Magnolia City

by Duncan W. Alderson

  “I finally found out what that means. Lockett told me. It’s the name of a mining company! But what does it have to do with your father? I thought he had his own mine.”

  “I think it’s time you heard the whole story.”

  “It might help me understand you better.”

  “First, you need to understand my dad. He was a man who worked in the mines all his life. He had a natural nose for ore. No one knew the business better—how to blast through rock, build tunnels in the deep. He was always down there burrowing, my dad, which is why they called him Termite. He was an earnest man, hardworking. He wanted me to have a better life than he did. He wanted to send me to college. He kept on learning more about the business. He even picked up enough surveying skills to make the discovery that turned him from a miner to a mine owner. This was where all his problems started.”

  Garret sat up in the hammock and steadied it with his foot while he tried to explain the technicalities of the mining business. There was a small triangle of land that remained unclaimed at the heart of the Anaconda holdings where Termite worked. It wasn’t very big, less than an acre, Garret said, but a rich vein of copper apexed within the boundaries, giving his father the right by law to mine the vein. He filed patent upon it and began digging out his fortune. But his ex-boss, Marcus Daly, the owner of Anaconda, wasn’t about to let him get away with such audacity. He filed a lawsuit to stop Termite from mining the claim, meanwhile sending crews underground to steal the ore right out from under his feet.

  “Daly took almost a million dollars’ worth of copper ore from the MacBride mine. That’s money that should have come to my family,” Garret said.

  “No wonder you were upset when you found out that Lamar was stealing our oil. Talk about déjà vu.”

  “It brought it all back. I knew we couldn’t win because my dad hadn’t. They found a way to rob him of his Senate seat. They broke him in court. They would have done the same to us. They always do. That’s why I gave up. That’s the only reason. I probably shouldn’t have left you, but I just couldn’t stay.”

  “So your dad never took bribes?”

  “He didn’t have to. He made his own money. The miners loved him.”

  “Speaking of money . . .” Hetty showed him the wad of cash in her purse and described where it came from. She explained how she got the bruise rouging her cheek. Garret kissed it and acknowledged the risk she had taken to pay off their debts.

  “Now I feel bad that I left you. But I had to clear out of there in a hurry. I was really afraid I’d end up like my dad.” Garret lay back down on the pillows.

  “What happened to Termite?”

  “When they took his Senate seat away and people stopped believing in him, it just crushed him. He ended up drinking himself to death.”

  Hetty lay on her side and watched him as he talked, studying every nuance of regret on his face. His long eyelashes were at half-mast, his crystal-blue eyes darkened. His lips didn’t smile, and he had a scruffy growth of beard. But still, she found his uncertainty irresistible, something broken she could mend with her love. The first night she met him, she hadn’t been able to get a good look at his face, and now she wondered if she’d ever really seen him clearly. She’d fallen in love with his fearlessness, his courtship of chaos. Now she needed to embrace the faint heart that also quivered in his breast when he was afraid.

  “Was that when you had to leave the university?”

  “Yes, after my sophomore year.”

  “Were you disappointed?”

  “The worst part was giving up my Olympic dreams.”

  “That must have been devastating.”

  “It’s what sent me to Texas. I was hoping to make back the money we lost. I didn’t want my mother to suffer.”

  “It doesn’t matter now. We have each other.”

  Garret’s beard scratched her lips when he kissed her, but she didn’t care. She loved him just as he was, unshaven, unheroic, and barefoot.

  “You’re worth more to me than all the money,” he said, in between kisses.

  “Then why didn’t you call me? You knew where I was.”

  “I was waiting to see if you’d come looking for me.”

  “Why?”

  “Don’t you know?”

  She shook her head.

  “I thought you were going to go back to Lamar.”

  “You did?” Hetty sat up, making the hammock swing. “Oh, Mac, you poor thing!”

  “Well . . . you seemed awfully interested in fighting with him.”

  “I was stupid. I don’t know what got into me. But it’s not because I’m in love with Lamar!”

  “It’s not?”

  Hetty looked out through the rusty screens in frustration. “No, honey. I don’t want Lamar. I don’t know how many times I have to tell you.”

  “It’s really been eating away at me.”

  Hetty looked back at the man lying in the hammock. What she saw caused her to put her foot on the floor and stop it from swinging. Tears welled in Garret’s blue eyes. His face was that of a boy’s: guileless, hurt, his pain unprotected. “I left you before you could leave me.”

  She reached for him. “You’re the one, Mac. You were always the one.”

  She’d never seen him weep like this. She held him close while a riptide of emotions broke loose, all the doubt and the disappointment and loss of the last few months flooding out. She could feel everything crashing around their heads: Pick and the Ada Hillyer, Cleveland and the interest owners, Splendora and Anaconda and a thousand oil wells sitting idle. Garret needed her to hold him while he tore through his anguish and told her how sorry he was. She consoled him, her breasts wet with tears.

  Soon, Pierce woke up and started crying for her from the iron bed. Hetty and Garret dressed and took him out to the beach. Garret played with his son for a long time in the sand. When they grew hungry, she cut up the apples she’d bought and found some cheddar cheese to slice out of the icebox. Swaying in the hammock, they talked through the dusk, until the salty air put Pierce to sleep early on his blanket. Hetty nestled him in the old iron bed where he’d taken his nap. Then she swung back into the hammock and wrapped her arms and legs around Garret, swimming in his heavy scent. She rocked him for a while, feeling close but not erotic, blending her breath with his. The sound of the surf rose and fell like the voices of lovers murmuring at midnight. She nuzzled her mouth close to his ear and whispered, “Now I’m rich,” but he had fallen asleep. Mac was finally at peace.

  Hetty woke in the night and found Garret unbuttoning her blouse. An old moon had crept out of the ocean and built a nest of pale light in the clouds. She couldn’t see her husband’s face, but she could make out his naked body stretched out on the hammock, aroused and smelling like wetlands musky with heat. She let him undress her and suck at her nipples until they ached with pleasure. She wanted him so much she was delirious with it, still half asleep and reddening in the face. As he lifted above her, she spread her legs all the way, causing the hammock to fan out to its fullest berth. There were no more barriers in their way; she was dripping with fertility and ready to yield everything to his need. He lay on top of her and penetrated her slowly, taking his time. They were so ripe with love they couldn’t have stopped if they’d wanted to. His arms came around her, her legs entwined him, and they cleaved to one another breathlessly as the hammock rocked and pitched through the night.

  Hetty rises through the ceiling and stands on the cedar shingles of the porch. Music washes in from the Gulf. A yacht is passing by, the Rusk yacht, all one hundred and three feet of it lit up for a party as it glides through the water. On the back deck, Nella and Charlotte and Lamar sit in deck chairs talking. Hetty’s friends Belinda and Wini lean over the railing. Diana Dorrance is flirting with the captain. No one is paying any attention to Hetty except for Cora, who smiles at her as the yacht flows by. She looks as beautiful as Hetty has ever seen her, lounging in a silk rebozo, gesturing to the east. Hetty follows to where h
er finger is pointing: Dawn is splintering the darkness. Out of the blue fog, the spires of the Galvez Hotel rise into the morning light.

  “That’s where we spent our honeymoon,” she says to the partygoers, but they have drifted away.

  Children appear in the clouds, refugees from a baroque ceiling. They sit there enormous, translucent, as if made of glass, gazing at her with ancient eyes. A boy and a girl. The boy is naked except for the paintbrush in his hands. He is painting the dawn by dipping bristles into the sun. He doesn’t streak the sky with the usual russet and orange, but blends his palette from the dark side of the spectrum, mixing a radiant magenta out of red and purple, crowning it with golden light and resting it on the turquoise of the sea. He circles the girl with his rainbow of darkness and draws it across the sky like a comet’s tail, a Roman candle. Hetty watches it arch and dive. Then it enters her womb.

  The blue light of dawn drew Hetty out of a blissful slumber. She thought she heard voices in the tide. Rolling out of the hammock, she picked the striped beach towel off the floor and wrapped it around her shoulders. She opened the screen door soundlessly, descending the wooden steps to the sand. The old moon was setting, pale and evanescent in the growing light. She followed it along, wading in the surf, curious to see what the ocean had spawned in the night. A brine of cockleshells and twisted whelks littered the beach, along with braids of seaweed and broken sand dollars. The pink inside a seashell reminded her of the dark rainbow she’d seen in her dream last night. A dream that was not of the earth, born of the sea. She remembered how Cora had described what happens when the two darkest sides of the spectrum meet: something unexpected and rare, a shimmering pink lighter than the purple and red that give it birth—a cosmic color that must be what flows in the arteries of angels in place of blood. That’s what happened to Mac and me last night, Hetty mused. Our darkest colors touched and gave birth to something radiant and new. A light and joyful magenta. Love made visible.

  She looked across the gleam of the water at the ghost of a moon sinking below the horizon. It was speaking to her in its silent language, the language understood by every woman and by women only. She let the towel gape open in the morning breeze. Her breasts lolled out, full and promising. She cradled her abdomen with her hands. She remembered how the dream ends.

  Please turn the page

  for a very special Q&A

  with Duncan Alderson!

  What inspired you to write Magnolia City?

  I grew up seeing photographs of my mother, Dottie May, as a flapper from a remote, more romantic time in Texas history. The exotic woman in the pictures wore furs and long strands of pearls, staring into the camera with a kind of flaming defiance missing in the practical housewife who was raising me. I had to write a book to explain who that other woman was. She sparked my imagination in so many ways as I tried to picture her on a honeymoon in Galveston, sneaking into the Balinese Room for one of the fashionable new bootleg cocktails. “Dottie” shape-shifted into “Hetty” and sprang to vivid life in my mind. Henry James said that every writer must find his donnée (what’s given to him by life). I found the thread of my donnée in those old faded photographs of my mother. When I yanked on it, a whole book unspooled.

  Why did you choose the title Magnolia City for a book about Houston, Texas? That brings to mind the Deep South.

  As I delved into the history of my hometown, I discovered many surprises. The biggest one was that Houston’s historic nickname was “the Magnolia City.” This may seem odd until you realize that during the period my novel is set, the 1920s, Houston was still a gracious bayou town, steaming at the edge of the Old South but awash in the new money of Spindletop oil. The city didn’t get varnished with the Western Myth until the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo kicked off in 1932. Before that, there were no cowboys and Indians in Houston’s history. But there was a Lost Eden. During Edwardian days, Houstonians took the trolley out to Magnolia Park along Buffalo Bayou, an earthly paradise that rivaled Central Park and was planted with 3,750 Southern magnolia trees. It was wiped out by urban sprawl in the 1920s but it lingered in the collective memory of Old Houstonians like the lost scent of the lovely white flowers that gave the city its name.

  Hetty’s mother, Nella, is a complex, fascinating character, one who can be both magical and infuriating. Is she based on a real person?

  Nella is a fictional collage that I glued together from many different scraps of real life: an elegant grandmother who lived in a hotel; a witty aunt who wrote letters in calligraphy; a mystical Mexican woman who worked in an herb shop and entranced me with her glittering eye. I took an earring here, a pair of lips there, a gesture, a tone of voice, a memory, an innuendo, then cut and pasted them all together in my imagination, fitting the pieces like a puzzle. People who accuse writers of identity theft don’t understand how the creative process works. Characters stolen wholesale from real life often come across as flat in fiction. There’s an alchemical process that must happen, just as in making a collage. Suddenly all the clippings coalesce, and a new face is staring out at you.

  Why did you choose to write from a woman’s point of view?

  I didn’t choose it, it chose me. I was trying to write a novel about a male protagonist in the 1960s who was loosely based on myself. At one point in the story, his mother returns home and drifts off into a long reverie about her youth in the 1920s. I was studying at the Humber School for Writers at the time and my writing coach, the Canadian novelist Sarah Sheard, said, “You know, the best part of this manuscript is the flashback. Why don’t you let the mother tell her story?” It turned out to be a good suggestion. As soon as I allowed my imagination to dance, Hetty MacBride was born. That one chapter mushroomed into a whole book, and suddenly, I discovered I had this strong female voice living inside of me. I was as surprised as everybody else.

  Larry McMurtry pioneered a spare prose style for his novels about Texas, a lyricism as “clean as a bleached bone.” Why have you chosen to write in a more descriptive style?

  Most of McMurtry’s books are set in the Panhandle Plains or the Big Bend Country of West Texas. Magnolia City unfolds along the Gulf Coast, in the moist subtropical part of Southeast Texas. In place of the wide-open sky of the West, Houston has moss-hung bayous and lush azalea gardens flickering in the shade of twisting post oak trees. It’s a different geological zone and a different culture. In order to capture the intricacies of Old Houston, with its elaborate social customs and Art Deco skyscrapers, I needed a language as rich and heady as one of those big, fragrant Magnolia grandiflora blossoms.

  A READING GROUP GUIDE

  MAGNOLIA CITY

  Duncan W. Alderson

  ABOUT THIS GUIDE

  The suggested questions are included

  to enhance your group’s reading of

  Duncan W. Alderson’s

  Magnolia City.

  DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

  Hetty dates two charismatic men, Lamar and Garret. She has trouble choosing between them and, even up to the last moment, isn’t sure she’s made the right decision. She feels that the human heart, after all, has four chambers. Do you think a woman can love more than one man? Does Hetty make a good decision . . . or a foolish one?

  Is Hetty’s impulse to work at the Dowling Street Medical Clinic a pure one, or simply rebellion against her parents? She likes shocking her contemporaries by riding in the front seat with Pick and consorting with his family. Is this true philanthropy on her part? If she really cares about Pick, would she ask him to pump hot oil under cover of night? Houstonians are famous for their generosity, but is there such a thing as pure philanthropy—or is there usually a hidden agenda?

  Why does Nella keep her heritage a secret? Why does Hetty insist on taking Garret into her mother’s secret room? Why does she expect him to reject her when he sees what’s on the walls? What does this reveal to us about society in Houston in the 1920s? Have things changed much since then?

  Why does Hetty have precognitive dreams? W
hat part do they play in the unfolding of the story and what do they tell us about her heritage? How does she use the knowledge that’s revealed to her? Do you think dreams are caused by indigestion or are they a conduit to a deeper part of ourselves? What responsibility do we have in interpreting them?

  Many sisters feel affection for each other. Why don’t Hetty and Charlotte get along? What does their relationship reveal about family dynamics in the Allen household? Why is Charlotte compared to a Stegodyphus spider? Do you have a harmonious relationship with your own relatives today? Or do you still feel “trickles of irritation” like Hetty?

  Does Hetty cross a line when she starts helping her husband break the law? Do you think she’s justified in what she does, or is Pearl correct when she says “the wages of sin is death”? We have similar laws today forbidding recreational drugs like marijuana. Do you think drugs should be legalized or not? What lessons can be learned from Prohibition?

  At one point, Nella quotes the Hopis: “When you dig treasure out of the earth, you invite disaster.” What disaster does Hetty witness in the Splendora oil field? How is this environmental blight a metaphor for her relationship with Lamar? And what do more recent spills tell us about the dangers and ethics of the oil industry?

  Do you think Nella should have stayed at the Kneeling Station for three days? Why didn’t she recant her story of the Alamo sooner? What was at stake for her? Do you think we should teach our children both sides of the conflict? It’s been said that “History is written by the victors.” Do we need to rewrite Texas history for a new generation that includes a larger Hispanic populace?