by Edna Ferber
Someone asked her a question, she turned her face up to the questioner, she smiled a stiff contortion of the mouth, she even arranged a reply of sorts in her mind, but it never was uttered. At that moment the bunkhouse tipped toward her, the sky rolled with it and the ground rose up in front of her and rapped her smartly on the head.
For the first time in her healthy twenty-odd years Leslie Lynnton had fainted dead away.
12
“No,” the doctor (hurriedly summoned from Benedict) said. “No, no sign of it I can see. Sun got to her, I’d say.” The doctor from Benedict had worn boots and a Stetson and this had outraged Leslie’s deep feeling for the medical profession, though she did not express her protest. She had shut her eyes and her mind against him, she had refused to answer his questions. “I feel perfectly well, really. I feel quite wonderful. It was just—Jordan—if you’ll just——” She whispered in Bick’s ear. “Make him go away. Please.”
Very white she lay then in the big bare bedroom at Reata and Bick had sent for Doctor Tom Walker at Vientecito. When he came in Leslie knew it was all right. He was a small slight man, his suit his shoes his hat were the clothes she had been accustomed to see worn by middle-aged men in Virginia’s hot weather—by her father. Rather rumpled linen stuff, pale in color, with neat white or blue shirt and small bow tie and easy comfortable black or tan oxfords. He placed the soft straw hat and the scuffed black bag on a table and came over to the bed. He did not take her hand he did not feel her pulse, he did not say “Well, how are we?” heartily. He just stood there, dabbing his forehead a little with a white handkerchief.
“How nice,” said Leslie to her own astonishment. She had not in the least meant to say it, it had blurted itself out.
“I never will get used to this damned heat,” Doctor Walker said. “I’ll just go in and wash my hands. How are you, Bick? I heard you’d married. High time.”
She heard the water and his hearty splashing and then he stood in the bathroom doorway wiping his hands briskly and talking casually.
“This climate’s new to you, h’m?”
“Yes.”
“It takes a while. I was saying to Bick downstairs. I’m from Tennessee myself but this is different. I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else now, this is wonderful country but you have to get used to it and look at it the long view. Fifty years from now.”
“Fifty years!” She did a simple problem in arithmetic. “I’ll be seventy-three! Seventy-three!”
“That’s a nice age. You’ll see wonderful things in Texas when you’re seventy-three.”
“I won’t care then.”
“Yes you will. Especially if you’ve been part of it.”
“You sound like my father,” she said then.
He had finished wiping his hands, he folded the towel neatly, he came again to the bedside, relaxed and easy. Now he picked up her hand as it lay there so inert on the coverlet.
“And who is he?”
She watched his face intently. If he didn’t know when she said it he was no good either, just like the other one. He was intent on her pulse. “His name is Lynnton. Doctor Horace Lynnton.”
There was one sign only, and she noted this because her eyes were so intent on his face. His eyes had widened, then the lids had dropped again over them. His hand was cool and steady on her wrist. He placed her hand gently on the coverlet, he smiled a little. The routine. The chest, the lungs, the back, the stomach, the heart, the belly.
“She’ll be all right I think,” he said turning to Bick Benedict standing so tensely at the bedside. “I’d say a temporary fatigue and sort of—have you had a shock?”
“No.”
“She’s been fine,” Bick said. “She’s been wonderful until just today. When she fainted we thought—some of the women thought maybe——”
“Maybe next week you’ll drive to my office where I can really examine you properly. You do that, will you?”
Doctor Tom Walker took out his pad and fountain pen, he began to write a prescription in a neat hand. He finished it, he capped the pen and he snapped his shabby black bag. He looked up at Bick, his glance went about the stark room with its incongruous drifts of silk and flashes of silver and crystal that bespoke her occupancy there. His eyes came to rest on her face.
“Horace Lynnton’s daughter.”
“Do you know him?”
“Do I know Horace Lynnton. It’s like asking a private in the infantry if he knows the General of the Army.”
She felt the tears, hot and stinging, in her eyes. “Thank you,” she said inadequately. Then, “I’ll write him you said that. No I won’t. He’ll think I’m ill.”
“You’re not,” Doctor Walker said.
“What about it, Tom?” Bick asked. “What about it then? What made her faint and stay that way so long? She just wouldn’t come to. I don’t know how long. I guess went kind of crazy I was so scared.”
“Unconscious a long time, h’m?”
“The heat I suppose, eh, Tom? It wasn’t a really hot day but maybe if you’re not used to it, and in the morning I hear she ran around a lot in the sun.”
Luz, Leslie said to herself. She told him—she or someone. Told him what? It doesn’t matter. I went for a walk.
Doctor Tom Talker was silent. Then he stood up and he had the air of one who has made a decision. “Fainting is a way of shutting out of your consciousness something you find repellent. In the old days ladies used to do it quite a bit. It was a kind of weapon. They don’t use it so much nowadays because they’re more free to rebel against what they don’t like. This young lady doesn’t look like the fainting kind to me.”
Bick brushed this aside with some impatience. “Yes. Sure. But what do you advise now? What’s the thing to do for Leslie?”
Tom Walker seemed to ponder this a moment. “Well, Bick, if I were married to this girl I guess I’d spend the rest of my life cherishing her—no, I’ll give you the advice of a man of medicine, not a romantic. You see, all this is new to Mrs. Benedict.”
“Leslie,” she murmured rather drowsily from the bed. She was feeling strangely relaxed, suddenly, and lighthearted and understood.
“New to Leslie. Beginning marriage is an adjustment under the most simple of circumstances. But when you have to adjust to marriage and Texas at the same time! Well, that’s quite a feat.”
“Now Tom! You’re talking to an old Texian, just aiming to rile me.”
Doctor Walker shook his head then, hopelessly; he turned to Leslie. “Tell me, if you could do whatever you liked here what would you want to do?”
She sat up vigorously and pushed her hair back from her forehead. Her face was sparkling, animated. “I feel better. I feel wonderful. Do you mean exactly whatever I’d want to do forever—or for a week, perhaps?”
Doctor Walker, neatly packing his stethoscope, looked at Bick Benedict. “Let’s start with a week.”
Bick had been standing at the foot of the bed, his eyes intent on her. Now he came to the side of the bed and sat down and took Leslie’s hand. Absent-mindedly he ran his thumb over the narrow band that was her wedding ring. “Hardly anybody in the world can do exactly as they please for a week.”
“Why not! If no one else is hurt by it.”
Then, simultaneously, as though rehearsed, the two men asked, “What do you want to do?”
The three laughed, tension snapped, the doctor’s visit took on an air of coziness. Leslie smoothed the coverlet with her free hand, her face serious and thoughtful. She raised her eyes to the window and the brazen sky, she glanced at Doctor Tom Walker and then her eyes came to rest in Jordan Benedict’s eyes.
“I want to go into the kitchen and cook two chickens—pan-roast them—a quick broil first to brown and then a slow oven. Delicious. In butter and a strip or two of bacon for flavor. I want to whip up a meringue. With strawberries on top. Are there strawberries in Texas?…I want to go to Benedict and walk in the town and look in the store windows and I want to see the side stree
ts where people live in their houses…. I want to have the piano tuned…. I want to see the Alamo at San Antonio…. I want to learn to speak Spanish…. But most of all I want to go with you, Jordan—I want that more than anything—to go with you and see what you do. I promise not to bother you—just to have someone show me and let me see and learn about the ranch…. And I’d like to talk—I mean good talk with all kinds of people at dinner and after dinner…and books…and flowers in the house…”
Bick’s brow was furrowed. “Look, Leslie honey. You’ll do all these things in time. But why not just relax for a while and take things as they are. Don’t you think so, Doc?”
The slight figure in the rumpled linen suit stood looking down at the two seated there on the bed, hand in hand and miles apart. Slowly he tore into small scraps the prescription he had so recently written, he gathered the bits neatly in his palm and, walking over to the desk, he let them sift slowly out of his fingers into the wastebasket. “I think Leslie’s prescription is better than this one. I’d advise you to try it…. Well, I’ll be getting along.” He stooped for his bag. Then, without glancing over his shoulder he said, “Come on in, Miss Luz. The diagnosis has been made, there’s nothing wrong. Just a rush of ambition to the ego.”
And there was Luz Benedict, not at all embarrassed at being caught. Doctor Tom looked at her, he quirked one eyebrow. “You weren’t eavesdropping, were you, Madama?”
“There’s no call to get personal, Tom Walker. I’ve got a right to know in my own house——”
“What a word—eavesdropping,” Doctor Walker continued ruminatively. “Eaves. Dropping. Hanging over the roof to the eaves’ edge, to listen at the window. Or perhaps beneath the window where the eaves used to drip. Eaves dripping, perhaps it used to be. A word caught here and there, drip drip…”
“What in the world are you taking the stump about?” Luz demanded.
But now the three seemed again as unconscious of her presence as when she had been lurking, unseen, in the hall. “What do you think, Doc?” Bick Benedict asked again, worriedly.
“I’m a man of medicine. Are you asking me as a physician or as an average intelligent man with a wife and three children?”
“Both.”
Tom Walker leaned against the doorway, his bag in his hand. “I’d say, as a man and a doctor, there’s nothing Leslie wants to do that isn’t good and proper and even mighty helpful and shows the right spirit in a young wife. She wants to go into her kitchen and cook. Well what’s wrong with that! She wants to learn about her new home. She wants to see the sort of work her husband does, and how he does it. She wants to acquaint herself with the town in which her husband has lived all his life and in which she will spend the rest of her days. She wants to play the piano and talk about things of the mind and the emotions. She wants—what was that other thing?—oh, yes, she wants to learn something of the history of the most colorful and dramatic and ornery state in the United States of America. If there were more wives like that——”
“I run this house.” Luz Benedict’s voice was high and shrill. “Her house! Her kitchen! I should think anybody’d be glad to have all that responsibility taken off them. She can’t even speak Spanish——”
“I forgot that one,” Tom Walker put in, but she went on, unheeding.
“—they would make out that they don’t understand English the way they do when they don’t want to understand or do something. Whyn’t you just relax,” she demanded, turning directly to the girl, her voice taking on a wheedling note. “Bick and me, we just want for Leslie here to have a good time.” She apparently was addressing Doctor Tom Walker but her eyes were on Leslie. “She ain’t real strong, you can see that. And look at what happened at the barbecue, just toppling over like a person dropped dead.” This last with a certain relish. “Poor delicate child, so ganted.”
Leslie, sitting up in bed, seemed now to tower as she sat. She flung the bedclothes aside and swung her long legs in a decorous arc so that in one swooping movement she had got out of bed, was standing in her nightgown, had thrust her arms into her robe and was wrapping it about her with the air of one who buckles on a coat of mail.
“Luz Benedict,” she said, very distinctly. “I’m not going to behave like Dora in David Copperfield, I’m not the crushed little bride in a Victorian novel, and you’re not going to behave like a fantastic combination of Rosa Dartle and Aunt Betsey Trotwood——”
“We don’t read Dickens in Texas,” Doctor Tom interrupted.
“I don’t want to take your place, Luz Benedict, but I won’t have you take mine, either. I know I can’t take over this huge house twenty-four hours after I’ve come into it. I don’t want to, yet. But I won’t be a guest in my husband’s house, I won’t pretend I’ve just dropped in for a meal like those people at breakfast yesterday—or was it today—I’m all mixed up, it seems days ago.”
“You see,” said Luz.
Bick came to Leslie, he held her to him. “Leslie honey, you’re tired and upset and you don’t seem awfully strong——”
“Look here. Listen a minute.” Tom Walker had an edge to his speech now, very unlike the soft casual tone of a few minutes earlier. “What are you trying to do? Break her down! Let me tell you something. This girl is as wiry as a steel spring and as indestructible. She’s sound and strong and she’ll bounce back when you two big high-blood-pressured people are wondering why you feel so tired after eating all that beef. You let her do as she rightly pleases.” He picked up his bag again and turned toward the door, then he wheeled and turned back, his mouth smiling but his eyes serious. “And Luz, I’ve known you long enough to be sure that when you go in for that Texas homesy folksy lingo you sure got your kettle on fur somebody to git scalded. Honey.” He made for the door, one hand held high in farewell. “Call me if you need me, any hour of the day or night.” He was gone. Bick was after him. “Tom! How about a drink or a cup of coffee?”
And Tom Walker’s voice from the stair well. “Next time, Bick. Lot of people to see, they think they’ll feel better if I look at them, it’s all in the mind.” You heard the snort of his car in the drive.
The two women in the bedroom looked at each other. “That’s all right,” Luz said meaninglessly. Her usual high color was drained away now and Leslie found herself startled by this aspect, there seemed something sinister in the new white face.
Leslie said, “Let’s have everything clear and open, Luz, and then there won’t be these dreadful hidings and listening and little insinuations. I’m sorry if that sounds rude. I’m just trying to be honest.”
“That’s all right,” Luz said again.
“I’m going to dress now. I feel just fine. It must be nearly dinner time. I’m going down to see what there is in that great enormous ice chest in that great enormous pantry and the one in the kitchen too, and wherever else there is one.” At the look in Luz’s face, “I think I’ll go down right now, in my wrapper, and settle it. No steak.”
13
Bick had said that night, “How about riding out with me after breakfast? Horses, I mean.” Then, at her look of pure joy, “Yes, I know. But I start before daylight and it’s a far piece down there. Dusty and noisy and hotter than today. Roundup.”
“Roundup!” She repeated the word as though he had said Venice—lagoons—gondolas—music—love in the moonlight.
“It’s tough going and you haven’t felt so—yes, I know what Tom Walker said, you’re all set to outlive me in a lot of coquettish black from Bergdorf’s or Neiman’s. But just the same today was a bad time.”
“The barbecue,” she murmured. “Not wishing to seem ungrateful, sir, but the barbecue.”
“We’ll eat from the chuck wagon. Rosendo’s a good cook, I’ve ordered a special—no, I won’t tell you. Anyway, no barbecued calves’ heads. Jett’ll drive you home when it gets too hot, I don’t want you to ride back in the sun. He’ll call for you with the car.”
“Oh, Jordan, it sounds heavenly!”
“I
t isn’t like the movies. Don’t expect romance. What you’ll see is rough.”
She was happy. Even next morning when she wakened to the scent of strong coffee in the blackness and heard the murmur of faraway talk belowstairs she dismissed from her mind the sure knowledge that she was the subject of the conversation over the pre-breakfast coffee in the vast kitchen. Luz and Jordan. Luz talking, talking, Jordan placating. Buzzbuzzbuzz. Mumblemumblemumble. On and on. Defiantly she put on robe and slippers and slip-slapped down to the source of the sound. It led to the kitchen. There they sat at the kitchen table, Luz and Bick, elbows on the table, drinking their coffee before the first fingers of dawn had tapped at the windows. Through the years it continued to madden her that everyone in Texas rose before dawn, reason or no reason. Up early, to bed late, a vestigial custom left over from pioneer days, as useless now as the appendix.
“Good morning!” she cried and then thought, I sound like Mama. “Can I have—uh—I’m having a cup of coffee, too, before I dress.”
Bick was in boots, canvas, shirt. “I was going to wake you when I got up. But I smelled Luz’s coffee so I beat it downstairs first.”
Leslie looked at Luz. She was dressed for riding. “I’ll be dressed in a minute. Jordan and I are riding out to the roundup.”
“I know.”
“I thought we’d better begin to get acquainted. Honeymoons don’t count, you’re on your good behavior. Mm, lovely!” as she sipped her coffee. The Mexican servants were slipping into the kitchen, they made their morning greetings formally and respectfully, first to Jordan Benedict, the mighty male. Buenos días, señor. Buenos días, señora. Buenos días, madama. “Are my riding clothes going to be right?”