Giant

by Edna Ferber

  “Or informed?”

  Leslie, the outspoken, looked at him, she felt admiration and almost affection for this man who had met insult with such dignity. “Here in Texas we are very modern in matters of machinery and agriculture and certain ways of living. Very high buildings on very broad prairies. But very little high thinking or broad viewpoint. But they’re the most hospitable people, they love entertaining visitors——”

  He inclined toward her in a little formal diplomatic bow. “I am happily aware of that, madame.”

  “Oh, I didn’t mean—I just—sometimes I forget I’m a Texan by marriage. But thank you. I—you see they’re really wonderful in a crisis. In the last war—and the First World War too—the Texans were the most patriotic and courageous——”

  “Yes. I know. But war is, as you say, a crisis—an excrescence, a cancer on the body of civilization. It is what a people do and think in the time of health and peace that is most important.” He was very quiet and collected and somehow aloof in the midst of the turmoil all about them. Like Jordy’s wife Juana, she thought suddenly. Remote, like Juana. He was speaking again, through the uproar. “But you are not a Texan?”

  “No. But my husband is, of course, and all his people since the beginning of—— Oh, it must be dinner. They’re moving toward the other room. Our party is all at the same table, it’s Number One on the dais with our host, Jett Rink.”

  “Ah yes, the host who spends twenty-five thousand dollars for a dish of barbecue.” He glanced about at the incredible scene. “I can well believe it now.”

  “There’s Jordan—there’s my husband—with the others. Now if only we can stay together.” She raised her voice to reach her husband struggling toward them. “Luz? Jordy?”

  His shoulders were making a path for the royal pair behind him. “Haven’t seen them,” he shouted. “Catch on like a conga line and we’ll make it.”

  Breathless, disheveled, they found themselves half an hour later seated on a platform at an orchid-covered table like a huge catafalque. From the hundreds of tables below a foam of faces stared up at them. Flashlights seared the air. Bands blared. The loudspeakers created pandemonium.

  “And when,” said the King seated beside Leslie, “does our host appear?”

  With awful suddenness the loudspeaker system went off. It had exaggerated every sound. Conversation had necessarily been carried on at a shout. Now the abrupt quiet was as shocking as the noise had been. The comparative silence stunned one. From the dais where he sat with the guests of honor boomed the unctuous voice of Congressman Bale Clinch in tones which, under stress of the megaphones, had been meant for the confidential ear of his dinner neighbor alone. In the sudden silence they now rang out with all the strength and authority with which, in Washington Congress assembled, he frequently addressed his compatriots on the subject of Texas oil rights in general and Jett Rink’s claims in particular.

  “That wildcattin’ son-of-a-bitch Jett Rink is drunk again or I’ll eat a live rattlesnake. They’re soberin’ him up in there——” He stopped, aghast, as a thousand faces turned toward him like balloons in a breeze.

  Big though his voice was it had carried only through a fraction of the great concourse. But the repetition from mouth to mouth had taken only a few seconds. A roar, a Niagara of laughter, shook the room.

  In the midst of this Luz Benedict appeared suddenly at the main table, she had not made her way through the main room, she seemed to have materialized out of the air. She was wearing a white chiffon gown, not quite fresh; no jewelry, her fair hair still tied back in the absurd horse’s tail coiffure, though now a little spray of tiny fresh white orchids replaced the black ribbon that had held it.

  She leaned over her father’s chair as casually as though she were in the dining room at the ranch. “Who told the joke?” she inquired casually. “I could use a laugh.”

  Bick Benedict turned his head slightly, he bit the words out of the corner of his mouth. “Where’ve you been? And Jordan?”

  ‘Parn me, lady,” said a waiter, and placed a huge slab of rare roast beef before Bick Benedict. It almost covered the large plate, it was an inch thick, astonishingly like the map of Texas in shape, and it had been cut from the prime carcasses flown by refrigerated plane from Kansas City. Luz viewed it with distaste as she leaned over her father’s shoulder.

  “Listen. Jordy’s looking for Jett, he says he’s going to beat him up he——”

  A girl in a strapless scarlet evening dress appeared on the platform at the far end of the great hall, she began to sing to the accompaniment of the orchestra, her lips formed words but no note was heard in the absence of the sound mechanism, there was an absurd quality in her mute conquetry as she mouthed the words of the familiar Texas song that now opened the evening’s program.

  Bick Benedict jerked around in his chair to face his daughter. “You’re crazy! Where is he?”

  “Louder!” yelled a man in the audience. “Louder!” someone echoed from a far corner. “What’s the matter with the loudspeaker! Jett! Jett, get busy in there.” With knives and forks they began to tap the sides of their water glasses or wineglasses or bourbon tumblers, the clinking rose to an anvil chorus. The girl in the red dress faltered, stopped, smiled uncertainly, went on with her soundless song.

  From the far far end of the room young Jordan Benedict strode down through the jungle of tables close-packed as mesquite on the plains. He was alone. A neat grey suit, a neat blue bow tie, his blue-black hair that was so like his mother’s seemed a heavy black cap above his white face. Straight toward the table marked Number One—the table on the dais.

  Bick Benedict muttered an apology to the right to the left, quickly he pushed back his chair and stood facing Luz. He grasped her wrist. “What’s the matter with him! What happened!” He shook her arm a little as though to hurry her into speech.

  “He smashed up the Beauty Parlor at the hotel, he threw chairs into the mirrors and shot out the lights like an old Western movie——”

  “Beauty Parlor! What the hell do you m——”

  “Oh, you know—where we have our hair done and everything. Don’t be—anyway, he wrecked it and now he’s looking for Jett he says he’s going to smash his face he says it’s Jett’s hotel and his orders——”

  “Why! Why! Why! Quick!”

  “Juana went down to keep an appointment to have her nails done. She’d telephoned, and given her name of course. When she got down there the girl at the desk looked at her and said they didn’t take Mexicans, she came upstairs and Jordy went——” She stopped abruptly. “There comes Jett. Look. He’s been drinking.”

  With a sudden blare that jolted the eardrums the loudspeaker went on. From the two bands there was a ruffle of the drums. Jett Rink came through the door marked Office. Private. White dinner clothes, a tightly little boutonniere of bluebonnets on his lapel. The curiously square face, thin-lipped, ruthless, the head set too low on the neck that in turn was too massive for the small-boned body. He walked, not as a man who has authority and power but as a man does who boasts of these. On his right walked a man, on his left walked a man, the two looked oddly alike in an indefinable way, as though the resemblance came from some quality within them rather than from any facial kinship. Their clothes seemed too tight as though they covered muscles permanently flexed, and their shaves were fresh, close and unavailing. Their faces impassive, the cold hard eyes regnant as searchlights.

  “Hi, Jett!” bawled the cowboy movie star.

  “Which is he?” the King inquired, not very astutely.

  Congressman Bale Clinch answered somewhat impatiently. “The middle of course. The other two are strong-arms.”

  Now that the sound system had been restored the girl in red and the accompanying band were in full swing with a childish song which the state had adopted as its own. The tune was that of the old ballad, “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” to words which someone had written.

  The eyes of Texas are upon you,

/>   All the live-long day.

  The eyes of Texas are upon you,

  You cannot get away….

  Jordy Benedict reached the dais, he leaped upon it nimbly, crept beneath the table opposite his father’s empty chair like a boy playing hide-and-seek, he bobbed up to face Jett Rink. At the tables below the dais the diners had got to their feet leaving the slabs of red roast to congeal on their plates.

  Jordy Benedict called no names. He looked absurdly young and slim as he faced the three burly figures.

  “Stand away,” he said quietly, “and fight.” His arm came back and up like a piston. A spurt of crimson from Jett Rink’s nose made a bizarre red white and blue of his costume. A dozen hands pinned Jordy’s arms, the flint-faced men held Jett Rink, the two glaring antagonists, pinioned thus, strained toward each other like caged and maddened animals.

  Jett Rink jumped then, swinging hammock-like between the two guards whose arms held his. His feet, with all his powerful bulk behind them, struck Jordy low with practiced vicious aim so that the grunt as the boy fell could be heard by the guests of honor on the dais even above the blare of the band.

  Quick though Bick was, Leslie was there before him, kneeling on the floor beside her son. For the moment he was mercifully unconscious. The first exquisite agony of this blow had distorted the boy’s face, his body was twisted with it. His eyes were closed.

  Bick, kneeling, made as though to rise now. His eyes were terrible as he looked at the panting Jett Rink. But Leslie reached across the boy’s crumpled form, she gripped Bick’s arm so that her fingers bit into his muscles. Quietly, as though continuing a conversation, she said, “You see. It’s caught up with you, it’s caught up with us. It always does.”

  But now the boy stirred and groaned and his eyes opened and his face was a mask of hideous pain as he looked up into the two stricken faces bent over him. The physician in him rose valiantly to meet that moment, the distorted lips spoke the truth to reassure them.

  “Morphine…pain…horrible…not serious…morphine…”

  5

  Though the three Lynnton girls always were spoken of as the Beautiful Lynnton Sisters of Virginia they weren’t really beautiful. For that matter, they weren’t Virginians, having been born in Ohio. But undeniably there was about these three young women an aura, a glow, a dash of what used to be called diablerie that served as handily as beauty and sometimes handier. These exhilarating qualities wore well, too, for they lasted the girls their lifetime, which beauty frequently fails to do.

  The three Lynntons were always doing things first or better or more outrageously than other girls of their age and station in Virginia and Washington society. Leigh, the eldest—the one who married Sir Alfred Karfrey and went to England to live—scandalized Washington when, as a young woman in that capital’s society circles, she had smoked a cigarette in public long before her friend Alice Roosevelt Longworth shocked the whole United States with a puff or two. Leigh certainly was the least lovely of the three Lynnton Lovelies as they sometimes were fatuously called. She had the long aquiline face of her mother—horse-faced, her feminine detractors said—and she was further handicapped for dalliance by a mordant tongue that should have scared the wits out of the young male Virginians who came courting with Southern sweet talk. People said that with her scarifying wit she actually had whiplashed the timorous Karfrey into marrying her.

  Leslie the second sister was, as the term went, a bluestocking. She was forever reading books, but not the sort of books which other Southern young women consumed like bonbons as they lay, indolent and slightly liverish from too many hot breads, in the well-worn hammock under the trees. Leslie Lynnton had opinions of her own, she conversed and even argued with her distinguished father and his friends on matters political, sociological, medical and literary just as if she were a man. Though her eyes were large, dark, and warmly lustrous there undeniably was a slight cast in the left one which gave her, at times, a sort of stricken look. Oddly enough, men found this attractive, perhaps because it imparted a momentarily helpless and appealing aspect.

  The third girl, Lacey, was seven years younger than her second sister and represented Mrs. Lynnton’s last try for a son. Lacey turned out a tomboy and small wonder. As each of the three had been intended by their parents to be males only masculine names had been provided for them before birth. With the advent of the third girl Mrs. Lynnton, admitting final defeat, had hastily attempted to change the name from Lacey to Laura. But Lacey it remained.

  You were always seeing photographs of the three in airy organdies and sashes posed with arms about one another’s waists in front of white-columned porticoes with a well-bred hunting dog or two crouched in the foreground. But Race Lynnton—Doctor Horace Lynnton in all the encyclopedias and Who’s Whos and medical journals—had really brought them up with a free hand and an open mind. Though the girls moved with grace and distinction they were generally considered too thin. Theirs were long clever-looking hands rather than little dimpled ones; theirs a spirited manner; little money and small prospect of more, being daughters of a very dedicated surgeon-physician-scientist.

  In spite of these handicaps the Lynnton ladies somehow emerged feminine and alluring. The life juices were strong in them, they possessed the gifts of warmth and sympathetic understanding which tempered their wit. Sometimes, talking before the fire with a gay and friendly group, Leslie had a way of sitting on the hearth rug, her shoulder and arm pillowed against her father’s knee, her face turned up to him as he talked, her fine intelligent eyes seeming to absorb the light in his face. At such times the younger men present were likely to take their handkerchiefs furtively from their pockets and wipe their brows. Electra, even in that fairly recent day, was merely a Greek legend, together with the equally bemused Oedipus.

  “I declare,” Mrs. Lynnton would say—she frequently prefaced her statements with a warning salvo such as I declare or I must say or if you want my opinion—“I declare, Leslie, I sometimes think your father and I will have you on our hands as an old maid. Leigh was late enough, twenty-three when she married, but look at her now, Lady Karfrey! So it turned out well enough in spite of her sarcastic ways when she was a girl.”

  “But Mama, you didn’t marry Papa until you were past twenty. And you did pretty well for yourself, you will admit. Married to the most wonderful man in the world, that’s all.”

  “I married your father because he asked me, and that’s the truth. I was no beauty and neither are you. You treat men as if they were girl friends, though you’ve had a hundred chances I must say.”

  “Not quite a hundred, Mama. Perhaps ten.”

  “Most girls have one, and snatch at it, and don’t let them tell you anything different. If you’re not married next year I’m going to dress up Lacey and put her in the parlor. She’ll be seventeen soon and there she is out at the stables day and night. It’s time she learned that all males aren’t quadrupeds.” She had a somewhat tangy tongue of her own, Nancy Lynnton.

  Equipped thus rather meagerly for matrimony, one would justifiably have thought the three Lynnton sisters fated for spinsterhood. On the contrary the big shabby Virginia house was clogged with yearning swains. Young Washington career men; slightly balding European sub-diplomats and embassy secretaries in striped trousers and cutaways; Virginia and Maryland squires of the huntin’ ridin’ and slightly run-down set; with a sprinkling of New York lawyers and Wall Street men and even an occasional Midwestern businessmen. Doctors who came ostensibly to confer with Horace Lynnton ended up in the vast hospitable kitchen (for the Lynntons were famous cooks in defiance of a day and place in which cooking was considered menial). Beaux haunted the verandas the parlors the stables. They swarmed all over the place—to the dismay of neighboring beauties—much as bees will sometimes desert the stately cool rose for a field of heady wild red clover.

  As for the boasted Virginia background, this lay so far in the past as to be misted by the centuries and discernible only to Mrs. Lynnton’s some
what bemused eye. A great-great-great-grandfather had sailed overseas to Virginia in the 1600s, one of those indentured servants or jail bait whose descendants later became First Families of Virginia perhaps as legitimately as their more aristocratic contemporaries. But this traveler’s son too had possessed the spirit of roving adventure. He had moved with the tide of travel from Virginia to Kentucky to Indiana to Ohio. Mrs. Lynnton always skipped lightly over these geographical intervals when she spoke of herself as having descended from one of the F.F.V.s. Leslie and Lacey made nothing of this, or at best regarded it as a family joke. Leigh—now Lady Karfrey—having inherited something of her mother’s snobbishness, took the doubtful distinction more seriously. As for Doctor Horace Lynnton, late of Ohio, here was a great human being and a dedicated spirit disguised as a tall somewhat shambling man in a crumpled suit and bow tie slightly askew so that his wife or one of three daughters seemed always to be busy under his chin. When finally he had moved with his family to the once stately but now rather ramshackle house in Virginia it was because he could give his brilliant brain his surgical genius and his magic hands to the rehabilitation of the thousands of broken boys who, veterans of the gruesome 1917–18 war years, filled the nearby hospitals of Washington Virginia and Maryland. Offered the cushiony post of White House Physician, he had refused it as casually as though he had been handed an over-sweet dessert.

  Though there was only a physician’s income behind it, profusion was characteristic of the Lynnton ménage. Horses in the weathered stables; the most delicate and savory of American cooking in the kitchen with no Southern grease fried indigestibles to mar it. There were succulent soft-shell crabs from Maryland, smoked Virginia hams, Ohio maple sugar and pancakes, little plump white chickens, button-size hot biscuits with golden pools of butter between their brown cheeks. Terrapin. Oysters. Succotash. Devil’s food cake. Profusion not only of food but of gaiety and laughter; of good talk at dinner and after; of guests, of servants, of books, of courtesy, of horses and dogs and crystal and silver. Sweet-scented flowers in the rambling garden, deep-cushioned shabby handsome chairs, vast beds and capacious fireplaces, sherry on the sideboard, leisure in the air, and wit to spice the whole of this.