Magnolia City

by Duncan W. Alderson

  Adding to her confusion was the frenzied pace of life in the city that spring. Thanks to businessman Jesse Jones, Houston had won the bid over San Francisco to host the Democratic National Convention in June. As April’s wet nights melted into the humid, radiant mornings of May, it seemed the whole town was under construction. A vast coliseum was being erected that would seat twenty-five thousand cheering, sweating delegates. Contractors were throwing up hotels to house the expected one hundred thousand visitors, outfitting penthouses with palm courts and terraces elegant enough to entertain the most distinguished guests. Streets were closed, traffic a tangle. The ground often shook under Hetty’s feet when she was downtown shopping. Overhead, prop planes buzzed by heading to the new municipal airport.

  Within the secluded niches of No-Tsu-Oh, all was in a flurry. Word got out that only six women would be invited to play hostess at the Hospitality House. Nella was determined to be one of them.

  “I’m just so glad I was never interested in politics,” Hetty overheard her mother telling Lockett one afternoon. “Now I can declare myself a Democrat without feeling hypocritical.”

  “I think we should all strive to be bipartisan at a moment like this,” Lockett answered, then murmured something in a confidential tone.

  Hetty sat at the dining room table eating the ham sandwich Lina had made her for lunch. She looked into the drawing room. She could just make out the profiles of the two women huddled together in the art moderne armchairs. Nella fanned herself with one of the black lace fans that were scattered around the apartment. Lockett’s normally raucous tones had been hushed in order to convey insider information she’d gleaned from her husband, the congressman. There were to be lots of parties, she was telling Nella, but only two were significant: The first was the opening Sunday brunch at the Cupola Club, at which Mrs. Woodrow Wilson would be in attendance. “That’s the one we have to go to. There’s going to be another breakfast for her on the Roof at the Rice, but anyone can go to that by paying a dollar and a half.”

  “How democratic,” Nella said.

  “Exactly. Which is why we want to be at the other one. But”—Lockett leaned forward, panting—“wait till you hear what’s happening later in the week!” She went on to describe the second party, at which attendance would be mandatory for Old Houstonians of any note: a private reception Saturday night at Bayou Bend in River Oaks. Hetty could hear her mother moan in the other room. She knew she’d been itching for an invitation for years now, ever since the estate became one of those magnetic centers to which the denizens of No-Tsu-Oh were drawn. Bayou Bend: the fabled pink mansion, home of Houston’s most celebrated hostess, Ima Hogg. Not only was Ima heir to the Hogg oil fortune, she was a connoisseur of the finest taste, an urbane world traveler and founder of the Houston Symphony. To stand on her terrace and be served a Bayou Bender by her butler, Lucious Broadnax, was to arrive at the pinnacle of social eminence in the city.

  “The congressman tells me all the bigwigs will be there,” Lockett said, “the Roosevelts, Will Rogers, H. L. Mencken. Ima’s using it as an occasion to unveil her new Diana Garden.”

  Nella’s fan beat at the air. “Sounds like an event we can’t miss—”

  “Y’all forget, there’re going to be a hundred thousand people in town that week. Invitations will be scarce as hen’s teeth.”

  “Whatever can we do?” Ice cubes tinkled as Nella poured Lockett some more iced tea. Hetty slid her chair back and stood up, wondering what it would be like to shake Will Rogers’s hand. She turned and smiled at him in the blue trapezoid mirror over the sideboard. Then she licked her fingers and formed two perfect black spit curls on her cheeks.

  After their date, Lamar kisses her good night in the lobby of the Warwick Hotel. He never comes up to the apartment because of Char. Hetty takes the elevator to the eighth floor and steps out into a jungle. She wonders when they installed a terrarium in the hallways. She wanders through the damp air and catches the scent of freshly turned black soil. Large leaves have the color of limes and drip with moisture. She parts them and looks up to see luminous pink flowers scaling the walls of the hotel. They glow with an inner light that strikes Hetty as dangerous, a lure for insects and small birds. She glimpses Garret through the foliage. Fear stabs her. Did she make a mistake and invite both men on the same night? He beckons to her. She follows him to a hill where an exotic woman is singing. Somewhere there is a piano. Hetty can’t understand the lyrics but loves the throaty timbre of her voice. She has the eyes of a lizard. They look into Hetty’s, and she becomes aroused in her sleep. Then, the long lime-colored dress of the woman, slit high up her thigh, opens and reveals that she is a mermaid. But her bottom half isn’t a fish. It’s a snake. She hovers there on the hill, coiling and uncoiling. Her singing turns into a rhythmic hissing, and all the leaves begin to undulate to her beat. Hetty tries to step behind Garret, but he isn’t there. Then blue light breaks through the trees, and Hetty awakens in the dawn.

  She sat up in bed. She knew she’d had another one of those dreams . . . visions that gave her enigmatic glimpses of days to come. This had happened to her since she was a girl, but she had never mentioned the dreams to anyone. They were forbidden. She never foresaw trivia but always something fateful, a turning point, a closure or beginning. The night before Garret appeared at No-Tsu-Oh, she had dreamed of his car. She had seen the Auburn moving through her mind as if lit by sparklers. That was why she’d been so intrigued when she first saw him. Hetty rolled over in bed, her pillows smelling like last night’s perfume. She pushed the covers back and swung her bare feet off the mattress, then pulled them back up. She scanned the floor to be sure nothing was creeping by before running down the dim hall to the bath.

  On Sunday, Hetty sat at brunch in the gardens of Splendora. Antique wicker chairs were shaded by the tangled vines of wisteria. The heavy fragrance was lulling her to sleep next to Lamar. Chief Rusk was slurping his second Bloody Mary while his wife Rachel asked Hetty for her indulgence. “When I invited y’all for brunch, I had no idea my entire staff would take the day off.” She’d done her best to cobble up some omelets.

  “Where’s Tuggie?” Hetty asked. Tuggie was the much-feared boss of the Rusk household, a stout no-nonsense cook who always dressed in starched white cottons and had a sassy word for anyone who tried to cross her. Visiting Splendora as children, Hetty and Charlotte had often eavesdropped on her drilling the other servants with military efficiency. They had found it amusing. “Prods ’em like cattle,” Chief Rusk was fond of boasting. The Rusk family could not have functioned without their treasured Tuggie, and they knew it, allowing her to accompany them when they traveled to cooler climes in the summer.

  “Oh, Tuggie goes to Pilgrim Branch Baptist Church every Sunday,” Rachel said. “Big doings. You should see the hats she wears.”

  “I’d like to whip somebody real good.” Chief Rusk downed the last of his Bloody Mary. “The whole string of ’em gone.”

  Lamar came out of his slouch on the sofa beside Hetty. “It is Sunday, Dad. A day of rest.”

  “I hope to Jesus Tuggie took some of ’em to church,” Rachel said. “They all need religion.” Rachel Rusk always looked as if she smelled an unpleasant odor, her immaculate blond hair marcelled into perfect waves. She was never seen without the armor of eye shadow, mascara, and rouge.

  “It’s like this, son—I keep my liquor locked up or those dingy bastards drink it.”

  “Finding help is my biggest headache,” Rachel said wearily. “And we pay good wages!”

  “Too good!” barked Chief. “Those niggers—”

  “Baby, watch your language!”

  “That’s not something I do.”

  “How well I know. Y’all better not use that word in Tuggie’s hearing.”

  “She uses it more than I do.”

  “Yeah, well, she can. You can’t. It’s not polite.”

  “Polite! Those niggers go rotten working here. We’re Splendora’s niggers. We work for the C
hief. We’re fancy. I’ll show ’em polite. Why have staff if you have to prod ’em every goddamn minute? Like to drive poor Tuggie crazy.” He ranted on. Hetty tried to think of a way to change the subject. She scanned the tennis courts, then caught a flash of light from a dormer window in the gabled roof.

  She waited for Chief to catch his breath. “Is the attic still a playroom?” she asked.

  “I haven’t moved a thing,” Rachel said. “I’m saving it for my grandchildren—if a certain young man of my acquaintance ever decides to produce an heir.”

  “You should never pressure a man around heir production,” Lamar said. “It’s a good way to make him impotent.”

  His father knuckled him in the arm. “I better not hear about you being impotent, son.”

  “Let’s go up there, Lam,” Hetty said.

  “Y’all don’t!” Rachel drawled. “It hasn’t been cleaned in ages.”

  “I don’t care. C’mon.” She reached for Lamar’s hand and tugged him out of his nest of cushions and down the colonnade. He led her through the cavernous kitchen spangled with copper pots. They took the spiral staircase that the servants used, creaking as they climbed to the top. The door rattled when Lamar pushed it open—the long attic stretched before them, the upper half of its walls slanting in with the ceiling. Sunlight spilled through the dormer windows, glinting on sudden motes that floated up as they walked. This had been Hetty’s heaven as a child, a room in the sky devoted wholly to play. It was all still here: the yellow-striped wallpaper with the blue sailboats, the wide window seats. They passed marionettes hanging on their floppy strings, the rack of dress-up costumes, and the shelf of tall illustrated books.

  At the top of the room stood the puppet theater, with players on sticks that you moved through grooves in the stage floor. Hetty flicked on the cabinet light that lit the stage, and it flashed across the face of a clown leaning to one side. Lamar closed the red velvet curtains. The pulley squeaked, and a smell of must rose up that entered Hetty’s lungs and left a pang in her heart.

  Automatically, they sat at one of the tables where a Chinese checkers board had been abandoned mid-game. The chairs were too small for them now. Lamar made a move to continue the game. “Oh no, I’m not playing checkers with you,” Hetty said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because you used to cheat. You would change the rules in the middle of the game so you could win.”

  Lamar watched her across the table, his skew-jawed smile fading. The desolate look drifted into his eyes, the one he only showed her, the one that allowed Hetty to forgive him his trickery. “Who’s the one that’s cheating now?”

  Hetty smiled at him meekly. “I can’t help it that I met Garret.”

  “But you don’t have to date him.” He toyed with the checkerboard, jumped two of her marbles, and took them. “Do you know how that makes me feel?”

  He looked so wounded, all Hetty could do was touch his hand and whisper, “I’m sorry. How can I make it up to you, dear Lam?”

  “We’ve been invited to the reception at Bayou Bend during the convention. My folks said I could bring a date. I’ll take you if you promise to stop dating Garret.”

  Hetty held his gaze for a moment, then looked away. In the dim corner behind him, she spotted Lamar’s panpipes fanned out in the shape of a bird’s tail. Their notes rose in her memory like returning swallows, twittering as Lamar led her and Char around the room in a dance, so seductive. His offers were always like that, too good to refuse but too easy to reject. The piper who plays for a price, inviting you to places you’ve always wanted to go but couldn’t afford without him. He was giving her a wing into the splendor of Bayou Bend and knew she wouldn’t be able to refuse. It was the party everyone wanted to go to, the only place to alight on that Saturday evening in June. But was it worth giving up Garret for? She didn’t know yet.

  “I’ll make you a deal, Lam. Ima’s party will be my deadline. I’ll choose between you and Garret before that night.”

  “All right, kiddo. And you know,” he said, standing up and shoving his hands into his pockets, “I should invite Mac over for a game of tennis, or something.”

  Hetty’s chair scraped the floor as she stood up. “Don’t you dare.”

  “Why not? He’s part of our set now, isn’t he?”

  Hetty tried to read Lamar’s eyes to see if he were plotting something or merely being kind. She was never sure with him. “Go ahead,” she said. “He won’t come.”

  But Hetty was wrong. Garret accepted Lamar’s challenge, and the tennis match was set for the second Saturday in June. As the date approached, it became clear to her that the invitation was anything but a signal of Southern hospitality. The two men had sensed each other’s presence in her life for weeks and had sniffed the other’s cologne in the curves of her ear. Now they were hankering to meet face-to-face, to joust it out with the lobs and lunges of the court.

  The light broke entirely too bright on the day of the game with hardly a cloud in the broad Texas sky to smudge edges a little. By noon, the sun had entirely inundated the courts at the Rusk mansion. Even under the arbor, it leaked through the wisteria vines and began to corrode the shade. Hetty could feel a headache pounding at the back of her eyes. She’d been so nervous this morning, she’d forgotten her sunglasses.

  Once the match started, there was no sound but the tinkle of ice cubes in tall sweating glasses and the distant thud of tennis balls volleying back and forth. The men gathered in grim silence around the court to see who would take the lead. Glen Jr. kept score while Todd Eldridge tossed out fresh tennis balls when needed. The girls avoided the sun as much as possible. Winifred and Belinda stretched out on matching wicker chaises piled with pillows. Doris Verne had her legs drawn up on a wicker love seat deep in the shade. Two Carter girls and Diana Dorrance sat around one of the circular wrought iron tables. Hetty pulled the big brim of her straw hat closer to her face.

  Winifred soon got bored with the game and started reading out loud from a heavy tome propped in her lap. Actually, she wasn’t reading; she was translating a sex manual that hadn’t been published in English. Hetty listened halfheartedly to her halting rendition, amused as always by the various roles Wini adopted for herself: sex expert, German translator, interpreter of European customs. She had been to Berlin with her family. She had witnessed cabarets and things that would be unthinkable in Houston, Texas. She cut her hair like a man and wore tailored golf slacks. She claimed to have read every marriage manual published since the war. Quoting Margaret Sanger on the importance of birth control, she had made herself rather notorious in the sheltered circles of No-Tsu-Oh. Winifred Ilse Neuhaus always had a group of giggling, blushing girls clustered around her over in some secluded corner as she lectured them on the facts of life. She explained what would happen on their wedding night. She told them bluntly what they had to do to keep a man happy. “But don’t be a doormat,” Wini counseled. “Demand your equal rights. Keep your maiden name when you marry. Join the League of Women Voters!”

  “It should be the boys hearing this.” Belinda laughed as Wini read how a skillful husband worked to get his wife sexually aroused. It’s like coaxing a flower to open, Hetty thought.

  The language became so explicit that Doris Verne covered her ears and said, “Honey child—stop!”

  This, of course, egged Wini on all the more. She gave them the highlights of a section meant to teach the husband how to kiss amorously, then ended with a German phrase that she drew out suggestively before translating, “Or, in English, ‘the genital kiss’!”

  The two Carter girls erupted in shrieks while Diana Dorrance shot Wini a dirty look.

  “Is that what it really says?” Belinda glared at the book.

  “I swear. Der genitale Kuß,” Wini read.

  “Your husband’s supposed to kiss you down there?” Doris Verne asked. “Ohhh my god.”

  Diana Dorrance made a face at Doris Verne, but Hetty didn’t share their disgust. She was glad to learn
that something she’d wondered about actually had a name.

  “You may stop reading now, thank you, ma’am,” Doris Verne said.

  “What?” Wini assumed a quizzical look. “It’s the best way for him to get you lubricated.”

  The Carter girls shrieked again and collapsed in each other’s arms, laughing. Glen Jr. shushed them, unable to concentrate on score keeping. Hetty turned her attention to the game again. Lamar had apparently just taken the first set. “Lamar!” Glen Jr. shouted out, and they all applauded politely. Garret rallied with some swift volleys close to the net and managed to win the second. As they moved into the third game out of five, Hetty could hardly stand to watch. The tennis court became a battleground upon which Lamar was determined to defend his honor and superiority. Tapping years of training, he unleashed a bombardment of ace serves that sent Garret lunging for the ball time after time and missing it. He was all over the court, sweating, while Lamar hardly moved from his command post behind the baseline.

  At the break between the third and fourth set, Garret came up to her table to guzzle some iced tea. As he stripped his wet shirt off and wiped the sweat from his face, Hetty poured him a glass. He threw his head back to drink it, the Adam’s apple in his thick neck bobbing up and down as he swallowed. She let her eyes fall like fingers over his naked skin, so tanned and smooth that nothing stopped her as she glided over the round swelling of his chest, stopping for a moment to brush the brown nipples, like perfect little pebbles. He’d make a good swimmer, she thought. He had the kind of muscles that skim through water, long and lean. Hairless, too. Except in the armpit he flashed when he raised his drink. She found that thick tuft of black shocking in a way that entranced her, a wild fragrant herb in a manly garden usually hidden from view. She wondered if a wife was expected to give genital kisses to her husband, too. When he finished drinking, he slammed the glass down. “That bastard is beating me.”