Texas is right beyond my room, and here I lie on my bed with my course material, a thick book on Texas called Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans by T.R. Fehrenbach.
He begins in the Ice Age with the human bones discovered lodged in limestone, side by side with a wild prehistoric horse that archaeologists have been at odds about ever since. Who were these ancients, the first Americans? Were they Indians, whites, Blacks? Who first settled the harsh, windswept prairies? All we know with certainty is that they died out, and that was that. Old Americans.
•
My dad’s third cousin, Gloria, was the one who recommended I read Fehrenbach’s book. I know she’s eighty-three, and that my grandmother thought she was smart as a whip. She was the cousin my grandmother wrote about most often, and once she even sent me one of Gloria’s letters. I don’t recall what was in the letter, only that I wondered if she also sent my letters to others. Maybe even Gloria? Despite her age, we have a lot in common. The Clark and McMahan trees, and just like me she’s her dad’s first child. Her dad was Hugh, the one my grandmother dated before she got together with his brother, Preston. Her mother was only seventeen when she married Hugh, and they weren’t together very long before they divorced. And just as my dad quickly got together with my siblings’ mother, Gloria’s dad also quickly met a new wife. She shared his surname, and it turned out they were distant relatives: Hugh and Cora, whom I’ve always thought of as the Double-Clark, the woman who wrote Our Clark Family 1740–1998.
Gloria was a journalist at a time when it was unusual for women. She had a regular column in the newspaper, and she won prizes for her work, but it was the books she wrote that especially impressed my grandmother. Gloria was an author, she wrote. She wrote books for children, and when she and her husband divorced after twenty-five years of marriage and she faced the dating scene at a ripe age, she wrote a book about it: A Woman’s Guide to Prime Time Dating—for the Woman Who Wasn’t Born Yesterday. And when the husband she found retired, she wrote another book: Keys to Living with a Retired Husband, which is doubtless a practical read for many. I think her retired husband must be dead now. For part of her adult life, she lived in Oregon to be close to her children, but she moved back to San Antonio at an advanced age. She would rather be in Texas than any other place on the Earth, she’s told my dad.
My dad has written to her to tell her that I’m visiting, and keeping with the family tradition, he forwarded her email directly to me. She seems to like the caps lock button on her keyboard. glad to hear from you, she writes my dad, i thought you had fallen off the map.
She thinks I’ve taken on an impossible task. She writes that I ought to read ‘Mr. Fehrenbach’s book’ if I hope to understand the depth of the Texan’s nature. she has set a hard task for herself as coming from far away to capture the history, essence and spirit of texas, she writes. it is unfathomable to most foreigners and to most americans! we are different!
She was just on her way to a United Daughters of the Confederacy meeting, she writes, and she wishes that she could take me along. it is touching to see how we women all remember and love the south. at the end of our meeting, we join hands and sing dixie.
My dad had to explain what that meant, but as I understand it, there are hundreds of these kinds of hereditary associations across the United States, and perhaps especially in the South, where people have a predilection for viewing the past through rose-colored glasses. He has mentioned more than once that I, thanks to Samuel Clark and probably the other eight forebears who fought in the American Revolution too, am qualified for membership in the hereditary association that he believes is one of the most important, United Daughters of the American Revolution. Membership is no small thing, you are required to document direct descent from a revolutionary soldier, but my dad has papers that assures Gloria and I can both be accepted.
Apart from the fact that in some of these clubs the women join hands and sing Dixie, I have no idea what goes on. Do they talk about their Samuel Clarks? Do they hold séances, Madam Blavatsky style? I imagine poofy, ornate dresses, hair piled high atop their heads, hats, and richly decorated silk ribands. Iced tea in fine parlors, maybe some not-too-strenuous charity work.
Although it’s not for me, the revolution’s other daughters are welcome to it as far as I’m concerned. Commemorating the American Revolution seems harmless to me. But United Daughters of the Confederacy? The Civil War ended a long time ago, and yet it’s so close that if I stood on the edge of the blue mountains of forgetfulness and threw a stone, I would strike the point where my two great-great grandfathers (Gloria’s great-grandfathers), Hugh Clark and James B. McMahan, fought on the South’s side. I struggle to comprehend the affectionate, Dixie-singing commemoration of efforts to preserve slavery.
But to love and respect the Confederacy, writes Gloria, is a tradition in the Clark and McMahan family.
Texans are composite creatures. In addition to United Daughters of the Confederacy, Gloria is a member of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas. She had a forefather whom I don’t share, unfortunately, because if his Wikipedia page is accurate, he was an incredible figure. José Antonio Navarro was his name, a Texas patriot who advocated independence as far back as 1812, long before Austin showed up with his Old Three Hundred. He became one of the leaders of the revolution in 1835, and he was one of the few of Mexican descent who fought on the side of the Texans. He was good friends with Austin, and when Texas achieved independence in 1836, he was one of the signers of the Texas Declaration of Independence.
Gloria ends her email by praising Fiesta in San Antonio. The streets buzz with life, a weeks-long city festival, an explosion of colorful Mexican hullabaloo. would your daughter be able to get over here to enjoy some of that spirit? she asks. anglos are a minority here, you know, she writes and it’s clear that we’re to understand that as a good thing.
But how can her excitement over Fiesta and the city’s non-white majority coexist so easily with the singing of Dixie and loving and respecting the Confederacy? She’s right. Texans are different, and I might never understand them.
Despite all the good things you can doubtlessly say about Mr. Fehrenbach and his book’s ability to unlock the Texan’s unimaginable depths for me, he can’t keep me awake. The pull from another depth is too strong. I fall asleep thinking of the word foreigner. It stings me like a hard slap. My dad’s cousin says it like it is. No matter what I do, I will always be a foreigner in my fatherland.
i awake with the feeling that someone is there. Surprisingly, outside the window, formed as a silhouette on the white curtains, sits a good-sized bird. It remains and so do I. I slide back into sleep. When I awake, it’s gone.
On the other side of the parking lot, across a very busy road, is the reception, where overweight white Americans from the lower middle class stand in line to argue with three Black women behind a faux wood counter. The same cramped space is the setting for a breakfast buffet consisting of individually wrapped packages of various edibles of little nutritional value, corn flakes, muffins, white toast, black coffee, powdered coffee creamer. Nothing here requires washing, no tableware, cups or silverware, nothing made of porcelain, only cartons and plastic and Styrofoam. It’s 9:00 am, and the trash bin is already overflowing, a skinny woman enters and carries the trash bag out, resigned. I make a cup of tea with the powdered coffee creamer in lieu of milk and I sit at the only empty table to write in my notebook.
A couple in their sixties park themselves at my table, the wife wears a prominent neck wallet and sits with her legs spread wide, pretending I don’t exist. Her list of complaints is long.
There are no cinnamon rolls.
Someone spilled juice on her foot.
Her waffle is mushy.
You have to go outside to get cold water.
The man prowls between the tables with new servings from the buffet, doing his best to ward off catastrophe.
•
When I spoke to Gloria on the phone yesterda
y, she suggested that we meet in the hotel lobby, and before I could tell her that I lived in a simple motel without such extravagances as lobbies to meet in, she’d hung up. The plan quickly proves futile. I’ve now wasted an hour running back and forth across the crowded street between the motel’s various buildings in hopes of finding her in one of them, and I’m just about to give up when I finally spot her in the parking lot in front of my room, deep in conversation with the parking attendant. Leaning against her cane, strikingly beautiful, a Texas Sophia Loren with soft, chalk-white curls and large, slightly tinted glasses, slapdash and natural, as if beauty is a shawl she’d slipped around her on her way out the door.
I make my way to her.
As I was shuttling, she was circling the block. I saw you the minute I turned that corner, she says, pointing at the stoplight where only a moment ago I stood waiting for it to turn green. And I thought, that’s Gussie!
In her cane-free hand she holds a book she intends to loan to me, bound and with gold lettering: Our Clark Family 1740–1998. Cora Clark’s book. I open the book immediately, drawn to the photos in the middle. Ancestors with long horse-faces and sunken cheeks holding on to their dignity in their Sunday best.
Look at their faces, I say, fascinated.
Yes, Gloria says. It’s a wonder we ever got here.
We go up to my room with the chemically cleaned carpet. On the way up the stairwell she asks: What do you think of Obama? Thinking of her membership in the United Daughters of the Confederacy and their affectionate Dixie-singing, I answer cautiously that I like him. Oh, I do too! she says, relieved. I just love him. She even hates those who hate him. Racists, she says. Even though they don’t admit it, it’s the actual reason they don’t like his politics.
As I boil water for tea in the coffee maker, Gloria fans out three or four photo albums she’d brought with her on the bed closest to the window. I sit on the edge of the bed while she sits on the room’s only chair, next to the window. The light behind her makes her silver-white hair shine in an aureole that matches her name. Outside, a car horn beeps. Oh, they are bad drivers in this town. I started driving when I was thirteen, she says, in Luling. She begins to rummage in a shoebox packed with photos.
Gussie did all the housework.
Grandma Clark was crippled, and she was irritable.
She was a very beautiful lady. She was gorgeous in her wedding dress.
She searches for something in the box. The photographs can’t keep up with her narration.
Oh, I wanted to show you your Daddy in an apple box. Well, shoot.
Gloria is so happy that I’ve gotten the chance to talk with my dad. I never talked to my dad, she says. They never had any actual conversations, he was so quiet, and she was so shy. And then she’d had Cora Clark in the role of evil stepmother. We compare notes. She listens with a blend of fascination and horror when I tell her that my dad’s wife, after forty-two years, has forbidden him to see me.
Tell me, doesn’t she know your Daddy is coming to Lockhart to see you?
I don’t know. I haven’t asked. In the end, I think, it’s best not to know those kinds of things.
Cora never ceased torturing me, she says. Cora was also the one who took control of her dad’s will. She for whom the family was so important that she traveled far and wide gathering up one hundred and three leather-bound pages with charts and records, made sure that Gloria didn’t inherit so much as a button from her dad. I didn’t get a thing when Daddy died!
But what gets to Gloria more than anything is that they never really spoke to one another. She regrets that every moment of every day.
I don’t know a thing about Daddy.
He was always there.
But we never talked.
The way she calls her dad Daddy, even though he’s been dead for many years, touches me deeply. Even though she’s eighty-three and has won prizes for her journalism. One is never too old, I think. Here she sits, in an upholstered chair in a motel room, and she’s still just a little girl who misses her dad.
I look at her, and I see myself.
She is me, I think, in forty years.
Do you believe in ghosts? Gloria asks. Her daughter, now a woman of sixty-three, has special abilities. She’s rather psychic. Do you buy into that? Tarot cards, that kind of thing, she can speak to the dead. It comes from the Spanish side of the family, Gloria says, beaming.
The Spanish, I understand, comes from her forefather in the Texas revolution. Her grandmother and mother also had special abilities. When her beloved dad died, they all sat in Cora’s living room in Lockhart, in a house on the corner a few blocks from my grandmother’s. There they sat, Gloria and her daughter on the sofa, the stepmother gabbing away as usual, without noticing what was happening around her. There was a cane on the other side of the room. Like the one I use, Gloria says, raising the cane beside the chair. Suddenly it tipped over with a sharp crack. And my daughter said: We are not alone. Cora had left the room to make coffee, so it was now just the two of them in the room. And I said: Whaddya mean we are not alone? And her daughter replied that Gloria’s dad, Hugh, had just entered the room with his brother, Preston. Both men were dead, and now Gloria’s dad and my granddad had returned to see Gloria and her daughter.
She said he just kind of walked out of a wall, and then he said: Come on, Pres.
The daughter had no idea that Hugh had always called his brother Pres. Only Gloria knew that.
And there they stood, in Cora’s living room, Hugh and Pres, looking in on them, making sure they were okay, and Cora, in the kitchen, knew nothing. When she returned with the coffee, the brothers simply melted away, as imperceptibly as they’d emerged from the wall only a moment before.
Are you hungry? The conversation has made her hungry, Gloria has always had a healthy appetite, and she hopes that I do too. I do, I say, in fact, I am always hungry. Great, she says, because she’s reserved a table at the Menger—the elegant old hotel that I happened to pass the day before, and which is right behind the Alamo. It’s considered the finest hotel west of the Mississippi, so fine in fact that I didn’t dare do anything but steal a glance through the glass door of the restaurant in the Colonial Room to see the tables covered with pale yellow damask, the waiters in their white gloves, and the bar where Teddy Roosevelt recruited his soldiers.
The Menger is right next to the motel, but we drive there in Gloria’s car. She slogs across the mosaic tiled floor with her cane, she wants to show me the lobby and the mirror that’s haunted by a ghost. We gaze thoroughly into each one, mirror after mirror with elaborate gold frames that cover the length of the curving stairwell toward the balcony on the second floor, but all we see is ourselves. Gloria and me in the mirror.
Oh, shoot, she says. No ghosts today.
In the center of the restaurant, an interminably long buffet table awaits us with glistening roasts, entire fishes, broiled salmon, steamed catfish, plump shrimp, crispy chicken in gravy, and bowl after bowl of delicate-looking dishes surrounded by large centerpieces, resting at one end, like a galleon figure, is a whole turkey built from decorative gourds, and on the other end an offering of fruit, cakes, waffles, and chocolate so rich that my head spins for a moment. We eat quite a bit.
Save room for the ice cream, Gloria says as we carry our third overstuffed plates back to our table. And oh, to the waiter, can we please have some more of that cold butter?
Time melds, and the dead seem as alive as the living. When Gloria guides me around the Alamo afterward, where she moves with a familiar air without really taking notice of all the tourists, she tells me about how she and her compatriots in the Daughters of the Republic of Texas have functioned as a kind of custodian and protector of the ruin, which the state ignored for a long time. The old mission, so significant to the revolution that led to Texas’s independence, almost faded into oblivion. There were even plans to sell the property. They wanted to build a luxury hotel! Gloria says.
But then came Gloria and h
er revolutionary sisters. One of us chained herself to the building, she says, and some time passes before I realize that this had happened in 1903 and that the one of us she’s referring to, who had barricaded herself in the Alamo and attracted the nation’s attention via newspaper interviews given through the gap in her self-imposed cell, isn’t one of Gloria’s contemporaries in the club but one of the founders from the 1800s. She’s been dead ever since Gloria was a young girl. But for Gloria, the mountains of the past aren’t so blue at all, the past is as real and present as the present. There seems to be no true difference between the living and the dead.
To Gloria’s astonishment, other women in the Daughters of the Republic of Texas are proud of their pasty forefathers. A bunch of goat herders, she calls them. Her Grandpa José Antonio Navarro, on the other hand, was more colorful; he’s the one whose ‘Spanish’ blood runs so thickly in her veins. Though he was born in the 1700s, she always calls him Grandpa, and so far as I can tell, there must be a number of greats ahead of that grandfather.
Let me show you Grandpa’s house, she says, driving us to a baking hot parking lot in the center of San Antonio, where his home, Casa Navarro, a humble limestone house, has been transformed into a museum to which Gloria has donated her family photos. To judge from the photographs, he was a man of gentle countenance from a noble family. A county bears his name, and it contains a city, Corsicana, that he christened himself. There, his statue sits with its cane in front of city hall meditating over time’s imperceptible forward glide.
All of it lies before Gloria like a moon landscape where everything is illuminated just as sharply, without the atmosphere’s blurring distance.
The I fades into the endless past.
Time has thrown an invisible blanket over us all.
Only the present exists.
And here we are, the living and the dead, in the same now.
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