Out at Sea

Abstract

Out at Sea Pamela Schmid (bio) On May 5, 1929, my great-uncle Howard plunged into the choppy surf of Hermosa Beach in southern California. It was a Sunday afternoon, and the shore was littered with towels and umbrellas, families and picnic baskets. Seagulls wheeled and cried over bone-white sand, over coins of light that danced on the water. A wide concrete pier with tiled pavilions stretched one thousand feet into the ocean. It must have felt like heaven to a boy of sixteen, churning through that salty-cool water, feeling the waves’ silky spray pulse through his fingers and tickle the downy-soft hairs of his chest. The push and pull, the weightlessness. Fishy and rank and pure. Losing himself in it, not noticing the tug of the tide, his growing distance from shore. He is sepia-bathed inside a gilded oval frame, and I cannot take my eyes off him. He is four, maybe five, and he is lovely—a golden child. Consider the double-breasted jumpsuit (is it blue? red?) and the silky bow tied beneath his chin. Consider the upturned nose, the eyes’ impish gleam. His palms are relaxed, open, resting on knees, shockingly [End Page 91] white against dark, sumptuous velvet. An unruly lock of hair curls like a fishhook above his right eye. It indicates mischief uncorked, irrepressible boyness. His beauty sears me. He is the future’s gleaming promise. Howard, the boy, sits on the lap of his mother—Mamie, my great grandmother, whose index finger rests lightly on his hand. Perhaps she caresses it inadvertently, the primal need for skin to find skin. Her deep-set eyes are framed by plain wire glasses. She sits beside my great grandfather, George, who sports a blunt mustache and the bushy eyebrows of my father. He is a Methodist minister and looks the part. I can hear his stentorian voice blasting down the pews. Completing the set is Lowell, my grandfather, who is nine years older than Howard and looms behind the other three. His hair is parted down the middle, shorn high and close, bangs curlicued like the horns of a ram, a look that accentuates his long face and jug ears (also like my father’s). Shadows cover the left half of his face. His thin lips betray the merest hint of a smile. His three-piece suit appears to strangle him. Photographs trick us. They capture the leaf before it falls: the smooth, unfurrowed forehead, the thick and lustrous hair. They prop up the dead, pull their skin taut, dust their cheeks with rouge. They make us yearn to touch the untouchable, to say: If only you knew. The stiff formality and fancy clothes and quaintly curled mustaches—all just a ruse. We see past that, and see ourselves. I learn about Howard during a weeklong visit with my father’s sister. “You know that picture in the guest room, the one of Grandpa as a teenager?” I ask. “Who’s that cute little boy in the front?” I’m sitting on the couch, between my aunt and my father, while my eighteen-month-old son naps nearby. Sunlight bounces off the cathedral ceilings. A pair of giant sandhill cranes trot past the back window. My aunt feeds her elderly poodle a treat and shoots me a look of [End Page 92] surprise. “Oh,” she says. “That’s your great-uncle Howard. He’s the one who drowned.” For a second, I stop breathing. Then I turn to my father. “Grandpa had a brother who drowned?” I ask. Dad considers the question for a moment or two. “That’s true,” he finally says before turning back to his newspaper. I have been surrounded by ancestors for the past four nights, here in my aunt’s guestroom, amid the palm trees and impeccable, spongy lawns of southwestern Florida. Black and white strangers—all related to me—plaster nearly every inch of wall space. Their eyes follow me around the room. When I lie in bed at night, I imagine them humming secrets like grasshoppers. Among this jumble of forbearers, Howard fascinates me most. Those apple cheeks, those plump and immaculate hands—they...