Uncertain Ground (22 page)

We’d disagreed with each other daily, but for the first time, we both tried to work something out. That afternoon he sent Doris a postcard with a picture of the Gulf on front—too blue, stretching out to nowhere. Before going out to mail it, he flashed
it in front of me. On it he’d written, “I’ll be home on the 2:30 train Thursday.”

Though I’d wished his message had been longer and I’d hoped he might send her a letter, the card was Emmett’s style. Now he’d have to go back to Mullin, back to the dusty little settlement near the ranch, and I would have to go too. We had been in Galveston almost a month, nearly as long as our parents had planned, and it was just as well since Aunt Bertha wasn’t sleeping any better at the end of our stay than I had been at the beginning.

After I looked at Emmett’s card, I told him he might as well ask to be met by a brass band because the postman on the Lacey’s route would, in his neighborly way, undoubtedly spread the word. What was more, people in Mullin might even guess exactly why he was coming. He knew as well as I about the way everyone loved to jump to conclusions.

“Fine with me,” he said. “Maybe she’ll speak to me when I get there. She might as well, don’t you think? If we’re going to get married—”

“Emmett, what if she won’t?”

He looked at me as if I’d asked him something so fundamentally dumb he might ignore the question. “She may not want to,” I added. I didn’t think he’d even considered such a possibility.

“It’s my baby!”

“It’s hers too. It’s her life.”

He gave me another long look and stalked off to the mailbox like a man overlooking a small pebble he’d just stumbled across in the street.

Whatever Ed Lacey had said to Aunt Earlene, I still didn’t think he’d told Doris before he went. Or maybe his wishes didn’t carry the same weight with his daughter. It was a sad plan for a shotgun wedding, a demanding father and a reluctant bride, the same result I’d so often dreaded.

Luis laughed at my assumptions and suggested that Doris simply didn’t want anyone to know it was a shotgun wedding.

I wasn’t sure. Doris was pretty straightforward. She might really not want to marry Emmett. I was sure she hadn’t been interested in him just for the sake of the ranch. If she was simply greedy, there were other boys around who’d inherit land in counties nearby. She could have known some of them. I never thought Doris or her parents—for that matter—were so conniving. Aunt Earlene’s exaggerated notions of the importance of her own social standing led her to make foolish accusations. Doris would marry someone she loved, and I desperately wanted to believe she still had a choice.

“It’s hard to tell who does the choosing sometimes, isn’t it?” I said to Luis. “Maybe they both choose and they don’t know it.”

He looked puzzled for a moment then shook his head, “I think one of the two always knows, Celia.”

He’d dropped by the Mcleans’ late in the morning for coffee. Bertha had been working her way through a long list of ingredients in a gumbo recipe and seemed pleased to see him. They discussed the merits of browning fresh versus frozen okra until I thought I might go out and wait on the steps. In the middle of comparisons of Louisiana and Texas gumbos, Aunt Bertha, in her usual abrupt way, interrupted to ask about his father.

“He’s …” He paused as if he were having second thoughts. “You haven’t heard?”

Bertha flicked the heat down under the gumbo, moved the coffeepot to the kitchen table, and turned back to him slowly.

“He and Louise Finley. They’re going to marry.”

“Really?” I could hear my Tennessee aunts’, my grandmothers,’ my mother’s voices, a chorus of women dissembling, speaking in the same expression of polite disbelief. There was nothing in her tone implying either pleasure or regret. I knew she thought Mr. Platon should remarry. As far as Luis could tell though, she was only receiving information. Then she added, “She’ll be a good companion for him.”

“You think so?” Luis asked as if he were merely inquiring.

“Oh, I actually don’t know her that well, but at least he won’t be so lonely any more.” She poured more coffee, led us to the back porch where she promised to join us—her usual method for getting people out of the kitchen so she could concentrate—and left us sitting there.

Luis stretched his legs out in front of him, stared at the small yard where the red and yellow hibiscus were still in bloom and sighed as if he couldn’t stand the sight of them.

He looked so unhappy I said, “Maybe it’s only strange at first. Later you’ll—”

“I doubt once I’m used to the idea I’ll like it. I doubt I’ll ever get used to it and even if I do….” He shook his head.

Emmett and I took a morning train from Galveston. Aunt Bertha, Uncle Mowrey, and Luis came down to the station to see us off. Emmett and Aunt Bertha withdrew to argue quietly, Bertha doing most of the talking. She wouldn’t give up her arguments against his marrying. Most of all, she was sure he was too young. She was also afraid of an early divorce. Emmett nodded now and then politely, not really hearing. He was as good at this sort of pretense as he was about slipping out of a house quickly without anyone noticing. Beginning with his mother, he’d been practicing all his life on ways to avoid bossy women.

For a while Uncle Mowrey paced between two posts; after watching them from a little distance for a while, he walked over to take Aunt Bertha by one arm, Emmett by the other.

Beyond them the Santa Fe, steaming and hissing, glistened in the sun while Luis and I waited further down on the platform beside a high flatbed wagon heaped with gray canvas bags labeled U. S. MAIL. From now on the mail would carry my letters back to Galveston just as it had carried my letters to Tony, to friends, to my parents in Leon. I was continually saying good-bye to one set of people, and hello to another. There would be someone else to write now, Luis in Galveston or in Mexico.

He wished I could stay longer, he said, and I believed him; both of us were adrift that summer. I reminded him he
was older, freer to come and go, especially since his father had decided to remarry. My parents wanted me to come home, and I still had to do as they wished.

The porter emerged from the car ahead of us. While talking to Luis, I watched him place the shiny metal auxiliary step in front of those leading to the train, then he picked up Emmett’s and my suitcases and carried them inside. After wearing only shirts, shorts and sandals all day for weeks I felt uncomfortably bound by my dress, stockings and heels.

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.