On the Gulf

by Elizabeth Spencer

  On the Gulf

  ALSO BY ELIZABETH SPENCER

  Novels

  Fire in the Morning

  This Crooked Way

  The Voice at the Back Door

  The Light in the Piazza

  Knights & Dragons

  No Place for an Angel

  The Snare

  The Salt Line

  The Night Travellers

  Short Story Collections

  Ship Island and Other Stories

  The Stories of Elizabeth Spencer

  Jack of Diamonds and Other Stories

  Marilee

  The Light in the Piazza and Other Italian Tales

  The Southern Woman

  Nonfiction

  Landscapes of the Heart

  Drama

  For Lease or Sale

  ON THE GULF

  Elizabeth Spencer

  www.upress.state.ms.us

  The University Press of Mississippi is a member of

  the Association of American University Presses.

  Copyright © 1991 by the University Press of Mississippi

  Stories copyright © by Elizabeth Spencer

  “On the Gulf,” “Mr. McMillan,” “Go South in the

  Winter,” and “Ship Island” are reprinted from

  The Stories of Elizabeth Spencer, Doubleday, 1981.

  “The Legacy” was first published by Mud Puppy Press,

  Chapel Hill, 1988.

  First paperback edition published by UPM in 2012

  All rights reserved

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  ∞

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Spencer, Elizabeth, 1921–

  On the gulf / Elizabeth Spencer. —1st paperback ed.

  p. cm. —(Banner books.)

  ISBN 978-1-61703-684-2 (pbk.: alk. paper) —

  ISBN 978-1-61703-685-9 (ebook) 1. Women—Fiction.

  2. Gulf Coast (U.S.)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3537.P4454A6 2013

  813’.54—dc23

  2012011629

  British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

  TO THOMASINA

  With many golden memories of that place

  and the happy hours passed there.

  For a beginning

  let yourself be drawn like debris

  to all the great bodies of water:

  I will be there

  asking you to help

  lift up a hand of water

  and reach into a time

  we dream to change.

  —JAMES SEAY,

  from Water Tables

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  On the Gulf

  The Legacy

  A Fugitive’s Wife

  Mr. McMillan

  Go South in the Winter

  Ship Island

  INTRODUCTION

  An Opening to the Sea

  If I could have one part of the world back the way it used to be, I would not choose Dresden before the fire bombing, Rome before Nero, or London before the blitz. I would not resurrect Babylon, Carthage or San Francisco. Let the leaning tower lean and the hanging gardens hang. I want the Mississippi Gulf Coast back as it was before Hurricane Camille.

  All through my childhood and youth, north of Jackson, up in the hills, one happy phrase comes down intact: “the coast.” They’ve just been to the coast … they’re going to the coast next week … they’re fishing at the coast … they own a house at the coast … let’s go to the coast…. When? For spring holidays? next week?… Now!

  What was magical about it? In the days I speak of, it did not have a decent beach. Strictly speaking, it was not even a sea coast. The islands that stood out in the Gulf—Horn Island, Ship Island, Cat Island and the rest—took the Gulf surf on their sandy shores: what we called “the coast” was left with a tide you could measure in inches, and a gradual silted sloping sea bottom, shallow enough to wade out in for half a mile without getting wet above the waist. A concrete sea wall extended for miles along the beach drive, shielding the road and houses and towns it ran past from high water that storms might bring, also keeping the shore line regular. Compared to the real beaches of Southern California, or Florida, or the Caribbean islands, all this might seem not much to brag about: what was there beside the sea wall, the drive along it, the palms and old lighthouses, the spacious mansions looking out on the water, with their deep porches and outdoor stairways, their green lattice work, their moss hung oaks and sheltered gardens, the crunch of oyster shells gravelling side roads and parking lots … why was this so grand?

  Well, it wasn’t “grand,” let that be admitted. Natchez was grand. New Orleans had its seductive charms securely placed in a rich Creole history. Still, nothing gave Mississippians quite the feeling of our own Gulf Coast.

  We came down to it driving through plain little towns, some pretty, some not, went south of Jackson through Hattiesburg. The names come back: Mendenhall, Magee, Mount Olive, Collins, Wiggins, Perkinston. Somewhere in there was D’Lo, curiously pronounced Dee-Lo. In all of these, people of an Anglo-Saxon sameness in names and in admirable qualities, were pursuing life patterns thought out so long ago they could never be questioned since. A day or two to piece the relationships together and anyone from Carrollton or Winona or Pickens or Vaiden could pick up the same routine of life there as in the ancestral home.

  But soon there was the thrilling smell of salt on the breeze increasing until suddenly there was Gulfport and straight ahead the harbor with its big ships at rest and to either side the long arms of the beach drive stretching east to Biloxi, west to Pass Christian and Bay St. Louis. There were names foreign to our ears, the mystery of these almost foreign places, easy in their openness, leaning toward the flat blue water, serene beneath the great floating clouds. That first thin breath of sea air had spread to a whole atmosphere. There was no place where it wasn’t.

  What to do in a car crowded with friends on holiday from school but drive straight to the water’s edge and sit there breathless, not knowing which way to go first, but ready to discover.

  I must have come there first with girls from around home, or friends from college in Jackson. Someone would have borrowed the family car. Occasions blur into one long sighing memory of live oaks green the year round, and the pillared white houses the trees sheltered, set along the sweep of beach drive, boxes of salt water taffy to chew on, and little screened restaurants advertising SHRIMP! ALL YOU CAN EAT FOR $1. Gumbo, too, “made fresh every day.” Jax beer. Prohibition lingered for a long time inland, but the coast never paid it much attention. Names alone would tell you that they wouldn’t. French and Spanish were here from the first, but Poles and Yugoslavs and Czechs had come long ago to work in the fishing industries, while the French traded and the Spanish built ships. But we wouldn’t have thought of looking up their history. It was the feeling those names breathed that stirred us: Ladnier, Saucier, Legendre, Christovich, Benachi, Lameuse, Lopez, Toledano. Religion here was foreign, too: churches like Our Lady of the Gulf stood proclaiming it, with a statue of the Virgin in the wide paved entrance court, and a bare but graceful façade, facing boldly out to sea. Those who ran the restaurants, and went out in the shrimp boats, worshipped here, as did no doubt the men who waded the shallow water at night with flambeaux blazing, spears ready for flounder, and the women, too, who sat talking through the long afternoons on latticed porches. We learned that annually at Biloxi, before the shrimp boats go out to their deep sea fishing grounds, an outdoor mass is held to bless the fleet. It is a great occasion, and one of general rejoicing. These were ancient ways. Above, the white clouds mounted high, the gulls on broad white wings soared and tacked, tilting into the wind. The
pelicans stroked toward land in flawless formation. Mid-afternoon in spring. Intense heat had not yet taken over, but a stillness came on, a sense of absolute suspension. The camellias were long finished, the azaleas, lingering, but past their height. Magnolia blooms starred dark green branches. Jasmine breathed in the back gardens. The moss hung breezeless. Time stood still.

  We were used to staying at the Edgewater Gulf, a wonderful hotel between Gulfport and Biloxi. Its grounds were ample. I remember a cool lobby of gently turning ceiling fans, plants in white recesses, and rooms designed each with a long entrance passage facing on the sea, drawing a constant breeze through latticed doors. Parting admonitions—“Don’t talk to strangers,” “Be careful where you swim,” “Be sure to call Sally the minute you get there”—may have sounded in our ears for a while on the way down, but vanished after Gulfport. Yet I cannot recall any serious mischief we ever got ourselves into.

  Grown beyond all that and long out of school, I was to return to the coast many times over after our spring holiday frolics. A nagging sense began to persist that the coast was withholding something; I’d something yet to solve. Then I took the boat one summer and went out to Ship Island. Ship Island is the largest and best known of the coastal islands, and the only one that excursion boats go out to. It takes these little tourist ferries well over an hour to make the twelve miles or so to the island. But who is in a hurry? Someone in the pilot house will be playing an harmonica. Cold drinks and snacks are sold in the galley. The island is low and white, like a sandbar with dunes. Once ashore, the dunes seem higher: they mount up before the visitor, low hills fringed with sea oats which blow in the steady breeze. Wooden walkways climb among them. There are signs to an old fort to the west, dating from Civil War days. History will be related on the dutiful markers. An old weathered lighthouse, wooden, four-sided, gray, stands guard.

  I am speaking now of 1951, the first visit I made to this spot. Like the coast itself, though, it had been mentioned so often throughout my childhood as to seem part of my own personal geography. Everyone had been to Ship Island. Picnics were talked of, summer days recalled. On that first time for me, I remember walking ahead of friends (a man I went with then, two friends of his) straight south, taking the walk through the dunes. Then, cresting, I saw it there before me, what I’d come for without knowing it: the true Gulf, no horizon to curb its expanse, spread out infinite and free, restless with tossing white caps, rushing in to foam up the beach, retreating, returning, roaring. Out there I thought, astonished, is Mexico, the Caribbean, South America. We are leaning outward to them. Everybody back there on land, all along the coast, feels this presence, whether they consciously know it or not. What was it but the distance, the leaning outward, the opening toward far-off, unlikely worlds? The beyond.

  Here at the Mississippian’s southernmost point of native soil, one had to recall what inland Mississippi was like, how people in its little towns (or even in larger towns like Meridian and Jackson and Columbus) related inward, to family life, kinfolks, old friendships and hatreds. How hospitably newcomers were welcomed, but how slowly accepted. Once I heard the remark: “The H-----s haven’t lived here but thirty years, but look how everybody likes them!” In talk of the outside world, not much was to be accepted, nothing could be trusted to be “like us.” There were Yankees “up there,” we said to ourselves, looking north; the other Southern states, like neighboring counties, offered names that could be traced in and out among one’s connection and might prove acceptable. There was a single Jewish family in the town where I was brought up: they had come to run the local department store, one of a chain. There was one Catholic lady, unmarried, who lived in a fine old house among some cedars. High steps went up to it from the street and a long front walk led to a white pillared porch. This lady was the object of solicitous telephone calls during the summer revival meetings that the Protestant churches took turns holding. She got some amusement from these, we had to guess; the answers she was quoted as giving sounded as if she did. “No, the Pope told me I could play bridge. I was talking to him on the phone just this morning. He said I could smoke, too, if I wanted to, and a glass of sherry wouldn’t hurt anything.”

  In such towns people lived on stories of each other’s sayings and doings, repeating and checking for the facts, speculating and measuring and fitting together the present to the past, the known to the suspected, weaving numberless patterns. It was a complex and at times beautiful society; much fine literature has been created to do it justice; but the smell of salt air did not reach it, and none can deny that it was confined and confining.

  So one from those places comes to stand, in memory fixed there forever like a monument or a snapshot, on a Ship Island dune staring out to sea.

  In the story of mine included here, named for the island, a young girl comes there with her summer lover, and in the sight and feel of the sea discovers her own true nature—good or bad, she finds it there, like a wonderful shell dug out of the sand. In Walker Percy’s book The Moviegoer, we read: “You come over the hillock and your heart lifts up; your old sad music comes into the major.” That’s another way of saying it. But it may be that the only way of knowing it is to go there.

  From the summer of 1951 to the following spring I went to live on the coast. I took a small apartment in back of a wonderful old lady’s house in Pass Christian. I had begged off from teaching for a year at the University of Mississippi, and was at the coast trying to take a new start on some writing I had only vaguely in mind. How I wrote anything I don’t really understand, for it was a time of many visits.

  Not the least were two blessed descents of Eudora Welty from Jackson, bringing with her each time a friend she wanted me to meet. The first was Katherine Anne Porter who had given a lecture in Jackson on a series featuring Southern writers. (I had myself been asked to participate, but was unbearably shy on a platform in those days, and had declined.) Miss Porter was, as so often described, beautiful, with snow white hair. Her small figure seemed delicate without being fragile. Her features were remarkable for showing no trace of slack skin; I was reminded of the trim, spare, expressive faces that Florentine sculptors knew so well how to mold.

  I had the two ladies over to my little apartment one evening. We sat and sipped drinks and talked. I will always be glad that Katherine Anne (as she insisted I call her) talked so much about herself. She felt like doing this, and she did it. Where else could I have heard her precise but soft voice say, “I would have been able to do much more, except for the many interruptions—by that I mean the time I’ve given to men.” I think this is reasonably exact. It was honest and certainly not coy; she was anything but that. Another observation I recall: “I don’t understand people who complain about art for art’s sake. If we don’t love her for her own sake, why else do we love her?”

  She and Eudora were staying at the old Miramar Hotel, just west of Pass Christian. It was a comfortably run-down old place; I used a made-up version of it in my novel The Salt Line. My feeling was that people who had made a habit of coming to the coast through the years had grown used to staying there and nowhere else. I remember sitting on the floor of the large room Katherine Anne had—I think she was propped up on pillows and trying to nurse away a cold or headache—and listening to her and Eudora talk, though of what subjects I can’t recall.

  It was sometime after this that Elizabeth Bowen also visited Eudora. The two of them came by to see me before proceeding to New Orleans where Miss Bowen was to lecture. We planned to meet for lunch at Friendship House, a wonderfully sprawled out restaurant on the beach drive east of Gulfport, just before Biloxi. The day was mild and the broad windows looked out on the sound. And on the beach drive lined with oaks. The water lay placid and blue beyond. I remember the delightful sound of Miss Bowen’s very English voice, not exactly marred by stuttering, but made a little comical when she came to speak of our wonderful b-b-buh-bourbon whisky. Or related coming into the airport of some Western city (she had been lecturing through
out the U.S.), and how she had admired those numerous neon s-s-suh-signs. I wondered at her courage to undertake lectures at all, but am told that her fine quality and her certainly imposing looks—tall, strongly built, with red hair swept back—more than made up for the flaw. I came to know that she was one of Eudora’s closest friends, had invited her often for visits to Bowen’s Court, the family home in County Cork, Ireland, and that they each lavished admiration on the other’s work.

  I also remember that the two ladies were late in appearing that day, having not started early enough from Jackson, and that I was seated in the restaurant foyer waiting for a good while when two young officers from the nearby air base came out of the bar and started to talk. Was I waiting for someone? Yes, two women friends from Jackson. Both from Mississippi? No, one was from Ireland. “Ah, a Jackson doll and an Irish babe!” When the imposing pair actually came through the door, regal in their tweeds, the air force wilted away.

  During those months of sojourn on the coast, I tried every day to work, but nothing seemed to flow. I had a second novel slated to come out in the spring. Just having finished a book creates difficulties in starting another. In spare afternoons, closing up the hope of a fresh start for yet another day, I used to drive to places I loved seeing. One by one they were there for me to find and re-find, always giving off to me their air of a past which I knew had occurred, but which I had no key to opening up, could not do what a writer most enjoys, visualize with confidence what has not actually been seen.

  For instance there was DeLisle, a town site inland from the beach drive, just northwest of Pass Christian. Once out of sight of water, oaks gave room to pines, the tall longleaf pines of South Mississippi, and the road, largely unpaved, was carpeted in pine needles, quietened by a mix of sand in loam. DeLisle itself was fairly populous once, and was all but entirely French, the descendants of the Acadians from Nova Scotia having settled here. French was taught in school far into this century. A plain little church, in my day, was still standing, and a few houses. The spaces where houses and stores must once have stood were peaceful savannahs, moss-hung round the edges, keeping memories not to be shared with me. A cloud of butterflies could be counted on to waft about like a length of yellow silk floating on air. A wooden bridge led over still black water, Bayou DeLisle.