Giant

by Edna Ferber

  They stood a moment, Leslie, Juana, the child, in the bright steamy room with its odors of coffee and fried food. “That table in the corner,” Juana suggested. “Perhaps there is a high chair for you, mi vida.”

  “I don’t want a high chair, I am a big boy.”

  They sat down. “What’s keeping Luz?” Leslie said, and tucked in a paper napkin at Polo’s neck which he at once removed.

  “We don’t serve Mexicans here.”

  They did not at first hear. Or, if they heard, the words did not penetrate their consciousness. So now the man came from behind the cash register and moved toward them. His voice was louder now. “We don’t serve Mexicans here.”

  Leslie Benedict stared around the room, but the man was looking at her and at Juana and at Polo. Leslie was frowning a little, as though puzzled. “What?”

  “You heard me.” He jerked a thumb toward the doorway. “Out.” The men drinking coffee at the counter and the people at the nearby tables looked at the two women and the child. They kept on eating and drinking, though they looked at them and glanced with sliding sidewise glances at each other.

  Leslie rose. Juana stood, too, and the child wriggled off the chair and ran to his mother’s side. “You can’t be talking to me!” Leslie said.

  “I sure can. I’m talking to all of you. Our rule here is no Mexicans served and I don’t want no ruckus. So—out!”

  The worried-looking woman behind the lunch counter said, “Now Floyd, don’t you go getting techy again. They ain’t doing nothing.”

  Leslie felt her lips strangely stiff. She said, “You must—be out of your mind.”

  “Who you talking to!” the man yelled.

  Luz came blithely in, she stared a moment at the little group on whose faces was written burning anger; at the open-mouthed men and women at the counter and tables.

  “Heh, what’s going on here!” she said.

  The man glanced at the golden-haired blue-eyed girl, he pointed a finger at the two women and the child, but Leslie spoke before he could repeat the words.

  “This man won’t serve us. He says he won’t serve Mexicans.”

  Even the jaws at the counter had ceased champing now.

  The scarlet surged up into Luz’s face, her eyes were a blazing blue. Leslie thought, with some little portion of her brain that was not numb, Why she looks exactly—but exactly—like Jordan when he is furious.

  “You son of a bitch!” said Miss Luz Benedict.

  The man advanced toward her.

  “Floyd!” barked the woman behind the counter.

  “Git!” shouted the man then. “You and your greasers.” And he gave Polo a little shove so that he lurched forward and stumbled and Luz caught him.

  Luz reverted then to childhood. “I’ll tell my father! He’ll kill you! Do you know who my father is! He’s——”

  “No! No, Luz! No name. Come.”

  As they went they heard, through the open doorway, the voices of the man and woman raised again in dispute.

  “You crazy, Floyd! Only the kid and his ma was cholos, not the others.”

  “Aw, the old one was, black hair and sallow, you can’t fool me.”

  Leslie put a hand through Juana’s arm, she took the child’s hand in hers.

  “Come, children. Sh! Don’t cry!”

  “That is a bad man,” Polo said through his sobs.

  “Yes, darling.”

  “I am hungry I want my breakfast.”

  They were climbing into the car now. “Grandma will sit back here with you. That man didn’t have nice milk to drink. Luz will get out at the next place and she’ll get you a bottle of milk and some crackers and you can drink the milk through a straw as we ride along and you can see the little lamb all the sooner. Won’t that be fun!”

  30

  She had their promise. All the way to Bob Dietz’s ranch and all the way back they had argued. But in the end Luz and Juana had promised.

  “Please,” Leslie had implored them, “please not until after that horrible Jett Rink party is over. Please Luz, please Juana, don’t tell your father don’t tell Jordy don’t tell Bob until after that. You know they’d do something—something hasty, it would get into the papers, it would be all over the state. All those guests at the Big House, and a thousand people going to the party. There’ll be publicity enough. Please just wait until next week, then we’ll all talk about it quietly, together.”

  “Quietly!” shouted Luz. “I’m going to tell Bob the minute we hit the house. He’ll kill that baboon.”

  “Luz, I promise you it won’t be left like this. I promise. But it can’t be now. This is the wrong time. It’s got to be handled through proper channels, carefully. Your father and Gabe and Judge Whiteside.”

  “Judge Whiteside!” Luz scoffed. “That belly-crawler!”

  Quietly Leslie said, “We’re furious because of what that ignorant bigot did. But we all know this has been going on for years and years. It’s always happened to other people. Now it’s happened to us. The Benedicts of Reata. So we’re screaming.”

  “All right,” Luz snapped, “then let’s hit it.”

  “Yes. But not now. Please. Not just now. It’s the worst possible time to make public fuss.”

  And deep inside her a taunting voice said, Oh, so now you’re doing it too, h’m? After twenty-five years of nagging and preaching and being so superior you’re evading too. Infected. Afraid to speak up and act and defy. Hit the rattlesnake before it strikes again. Tell them now, tell them now, what does it matter about the silly guests and the ranch and the oil and the banquet and the talk and the state? It’s the world that matters.

  At six that evening Bick Benedict, sprawled on the couch in their bedroom, regarded his wife with the fond disillusioned gaze of the husband who is conditioned to seeing cold cream applied to the wind-burned feminine face.

  “What the hell went on down there at Bob Dietz’s?” he inquired. “You girls came home as sore-acting as if you’d been scalped by Karankawas. Juana looked as if she’d been crying and Luz stamped past me without speaking. Just glared. Did the two girls quarrel or something? What the hell went on down there, anyway?”

  “Nothing,” Leslie replied. “Just tired, I guess.”

  “Uh-huh. All right, keep your girlish secrets. You don’t look so good yourself, by the way.”

  Leslie continued to pat the cold cream on her cheeks. “Thanks, chum. There’s nothing like a little flattery to set a girl up before dinner.”

  “The boys decided not to stay. Except Uncle Bawley. He’s not going back to Holgado until tomorrow.”

  “Did you finish your business? That private business you were all so cagey about?”

  “Uh, yes. Yes.”

  “I thought you all looked as guilty as kids who were going to rob an orchard. Did it turn out all right?”

  “Fine. Fine.”

  “What was it all about?”

  “Oh, nothing you’d be interested in, honey. Town business. Elections coming up. Stuff like that.”

  Tell him now, the Voice said. Tell him his wife and his daughter and his daughter-in-law and his grandson were kicked out of a roadside diner and it’s his fault and your fault and the fault of every man and woman like you. But she only said, aloud, “We brought the little lamb back with us in the car. Bob gave it to Polo.”

  “You trying to make a sheep man out of a Benedict! Don’t let that get around the cow country.”

  “He insists on keeping it in a box in his bedroom. Juana’s having quite a time.”

  He laughed like a boy at his mental picture of this. Then he fell silent. When he spoke he was serious, he was urgent. “Leslie, I wish they could live here at Reata. Not only little visits like this, but stay. Do you think they might? The kid loves it here.”

  “Of course he does. He thinks it’s heaven. Wouldn’t any child who’d lived in a three-room New York apartment while his father went to school?”

  “Speak to Juana about it, will you?
Maybe if Jordy sees how happy she and the boy are here he’ll leave Vientecito and give up that stinking clinic, settle down here at Reata where he belongs.”

  Agreeably, quite as though she did not know that what he suggested was hopeless, she seemed to fall in with his plan. “Wouldn’t that be lovely! I’ll speak to Juana tomorrow.”

  He sighed with a sort of deep satisfaction as if the impossible were already accomplished. “Let’s have a little drink up here before I have to go down and start arguing again with Uncle Bawley.” After she had given the order, “What’s Dietz’s place like?”

  “Compact as a hairbrush. You wouldn’t know it was Texas. Everything planned to the last inch like a problem in physics. It’s planted right up to the front door. I expected to see grass growing in the house.”

  “Did, huh? See his stock?”

  “Yes. Some. It looked—what’s that word?—thrifty. Bob said it was solid beef cattle, he wasn’t going in for collectors’ items.”

  “Snotty kid.”

  “Let’s be fair. Bob’s more than that. Jordan, maybe this boy has got hold of something so fundamental that it’s enormous.”

  “You sound as if you’d been talking to your daughter Luz. I want to know what you think of him.”

  “Bob’s a fine man. And more than just smart. For the rest, perhaps he’s just a le-e-etle bit too earnest for my taste, and not enough humor. But maybe that’s the mark of future greatness. Great men are usually pretty stuffy. Except you.”

  The Mexican girl came in with the tray and placed it on the table beside him. Bick opened the bourbon, cocked an eyebrow at Leslie, she nodded.

  “That’s mighty pretty talk, missy.” But he was not smiling. “Look. Is she going to marry him?”

  “I don’t know. Neither does she. He won’t marry Reata. I’m sure of that. Not even if he has to lose Luz. And he’s crazy about her. But not that crazy.”

  He put down his glass. “Hey, wait a minute! This is where we came in, isn’t it?”

  “Sort of. We talked a little about her Aunt Luz today. I told her about Luz and Cliff Hake—before he was old Cliff Hake.”

  He got up and began to stride about the room. “Oh, you did, eh?”

  “Yes. I thought she might be interested to know what happens to a woman, sometimes, if she doesn’t marry because of some unimportant thing like a ranch, for example.”

  “She doesn’t want to marry that dirt farmer. Anyway, she isn’t going to. Not if I can help it.”

  “Twentieth century. Remember?”

  Moodily he stared at her. “Oh, let’s forget it. I’m tired. This has been a stinker of a day.”

  Instantly she was alert. “What happened?”

  “Nothing. Everything. After the boys left I sat there talking to Bawley a while. He looked like an old hundred-year turtle, mopping his eyes and mumbling. I love the old goof but he sure can drive you crazy. Talking. He thinks he’s one of the Prophets or something now, the way he talks.”

  “But what did he say that upset you?”

  “Nothing. Nothing that made sense, that is. It was just the whole stinking day. I got to thinking about this damned Rink shindig next week. Bawley said he wouldn’t be seen dead there, oil or no oil. And to tell you the truth I’d rather be shot than go.”

  “That’s wonderful! We won’t go.”

  His shoulders slumped. “We’ve got to. Because everybody’s going. If we stay away we’ll be the only outfit for a thousand miles around that isn’t there. Everybody’s going and nobody wants to—nobody that is anybody. Stay away and we’d be more marked than if we went to the party naked…. To think that cochino could make decent people do anything they don’t want to do!”

  “He can’t. We don’t have to go.” She faced him squarely, hairbrush in hand, she gesticulated with it as she spoke. “You keep on going—we keep on doing things we’re really opposed to. You just can’t keep on doing things against your feelings and principles.”

  Belligerently, “You don’t say! What things?”

  “You’ve just said it. This hideous kowtowing to a thing like Jett Rink. But that isn’t so important. It’s a thousand other things. Oil. And the ranch. And the Mexicans. The bigotry. The things that can happen to decent people. It’s going to catch up with you. It’s taken a hundred years and maybe it’ll take another hundred. But it will catch up with you. With everybody. It always does.”

  “Go join a club,” he said wearily, and turned away from her and threw himself again on the couch, his boots scuffling the silken coverlet.

  She came over to him and sat beside him. “Bick, do you feel ill?”

  He stared at her. “You called me Bick.”

  “Did I?”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know, Jordan. I didn’t know I had.”

  “You’ve never called me that before. Never. Everybody else did, but you’ve never called me anything but my name, since the day we met. Say, that’s kind of funny. Maybe it means you’ve kind of finished with your husband Jordan.”

  She sank down against him, her cheek against his, her arm across his breast. “Jordan’s my husband, darling. Bick’s my friend.”

  “Tell your friend to get the hell out of my wife’s bedroom.” But he was not smiling. He lay inert, unresponsive to her. After a moment he began to talk, disjointedly, as though unwillingly admitting the doubts and fears that for months had been piling up against the door of his consciousness. “I guess it’s kind of got me…the Boys this afternoon screwing around…and the whole damned oil crowd…it’s like any dirty boom town now, Benedict is…. And on top of everything Jordy turning out a no-good maverick…. Oh well, no real Benedict, anyway…. Doctor Jordan Benedict! Can you imagine! Down in Spigtown with the greasers in Vientecito, a shingle on the door right along with a fellow named Guerra…. Juana and the kid…Juana’s all right she’s a decent girl she’s Jordy’s wife Jordy Benedict’s wife and the kid looks like a real cholo…”

  “Darling, don’t say things like that! They’re terrible. They’re wrong. You don’t know how wrong. You’ll be sorry.”

  “Yeh, well I know this much. Things are getting away from me. Kind of slipping from under me, like a loose saddle. I swear to God I sometimes feel like a failure. Bick Benedict a failure. The whole Benedict family a failure.”

  She sat up very straight, she took his inert hand in hers, his brown iron hand, and held it closer to her. “Jordan, how strange that you should say that just today!”

  “Today?”

  “Because today was kind of difficult for me too, in some ways. And I thought, as we were driving along toward home—Luz and Juana and little Jordan and I—I thought to myself, well, maybe Jordan and I and all the others behind us have been failures, in a way. In a way, darling. In a way that has nothing to do with ranches and oil and millions and Rinks and Whitesides and Kashmirs. And then I thought about our Jordan and our Luz and I said to myself, well, after a hundred years it looks as if the Benedict family is going to be a real success at last.”

  As he turned, half startled half resentful, to stare at her, the man saw for just that moment a curious transformation in the face of this middle-aged woman. The lines that the years had wrought were wiped away by a magic hand, and there shone the look of purity, of hope and of eager expectancy that the face of the young girl had worn when she had come, twenty-five years ago, a bride to Texas.

  Giant

  1952

  Considering its enduring popularity, it is hard to imagine the furor that erupted when Edna Ferber published Giant—at least in Texas, where its author was reviled. Banner headlines in Texas newspapers called for nothing short of Ferber’s hanging.

  “The blast of insult, vituperation; the published scatological and libelous outpouring that followed the magazine serialization and the book publication of this novel was something I never before had witnessed,” Ferber remembered a decade after the uproar. “This was savage. It sickened and saddened me. I had written truthfully, se
riously, and with purpose. The book contained no errors of statement, no exaggeration of conduct or character. I had, in fact, felt it necessary to play down or even to eliminate some of the facts and situations and behaviorisms encountered in the violent mores of this unique society. In Texas the truth often is too strange for fiction.”

  Before Doubleday published the book in the fall of 1952, it was excerpted in six consecutive issues of Ladies Home Journal. Introducing the book in the June 1952 issue. Ferber wrote: “Giant is a novel about our world today. Now. It is a novel peopled by imaginary characters who portray, I hope, the manners, mores, minds and emotions of part of that enormous and somewhat incredible commonwealth called Texas…. Today’s Texas is exhilarating, exasperating, violent, charming, horrible, delightful, alive. So Giant is not only a story of Texas today but, I hope, of Texas tomorrow.”

  Prepublication reviews were less than promising. Kirkus said, “It reads like broad caricature of new quick money; I can’t imagine even Texans will like it. It has money-snob-appeal for the masses, but for this reader, it created frank distaste.” Somewhat less harsh, Library Journal called the book “below-par Ferber which may not be popular except with fans…. Book loosely constructed: one-half would have been more effective. However, some fine flashes.”

  Though Giant fared better in the mainstream press, the reviews were decidedly mixed. John Barkham, reviewing for the New York Times, loved the book, saying, “Miss Ferber makes it very clear that she doesn’t like the Texas she writes about, and it’s a cinch that when Texans read what she has written about them they won’t like Miss Ferber either. Almost everyone else is going to revel in these pages…. Giant makes marvelous reading—wealth piled on wealth, wonder on wonder in a stunning, splendiferous pyramid of ostentation.” And Phoebe Lou Adams of the Atlantic echoed these sentiments, saying “Miss Ferber makes no predictions about the future of Texas. She records her views of the state’s present tartly, deftly, with a relish for bizarre details.”

  But a review in the Christian Science Monitor, signed M.S.W., claimed, “To this reviewer, the whole picture seems lacking in perspective, like a candid camera shot taken much too close to the giant structure it is focused upon. There is entertainment in plenty, of course; but the discriminating reader may want to investigate further before deciding upon the book’s over-all validity. Perhaps that is just what Miss Ferber is trying to do, after all.”