Since my father’s death I was the only family my mother had left. At any time in the past six years I might have received the call I dreaded, the summons to Houston to decide her fate, supervise her care, put her into a home, take responsibility for someone sadly broken by age ... I had dreaded it, but it had never happened. She’d remained compos mentis and physically fit despite increasing frailness. She’d gone on living alone in that big house with the aid of a housekeeper and a few younger friends, and I’d never been put to the test.
A worm of doubt twisted in my gut. Not just chance, was it? Not just good luck for both of us. She knew what I was like. Of course she wouldn’t ask. She would sacrifice herself rather than become a burden to me.
I shouldn’t have waited to be asked.
My throat ached. I wanted to cry now that it was too late for anything but self-pity.
She opened her eyes and gazed vaguely in my direction. My heart gave a lurch. I swallowed my regrets and leaned forward. “Ma.” I squeezed her hand gently. “How do you feel?”
“Not much ... not much longer.”
I shivered. “Can I get you anything? Do anything for you?”
The faintest of smiles moved her mouth and I felt her fingers stir in my grasp. She was stroking my hand. Even at the last, she was more concerned about me.
“I mean it. Anything. If there’s anything I can do. I know it’s too little, too late, but ... I love you. You know that? And I’m sorry ...” I took a shaky breath, mastered myself. “Sorry if I’ve been a disappointment to you. You know, never giving you a grandchild, my crazy lifestyle, living so far away and all ...”
“Shhh, shhh.” The gentle hushing sound reminded me of all the times she’d soothed me when I was feverish or scared, over-tired, or simply in a temper.
“I just wanted you to know. And I wish I’d done more to show you I love you. I wish there was something I could do now.”
Then I shut my mouth, aware that I was doing it again, turning it around, making it all about me. I wanted her to give me her blessing; that’s what this was really about.
She didn’t answer right away, and an expression I couldn’t interpret flickered across her face, and then she sighed very faintly. “I don’t like to ask ...”
My heart gave a startled leap. “Ma! Anything. What is it?”
“The house is yours. I left it to you.”
I didn’t know what to say. I had assumed I’d inherit everything she left, but I’d never asked about her will. If she’d decided to divide her property among several deserving charities, or give it to her church, that was her right. I wouldn’t take it to court.
Her voice came out dry and whispery. “But you don’t want it, you’ll sell it. Won’t you?”
I shrugged, equivocating, but of course I meant to sell. What else? She was my only remaining link to this city; I’d returned over the years only for her sake. The house was lovely, but I wasn’t going to live in it, whereas I could live on the proceeds for years; maybe, with wise investments, forever. “Maybe ... if you don’t mind.”
She closed her eyes. “I can’t ask ...”
My pulse pounded. What was it, this sacrifice? Something to prove my love? Did she want me to give up my claim to her property? “Yes, you can,” I said, and hated the tremor in my voice. “Ask. I’ll do whatever you want.”
She opened her eyes. “He needs to be looked after. He won’t have anyone after I’m gone.”
That wasn’t what I’d expected at all. “You want me to give the house to someone?”
Her brow furrowed. “No—of course not. He doesn’t need it. The house is yours. He’s used to it, but I don’t think it matters where he lives.”
“Ma, I’m not with you. I don’t understand what you want me to do.”
She sighed. “I want you to take care of him. He needs someone. And you ...”
“Who are you talking about?”
Her pale eyebrows rose in astonishment. “Mr. Boudreaux, of course.”
That was a name I hadn’t heard in years.
Old Mr. Boudreaux was my grandmother’s fancy man.
I’m not sure where I picked up that expression, but as a child it appealed to me, and it seemed an appropriate label for the little old man who shared Nanny’s house. He was someone who had caught her fancy, someone she was sweet on, someone sweet and desirable like those tiny little cakes called fancies, covered in thick, sweet icing in appealing pastel colors.
Of course it caused a scandal when Nanny came back from a trip to New Orleans with a strange man on her arm and then, without a word of explanation, without the slightest attempt to give a veneer of social acceptability to their relationship, set up home with him. She sold the house in River Oaks and moved the two of them into the mansion her late husband had commissioned but never lived to see finished. This was a shocking thing in the social circles she’d previously presided over, and she was never allowed to forget it.
“Why don’t you and Mr. Boudreaux get married?” I remember asking my grandmother once. Children tend to accept whatever happens in their family as the norm, but I knew this wasn’t right because my parents were disturbed by Nanny’s behavior.
“Marriage is for younger folks, Darlin’,” she replied. “I don’t need to get married again, and Mr. Boudreaux is far too old for that kind of carry-on.”
I never knew the man’s first name, or anything about his existence before he took up with my grandmother. It wasn’t like there was some big mystery about it; simply, I’d never cared enough to ask. Adult relationships had been of no interest to me as a child, and when I was grown up I was too absorbed in my own relationships with contemporaries to spare much thought for older generations. I imagined he’d passed away within weeks or months of my grandmother’s death, if not several years before.
Certainly, I believed he was dead when I promised my dying mother that I would look after him. Yes, truly, for as long as he needed me. Of course I didn’t mind! I’d be happy to do it. It was like reassuring a child who still believed in Santa Claus, and although I didn’t think there was any harm in it, I was sorry to have to lie to her, saddened that my mother, who had been so alert and engaged with the world all her life should, at the last, have slipped into a muddled dream of times past.
But how like my mother it was: even on her deathbed she was worrying about other people.
Peace settled on her after I gave my promise. She did not say another word. She died, perhaps an hour later, with me still holding her hand.
Nanny’s house—that was how I still thought of it—had been built on ten acres of uncultivated woodland, well outside the city limits when my grandfather bought it back in the 1940s. Since then, Houston had grown like a ravenous amoeba, spreading in all directions. The freeway system had expanded and new neighborhoods had popped up with all the accompanying services, schools and shopping malls a modern family could want. What had been a rural area even in my childhood was now suburban, and much in demand. At any time since Nanny’s death my parents could have sold some or all of the surrounding acres for a pot of money, but they hadn’t. I know they liked the privacy and quiet, the sensation of being deep in the country, when they were actually just a short drive away from a particularly nice shopping center, and everything else the city could offer.
Getting away from the hospital complex took me some time, and navigating the freeways was a nerve-wracking experience, but once I’d managed, more by luck than skill, to force my way across four lanes to the necessary exit, the rest of the route was a piece of cake. As I drove along the winding, tree-lined residential streets I relaxed, comfortable here in a way I could not understand. I thought of myself as European—by choice, sensibility and heritage, if not actual birthright—and I had lived abroad for nearly four decades. I’d tell anyone who asked that Houston’s climate was inhuman, unbearable for most of the year, and the social-political climate was no better. I’d left as soon as I could, never wanted to live there again, and yet ... an
d yet ... Being here was something else. The physical atmosphere acted upon me like some terrifying truth serum, forcing me to admit that, like it or not, on some level, here was where I belonged.
I eased up on the gas. Even before I saw the old metal mailbox, still leaning at a slight angle, I’d anticipated it, and was slowing to take the turn. As the car moved, bumping and swaying on the uneven, pot-holed driveway into the mysteriously cool, shadowy, pine-scented tunnel created by the trees that so closely lined it, I imagined it was carrying me into a lost world, like Conan Doyle’s, a primeval pocket universe out of time. It was a fantasy I used to savor on every visit, well into my teens. Memories bubbled up from my past, mostly the books: The Lost World, Dwellers in the Mirage, Fu Manchu, She, old hardbacks by Talbot Mundy, P.C. Wren, Louise Gerard, E.M. Hull and Richard Halliburton. Nanny’s bookshelves were full of exotic delights, adventure stories, romances and travel books from long ago. I was happy to read while the grown-ups talked or played cards, and when, inevitably, I was ordered to stop ruining my eyes and go outside to get some fresh air I’d smuggle a book out with me. The best place to read about lost worlds and adventurers hacking their way through the Matto Grosso was in some private corner of the mysterious uncharted wilderness all around me.
The house finally came into view, familiar as my mother’s face. It was a handsome building modeled on some New Orleans mansion, and back when it was built it was considered awfully grand, especially for its primitive setting, too far from the city for convenience. But times had changed. While I continued to inhabit a cramped little apartment in Paris, most Americans lived, and built, on an increasingly grandiose scale. It was no longer unusual for bathrooms to outnumber the bedrooms in a house, and while the house had come to seem more ordinary (would anyone call it a “mansion” today?) the undeveloped acres all around it constituted prime real estate.
I parked the car on the turning circle and tried to look at the house objectively. It was over sixty years old, there might be structural problems, very likely the central heating and air conditioning systems needed replacing. But it would sell. Someone would buy it, whatever the drawbacks, if only for the land it stood on.
I got out of the car and inhaled the scent of dry earth and pine-needles that could not cover the swampy, fecund odor of the bayou underneath. A mosquito whined past my ear. I felt the sweat gluing my clothes to my skin, and I turned my back on the forest and went indoors.
It was much cooler there, even though the air conditioning had been set to the lowest level. The cold bare marble floor in the front hall had something to do with the almost chilly atmosphere, I suppose. Pale wooden shutters—my mother’s improvement on Nanny’s dust-gathering drapes—filtered out the harshest rays of the sun. I went into the big living room where the atmosphere, the subtle ambient scents of furniture polish, flowers, room freshener, whatever it was, spoke to me so immediately and intimately of home that I was put at my ease. It had always been like that, I’d always loved coming here. It didn’t seem possible that my mother was dead, and this house was mine alone.
The house did not feel empty. I shivered as the sweat dried on my skin, and I recalled the promise I’d made to my dying mother. I couldn’t remember when Mr. Boudreaux had died. Surely I would have been told. I didn’t think he’d been present at Nanny’s funeral. He must have predeceased her. Although I’d never known much about him, I’d had the impression that he was a good deal older than my grandmother, and she’d been over ninety when she died. But even if he’d been a few years younger—even a decade younger—it was now twenty years on ...
My skin crawled as I imagined a shriveled, dehydrated old man lying in his own filth in one of the bedrooms upstairs.
I’d promised my mother I’d take care of him.
I forced myself up the stairs before I could chicken out. My ears straining for a faint moan or whimper, I checked out each and every room.
Finally I managed to calm down, reassured that I really was alone in the big house. I felt a bit sheepish. Just because my mother had slipped into the past for a few moments at the end of her life was no reason for me to get crazy.
Every room was clean and tidy, kept that way by the housekeeper, and lack of use. The only bedroom showing any sign of recent occupation was my mother’s: there was an empty water glass on the bedside table along with a little tin of Altoids and a book-marked paperback of The Joy Luck Club. The bed was made up, but there was an indentation visible in the cotton coverlet, showing where someone had sat down on it.
I sat down there, where my mother had been, and suddenly felt dizzy with grief and exhaustion. I lay back, my head on the pillow, and the faintest whiff of her perfume (Chamade) brought the tears stinging my eyes. For distraction, I thought about Mr. Boudreaux, dredging my memory for some solid facts about him. How had he managed to remain such a stranger? He’d always been around throughout my childhood, the quiet, little old man who lived in my grandmother’s house. He rarely spoke to me that I could recall; we certainly never bonded; I don’t think I’d ever spent time with him alone. Why would I? A closer friendship between us was not forbidden, simply unattractive. We weren’t even related.
I could barely remember him now, although I’d seen him several times a month for the whole of my childhood and adolescence. No matter how I searched my memory, his face refused to come back to me. His only significance was due to the scandalous cloud that hung over his long and apparently contented relationship with my grandmother. It was generally assumed that they never married because of some legal obstacle: he had a wife already, who would not allow his remarriage. Or else there was something in my grandfather’s will that prohibited it. Both these “reasons” seemed unlikely to me. Nanny had loved Mr. Boudreaux; she was rich and he had nothing but her. How would he manage if she died first? Had Nanny invoked a promise from her daughter like the one I’d just made my mother? Who was Mr. Boudreaux, and what had happened to him?
When I opened my eyes again the room was dark, and I was well-rested. Checking the clock, I figured out it must be nearly dawn, and that I’d slept for over ten hours. After washing, I went downstairs and drank a cup of instant coffee as I watched the sun come up through the trees.
When I went outside to get my bag out of the car, I was surprised by how pleasantly fresh the air felt. Since I’d left, I’d come to believe Houston outdoors was unfit for human habitation except in winter. It was now high summer, and my body responded to the ambient temperature with a greedy desire that took me by surprise. The heat would be unbearable later, so I decided to make the most of it, and set off for a walk right away, leaving my bag beside the car.
As soon as I left the driveway I plunged into the murk of the pine woods. Nostalgia rose, powerful as sickness, when I breathed in the familiar scent of the land. It was strong and contradictory, mixing fresh and foul odors. One part was the clean, resinous scent of pine, along with the subtle, baked smell of the earth, but mingling and merging with this goodness was the fetid reek of rotting vegetation and stagnant water. It was an odor more distinctive than that of any of the cities I’d known—Paris, London, Amsterdam, Hong Kong—and it stirred old emotions.
Not until that moment had I realized how much I missed it. Or how primal the feeling for a place could be.
It was like the smell of a living body, like catching the whiff of another person—not always repellent, whatever deodorant manufacturers would have you believe. Especially not when it’s someone dear to you.
I was suddenly as thrilled and eager as I’d ever been as a child embarking on exploration.
Houston was originally settled on the banks of Buffalo Bayou, but most people, locals or visitors, seemed barely aware of it as a waterway. The bayou wasn’t at the heart of the city, intrinsic to it the way the Thames was to London, or the Seine to Paris. Of course, it wasn’t a river. I still remembered the definition I’d copied down in Texas History class for “bayou”: “a slow-moving creek or stream.” To me, it was much more than
that.
I had grown up in a very ordinary, very boring residential subdivision of the city, full of little brick boxes built not long after the war. Even the trees were the same age as the houses, all planted a regulation distance apart—there wasn’t a scrap of nature or wildness in the neighborhood, not so much as a tangled, overgrown garden or an abandoned house that could have been haunted. My family didn’t travel or go on exotic vacations. My only taste of something different, of a bigger, more primitive world, apart from the books I read incessantly, came from our regular visits to my grandmother. Her house occupied a mysterious borderland between the ordinary suburban world I lived in and The Wilderness. Inside the woods, which began just a few yards beyond her house and encompassed a stretch of bayou, there existed countless other worlds. I could find anything there: dinosaur tracks, a magic playhouse, an Aztec temple, a lost civilization, buried treasure, warring tribes, magical talking beasts, the fountain of youth or the source of the Amazon ... nothing seemed impossible.
Visitants-Stories of Fallen Angels and Heavenly Hosts Page 16
