Colonnades — surely a Venetian touch — shaded the sidewalks along Windward Avenue, though the columns were plaster, not Italian stone, and sounded hollow when she tapped them. There were half a dozen raucous saloons. In Pasadena and L.A., saloons and pretty much everything else had to close on Sundays, but Venice had its own laws.
She found the real estate office a block back from the beach, in a storefront between a seafood restaurant and a shop that sold Indian moccasins, ships in glass bottles, and striped beach towels. Peering into the office through the plate-glass window, she saw empty desks and a potted plant of gigantic proportions. She wondered if the office was closed, then noticed a man with his feet up on a desk in the back of the room, reading a newspaper. A bell jingled as she opened the door. The man lowered his newspaper. Seeing her, he took his feet off the desk and stood up.
“May I help you?”
“I’d like to see some properties.”
“Oh. Well. I can certainly help you with that.”
He was maybe a year or two younger than she was. His skin was tanned, eyes blue, and teeth very white.
“Perhaps you’d like to finish your lunch first.” There was half a chicken sandwich on his desk.
“Oh, no. Wasn’t all that good anyhow.” He came forward, picking up his hat. “I’d be happy to show you what’s on the market. Not a lot of houses, but there are some choice lots. I’m Grattan O’Brien.”
Some men seized Iseult’s hand and squeezed as if it were a bird they wanted to crush before it could escape. Her mother had disapproved of men and women shaking hands, considering it a vulgar Americanism. Grattan’s handshake was firm and quick, but she felt something intimate in his touch. As though he had rubbed some bone of herself. She felt her cheeks flushing with thoughts that weren’t words, just burrs of feelings, inchoate, startling.
But one could ignore feelings; one didn’t need to let them show.
~
On Windward Avenue, in the shadows of the colonnade, voices were keyed up and the air smelled of fried food. People spooned ice cream from paper cups. A man in front of a store had watch chains draped over his arm. “Real gold!” he called. “Come along, gents, don’t put a fine watch on a cheap chain! Real gold watch chains, only one dollar!”
As they walked, Grattan O’Brien told her that Mr. Abbot Kinney planned to make Venice the most extraordinary residential community in America, a garden city with shining waterways instead of dusty streets. She was doing her best to pay attention while constantly feeling death, the presence of death behind everything.
“We’ll go by the Lagoon and see if we might catch a gondola. There are only a couple of houses to see. The lots have been selling, but the fact is not many people have built yet.”
I am an orphan, Iseult thought to herself. An orphan led westward, windward, by a young man whose wrists and hands are brown and glossy smooth as the branches of a manzanita tree.
The Lagoon was a stagnant green pond flanked by what he called the Amphitheatre.
“They held swimming races here this morning. The Amphitheatre seats 2,500. This was all wasteland when Mr. Kinney first saw it. Nothing but mud and birds.”
White plaster columns, plaster statues everywhere, and banks of rickety seats: she thought it looked a bit like a Roman ruin and a bit like the Dartmouth College swim tank. On the far side of the Lagoon, three black Venetian gondolas were tied up at a float where the boatmen, in striped jerseys, were smoking and playing cards. Mist was blowing inland, giving some texture to plain, brutal sunshine. She could feel surf thumping on the beach.
“Luigi, per piacere, let’s take the signora down to the Linnie.”
The gondoliers looked up from their card game. One of them shrugged, tossed down his cards, and stood up. “Sure thing, Mr. Grattan.”
“How’s business?” Grattan asked.
“Ah, not so good.”
The man stepped into one of the gondolas, then held out his hand for Iseult as she stepped down. It was pleasant to be on the water, to sense something soft beneath the hull, liquid depth, a mystery. Grattan sat down next to her and the gondolier slipped his line and pushed off.
With its toothed stern rising like a wicked tail, the gondola resembled a dragon. It had something of a canoe’s narrowness and fragility. The gondolier hummed a tune as he worked the scull.
“It’s a nice way to go, don’t you think?” Grattan said.
It was wonderful: the scent of tarry wood and the black hull sliding noiselessly across the Lagoon, headed for the Grand Canal. A flock of ducks paddled in the sluggish water.
“What’s the difference between a canal and a ditch?”
He smiled. “Good question. You dig a ditch to drain a swamp or to bring water to crops. The canals are so people can enjoy living by water. That was Abbot’s idea, anyway. In summer it’s often fifteen degrees cooler out here than in Los Angeles. You can sleep under a blanket all summer. You’re from back east?”
“Yes.”
“I’m out of Canada myself. Don’t let me get started on the ocean air out here, or you’ll think I’m huckstering you.”
They glided along. To the north she could see the olive green Santa Monica Mountains, and the purple San Gabriels to the east, beyond Pasadena. Something dreamy, sleepy, about moving on water. Her mother would have called this day a whim. Was that what it was? How weightless and unencumbered she felt.
The gondola slipped beneath a couple of footbridges. There were only a few people strolling along the canals. She saw survey sticks and sand piles but few houses.
“We haven’t actually sold that many lots, to tell you the truth. People don’t appreciate the canals; they want real streets so they can park automobiles in front of their houses. They might not own an automobile yet, but they hope to.”
“You’re not being a very good salesman. You shouldn’t be giving me reasons not to buy.”
“Well, we do have the electric cars. It’s only fifty-two minutes to Los Angeles. I want to give you the whole picture. Venice hasn’t worked the way Mr. Kinney had in mind. I shouldn’t say so, but I believe he’s tired of the whole thing. People just aren’t interested in beauty — not his idea of beauty, anyway — so he has to give them fun parks and crazy rides and the Pier. A person like you might be happier living in Ocean Park or Santa Monica.”
“A person like me? What sort of person is that?”
“Well, Santa Monica’s more civilized, that’s all I mean. There’s not a lot going on at the office — you may have noticed. All the other salesmen have quit, and I’m thinking about it. Nothing to do all day gets kind of lonely.”
“How can you be lonely with the biggest dancehall in world?” she teased. “And a roller-skating rink!”
“You ought to meet my wife,” he said. “She could tell you what it’s like out here.”
Iseult turned away, let her fingers dabble in the water. Her throat felt tight and dry.
“You’ll hear coyotes at night,” he was saying.
Wild sun, hard blue sky, the slip of the hull through green water. Not a very sensible place to live.
The gondolier was humming and every now and then burst out with a stanza in Italian. Was he singing for her, she wondered, was it part of his job? Did it matter? No. Shutting her eyes, she let the music float by as the sun stroked her face.
What she was most conscious of was animal will: a jump of desire. Grattan, slender and crisp. She longed to bite him, taste his skin.
~
He showed her through a pair of bungalows on the Howland Canal, then one on the Linnie, all three built to the same pattern. Inside they smelled of raw wood, sawdust, grout, and stale new paint. Squirrels or raccoons had gotten inside one of the Howlands and made a nest of rags, dry grass, and twigs on the kitchen floor.
Big white New England houses could be iron chains around the necks of their inhabitants, and she had watched her father being dragged to his death by the gloom and weight of such a house, until he ha
d climbed up to the attic one Sunday afternoon and blown out his brains with a Colt Navy pistol his own father had carried through the Civil War.
She liked the Linnie Canal cottage best. Maybe it was just the name. Linnie sounded like a pretty girl, Howland bleak and masculine. It was strange to stand in an empty house alone with a young man, a stranger. She felt vulnerable and open, without edges.
Grattan said, “I guess I don’t understand why people are so keen for houses in the first place.”
“Everyone needs a home, Mr. O’Brien.”
“Do they? I think I carry my home inside my head.”
“What does your wife think?”
“Oh, she wants us to buy a house,” he said gloomily. “We live in her studio right on Windward. Above the Chink laundry. She says it won’t be good for the baby. She’s due in a couple of months.”
“Congratulations.”
“I’d like to feel I can up stakes whenever I choose. All rooms are boring, sooner or later. I like the outside.”
Mr. Grattan O’Brien was restless. She wondered if it worried his wife.
It took only a minute to see everything. Dirty windows, plaster dust, stale air. She tried to ignore her lewd feelings and pay heed to the space, the way the light worked within the small rooms. The kitchen sink, brightly tiled counters, yellow and black. Icebox. Bathtub, porcelain toilet, sink, white tiles on the floor. Windows in the sitting room looked out to the green glint of the canal. Could she make a home for herself?
“I guess you like it or you don’t,” he said. “It’s a nice time of day out here, though, isn’t it? The way the light cuts in. These houses are very bright most of the time. Look, why don’t you nose around a bit by yourself, get a feel for the place. You don’t want me looking over your shoulder. I’ll wait outside.”
She thought about his wife: busy, pretty, young. More ambitious than Grattan, perhaps, and getting a little impatient.
“Thank you. I won’t be long,” she said.
“Take your time, Miss Wilkins.”
He went out, closing the door behind him. She stood still and heard him strike a match. And the gondolier was still crooning, singing for no one but himself.
Alone this time, Iseult took herself once more through the bright, bare rooms. The layout was very simple. It was a nothing little house, the bedroom half the size of her bedroom in Pasadena. Still, it was bright. Hard to imagine someone dying in these rooms. The spare room that could be her library, studio, thinking room.
What sort of passion might spill in this house? The houses she’d known had all spoken her family’s dark language. Venice, California, was awfully far from everyone and everything, but did that matter? She had enough income to live modestly. She was prepared to be lonely for a while. In a bare little house of her own she might find clarity and calm, she might find her own purpose.
~
As they were gliding back along the Grand Canal, Grattan didn’t ask what she thought of the Linnie cottage. He didn’t say anything. Something in him seemed to have turned off, or turned inward.
They disembarked and he insisted on walking her to the electric car stop, where a three-car train was boarding passengers.
“I hope it hasn’t been an utter waste of your time,” he said.
“I hope it hasn’t been an utter waste of yours.”
“Certainly not.” He smiled and they shook hands, then she boarded the last car. The floor was gritty with beach sand. She found a window seat and looked out. Grattan O’Brien was still standing there, hat in hand. There was something unfinished about him; some protective carapace was missing. She would want someone tougher. Stubborn, forceful. A man to take her places she couldn’t get to on her own.
The train started with a jolt and she turned away from the window. The car was packed with sunburnt mothers and infants, beach umbrellas and picnic baskets, fathers and uncles already nodding asleep, older children fussing. She seemed to be the only person travelling alone.
The day before her mother’s death, the son of one of her mother’s friends, home from his junior year at Yale, had telephoned Iseult and invited her to a tennis and tea party at the Pasadena Club. “Tomorrow afternoon at, say, three o’clock?”
That was when she broke for the first, the only time. Holding the telephone receiver to her ear, feeling the oxygen being squeezed from her lungs and not having the strength to pull it back in.
The telephone was on a wall in a dark panelled hallway that reeked of cleaning fluid. For weeks her mother’s housekeeper, Cordelia, displaced by shifts of hired nurses, had had little to do but dust the barren rooms of that mostly unlived-in house. She was a tall, stringy coloured woman from Oklahoma and it was hard to guess her age. She was slender and long-waisted and there was something mannish about her, a sense of power and fluid strength. Determined to earn her keep, she had been scouring, buffing, and waxing so ferociously that the Pasadena house shone with a kind of cruelty, everything glossy, ugly, and perfectly arranged, so that the house itself seemed like a kind of funeral.
Hearing the Yale boy’s treble over the telephone wires, Iseult felt her lungs deflate, withering as grief closed in. Unable to withstand the pressure, she dropped the receiver. As it dangled on its wire, she got slowly down on hands and knees, touched her forehead to the Tabriz carpet, then rolled over and lay on her side on the mottled wool, gasping and wheezing, until Cordelia, hurrying through with a tray, tripped over her and let out a startled yell.
Cordelia telephoned the doctor, who arrived in an automobile and gave Iseult an injection that allowed her to breathe normally; within a few moments she was in a deep stupor. Cordelia summoned the Japanese gardeners to carry her upstairs, then undressed her and got her under the sheets.
Iseult had woken up the next morning with a sour taste in her mouth and a cracking headache. She dressed and went downstairs without first going to check on her mother as she usually did. She was drinking coffee in the breakfast room when Cordelia walked in, placed a brown hand on her shoulder, and said, “I tell you, girl, your mama is gone.”
She had, in fact, died during the night. The sitting nurse had awakened Cordelia, then packed up and left at dawn.
Cordelia poured herself a cup of coffee and Iseult went upstairs alone.
The room had been scoured and the windows opened wide, and much of the smell was gone. Cordelia had gathered flowers from the garden and set them on a table at the foot of the bed. Iseult’s mother lay with peculiar stillness under a fresh white sheet drawn up under her arms and crisply smoothed. Her hands had been placed one on top of the other. The pillow was fresh and plump.
First her father, then her mother — each death had hardened her a little. She was alone now, and more boldness was going to be required. Life had to be engaged, life had to be started.
No, she would not stay in Pasadena.
Even with the windows open, the atmosphere in the trolley car stank of hot metal, rubber flooring, and sweet, stale food. Steel wheels made a steady, flatulent grinding underneath. Every seat was taken. Across the aisle a sunburnt girl had fallen asleep with her head on the shoulder of the young man holding her hand.
Animal appetites were embarrassing because they would not be denied, and only with difficulty could they be controlled. Before her parents sent her to Sacred Heart Convent, while she was still taking her lessons at the schoolhouse in their town in New Hampshire, there had been that one rough, wool-smelling boy, Patrick Dubois. One bright afternoon in April, Patrick had forced her, step by step, down the wooden stairs that led to the school’s cellar. It was supposed to be a game: she was supposed to be his helpless prisoner.
Confident that she was the one really in charge of this exciting little contest, she had lingered on each step, challenging him. “You can’t make me.”
“Aw, yes, I can.”
“Try it, then.”
That was the signal for Patrick to place big, meaty paws on her shoulders and apply pressure until she took another
step down. Thirteen steps in all, then they were standing on the dirt floor of the cellar. It must have taken ten minutes to get down there. Patrick was just tall enough that he had to crouch a little below the floor joists.
Patrick Dubois lived with his parents and sisters in one of the tenements her grandfather had put up during the Civil War. He was a pupil at her school but he also had a paid job. Three or four times a day, all winter long, he left the classroom and disappeared into the cellar, where he shovelled and spread coals in the furnace. He kept a towel and a bucket of water warm down there, and a scrap of yellow soap to clean himself with, but it did no good. When he resumed his seat in the back of the classroom, there was always a gash of wet soot somewhere on his face, neck, or forearm. She could smell coal on him; anthracite had a scent like an old, dead fire, the scent of underground.
At the bottom of the cellar stairs they stood facing each other. There was just enough daylight coming down that she could see his expression, and what frightened her was that he looked so nervous.
“Aren’t you going to give me a kiss?” he said. Licking his lips. His eyes shiny and wandering. He had probably dared himself into that moment in that place, and now nothing was going to stop him from carrying out his dare. He would hate himself if he did not, and whatever she said or did wouldn’t matter. She really didn’t have anything to do with it anymore. Neither did he, in a way. Not anymore.
April days were long in New Hampshire. Not like, say, November. Still plenty of light after the school day ended, light falling down the cellar stairs. According to her mother, the town school was well and good for town children, but Iseult’s horizons extended beyond the town, which was why her parents would be sending her off to Sacred Heart Convent in New York City, where there were girls from all over the country, from Mexico and South America, and she would learn important things.
“Like what?” she’d asked.
Her mother had smiled. “Such as not to say ‘Like what?’”
The O'Briens Page 6
