. Luker blew the horn, and she jerked around.

He pointed ahead, and mouthed the word
Beldame
.
India leaned back against the windshield, not caring if she blocked his vision, and stared ahead. They crossed a small damp depression of wet sand and clay, shell-littered, that looked rather like a dried riverbed, and proceeded onto a long spit of land, no more than fifty yards wide. On the left-hand side there was the Gulf, with gulls and flying fish, and porpoises in the distance; but on the right was a narrow lagoon of green motionless water and beyond it the much wider peninsula that was traversed by the Dixie Graves Parkway. On this narrow spit they traveled another quarter of a mile, and the little lagoon on the right grew wider and seemingly deeper. And now before her, she saw a group of houses: but not houses such as had been built at Gulf Shores and Gasque—those little shingled shoe boxes raised on concrete blocks with rusting screens and dried-out roofs. These were large, eccentric, old houses such as appeared in coffee table books on
outré
American architecture.

There were three of them she saw now; three solitary houses arranged at the very end of the spit. They were large, tall, Victorian structures weathered a uniform gray, with angular verticalities and hundreds of scraps of unexpected wooden ornamentation. As they drove closer, India saw that the three houses were identical, with identical windows placed identically in their façades and identical cupolaed verandahs running around three identical sides. Each faced a different way. The house on the left looked toward the Gulf, the house on the right toward the lagoon and the peninsula of land that snaked out from Gulf Shores. The third house, in the middle, looked toward the end of the spit, but its western view was evidently blocked by the high dunes that had formed there.

The houses were placed at right angles and backed onto an open square of shelled walks and low shrubs. Except for this vegetation, all was white sand, and the houses stood foursquare on the undulating surface of the shifting beach.

India was entranced. What mattered intermittent electricity, what mattered washing her hair in cold water, when three such splendid houses composed the whole and entirety of Beldame?

Luker pulled the Scout up to the shrubbery shared by the three houses. India jumped off the hood. “Which one is ours?” she demanded, and her father laughed at the excitement she could not hide.

He pointed to the house on the Gulf. “That’s ours,” he said. He pointed to the house directly opposite it, on the little lagoon, “That’s Leigh and Dauphin’s place. The water is called Elmo’s Lagoon. At high tide, you know, the Gulf flows into St. Elmo’s and we’re completely cut off here. At high tide, Beldame is an island.”

India pointed to the third house. “And whose is that?”

“Nobody’s,” replied Odessa, as she lifted one of the boxes of food out of the Scout.

“Nobody’s?” asked India. “It’s a wonderful house—they’re all wonderful! Why doesn’t anybody live there?”

“They can’t,” said Luker, with a smile.

“Why not?”

“Go round the front and see,” he said, pulling the first of the bags out of the Scout. “Go round and take a look, and then come back and help Odessa and me unpack.”

India stepped quickly along the paths in the common ground, what Luker called the yard, and now she saw how closely the sand dunes at the end of the spit had encroached upon the third house. Something made her hesitate to mount the steps up to the verandah, and she skipped around the side. She stopped short.

The dune of white sand—blinding now that the sun shone glancingly off it directly into her eyes—did not merely encroach upon the house, it had actually begun to swallow it. The back of the house was intact but sand had covered the entire front of the house to a line well above the verandah roof. The dune slid gracefully along the verandah, and had trapped an oaken swing that hung in chains from the ceiling.

India crept around to the other side of the house. It was the same there, though the sand began at not so high a point, and its slope to the bare ground was gentler. She longed to go inside the third house to see whether the dune continued within the rooms in the same gentle curves, or whether the walls and windows had held against the sand. Would she be able to stand before a window and look through the glass into the interior of the dune?

She hesitated at the corner of the verandah. Her curiosity was intense: she had forgot all her animosity toward her father for bringing her to this godforsaken place.

Yet something kept India from mounting the steps of the verandah; something told her not to peer into the windows of that house where no one came to stay; something held her even from pushing her toe into the last grains of white sand that had spilled from the top of the dune onto the bare ground at her feet. Luker called her name, and she ran back to help him unload the Scout.

Chapter
6

After the Scout was unpacked, India went room by room through the house that belonged to the McCrays. Thinking of the frigid decorator-opulence of Big Barbara’s house in Mobile, she was surprised by its homely but well-grounded taste. Luker explained that the vacation house had been refurnished when they bought it in
1950
and, except for replacing upholstery, cushions, and draperies, which quickly rotted in the salt air, it had been untouched since then. All that was lacking to India’s mind was carpets on the wooden floors, but Luker said that it was impossible to keep carpets clean when sand was being tracked through the house all day.

The first floor of each of the houses of Beldame consisted of three large rooms: a living room that ran the length of the house along one side, and, opposite this, a dining room at the front and a kitchen at the back. The single bathroom had been made out of a corner of the kitchen. On the second floor four bedrooms were set into the corners, each with two windows and a single door opening onto a central hallway. A narrow staircase descended to the first floor, and an even narrower set of stairs led up to the third. This top part of each house was a single narrow room, with a window at either end, which had always been made over to servants.

India was given the second floor bedroom that at the front looked out over the Gulf and from the side provided an entrancing view of the destructive dune that was devouring the third house. It contained a double bed of iron with brass insets, a painted vanity, a chifforobe, a wicker writing desk, and a large standing cupboard.

While India was unpacking, her father wandered into the room; he sat on the edge of the bed and loaded film into his Nikon.

“Which room did you take?” asked India.

“That one,” he said, pointing at the wall she shared with the other bedroom at the front of the house. “That’s been my room since ’
53
. Big Barbara has the one cate
r
corner from this, next to me.

“So,” he said, lifting the camera and quickly taking a couple of photographs of his daughter as she stood before the open suitcase, “how do you like Beldame?”

“I like it very much,” she said quietly, and meant him to understand more than that.

“I thought so. Even if it is the end of the world.” She nodded. “That’s very New York of you, you know.”

“What is?” she asked.

“Unpacking your suitcase first thing.”

“Why is that such a New York thing to do?” she asked defensively, pausing between the suitcase and the dresser.

“Because when you’re finished you’ll snap it shut and stick it under the bed—these houses don’t have any closets, I suppose you’ve noticed—and you’ll say to yourself, ‘Well now we can get down to business!
’
”

India laughed. “That’s right. I guess I’m thinking of Fire Island.”

“Yes,” said Luker, “but we’d be at the Island for only two or three days at a time—turn to the right a little, you’re in shadow. God only knows how long we’re going to be
here
. And in case you haven’t noticed, I should point out that there’s not much in the way of diversion at Beldame.”

“It’ll be worse for you than for me”—she shrugged—“at least
I
’
m not old enough to get horny . . .”

“I’ll be all right,” said Luker. “I’ve been coming here all my life, at least up until you were born.
That woman
—as Barbara calls her—
that woman
and I came here once, part of our honeymoon, and she hated the place and said she would never come here again. We only stayed long enough to conceive you.”

“What? You think that happened here?”

Luker shrugged. “I think so.
That woman
and I screwed around a lot before we were married, of course, but then she was on the pill. On our honeymoon she went off it—she didn’t tell me that, of course. And when I found out, we had this huge fight and then didn’t have sex again for like two months—so the timing’s about right for you to have been conceived here.”

“You’re also saying I was a mistake, aren’t you?”

“Of course, you don’t really think that I
wanted
a child . . .”

“But it’s so weird then,” said India.

“What is?”

“That I might have been conceived here and this is the first time I’ve been back since.”

“I don’t imagine that you remember a whole lot about it.”

“No,” replied India, “but the place doesn’t seem entirely strange to me, either.”

“When your mother said she hated Beldame, I guess I knew there was something wrong with the marriage. Anyway, what with one thing and another,
I
haven’t been back since either—it’s strange to be here.”

“Lots of memories?”

“Of course,” he said, and waved her toward the window. India, who had had many thousands of photographs taken of her by her father and her father’s friends, complied without self-consciousness and assumed the poses and the expressions that she knew pleased him. “
But
,” he said, fiddling with the exposure, “I just wanted to warn you that you would pretty much have to entertain yourself.”

“I know.”

“And if it gets too bad, just give me the high sign and I’ll slip you a down.”

India frowned. “I get twisted on downs.”

“I was joking. You’re not going to need anything here.” The Gulf broke loudly against the shore, and they must speak carefully above the noise. The wind blew off the water, and the thin curtains wrapped themselves delicately around India.

“The pictures on the wall are mine,” said Luker. “I used to paint when I came here. I used to think I was going to be a painter.”

“The pictures stink,” said India mildly. “But you’re a
good
photographer. Why don’t you take these down and put up some prints?”

“Maybe I will. Maybe that’s going to be this year’s project, if I can get up the energy. I ought to warn you—Beldame’s a pretty low-energy place. You can figure on getting about two things done a day, and one of ’em is getting out of bed.”

“Luker, I can take care of myself. You don’t have to worry about me. I brought that panel with me that I want to hang over my bed at home, and that’ll take me forever. As long as I’ve got a needle and thread I’ll be all right.”

“All right,” said Luker then, relieved. “I promise I won’t worry about you.”

“How long are we going to be here?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. It depends. Don’t get antsy.”

“I’m not. But what does it depend on?”

“On Big Barbara.”

India nodded; she understood from Luker’s reluctance to elaborate that this was a matter not yet to be discussed between them. Having finished her unpacking, India shut the suitcase and slid it beneath the bed. She sat before the vanity, and Luker took photographs of her and her mirrored reflection.

“Stand by the window,” said Luker after a few moments, “I want the Gulf in the background.” Instead of moving to the window that looked directly out on to the water, she placed herself at the other casement, and gazed at the third house, fifty feet away. There was nothing but a square of undisturbed sand between the two houses.

“I just can’t get over that house,” said India. “Who owns it? Does it belong to the Savages?”

“I think . . .” said Luker hesitantly.

“That’s crazy. There are only three houses at Beldame, and you’ve been coming here for thirty years—but you’re not sure who owns the third house?”

“No.”

He was taking her picture, moving about quickly to get her from different angles and, it seemed to India, from angles that would not include the third house in the background.

“Let’s go downstairs,” said India, “and sit outside. I want you to tell me about Beldame. You know, you’ve practically kept this place a
secret
from me. You never told me it was anything as wonderful as this!”

Luker nodded; and in a few minutes they were seated in the swing that was hung beneath the southeastern cupola of the verandah. From here they could see only the Gulf before them; if they turned they could see the Savage house directly behind, but the third house lay out of sight around the corner of the verandah. India clapped her hands upon a mosquito, and asked, “When was Beldame built?”

“Dauphin’s great-great-grandfather built all three houses in
1875
. He built one for himself and his second wife, one for his sister and her husband, and one for his oldest daughter and
her
husband. And they all had children. Probably he decided to use just one set of plans to avoid arguments about who had gotten the best deal—or maybe he was just cheap. Of course, it couldn’t have been cheap to get labor and materials out here in
1875
. It would have all come by boat from Mobile, I guess, or Pensacola. I wish I knew more of the details about the construction—that would be the really interesting part. Maybe Dauphin knows where the records are—the Savages never get rid of
anything
.” Luker glanced at his daughter to see if she appeared still interested in the story. She understood, and nodded her desire for him to continue.