by Edna Ferber
Though they spoke lightly they were both terribly in earnest. This was more than a little visit with the family back home in Virginia. This was a long look around. This was a separation in spirit as well as body. These two terribly dissimilar people would not admit even to themselves that they were about to take a cool detached look at the brief tale of their married years, and a long speculative look at the years that stretched ahead.
In the spring she made the trip to Virginia, traveling true to Benedict tradition in a private car with two Mexican nursemaids; Petra her own maid; a welter of trunks, boxes, bags, small luggage; and gifts ranging from a complete Western riding outfit for Lacey including saddle boots hat, to crates of Valley grapefruit and bushels of paper-shell pecans.
Leslie was in a state of chills and fever as the Southwest receded, then the Midwest was left behind and the train approached the Eastern seaboard. Her father. The lovely rambling old shabby house. Lacey. Apple trees in bloom. Rich green grass in the meadows. Her Mother. In exactly that order her longing. Jordy and Luz were dressed within an inch of their lives hours before they reached their destination, managed to ruin this effect, were undressed, dressed again. The safari wound its way out of the train to the station platform in such a brouhaha of squeals shrieks chatter laughter tears Spanish English and Southern sweet talk that Leslie only tardily became aware of the actual presence of her sister Leigh, Lady Karfrey, here in the flesh in Virginia instead of being a voice on the overseas telephone from England.
“Leigh!” Her surprise was less than completely joyous. She looked about her. “Is Alfred with you?” She hoped not, she wanted only for own dear family for this homecoming.
“He’s joining me in a few weeks. Leslie, he’s mad to see Texas.”
“To see Texas!” Leslie repeated with sinking heart. Then, hastily, “He wouldn’t like it.”
But there was no time now to go into this. Jordy and Luz were being kissed, exclaimed over, thoroughly disorganized. Howling, they were carried off by their Mexican nurses who conversed in a torrent of Spanish to the Lynntons’ Negro servants. With the miraculous rapport of the minorities they understood each other.
Mrs. Lynnton said, “Leslie! Your skin!” She said, “Leslie! Your hair!” She said, “Leslie Lynnton, that’s one of your old trousseau dresses. Well, I should think the wife of a husband with three million acres would be able——”
“Only two and a half, Mama.”
Lady Karfrey said, “You travel like an East Indian maharanee. I thought Texas was a republic or a democracy or something. Do all Texans travel with a retinue?”
“Only a few.”
Lacey looked at her gift of the massive Western saddle, the hand-tooled boots, belt, reata, as one would gaze upon an exhibit of prehistoric tribal utensils. The saddle especially fascinated her. “It looks like a rocking chair. And all that carving! It weighs tons, doesn’t it?…What a pommel! Goodness, look at it miles high, what do they use it for—flying the Texas flag?”
Doctor Horace Lynnton said, “Well, Leslie.”
It was she who threw her arms about him and held him close as if he were a child. “Oh, Papa!” He looked so much older than she had remembered him, so much frailer, so much paler and more stooped. “Oh, Papa, you aren’t—have you been well?”
“You’ve been looking at seven-foot beef eaters for two years, all Eastern men will look like albino dwarfs to you.”
He held her off and regarded her with the eyes of a loving father and a great physician. Then he nodded his head as at the conclusion of a satisfactory diagnosis. “You’ve come through it all right. Some scar tissue. But in the main a triumph.”
“Through what?” snapped Lady Karfrey. “One would think she’d been to the wars and back.” Leigh Lynnton Karfrey of the tart tongue had always been tinged with the jealousy of the first-born for the next in years. “What has your darling daughter been through that’s so terrible!”
“Through the first years of marriage. Two children in two years. And Texas. It makes any mere warrior look like a sissy.” Doctor Horace rolled a non-existent pill between thumb and forefinger, an elderly habit that Leslie had never heretofore noticed in him.
In a haze of sentimental remembrance Leslie walked through the lovely and beloved old house. The drawing room. How faded the curtains were. Her old bedroom so tidy now, with the bed head pushed against the wall. It all looked shabbier than she had so longingly pictured it in these past nostalgic years. And smaller. There was the apple orchard in bloom. With the new vision of one who has seen a vast domain equipped with every modern mechanical device she noted that the trees badly needed spraying and pruning and mulching. There in Virginia and Washington and Maryland were the boys and girls—men and women now—with whom she had spent her carefree girlhood and the more serious years of young womanhood during the war. Now they welcomed her with all manner of festivities. Cocktail parties. Hunt balls. Dinner parties. Teas. Receptions. Luncheons. Presidential, ambassadorial, senatorial affairs, quite splendid and formal. Local society affairs, quite the opposite.
“But Leslie, you can’t go to all these things in those clothes!” Even Lacey, of the erstwhile overalls, was scornful of Leslie’s dated gowns. “The new things are way below the knees, and some evening dresses are almost to the floor.”
Mrs. Lynnton took her daughter in hand. “It’s bad enough to have Leigh home for the first time in ten years looking like a frump. But she does it purposely. She tries to out-English the English. They’ve always been dowdy, God knows, but since the war they’ve made a religion of it. Leigh’s brought along enough scratchy old tweeds for daytime and moth-eaten old portieres for evening to make a British country wardrobe.”
“But Mama, you know perfectly well Jordy was born almost on the dot of nine months. I had hardly time to change from my traveling suit to a negligee when I found I was pregnant.”
“Don’t be common, Leslie.”
“Well—uh——” Leslie indulged in a noncommittal grin. “Then just as I’d got myself pulled together and thought I’d go to Hermoso or Dallas on a dress-buying spree——”
“Dallas!”
“You’d be surprised. So then it was Luz. And here I am.”
“Well, Washington’s no place for shopping, heaven knows, but it will have to do. You can’t go to Washington dinners looking as if you were dressed for a hoe-down.”
There was a great deal of talk about a catastrophe called the Crash and a long-lasting condition known as a financial Depression.
This, it seemed, was an emotional as well as a financial condition. People dated things from it as they once used the war as a basis for time computation. Before the war. During the war. After the war. Now they said, “No, we haven’t had one since the Depression…. I used to but that was before the Depression…. He’s been like that ever since the Depression.”
She was having a dazzling time of it. Old friends, new clothes, delicious food; gaiety, amusing talk; girlhood beaux who had not found consolation in her absence. Surprisingly, they all seemed to have learned quite a lot about Texas. Modern Texas.
“How did you know that!” Leslie would exclaim when someone referred airily to the vast Hake or Beezer or Waggoner or King or Benedict ranches; or to Neiman-Marcus in Dallas or the newest skyscraper in Houston.
“Everybody knows about Texas,” they said. “It’s getting to be the fashion. Pretty soon Texans won’t even have to brag any more.”
A newly met acquaintance at a Washington dinner might say, “I know you’re from Texas, Mrs. Benedict. Well, of course we’ve all heard of the fabulous goings-on down there. Exaggerated, I suppose?”
“No. Understated.”
If he happened to be a somewhat stuffy newcomer he would smile uncertainly, scenting a note of sarcasm. Reassured by Leslie’s earnest gaze, he would go on. “But I suppose the Depression has hit you folks down there just as it has everyone else. Wall Street has a long reach.”
“No one ever complains about th
e Depression down there. I don’t think it has touched them. Us. When I left Texas everything seemed as booming as always. If anything, a little more so.”
Her warm and charming smile took some of the edge off this. But the man would glare and then sigh as he drank a mouthful of pleasant dinner wine. “If I were twenty years younger I’d go down there and start all over again.”
After the first two weeks her nostalgic longing was satisfied. She took to visiting Caroline in the kitchen in quest of that gifted woman’s somewhat haphazard recipes. “Yes, but just how much sugar, Caroline?” Or flour or baking powder or butter or lemon. “It’s delicious when you make it, but what are the quantities?”
“A body cain’t be so businessfied about how much this and how much that, Miss Leslie. I just th’ow in.”
Mrs. Lynnton said, “You didn’t come up here to fuss around in the kitchen. If your cook isn’t suitable why don’t you send her away?”
“My cook is a he. Not bad. I’ve tried to teach him a lot of Virginia recipes. But the Mexicans aren’t very gifted with our kind of cooking.”
“A Mexican cook! No wonder your skin looks blotchy. Chili and red peppers and all sorts of strange hot spices. Deathly!”
“Reata food is now considered epicurean. Most of Texas prefers beef cut hot off the steer and flung into the frying pan.”
When at last she encountered Nicky Rorik the conversation and the emotions in which they became involved were something of a shock to both of them. Safely Mrs. Jordan Benedict, mother of two. The Pink Coat was at the point of marrying an attractive rather prim girl of Pittsburgh derivation whose grandfather (not at all hale at the moment) possessed one of the four greatest fortunes in the Western Hemisphere.
Leslie and Nicky relaxed comfortably and had a real talk.
“According to the storybooks,” Leslie said, “I ought to find you pallid and what-did-I-see-in-him. But my goodness you’re attractive, Nicky!”
“If I were to tell you what I feel about you this minute you would leave me sitting here, Leslie.”
“It’s pleasant to know that we both had such good taste. We were almost in love in a nice—or maybe not so nice—kind of way.”
“And then along came that enormous Texan.”
“Not so enormous, really, when he’s stacked up against his native state. Anyway, it wouldn’t have done. No money in the Lynnton family—if you don’t mind my putting it crudely. Is she terribly rich?”
“Fantastic.”
“And very nice, I hear.”
“She is a little like you. A carbon copy, fourth perhaps and not sharp and clear like the original. But like.”
“Your country will be grateful to you. And to her.”
It was all very reassuring. She wondered if she could possibly tell Jordan. No, of course not. Still, it would be pleasant to think about later, perhaps, when she was older and the children had the measles and Jordan was even more matter-of-fact than usual.
Lady Karfrey was proving something of a problem. As the time for Sir Alfred’s arrival was now a matter of days she attacked the business at hand with her usual ferocity, possessed as she was of a drive equal to Leslie’s but with none of Leslie’s charm.
“I’ve been studying up on our Texas, Leslie. I must say you don’t seem to talk much about it.”
“I didn’t think you’d be particularly interested,” Leslie countered faintly.
“Of course I am—as we’re going down I hope. Now tell me, what do you do down there? For society, I mean. I know it’s a ranch, and millions of miles. But what do you do? I mean—concerts plays clubs gardening politics committees? House guests?”
“Uh, no gardening, dearie. Don’t confuse the Texas climate with Kent, England. But house guests, yes. Hordes of house guests.”
“That will be stimulating. But what do you do? All that land and all those cows. You don’t just sit and look at it.”
“Well—uh—people visit, sort of. And everybody drinks a lot of coffee.”
“Coffee!”
“Oh, my poor darling girl!” moaned Mrs. Lynnton, who was sitting over the breakfast crumbs with her two daughters.
“Poor me eye!” Leslie said briskly, to her own surprise.
Lady Karfrey now moved in for the kill. “Alfred always has been fascinated by Texas, he’s mad to have a look at it. His grandfather, you know, had an interest in that vast thing that went bust in the 1870s, wasn’t it? Called the T. and P. Whatever that means.”
“Texas and Pacific Railroad.” Horace Lynnton now spoke from the corner of the veranda off the dining room where he had been smoking his pipe, viewing the Virginia sky through the falling apple blossoms, and listening to the acquired English accent of his least favorite and eldest daughter. “It went bust through Jay Cooke, and those big Wall Street boys in the panic of 1873. A lot of English had money in it. The railroad was to service the big ranches that the English were supposed to buy.”
Speculatively Leslie surveyed her formidable sister. “Just imagine if it hadn’t failed, Leigh. You’d have been the Texan in the Lynnton family. Though I don’t know how you’d have met Alfred.”
“Let’s talk about our visit. When would it be convenient for you?”
“Leigh, we’d love to have you, of course. But I don’t know that you’d like it, really. Alfred isn’t used to—he’d find it too terribly hot after the cool English——”
“Nothing’s too hot for the English,” Leigh Karfrey stated with great definiteness. “Or too cold. Remember India. And Hudson’s Bay. And all that. They just put on a topee or long woolen underwear as the case may be, and thrive. They always have.”
“But you can be frying under the sun at noon and freezing an hour later in a sudden norther. Texas is like that.”
“It sounds absolutely Alfred’s cup of tea,” said Lady Karfrey.
Leslie tried to imagine Sir Alfred at Reata. A chubby little Englishman with a somewhat falsetto speaking voice and a mottled magenta coloring. He doted on good food, had a name as a collector of antiques and bibelots. Christie’s and Fortnum and Mason’s were always sending him special notices.
“Besides,” Leslie said deliberately, “I don’t know when I’m going back.”
There was the silence that follows indrawn breaths. When she had recovered, “Just what does that mean!” demanded Mrs. Lynnton.
“Benedict’s in Washington, isn’t he, next week, that is?” Lady Karfrey marshaled her facts. “He’s calling for you, isn’t he? To take you and the children back? You said.”
“That was the plan.”
“Was!” shrilled Mrs. Lynnton.
Doctor Horace Lynnton stood framed in the veranda doorway. “Want to take a little walk with your old pa, Leslie? I’ve hardly seen you or talked to you since you came. Really, I mean. And now this talk of going back home.” Wordlessly she joined him, she tucked her hand in his arm, close, as they descended the broad shallow steps to the garden. Horace Lynnton’s voice, louder than necessary, came clearly to the undeceived ears of his wife and eldest daughter. “I’ve been at the hospital every day, you’re at some party every night. Next thing I know you’ll be gone. Why don’t you stay until you’re really ready to——”
“Well!” said Leigh Karfrey to her mother. “What do you make of that!”
The somewhat stooped elderly man and the blooming young woman walked close together through the garden, through the orchard, across the meadow and into the woods as lovers would have walked, seeing nothing with the conscious eye. Silent.
When Doctor Lynnton broke the silence it was as though he were continuing a spoken conversation. “Of course it’s something no one can decide for you. But if you feel like talking about it a little.”
“Oh, Papa. I’m so confused.”
“You don’t love him?”
“That’s the terrible part of it. I do. Not only that, I’m in love with him. More than when I married him.”
“But he seems to me to have a first-rate mind, to
o. Not only smart but aware and civilized. And amusing, too, I thought. Amusing is very important after the first years.”
She thought of her mother. Not amusing. She pressed his arm. “Yes, he’s all those things. But he’s got that blind spot. Papa, he and I don’t see alike about a single thing—except unimportant things.
Handsome intelligent sexy ambitious successful vital amusing tender tough. Everything.”
“But——”
“Power-mad. Dictator. His thoughts and energies and emotions are bounded by the farthest fence on the remotest inch of Reata Ranch. He’s not unkind to people. Around, I mean. But to him they’re only important in relation to the ranch, his life, Texas. He’ll never change.”
“No, we don’t change.”
“We?”
“Dedicated men. Men primarily in love with their work. Like Bick. And me.” As she stared at him, peered into his face open-mouthed, like a child: “Leslie, your mother talked the same way. Poor girl, she’s had a thin enough time of it too all these years while I’ve been pouring myself into the laboratories and hospitals. She’s had what was left, and it wasn’t much. It was unreasonable of me to expect her to understand. So I took it out on you girls. I tried to make you conscious of the world. Your mother never changed. But neither did I.”
“Jordan will never change. I know that now.”
“No. But you’re forgetting something.”
“What?”
“The world will. It’s changing at a rate that takes my breath away. Everything has speeded up like those terrific engines they’ve invented these past few years. Faster and faster, nearer and nearer. Your Bick won’t change—nor you—but your children will take another big step. Enormous step, probably. Some call it revolution but it’s evolution, really. Sometimes slow sometimes fast, horrible to be caught in it helpless. But no matter how appalled you are by what you see down there in that strange chunk of the United States, still, you’re interested. Aren’t you?”
“Fascinated. But rebelling most of the time.”