Magnolia City

by Duncan W. Alderson

  Garret jumped in beside her, revved the engine, and edged past the Packard. “I’m riding with Mr. MacBride,” Hetty shouted, not giving Nella a chance to say no. They set out into the clear morning, in tandem, the Auburn leading the way. It had a luxurious leather bench, and Hetty had to squeeze rather close to Garret and move her long legs to one side so he could shift the gears. She said a prayer of thankfulness that she’d remembered to rouge her knees.

  She brushed her hat off and whispered to Garret, “Can you ditch my mom?”

  “Now don’t get me into trouble. I’m trying to get into her good graces.” He blipped the throttle. “But I could if I wanted to. When you open’er up, she’ll do eighty easy.” He tapped the dashboard, where a signed plaque certified that the car had been driven 100.2 miles per hour before shipment. He passed a couple of Model Ts along the wide boulevard of Main Street, sailing by the staring faces with that exotic hood ornament leading the way, a naked woman with wings flying before them.

  “What brings a Northwesterner like you to the sultry subtropics?” Hetty spoke into the wind.

  “Need you ask? Same thing that’s bringing thousands here. One magic little word.”

  “Rhymes with royal?”

  “How’d you know?”

  “That’s all my father talks about.”

  “My dad was in copper,” he told her. “But mining’s dead. Along with you and your cotton carnival. Yeah—we’re living in a new golden age, only it’s black gold this time. Why—look what happened at Spooltop.”

  “Spindletop,” she laughed. “I’ll have to educate you about our history.”

  Hetty could see he would need a guide to the local customs. But how could she possibly convey to an outsider what the time before the war meant to Texans? The tales from that era—tales that she grew up hearing—had grown so tall they dwelt on a plane only a little south of Mount Olympus. Her mother had spun them out like fairy stories, glimmering and strange. Once upon a time, she’d been told as a child, in the flat coastal land near the sea, there was something called a salt dome. Hetty had pictured a white mound like a pyramid with the blue Gulf in the distance. This salt dome hid fabulous treasure. From its depths, a black geyser shot into the sky. Spindletop erupted with one hundred thousand barrels of oil a day and took ten days to bring under control, wasting $90 million worth of petroleum. There was so much richness spewing from the earth, those early Texans squandered it.

  Nella had painted these wildcatters as bigger than life, like Johnny Appleseed or Paul Bunyan. They could hear oil flowing underground, she said. They learned how to drill through solid rock. They could tame the heart of the earth itself, bending the elements to their will. And, as a result of these superhuman powers, they grew hugely and suddenly rich.

  “Only in America,” her father the banker used to say, “can a man own the mineral rights to the land. In other countries, these belong to the king.”

  And so the risk takers had made their fortunes before the World War, then migrated to Houston to live like royalty. They built their mansions behind the palatial gates of Courtlandt Place, where magnolia grandiflora trees unfolded huge, glistening leaves over lush Saint Augustine lawns. They ran their empires from skyscrapers that looked like temples: the Esperson Building, the Splendora Tower, the Humble Oil Headquarters. They didn’t have names; they had initials. Or titles like “Chief” Rusk, Lamar’s father, founder of Splendora Oil. He’d been Chief so long, nobody remembered what his real name was.

  “Spindletop?” Hetty glanced at Garret’s profile and sighed. “That was so long ago.”

  “I don’t care. Another oil boom’s coming soon.”

  Hetty couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “Do you really believe that, kiddo?”

  “I hope to tell you!”

  “I’d like to believe it, but my dad keeps telling me all the booms are over.”

  “He’s wrong!” he shouted over the revving of his motor as he outraced the long black car in their wake. “Land on that hill in Beaumont jumped overnight from ten dollars an acre to one million dollars an acre? It’ll happen again—why, did you know the other day Ford built nine thousand new Model As in one day? They all need gas!”

  “You seem to be up on all the latest figures, kiddo,” Hetty said.

  “Got to be.” He tore through the traffic lights at Polk and Dallas, then brushed her legs as he shifted gears to cruise more slowly along the busy stretch of Main.

  Hetty looked behind them. Her mother was nowhere to be seen. She whipped her hair off her face and peeked at Garret out of the corner of her eye. “But hey—I notice you don’t drive a Model A.”

  He smiled back. No, the speedster was his style—gliding like a yacht past the flivvers puttering through the currents of downtown traffic.

  “Pull over here at Everitt-Buelow.” Garret grazed the curb, and Hetty stepped out onto the sidewalk. “What’s the little door in the side of your car for?”

  “Golf clubs. I’d be glad to demonstrate.” He asked her where the best greens were.

  “Here comes my mother,” Hetty said as the Packard pulled up behind them. She twisted her hat on so Nella wouldn’t notice how intently she was peering into the blue eyes that had emerged from behind Garret’s shades. She had to see this man again. “I like to go strolling in the park in the afternoons.”

  “What time?”

  “I don’t know. Before dinner. I’ll be in the sunken garden tomorrow.”

  “It’s a date,” Garret said a little too loudly before he drove away.

  In a moment, she heard Nella at her side chiding, “You didn’t make a date with that man, did you?”

  “Oh, Mother! He gave me a ride in his car, that’s all.”

  The new hat styles were so handy for avoiding eye contact.

  They made their way toward the entrance of the shop, where they were greeted by Everitt-Buelow’s ubiquitous floorwalker, Ellison: “Mrs. Allen, Miss Allen, Miss Allen.” The institution of the floorwalker was one of the amenities of life for Old Houstonians. All the fashionable shops had one, a distinguished white gentleman whose job was to make shoppers feel coddled. Hetty just found his presence intrusive. As if I can’t carry my own bags out to the car! When Ellison opened the door for her on cue, she hesitated.

  “Coming, dear?” Nella asked.

  “I think I’ll walk over to the bank first. I’ll find you.”

  “I thought we were going after lunch—together!” Charlotte said.

  “I want to talk to Dad.”

  “About what?”

  “Mamá!” Hetty strode away.

  As she walked over to Travis Street, it wasn’t hard to spot her destination. Last year, a mirage had materialized in the sky above Houston. Up there in the clouds, thirty-two stories high, a round Greek temple floated in the haze. Twelve ionic columns held it up, at the top of the soaring new Esperson Building. The skyscraper was so tall—taller than anything else in Texas—that a red beacon flashed at night atop a giant bronze tripod at its zenith so planes wouldn’t crash into it. Hetty crossed Travis and stood on the sidewalk at the base of the massive building, tipping her head back far enough so she could see past the brim of her cloche. The struts of the building shot straight up, broken only by encrustations of Italian Renaissance carvings. Even though it gave her vertigo, she loved this view. It reassured her that the modern age had finally arrived in Houston. The city now had a center, a place where the flat prairie could rise up and touch the heavens. “It’s our axis mundi,” Nella liked to say, “our new cathedral.” She steadied herself on a lamppost, then joined the stream of people flowing through the Travis Street entrance.

  Hetty headed for the banking quarters, glad her father’s bank had been one of the first tenants of the building. Just walking through the lobby made her feel flush. Everywhere she looked, there was some flourish, some elegant inlay—“four million dollars of Esperson oil money!” her father liked to boast with a kingly wave of his hand—lavished on every
last detail.

  Once inside the banking quarters, Hetty walked up to a teller cage and dropped her handbag on the marble counter. She pulled out her black leather passbook. CITIZEN’S BANK OF SOUTH TEXAS flashed at her in embossed gold letters. She opened it. Inside, Esther Allen was written in elegant calligraphy beside the words “In account with.” This had been given to her by Kirby after her coming out, along with a stipend of thirty dollars a month. All she had to do was present this at one of the tellers and she could withdraw as much as she needed for spending money each week. “Don’t want a daughter of mine doing without,” he told her and Charlotte.

  “Five dollars, please.”

  “Of course, Miss Allen.” The teller entered the amount under the withdrawals column, balanced the account, swatted it with a rubber stamp, and scribbled his initials. Fawning over her, he handed the passbook back with five crisp new dollar bills tucked inside. She gloried in the whole ritual, the gold letters, the name Allen written in swirls of calligraphy that swept her right back to her iconic ancestors, John Kirby and Augustus Chapman Allen. Across the banking floor, she could see her father enthroned at his desk beside the stainless steel vault.

  Hetty made her way to the back of the tellers’ cages and waved at the coin boy, Lonnie. He opened the gate and admitted her into the inner sanctum of the banking floor.

  “I’d like to see my father,” she told him.

  “Yes, ma’am.” They dodged a cart of ledgers rolling by on wheels as he led her up to Kirby’s wide walnut desk. She sat down and looked across at her father, knowing better than to try and kiss him in front of the staff. He’d brush her off with a whispered “Decorum!” Barking an order at a teller in the vault, he pivoted around, far too stout for the desk chair that groaned underneath him.

  “Princess!” He flashed her a quick smile, then shouted, “Lonnie, how many bags of coins have you rolled this morning?”

  “Four, sir.”

  “I would have had six done by now. Speed it up!”

  “Yes, sir!” Lonnie scrambled back to his station.

  “He can’t keep up with you, Dad. You were the best coin boy ever.”

  “I set records that have never been broken!”

  “And you never let anyone forget it.”

  “Never.”

  A bookkeeper drew his attention away for a moment. Hetty glanced around at the bustle. Although Kirb had a private office in back, he rarely used it. She always found him out here, manning this command post in the war of affluence. His ears seemed to crave the dissonant music of money changing hands, the clacking of adding machines, the tinkle of coins in the Brandt manual cashier, the snap of bills being counted. On his desk sat his Edison stock ticker with the ticker tape streaming down to the floor and curling in a pile. Next to that, two pictures in gilded frames: the famous one of King Edward in his ceremonial robes and Kirb’s wedding portrait, with Nella as the perfect Gibson Girl.

  “By the way, Dad,” Hetty said once he turned back to her. “I was telling a friend how Mr. Esperson got his start.”

  Kirb squinted at her. “Why this sudden interest in oil? You usually act bored when I talk about it.”

  “I guess your little girl’s growing up.”

  “About time. Well . . . tell your friend, the first thing he’s got to do is get himself a lease in an oil field. Esperson had one right up on Moonshine Hill in Humble. That was the easy part. Then he had to talk a banker into loaning him money.”

  “You?”

  Kirb shook his head. “Union National.”

  “So it’s just that easy? ABC?”

  Kirb’s paunch shook with a deep belly laugh. “Easy? He drilled one dry hole after another. Four or five as I remember.”

  “And they kept giving him money?”

  Kirb shrugged.

  “Why?”

  “They loaned on a man’s character back in those days.” Then her father crooned his favorite words: “Before the war.” A new light came into his gray eyes as he gazed over her head into the far reaches of his memory. Kirb nursed an unwavering nostalgia for the lost years of his youth, not a golden age in his mind but a silver one, polished and genteel, an Edwardian order untarnished by the hot breath of modernism. “That was before your generation, of course.”

  “Oh, we’re just finishing the job your generation started.”

  “No, no, you can’t blame this on us. We knew the rules.”

  “Rules?” Hetty waited while he stared her down. “For instance . . . ?”

  “For instance, not bringing liquor into the cotton carnival.”

  “Well, thank God you were there to restore order promptly, Dad. Civilization can continue.”

  “But then your mother finds you in a hotel room with that fellow?”

  “Well, not alone.”

  “Don’t split hairs with me, Esther. You know it’s not allowed. All your mother and I are trying to do is maintain some decorum. For your own good.”

  “I know. I’m sorry, Dad. I guess I’m like Lonnie. I can’t keep up with you.”

  Kirb chuckled. “You might be surprised. I got into my share of mischief when I was at Rice. But I knew how to keep up appearances. Your generation goes too far.”

  “Let’s just say we have a different idea of how far too far is.”

  “Be careful, Esther. That’s all I ask. Remember, you’re an Allen. People are watching.”

  “It’s a deal, Dad. Now . . . how about I make it up to you?”

  Kirb’s eyebrows lifted in expectation.

  “What if I found you the next Mr. Esperson?”

  He laughed derisively. “These boys today?” Leaning back in his desk chair, Kirb unbuttoned his suit coat and snapped his striped suspenders. “I haven’t met a young man in years I’d bet on.”

  “Well, Dad, maybe you will.”

  Maybe you already have, she thought.

  The next afternoon, Hetty planned her strategy for sneaking out to meet Garret. She peered down the hallway outside her room and saw at a slant Nella’s postigos, ancient colonial doors from Mexico with little barred windows too high up to peer through. That means she’s home, Hetty thought. If Nella left the apartment, the postigo doors were locked; only she and Kirby carried a key. No one saw what was behind those doors, not even her best friend Lockett. As far as Hetty knew, Lockett had never been that far down the hallway.

  Hetty strolled into the kitchen and came back into the drawing room carrying a glass of water. Nella sat in her black-enameled armchair cutting the golden twine off a package wrapped in fine linen rag.

  “Oh, Aunt Cora,” Hetty said, recognizing the carton. Every few months, Nella’s only sister would ship her four bottles of a mysterious liquor without any label on it, nestled in raffia.

  “Yes, it came in today’s post.”

  Hetty strolled back into the shadows where she could only see her mother’s hands, light glinting off the bottles as Nella raised them from the box. She immediately opened one. Hetty breathed a sigh of relief. When these packages arrived from San Antonio, Nella would sit here for a day or two sipping out of a snifter, getting quietly drunk. She held her liquor well—most people wouldn’t notice any difference, but Hetty would. Her mother started going adrift, staring off into space and humming to herself old ballads in minor keys. Scraps of golden twine would litter the floor. Kirb would join her when he got home from the bank. Dinner would be late. Then it would all be over until the next bottle was opened. Hetty smiled, edging her door closed as she heard the first splash trickling into a nearby snifter.

  An hour later, Hetty threw on a long strand of pearls, grabbed her shoulder bag, and walked through the drawing room to the front door. From the armchair, Nella looked at her out of lidded eyes. “Where are you going?”

  “For a fag.”

  “Don’t let your father catch you. He’ll be home soon.”

  “He knows I smoke, Mamá!”

  Once she escaped onto the esplanade that stretched out before the ho
tel, Hetty exhaled fully. This was her favorite spot in all of Houston, where the two great boulevards of the city flowed together like destinies meeting. Main Street surged up from the heart of downtown and collided with Montrose Boulevard, which slanted in at an angle to form a wedge of land Houstonians liked to call the Cradle of Culture. Here rose the Corinthian columns of the art museum, the walled mansions of Shadyside, the triumphant arch upon which Sam Houston mounted his magnificent bronze horse. Everything came together in a huge traffic circle that rotated around a sunken garden. Hetty liked to stand down there, alone at the axis, watching the carousel of cars swirl by from all directions. Only a few honked their horns, but everyone saw her.

  She descended the steps and strolled among the sago palms and formal rows of flowers, watching for a creamy sports car to appear. She lit one Lucky. Then another. She glanced toward the museum, its deep blue shadows reminding her of the show of modern French art held there in January. When she’d glimpsed her first Fauve painting, it was as if a film had been peeled off her eyes. Les Fauves: the wild beasts! such deconstruction! such streaks of color! “I want to live with this kind of intensity,” she’d told Winifred, as they browsed among the burning canvases. Doris Verne and Belinda had trailed behind, each girl choosing a favorite quote about modern art from the wall copy accompanying the exhibit.

  HETTY: We live in a rainbow of chaos.—Cézanne

  WINIFRED: I am an artist . . . I am here to live out loud.—Zola

  BELINDA: With an apple I will astonish Paris.—Cézanne

  DORIS VERNE: I shut my eyes in order to see.—Gauguin

  Hetty ground her butt under her heel, smiling at the memory. More cars wheeled by. She was about to give up waiting when a long burgundy brougham entered the traffic circle and started revolving. The driver wore a Panama like the one Garret had on yesterday. Hetty dashed across Main and walked up the center of the esplanade that led into Hermann Park. The car stayed on her tail and finally pulled up to the curb.