A Saint from Texas

by Edmund White

  I snapped the radio off. Lord, next they’d be advertising wood-burning barbecue at Golgotha or breast cancer at St. Agatha’s.

  But I ran down to Congress Avenue looking for Yvette and I found a weeping group—two slender young Mexican men in straw cowboy hats and jeans and a mother (maybe she was the grandmother) in a blue rayon skirt holding on to a little boy, all of them sobbing and clamoring and saying Hail Marys in Spanish.

  Where was Yvette?

  One of the slender young men who could speak English said “an ambulance took her away.” She was at Brackenridge, he said, which I’d never heard of, but I jumped into a taxi and surprisingly the man got in with me. I wasn’t sure if the (white) driver would object to a Mexican riding with me but he didn’t seem to notice. Maybe he thought I was taking my gardener to the emergency room. That’s where we were going—the emergency room. The Mexican man kept saying, “She’s a saint, santa. It was a milagro,” which I figured out later meant “miracle.”

  There she was in the emergency room, waiting impatiently, still not “observed.” She looked blue and tiny under the harsh neon lights in her little-boy clothes, with her bushy hair and big black glasses. She was hugging her knees but she jumped up when she saw us. The man took off his straw hat and went to his knees and kissed her feet. She looked to one side in embarrassment and pulled him up, saying, “For pity’s sake.”

  “What happened? Did you really lift an entire car off a child and save his life?”

  She rubbed her hand across her face and shook her head slightly, as if awakening from a bad dream. “I—I really don’t remember.” She smiled and held up her feeble arm, making a muscle. “It seems highly unlikely.”

  “But I saw it with my own eyes! It was a miracle. You saved little Hector Colimas.” Yvette touched his bare brown arm with her tiny hand; she didn’t want to disabuse him of a crucial belief but didn’t subscribe to superstitious nonsense either. She looked confused, as if she’d just stepped in a puddle with one foot and on a live cable with the other. She had that scorched look and I thought that something serious had undoubtedly happened to her.

  “Are you feeling all right?”

  She nodded. “Let’s get out of here.” We both knew it was against the rules to walk out.

  The Mexican man asked her to bless him. Yvette looked around in real embarrassment, I suspected. She shook her head no, and we went back into the infernal heat. The asphalt was melting and I saw someone’s sandal half-buried in the tar.

  Two days later there was a nasty letter in the Austin newspaper: “We never did like no Catholics round here. Thank God there’s the Klan to defend us against these foreigners. But now they’re trying to stir up trouble with our wetbacks. Them Catholic priests with their incense and holy water live off the backs of poor people; the people eat tortillas and the priests eat cake. Yes you can always fool them Mexies with meer-cles.” It was signed, “a Baptist nabor.” I thought it was clever of the editors to leave in the bad spelling—showed just what kind of white trash we were dealing with.

  I dashed off an angry letter to the paper on my Tri-Delt stationery: “Dear Miss Nabor, I’ll have you know my entire family, including the meer-cle worker, my sister Yvette—we’re all Baptists, though educated ones. Yvette never claimed to have performed any miracles; we Baptists don’t have saints, in case you forgot (back to church with you!). And I don’t care what priests eat! Signed, A Baptist Sister.”

  They printed my letter and a couple other pledges congratulated me, but our Tri-Delt president, while sharing a Co-Cola with me and smiling, said it was better to avoid all controversy. “A Tri-Delt never argues about politics or religion and never mentions money or sex.”

  Things died down. I was still puzzled by what had really happened, but Yvette just said mysteriously and with a smile, “God moves in strange ways.” Was she being ironic? I found out later that people were leaving plastic flowers on the sidewalk where the miracle had taken place (real flowers just died right away in the Texas heat though they were ever so much nicer). They also had left big pink and blue candles that smelled like sweet bubble gum. The Catholics were always relighting the candles and crossing themselves; I watched them from half a block away for nearly a half hour.

  I had my own pearl-encrusted key to the Tri-Delt house and we pledges were guaranteed a date, a fraternity pledge, every night. My, it was exhausting but exhilarating. It was all arranged by our officers and the fraternity leaders. Because I spoke well, had gone to the right girls’ school and the right summer camp and made a Dallas debut, I was popular. Sometimes my date was a jock, rarely a brain, usually a “good guy” (heavy drinker), and once in a while a “face man” (handsome). All the fraternities thought they had to have face men in the mix; I thought it was amusing that these guys, who pretended they were so straight they were blind to male beauty, could actually pick out a looker if need be.

  I never knew what the evening would bring. Some guys would invite me to a keg party that was so noisy I knew nothing more about my date at curfew time than I had at seven thirty, when he came to pick me up. Some guys would drive me to an open-air barbecue place in the hills for a piece of blackberry cobbler. Sometimes we’d go to a bowling alley and I’d always let my date win, though I could ace the game, really. My sorority “big sister” had warned me against showing more skill or knowledge than my date.

  If we sat in a coffee shop on the Drag, I knew that the boy, with his nascent mustache, which looked like a streak of coal dust, and his West Texas drawl, was feeling homesick or lonely and wanted to tell me about his drunk Lubbock father who flogged him as a child if he was scared to dive into the deep end. Brian, a Sigma Chi I dated, worshipped his father, said his dad had an airplane, owned a ranch, could break a wild horse, and could even ride a bronco in a rodeo; he was a Baptist deacon, a real estate millionaire, and a “good ole boy” who’d been on the UT football team, the Longhorns, under the legendary coach … but here I stopped listening. It was boring listening to a guy who was obviously lying—worse, lying to himself. Brian evidently hated his father, a he-man sadist, but there was no way to cut through all that deception, so I just smiled and said, “Gracious me, your daddy sounds like Superman. You are one lucky son.” Brian just stared at me, wide-eyed, tears welling up. When he lit our cigarettes his hand was shaking. I pitied him, but I pitied myself more for having to swallow so much bull crap.

  Between dates and the occasional class and a retreat out to a local dude ranch called Christian Faith and Life Community, I scarcely had a moment to myself. All my clothes smelled of Lone Star beer and cigarettes. I’d given up Kents and Virginia Slims and become a Pall Mall girl, which I pronounced “Pell Mell” because that sounded more British. Like I said, I loved everything British or Continental. Pinky would drive down every week to pick up my dirty laundry and deliver fresh, pressed blouses—she even ironed my underwear and my sheets. Sometimes I’d watch TV with my “sisters” (Dragnet and The Ed Sullivan Show were my favorites, though I also liked Your Hit Parade). Whenever I did these normal things, I’d picture my twin disapproving of me wasting my youth, my life! But over lunch on the Drag she said earnestly, “I don’t disprove of anyone or anything except war. I love you.”

  I teared up and said, “Why, I love you, too, Yvette.”

  But she added chillingly, “I love Christ in you and with the tenderness of the Blessed Mother.”

  I laughed and felt ashamed of the tears in my eyes. “Waiter, another Lone Star, please. So you’ve gone over to the old Catholics after all, have you? Or what are you, a Communist? Some folks say you’re a Communist. A Catholic Communist?”

  “I’m an anarchist,” she said, “not the bomb-throwing kind or the enemy-of-the-state kind. I just believe people should govern themselves.”

  “That’ll never happen!” I exclaimed merrily. “You can’t even get two Tri-Delts to agree on a place for lunch.”

  “I should visit you in your sorority one day to see what it’s all abou
t,” Yvette said, as if to show she loved the Christ in me and didn’t think herself better than me. But I dreaded a visit from her, so skinny, her hair bushy and black, her eyebrows untweezered, her clothes so masculine. What if she told the girls she was my twin? Would they just laugh in disbelief? Could I convince Yvette to say she was my little sister?

  Oh, I knew even then that Yvette’s way was the serious one, but I didn’t want to get serious just yet. I liked dating a different man each night, feeling an erection through gabardine trousers, letting Tom, Dick, or Harry lean his hot cheek on my breasts in their wired brassiere, laughing and speeding out to the Hollow, where a few fast kids bathed and sunbathed nude.

  I knew it was a shallow life, one that could lead only to disappointment, to loneliness, to an understanding of how empty these worldly pleasures are, this unholy alliance of charity work performed by girls of the highest status, this conflict between the inclusive and the exclusive. I wanted to be a rich woman in Junior League doing charity work for little white cancer victims. I prayed God to let me be young while I was young, to walk in the rain holding a quarterback’s powerful hand under the glow of the campus tower, lit orange to celebrate our latest football victory. I wanted to squeal and stomp with the other Tri-Delts, to feel a big masculine hand inching up inside my skirt and stopping dead, frustrated, turned back at the fortress wall of my foundation garment, though one golden hair was poking out, and just on the other side of that unyielding molded rubber I was a hot liquid mass, a magma of molten lava. I knew I’d cool off, reform, turn sensible—but not yet, oh Lord, not yet! I knew real youth was expensive, afforded only to the privileged, that to drive into the night with the top down in a pretty scarf holding one’s peroxided, perfumed hair in place, that to snuggle while parked, looking at the full moon, and to talk about one’s painful childhood or boring debut, to joke about one’s lesbian psych professor or airheaded roommate from Natchez—that this frivolity was priceless and that my duty was to be happy. Eventually I wanted a husband and children—an aristocratic husband whose worth was guaranteed by a long noble lineage, children finer than their mother. Wars and poverty and crippling physical labor and sickness, a spotted face and a grotesquely ballooning stomach—all this suffering was on every side and probably lay in wait for me, but not yet, oh Lord, not yet; for the moment I was among life’s elite.

  CHAPTER 4

  I asked Yvette what she did with her free time. “Be interested in others” was the Tri-Delt rule. Once I wouldn’t have had to pretend to be interested in Yvette, I knew what she was thinking without asking, I felt the same menstrual cramp at the same moment, but now I was intimate with my sorority sisters, with Nan, Kelly, Page, Anne, and Rhonda. I laughed and cried and squealed with them and whispered about how to keep marauding male fingers beyond the panty line.

  “I’m studying Spanish with a tutor,” Yvette said, “so I can communicate with the Mexican students I’m helping at St. Austin’s. It turns out I’m not bad at languages.”

  “Oh, that’s so good to hear,” I cried. “Want another Co-Cola?”

  “Sure. Why is that good to hear?”

  “Here I am—Miss Egotist—but if my twin is quick to pick up a language—”

  “Yes, it must be genetic,” she said with a smile. “A good ear for the accent. What language do you want to learn?”

  “French!” I said. “I want to move to Paris. I’m crazy about fashion. I want to move to Paris and work for Monsieur Givenchy. And maybe be a noble.”

  She cocked her head to one side. “Well, we all need to be clothed, especially in cold weather. And nobility begins with the soul.”

  I wanted to kiss her for making an effort to be agreeable and understanding, but I needed to point out that there was a world of difference between functional clothes and fashion. I smiled weakly. “Any beaux?” I asked. When she looked blank, I said, “Any young men you’re dating?”

  “I have several male friends on the Observer.” I forgot she worked for the campus paper. “I get along fine with them.”

  “Have you ever been kissed?” I thought I’d surprise a confession out of her.

  She looked out the window, drew some Co-Cola through her straw, and whispered, “No.” Then she squared her thin little shoulders and said in a more definite voice, “I know and respect that woman was meant to comfort man, to help him, to be bone to his bone, flesh to his flesh, to bear his children and kiss away tears—but that’s not for me. God wants something different from me.”

  “Do you really believe in God?” I blurted out. “I mean, we all do, but do you really?” I believed in God during rush before I pledged, I believed in God the night before my debut, I believed in God that time the car skidded clear across the turnpike and faced the oncoming traffic, I prayed on my knees the night I wanted Buzz to invite me to his prom, and he did! But I’m not in touch with God on a daily basis.

  “You’re enjoying being natural, you don’t want to be supernatural, everything’s going your way but if you ever feel the need to cast off the natural woman in you and to let the supernatural live—”

  “Then what?” I asked sourly, wearying of this freak, my sister.

  “Then you know how to call on God. You’ve already called on Him for the things you needed—”

  “Needed and deserved,” I said, maybe a bit petulantly.

  “Yes, you know where to find Him. He’s waiting patiently for you.”

  “Do you believe in the Devil, too? And in Hell?”

  “I believe in Hell because it’s doctrinal,” she said with a smile, “but I don’t think anyone’s in it.”

  I couldn’t wait to get back to the Tri-Delt house where three “sisters” (the fun kind) were watching As the World Turns on TV and eating unbuttered popcorn. When I got there, Jane Beth had her hair in curlers as big as frozen orange juice cans and she was wearing a peony-pink silk nightgown with a cocoa-colored lace waist and a gathered bust. Good enough to eat! She was glued to the television screen but patted the empty spot on the sofa next to her. As soon as I sat down she swiveled her lovely legs onto my lap and, still not looking at me, passed me the popcorn. The show was the usual: a weepy organ, the threat of the criminal brother skipping bail, the adulterous couple, the niece who snitched on them. There weren’t even any cute guys, just middle-aged men in suits, with forlorn voices, and a corny old gramps with an Irish brogue.

  During the Oxydol commercial, Jane Beth finally looked at me and smiled. “I just shaved my legs. Aren’t they heavenly smooth? Wish they weren’t so plump.”

  I stroked her thigh as if testing out its smoothness. I said, “You’re not plump, Jane Beth, just edible,” but she wrinkled up her nose in irritation and indicated with a sideways jerk of her head the other two girls. Okay, what I said was weird, maybe, but not indiscreet until she reacted guiltily. She did look like a Valentine’s box of chocolates, with her cocoa lace and pink—foil? Glistening with shattered light. Silk?

  We hadn’t made out, Jane Beth and I, since we’d joined the sorority. But I had discovered how to pleasure myself, which I did at least once a day. I could do it quietly, in the john or even in my bunk bed without the girl in the upper bunk noticing. Anyway, she was always studying to be a civil engineer or something and was at her desk with bright lights and a protractor deep into the night. Lord, I was so glad I was studying baking!

  When I was bringing myself to a muffled climax, it was then I discovered I liked girls, not boys. Or if not girls, at least Jane Beth. I could caress her lovely breasts in my mind, giving them breasts a release from the brassiere like blancmange coming out of the mold and wobbling. Of course, the perfectionist in me wanted to pull those two or three hairs on her nipples. And I could feel that warm juicy slot between her legs, those lips of life! When you’re young and letch after someone, you assume she must be feeling the same thing, too—but what if she isn’t? What if she’s outgrown these pubescent pleasures and is now feeling genuine, oceanic ecstasy only with her Herbert? Wh
at if you made the wrong move and she looked at you with disgust, with horror?

  Yvette’s success with Spanish impressed me and made me courageous. I copied down a number for a French tutor on the church bulletin board. She was called Pauline, which sounded saucily authentic to me, and I pictured her, all fingerless black lace gloves, matching parasol, bangs, and white lipstick.

  We met at Schultz’s Beer Garden and I spied her right away: long straight hair that she kept shaking out of her eyes, flats, dark clothes, transparent skin, unsmiling even when I hailed her by name. She didn’t look at all like a cancan dancer but rather like an existentialist, a Juliette Gréco. She stared at me as if I were some unrecognizable animal or an ugly guy harassing her or some impertinent stranger. I tried to dial down my big Tri-Delt smile. “Pauline?” I asked, and you never saw such a minimal nod, more a facial tic than a nod. “I’m Yvonne,” but I said it wrong, the “von” like the German vahn instead of the French way to rhyme with “fun.” She drank me in with her huge, heavily made-up raccoon eyes, though the rest of her face was scrubbed clean. “Asseyez-vous,” she said, making a mock-courtly gesture with her hand. Not until later did I learn about French politeness, that every native was embarrassed by their manners and made fun of them. French women, even or especially the gratin, were always saying that things made them “shit” (ça me fait chier) or that men and women were stupid “cunts” (cons)—as if this gutter talk proved their sincerity and made up for their seventeenth-century formulas (“Je vous en prie”). I didn’t even get that right away, but I did understand that there were no rules governing the baldest curiosity (Pauline stared and stared), and that every polite gesture had to be performed buffoonishly lest one seem stiff and old-fashioned.