Galveston Page 36

  For the first time I think I had reached him. He looked down at me for a moment, then pulled me close to him. “Poor, poor Serena. Everything seems to fall apart at once, doesn’t it, baby?”

  I don’t know what had held back the tears before, but the showing of tenderness, the unexpected gentleness in his voice, dissolved all courage and determination to be brave, and I cried as I have not cried since the day I finally realized my mother was never going to be well again, when I was eight years old.

  Roman ordinarily detests tears, but that day he let me alone as I wept. I kept trying to apologize, catching my breath in gulps, yet I couldn’t quit crying and he held me and stroked my hair.

  “It’s my fault,” he said. We’d walked away from the surf and sat down together on the stage door steps. I wasn’t crying hard anymore, only shivering a little as the tears waned and dried upon my face. “I should’ve never intruded on your life. You’d have been so much better off, had I stayed away.”

  “No, no, you’ve brought me all the happiness I’ve ever known.”

  “The worst of it is, I knew from the beginning better than to fool with you. Knew it the first time I walked to that fence and saw you there on the pier with your dog and your little friend. You were not the sort for me, and I should have stayed away. You know what? I came very near doing that.”

  “But you didn’t. You must have cared a little, even then.”

  “No. I won’t lie to you, Serena, especially now. You were but a new distraction from the dullness of the summer, just like all the others. I didn’t care for you except that I thought you damned attractive, and I found your confounded innocence new and refreshing.”

  “But surely that isn’t all it’s been this summer?”

  “No, only until the first time I brought you up there,” he said, glancing toward the tower window. “I felt awful after it was over. I’ve never been the first for any girl in my life. I thought that day if you never came back it would be the best thing all around. I’m destructive, you see. Look what’s happened to your life since I moved in.” He picked up a stick and traced a path through the sand, then broke the stick in half.

  “No, don’t say that. You know how I feel.”

  “But you did come back, and I was as hooked on you as a schoolboy on his first grade schoolmarm. Damn, I didn’t have the guts to call it off because I couldn’t get enough of you.”

  “I’m so glad you didn’t …”

  “Look, there’s no use making things any more painful than they are now. Let’s just end it. We’d have to anyway, because our time’s run out. Let’s not hold each other with commitments to meet again next time I’m in Galveston … if ever I am again.”

  I must have looked as stunned as I felt, because he turned away and continued, “Take a good piece of advice. Go back to your organist friend, marry him, have his children. You’ll have a better life than if you cling to me. Believe me, it’s best.”

  “I could never marry Nick Weaver after having known you. The idea sickens me.”

  “But you know nothing of me, you little fool. Do you realize that? I’m one of those people nice fathers don’t let their daughters have anything to do with. Do you know why I came when your neighbor invited me to dinner? Because it was a novelty, being invited up into a respectable neighborhood in Galveston.

  “I’ve done things you wouldn’t believe, dearie, and you wouldn’t want to know what they are. My background is what people call ‘questionable,’ as you once so aptly put it. I told you I haven’t always been with a traveling band.

  “Just tell me something. Haven’t you thought all along that Professor King’s band was just the ultimate? Being its star was the zenith in the music world? Well, it isn’t. It’s an opportunity for someone who has nowhere else to go but down. It’s for losers, Serena, for losers.”

  “No, I won’t let you say that. I don’t care what you’ve done in the past. All I care about is what has happened this summer. You can’t go around all your life paying for what you did in the past, denying yourself any chance of happiness because you feel you don’t deserve it. When I met you, I decided I was due some happiness, after having been tied down to a sick mother and a dull, dull existence all my life.

  “You made me see there was a chance for something better. You made me aspire so much more toward being a dancer. You made me believe in myself. How can you turn around now and downgrade yourself? I know you haven’t been any angel, what man has? And how many would be so honest about admitting it?”

  “By God,” he said with a half-smile, “I had no idea how much you were influenced by the likes of me.”

  “I didn’t either until now, when you got me stirred up.”

  “You know, you’re twice as fetching when you get stirred up. You ought to get that way more often.”

  “No, I’m trying to be serious, to figure out what to do. I need you to take things in hand.”

  “What you’re really saying is you want to go away with me.”

  “I guess that’s what I’m saying.”

  “Well, I’m sorry, doll, that’s out. There isn’t any way for that to work. It would be disaster from the beginning, and you’d wind up being more unhappy than you ever thought possible.”

  “No, I wouldn’t. I could travel with you, help you, oh, Roman, I’d do anything for you. I love you so much … I never knew I could love someone as I love you …”

  I’d said too much, put him off. He looked down at the steps in silence for what seemed an eternity, and I awaited his decision as a helpless criminal awaits a jury verdict.

  “No,” he said finally. “No. Go now. Go away. Don’t ever come back.”

  “Roman?”

  “You heard me. Go. It’s no good. Go on, now. I don’t want to see you again.”

  “Roman?” I said again, backing down the beach. His mouth was set and he stared straight into my eyes. Finally I could bear the look no longer and turned away.

  I stepped unevenly down the beach. As though nothing had happened, the gulls kept on winging back and forth above, the edge of the waves flirted with my feet as I passed. I shaded my eyes from the glare of the sun with one hand, and tried to think only as far as the next step. It could not be over, yet it was, because his look was unequivocal, branded on my mind. I would go back home and try to act out the rest of the day. Later, I would call upon a reserve of strength that must be waiting somewhere within me, to help me through the week, the month, the rest of my life. If I were pregnant, as I now feared more each day, I would be forced to commit murder on the child growing inside me, for there was no way to get away, no way …

  There was a point, not more than a hundred yards or so from the Pavilion, when the thought struck me it would be so easy to turn to the right and continue walking toward the water, and to let the Gulf take me for its own. Hadn’t James said I was a child of the sea? Aphrodite would eventually return to her birthplace, would she not? One could so easily walk into the surf as though for a swim, yet then to wade a little further, a little further …

  Chapter 14

  How long had he been calling?

  He was running toward me now, fright written all over his face, the beautiful Apollo running to save what might have, should have, been his. He’d never run to me before; how strange to see him spatter like a panicked animal across the water, then to glide with muscles taut the last few feet. I treaded silently, waiting.

  “You crazy little fool,” he shouted, grabbing me first by the shoulders, then lifting, carrying me. “I start calling you, and you run into the water. Would you have the sea before me?”

  It was all a dream, of course, and I was but a limp puppet being handled by its master. I gave no resistance to his pulling me back, yet had he let me go I would have contentedly given myself to the sea.

  Back on the beach he sat me down roughly and shook my shoulders, bringing me out of the daze. He was angrier than I have ever seen him, for I had frightened him. “Damn you, don’t you eve
r let anything happen to you, you little idiot!” he said, then took me into his arms and held me, rocking back and forth, and kissed my face, till the breath went out of me.

  Later he carried me back up to the tower room, just as he had the first time I ever went to him for loving, laid me down on the bed, and pulled covers around my quaking body.

  He was kneeling beside the bed and rubbing my hands. “Look, whatever you want,” he said. “I’m not the prize you seem to think, but by God, how I’d ever live a day without you, I don’t know …”

  He laid his head down on the bed next to mine then, and I stroked his hair. It was strange, my comforting him. He was a man always in command of me, yet now he came to me as a small boy comes to his mother, frightened of a storm during the night. My body continued to shiver, yet I had a warm, overflowing feeling inside. I wanted him now more than ever, and raised the cover and looked into his eyes. It was the first time I had ever made the move toward love-making, and as he moved in and began to kiss me I felt I would never be afraid of anything again.

  Later I thought of it all, walking home from the beach.

  He hadn’t told me how we would work it out, only that he would fix it and for me not to worry any more. Just as I was leaving him I’d turned and asked the questions which had nagged at me all summer long.

  “You’re not already married or anything, are you? I mean, I’ve always had this fear you might have a wife back in New York. Are you … married?”

  “I have been.”

  “And now? What about now?”

  “No. There is no one.”

  “Roman, could you just say … do you love me? Tell me the truth now, please. I have to know.”

  “You little fool. There isn’t an inch of you I haven’t loved since the beginning took place right in this room. Haven’t you realized that?”

  “Then, will you say it?” I was at the door, looking out into the hall. I dared not face him at that moment.

  “All right. It’s only that … I’ve said it so many times to so many women, it has a rather cheap ring to it by now. I didn’t want to cheapen you by saying it. Can you understand that?”

  “Yes, but it wouldn’t be cheap to me. It would be like music.”

  He hesitated a moment, then said, “I love you, Serena. I love you by day and by night, as I never intended to love anybody. Is that what you wanted to hear?”

  I turned and looked at him. It was so much more than I had hoped for.

  There was much excitement on Avenue L when I returned, and I feared I must be awfully late and Mrs. McCambridge was having a fit, readying a search party to drag the ocean for my body. Yet why was everyone walking away from the beach?

  When I reached our gate I saw James come from the crowd several houses down, and run toward me. His face was tear-strewn as he tried to tell me. “Oh, Serena, Serena, it’s so awful. I don’t know how to tell you, I don’t know.”

  He was crying and talking at once, and I knelt and tried to calm him. “James, what is it? Has someone been hurt? Mother? Dad?”

  “No, no. It’s Porky. He’s down the street in the Madison yard, and he’s dead.”

  “Dead? How can he—where?”

  “Down there,” he said, pointing toward the people. “You mustn’t see. I don’t want you to see him. They’re going to bring him back in a wagon.”

  “No, I have to see,” I said, and ran down the block. Even as I approached the scene I couldn’t believe it. Porky never got out of the yard except at the end of a leash. What would he be doing down the street in some else’s yard?

  When I got there Dad was leaning over him, and I knelt down beside him. Porky’s body was perfectly still, lying on its side, showing no marks at all. He might just as easily have been sleeping, his legs stretched out in front of him, his eyes closing out the sunlight. I felt nothing, then, except disbelief.

  “But what happened? He doesn’t look as though he’s been touched.”

  “Poisoned, no doubt about it. You can see it around his mouth.”

  I didn’t want to see his mouth. “But why? Who?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe some mischievous prank. Some kids, or vicious grown-ups. Poor old boy, he never hurt a soul.”

  Something about the endearment clung to my heart and I felt the lump come into my throat. “Just let me stroke him,” I said, “tell him good-by. I haven’t been the best mistress lately, have I? Poor, poor Porky. He’s so beautiful, so beautiful …”

  “Come away now,” said Dad, pulling me up. Tommy Driscoll, a junior edition of his undertaker father, stood by with his wagon, and Dad gently picked up the lifeless form. James appeared then, and said, “Please, Father Garret, I want to help pull the wagon home.”

  “All right,” he answered, and allowed James to help him get Porky into the wagon. Over the summer Porky had been James’s dog more than mine. It was fitting, then, that he should be at the lead of this queer entourage of people, making its way back up Avenue L …

  Porky was the final living evidence of Charles Becker. Everything else he had given me during his lifetime—the countless bijous purchased here and there, and given for little or no occasion; the dolls in the doll chest in my room; the sewing machine on which I had learned to sew; the wooden rocking horse; the mounds of books he’d brought to me—all were still around. The books were in St. Christopher’s children’s library and even the rocking horse, his mane lost somewhere along the way, his paint job in bad need of repair, was housed in our attic. Yet Porky was the gift he took the most delight in giving. Now that Porky was gone I found I missed Charles more than I had following his own death three years before.

  I think now that if Charles were around, everything would be different for all of us today. Dad would find it much easier to handle his problems, for, contrary to the opinion of most people, Charles was the stronger of the two men. People found strength in my father because they expected it to be there, and never bothered wondering whether it really lay inside him, or whether his manner of self-assuredness was really only a thin mask imposed by the priesthood. My father leaned on Charles a great deal, and I don’t believe it was until after his death that Dad began to take his whisky so frequently.

  Were Charles here now, I might have gone to him, confided in him about Roman. He would have known how to reason with my father, there being no question he would have sided with me … why, I don’t really know.

  They buried Porky in the side yard, opposite Mother’s window and Claire’s house. I took a book and read to Mother as they turned the ground. We didn’t want her to see what had happened, and felt it might be better if she discovered him gone one day and thought he’d run away. Of course, one never knew about Mother. She might not even remember tomorrow that Porky ever existed and had sat sometimes at the foot of her wheelchair out in the sunshine.

  James came over in the evening, and asked if I could come out on the verandah and talk. We sat on the swing together, smelling the sweet scent of blooming oleanders in the moonlight. I had shed my tears for Porky in the afternoon, and I remember as we sat there the contentment I felt, as though no matter what happened between now and next week, everything was going to be all right. If I had Roman’s love, I could make it through anything.

  “Serena, I want to tell you a proposition,” James began.

  “Yes?”

  “It was so terrible about Porky …”

  “Yes. He was such a good dog, and I shall miss him. I know you will too, James. He was quite fond of you, you know.”

  “I never had a dog of my own. Mother and Father promised me one for this birthday, but then of course they were killed.”

  “Yes.”

  “Anyway, with Porky gone now I thought we might get another dog. Not that any could replace Porky, but at least he would be a dog. I looked in the directory just now, and there’s a pet shop downtown, right off the Strand. I think I’ve enough money saved to buy a puppy there. We could go down together and pick him out. He would be your do
g, and I’d only ask to be able to play with him the way I did with Porky.”

  It was one of the greatest kindnesses anyone had ever paid me, and I couldn’t resist a sudden urge to hug James’s neck, a fact which dismayed him terribly.

  “Don’t get all mushy,” he said, wriggling loose.

  “All right, I won’t. But, James, you’ll never know how much I appreciate your thoughtfulness.”

  “Does that mean we can do it?”

  “I’m afraid not. James, you’ve been swell at keeping secrets all summer. Now I shall tell you another, if you think you can stand it, and this is the biggest one of all. I’m telling you because it will explain why I can’t let you buy me another puppy.”

  “I think I know. You’re going away, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, did I give my secret away?”

  “Only just then, when you said what you did. You really love Roman, don’t you?”

  “You sound like a little old man, James. Of course I do, more than anything in the world. And he loves me. We’re going to be together always.”

  “Yes. I was afraid you would decide to go with him.”

  “You do approve, don’t you? Look at me. I wouldn’t want you disapproving, because you mean too much to me.”

  “I guess so. If you’re sure he can be trusted.”

  His words puzzled me until I thought back a little. “Oh yes, you’re remembering that girl Lucille, in your hometown. The one killed by the gambler.”

  “They never said for sure it was him, only assumed it was. They never caught him, you see.”

  “Surely you know Roman wouldn’t harm anyone. Didn’t he rescue you that day, carry you all the way home?”

  “Yes, and I believe he’s a good man. I just wouldn’t want to ever take any chance when it comes to you. You’re too special. And don’t get mushy again.”