The Edge of the Gulf (8 page)
Read The Edge of the Gulf Online
Authors: Hadley Hury
The next morning, Saturday, Hudson walked the four miles up the beach to Seaside. It would be hot again by mid-afternoon, but for now the humidity was still low and the sky and sea were dazzling. Moon ran ahead, bobbing back and forth between the sand and the surf, and bounding back to Hudson now and again to make sure everyone was having a good time. He knew not to run up to the other people they occasionally passed, and when another largish dog was in accompaniment, Hudson put the leash on to discourage any potential rowdiness.
They crossed Laurel’s beach, one of the widest in west Florida, and headed east. Just beyond the village, Hudson could just glimpse, through the scrub forest, one corner of the upper gallery of Charlie’s house. It angled toward the southwest, facing the Gulf and, for many months of the year, the sunsets, a discreet distance of some three hundred yards, across Laurel’s broadest expanse of dunes, from the sea, nestled among a thick stand of tall pine, oak, and hickory, its east side porch looking across the long lagoon. The original house had been a big old barny thing, built in the ’30s, for many years a rental property, and in dire need of work, when Charlie bought in 1970. Over the years, with restoration, renovation, additions, and much loving care, it had become exquisitely comfortable and graciously grand. A wonderful home.
Large as it was, there were certainly larger houses to be found along the coast, among the nouveau riche enclaves of Destin, Dune Allen, and Santa Rosa, and in the two or three even newer, planned residential communities like Greenway. And, quite probably, somewhere in the neo-quaint homogeneity of Seaside’s closely controlled architecture, there might possibly be a couple of houses with higher market value. But few homes anywhere in the hundred-and-fifty-mile stretch between the 1920s Italianate Deco mansions of Pensacola’s old East Bay neighborhood and the pretty little 19th-Century restorations in the old cotton port of Apalachicola could touch Brompton House, the name Charlie allowed only a few close friends—and not a single sign—to use.
He had met Charlie fifteen years ago, when some mutual friends in Memphis had suggested that he call him up during a visit to the coast. In those days, Hudson had been partial to a little rental house over in Navarre Beach. He had driven over one evening, thinking that he would simply have a drink and then stop for oysters or shrimp at one of the good places back along Highway 98. Instead, they became fast friends almost immediately, talking for three hours and drinking nearly two bottles of a very nice Pouilly Fuissé. Charlie had fixed omelets and salad, and, just before midnight, Hudson had been sent off to sleep in one of the guest rooms upstairs.
The same fondness at first sight struck again when Charlie had met Kate six years ago. After they spent an evening trading bits of Louisville lore, Charlie had drawled, smiling, “Well,
now
we know what the boy’s been waiting for.”
***
Seaside is nothing if not self-contained. Many of the families with vacation homes there tend not to sojourn on the Gulf for any experience of otherness it may offer them, any influence of place. Solid burghers or striving wannabes, they come, instead—from Memphis and Atlanta and Birmingham—for the low-risk opportunity of extending themselves, only slightly, by means of another highly acceptable address. They tend to bring their own well-marshaled domesticity with them, many of them almost like 19th-Century travelers whose first priority was to carry as much a sense of home as possible to wherever in the world they went.
Seaside has its share, certainly, of simple middle-class vacationers, who have saved strenuously for a week or two in one of its uniformly cute, vastly overpriced dollhouses, or in one of the two inns. There are some year-rounders, and inevitably a contingent of recently divorced geezers down for their part of the time-share with the much-younger trophy wife or girlfriend. But more often one found on the beach at Seaside the beautifully maintained, youthfully middle-aged mother, passing time with a book until her next tennis game; the father doing business with his cell phone in one hand and, with the other, vigorously playing Frisbee with some combination of children and dogs; nearby, the nanny, either building sandcastles with the younger offspring or trying to pacify them with something from a wicker hamper laid out as if for a
Town and Country
shoot. Or, at least, that’s the way some of its denizens
liked
to see themselves.
The beach to Seaside is not, as it were, “a two-way street,” a cause for rejoicing among Laurel folk. A few people were, like Hudson, walking or jogging
east
in the brilliant morning, sunglassed, hatted, or capped against the climbing sun. But over the course of the entire three miles he passed only three or four individuals headed west. Aside from a few young bicyclists, only the most adventuresome of Seasiders ever left its tidy environs, for dinner at Criolla’s or a casual meal or drinks at the Blue Bar, perhaps, or a quick poke around the shops just north of the 26-A intersection. When they did sally forth, it was usually by car, more likely than not a BMW, Jag, or Land Rover.
Of course, Laurel Beach had been
discovered
. Old Laurel cottages were at a premium and even undistinguished little structures on or near the beach sold for small fortunes. There was no place left on the Emerald Coast to hide, certainly not the oldest beach settlement for almost two hundred miles around. Hudson had already seen, cruising slowly up and down the village streets, often at dusk, the svelte vehicles with dark-tinted windows and out-of-state license plates, slowing or stopping to examine properties and lots for sale. Anybody with cash could build a big, new house, and, fortunately, that’s exactly what a lot of folks wanted to do, but people always want what’s hard to get, and more than a few potential buyers now found a cachet in Laurel’s very limitedness and out-of-the-wayness—not a tennis court or golf course for miles—as well as the patina that only comes with age.
But there were only so many houses and cottages in Laurel and, through the grace of God and the persistence of a few good citizens, it was surrounded by National Park Seashore, wilderness areas, and state land preserves. Greenway was the closest any new community would ever be. And to the east, Seaside, monolithic and insular as it might be, was, nonetheless, an attractive, stable buffer against any further incursions from the tacky development, uncharitably known as the Redneck Riviera, that spewed up 98 from Panama City.
***
Seaside is twenty years old, the admirable brainchild of a man who had inherited eighty acres on the edge of Seagrove Beach from his grandfather and didn’t want to do just anything with it. With a team of urban designers and architects, he planned a neo-traditional seaside community no point of which is more than a half-mile from any other. To the great surprise of almost everyone, it had caught on. People liked the explicit building codes, which insisted that all Seaside cottages be designed within a set of traditional criteria indigenous to old West Florida: wood frames adapted to the climate, built off the ground with ample windows and cross ventilation, overhangs and porches to hold the shade and breezes in summer. Upper middle-class Southerners, especially, were drawn by the opportunity of creating something in their own desired image. Many, including a number of Memphians, abandoned Destin and Santa Rosa, the tradition of generations, for the new, more upscale architectural fantasy. The goal was instant tradition, a seaside community that would be to the Emerald Coast what Nantucket and Charleston, Savannah, Lewes, and Cape May were to the East. If the result necessarily fell short of those lofty aims, and sometimes resembled a movie set, as, indeed, it had served for one major studio film, it nonetheless carried a charm of its own.
Having Moon along for the outing, Hudson made fairly quick work of their destination: a look along the newer shops behind the town green, a quick peer into the Sundog bookstore, a hot dog from the take-out window of one of the little sandwich shops in the open-air market along with two large cups of water for Moon, some people-watching from the main pergola overlooking the center of the beach at the end of Tupelo Street.
Everything, the cottages, in shades of white and pastels, tightly stacked along the narrow lanes lined with hawthorn, flowering succulents, and palmetto, and the beach with its manicured sand and regimentally placed azure umbrellas, everything, and everyone, looked healthy and confident and well turned-out.
In order to catch some occasional shade, Hudson and Moon walked back to Laurel along 26-A.
Forty minutes later they turned south, at the Hibiscus Bed & Breakfast, into the village, passing the V intersection of Potero Street which angled off due south. With its old weather-shingled cottages and clapboard bungalows, intermittently canopied by oaks and Spanish moss, Pendennis Street beckoned like a dream, wiggling slightly in the radiant heat and smelling of hot pine and gardenia.
Twilight found Hudson sitting on the porch reading over his work. Three reviews he’d pulled up to consider: he had lightly edited one, decided to keep one exactly as it was, and substantially revised the other.
Moon lay at his feet, in the shade, sliding into an early evening nap, and even Olive had deigned to come out for a sniff of the cooling air. Both by Hudson’s choosing and her own clear preference an indoor cat, Olive nonetheless, occasionally and only in his presence, toured the perimeters of the porch of the house in Memphis, and now had similarly extended her cautious range to the cottage. There had never been a danger of Olive’s running away. She liked to look around a bit but was fundamentally uncurious about the world beyond the comforts of her own domain. She disdained it as a world of dirt and dogs and things like cars and planes and lawnmowers that made more noise than any civilized creature needed to endure. Her universe stopped at the edge of the porch and she always kept the door close to her back. She had been outside once, long ago, and like a hideous nightmare that’s precisely where she wanted to keep it. She had been brought to the humane society by some good soul, unweaned, lost from her mother and siblings at only a few weeks and found cowering in a rainstorm under a mailbox alongside a busy street. She now sat in the last narrow slant of sun near the steps, engrossed in a pedicure of balletic invention.
Death in Venice
Following on the heels of
The Portrait of a Lady
and the recently released
Washington Square
, American audiences now have their third chance in less than 18 months to respond to the rather quixotic challenge of translating Henry James to film. A writer perhaps best known for the “interiorization” of his novels, in which only the barely registered twist of a synapse or the smallest inaudible gasp may indicate cataclysmic psychological or emotional upheavals or some life-altering spiritual revelation, James’s filmability suffers in direct proportion to the success with which he achieved his artistic purposes. If in the past few years Edith Wharton’s works have met with better treatment at the hands of filmmakers, it may well be because her novels of manners tend to indicate the more obvious ironies of the manners themselves. James used the novel of manners to indicate large ideas and passions; they open outward as if from a great precipice, providing a dimensionally complex vision beyond the surface observation. As his view of the human comedy matured, taking on wider and more deeply felt concerns, he became a master of indirection, and his goal of seamlessly blending character, action, and theme fairly well displaced omniscient narrative.
By the time of
The Wings of the Dove
(1902), James was using brilliantly intricate stylistic effects to create (ironically enough) a new kind of realism, melding his theatrical sense of dialogue as narrative, multiple viewpoints, and dramatic ellipsis. A master of subtlety, he asks his readers to accept the responsibility of ferreting out for themselves what is happening in the story. Going even farther, James places many key moments “off-stage,” as in classical tragedy: expected scenes never materialize; the reader is excluded from certain encounters. At the core of his later novels is James’ belief that life is a process of
seeing
“the great things,” through awareness attaining understanding and, thereby, achieving, if not freedom, the illusion of freedom. Through his masterfully controlled obliquities he sought to force the reader to
see
for himself. He wanted his art to provoke life, not talk about it. If this demand has caused more than a few 20th-Century readers to pass over James in favor of lighter or more explicit fare, it makes filming his major works an even thornier proposition.
Iain Softley’s version of
The Wings of the Dove,
like Jane Campion’s
The Portrait of a Lady,
isn’t shy about taking liberties. For one thing, it is palpably condensed; and while at ninety-nine minutes it is a welcome relief from recent period pieces which, wanting in accuracy of detail or spirit, seek to impress with sheer length, there’s an apologetic, Cliff Notes feel to the undertaking. Softley dares to distill the essence of James’ novel rather than try to hoodwink us with an overstuffed Edwardian waxworks, and we can admire the effort even as we find it lacking. The foreshortening is also felt in how and when the primary characters meet one another: Softley’s shortcuts and compressions make narrative filmic sense; they just don’t happen, rather crucially, to be how James intended us to discover and come to know the relationships. And, finally, the key events of the denouement have been altered with cheapening, though not fatal, effects.
The plot is a melodrama (“vulgar” by James’ own description). It’s what he does with it, and what he would have us make of it, that pries open the big questions about human love and spiritual possibilities. Kate Croy (Helena Bonham Carter) is a pretty and penniless young woman taken in by her rich and scheming aunt (Charlotte Rampling), who seeks to marry her off suitably. But Kate is in love with the equally penniless and charming Merton Denscher (Linus Roache), a journalist. Kate’s aunt will cut her off unless she drops Merton. Kate and Merton happen to befriend an orphaned American heiress, Millie Theale (Alison Elliott), who is terminally ill. Kate asks Merton to marry Millie, who is in love with him, knowing that she will leave her fortune to him and that after her imminent death, Kate and Merton can marry.
Though despicable, the couple’s plan unfurls with James’ ironic sympathy for the economic deter-minism that entraps Kate. What they do not bargain for is the Jamesian “great thing” that Millie’s love for both of them evokes: her generosity of spirit and her capacity for love live on after her death, with profound consequences.
Much of the film takes place in Venice, where Millie goes when she hears the prognosis for her illness, and this is where Softley’s film has its greatest success. It captures James’ almost excruciatingly delicate tug-of-war between good and evil, life and death, spirit and flesh. Kate accompanies Millie and, soon, Merton joins them.
This brief season of glamour and tenderness, of duplicity and forgiveness, is mesmerizing. Softley’s graceful pacing and his use of revelatory close-ups feel exactly right, Sandy Powell’s costumes are very fine, and the cinematography of Eduardo Sera brings the golden light and rain-dappled shadows of Venice to ethereal life.
Helena Bonham Carter is more interesting here than ever before. She lets her voice nestle in a lower range and projects a canny maturity that is more watchable than the line-up of strident ingénues in which she has heretofore been stuck. Roache (who did a fine job in the title role in
Priest
) is perfect as Merton, intelligently sexy, at first cynical, ultimately vulnerable to the large lessons with which life engulfs him. As Millie, Elliott is pictorially correct, American as apple pie, with a sweet, fun-loving smile. The actress doesn’t exude the magnanimity or spiritual grace necessary for us to see fully “the greatness” of which James provides such haunting intimations; on the other hand, her self-effacing rendition of simplicity does remind us that another of James’ key points is that life, and one’s sense of mortality, can have a way of creating unlikely heroes and alchemize even a perfunctory existence into a numinous life.
For all its presumptions and faux pas, Softley’s essay of
The Wings of the Dove
is a fairly honorable defeat. At times, hovering around certain frames of the film, just off-camera and if only obliquely (discretions of which James might approve), we sense the mourning dove murmur of a sort of falling greatness. The film gives a richly visual life to the central poignancy of James’ novel: in one of the most significant of its multiple, quiet epiphany scenes, Kate admonishes Merton about Millie: “She didn’t come here to die, she came here to
live
.”
Occasionally Hudson looked up from his reading and stared at the quiet street through the shrubs and trees. It seemed, at certain moments, almost a mirage. A piece of a conversation with Alex floated to him.
This is about your relationship to her. She believes in God and you believe in God. We can’t know what she’s doing about the relationship now. And, frankly, neither you nor I can make that our job. Yours is to change your relationship with her. It seems unspeakable, I’m sure, not only to feel the one thing you thought was forever unchangeable changing but to be called upon to be the agent of that change. But, Hud my man, you’re the only one who can find those new places, or at least help those new degrees and qualities of loving find their own places to exist.
He thought about Kate because it was unavoidable to do otherwise. She was—
is
the strongest person he knew. He would probably trade on her strength always. He had in the past two years and he really couldn’t imagine letting go of that. It was one thing he felt he could keep and about which he could feel okay, and know that she would approve. He used it as a sort of inner barometer. Her example. To try to be strong himself.