by Edna Ferber
“Not to me.”
“I think you actually mean that.”
“Damn right I do.”
But this came later. Just now the boy was seven months old. Leslie longed to have her father see him; to show him to her mother and her friends. She began to plan a Virginia visit. “It’s been almost a year and a half. I can hardly believe it. Jordy’ll be all grown up before they see him.”
“Why don’t they all come here for a visit?” Bick suggested.
“I wrote them. But Papa can’t get away just now. Lacey’s got a beau who isn’t safe to leave she says. Mama alone…?”
“You’re right.” Hastily.
“I feel so—I don’t know—kind of listless and no appetite and this morning——” She stopped, struck by a sudden shattering suspicion,
Doctor Tom had made the suspicion a reality. “No!” Leslie, appalled, had rejected the diagnosis. “I can’t! Jordy’s only seven months old!”
“Everything grows fast in Texas.”
“I won’t! There’ll be only—let’s see—nine—sixteen months between them. I won’t!”
“You’re a healthy young woman. It’ll be all right, Leslie. If this one’s a girl you’ll have a nice start toward a real family, all in about two years.” Doctor Tom regarded her with keen kind eyes. “It’s better this way. Something—two somethings—real and important to tie you to Texas.”
Bick had been startled, then hilarious and definitely pleased with himself. “I’ll consent to a girl this time, just to show you I’m no pasha.”
Half laughing half crying, “I’m like one of the Mexican brides. I haven’t even had a chance to wear my trousseau dresses. They’ll be museum pieces.”
“Give them to the Mexican girls around the house.”
“Mama would sue.” A terrible thought struck her. “Now I can’t go home.”
“Next year then, honey. In triumph. With two babies. Don’t forget to show them to that duke or whatever he was, in the pink coat. I’ll bet he couldn’t have——”
“Oh, I wouldn’t be so sure. He seemed to me quite a talented young man.” She felt irritable, restless, trapped. “I wish I could dress up and sit at a restaurant table and hear some music. And even dance, perhaps. I look awful. My skin is like a crocodile’s. I hear that dresses are longer and waistlines shorter and the boyish bob is out. I feel like a squaw.”
“I can’t get away for a long trip now. Anyway, you don’t feel up to it. Tell you what, let’s run down to Viento and stay at the Hake for a couple of days.”
“Hake. If it’s anything like——”
“It’s quite a hotel. Music and the Seville Room and hostesses and a gold-and-marble lobby, all new. Didn’t I ever tell you about the Hake? Besides, this is Fiesta week down there.”
“Crowded.”
“We’ll be all right. We keep a bit suite at the Hake the year round. It’s quite a story. Old Cliff Hake built the hotel to spite the Jaggers outfit at the old Lone Star House. He was staying at the Lone Star and he got good and boiled one night and thought he was back in the old days fifty years ago. He ran out of his own liquor and forgot all about Texas being dry, began shooting up the Coffee Shoppe, poor old maverick, and then he shot his way into the lobby, there was a Baptist Bible Society Convention going on——”
“Oh, Jordan, you’re making this up!”
“Ask Vashti. Ask anybody. After that they wouldn’t give him a room at the Lone Star. Old Cliff was so mad he said he’d build a new modern hotel that would put the old Lone Star out of business and he sure did. The night of the opening he and Vashti led the grand march in the ballroom, you had to dress in Spanish costume, the invitations said Frontier Fiesta, Cliff was drunk as an owl and Vashti wasn’t exactly cold sober. Well, guests began playing hide-and-seek behind those new marble pillars in the lobby, dodging bullets.”
“Poor little man,” said Leslie. “Living in a day that is gone.”
Bick stared. “I wouldn’t put it exactly that way. Cliff was modern as the next one.”
The Vientecito trip was quite a success. Leslie was amazed at the natural beauty of the thriving little city, perched as it was on the high bluff overlooking Vientecito Bay and the Gulf of Mexico beyond.
“It’s dazzling!” she exclaimed as she and Bick drove along the miles of waterfront. “In any other country in the world it would be a Riviera, with casinos and beaches and restaurants and all that dreadful stuff. Miles and miles and miles of waterfront! Jordan, let’s get out and walk. Really walk.”
“Walk! What for?”
“What does anybody walk for!”
“I never could figure out.”
The long promenade was strangely deserted, even the Fiesta crowds only drove briskly by, staring at the brilliant expanse of rolling waters as at some strange and unapproachable phenomenon of nature. Boats bobbed at the piers, sails glinted against the horizon. The man and woman walked alone, two figures against the background of sky and water, no other living thing moved except the swooping gulls and an occasional Mexican fisherman sitting hunched over his crude pole at the edge of the breakwater. The wind blew, it whipped you along if you went with it or buffeted you if you went against it, there was none of the exhilarating salty tang of ocean air.
Leslie drew in a few experimental deep breaths. Nothing happened. “Had enough?” Bick asked.
“Why doesn’t it make me feel terrific?”
“Uh—how would you like to go out in one of the boats? I always keep a boat here and so does Roady. And there’s the speed boat too, if you want to hit it up.”
“Boats. Oh, I think boats aren’t the thing for me just now——”
The bright thriving city was in gala dress. Plump matrons in fringed silk shawls and high combs and mantillas, mahogany giants in costumes that were an impartial mixture of late Texas and early buccaneer thronged the streets, the Hake lobby. Mexican food was dispensed at street corners, signs worded in Spanish proclaimed this attraction or that, there was a gigantic parade which Bick and Leslie and an assortment of unexpected guests (true to the state custom) watched from the windows of the big Benedict suite. Float after float rumbled past, bunting-draped flower-festooned; Spanish costumes, Mexican costumes; charro costumes, vaquero costumes, señoritas, ruffled long-skirted dancers, grandees, pirates, conquistadores, toreros, Spanish music, Mexican music; Miss Charlene “Cookie” Tacker, voted Queen of this year’s Fiesta, held royal court atop a vast moving platform transformed for the occasion from its prosaic everyday aspect as Baumer’s Trucking and Hauling vehicle. Men and women in satins and sombreros astride creamy palominos. The horses, glinting in the sun, looked like mythical creatures in a child’s fairy tale. Skittish quarter horses prancing and sidling. False ferocious mustaches and beards, grandees in goatees.
“You all right, Leslie?”
“I’m wonderful.”
“You don’t want to get all tired out. Maybe you’d better go in and rest for a while. Lie down. This’ll be going on for hours.”
“I love it. After it’s finished—later—let’s go down in the lobby. I want to look at all the people.”
“An awful jam down there. We’d better have dinner served up here.”
“Oh, no! No! I want to have it in the restaurant. It’s—it’s kind of stimulating to be in a crowd again. People, lots and lots of people.”
“Pretty rough down there…. All right all right. I’ll reserve a table. I hope. But it’s late.”
“Never too late for a Benedict,” the dining-room telephone assured him.
The parade the music the clamor the crowds streamed and blared and shouted on and on in the street below. At last, baffled, Leslie asked her question. “But where are the Mexicans? It’s all about Spain and Mexico and old Texas. Where are they? All the people in the parade and even on the streets are what you call—well—Anglo.”
“Uh—oh, they have a celebration of their own another day—a real Mexican Fiesta over in the Mexican part of town.”
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“Mexican Americans who live here in Vientecito?”
“Well, sure.”
“I suppose Coronado and all those conquistadores you’re always naming everything after were one hundred percent white Protestant Americans.”
“You going to start all that again? Come on now, this is Fiesta, Yankee. No fair crabbing.”
The hotel lobby fascinated her. Vast, marble-columned, it was, architecturally, a blend of Roman bath and Byzantine bordello. Gigantic men in boots and ten-gallon hats lolled in the stupendous leather chairs amongst the mottled marble and the potted palms. The Mexican bellboys, slim and elegant in their tight uniforms, agile as eels, were in startling contrast with the monolithic men whose bags they carried, whose errands they ran.
Clearing a path ahead of her, battling his way through the lobby mob…Hi, Bick!…Bick, you old maverick, where you been all these…Howdy, Bick! Say, I’d like for you to meet my wife she’s right over there…. What you doing in this stampede!…
A corner in a far end of the room near a pillar and beneath a gigantic palm. The assistant manager magically produced a chair. Here you are, Mrs. Benedict, right in the middle of the roundup. You want to look out, Bick, she don’t get tromped the way they’re milling around today.
Bick was puzzled. “It doesn’t seem like you, Leslie, wanting to get into the middle of a mob like this.”
“I know. I suppose I’m hungry for people. Crowds of people. Once in a while it’s sort of exhilarating.”
“Will you be all right here for a minute? I’ll just butter up those people in the dining room so we’ll have a decent table. The Beezers are here, they’re going to eat with us, and the Caldwells and Jim and Mamie Hatton—you met the Hattons, remember? At Len’s?”
“Yes, of course.” Brightly. Hattons?
The clamor was tremendous. She enjoyed it. She seemed to draw in through her skin and her senses a kind of vitality from the sheer strength and high spirits that flowed from these sun-soaked beef-fed people. Quietly she sat in her corner in her pretty trousseau dress, a bit snug for her now, and watched the surge and flow of these pseudo-Spanish and mock-Mexican Texans in their Fiesta finery.
“Howdy, Miz Benedict.”
Jett Rink in his good Stetson and his good handmade boots and his clean canvas clothes. “Jett!”
“Yes ma’am. I watched for you to come down. I knew you had to, sometime. I heard you was here. And I was across the street watching the parade, I seen you—saw you—at the window.”
Seen you saw you. The schoolteacher wife. “How are you, Jett?”
“Good.”
“And your wife? I hear you married Miss Dart, the schoolteacher.”
“Not now we ain’t. That’s all busted up.”
She glanced past him toward the dining-room doorway. Jordan would be furious if he found her talking to this boy. She turned her head away. But he stood there before her, staring at her.
“I’m running a rig now. Ain’t you heard? I’m the works, driller and tool dresser and grease monkey all rolled in one.”
“Grease monkey?” She couldn’t resist the question.
“On the oil rig. We’re drilling on my own piece, me and my uncle and little brother. Starting to, that is.”
She rose. “That’s splendid. Good-bye.”
“Huh?” He glanced over his shoulder. “Say, I know Bick’s got his kettle on for me, I ain’t aiming to meet up with him—yet.” He turned his hard relentless gaze upon her, those hot narrow eyes set so close together bored into her eyes. They traveled slowly down her face to her mouth and rested there a moment, then down to her throat, her breast. “I been wanting to see you,” he said, almost humbly.
She brushed past him, she began to push her way through the throng.
“I’ll be seeing you again,” Jett Rink said. It was not a casual farewell. It was a threat.
The crowd closed in on her. She was elbowed this way and that. A hand gripped her arm. “Leslie! I told you to stay till I came back for you.” Jordan’s dear face full of concern for her.
“I didn’t like it there. Hot.”
“The folks are waiting for us. Let’s have dinner early, before the big mob.”
The Seville Room maître d’hôtel turned out to be a headwaitress, brightly blonde and dressed as Carmen. Her kind careworn face beamed a genuine welcome. “Hiyah! Right this way, honey.” In the same breath she speeded a parting guest. “Come back quick!” Her flounced skirts bobbed energetically as she skipped ahead of Jordan and Leslie. And there were the Beezers and the Hattons and the Caldwells, brimming with friendship and warm hospitality. The men had brown paper parcels under their arms, and these they now somewhat sheepishly brought forth as bottles. Carmen hovered solicitously, she beckoned and a Mexican bus boy brought ice and glasses and water.
“Where at’s your castanets, Carrie?” Ed Beezer inquired.
“Never you mind,” Carmen retorted inadequately, her anxious eye on the doorway even as she bent over their table.
“Pay him no mind, Carrie,” Joella Beezer said kindly. “How’s your little girl?”
Carmen momentarily forgot the doorway guests. “Little! Say, you ought to see her! Taller than me, she’s singing in the choir of the First Baptist now, and taking vocal.”
“Well, you got a right to be real proud!”
Bick looked at Leslie. “Well, you asked for it.” His hand sought hers. “I love it,” she said. She dropped her voice. “I love you.”
Carmen, guileless as milk, bustled off to greet the Fiesta diners that now thronged the doorway. Her voice rang above the blare of the big band on the platform at the far end of the room. “Hiyah! Howdy! Sure nice to see you. Right this way, honey!”
Well, Mexican food is the thing tonight, sure enough, they decided. Not as good here as it is in a real Mexican joint, but good enough. What d’you say we start with enchiladas?…
Heartburn. “I think a steak for Leslie here,” Bick said. “Steak all right, Leslie?”
“Fine,” Leslie said. “Perfect.”
The band broke into the measured beat of a tango. Gourds chattered, drums pounded. The little dancing floor in the center of the dining room suddenly was asquirm with posturing figures in mantillas and silks and boleros. Handsome Texas males. Blooming Texas matrons. Dazzlingly pretty Texas girls with their strangely boyish six-foot beaux. The aroma of coffee, the smell of hot spicy food. No dark faces other than those of the Mexican bus boys moving silently from table to table.
Ed Beezer challenged Leslie’s wide-eyed interest in the colorful clamorous room. “I bet you never saw anything like this up North, Miz Benedict. You’d never believe you were in the United States, would you?”
“Never,” Leslie said. “Never.”
21
Even Bick conceded that the girl, from the moment of her birth, was completely a Benedict. She was fair as her brother Jordy was dark, sunny as he was somber. “Well, that’s more like it!” Bick exulted. “Too bad we can’t switch them around, but anyway now we’re really coming through with the strain.” With a cautious caressing forefinger he traced a path down the fragile pink face from brow to chin.
“Luz. H’m? We’ll call her Luz.”
“No!” Leslie cried. “We’ve never even mentioned that among the names we’ve——”
“Yes, but she looks it, though. All that yellow hair and blue eyes and look at that skin! Luz Benedict. Luz. It means light.”
“Not Luz. Not that.”
“What then?”
“You’d think I was some sort of prize cow that has her calf taken away from her after she’s produced it.”
“Wrong. Cows feed their calves.”
“Oh, all right, if that’s the only language you understand. And if it’s light you want we’ll name her Claire. Not Luz. Never Luz.”
“Nothing to get so upset about, honey. You just don’t like Benedict names, that’s all. You were dead against Jordan too, remember?”
“This i
s different. I can’t bear it.”
“All right. I’ll be big about it.” His arms about the woman and the child, his cheek against Leslie’s. He laughed a short grudging laugh of confession. “I guess I’m so set up about these two kids—two new Benedicts for Reata—I won’t admit anybody else has a right to them. Even their mother. My darling girl. My two darling girls…. All right then. Your turn this time. If Claire is what you want then it’ll be Claire.”
But he fell into the habit of calling her Luz. Just a kind of nickname, he said. And in time the child and everyone who knew her forgot that she ever had had another name. Only Leslie remembered. Even she, in time, became accustomed to the use of the name she hated. The child was Luz to the hundreds on Reata, Luz at school, Luz to her friends. She herself forgot the name of Claire and signed herself Luz Benedict. At school in the East she explained, “I was named for my aunt, Luz Benedict. You ought to hear the stories about her! A real Grade B Western movie type.”
The County began to approve of Leslie. In a limited way. Mrs. Jordan Benedict—you know—Bick Benedict’s wife. Yes, she took to Texas like a heifer to cake. You wouldn’t hardly know she wasn’t a Texian born, only little ways. Two children, boy and girl.
Now she longed for a glimpse of her family; for Virginia, for a taste of the easy graceful life of her girlhood. “This is your home. But you talk as if you were homesick,” Bick said.
“I suppose I am. I suppose I will be until I see it again.”
“It’s going to feel mighty funny to me, end of the day, no kids no wife.”
“It will be fine for both of us. We’ve been together every day every night since the day we were married.”
“Isn’t that good?”
“It’ll be better after a few weeks apart.”
“All right, all right. Tell you what, I’ll come up and call for you. I’ll have to go to Washington anyway about that time. That’s what I’ll do. Otherwise you’d probably never come back to this poor old beat-up cow hand.”