by Edna Ferber
But they shook their heads, they placed the bowls again on the tray, Lupe, the older, spoke in Spanish as always, her voice low but vibrant with insistence. Leslie caught a familiar word or two—“patata…con carne…señor…” The señor likes potatoes always with his meat. All right. I’m being quite a clever girl, she thought, with my new Spanish. She smiled, she nodded, she urged them from the room. She busied herself with the trays.
The bathroom splashings and puffings had ceased. He emerged, his face seemed clearer, younger, the sagging lines were partly erased.
“What’s this?” he asked as before, viewing the table with distaste.
“It’s chicken,” she said briskly. “I ordered it cold and they brought it hot. This is potato, I can’t imagine why, and that’s some sort of dreadful greens. And this is your wife. Remember?”
She came to him, she stood before him, she placed her cool slim hands on his cheeks. He bent his head and kissed her perfunctorily and walked away from her and seated himself in a chair by the window away from the food.
“A drink,” she said. “You can have bourbon or you can have champagne, one or the other. You can’t have both because one is grain and one is grape and they say you mustn’t mix them. The French say so.”
He looked down at his hands, he turned them over and inspected his palms as though expecting to find there something fresh and interesting. “The French, huh? They sure ought to know. You’re hell-bent on civilizing me, aren’t you?”
“Champagne I think,” she said, and plunked ice into the glasses to cool them and gave the bottle a twirl. “Bourbon lasts longer but champagne’s quicker. Open this, will you, dear?”
“Celebrating, aren’t you?” he said, his eyes ugly.
I’m going to take over now, she told herself. I’m going to go right straight through. I’m going to jolt him out of this.
“No. I just wanted to make you eat a little and rest a little because if you don’t you’ll be ill. And because I love you. I wasn’t thinking of Luz at the moment.”
He passed his hand over his forehead and brought the hand down and wiped its palm on his handkerchief. “I didn’t mean—I’m all mixed up today.”
“But now you’ve brought it up, the truth is that it was Luz or us. And it is better that it was Luz.”
He brought his head down to his two clasped hands. She came to him and knelt on the floor and put her hand on his shoulder.
“Jordan, after this is over and everything is quiet, Jordan darling, couldn’t we close this house or just use it for guests or something—there are so many here all the time—couldn’t we open the old house—the little Main House—and live in that, you and I?”
“Why? What for?” He had raised his head. He was listening.
“I like it. It’s a house. I’d love to live in it.”
He looked around at the room now, she saw that his mind was looking at the rooms and rooms and rooms that made up this fantastic pile rearing its bulk on the plains. “What’s the matter with this house?”
“It’s like living in a big public institution. It’s got everything but high stone walls and sentries. It’s Alcatraz—without charm. And then those miserable shanties down there where the Mexicans live.”
“I noticed your nigger cabins in the dear old South weren’t so sumptuous.”
“I know. But neither are the sumptuous old mansions sumptuous any more. The South has been busted for almost a century. And Texas is booming. Papa says that twenty-five years from now the cabins and the mansions will disappear in a new industrial——”
“Forget what Papa says.”
“All right. Your father built this house. Do you feel sentimental about it?”
At last he was jolted out of his numbness. He stood up as though jerked to his feet. “I hate it. I’ve always hated it. Ma hated it too. The only person who likes it is—was—Luz.” His head drooped again.
Now! she thought. “I want our son to be born in the little old house.”
“Son!” he shouted.
“It’s just bound to be a son. No real Benedict would consider anything but a male first child. And I want him to be born in the house where his father was born.”
16
The Girls said she ought to get away. “It’s fierce here July and August, even for us Texians, and we’re raised on it.” Proudly they quoted astronomical Fahrenheit figures. “Your condition and all, Leslie.”
“My condition’s fine. Fine and normal. My adrenal glands are working like a pumping station, Doctor Tom says. I’m a mass of energy.”
“Yes, but just you wait,” they predicted darkly.
“I’ll have to. Unless they’ve modernized that old nine months schedule. It’s odd, isn’t it? but the heat seems to stimulate me in some crazy ways. Jordan says I whirl so fast that he has to go out in the pasture and look at the big windmills to rest his eyes.”
The Girls fancied the local custom of dropping in for coffee and conversation at ten or eleven in the morning. They arrived with their hair in pins, they sat they talked they drank gallons of coffee. Or they telephoned in the morning. They sat at the telephone and talked and drank coffee. These time-wasting habits drove Leslie to quiet desperation.
Mr. and Mrs. Jordan Benedict were moving out of the Big House and into the old Main House. The County rocked with the news. Together Bick and Leslie were supervising the reconstruction of the ancient dwelling. But it was Leslie who majored in the project. Leslie had plans to redecorate and refurnish from eaves to root cellar. She whisked about all day with rainbow-hued swatches of cloth in wool silk canvas felt denim linen chintz dangling from her fingers, stuffing her handbags, pinned crazy-quilt-fashion to the front of her dress. She knew exactly what she wanted, her decisions were almost instantaneous, her taste unerring, but no one was safe from her happy plans. It was as though she were giving a huge party and wanted everyone to share in the entertainment.
“Do you think this blue is too deep? Too Mediterranean? I want it to be the color of the Texas sky. That washed grey-blue…. This pale yellow is just right against it, don’t you think? The lemon-yellow of the huisache in the spring…. What a time I had finding this pale green, just the shade of the mesquite. Jordan says he’s spent billions trying to blast the mesquite off Reata and now I’m bringing it into the house…. Is this the color of mountain pinks? I’ve never seen them but if Jordan takes me up to Holgado later perhaps they’ll still…”
Bits of paper flapped in the wind. Daubs of paint waited for approval on newly plastered walls. Chairs chests tables beds appeared remained or vanished. Leslie carried notebooks and a six-foot metal measuring tape that sprang out at you like a snake, whirring and rattling. Her supercharged energies encompassed Spanish lessons as well. She had discovered in the town of Benedict a sad-eyed professorial man of middle age who worked in some obscure capacity at the Ranchers and Drovers Bank.
“Pure Spanish,” Bick assured Leslie. “Oñates got no Mexican in him. He’s as Spanish as Alfonso and darned near dates back like a Habsburg, too. His people have been in Texas practically ever since North America cooled off.”
Fascinated, Leslie asked, “How many millions of acres does he own? He looks so defeated, though.”
“Not an acre.”
“But why!”
“Oh, you’re still that Why Girl. Uh, the Oñates sold their Spanish land grants a century ago.”
“Mhm,” she said musingly. She supplemented the Oñate hours with alternate lessons in the more colloquial Mexican-Spanish lessons given her by the new schoolteacher who now ruled in Cora Dart’s place. “Señor Oñate’s Castilian Spanish is all very nice in Madrid court circles but I notice that when I go lisping around the Mexicans don’t know what I’m talking about. Though all you need to do, really, is to speak Texan.”
“What d’you mean, Texan?”
“Even if you don’t know a word of Spanish you can’t talk to anyone on Reata—to anyone in Texas, for that matter—five minutes withou
t using words borrowed from the Spanish. Or Mexican. How about Reata! Retama. Remuda. Corral. Ranchero. Stampede. Mesa. Canyon. Rodeo. Corral. Sombrero. Pinto. Thousands of words.”
“Well, naturally. Everybody knows that.” He regarded her fondly. “You really feeling all right, Leslie?”
“Simply superb. And so do you.” Yes, you, she thought. We’re happy, normally naturally happy, because a woman named Luz Benedict is dead, and it’s much healthier to admit it, but he won’t or can’t yet.
He laughed. “Me! Well, that’s different. I’m not exactly uh——”
“Yes you are, in a way. Because you’re in love with me and I’m in love with you. We’re one. We’re three in one, really. What you feel I feel, what I feel you feel, you’re really as pregnant as I am.”
“Say, honey, for a girl brought up the way you were you’re pretty rough-talking, aren’t you?”
“Rough? It’s a biological fact that two people in love——”
“All right all right all right! Suits me fine. Say no more.” His arms about her, his vital being engulfing her.
Leslie and Vashti now had a common bond. These first weeks of pregnancy were not, however, flattering to Vashti. The Hake glands did not adjust as skillfully as did the Lynnton. Panting and uncomfortable, Vashti eyed her enceinte neighbor with an expression as near resentment as her naturally placid features could convey.
“Lookit the way you look, and then me. It’s made you pretty, almost, your complexion and eyes and all. I got spots and my hair is stringy no matter what I do with it, and you don’t even show. I look seven months instead of seven weeks. Pa doesn’t even believe that Pinky and I behaved right before we were married, he says.”
“It’s because I’m tall and skinny,” Leslie assured her. “What you all call ganted. Never mind. We’ll both look worse before we’re better.”
But Vashti, moist and lumpy, was a disconsolate heap in one of Leslie’s bedroom chairs. She sipped her ubiquitous coffee. “It’s all I can do to sit up, let alone run around the way you do. Run run run with all those samples and stuff. What do you want to go and live in the little Main House for anyway, honey? It looks like a bad old mill. All these lovely rooms here in the Big House, it’s a palace. Compared to it that old Main House is a Mexican shack.”
“Palaces have gone out. Like the people who used to live in them.”
Jordan the erstwhile glum bridegroom, Jordan of the knotted brow and the tense jaw, relaxed in this atmosphere of bustle and change and anticipation. He laughed at her, fondly. “You’re trying to make Texas over into Virginia, honey. Next thing you’ll have me riding in one of those red coats and some big old bull will come along and tromp me to death.”
“Why are you Texans so afraid of anything that’s beautiful or moving! You’re all still stamping around with a gun in one hand and a skillet in the other. You’re still fighting Indians and Mexicans and orange soufflés. Give up. Adapt yourselves. They’re here to stay.”
He shook his head, hopelessly. “I should have known. That very first morning up there in Virginia when you came down to breakfast blinking like a lighthouse pretending you were wide awake and used to getting up early. Talking a streak about Texas. You’d never heard of it until you reached out and grabbed me.”
“My knight in shining armor! Shining, that is, if I use enough Brillo.”
Grinning he regarded her and his smile faded. “Do you know what? I think you need to get away. How would it be if you took a breather somewhere cooler with Adarene, maybe, or Vashti?”
“Darling, you don’t know very much about wives, do you? I don’t want to go anywhere until I’ve finished the house. And when I do go I want to go with you.”
“I’m up to here in work.”
“You always will be. Me too—I hope. But I’d like to see lots of places. San Antonio and the Alamo that they’re always talking about.”
“I know. But hot there now.”
“Just a day or two. And then we could go up to Uncle Bawley’s in the lovely mountains. Mountains!”
“Girls aren’t invited to Uncle Bawley’s.”
“This one is.”
“No!”
“Yes! Remember he left two minutes after the funeral? He came over to me with his eyes streaming and said, ‘Along about July you get Bick to bring you up to Holgado. No women as a general thing, but you’re different.’ I’ve never been so flattered. And some of those Washington boys weren’t bad at it.”
“In July it’s likely to rain up there in Jeff Davis County.”
“Oh, it’s that Davis!”
“High up there at Holgado, a mile high some places, the nights are cool.”
“It sounds heavenly! Jordan, can’t we plan to go perhaps by mid-summer? The house will be set and the ranch can run itself for a little while—all these millions of people on it, somebody must have some sense besides yourself. Anyway, I’m supposed to have whims now, and be humored.”
Chip-chip clink-clink hammer-hammer went the tools of the workmen as they pierced the rocklike clay walls of the old Main House, transforming small dark rooms into luxurious bathrooms, adding servants’ quarters, devising closet space, building the wide veranda that Leslie stubbornly insisted would be like an outdoor dwelling added to the house itself. “I won’t sit indoors all day, like a cave dweller. And it will be cool, with this everlasting breeze, if we shade it and plant a sun-shield of trees, and lots of vines and have everything cool canvas in pale greens and pinks and blues. They do it in the tropics. Why not Texas!”
The old house had originally been built by slow hand labor, its stone and adobe walls were two feet thick, its window embrasures were cavernous, even the fierce shafts of the brush-country summer sun could not pierce this century-old fastness. It was cooler than the Big house ever had been.
Luz Benedict gone. Jett Rink gone. Cora Dart gone. Harmony. Peace. Home. The Big House became to Leslie as impersonal as the Vientecito depot. Guests came, went, it was like an hotel without a room clerk or a cashier’s window. Sometimes—not often—Leslie found herself watching a doorway, listening for the quick tap-tap of scurrying boot heels, dreading to see the small vigorous figure, to hear the strident domineering voice dictating plans to the carpenters and painters. Leslie sensed that Bick, too, sometimes listened and held his breath. At such moments she would come to him and slip her arm through his and look up into his face. And she would say, as she had on her honeymoon, “I’m having a lovely time.”
Almost fearfully he would bend his head to her lips. “Me too, honey.”
“I feel as creative as Leonardo da Vinci, what with the baby going on inside and the house going up outside.”
Her letters home were chatty and high-spirited…. I don’t want to come back home for a visit now with my figure like a grampus and it’s no good your coming here at this season it’s howling roaring hot but somehow I don’t mind I feel so very vital that I’m scared the baby will turn out to be an acrobat…. No Mama dearie don’t send a complete layette from Best’s there are really good shops here in Houston and Dallas and Hermoso though I haven’t seen them yet, and even in Vientecito near by…. Besides, they have showers here, I don’t mean Rain Showers I mean Baby Showers, the Girls give you Baby Showers and bring bootees and bibs and rattles and knitted gips…. Everything is different here you must see it. I am beginning to understand it a little. Some of it is wonderful and some of it is horrible, but perhaps that is true of any place—San Francisco California, or Chicago Illinois, or New York New York. But this isn’t only an outer difference. You know how these things interest me, Papa. Your fault, I’m afraid. It’s a difference that has to do with the spirit. Goodness, that looks awful on paper. So smug…. Doctor Tom says I can ride and walk and exercise as usual but no one walks…. We are going to a great Fiesta in Vientecito it’s an annual thing, they never have bazaars or fairs or exhibitions in Texas it’s always a Fiesta and everything’s very Spanish or very Mexican or both and yet the real Mexicans a
ren’t allowed to…
Not gradually, but quite suddenly, she felt that she belonged. She was part of the community. Her unabated curiosity about every aspect of Reata ranch life and the life of the town and the county and the far-flung state itself was a source of mingled amusement and irritation to Bick. He would greet her with a groan and, “Here’s that Why Girl again,” when she appeared at unexpected moments in unlikely places; when he and Gill Dace, the chief vet, were deep in some bovine experiment at the ranch lab; or in the midst of one of the rare sales of choice Benedict breeding bulls, attended by only the most serious and solvent stockbreeders within a radius of five hundred miles.
In the evening Bick would say, “Look, honey, what did you want to come down to the tent for! Hot and all that dust and yelling around. That’s no place for a woman. In your condition.”
“My condition’s simply elegant and I don’t even look out of drawing yet. Anyway, Luz used to take part in all that, didn’t she?”
A muscle in his cheek twitched. “That was different.”
“I’ll never huddle in the harem and nibble poppy seed and sew a fine seam. You knew I was a nosy girl when you married me. I didn’t deceive you, sir. From the first moment we met I couldn’t have been more unpleasant.”
“True, true,” he murmured. “I only married you because I hoped I could slap you around and bully you into being my ideal little woman.”
“Your mistake. You’re stuck with it. Anyway, you know you’re crazy about me.”
Half in earnest, “Only your grosser side. That fine mind you inherited from your father is pretty damn repulsive. In a woman, that is.”
“It’ll come in handy when we’re old gaffer and gammer.”
Up and down the ranch. In and out of Benedict. The tradesmen and the townspeople recognized her and greeted her in open friendly Texas fashion. She drove her own car now, for short distances. The workings of the little town, the pattern of its life, of the county life, of the Texas way of living and thinking, began to open up before her observant eye and her keen absorbent mind.