Cimarron

by Edna Ferber

  Mrs. Tracy Wyatt (she who had been Donna Cravat) had tried to adopt one of her brother’s children, being herself childless, but Cim and his wife Ruby Big Elk had never consented to this. She was a case, that Donna Cravat, Oklahoma was agreed about that. She could get away with things that any other woman would be shot for. When old Tracy Wyatt had divorced his wife to marry this girl local feeling had been very much against her. Everyone had turned to the abandoned middle-aged wife with attentions and sympathy, but she had met their warmth and friendliness with such vitriol that they fell back in terror and finally came to believe the stories of how she had deviled and nagged old Tracy all through their marriage. They actually came to feel that he had been justified in deserting her and taking to wife this young and fascinating girl. Certainly he seemed to take a new lease on life, lost five inches around the waist line, played polo, regained something of the high color and good spirits of his old dray-driving days, and made a great hit in London during the season when Donna was presented at court. Besides, there was no withstanding the Wyatt money. Even in a country blasé of millionaires Tracy Wyatt’s fortune was something to marvel about. The name of Wyatt seemed to be everywhere. As you rode in trains you saw the shining round black flanks of oil cars, thousands of them, and painted on them in letters of white, “Wyatt Oils.” Motoring through Oklahoma and the whole of the Southwest you passed miles of Wyatt oil tanks, whole silent cities of monoliths, like something grimly Egyptian, squatting eunuch-like on the prairies.

  As for the Wyatt house—it wasn’t a house at all, but a combination of the palace of Versailles and the Grand Central Station in New York. It occupied grounds about the size of the duchy of Luxembourg, and on the ground, once barren plain, had been set great trees brought from England.

  A mile of avenue, planted in elms, led up to the mansion, and each elm, bought, transported, and stuck in the ground, had cost fifteen hundred dollars. There were rare plants, farms, forests, lakes, tennis courts, golf links, polo fields, race tracks, airdromes, swimming pools. Whole paneled rooms had been brought from France. In the bathrooms were electric cabinets, and sunken tubs of rare marble, and shower baths glass enclosed. These bathrooms were the size of bedrooms, and the bedrooms the size of ballrooms, and the ballroom as big as an auditorium. There was an ice plant and cooling system that could chill the air of every room in the house, even on the hottest Oklahoma windy day. The kitchen range looked like a house in itself, and the kitchen looked like that of the Biltmore, only larger. When you entered the dining room you felt that here should be seated solemn diplomats in gold braid signing world treaties and having their portraits painted doing it. Sixty gardeners manned the grounds. The house servants would have peopled a village.

  Sabra Cravat rarely came to visit her daughter’s house, and when she did the very simplicity of her slim straight little figure in its dark blue georgette or black crêpe was startling in the midst of these marble columns and vast corridors and royal hangings. She did come occasionally, and on those occasions you found her in the great central apartment that was like a throne room, standing there before the portraits of her son’s two children, Felice and Yancey Cravat. Failing to possess either of the children for her own, Donna had had them painted and hung there, one either side of the enormous fireplace. She had meant them to be a gift to her mother, but Sabra Cravat had refused to take them.

  “Don’t you like them, Sabra darling? They’re the best things Segovia has ever done. Is it because they’re modern? I think they look like the kids—don’t you?”

  “They’re just wonderful.”

  “Well, then?”

  “I’d have to build a house for them. How would they look in the sitting room of the house on Kihekah! No, let me come here and look at them now and then. That way they’re always a fresh surprise to me.”

  Certainly they were rather surprising, those portraits. Rather, one of them was. Segovia had got little Felice well enough, but he had made the mistake of painting her in Spanish costume, and somehow her angular contours and boyish frame had not lent themselves to these gorgeous lace and satin trappings. The boy, Yancey, had refused to dress up for the occasion—had, indeed, been impatient of posing at all. Segovia had caught him quickly and brilliantly, with startling results. He wore a pair of loose, rather grimy white tennis pants, a white woolly sweater with a hole in the elbow, and was hatless. In his right hand—that slim, beautiful, speaking hand—he held a limp, half-smoked cigarette, its blue-gray smoke spiraling faintly, its dull red eye the only note of color in the picture. Yet the whole portrait was colorful, moving, alive. The boy’s pose was so insolent, so lithe, so careless. The eyes followed you. He was a person.

  “Looks like Ruby, don’t you think?” Donna had said, when first she had shown it to her mother.

  “No!” Sabra had replied, with enormous vigor. “Not at all. Your father.”

  “Well—maybe—a little.”

  “A little! You’re crazy! Look at his eyes. His hands. Of course they’re not as beautiful as your father’s hands were—are …”

  It had been five years since Sabra had heard news of her husband, Yancey Cravat. And now, for the first time, she felt that he was dead, though she had never admitted this. In spite of his years she had heard that Yancey had gone to France during the war. The American and the English armies had rejected him, so he had dyed his graying hair, lied about his age, thrown back his still magnificent shoulders, and somehow, by his eyes, his voice, his hands, or a combination of all these, had hypnotized them into taking him. An unofficial report had listed him among the missing after the carnage had ceased in the shambles that had been a wooded plateau called the Argonne.

  “He isn’t dead,” Sabra had said, almost calmly. “When Yancey Cravat dies he’ll be on the front page, and the world will know it.”

  Donna, in talking it over with her brother Cim, had been inclined to agree with this, though she did not put it thus to her mother. “Dad wouldn’t let himself die in a list. He’s too good an actor to be lost in a mob scene.”

  But a year had gone by.

  The Oklahoma Wigwam now issued a morning as well as an afternoon edition and was known as the most powerful newspaper in the Southwest. Its presses thundered out tens of thousands of copies an hour, and hour on hour—five editions. Its linotype room was now a regiment of iron men, its staff boasted executive editor, editor in chief, managing editor, city editor, editor, and on down into the dozens of minor minions. When Sabra was in town she made a practice of driving down to the office at eleven every night, remaining there for an hour looking over the layout, reading the wet galley proof of the night’s news lead, scanning the A. P. wires. Her entrance was in the nature of the passage of royalty, and when she came into the city room the staff all but saluted. True, she wasn’t there very much, except in the summer, when Congress was not in session.

  The sight of a woman on the floor of the Congressional House was still something of a novelty. Sentimental America had shrunk from the thought of women in active politics. Woman’s place was in the Home, and American Womanhood was too exquisite a flower to be subjected to the harsh atmosphere of the Assembly floor and the committee room.

  Sabra stumped the state and developed a surprising gift of oratory.

  “If American politics are too dirty for women to take part in, there’s something wrong with American politics.… We weren’t too delicate and flowerlike to cross the plains and prairies and deserts in a covered wagon and to stand the hardships and heartbreaks of frontier life … history of France peeking through a bedroom keyhole … history of England a joust … but here in this land the women have been the hewers of wood and drawers of water … thousands of unnamed heroines with weather-beaten faces and mud-caked boots … alkali water … sun … dust … wind.… I am not belittling the brave pioneer men but the sunbonnet as well as the sombrero has helped to settle this glorious land of ours.…”

  It had been so many years since she had heard this—it had
sunk so deep into her consciousness—that perhaps she actually thought she had originated this speech. Certainly it was received with tremendous emotional response, copied throughout the Southwest, the Far West, the Mid-West states, and it won her the election and gained her fame that was nation wide.

  Perhaps it was not altogether what Sabra Cravat said that counted in her favor. Her appearance must have had something to do with it. A slim, straight, dignified woman, yet touchingly feminine. Her voice not loud, but clear. Her white hair was shingled and beautifully waved and beneath this her soft dark eyes took on an added depth and brilliance. Her eyebrows had remained black and thick, still further enhancing her finest feature. Her dress was always dark, becoming, smart, and her silken ankles above the slim slippers with their cut-steel buckles were those of a young girl. The aristocratic Marcy feet and ankles.

  Her speeches were not altogether romantic, by any means. She knew her state. Its politics were notoriously rotten. Governor after governor was impeached with musical comedy swiftness and regularity, and the impeachment proceedings stank to Washington. This governor was practically an outlaw and desperado; that governor, who resembled a traveling evangelist with his long locks and his sanctimonious face, flaunted his mistress, and all the office plums fell to her rapscallion kin. Sabra had statistics at her tongue’s end. Millions of barrels of oil. Millions of tons of zinc. Third in mineral products. First in oil. Coal. Gypsum. Granite. Live stock.

  In Washington she was quite a belle among the old boys in Congress and even the Senate. The opposition party tried to blackmail her with publicity about certain unproved items in the life of her dead (or missing) husband Yancey Cravat: a two-gun man, a desperado, a killer, a drunkard, a squaw man. Then they started on young Cim and his Osage Indian wife, but Sabra and Donna were too quick for them.

  Donna Wyatt leased a handsome Washington house in Dupont Circle, staffed it, brought Tracy Wyatt’s vast wealth and influence to bear, and planned a coup so brilliant that it routed the enemy forever. She brought her handsome, sleepy-eyed brother Cim and his wife Ruby Big Elk, and the youngsters Felice and Yancey to the house in Dupont Circle, and together she and Sabra gave a reception for them to which they invited a group so precious that it actually came.

  Sabra and Donna, exquisitely dressed, stood in line at the head of the magnificent room, and between them stood Ruby Big Elk in her Indian dress of creamy white doeskin all embroidered in beads from shoulder to hem. She was an imposing figure, massive but not offensively fat as were many of the older Osage women, and her black abundant hair had taken on a mist of gray.

  “My daughter-in-law, Mrs. Cimarron Cravat, of the Osage Indian tribe.”

  “My son’s wife, Ruby Big Elk—Mrs. Cimarron Cravat.”

  “My sister-in-law, Mrs. Cimarron Cravat. A full-blood Osage Indian.… Yes, indeed. We think so, too.”

  And, “How do you do?” said Ruby, in her calm, insolent way.

  For the benefit of those who had not quite been able to encompass the Indian woman in her native dress Ruby’s next public appearance was made in a Paris gown of white. She became the rage, was considered picturesque, and left Washington in disgust, her work done. No one but her husband, whom she loved with a dog-like devotion, could have induced her to go through this ceremony.

  The opposition retired, vanquished.

  Donna and Tracy Wyatt then hired a special train in which they took fifty Eastern potentates on a tour of Oklahoma. One vague and not very bright Washington matron, of great social prestige, impressed with what she saw, voiced her opinion to young Yancey Cravat, quite confused as to his identity and seeing only an attractive and very handsome young male seated beside her at a country club luncheon.

  “I had no idea Oklahoma was like this. I thought it was all oil and dirty Indians.”

  “There is quite a lot of oil, but we’re not all dirty.”

  “We?”

  “I’m an Indian.”

  Osage, Oklahoma, was now just as much like New York as Osage could manage to make it. They built twenty-story office buildings in a city that had hundreds of miles of prairie to spread in. Tracy Wyatt built the first skyscraper—the Wyatt building. It was pointed out and advertised all over the flat prairie state. Then Pat Leary, dancing an Irish jig of jealousy, built the Leary building, twenty-three stories high. But the sweet fruits of triumph soon turned to ashes in his mouth. The Wyatt building’s foundations were not built to stand the added strain of five full stories. So he had built a five-story tower, slim and tapering, a taunting finger pointing to the sky. Again Tracy Wyatt owned the tallest building in Oklahoma.

  On the roof of the Levy Mercantile Company’s Building Sol had had built a penthouse after his own plans. It was the only one of its kind in all Oklahoma. That small part of Osage which did not make an annual pilgrimage to New York was slightly bewildered by Sol Levy’s roof life. They fed one another with scraps of gossip got from servants, clerks, stenographers who claimed to have seen the place at one time or another. It was, these said, filled with the rarest of carpets, rugs, books, hangings. Super radio, super phonograph, super player piano. Music hungry. There he lived, alone, in luxury, of the town, yet no part of it. At sunset, in the early morning, late of a star-spangled night he might have been seen leaning over the parapet of his sky house, a lonely little figure, lean, ivory, aloof, like a gargoyle brooding over the ridiculous city sprawled below; over the oil rigs that encircled it like giant Martian guards holding it in their power; beyond, to where the sky, in a veil of gray chiffon that commerce had wrought, stooped to meet the debauched red prairie.

  Money was now the only standard. If Pat Leary had sixty-two million dollars on Tuesday he was Oklahoma’s leading citizen. If Tracy Wyatt had seventy-eight million dollars on Wednesday then Tracy Wyatt was Oklahoma’s leading citizen.

  Osage had those fascinating little specialty shops and interior decorating shops on Pawhuska just like those you see on Madison Avenue, whose owners are the daughters of decayed Eastern aristocracy on the make. The head of the shop appeared only to special clients and then with a hat on. She wore the hat from morning until night, her badge of revolt against this position of service. “I am a lady,” the hat said. “Make no mistake about that. Just because I am a shopkeeper don’t think you can patronize me. I am not working. I am playing at work. This is my fad. At any moment I can walk out of here, just like any of you.”

  Feminine Osage’s hat, by the way, was cut and fitted right on its head, just like Paris.

  Sabra probably was the only woman of her own generation and social position in Osage who still wore on the third finger of her left hand the plain broad gold band of a long-past day. Synchronous with the permanent wave and the reducing diet the oil-rich Osage matrons of Sabra’s age cast sentiment aside for fashion, quietly placed the clumsy gold band in a bureau drawer and appeared with a slim platinum circlet bearing, perhaps, the engraved anachronism, “M. G.-K. L. 1884.” Certainly it was much more at ease among its square-cut emerald and oblong-diamond neighbors. These ladies explained (if at all) that the gold band had grown too tight for the finger, or too loose. Sabra looked down at the broad old-fashioned wedding ring on her own gemless finger. She had not once taken it off in over forty years. It was as much a part of her as the finger itself.

  Osage began to rechristen streets, changing the fine native Indian names to commonplace American ones. Hetoappe Street became the Boston Road; very fashionable it was, too. Still, the very nicest people were building out a ways on the new section (formerly Okemah Hill) now River View. The river was the ruddy Canadian, the view the forest of oil rigs bristling on the opposite shore. The grounds sloped down to the river except on those occasions when the river rose in red anger and sloped down to the houses. The houses themselves were Italian palazzi or French châteaux or English manors; none, perhaps, quite so vast or inclusive as Tracy Wyatt’s, but all provided with such necessities as pipe organs, sunken baths, Greek temples, ancient tapestries, Venetian gl
ass, billiard rooms, and butlers. Pat Leary, the smart little erstwhile section hand, had a melodramatic idea. Not content with peacocks, golf links, and swimming pools on his estate he now had placed an old and weathered covered wagon, a rusted and splintered wagon tongue, the bleached skull of a buffalo, an Indian tepee, and a battered lantern on a little island at the foot of the artificial lake below the heights on which his house stood. At night a searchlight, red, green, or orange, played from the tower of the house upon the mute relics of frontier days.

  “The covered wagon my folks crossed the prairies in,” Pat Leary explained, with shy pride. Eastern visitors were much impressed. It was considered a great joke in Osage, intimately familiar with Pat’s Oklahoma beginnings.

  “Forgot something, ain’t you Pat, in that outfit you got rigged up in the yard?” old Bixby asked.

  “What’s that?”

  “Pickax and shovel,” Bixby replied, laconically. “Keg of spikes and a hand car.”

  Old Sam Pack, who had made the Run on a mule, said that if Pat Leary’s folks had come to Oklahoma in a covered wagon then his had made the trip in an airplane.

  All the Oklahoma millionaire houses had libraries. Yards and yards of fine leather libraries, with gold tooling. Ike Hawkes’s library had five sets of Dickens alone, handsomely bound in red, green, blue, brown, and black, and Ike all unaware of any of them.

  Moving picture palaces, with white-gloved ushers, had all the big Broadway super-films. Gas filling stations on every corner. Hot dog, chili con carne, and hamburger stands on the most remote country road. The Arverne Grand Opera Company at the McKee Theater for a whole week every year, and the best of everything—Traviata, Bohème, Carmen, Louise, The Barber of Seville. The display of jewels during that week made the Diamond Horseshoe at the Metropolitan look like the Black Hole of Calcutta.