Magnolia City

by Duncan W. Alderson

  He topped off her drink and signaled for her to take a sip. She downed half of it in one gulp, gagged on the raw gin, and soon felt better as the blood in her veins ran warm. When the band swiveled into faster and faster tempos, she found she couldn’t fight the music but simply had to surrender to it in order to save her nerves. It was the kind of hot stuff you couldn’t stand in the path of for long. The drummer drove them unmercifully, topping off the beat with a constant clickety-clack sound that left the brass free to wander, the clarinet whistling in and out way over the top of it all. Finally, they all slowed down together, and the great wheels of music rolling off the stage churned almost to a stop, with only the clarinet player still climbing and circling in a flight all his own, higher and higher, on and on, till the pianist shouted at him, “Chase it—that’s what I call fried chicken!” and the voice of the audience rose up in one great cheer.

  Garret worked his chair through the writhing mass till he was sitting close to Hetty. He put his arm around her shoulder and shouted into her ear: “This is real Texas boogie-woogie you’re hearing. They call it the Santa Fe sound ’cause these guys work a circuit on the railway going West.” Hetty nodded, noticing again how the rhythms they struck sounded so much like train wheels turning on an iron track. She couldn’t keep her feet still.

  Later, when everybody had had too much to drink and things were getting mellow, they brought on a singer named Brown Sugar and a suave pianist to back her up. She had a sultry look and the perfect voice for blues, rich and deep. Hetty loved her dusky, honey-colored skin and the lime satin dress that dropped off her shoulders and shimmered as she sang. Her big brown eyes with heavy lids straight off a lizard reminded Hetty of something. Then she remembered her dream. The singer looked down at them after one of her songs and she said, “Hey, Mac,” then gave a throaty chuckle and added, “Ain’t no bayous going to run dry tonight, y’all.” This brought some whistles from the back of the room and a wave from Garret where he sat near the stage.

  Hetty was drunk enough that when Sugar went on to sing things like “Empty Bed Blues” or “Bayou Run Dry,” she didn’t even blush, though the singer was looking right into Garret’s eyes as she crooned:

  My bayou’s run dry since my baby been out,

  My bayou’s run dry since my baby been out,

  My man he better come and end this lovin’ drought.

  Instead, Hetty ended up sitting in Garret’s lap, hanging on his neck and telling him, over and over, that she was ready to go park somewhere. Lockett was right. This music did make you lose control. Or was it the gin?

  Hetty felt slightly dizzy as Garret swerved the Auburn into the circular drive of the Warwick. She was half asleep and had no idea what time it was. She just knew it was late, very late. She could only hope that Nella wouldn’t still be awake to witness how ossified she was. Garret tried to park the speedster under the porte cochere, but it was already choked with Kirb’s long Packard town car. She wondered what it was doing here in the middle of the night.

  He steadied her as they stumbled through the lobby and caught the elevator to the eighth floor. Its upward surge flooded her head with guilty thoughts from the evening. They had ended up parked beside the lagoon as they usually did. “Let’s get hot,” Garret had said as he steered into a dark spot and pulled out his silver flask. Ever since the tennis game, they’d gotten into some pretty heavy petting, although, like most of her girlfriends, she drew the line at intercourse. She’d gone a little further each time, letting his hands into secret places, pulling his tie off one time, unbuttoning his shirt to smell his heat the next. Now she was hooked: She always wanted him to take his shirt off completely and was even at the point of unbuckling his belt and letting her fingers slide over the tempting rise of his buttocks. Usually, she let Mac take the lead, only stopping him if he tried to go too far. But tonight, Wini’s words had echoed in her mind, how a modern woman might return the genital kiss. Hetty sat up and worked his Oxford bags down, pulling his boxers back. She’d bent over him and held his cock in her hand, then kissed the head of it. She was fascinated with how spongy and smooth it was, with the musk that rose off it and how it began to swell and stiffen between her fingers. She wished it weren’t so dark: She’d wanted him to see her brazen red lips closing over the head of his cock, adoring it.

  When they reached suite 810, she started fumbling in her evening bag for keys until Garret pointed out that one of the double doors was cracked. Her heart sank. She crept into the foyer and, despite the haziness hanging over her mind, noticed several things at once: Garret’s face reflected in the pink mirror, his sleepy blue eyes peering into the suite timidly, Nella looming in the doorway in a flowing silk kimono, two dark figures standing guard behind her.

  “No more petting parties for you, young lady,” she announced immediately. “You’re under house arrest for two weeks.”

  It took Hetty a moment to register what she meant. “House arrest?” she asked groggily. “For two weeks?”

  “Yes. Until the party at Bayou Bend. I’ll let you go to that with Lamar.”

  “But why?”

  “I told you Dowling was off limits. This is the last straw.”

  “But we didn’t go to Dowling Street. I kept my promise.”

  “No, you went to West Dallas—that’s even worse.”

  “Why?”

  “For God’s sake, Esther, wake up. It’s the red-light district.”

  Hetty caught her breath and glanced over at Garret. “You didn’t tell me that, honey.”

  “Of course he didn’t,” a gruff voice shot out from the drawing room. The two dark figures rustled ominously. One of them materialized as her father’s stern face, his gray eyes regarding Garret with chilling hauteur. “That’s how men like this take advantage of girls like you.”

  Kirb came past Nella and clutched Hetty’s arm so tightly she whimpered. He pulled her away from Garret and stepped between them, massive. “Now, I’ll have to ask you to leave my home, sir. You are not welcome here.”

  “Leave Mac alone, Daddy. Just leave him alone. It’s not his fault. Even if I’d known, I still would’ve gone. Besides—how’d you know where we were?” She glared at her mother. “Are you spying on me again?”

  “Spying?” Nella spat out a bitter laugh. “That was hardly necessary. You were a bit conspicuous, my dear, being the only white girl there. We have a witness.”

  She moved aside, and Hetty peered into the murk of the drawing room. The other person stepped forward into the light, but his face remained as dark as ever under the cream-colored brim of his straw hat.

  It was Pick, his eyes never rising above the level of her feet. “I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said.

  Then Hetty noticed Charlotte lounging on the sofa, witnessing her humiliation. “It’s not fair!” she cried. “You’re all ganging up on me.” She turned to hug Garret good night, but her father was still blocking the way, forcing him out into the hall. She craned her neck to search out his gaze. He was looking at her with such a burn of longing that her own eyes went hot in return, steaming with tears. Then the door slammed between them. She could feel him right outside, his heat radiating through the walls.

  “Don’t leave me, honey,” she shouted. “Don’t leave me here.”

  Chapter 4

  Voices woke Hetty out of haunted dreams. She heard footsteps padding down the hall. For minutes, she refused to open her eyes. Then she sensed light. She looked over sleepily and saw morning sunlight already streaking across her orange and black draperies, giving her room an eerie glow. She stretched and rolled over to check the bank calendar she’d pinned to the wall months ago under a teakwood lantern. The last four days had been circled to chalk up what Nella liked to call her “moon.” She’d taught her daughters to track their monthly cycles like astronomers, though it was hardly necessary in Hetty’s case. Her ebb and flow came like clockwork and never slowed her down. But more important than that were the big red Xs across the days. Nine days of hous
e arrest down, five more to go.

  Today was Monday, June 25, the calendar said—the first day of the Democratic National Convention. Hetty had itched all weekend for this morning to dawn, knowing that her mother and sister would finally vacate the apartment for a few hours so she could telephone Garret. She hadn’t talked to him since she’d managed to sneak behind the telephone screen late one night. Hetty slipped out of bed and opened her door, then crawled back under the sheet and pretended to be asleep. She listened to the sounds out in the hall, the scurrying, the shouting, Lina’s mutterings in Spanish as she passed back and forth with blouses to iron or shoes to polish. A whiff of lavender floated into Hetty’s room. During her solitary confinement, she had been humming the words of an old song that Lina used to sing as she worked: “Nunca me harás llorar.” “You’ll never make me cry.” “Nunca, nunca, nunca.” “Never, never, never,” Hetty had chanted in her mind to help her hide her misery.

  It seemed to take her mother and sister forever to get ready. Hetty grew drowsy but didn’t think she could sleep anymore, especially with the sun kindling such bright orange embers in her curtains. She could only melt a little in the haze, like stepping down many stairs into an unlighted house.

  And then she was cold. There was a wind rattling and ceilings so high they seemed to disappear into the night sky. She wondered why she wasn’t in the hotel anymore. This was the inglenook that was built in at the bottom of the stairs next to the fireplace, but it frightened her because the fire had gone out and the whole house was drafty and cold. She began to tremble because no one came to kindle the fire, and the house was a thicket full of tangled furniture and frightening curios.

  Then her dreams became memory. She remembered why the fire had gone out. She remembered the fog horns that kept thundering, like the deepest note on a organ, as an ocean liner passed like a great wall sliding through the Port of Houston, heading abroad. And her mother was at the top of that wall, waving down to Hetty, who stood so small on the dock beside Lina and who couldn’t wave back because she had to hold Char’s hand, and Char was crying because her mother was leaving them again and wouldn’t be back for months. But Hetty couldn’t cry—Nunca me harás llorar —because she was two years older and had to be sure Char didn’t fall off the dock into the water. Kirby said it was her duty to look after her younger sister.

  At night the two of them would huddle in the inglenook and remember when their mother was home and would make them a fire before bedtime and tell them old legends by the light of the crackling flames. Nobody knows the peril of a house without a mother; only the children know. Hetty would lie there trembling in the dark, listening to the sounds of the house: Lina haunting the hallways singing a sad song in Spanish about the husband who’d left her years before, Lina’s door closing, the creaking of the steps when her father finally went to bed, Char’s breathing falling into sleep. She would curl up amid the smells of old fires long burned out. She couldn’t sleep until she’d managed to push the cold shudder out of her heart by singing Lina’s words softly, over and over, to herself—nunca me harás llorar.

  And then there were the spiders. Even though Lina swept away cobwebs daily, there were too many corners she couldn’t reach with her brooms. Because Kirby thought spiders were beneficial, he refused to have the old house fumigated. They were everywhere—daddy longlegs hiding under toys, little black jumping spiders on the windowsills, yellow orb weavers on the potted palms. Charlotte, especially, was terrified of them because of stories she’d heard at school: Spiders drink from your mouth at night, brown recluses hide in your clothing, wolf spiders travel in packs. After a spider sighting, she once sat in a chair with her legs drawn up and refused to walk across the floor for hours. It got so bad Lina took them to the library on McKinney Street to check out books about arachnids. They learned that their father was right: Most spiders were harmless and helped humans by eating bugs. There was only one they had to avoid: the shiny black widow with the deadly red hourglass on her abdomen. She was so venomous she would eat her own husband after mating with him. They read about all kinds of exotic specimens: peacock spiders, assassins, even spiderlings who turned and ate their mother after being hatched.

  In spite of all Lina’s efforts, Charlotte never overcame her arachnophobia. Worse than that, she began to spin a web of her own as she grew up, becoming a tattletale to catch her older sister in a tangle of transgressions. This gave her a lot of power for an eight-year-old. She worked hard to maintain her status as Kirby’s little darling. She memorized all the rules out of The Child’s Book of Etiquette he had given them as girls, always making sure to brush her hair and don a freshly pressed smock by the time he got home from the bank. She never raised her voice in the drawing room, rose when guests entered, and always fulfilled her father’s requests with an adoring smile. Hetty, on the other hand, simply couldn’t be bothered with all these silly Edwardian rules. Her hair was always a snarl, she hurtled down the stairs two at a time, screamed with delight, and collected spiders in a old drawer out of a dresser. If she didn’t agree with an adult, she said so, and expressed her opinion freely. She was constantly breaking the rules, and Charlotte took note. At dinner every night, she would delight her father with a song she had learned at school, the A plus she had gotten in spelling, and the rules that her sister had broken that day. Lina tried to brush this off as just being Hetty’s high spirits, but Kirby often ended up frowning across the table at her.

  Charlotte’s list of privileges grew, while Hetty was put under house arrest time after time. They argued bitterly when Kirby wasn’t around, and Hetty started withdrawing and spending more time with Doris Verne. Their roles became reversed: Hetty had stepped in as surrogate mother when Nella was away, but now Charlotte had transfigured herself into the scolding parent. Like those spiders Lina had told them about in Mediterranean countries—the heartless Stegodyphus hatchlings that ate their own mothers—Charlotte had turned on her sibling and begun to devour her. Hetty remembered a lithograph from Nella’s book on Odilon Redon where he drew a spider with spindly legs and a human head. Yes, that’s where this rattling wind was blowing, that’s where her dreams had taken her, into a whispering house of memories haunted by spiders. And all of them had Charlotte’s face.

  When the telephone rang, it was like thunder in a glass sky. It brought her with a white jolt back to the hotel, pulling her out of bed. She dashed into the living room and dove behind the telephone screen, catching the call in the middle of the fourth ring.

  “Hello,” she exhaled into the phone.

  “Are they gone?” Garret asked.

  Hetty looked around the dim drawing room. All was silent. She didn’t even hear Lina in the kitchen. “It looks like it. Honey, I miss you like crazy.”

  “We’re getting married.”

  Hetty held the receiver away from her ear for a moment while she caught her breath. “We are?”

  “Don’t you want to?”

  “Could you ask me after I’ve had a cup of coffee?”

  “I’m serious. You probably can’t tell, but I am down on one knee. Will you marry me, Esther Ardra Allen? I’m in love with you.”

  The marble floors were cold under her bare feet. They sent a shiver that traveled all the way up her spine. It was the first time he’d actually spoken those words. “I’m in love with you too, Garret MacBride.” Her lungs expanded their capacity three times as she spoke.

  “Is that a yes?”

  “My folks would never let me marry you.”

  “Maybe if they knew my intentions were honorable, they would. I’m calling your father at the bank.”

  “All right, see what he says and call me back. I need a minute to think about this.”

  “It’s what’s behind the postigos, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. I can’t agree to marry you until you’ve gone into that room.”

  “It won’t matter. I love you.”

  “Wait until you see what it is.”

  “I’m calli
ng your dad.”

  Hetty went into her room and nestled her chilled feet in a pair of embroidered Chinese slippers, then sat back down behind the telephone screen and waited. Her toes no longer touched the marble floor, yet she couldn’t stop shivering.

  It wasn’t long before Hetty heard the front doors bang open and saw Lina staggering through them lugging a box that she could hardly get her short arms around. She sat it down with a thud on the floor of the foyer and glanced in at Hetty half-hidden behind the telephone screen. “¡Ay! Tanta agitación. Lina, bring this. Lina, take that. Ándale, ándale—we’re going to be late. ¡Éso es el colmo!”

  “You can relax now.”

  Lina came into the drawing room and sat down breathless on an ottoman. Her black eyes narrowed in suspicion. “Why are you sitting by the teléfono?”

  “You have to let me talk to Mac.”

  “Sí, pero no,” she said, shaking her head.

  Just then a braaang! sounded out. They looked at the black phone, then at each other. Lina jumped up as Hetty reached out. “No, m’ija, por favor.”

  Hetty’s hand hung in midair. Another braaang. “Garret asked me to marry him.”