It had a lively smell of danger and it was huge and spreading in vine-whips and fleshy shoots, sliding from stump to stump like a sponge growing in a puddle. It had gone on fattening in the ooze, but for all its density it had a limpness: the smallest movement of a bird stirred it. I had never seen anything like it. It was the earliest moment of life in America, before the canoes, and so different from what I knew on the Cape, where there were footprints in the remotest dunes. I had not known places like this existed; I could not believe my luck.
Eden was like this. Not that manicured park of fruit trees and fig leaves and trimmed hedges, the Old Testament orchard signposted with punishments for picking the fruit and walking on the grass — not that, but this wilderness of succulence, trackless, risky, and half-sunk in bubbly mud, sprawling sideways in an infancy it could not outgrow — order without rules. Here, one could imagine brother and sister bumping like frogs in broad daylight, for in one plump tree with its feet in ferns an orchid clung amid a bandaging of vines, moss dripped, an upright fringe of green flames flickered along its boughs and its own leaves were sheltering hands. Other identical trees embraced, wrapped together like lovers and swelling where they touched.
One thing about photography: there are no second chances. I tried to do this vision of Florida from the train, but the rocking window jogged my camera. Though I was able to shoot it later, without the whoops-a-daisy of the train, none of the pictures looked genuine. My best pictures saw more than my eye and these lacked that great slap of sight.
We’ll have our honeymoon here, I thought: a honeymoon in paradise.
“I hope you find something to do here,” said Mama, almost her first words to me after I arrived in Verona. Her tone was dim and discouraging. She blinked at me as if to say, You shouldn’t have come.
Papa read the words written on Mama’s face: “I can’t for the life of me think why you came all this way. Furthermore, I doubt whether Carney has room for you.”
“You said there are twenty bedrooms in this house.”
“Palace,” said Papa. “Twenty-five. And they’re full.”
“Can you beat that.”
Carney’s palace (we were on settees in a mammoth lounge) was an Italian-style fruitcake with a bell tower and battlements, a courtyard filled with leering statuary and surrounded by a blundering wall. On the shore side a pier jutted into the Gulf of Mexico. But the yachts at the pier impressed me less than the pelicans I could see opening like umbrellas for their dives, and the chandelier in our lounge wasn’t half as splendid as its reflecting shape, the pyramid of oranges in the crystal bowl beneath it. The place itself, with its pictures and gold pillars and baroque scrollwork and high painted ceilings, although magnificent at a distance, was up close much shabbier. It was nailed together several degrees out of kilter and thickly regilded: movie theater or opera house decor, a spectacular silliness. Here bad taste was gluttonous, size mattered more than finish, and I was sure that none of it had the grandeur of the swamp they had drained to build it on.
It distressed me to think that Mama and Papa could be happy in this monkey-house of vulgarity, and had visited year after year. But I think what worried me most was the person responsible for this mess. It was a motiveless satire of grace and art, and each smirking cherub and blistered wall showed it. It did not reduplicate the Italian original, it did not come near — it was as if the savage who made it, having failed at creation, could only mock it in debauched stucco and brass. The tropical storms had done the rest, completed the parody by pocking it with salt. A person who would do this would stop at nothing.
“Don’t worry about me,” I said. “Tell Carney I’ve got a room in a boarding house. Mrs. Fritts’s. She’s a nice old body.”
Mama said, “Circus people stay at those places.”
“She’s a big girl now,” said Papa. He stared hard at me. “But what about your sister? What’s she supposed to do while you’re gallivanting down here?”
Speak for yourself, I almost said. But I was warned by an anxious look on his face, a double image of worry in fact, since they were both tanned and wore blue and white outfits that matched. Far from home they looked startled and ashamed, as if seeing them here in Florida I had discovered them misbehaving in a state of undress and was spoiling their fun.
Papa said, “She won’t sit on her hands if I know my Phoebe.”
“Phoebe can look after herself,” I said.
“Hasn’t got a brain in her head,” said Papa. “And Orlando’s probably out raising hell. I tell you, Maude, if anything happens you’re responsible.”
“I’m not staying here long,” I said. “I’ll just do some pictures and go.”
“Carney doesn’t allow photographers on his property.”
“Then he’s either a fool or a criminal,” I said.
“He’s a Renaissance Man — American Renaissance,” said Papa. “He doesn’t want to be made a fool of.”
“Your Mister Carney is mistaken. We interpret, Papa. We do not create.”
“He’s quite a patron of the arts—”
I turned to the portrait of Carney as Papa spoke. He was a red fleshy man with tiny eyes set deep in a swollen swinish head, a porker’s hot face and bristly neck, hands like slabs of meat, and wisps of white hair, like smoke coming out of his earholes. He was squatting in that ornate frame over the mantelpiece as if watching us through a window with his raw rummy’s face.
“—but he’s a hoofer at heart,” said Papa, “and he’s a wonderful host. If you’re smart you’ll keep out of his way. And remember, no pictures — not here.”
“Who says,” I started, for Papa was talking like a patron himself, but I simmered down and said, “Who says I want to take pictures here? Why, I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.”
“You can do the Indians,” said Mama. “They wrestle alligators down the road. Pictures of them would be worth something.”
“Sure,” said Papa, “don’t go back to the Cape without doing the citrus groves, or the ballpark up in Sarasota, or Millsaps Circus in its winter quarters, or the drive along the coast.”
“Coral Gables is picturesque,” said Mama.
“Ever see a grapefruit tree? No? Big yellow basketballs hanging up there? That’s what I call picturesque.”
“Picturesque is what I avoid,” I said.
“It’s what people want to see,” said Papa.
“That’s why I avoid it.”
“Negroes,” said Mama. “There are some Negroes down in Boca Grande. You like Negroes.”
“Then you can go back to the Cape,” said Papa.
“We’ll see you to the station,” said Mama.
“What about the sourbob trees and the people crabbing and sunset on the wampum mills?” I said. “You didn’t mention them. And I couldn’t come all this way without doing the migrating chickens or the untitled driftwood.”
“Don’t be funny, Maude,” said Papa in his broker’s voice. “The least you could have done was tell us you were coming.”
“What would you have said if I had?”
“I would have told you not to come. You’ve got no business here.”
My eye is my business, I thought. I said, “This is a fine how-do-you-do.”
Mama looked at Papa slackly as if to say, What are we going to do with her?
Papa said, “I don’t know what you want, Maude, but I hope to God you don’t get it.”
I almost went home that minute; then I saw the shifty look on his face, worry and hope.
He said, “How you could leave Phoebe up there alone is more than I can understand.”