Magnolia City

by Duncan W. Alderson

  “You live in a garage apartment?”

  “A carriage house, please.” He opened the door for her to pass through.

  What she saw inside confirmed her worst fears. Garret lived amid the vulgar litter that virile men often leave floating in their wake: stacks of cardboard boxes that hadn’t been unpacked, clothes flung about on the furniture, trash cans that needed emptying, a ring around the bathtub. The woodwork was blistered with old varnish; the floral wallpaper was starting to curl off in places. Bare bulbs decorated the ceiling; slats drooped in the venetian blinds.

  “You expect me to live here?”

  “It’s just a starter place for us, honey.”

  “This isn’t a starter, Mac. This is a finisher.” Garret looked sheepish in the silence that followed. Hetty sighed, not wanting to start a fight. “But there’s only one closet.”

  “Maybe we could get a rack?”

  She looked at him dumbfounded. Surely he was joking. As he paced about picking up debris, she studied his face for a moment and decided he was perfectly serious. That was the kind of man Garret was—slap up a rack and make do till we hit our big strike. Women were expected to rough it along with the men, like she imagined they did in the mining camps of Montana. Grit your teeth, hack out a life, and don’t complain. It was his Rocky Mountain vigor again, the part of his manhood she found so bracing. She just wasn’t sure how it would mesh with her womanhood. Hadn’t he noticed how many clothes she had?

  Hetty gritted her teeth. “All right, I’m willing to slum it for a while. On one condition.”

  “What?”

  “That you find us a better place to live.”

  “It’s a deal.”

  In the middle of the night, Hetty placed her feet gingerly on the floor. Smooth and cool. Stumbling through the dark, she used the bathroom. She worried about what she’d find behind the closed door of the kitchen. Don’t go in there, she told herself. But as she came out of the bathroom, she found herself turning in that direction—in spite of her vow never to walk across the living room carpet barefoot. Marriage is compromise. She found the door and pushed it open. All was black inside, quiet except for that almost imperceptible rustling she’d heard the day before. A scurrying, a ghostly whispering. She stepped onto the linoleum floor, and something immediately tickled the side of her foot. She groped for the light switch. Her fingers found the top button and pushed it. When the light flickered on, she screamed. Dozens of huge brown roaches crawled over the trash and swarmed on the dirty dishes in the sink. The light appeared to terrify them. They retreated in all directions, evaporating into cracks and crevices.

  She strode back into the bedroom, hit the light switch, and slammed the door loudly enough to wake Garret. “You’ve got roaches.”

  “What . . . ?” He squinted up at the light. “Naw, just a few palmetto bugs.”

  Hetty snickered. There was no such thing as a few palmetto bugs. These weren’t the little cockroaches common across the South. No, the palmetto bugs of the Gulf prairies were monster roaches—up to two inches long with spindly hairy legs and long, twitching feelers. They flourished in the moist semitropical air of south Texas, building kingdoms unseen right under your feet. She knew they could fly—across the room, into your face. She sat down on the bed.

  “That’s the last straw. I can’t live here, Garret.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean . . . I’m going back to my mother’s . . .” She said this with more confidence than she felt inside.

  “You are?” He turned and looked at her with the hollow eyes of a hurt child. He sat up and tried to slip his arms around her.

  She pushed him away. “Yes. And don’t expect to sleep with me again until you find us a better place to live.”

  Later that afternoon, Hetty let herself into the Warwick apartment with her old key. She sat her suitcases down in the foyer and removed her shoes, intending to enter the suite like a pilgrim, a penitent. She had to tread carefully here. Although it felt like months had swirled by since her elopement, in reality it had only been a week. Now she was back, wishing she could slip into her old room unnoticed.

  She entered the hallway, counted her steps as she walked by her sister’s door, then the bedroom she had abandoned a week ago. She turned sideways to squeeze through the heavy postigo doors so that their hinges wouldn’t creak. She wanted this invasion of Nella’s privacy to be a sneak attack, giving Hetty a clear advantage. She tiptoed to the threshold and peeked through the open door. Shutters dammed up the flood of afternoon heat. Only ceiling fans stirred the sultry air, rippling the scarves draped here and there about the room.

  Hetty stepped in and spotted her mother immediately, sitting at the bureau de dame wrapped in a kimono and painting her face. She didn’t see her. Hetty glided forward soundlessly and stood amid the rippling scarves. In the mirror, Nella sensed movement and looked up. Her eyes widened with surprise only for a moment, then glazed over. She pursed her mouth and applied lipstick. She said nothing.

  In the silence that followed, Hetty moved automatically to the place where she and her sister always sat when they watched their mother adorning herself—on one of the two quarter-moon chairs at the foot of the dais. She tried to slump back against the hard, straight back. These were not chairs to relax in. The only way to sit in them successfully was the way Nella did: spine perfectly straight, shoulders lifted just slightly, hands floating above her lap, barely touching, head held high—like a figure come to life off a Mayan frieze.

  She sat like that now appraising her hair, sleek as patent leather. The lipstick she had applied was the same color as the walls behind the mirror, deep marigold. Hetty expected a tirade of spicy Spanish to come sizzling out of those orange lips, but instead her mother asked coolly, “How was Galveston?”

  “It rained the last two days. We came home early.”

  “If you’re here to discuss the weather, Esther, I don’t have time. I’m going out.”

  Hetty fished for something to talk about. It was too soon to mention moving back in. “How was the party at Ima Hogg’s?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Just curious.”

  “I didn’t realize you were interested, since you so carelessly threw away the chance to go.”

  “You’re right, Mamá. I did. But I still want to know what it was like.”

  Nella’s eyes grew misty as she gazed into the silvered light of the mirror. “You want to know what it was like? All right, I’ll tell you. Every room at Bayou Bend was thrown open to the new gardens. There were flowers all over, inside and out, and the whole place was lit only by candles—thousands of them twinkling. The Houston Symphony played music from the Vienna woods. Will Rogers asked me to dance.”

  “And the Diana Garden?” Hetty was almost afraid to ask.

  Nella finished applying a light dusting of powder and reached for one of the perfume bottles she’d massed on the bureau de dame. Hetty had forgotten with what tiny things Nella always surrounded herself—this one had a crystal grasshopper for a stopper. She touched it lightly to her wrists and her neck, releasing into the air the fragrance of distant, exotic flowers filtered through a spring orchard.

  She rubbed her wrists together lightly, then slid the thronelike chair around to face her daughter. “Just as you would imagine it. Even better. ¡Glorioso! You step out of the rear entrance—and by the way, I’m so glad Ima had the good sense to do Latin Colonial. When will people realize that Georgian just doesn’t suit our climate!” Nella snapped open a black lace fan and cooled her face. She chatted on in an almost amiable fashion, which puzzled Hetty. Why wasn’t she livid, as she’d been on the phone? Had she forgiven her in only a week? Hetty found that hard to believe.

  “The view is magnificent—through stucco pillars with just a hint of pink you look across terraced lawns, and there she stands—la diva, reflected in a pool of water. She’s copied from the Diana of Versailles, you know. She’s striding forward, Esther, stridin
g—hunting—reaching for an arrow. She’s so—sofisticada.”

  “Were any of my friends there?”

  “No. Charlotte . . . solamente.”

  “Charlotte?”

  “Sí . . . someone had to go with Lamar.” Nella gave her an impish glance from behind the fan.

  Hetty looked away quickly, not wanting her mother to note the look of regret stealing over her face. She hadn’t foreseen that her sister would take her place at Lamar’s side for the gala that all of Houston clamored to attend. The whole affair had mattered little to her a week ago, but now—in the midst of her uncertainty—she found herself longing to know what the statue of the goddess looked like . . . mirrored in a pool of water.

  Nella walked over to the cedar armario, whose rustic facade hid a wealth of finery inside. She began flipping through various gowns, and Hetty heard the kind of rustling that brings taffeta and silk satin to mind. Presently, she pulled out a long black tunic and hung it on a hook on the door. She untied her kimono and stepped forward. As she did so, one knee emerged. Hetty could see some kind of strange markings on it. She realized that she had never seen her mother’s knees. When Nella saw her looking at them, she frowned. “Perdóneme,” she said, pulling her kimono back together.

  This was obviously not the moment to ask her about moving back in. Hetty walked out into the hall and pushed the heavy postigo out of the way. It banged against the wall, drawing a startled look from Charlotte, who, at that moment, had just emerged from Hetty’s room down the hall. Her eyes had the haunted look of someone caught stealing. Hetty moved closer and took in her impressive metamorphosis: Her face was beautifully made up, and she wore her hair like a crown across her head, woven with pearls.

  “Hetty . . . ?”

  “What were you doing in my room, sis?”

  She pulled her dressing gown closer around her. “Oh . . . didn’t Mother tell you? It’s not your room anymore.”

  “What are you talking about?” Hetty brushed past her sister and crossed the threshold into her old quarters. Charlotte was right—it wasn’t her bedroom anymore. In fact, she wondered if she had walked through the wrong door. All traces of her previous residence had been stripped away. Not one of her possessions remained—not her orange and black draperies centered with the Chinese emblem of happiness, not her four-poster bed, not her Chinese lanterns hung with fringe, not her chest of drawers inlaid with mother-of-pearl. She was unable to move for a moment. Suddenly, she’d become a displaced person, someone whose passport back home had been revoked, leaving her stranded in a strange place. The only things standing in the empty room were two racks of new clothes still tasseled with price tags. Charlotte leaned against the doorjamb, sniffing at her.

  “Where’s all my stuff?”

  “Look in the back hall.” Hetty searched her sister’s face for a hint of sympathy, a quiver of regret. But Charlotte didn’t smile or blink, just stared back with those metallic gray eyes of hers unfazed. The Triumphant Sibling. Hetty blinked back tears as she barged out, forcing Charlotte to step aside. She marched through the gloom of the drawing room, swung the kitchen door aside, and made for the back hall. And there they were: All the possessions she had prized through the years thrown in heaps along the wall, not even boxed up. The lightbulb in one of the lanterns was broken, its shards scattered on the floor. Hetty stepped gingerly so as not to cut her bare feet. A dreadful smell coated everything back here: ripe garbage, rancid grease, the must of things forgotten. Hetty closed the door to shut it out and glanced into the servant’s quarters. Lina lurked in there, looking shamefaced.

  “I’m sorry, m’ija. She made me do it.”

  “It’s not your fault,” Hetty said, going over to squeeze her tiny hands.

  “Now I call you Señora.” Lina stood on tiptoe to kiss her on both cheeks. “¡Felicitación!”

  “Gracias, Lina.” She smiled quickly and turned her face away.

  Hetty made her way back into the Mexican quarters. Nella stood on the dais, wearing a long black tunic covered by an equally long evening coat extravagantly beaded in black-and-white seed pearls. She was sliding a matching headpiece over her shining hair.

  “Mamá, you gave my room to Char?”

  “She needs it as a dressing room now that she’s dating Lamar.” Nella yanked the headpiece until it was sitting properly, dipping over one cheek, a single teardrop pearl dangling like an earring. The effect was most provocative.

  “Dating Lamar?”

  Nella did a final appraisal of her image in the mirror, then swiveled to look down intently at her daughter from the dais. Hetty felt her knees slacken for a moment as she met the gleam of those black eyes, sharpened by the faintest trace of mascara. She sat down in the quarter-moon chair. When Nella turned herself out in full regalia like this for dinner, no one looked more radiant or assured. “Yes, dear. That’s where we’re going tonight—to Splendora for dinner.”

  This time it was Hetty who rose in her seat and lifted her shoulders. Now she understood why her mother wasn’t angry. She didn’t have to be. It was becoming only too clear how cleverly Nella had finessed this whole situation. She had moved decisively while Hetty was out of town, working her subtle stratagems to match one of her daughters with the Rusk heir. It really hadn’t mattered which one. It wasn’t the person who was important here, but the prize. With Hetty out of the game, Charlotte had been moved into position as the perfect pawn—eager, malleable, a vessel still open to Nella’s adoring ambitions.

  Hetty had to laugh. “Lamar!” An image came to her mind: She thought of the victorious smile that would play across her mother’s lips when she made her favorite winning move in mah-jongg, clicking together a pair of matching tiles bearing the ma chiang figure, the house sparrow that gave the sport its name. Nella cast her head back and was now watching her daughter across the white tilt of her cheekbones, her black eyes impregnable within their serene depths of power and elegance. With a chill, Hetty knew she could never return home.

  Nella followed her all the way out to the foyer in a frosty silence. Hetty slipped into her shoes and picked up her suitcases.

  “Now I’d appreciate it if Pick could carry me home.”

  Nella took a deep breath. “I’m afraid that won’t be possible.”

  “Oh? Why not?”

  “Picktown was fired.”

  Hetty felt as though her mother had kicked her in the solar plexus. She dropped the suitcases with a clatter and sank down on the large one. “Fired?”

  Nella nodded.

  “But . . . why?”

  “We no longer found him suitable.”

  “You can’t, Mamá. You know as well as I do he supports his whole family. There’s no father.”

  “We’ve made our decision.” The clock chimed five. Nella walked back into the drawing room. “Now I must ask you to leave before Lamar shows up. You’ve caused him quite enough heartache for one week.” Nella sat in her armchair in front of the great Diana screen and began transferring the contents of her handbag to an evening purse. She ignored Hetty, crouched in the foyer.

  “You’re throwing me out?”

  “You’ve got it backward, Esther. You were the one who abandoned me, remember?”

  Hetty stood and heaved up her suitcases, but had no idea where she was going. “How am I supposed to get home?”

  Nella continued to look away from her. Hetty could never remember this happening. She found it unbearable. Her shock and frustration turned to panic. She wanted those black eyes on her, seeing her, whether in rage or love she didn’t care, as long as they were seeing her. But Nella only looked down as she continued sorting through her purse and said, “May I remind you that the streetcar stops right in front of the hotel?”

  Hetty left the Warwick by the side exit, putting a line of shrubs between her and the doorman. The greenery shrank back, and she was out there, on the esplanade, in the deepening haze of a late afternoon, wandering aimlessly through the clipped hedges, shifting the heavier b
ag from one hand to the other.

  She stopped.

  Spread-eagled on the grass before her was the Texas star, bronze centerpiece of the city fathers’ master plan. It was pointing in five directions. She had never noticed that before. Clearly five directions. She was astonished. It lay there in the grass, a dark star burned into the earth, an unexpected horoscope pointing with its tarnished rays toward the different paths unfolding before her: back to the hotel. No longer an option. East toward the refineries out along the Ship Channel. Her future? Due south to the lagoon in Hermann Park. Time to think. West toward the trolley stop. Where would she go? North to the Heights. Back to that dingy garage apartment.

  She decided to follow the southern ray into the park, to the spot where she always came to be alone. Skirting the lagoon until she reached the far end, she let the suitcases slip through her fingers and fall to the grass. She sat on one of them, long scarf dangling about her ankles. She pulled out a Lucky and lit it with her shaking fingers, watching the light dropping in spangles across the sheen of the water. She sat there until a length of hot ash cascaded onto her hand.

  She was all heat and ashes inside, too. She couldn’t get Nella’s face out of her mind, looking away from her, sorting through the contents of her handbag. As if lipsticks and compacts were more important than a daughter! As if Hetty were a cast-off, something to be thrown on the floor in the back hallway like her clothes sprawled there in the dust.

  The Lucky burned her fingers. She’d hardly smoked it all. Her fags weren’t tasting as good as they used to. She threw the butt into the lagoon. It hissed when it hit the water. The cruelest thing of all, she thought, was telling me they fired Pick. Nella knew what that would mean to Hetty, who had discovered him. Lifting the Waller family out of the poverty they’d sunk into in Settegast had been like dragging six people out of quicksand. What would happen to the children now? It was like Addie and Ollie and Minnie and Lewis were sitting there on the grass in front of her, not saying anything, just watching her with those orphaned eyes. No one is coming to rescue us, they seemed to say. No one is coming to help.