by Edna Ferber
It came to Leslie with a shock that this woman was acting a part. Was purposely talking a kind of native lingo. The black eyes were darting here and there as the suitcases and bags were opened. Lupe had come in with a tray on which was coffee.
“I hope it won’t spoil my dinner,” Leslie said.
“Coffee never spoiled anything. Here in Texas everybody drinks coffee morning to night and night to morning.”
“It’s the climate,” Leslie thought suddenly, but thinking aloud. “That’s it. Hot and flat and humid. They have to have it as a stimulant.”
“Nothing wrong with Texas climate I know of,” Luz countered belligerently.
“No, no, I just meant—you know, the English drink a lot of tea. Uh—Bick told me you went to Wellesley when you were a girl.”
“Yes, the Benedict girls go to Wellesley for anyway two years and the boys to Harvard, but it never takes. I don’t talk like college, do I?”
“Perhaps not. I don’t know.”
“Where did you go? Vassar, I suppose. Or one of those places up on the Hudson.”
“No. In fact my sisters and I had the sketchiest kind of education. Papa didn’t believe in separate schools for boys and girls. He said they were tribal vestigial.”
She felt better now that she had had the coffee. She had gulped it down, hot and strong. “That was lovely,” she said. Lupe was taking things out of the bags. She was a dark silent woman in a shapeless clean dress of no definable color pattern or material. A covering. On her feet were soft shapeless black sandals. Her garments, her face, her hair were decent yet she gave a general effect of untidiness as though she had thrown on her clothes in a hurry and had not since had time to adjust them. Leslie was to grow accustomed to this look in the house servants, as to so much besides. The young girl Petra had joined the older woman. Now the clean bare room with its big white bed, its neat wooden chairs, its stark table burst suddenly into bloom like a spring garden released from winter. Lacy filmy silken things. Soft beribboned flowered things. Scent. Color.
“My!” Luz exclaimed inadequately. “Where you fixing to wear those?”
With a sinking heart Leslie thought of the trunks that were even now on the road from Vientecito—trunks crammed with more dresses, more chiffons, silks, laces. The woman Lupe and the girl Petra were not being very helpful. They caught up the scented silken things and gazed at them as a child would look at a toy, in wonderment. They held them and stroked them, making little crooning sounds of admiration and amazement. As they hung the garments in the inadequate closets they chattered to each other in Spanish, hard and fast, the sound of the consonants falling on the ear like hailstones on a tin roof. Leslie began to hate the filmy bits of lace and ribbon that Nancy Lynnton had insisted were the proper garments for a bride’s trousseau, Texas or no Texas. Suddenly, too, she felt an unbearable weariness and lassitude. She wanted to be alone. It was not an urge merely, it was a necessity. For over two weeks now she had not had an hour, a moment alone. She longed to be alone in the big bright room and rid of the two chattering women, the little pink-frocked woman still wearing the red hat beneath which her right round little pink face was like a baked apple bursting its skin.
“Do you know,” she began haltingly, “it’s the queerest thing but I feel so—so terribly tired. And sleepy, too. I can hardly——”
“Texas,” Luz said triumphantly. “Lots of strangers from up North feel like that. Thin-blooded is what’s wrong with them. Texas air is so rich you can nourish off it like it was food.”
“That must be it. And everything so new and strange.”
“Texas is different, all right. But you’ll have to get the hang of it.”
“Oh, I will. I’m going to love it. It’s so big and new and different—as you say. I just thought if I could have a tiny nap before dinner—supper.”
“Well, sure. You go right ahead.”
“And a bath. That will be lovely.”
Luz took charge. “Lupe! Un baño caliente.”
“No. No, thanks so much. I’ll just take my time and perhaps sleep a little first and then have the bath, or perhaps the other way around. I don’t know.” She was growing incoherent with weariness.
“Go at once,” Luz commanded the two women. Leslie caught the Spanish immediato. “Cierra la puerta.”
As they went Leslie remembered her two-word Spanish vocabulary. “Gracias! Muy gracias!”
They were gone. The door was closed. She stood with her back against it for a moment like a woman in a melodrama. Don’t be silly. Where did you think you were going to live? Paris? This is all strange and wonderful and tomorrow you’ll love it, but you’re tired and tense. That’s all that’s wrong with you, Leslie Lynnton. Benedict.
A bath, that was what she wanted after all that grit and grime of the train journey and the dust of the drive. The immense tub was a man’s tub, when she tried to relax in it her toes were six inches from the tub end. The immense towels were men’s towels. It was as though no arrangements were made for the comfort of women in this man’s world of Texas. Everything in the bathroom and the bedroom was good, utilitarian, and plain as a piece of canvas and as durable. Well, she argued to herself, this is a ranch, isn’t it? You and your silly trousseau—what do you expect!
She went through the pleasant relaxing ritual of the bath, the powder, the lotions, the creams. Nancy Lynnton had made a warning din about cold cream. “That Texas climate is frightful for the complexion. Remember to use cold cream all the time, every minute, or your face will look like leather.” Leslie had laughed at the mental picture of her face grinning socially through a mask of oily white cream. Still, it wasn’t advice to be sneered at, she thought now as she patted the smooth stuff on cheeks and chin and was startled to see it vanish like water into thirsty earth. She put on a plain silk dressing gown, stood blinking a moment in the disordered bedroom and was reassured by the scent of the perfume that Leigh Karfrey had sent her from Paris, by the look of the pink bottles and jars ranged neatly on the grim bureau, by her own small frilled and lacy pillow, the satin mules, the peignoir flung across a chair, by all this fluff of feminine belongings that had turned the dour chamber into a woman’s room.
She threw herself in a fine Gulf draft across the great double bed and was immediately asleep in spite of the strong coffee and the bewildering day.
She awoke to a bedlam of sound, she sat up terrified, her terror mounting as she stared about her at the unfamiliar room and did not know where she was or how she had got there. Now she remembered and now she translated the sounds that had shocked her into wakefulness as the clamor of metal on metal. A brazen gong was beating within the house. An iron-tongued bell was shattering the air outside. She sprang up, she ran a comb through her short clipped hair and arranged its waves tenderly over each cheek in the mode of the day. I don’t care, she argued to herself, I’m going to put on a pretty tea gown for dinner, that’s what they’re for, I’m not going to dress in linsey-woolsey just because I live on a ranch, what’s linsey-woolsey I wonder, anyway I’m going to dress as if I were having dinner with the family at home. At home. You are at home, you little fool. Hurry.
She put on the filmy tea gown with the lace fishtail in the back though it came just below her knees in the front. The clamor had ceased, the sound of the brazen gong had died away. Suddenly it was cooler—not actually chill but the fierce heat of the day was gone. She shivered a little standing there in here transparent chiffon gown, she wondered if perhaps she should have worn something heavier. They’ll have a fire in the fireplace, she told herself, and a glass of sherry. Perhaps Jordan hadn’t come in yet, that’s why they rang that big bell outside. She went carefully to the hall and peered over the banisters. The vast hall below was empty but she heard the murmur of voices and now they were raised in something very near a shout. Here I am, Leslie Lynnton—Leslie Lynnton Benedict—tiptoeing around and peeking over stair rails like a schoolgirl afraid to go down to her first party. She stepped slowly do
wn the great stone stairway in her slim pointed satin slippers with the brilliant buckles and the high heels. The javelinas and the jaguars and the buffalo glowered down upon her from the stairway and the hall, their lips curled back from their teeth in sneering distaste.
She stood a moment in the center of the hall. Then she followed the direction of the voices. Jordan and Luz Benedict were talking with considerable animation in the room that Luz had designated as the music room. Curiously, it was Luz who was standing in front of the fireplace facing the door and Jordan who was seated. Their voices were loud and, Leslie sensed, angry.
“Maudie’s a hog for money,” Luz was saying, “she wouldn’t care if the ranch was put in sheep if she could get more out of it. And Placer—well—Placer! A pair of fools, but Maudie’s the worst, because she knows better.” At this somewhat ambiguous statement she saw Leslie in the doorway. “Well, come on in. Where’s the party at? My!”
For one terrible instant Leslie sensed that her husband had momentarily forgotten that he was married, had forgotten that she was in the house, had forgotten that she existed.
Now he jumped up, he came to her and took her two hands in his and held her off to look at her. “You’re prettier than a sunrise. Just look at her, Luz!”
She came closer to him. “I fell asleep.”
“Don’t I know it! I came up and there you were stretched across the bed, dead to the world, and the room looking as if a norther had struck it.”
“Really! Really were you there while I was asleep?”
“I didn’t have the heart to wake you, I sneaked out and washed up in the next room.”
“You look kind of wonderful yourself,” she said, and meant it though he wore boots, brown canvas pants and brush jacket, a brown shirt open at the throat. Luz was as she had been through the day. Leslie was relieved to see that she had taken off the red hat. Her hair was wound quaintly in neat slick braids like a crown round her head, just as Jordan Benedict once had described it.
No fire in the fireplace. No sherry. A concert grand piano dominated the room, it bore the Steinway stamp. “What a beautiful piano!” Leslie exclaimed. “I haven’t seen one like that since I heard Paderewski play in Washington years and years ago. Who plays? You, Luz?” She opened the lid, the keys were yellow, she ran a tentative handful of notes, it was badly out of tune.
“The strings go to rusting,” Luz said. “Bick plays a little and so do I, Ma made us all take lessons, like it or not, but there’s no time for piano playing on a ranch.”
“Why not?” Leslie inquired innocently.
“There’s too much work to do.” Luz, in spite of the baby-pink cheeks and the plump comfortable body, seemed always to speak with belligerence. Now the gong sounded again furiously from the dining room. “Come on,” said Luz, “let’s go eat.” She led the way, scudding across the tiled floor. The two followed slowly, his arm about her, her shoulder nestled in his shoulder. The lace fishtail slithered after them, absurdly, from the upper hall dark eyes watched it, wondering.
She pressed her cheek against his arm. “I’ll have to learn to be a rancher’s wife. Look at me!” She kicked up a satin-shod foot. “Ridiculous.”
“No it isn’t. I love it. Don’t change. There are too many ranchers around here already.”
The great table would have seated twenty, it was covered with a white tablecloth, a mammoth spread that could have been rigged as a sizable tent. Down its middle, at five-foot intervals, were clustered little colonies of ketchup, bottles, chili sauce, vinegar, oil, salt, pepper, sugar bowl, cream pitcher.
Luz took charge. “Bick sits there of course. You sit there. I sit here.” The three huddled at one end of the table, Bick at the head. Places were laid for ten.
Leslie sat down, she tucked her absurd chiffons about her, she shivered a little in the damp air of the vast vaulted room through which the Gulf wind blew a ceaseless stream. She eyed the empty places with their expectant china and glass and silver. “Is there company?”
“No, thank goodness for once,” Luz said. “But you never know on a ranch whether there’s going to be two or twenty. Folks stop by.”
Leslie smiled at Luz, at Bick. “We’re like that at home. There’s always enough for sudden guests. But not quite twenty.”
Bick reached forward to cover her cool fingers with his big hand. “You’re cold! You must be starved. I remember now you hardly ate a bite at lunch.”
“I was so excited. I couldn’t. We had just half an hour before time to leave the train. But now I do feel kind of hollow and limp.”
Two Mexican girls came in, very quiet and neat in dark dresses and white aprons, their feet slip-slapping in sandals. They carried platters and vegetable dishes. There was steak—not the broiled steaks of the Eastern seaboard, crisp on the outside, pink on the inside, juicy and tender and thick. These were enormous fried slabs, flat, grey, served with a thick flour gravy. Mashed potatoes. Canned peas. Pickles. Huge soft rolls. Jelly. Canned peaches. Chocolate cake. It was fundamental American food cooked and served at its worst, without taste or imagination.
Wrestling, Leslie found that the steak once cut could not be chewed. She felt her face flushing scarlet, she tried to swallow the leathery mass, it would not go down, she choked a little, took a sip of cold water, chewed again resolutely, swallowed with a final fearsome gulp and thought what a surprise it would be for her stomach when the door opened and that rude mass of rubber beef tumbled in. She ate her mashed potatoes, she ate her peas, she worried the steak around her plate and tried not to think of little broilers and strawberry meringue and lobster bisque and spoon bread. She looked with wide bright eyes that still did not seem, somehow, to envision things very well, at the clump of ketchup chili sauce vinegar and other condiments that served this particular corner of the long white expanse which spread like a roadway down the room.
“Doesn’t she look lovely, Luz!” Bick was saying.
“Certainly does,” Luz agreed, without enthusiasm. “I was just wondering where she was fixing to wear all those party dresses.”
“She’s going to wear them for me, aren’t you, Leslie? I’ll feel like a maharajah. Run cattle all day and when I come in evenings there you’ll be all satin and sweet.”
“I was just thinking of sending them all back home to Lacey,” Leslie said, “and swapping them for her blue denims.”
“Don’t let Luz fool you, just because she goes around looking like an old daguerreotype. It’s a pose of hers. Texas girls are mighty dressy. Wait till you see them, they go to Chicago and New York for their doodads.”
Here Luz made a bewildering about-face. “They don’t have to,” she said spiritedly. “We’ve got plenty of stores right here in Hermoso and Houston and Dallas and around.”
“That’s so,” Bick agreed. “I heard that Neiman-Marcus dresses the cotton crowd up in Dallas now and the new oil rich. They say they’ve got stuff there makes Bergdorf and Saks in New York look like Indian trading posts.”
Luz smiled a little secret smile. “You’ll have a chance to see for yourself tomorrow.”
Bick leaned forward. “Leslie’s going out with me tomorrow…. There’s a roomful of riding clothes here in the house, Leslie. All sizes, all shapes.”
“But won’t my own things be here by then?”
“Well, yes. They’re probably here now, unless Dimodeo and Jett Rink want the hides skinned off ’em. But your kind of riding clothes out on the range——”
Luz cut in. “The girls are coming. We’ve fixed up a real old-fashioned barbecue tomorrow noon. Out at Number Two.”
“Call it off.”
“Likely. With some of them on the way this minute from every which place. It’s a welcome for the bride.”
“How lovely!” Leslie said weakly. She was afraid to look at the fuming Bick.
“Damn it. Luz! Why don’t you mind your own business! Leslie wants to see the ranch.”
“She’ll be seeing it on the way.”
“I
don’t think she’d like a barbecue.”
Leslie began to laugh a little hysterically. “If it’s me you’re talking about I’m right here. Remember? And of course I’d love a barbecue. It’s like a picnic, isn’t it? And cooking out of doors?”
Dinner was finished. Bick rose abruptly. “This is different.”
“How?”
“Well—different. I know what you Virginians mean by a picnic. Chicken and ham and champagne cup and peach ice cream and a darky in a white coat to hand it around.”
She went to him, she linked her arm through his, she looked up into his eyes. “But if that was the kind of picnic I wanted for the rest of my life I wouldn’t be here, would I?”
The little clatter of Luz Benedict’s heels, the high shrill voice. “Gill Dace is waiting on you, he phoned twice.”
“Yes, I know. I’m going down now.”
To her horror she heard herself cry out. “No. No, don’t go away. Stay with me, Jordan. Don’t leave me alone.”
“Why honey, Luz is here.”
“Where are you going? I’ll go with you.”
“You can’t go down there in those clothes.”
“Where is it?”
“Gill Dace is the vet. He’s the man who doctors all the four-footed characters and there isn’t a more important man on the ranch. I’ll take you down someday soon.” He kissed her lightly on the cheek, the friendly placating kiss of a husband of ten years’ standing, whose thoughts are elsewhere. He was off down the hall and out into the twilight, she heard the sound of the car roaring down the road. She stood in the center of the great hall with the stuffed animal heads goggling down at her in her trailing tea gown. Luz was standing on the stairway waiting for her to ascend and as Leslie looked up at her it seemed to her weary and confused gaze that this face had in it much of the quality of those others eying her from the walls.