“Pearl . . .” Her voice echoed against bare walls.
“Yoo-hoo,” came a thin reply. Hetty followed the sound down the hall, through leaded glass doors. She found Pearl slouched wearily on boxes stacked in the living room. Around her, the few possessions she had left huddled, everything else sold to pay debts. “In here having a pity party. Pull up a box.”
“It would have to rain on top of everything else.” Hetty found a perch on a wardrobe trunk. “I hear the bayou’s flooding.”
Pearl sighed. “Like my mother used to say, ‘First it’s all roses, roses, then thorns, thorns.’ ”
“You didn’t happen to find that certificate, did you? From the oil syndicate?”
“Lord, I have messed up.” Pearl stood as though every bone in her body ached. She tore open a box on one of the piles and dug around until she found a manila envelope. “I meant to give this to y’all.”
When Hetty opened the flap and let the contents slide out, she found a letter from the Joiner Oil Syndicate in the Praetorian Building in Dallas, a certificate to a one-acre share and a scientific report entitled “Geological, Topographical and Petroliferous Survey of Rusk County, Texas.” “Sure you don’t want to keep this for yourself?”
“Ain’t worth spit to me without Odell.”
“I’ll accept it on one condition.”
“What’s that?”
“That you become a partner with us.”
“Well . . .” Pearl looked out into the sky and chuckled. “I do hail from Rusk County, you know.”
The slanted coast of Texas sent the hurricane veering into land just shy of Port Arthur, so they missed the worst of it. But there was still plenty of tempest to endure. After moving the last of their possessions into a new garage apartment, Garret cut open some of the cardboard boxes and taped them over the bedroom windows. Hetty got to the corner store just in time to grab a few emergency rations. They plugged in her hand-painted china lamps and stretched out right on the mattress because they couldn’t find any sheets. The storm roared all afternoon and all night. Garret spent the time napping and reading the papers from the oil syndicate, but Hetty lay wrapped tightly in a blanket, listening to the ominous sounds outdoors, afraid even to go to sleep.
“You don’t know what it’s like,” she told him when he teased her. “You didn’t grow up here.” His clear blue eyes shot her an amused glance, his slick black hair glistening with pomade in the lamplight.
She turned her back to him, knowing he couldn’t understand her weather phobia. He hadn’t been suckled on stories of Gulf storms like she had. The granddaddy of all such stories was the one her mother Nella told her about the terrible Galveston storm of 1900, the hurricane that had launched the new century with the greatest natural disaster in American history. It hit suddenly on a Saturday in September. When the big breakers started to roll in, crowds took the trolley out to the beach to see them. There was a party atmosphere, Nella said. Then the winds began to rise, reaching 145 miles per hour in only a few hours. A fifteen-foot surge of water swept over the island. Thousands of homes were turned into kindling. Some said the death toll reached six thousand souls; others placed it as high as twelve thousand—nobody knew for sure because they had to burn the corpses quickly to stop the spread of disease.
Hetty remembered how she and her sister Charlotte used to cry when their mother told them the story of St. Mary’s Orphanage. It had been right on the beach at 69th Street. The gale had blown it down like a house of straw. In a desperate attempt to save lives, the nuns had lashed themselves to groups of children. Hetty wondered what sounds the orphans made right before they died. She smelled something burning and realized that Garret had lit a cigarette. The thought of her husband smoking in bed as if nothing had happened comforted her and, haltingly, she let the wind carry her away.
She woke later in darkness. She could hear waves, giant ones crashing one on top of another. The winds began ripping boards off, and a wild light came in with the rain so she could see where she was. A crucifix hung crookedly in the wind. She wanted to get up and run. But she couldn’t. She was tied down. She could feel Charlotte squirming beside her. Hetty called out. But her voice was lost in the loud crack that broke open the wall between them and the sea. Hetty saw a veranda float away. She craned her neck to look out at the ocean . . . and there it was. A fifteen-foot wall of water. All the girls were told about it when they first came. It spread itself above them like a cobra about to strike, moving from side to side, taking its time. And now she knew what sounds the orphans of St. Mary’s made right before they drowned. They didn’t die praying, as she’d always hoped.
It was cold, that’s what she remembered most about the wave when it finally hit. The cold. It took her breath away. She couldn’t move. She wondered where her mother was, if she’d heard about the storm. She tasted the salt in the water as it thundered over them.
“Mommy!” she cried. “Mommy! Mommy!” Hetty longed to be back in her mother’s arms, to stop this headlong roll into the cold shock of womanhood. The wave shook her over and over, as if she were being scolded. But it was Garret shaking her—Garret had hold of one shoulder while her other shoulder was still being sucked down into the black vortex. “Help,” she cried to him, but the sound got dammed up in her throat as a moan. I must save Charlotte! she thought.
“Honey,” he called. “Honey, what’s wrong?” He was on the shore. He could save her. She wound an arm around his neck and let him pull her out of the ropes to a bright place of morning.
“Hey. You were moaning in your sleep.”
She looked around their bedroom wildly. The only thing flooding the room was sunlight. Garret had ripped off the cardboard. She could see clear sky opening up. “I was tied down. . . .” The effort of pulling herself and Charlotte out of the ropes made her tremble. She clung to Garret until her fear subsided. “Nella left my sister and me at the orphanage. I was so scared.”
Garret stroked her arm. “It’s all right. I’m here. The storm’s over. And guess what. I found the coffeepot.”
“That’s progress.”
The calm blue sky settled Hetty, and she kissed her husband’s neck. He let her slide back to her pillow and sat up on his side of the bed, where papers spread around, crinkled. “I’ve been up drinking coffee and reading this report from the Joiner Oil Syndicate.”
“Look good?”
“I hope to tell you!” He handed her a scientific journal. “Look, here’s an article written about East Texas by two Humble geologists. I’m telling you, honey, they’re going to discover one of the largest oil fields in the world. Listen to how he describes it—a treasure trove all the kings of the earth might covet,” Garret read from the report. “This is big. And we’ve got a one-acre share.” He kissed the certificate. “Now I hope you’ll call your dad.”
“You know he won’t talk to me,” she said, pushing out of bed. She wormed her way around stacks of cartons in the living room and peered through the window. Tree limbs scratched the street everywhere, and wires sagged. “We’ll never get a telephone now,” she muttered.
Garret yanked on his pants and snatched up the envelope on the bed. “All right! If you’re too proud to call your parents, I guess I’ll have to do on my own, won’t I?” He jammed his shoes on and tied the laces. “I’ve got ways to raise money. You just watch.” He slammed his hat on and wrenched the door open, dragging his raincoat behind him.
For the rest of the day, Hetty distracted herself by unpacking one box after another. Stacks of them sagged against the walls, making the apartment even more oppressive than it was. All her new furniture had been crammed into the middle of the living room, barely leaving a space to sit on the davenport. She’d never be able to fit it all into these two small rooms. Half the stuff would have to be stored downstairs in the garage. Hetty looked around and sighed. No one would ever refer to this place as a “carriage house.” She could still smell the old tenants in the air. The closets were scaled for dwarves and,
for her new china, there were only a few cramped cupboards in the kitchen. She looked at the floor under her feet in horror. Linoleum! My carpets will clash with the pattern! To try and bring a little warmth into the rooms, she unpacked her fringed shades and set a couple on the china lamps. But it was pretty hopeless. Mostly the place needed a good cleaning and a fresh coat of paint on the gray plaster walls.
Garret came home late smelling of whiskey. He fell asleep across the bare mattress with his clothes on. She rifled through his wallet. It was empty. He woke with a headache around noon and emptied two or three cartons, leaving bottles strewn on the floor in a search for aspirin. When he left that afternoon, Garret had the same look of impotent rage in his eyes. He wouldn’t tell her where he was going, but he took the checkbook with him. Hetty couldn’t stand to stay in the apartment alone.
Miraculously, her landlady’s phone was still working. Hetty slouched in the hallway while the woman eyed her from the kitchen—a lumbering lady named Mrs. Cobb. Whiffs of rancid chicken fat lingered in the air. Hetty took the phone book off its nail and looked up a Courtlandt Place number.
“Good afternoon. Hargraves residence.” The sweet mellow Southern tones identified the voice immediately as Doris Verne’s.
“Hi, kiddo, it’s Hetty.”
“Hey—whatever happened to you? I haven’t seen you at any of the parties.”
“Shame on me. I guess I’m turning into a boring old married woman.”
“Not at all. Why do you think the rest of us are running around like mad women? We’re looking for husbands, honey child.”
“Fools,” Hetty said with a laugh and caught up on all the latest buzz before describing to her friend the scenes she’d just had with her husband. Doris Verne suggested that Hetty bring Garret to Ima Hogg’s benefit. “What benefit?”
“You are out of touch, girl. Ima Hogg’s giving a concert. Fifty dollars a plate.”
“What would I do without you, kiddo? Give me the number to call!”
Hetty scribbled it on Mrs. Cobb’s notepad, ripped the page off, and tossed the earpiece back onto the phone. After a hasty thank-you, she raced on her toes out the back and up the stairs, where she began ripping open carton after carton. She nosed about until she found the box she was looking for. She lifted out handfuls of jewels: long strands of pearls with a pink blush, the good ones off the floor of the Sea of Japan; her moonstones; her jade scarabs; her amethyst bracelets—the stuff that would bring some kind of quick money from the hock shops down on Preston Avenue. She pulled more and more out, piling them up, until she had enough to fill two dinner plates.
In the damp December night, fog floated over the bayou that snaked through the deep forests of River Oaks. Rising like ghostly fox fire out of the woods came globes of light rolling through the mists: the headlights of cars, one long, elegant automobile after another. They came up from the east, from the city, sweeping around the curves of Lazy Lane, their beams striking across white pillars and moss-hung trees, all slowing down to turn at the same place: into a narrow lane that looked like it disappeared into the woods unless you knew that it led to the most talked about new house in Houston, the pink stucco mansion perched on a crook of Buffalo Bayou. The family who’d carved the exclusive subdivision out of the woods around the country club—the Hogg brothers, Will and Mike, and their sister, Ima—had saved this choice spot for their own fourteen-acre estate.
In some long, shaded driveway, Hetty and Garret sat parked in the Auburn, watching the cars pass behind them. She was trying to make Garret understand why they didn’t just rush up to the mansion at the appointed time. “Our blood veins are like our bayous,” she explained. “Slow moving.” An hour on an invitation was only a suggestion. It was much swankier to mosey in on the verge of being late than to stand around waiting for something to happen. Besides, she was still trying to recall everything she’d been taught about the behavior of well-bred Southerners at social occasions—don’t take your seat before the hostess does, don’t unfold your napkin all the way, never sit closer than four or five inches to the table, never ask for seconds. She described the nine or so courses they could expect tonight and what utensils were proper for each.
“You really expect me to remember all this?” Garret chuckled. Hetty found his amused smile catching. She was in a splendid mood, anticipating the auspicious moment when she would step across the wide threshold of Bayou Bend with a proper invitation in hand. She hadn’t even minded hocking some of her best jewelry. “I know it’s silly. But tonight it’s important. We have to look like we know what we’re doing.”
He watched the lights in his rearview mirror for a few moments. “Haven’t enough cars passed by?”
“Oh, all right. I just hope we don’t arrive before my family does. I have to upstage my mother tonight.”
Garret backed out of the driveway and followed the red taillights of another car into the narrow woodland road. The fog obscured everything. Then, a strange pink luminescence glowed through the black trees. Bayou Bend rose into view at the peak of a circular drive. They waited their turn to drive up to the arched entrance, where a colored attendant opened the door and Hetty stepped into the spangled air. Out of tall French windows, light and music lapped at the darkness welling under immense oaks. She heard the purr of soft voices, sniffed wood smoke trailing out of four towering chimneys. In the blue haze, the spreading stucco walls took on a ghostly light, unfolded into pale pinkish white wings on either side of the two-story central quarters. She glimpsed an elegant wrought iron railing, a round window, and then Garret took her arm and led her, entranced, into the long entrance hall that led all the way to the gardens in back. Her vision blurred as she passed through the crowd: Massive antiques loomed darkly along the walls while above, like angels, girls in white crepes gazed down at them from the twisting railing of the grand staircase. Hetty spotted Diana Dorrance and her date up on the landing. Garret escorted her through one spacious room after another, past crackling fires, under scrolled pediments, his report from the oil syndicate tucked carefully under one arm.
As she strolled along, inches taller than the boyish girls who flitted about in their short little gowns and white gloves, Hetty was glad she had dressed the way she did. She had her hair cut daringly short in a waved shingle and long metallic earrings dripped like shimmering minnows from her earlobes. Her eyes were streaked with their exotic and secret pedigree: a bloodline flowing back to a mestizo grandmother whose blood had been cut with German genes, then thoroughly anglicized, leaving Hetty with a slightly foreign look no one could place. She was just sorry there weren’t more familiar faces around to appreciate her appearance.
She was also disappointed to find the dining room dim and empty. She circled the round tables, scanning the place cards set on top of damask napkins on the gold-rimmed plates. Garret found their place first. “Here we are. Next to your mother and father!”
“What?!” Hetty strode over. “That’ll never do. Let’s see—” Glancing around to be sure no one was in the room, she quickly rearranged the white cards. “That’s better. Put you next to the Yoakums. Cleveland Yoakum’s a promoter. Could bankroll your scheme in a heartbeat if he chose to. His wife’s in between you, so you’ll have to charm her first.”
Maids started lighting candles, so she knew it wouldn’t be long until dinner was called. They made their way back into the entrance hall, where Hetty noticed people revolving around two balding, robust men standing in front of a massive Remington painting of a cattle drive. She heard one of them referred to as Will, and realized that these were the Hogg brothers themselves. She pointed them out to Garret and murmured into his ear that their father, Jim Hogg, had been one of the original investors in the Texaco Company and that they themselves had discovered oil on their old family home, the Varner Plantation, where all you had to do, legend said, was strike a match near the ground and a flame would appear. Hetty sidled up to the group and had just presented her husband when another group of partygoers arr
ived with a flurry at the door. There was a lull as everyone turned to see who the latecomers were. Nella stood in the archway, pausing for a moment to let all eyes take her in. She looked sumptuous all right, in cinnamon satin with silver brocade, a cape of monkey fur falling off one shoulder. Kirb led her in grandly, followed by the rest of the Warwick party: Congressman and Mrs. Welch, their daughter Belinda with a new beau. Hetty made sure she and Garret were standing in between the Hogg brothers as they approached. When Nella spotted them, a look of sheer terror flared for a moment in her eyes but was quickly doused by her icy composure.
“Esther, I—what a surprise to see you here,” she said, brushing her lips against her daughter’s cheek and only nodding at Garret.
“I didn’t think you’d want me to miss another party at Bayou Bend, Mamá. You do know Will and Mike Hogg, don’t you?”
“Of course, dear. You gentlemen must excuse our tardiness, but it’s such a piece out here from the Warwick.”
“Then you’ll have to become neighbors,” Will replied, shaking Kirb’s hand vigorously. “What a pleasure to see you here, Mr. Allen.”
“Mighty pleased, Will, I—”
“I’m afraid River Oaks is too country for me, Mr. Hogg,” Nella cut in. “You remember our neighbors at the Warwick, Congressman and Mrs. Welch?” Greetings ricocheted around the circle, but Kirb ignored Garret altogether. Through the crowd, Hetty saw Lamar lead Charlotte through the front door. She tried to catch his eye. What shall I say to him once we’re face-to-face? How will he treat me? Her high spirits were in danger of being ruffled when she was rescued by a woman in a shimmering gown who appeared from the dining room, ringing a bell. It was Ima Hogg. She had a golden head, an air of importance about her. When she turned to lead the procession in to dinner, she walked as though she were drawing a rustling train behind her.
Once she took her seat, everyone else followed and, as the oyster course was served, the women began the Ritual of the Glove Removal. White gloves were tugged off finger by finger and placed on laps under half-folded napkins. Hetty slipped her kid casings off her hands and bunched them up at her wrists. She thought it was much sexier that way. And so, apparently, did the congressman at her side, who ogled her aslant. She made sure Garret noticed her picking up her oyster fork, which for some esoteric reason she had never understood was placed on the side with the knives rather than with the other forks.
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