The Promise (7 page)

The leaves of the oak stirred. I should say something but I couldn’t think what that might be. Oscar, too, didn’t seem to know what to say. The breeze caught at my hem, lifted it and my navy skirt ballooned. I pressed it flat, and on the street that bordered the courthouse park, a trolley slowed to a stop, the sharpness of the clanging bell carrying me to Dayton, the overhead electric wires humming as Edward Davis sat several rows behind me.

‘How about we take a ride?’ Oscar said. ‘Show you the sights?’

‘Yes,’ I said, the word coming out in a rush. ‘I would enjoy that very much.’

‘Me too,’ Oscar said. He took one last pull on his cigarette and blew out the smoke in a thin stream. He dropped the cigarette on the gravel and ground it with the toe of his boot.

We sat in the middle of the trolley, Oscar on the aisle seat and I at the window. His leg was close to my skirt, and the weave of his trousers was rough and knobby. In front of Oscar a dark-haired woman held a sleeping baby whose cheek was pressed into her shoulder. The trolley, buckling and shuddering, lurched into the traffic.

His hat in his hands, Oscar leaned forward to see around and past me. The trolley creaked as we gained speed, and Oscar’s leg came closer.

‘We’re on Winnie Street, coming up to what we call the East End,’ he said. The track dipped and the baby in front of us opened his eyes and then closed them.

‘Beautiful homes,’ I said. ‘And such lovely shade trees.’ Block after block of two-story houses with wraparound porches and gingerbread trim slipped by. The houses had complicated roof lines with peaks, dormer windows, and widow’s walks. Their staircases were grand, wide and sweeping. In my mind, though, I was at the Central Hotel, Oscar directing me toward the stairs. I’d have to hold on to the banister, the pitch of each scuffed step uneven as he followed with the room key in his hand.

That could happen an hour from now. Perspiration dampened my hairline. Hot wind rushed in through the trolley windows and loosened strands of my hair. I tried to tuck them into place but it was hopeless. Beside me, Oscar swayed with the trolley. His leg crushed my skirt. I blotted my forehead with my gloved fingers.

In front of us, the woman rocked from side to side, and patted the back of her sleeping baby. The voices of passengers floated around me, the trolley stopping at every corner, the bell ringing. People got off and others boarded, a few of the women glancing at Oscar and then at me as they walked past in search of seats.

‘Next street up is Ninth,’ Oscar said when the trolley started moving.

‘Very nice,’ I said. I saw myself in the hotel washroom that I had used yesterday. I was in the rusty tub, water to my shoulders, the door locked and Oscar down the hall, waiting in my room. Our room.

We rounded a corner. ‘The cross street coming up is Sealy,’ Oscar said. ‘They’re a big family in these parts. They’re customers, too. Good ones.’

‘Pardon?’

‘My milk,’ Oscar said. ‘The Sealys drink it by the bucket.’

‘I see.’ With Edward Davis, there had been conversations about literature, artists, and composers. There had been dinners in secluded dining rooms and rides in private cabs, my hand on his arm.

‘Broadway Avenue,’ Oscar said. ‘We’re proud of this street.’

‘I can well imagine.’ Oak trees and bushes with pink flowers trimmed the boulevard in the center of the avenue. The trolley crept across the avenue, the conductor clanging the bell to warn the cross traffic. We stopped and started, the trolley jerking. Finally we were on the other side of Broadway. We gained speed, passing blocks of houses. Here, though, the yards were narrow, as were the small plain one-story clapboard houses, most of them atop brick columns a few feet above street level.

The trolley turned a corner, lurching. I fell against Oscar, my shoulder colliding with his arm, my leg pressing against his. I felt the solidness of him; I heard the quick intake of my breath. He steadied me, his hand gentle on my upper arm. I gathered myself, straightening. The trolley slowed, and Oscar released my arm.

‘The Gulf of Mexico,’ he said. The city street had given way to sand, and the tracks now ran parallel to a beach. Beyond it, a wide expanse of water shimmered blue and silver in the sun.

‘See them?’ Oscar said, pointing out the window. ‘The Pagoda.’ In the water, two round wood buildings stood on top of tall thin posts. Long wood walkways, crowded with people, connected the pagodas to the beach.

‘We call them bathhouses,’ Oscar said. ‘Aren’t they something, up on those stilts? Seven feet above the water and some thirty paces from the high-tide line. Folks call them an engineering marvel. Tourists come by the hundreds to see them.’

‘I’ve never seen anything like them,’ I said.

‘And all this commotion over here is the Midway. See it? Here on the beach? The carnival games, rides, and suchlike? Tourists keep it busy spring, summer, and fall.’

The trolley crawled along the wide, flat beach and took us past the clutter of the Midway. In the surf, children leapt over small waves while others dug barehanded in the sand. Men and women walked along the tide line, the women in belted bathing costumes, their striped bloomers billowing down to their ankles and their hair tucked up under ruffled caps. The men’s black costumes were sleek and form-fitting, the shapes of their torsos and thighs unmistakably outlined. Their calves were bare. The straps over their shoulders were narrow so that their upper chests and arms were exposed.

‘Murdock’s, that’s one of the bathhouses out over the water. Can’t see it from this angle but it has a restaurant,’ Oscar said. ‘They’re proud of their lemonade. They serve their beer cold, too. I’m a tad thirsty, how about you?’

I forced a smile.

The trolley eased to a stop and began to empty as passengers filed down the aisle and towards the back exit. The woman in front of us with the baby stood up. My pulse rushed. I could have a child by early June. That had been something Edward and I had sought to avoid, although we had never spoken of it. But I was married now, and Oscar was a Catholic. He would expect children. Many children. It was one more thing that I had pushed from my mind when I was in Dayton.

He stood and stepped into the aisle. He thought I had agreed to get off. He didn’t know that I couldn’t depend on my legs to hold me.

From somewhere, a calliope played, the tinny notes carried on the breeze. The words hummed in my mind.

Out in the water, bathers held on to chains looped to staked metal poles, the waves picking the bathers up and setting them down.

This morning I hung my nightgown in the hotel wardrobe that smelled of cedar. Soon, I would take that plain, highnecked gown from the hanger and put it on, my fingers clumsy with the buttons and my knees buckling.

‘I can’t,’ I said.

Oscar said, ‘Lots of newcomers say that about the bathhouses. Said it myself when I first got here, the stilts being so thin and sunk down in soft sand. But Murdock’s is safe, even if it is high up. It’s been here for years.’

The sweating wallpaper on the hotel walls, my crystal earrings on the nightstand, and the bed draped with mosquito netting.

Oscar said, ‘Wouldn’t take you up there if I didn’t think it was safe.’ He paused. ‘How about it? Willing to give it a try? Catherine?’

The sound of my name startled me. I looked up at him. The scar on his cheek appeared more prominent than it had earlier. The corners of his mouth were turned up in a small smile, and his green eyes carried a steadying calm look. And something else. Disappointment. How could he not feel it? My conversations were stilted, my smiles were frozen, and my bearing was rigid. I found it difficult to be any other way. He was a stranger to me, as was the world he offered. But there was more. There was this sense of disquiet stirred by his very presence.

He put his hand out to me.

The trolley was almost full now. The new passengers slumped in their seats, tired from their day at the beach, faces flushed from the sun. At any moment, the trolley driver would ring the bell and we would begin to move, slow, then faster as we traveled away from the beach and returned to the city and to the Central Hotel.

I reached up and took Oscar’s hand.

Hours later, at the hotel, it went much as I had imagined: the speculating glances from the desk clerk, the sinking into the bathtub, my wobbling knees, and Oscar’s expectations. What I had not imagined was me. I had not known I would break down into sobs when he finished or that I would say nothing when he apologized. I could not tell him that I loved another man, that Edward’s abandonment had hurt me to the quick, and that my mother’s had hurt me even worse. I could not tell Oscar that when he embraced me, his arms around me, tender at first and then turning into a quick rush of desire, the pain of the past eight months had unexpectedly welled up inside of me and pierced my very being. Instead, when it was over, I curled away from Oscar, overcome by the turmoil of so many raw and exposed feelings. I wept, Oscar’s apologies faint in my ears. I wept, and in that way, I let him think he was the cause of my pain.

CHAPTER FIVE

Down the Island

The wet hard-packed sand crunched beneath the turning wagon wheels. Oscar’s horses, Maud and Mabel, plodded as they flicked their tails and shook their heads at the black flies that bit their reddish-brown rumps and gathered in the corners of their eyes. To our left, shallow lacy waves rushed close to the wagon wheels, then fell back and merged with the next oncoming wave. Off to our right by a hundred feet or so, rows of tall sand hills edged the beach. There, bushes with yellow flowers and tall sea grass rippled, swept by the hot breeze.

‘We call this the beach road,’ Oscar said, breaking the silence between us. He and I sat on the wagon’s short buckboard under a canvas canopy. Washed-ashore splintered trees, crates covered with barnacles, and parts of glass bottles littered the flat wide beach that stretched ahead of us for what seemed like miles. I felt small and insignificant. Apart from the steamships and schooners far off on the horizon, there was only Oscar and me.

‘Beach works good for the most part,’ he said.

‘It certainly lacks traffic,’ I said.

‘That it does.’

The sky was a sharp blue, and the gulf was silver in the morning light. The shallow waves chased small brown-speckled birds that ran and pecked the wet sand. Flocks of seagulls stood near the water’s edge and rose in flurries of gray wings as we came upon them.

The slow surf was a soft crash in my ears. The feathering on the legs of the horses was covered with sand, and specks of it flew up from their hooves and splattered the front of the wagon. Oscar’s rolled shirt-sleeves flapped in the wind, his suit jacket stored under the buckboard.

‘Roads aren’t paved on our end,’ he said, not looking at me. His hat was low on his forehead. The tendons on the backs of his scarred hands were taut as he held the lines steering the horses around a long tree that lay partially buried in the sand with its bare branches poked up into the air.

I should say something. I should behave as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened last night. That was what Oscar was trying to do with these attempts at conversation.

The wind made hollow beating sounds as it pulled at my shirtwaist and skirt. I said, ‘Where do all these dead trees come from?’

‘From the rivers, the ones that feed into the gulf.’ I felt him glance at me. My straw summer hat hid much of my face. He said, ‘Maybe they come from the Brazos south of here or maybe from the Neches at Sabine Pass. Hard to say when it comes to water.’

I nodded as though I were familiar with these names and places. Oscar said, ‘Sailors dump the crates overboard, most of it’s trash and such. Once in a while, passengers lose things, leastways that’s what we figure. A year ago in June, Andre found a baseball, and that, I can tell you, was a big day for him.’

‘A baseball, of all things,’ I said. Andre. My stepson. I couldn’t begin to picture this child with a French name.

The wagon wheels ground in the sand. The sun bore down. Perspiration ran from under my arms and into my corset.

Oscar said, ‘We have the ridge road; it’s inland over a half of a mile from the sand hills.’ He inclined his head toward the right. ‘That’s where the house and dairy are, on the ridge.’

‘Here?’ I said. ‘We’ve arrived?’

‘We’re on down a ways.’

I nodded.

The muscles in his forearms flexed as he navigated the horses around a barrel crusted with barnacles. ‘We use the ridge road when the tide comes up too high on the beach,’ he said. ‘The ridge is rough going, it not being much more than tracks – and plenty hot. But here we get the breeze.’ He paused and gave me a sideways look. ‘Thought you might appreciate that.’

‘A breeze is most welcome,’ I said.

‘It surely is.’

The horses plodded on, the wheels turning, but the scenery didn’t change. Just more sand hills, the water, and the long beach before us.

‘There used to be a narrow-gauge train,’ Oscar said after a while. ‘It ran from the city to the lace factory.’

‘A lace factory? Here?’

‘Had been. By Offatts Bayou. Building’s still there but it’s empty. It was called Nottingham, and I didn’t like the idea of it, women cooped up and doing that kind of work with machines. And in this heat. Wasn’t right, and I wasn’t altogether sorry when it closed down.’

The three layers of lace on my shirtwaist ruffled in the wind. I’m not prone to hysterics, I wanted to say to Oscar. But last night … To say this, though, called for an explanation that would shock him and humiliate me. I couldn’t tell him that I cared for someone else. I couldn’t tell Oscar that last evening when he held me, his heartbeat in my ear, I felt myself give way to raw feelings. During the night, we had stayed on our own sides of the saggy bed. Spent from weeping but my nerves pulled tight, I listened to Oscar’s breathing settle as he eventually fell asleep. Around dawn, I felt the mattress give when he got up. The floorboards creaked while he dressed, the rustling of his clothes loud in my ears. He whispered that he was stepping out for a while. He wanted to check on his horses at the livery, and after that, he’d stop by the barber’s for a shave. I lay still, feigning sleep. As soon as his footsteps faded in the hallway, I got up, my legs shaky and my eyes puffy. I hurried, desperate to be washed, dressed, and to have my hair arranged before Oscar’s return.