A Saint from Texas

by Edmund White

  After the ordeal of the drink, Edward stood and led the way out to his pickup truck. Yvette told me she wanted to say something shockingly honest, something that would clear the air, like “I hear your family is poor and ashamed of it,” but I’d steered her away from that particular conversational gambit. Yvette’s tube was so tight around her shoes that she couldn’t climb up into the cab of Edward’s truck and he had to put his hands on her skinny buttocks and push. My party, which was at the beginning of November, was very glamorous, what with the illuminated boats in the water and the singing gondoliers and the pizza-oven campanile and the bathrooms concealed in a scale model of the Doge’s Palace and a billiard table plunked in the middle of the Bridge of Sighs for the older men who wanted to play rather than dance. The winding lane to the porte cochere of the golf club was lined with 200 hurricane lamps, and Honey had paid men in hacked-off red velvet sweatpants and white silk stockings to keep all the candles lit because the one constant in Texas weather, from the Panhandle to the Rio Grande, is wind. It’s always blowing hard in Texas. Inside the club we’d re-created one-third of Piazza San Marco, including of course Caffé Florian, but what really made it all zing were the flowers. Honey had emptied every greenhouse west of the Mississippi—40 dozen gardenias, a blanket of bride’s roses, smilax for days, 150 sprays of white stock, 1,500 bouquets of white freesia. It smelled like a rich man’s funeral.

  I swanned around and danced with maybe fifty guys. What some people don’t realize (I certainly didn’t at the time) is that whereas the debutantes are very few and very rich (there were only eleven in my year), the boys are numerous and of various castes—virtually any guy who owns evening clothes. The idea was to have three times more boys than girls so they’d cut in on every deb as well as dance with their mothers. The only problem is that some of the boys were fairly presentable fortune hunters or they were much older and sort of beat-up. I guess they were veterans of the war, still unmarried, still studying on the G.I. Bill.

  One of the tall, blond, square-jawed guys who cut in to dance with me said, “Hey, I’m Greg Martins. Don’t y’all live in the White House? Funny old place. My aunt May used to live there all by herself after Uncle Pete died. She never could get the ovens to work. And it’s strange not having an indoor pool—doesn’t the real White House have one? Or did they fill that in to make the room for the press corps?”

  “My,” I said with a giant smile, “you sure know your D.C. You must have lived there.”

  “A bit. My grandfather was a senator from Mississippi and he got me a job one summer as a page.”

  “I declare.”

  Luckily just then Harry Hopkins cut back in. He was my escort, a smiley guy fixing to bust out of his tails.

  “Thanks for rescuing me,” I said.

  “Poor Greg,” Harry said with a grin. “All that money and those looks and no one likes him. He’s the president of the Bachelors’ Cotillion.” I think he meant the Idlewild Club, the men who’d selected us debs. “They say he has a private room in the pool house here and takes some of these young bachelors out there for sex.”

  “Oh,” I said. “That can’t be true, Harry Hopkins. You just made that up.” He smiled and didn’t say anything, but for the next ten minutes I couldn’t get that image out of my head, one penguin on top of another and both male! Pumping away. I never was so disturbed but then that sexy tennis coach cut in. He said, “I tried dancing with your sister but I’m all black and blue now. She can’t dance worth a darn.”

  I laughed and said, “She says so herself, though Conchita gave her twelve lessons.”

  “All I tried was the box step.”

  I laughed again. “That’s the one she knows, bless her heart.”

  I spotted her across the room near the vases of white stocks. Her date, Edward? He was holding her at a respectful distance and was steering her around to a slow ballad, but, poor thing, Yvette has two left feet. I must say she was a good sport, her hair straightened and peroxided, her blue organdy gown almost falling off her skinny torso, the idea she had no panties on—Lord! How she must have hated that! Only for the love of a sister.

  Our daddy cut in and I danced with him to “The 12th of Never.” He was a pretty good dancer but it was odd to feel his breath on my bare shoulder. He’d had a lot to drink and was slurring his words. “Are you happy?”

  “Ecstatic!” I said. “Bobbie Jean looks lovely.”

  “She’s happy as a pig in shit,” Daddy said. “All these stuck-up high-society bishes are inviting her to this club and thas. How do you think Yvette’s holding up?”

  “What a trooper!” I said. “She’s being good as gold.”

  “Mostly,” Daddy said, “but Bobbie Jean overheard her talking to the colored help in the kitchen, asking them why they don’t organize in a damn union. Born troublemaker!”

  “That’s just Yvette being Yvette.” We both smiled.

  Dawn was already breaking when the waiters brought in scrambled eggs, coffee, and toast. They’d opened up the Magnolia Room, where all the tables were set with peach-colored cloths, matching napkins, and more smilax. The orchestra members were yawning and packing up their instruments. The horn section looked particularly gray in the daylight, all that puffing. The coffee smelled wonderful!

  Each woman was given a goodie bag with a big bottle of Chanel Nº5 in it and a silver tray engraved with the invitation. The boys got Canoe cologne. Some of the women couldn’t wait to open their bottles and soon pockets of perfume were competing with the rich coffee smell. Everyone was smoking, especially some of the more sophisticated girls.

  I saw Greg Martins slip in and a moment later the handsome little Howard Clay. They went their separate ways—guiltily, I’d say. They both had red lips as if they were wearing lipstick. They’d loosened their white ties, which were dangling across their shirtfronts. Maybe their fathers had tied them hours ago and neither of the boys knew how to retie them. I looked long and hard at Howard; I’m sure he was the “wife” in bed with that big manly Greg. I was fascinated.

  After endless farewells my escort found my wrap and steered me to his green Pontiac, which the valet had just pulled up. Harry was a live wire and a fun date, bristling with extra energy, his eyes always moving nervously behind his glasses as if he were watching a speeded-up ping-pong game. He loved to gossip but understood that I, as a “nice girl,” could only go so far. “Did you catch sight of that disheveled Greg Martin and his little Howard?”

  I just put my finger over his lips, though I was dying to hear more.

  When I went upstairs to our room in the White House, I saw Daddy in the hallway looking confused. I said, “Why, Daddy! I’m going to help Yvette out of her dress—and help her to burn it, probably.”

  “Don’t. Let me help her. And why don’t you sleep somewhere else?” His voice sounded choked and I could guess how serious he was, just as you can tell how drunk a man is when he fails to walk a straight line.

  I was alarmed. “No reason for you to bother, Daddy.”

  “It’s no bother. I want to touch base with Yvette after the ball—which must’ve been a trial for her.”

  I felt protective of Yvette and was willing to risk Daddy’s ire. “I’m not sure it’s appropriate for a grown man—”

  “I don’t give a damn what you think!” He shouted in a whisper, pushing me roughly aside. He let himself into our room and I sank to the floor, stunned. I’d seen him angry before, usually about suspected Communists, but he’d never cussed us out. Was he just drunk? Why had Yvette never told me about … Daddy? Was Bobbie Jean in on this too? I couldn’t bear to think about it. Was ours the strangest family in the world?

  I went down the hall, out of sight. I must have fallen asleep there on the floor in the hallway. I thought I could hear the sound of a belt clinking, of the mattress wheezing, of a muffled cry, but I felt helpless. I could feel only an immense pity. I know I cried myself to sleep and thought this night marked both the high point and the low point of
my life. The carpet I slept on smelled new (it was new). It was plush and had been recently swept and still smelled of electricity.

  Much later I saw Daddy come out of our room, his hair and clothes all in disarray. In a heartbreaking voice, he said as he looked back into the room at Yvette, “Sorry, pal.” I had an impulse to run to Yvette and comfort her, to hold her in my arms, to coo soothing words. But what if Yvette was covered with shame and the only fire burning in her was indignation?

  My father had done “everything” for me by giving me a spectacular debut, the high point of the season, but I hated him now for what he had done … to us.

  CHAPTER 3

  My sister and I were driving down to Austin that September for our freshman year at the University of Texas. We drove past empty fields of scorched grass dotted with cactus. We passed a big century plant, a mountain laurel, cedar elms, palo verde. It was a real scorcher that day, and my new Buick didn’t have air-conditioning. But it was a convertible and halfway there we decided to lower the roof. It was so much fun to see it retract and collapse and disappear into its slot just above the trunk. It jerked and groaned. The sun was punishing, so bright and hot, we’d had absolute years of drought that ended in 1956, but the landscape was still dry. I thought the sun might lighten my hair and deepen my tan; it left Yvette so sunburned she had to sleep between wet sheets for two days in her dorm room—I’d plum forgot she didn’t have a starter tan and was always white as a ghost. Later her arms and neck peeled—brown patches of dead skin that lifted off to reveal tissue as pink as bubble gum.

  We were assigned dorm rooms. Daddy said he’d buy an apartment off-campus for us but freshmen had to live in the dorm. That was a rule. I ran around signing up for Texas history and secretarial skills like typing, which I already knew how to do, and home economics with a specialty in baking. I wanted to take Human Sexuality but Daddy wouldn’t hear of it (Daddy said he thought premarital sex was the Devil’s handiwork).

  Yvette, whose room was just down the hall, signed up for Introduction to Philosophy 101, Music Appreciation from Bach to Ferde Grofé, English Literature 407 from Chaucer to Larry McMurtry, and Quantum Physics. She was considering majoring in religion but she heard the course Comparative Religions was nicknamed “the faith breaker,” and that put her off. What she really loved was anything medieval, especially Gregorian chants and Luca Marenzio’s madrigals. She would listen to them on the turntable she brought down with her from Dallas; it was a birthday gift from Namaw. Yvette wore the same clothes every day—cowboy boots and a denim skirt and a man’s cowboy shirt. She had three of those skirts and seven of those shirts, all identical. She had let her hair grow in black and kinky again. She was neat and clean. She said, referring to the dorm cafeteria, which everyone else complained about, “I don’t mind what I eat as long as it’s always the same thing.” I think she got that line from one of her favorite philosophers. Don’t ask me who; I don’t do names after six o’clock.

  I took one course in French history and it ignited all my longings for another life, a noble life, one that was rooted and flourishing. Texas seemed nothing more than a tumbleweed blowing across an arid field. I wanted a castle with walls ten feet thick. I wanted historic jewels. I wanted a titled husband, not some heavy-drinking cowboy with a mustache and piss-soaked jeans. I wanted the people around me to be polite and deferential, gentle and respectful.

  I knew a bunch of girls from our fancy high school, Hockaday. We were all determined to get into Tri-Delt, the Theta Zeta chapter. We were all white and blonde in those days (I see from the alumni magazine they still are!). The girls were so sweet you could have a diabetic attack after ten minutes with them. But also playful. They’d answer the phone: “Delta Delta Delta. May I help you help you help you?” You had to demonstrate a “broadened moral or intellectual life”—which meant not going “all the way” and choosing the occasional “brain” (but only if she was pretty) to keep up the house average. The girls had a strange way of shrieking with excitement and stamping their feet and embracing each other when they ran into one another, even if it was the third time that day. When we became exhausted we’d stare at one another’s feet and exclaim, “Cute shoes!” I can still hear that breathless talk ringing down through the decades. At the oddest moments, like when I’m walking down the Quai d’Orléans or waiting for my guests at my favorite table at Voltaire, or when the house lights go down at the Opéra Comique and the curtain hasn’t risen yet and the only light is coming through the blue windows in the boxes. Sometimes it will get stuck in my head like a rengaine, “Cute shoes! Cute shoes!” What’s rengaine in English? I must look it up. An “earworm”?

  I rushed hard with some of my friends. Two of my classmates posed with me, our arms describing a giant Delta. Wishful thinking at that point, of course, because we were just hoping to be selected. Our chapter had been founded in 1912 and our motto was “Steadfastly Love One Another.” Now women like one another, but back then they’d as soon stab you in the back, though they all played honey-sweet. And most of them were rich—enough to fart through silk all their lives.

  I was selected because I was blonde and white and a Dallas deb. Our house was pretty; we called it the Delta Shelta. I was excited because I knew that all the big men on campus (BMOC), like those on the football team, wanted to date Tri-Delts. Oh, those guys treated us like little sisters, so respectful; they’d drive down to Laredo, get drunk, and fuck fat whores, two men at a time, spit-roasting the girls, but with us Delts butter would melt in their mouths. A Sigma Nu told me that during their secret initiation ceremonies the men, hooded like Klansmen, took a pledge to protect white Southern womanhood, and most of the frat guys I knew back then actually subscribed to that kind of creepy pledge. Sure, they’d kiss us for hours and their hands might stray below the waist in the dark make-out room, but we Delts knew how to stop that kind of funny business.

  I tried to get Yvette to rush a minor sorority. “Why don’t you try the Kappa Alpha Thetas? Someone told me the chapter was close to being suspended for bad grades and public drunkenness—they’re really desperate for someone sensible and with brains.”

  Every sorority was so eager to keep up their grade average that they’d recruit rush girls with easy majors—education, not engineering. At Austin the competition to get into a top sorority was so fierce that I hired a “rush consultant” (Honey recommended her). You might think a rich beauty who’d made a Texas debut like me would have no problem getting into the Tri-Delts. But I wasn’t a legacy. At one afternoon ice-water tea, I’d worn open-toed shoes, which I later found out was a real no-no. No white shoes before Easter or after Labor Day, no velvet after February 14. No gold in the summer, just silver. Lots of “Yes, ma’ams” and “No, sirs.” No dark meat in the chicken salad, plenty of mayonnaise, no weird curry powder. Everyone can be divided into “trash” or “quality.” Never chew gum in public and never smoke on the streets—that’s trashy. Put a paper doily under the finger bowls. Be sure to “sparkle” all day long and with men turn on the “charm.” Learn to recognize that the three biggest insults are “sweet” and “nice” and “interesting” (pronounced “innarestin’ ”).

  Jane Beth, who was also rushing Tri-Delts, told me her grandmother had been a Louisiana Tri-Delt. She dressed me for the next event, the Courtyard Cookout. She told me that they were looking for girls capable of “unselfish leadership,” which meant volunteering for charity work. I visited some children with cancer in the Austin Hospital; Tri-Delts were especially committed to juvenile cancer and were raising money through a Sincerely Yours letter-writing campaign. I knew that Yvette was tutoring Mexican children at the local church. I wondered if I could pretend I was the one doing that—or maybe that was a controversial charity. I asked my rush consultant, Sue-Ann, and she said it would be best to avoid anything that might involve dark people. Stick with cancer, she said, though I pointed out there were only three afflicted kids in the whole hospital right now and one was nigra. She made a litt
le face and pulled her bobby pins out and shook out her full mane of blonde hair. “Concentrate on the other two,” she said. “You’ll get no points for loving colored folks. And never let me hear you say the N-word. Say ‘Negro’ or ‘Colored.’ Our top girls are never prejudiced.” She bit her lip, lowered her head, raised her eyes, stared at me thoughtfully to make her point as dramatic as possible.

  Pledge day came early in the semester—and I got in! I was so proud to be a Tri-Delt that I plastered two crests on my car window, but then Jane Beth, who also got in, told me that decals were considered tacky in Austin. I scraped them off.

  The best church for quality people was Episcopal, but I had to go to a Baptist one or Daddy would’ve had a cow and docked my allowance, just when I needed it most to buy little gold fish for the Tri-Delt president’s charm bracelet and to make a significant donation to the St. Jude fund for cancerous children. I needed money for gas also, since I wanted to drive to all the football games our guys were playing within five hundred miles. As the coach said, we should all work to make a university our team could be proud of. Football games were the biggest events in our campus life and we worshipped these gladiators. I would’ve been in awe of any of those cute boys—well, “cute” isn’t the right word for these hulking, lumbering death machines. If I met one, he could do anything he wanted with me, I swore. It was only normal for a Texas girl.

  One morning (it must have been in November) I was twirling the radio dial, looking for some of that exciting race music, when I heard on the local news a classy Yankee bass voice saying, “We interrupt our broadcast to report that, well, something like a miracle has occurred right here on Congress Avenue near the Capitol building. A Ford pickup truck, driven by Mr. Orville Teddlie from Bluffdale, Texas, ran up over the curb onto the sidewalk and rolled over a Mexican child, Hector Colimas. I can hardly tell this in a normal voice. Well, a young woman—I’m getting all this over the phone from our reporter, go on, Maybelle, tell me—a young person, a Miss Yvette Crawford, a UT freshman, single-handedly lifted the vehicle a foot in the air and the child’s mother was able to pull him to safety. And, Maybelle, is this girl a big strapping farm girl? No, you say she’s a little biddy thing—well, Lord, how on earth did she do that? She doesn’t know herself? But she felt this superhuman force? Was she related to little Hector? No, you say she’s an Anglo. Folks, this is an amazing story, an eighteen-year-old white freshman girl, a puny little girl, has saved a Mexican boy! Yvette Crawford has saved Hector Colimas.” Suddenly a jingle interrupted the broadcast. “Now, have you ever wondered how to wash your delicate underthings, your Luxables?”