Galveston Page 21

  I do pity James, and feel a little guilty over leaving him next door, with only a meddlesome guardian four times his age and a stone-faced housekeeper to look after him. But then he could have done worse than to have his cousin Claire Becker as guardian. She does have money enough to provide well for him, and the sense to see to his education, and no doubt Roman is right when he says she’s just a harmless old tabby. If she has pried into my affairs, probably she’s meant no harm. My dislike and mistrust of her all these years is perhaps unfair. Still, I’ve never been able to help feeling as I do about her.…

  There it is, sitting next to me on the bed: my whole nineteen years of life enclosed in a carpetbag. One change of clothing, a nightdress, hairbrush, and toothbrush; my dancing shoes (I won’t take my practice outfit because Roman says it’s not like those they wear in New York), my one-year diary with less than four months of space to be written on, two souvenir programs, and the picture of my mother and father. These things aren’t much, but they are the essential things belonging to me, and all I will take because Roman insists we travel light.

  “By the way,” he said the other day, “I hope you aren’t one of those tiresome women who carry six trunks and eighteen hatboxes whenever you go on a trip. I won’t have the patience or the time to look after them all the way to New York.”

  “I’ve never been on a trip before, and I don’t own enough to fill one trunk,” I told him. “One carpetbag will carry all I need, and it probably won’t even be full.”

  “Good girl,” he said. “I knew you were sensible from the first time we met.”

  Roman would never stop teasing me if he saw the diary, but I must keep it because it tells so much about us that I was never able to share with anyone else, the beautiful parts of the summer that I’ll read of again someday, when we’re two old people spending our final days, sitting together on a porch somewhere.

  Not being sentimental, he’d probably laugh out loud at me for having saved these two programs, yet much of my happiness is written into them. First is the one from the evening performance of Professor King’s Traveling Band at the Seaside Pavilion on June 17, 1899, in which the name Roman Cruz stands out bolder than all the rest.

  So intriguing was his name, so commanding had he looked as he stood and raised his trumpet, I probably would have kept the program even if he had not come to hold me in his power just as surely as he did his audience that night.

  The other program, from the Emma Abbott Opera Company’s production of The Rose of Castile, is special to me because it is a souvenir of the first time I ever saw ballet. Claire and Charles Becker took me to the Tremont Opera House on December 31, 1890, and Miss Margueretta Sterling danced a ballet solo between Act II and Act III of the opera. I’ve only to glance at the program to remember how I sat in my balcony seat spellbound by the beauty of the fragile soloist as she performed. I was unable to believe anyone could create such magic on the points of her toes, could be so perfectly wound into the rhythm of the music from Swan Lake, at one with its haunting majesty. And at the end of her solo, the audience had stood from their chairs and yelled, “Bravo! Bravo! Bravo!” above their wild applause, and she had come forth for curtain calls time and again, and someone had brought a huge basket of flowers and placed it in front of her on the stage. Even the curtain calls taken by Emma Abbott herself, at the end of the opera, outnumbered those of Miss Sterling by only two.

  On the way home that evening, Charles noticed my starry eyes and asked if I wanted to be an opera singer when I grew up. I told him no, but that I’d love to be able to dance like Miss Sterling.

  He paused a moment, then said, “I have a new client, a Madame D’Arcy. She has a ballet studio right here in Galveston. How would you like to take lessons from her, Serena?”

  “Oh, more than anything in the world,” I answered, then added, “but do you think Daddy will let me?”

  “We’ll see,” he said. “I’ll discuss it with him. I have a feeling if he knows you really want to, he’ll be persuaded.”

  And thus, soon after, had begun my ballet lessons, which, even this summer, had taken on still more importance than ever before. How many times, over the years, have I looked at this program, and relived that marvelous and fateful night, never knowing it would lead me to such happiness, would open doors that had yet to appear?

  Then there is the photo of Mother and Father taken on their wedding day. Roman would probably say it would be easier to leave the picture here. After all, a clean sweep, cutting all cords with the past, would be more apt to allow one to forget sooner. Yet I don’t really want to forget it all. I keep thinking if I can only get away from here and gaze on this picture long enough, I can blot out the past thirteen years since Mother’s accident and remember only the good times that went before … the days we spent on the beach together building sand castles, the times she read to me of faraway places and exotic people, or of simple things like animals or limericks; the nights I fell asleep in her arms, the one time we played in the snow together, when she was so near the birth of Donnie and we saw Claire watching us through her parlor window. Claire is always watching someone …

  If not for Mother’s accident so long ago, things would have been different for me. I might not be leaving at all, might not have fallen in love with a stranger and felt I needed him at any cost, and under any conditions he might name.

  I was about six when it happened, and can remember little about it except that she and my infant brother Donnie fell together from the front stairs of our house and he was killed. She then lived in a hospital somewhere for months and months, and when she came home one morning she didn’t recognize me … didn’t for a long time.

  Claire, standing by with me as Dad carried Mother in her peach-colored robe from the rig into the house, said, “So it’s true about the brain damage. She doesn’t remember a thing.”

  And I asked Claire, observing the skeletal image with transparent skin and limp hair, if my mother was going to get well.

  “Your mother is as well as she ever will be,” Claire had said. And I cried because I couldn’t connect the warm, vibrant person my mother had been with the wan creature whose robe trailed slowly up the stairs from which she’d tumbled months before, and my father cried too because he’d lost his wife as surely as though she, with Donnie, had died at the bottom of the stairs.

  He still cries sometimes, even now.

  Claire’s blunt assessment of my mother’s condition was correct. She never changed from that day on, and even now sits alone in her room, day after day, rarely uttering a sound. I’ve tried to get her to paint pictures again, as she did in the old days, for she does have use of her hands and can see. However, she uses only one pastime to occupy herself: writing poetry.

  Her poetry is nonsensical, often bizarre, yet I’ve kept it all in a box in my dresser. I did hope for a while her poems would somehow convey her feelings, and from time to time I’ve thought she was trying to tell me something through them, yet I suppose they are but the meaningless ramblings of a sick person.

  I won’t take them with me today, for they are reminders of what I’m trying to forget. I couldn’t consider giving them to Claire, although she knows of Mother’s penchant for writing them and has often asked me to let her read them. There is a small chance my suspicions are true, and the poems refer to something once done against Claire, and, knowing her, if she should read them and guess …

  Claire has been an almost constant presence at our house all these years, bringing oleanders for Mother’s room and cooking food for her, which she never eats. It’s been hard keeping anything from Claire, especially over the past three years, since Charles’s death.

  He went quite suddenly, one night while sleeping, and Claire rushed over to our house in her robe early next morning, screaming and begging my father to come home with her. I felt sorry for her then, because she and Charles had been married many years, and he was one of the finest human beings there ever has been. And to waken one mor
ning and find you are lying next to a dead person … well, that would be more horrible than anything I can imagine.

  I couldn’t comprehend then that the man I’d loved as a favorite uncle could be dead. I shed no tears for him then. This summer, I’ve felt the loss of him far worse, and realized his great value to all of us, and wished I had cried for him as my father did, as we watched them bury him in the ground.…

  There is the problem now of who will care for Mother after today. Since I was twelve, most of my afternoons have been spent with her, and Mrs. McCambridge, who nursed her after Donnie was born, has stayed with her mornings, at first so I could attend school and later, after I finished, so my mornings could remain free because they are all I’ve had. Mrs. McCambridge didn’t hold with the idea of my dancing lessons with Madame D’Arcy when they began eight years ago, or perhaps she just resented having to stay extra hours with Mother twice a week so I could attend them. But for the past three years I’ve had morning classes, so that I’m home by noon, and this has put an end to her head shaking at the frivolity of young people. The only irony now is that Dad must have felt the lessons somewhat frivolous too. He seemed puzzled at my minding so when I had to give them up.

  I wonder if Marybeth Fischer will go on with her lessons when she comes home this fall, if she comes to stay. Madame D’Arcy’s studio is where I met her, and I surely wouldn’t have known her at all except we were both dancers, for our backgrounds are opposite. Marybeth is rich. Her family travels to Europe each summer, and her father has allowed me the use of the pier and bathhouse on their property at the end of the island, while they’re away. In exchange, I’ve been expected to keep an eye open for any mischief done to the house, and report any trouble to the police. However, no one has a key to the grounds except me, and the gardener who comes very early on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and anyway, someone breaking in would be unlikely. You hear little of burglaries or plain wickedness for its own sake in Galveston.

  I’ve tried to teach Marybeth to swim, but she is a heap of clumsy arms and legs in the water, and claims to be too unco-ordinated for swimming just as she is for dancing ballet. She dances only because her mother insists, while I would dance if I were dying of some terrible disease and could barely gather the energy to pull on my dancing shoes.

  This matter of co-ordination isn’t the only difference between Marybeth and me. She’s as tall as I am, but pale of complexion, with dark wavy hair and dark eyes. She’s more full of adventure than I, or at least than I was before this summer, and it was she who dared me to swim in the nude. “After all, there’s no one around our place to watch you in the summer. Try it, and tell me how it feels,” she once said.

  It did feel wonderful: the warm water spilling over me was like being wrapped and unwrapped, again and again, in a piece of silk. When I told her this, and suggested she try it too, she said she would sometime, but only on a moonlit night when she could sneak away from the house unnoticed. “The adventure of it is just not great enough to be worth getting caught,” she told me. “I’d rather save up for something really big, like the time I made Don Singleton hide me in the back of his rig and drive up and down Post Office Street, so I could get a look at a real prostitute marketing her goods.”

  I do wish I could have shared more of this summer with Marybeth. My letters have mentioned Roman, but not our plans to run away. I can’t help believing she’d be proud of me for what I’m about to do.

  Will I ever see her again? Probably not, for I can’t write to her once I’ve gone. She’d never tell anyone where I am, but if one of the servants at her house, or her father or mother, were to discover a letter from me, they might rush over to tell Dad and ruin everything. I’ll tell him eventually that I’m well and happy, but I’ll do it in my own time and won’t have anyone interfering.

  … if I can just get away safely today.

  Anyway, Marybeth’s last letter from Europe said she’d met some young man from a family who were also traveling abroad, and she sounded more serious about him than usual. He’s probably of royal descent or something, and she’ll marry him and move off somewhere far away and terribly romantic. Lucky, lucky Marybeth. Things always turn out right for her.…

  I do hope she’ll make a good match in marriage. When I think what I narrowly missed in the way of lifetime contracts I shudder, and know she was right when she insisted I shouldn’t marry Nick Weaver.

  I couldn’t see her point at the time, of course. Nick is a fine, upstanding young man who plays organ at St. Christopher’s, and at the time he began to court me more than a year ago, I had no prospects of anything better in the way of a husband. I felt it was simply my destiny to marry him, just as it had been my lot in life to care for Mother and go to dull church parties, and sew needlepoint on Sunday afternoons. Not having known love, I wasn’t concerned over going into marriage without it.

  “What’ll you have if you marry Nick Weaver?” she asked one day.

  “I’ll admit we won’t be wealthy, but you seem to forget, I’ve never been wealthy so it wouldn’t be anything to have to get used to. Besides, he’s steady, and has good morals, and Dad says he’ll always have a position at St. Christopher’s.”

  “That isn’t what I mean,” she said, frowning. “Serena, tell me something, dear. Please don’t be offended by my asking—you know, I always speak my mind and you’ve been good enough to put up with me all these years. Have you ever been to bed with a man?”

  I stared at her in disbelief.

  “All right, I can see you haven’t. Take my word for it, it wouldn’t be any fun doing it with Nick, and you’d have to face many nights of it if you married him.”

  “But it isn’t for a woman to enjoy—”

  “Fiddlesticks! Gad, you poor little innocent thing. And don’t look so shocked. Things are not always so proper as they appear. Just because I went to private school, and dance at Madame D’Arcy’s, doesn’t mean I haven’t had any experience beyond that.”

  “Have you ever—?”

  “Twice. Different men, of course, in Europe. I just wanted a taste. Of course they’re far more open over there, not like here, where everyone is so starchy and aboveboard.

  “You understand, I only tell you this as a friend, so you won’t go getting yourself hitched to Mister Propriety. Don’t look like you disapprove. You’d do well to appreciate the benefit of my experience.”

  “That may be all right for you, Marybeth, but what chance would I have? I’ve never even been to Europe, have no hopes of getting much further away from here than Houston.”

  “You give up too easily. The world’s a big place with lots of interesting things in it. Take it from me. If we could only talk your father into letting you go to Europe with us one year, I could show you some real excitement.”

  “Yes, but you know he won’t let your father pay my way, and we could hardly afford it ourselves. Besides, who’d take care of Mother?”

  “All right,” she said with a shrug. “Just do me a favor and don’t sell yourself short by marrying Nick Weaver.”

  “I’ll have to do what’s best. There’s a lot to consider.”

  “Nonsense. The only thing to consider when it comes to marriage is how you feel.”

  I have often wished Marybeth could have met Roman. They’d have never gotten along, of course, would have probably scrapped like two animals, but I’ve a feeling they would have had a certain respect for each other.

  Yet even that harmless thought comes wrapped in a new sinister one. What if I have been for Roman simply an adventure, taken no more seriously than Marybeth takes hers? What if he never intended taking me with him today, and will sneak away on an earlier train along with his band cronies, smiling with satisfaction as he watches Galveston disappear from his train window?

  And one of his buddies will slap his shoulder playfully, and say, “Escaped again, eh? You better watch out, pal, one day some gal’s going to get you yet.”

  Somewhere in the distance a lonely train
whistle blows, and a nervous thrill runs all through me. How absurd to think that of Roman.…

  I’m just nervous.

  He wouldn’t do that to me.

  He loves me.

  Please, God …

  Chapter 2

  I shall miss James Byron more than anyone; I know it’s terrible, for my loyalties seem always to lie in the wrong places. But there it is, and at least I can be honest about one thing.

  James has been here since June, when his father and mother, Ruth and Edward Byron, were killed in a carriage accident on a hill outside Grady, where they lived, and Claire Becker, being his closest relative of means, was given the responsibility of mothering him. I have felt an attachment to him from the start, perhaps because his mother once spent a summer here, and Dad tells me Mother was very fond of her; in fact, that everyone was. A portrait of her face, captured in shimmering oils, hung in our dining room until a short time ago. The painting is initialed by Mother, dated summer 1879. She is portrayed as a small girl, delicate as a lacewing, with laughing eyes and soft, flowing hair.

  James has her eyes. Seeing him the first time, I remembered the picture. I caught him staring at me from behind a bush in Claire’s yard as I walked down on my way to Madame’s the morning after he arrived in Galveston.

  “You there, come out.”