Keeping Secrets

by Suzanne Morris

  Outside in the car, Emory’s mood had switched again with lightning speed. He took my hand, looked across at me, and smiled. “Well, Mrs. Cabot, how about some dinner?”

  “Oh, I do like the sound of that name … please feel free to call me that any time … and Emory, I’m going to try very hard to make you happy.”

  “You already have,” he said triumphantly, then winked. “By the way, I’m glad you decided to accept the position after all.” Then he reached under the seat and brought out a small box, which held a stunning emerald dinner ring. He watched my awestruck expression, then said, “Look inside.” And there, engraved in fancy scroll, was the date of my arrival in San Antonio.

  Across a candle-lit dinner table, Emory enlightened me on some of his business affairs. The vintage champagne served to the dreamy music of a stringed orchestra enhanced my romantic mood, but not, apparently, Emory’s. Yet I was fast coming to know him as one who accomplished a project, only to vault headlong into another. I didn’t really mind. In fact I loved listening to him speak on subjects that interested him so intensely, his eyes aglow when he mentioned high profits and shrewd deals. Once during a pause I tried to get him on the subject of Nathan.

  He shrugged. “Why should Nathan surprise you? He knows record keeping; he can put up with details that I detest. What makes you think we don’t get along?”

  “Well, it’s obvious you’ve won his loyalty, anyhow.”

  “Loyalty?” He raised an eyebrow, then laughed shortly. “I never quite thought of it that way. Now I want to tell you something about Mexico—”

  Another question had been nagging at me, so I interrupted, “Emory, did you ever find your mother?”

  He paused and eyed me thoughtfully. “Why did you ask that?”

  “I don’t know … something left over from the past, I guess.”

  “I found her, all right.”

  I leaned forward, eyes wide. “Where? How is she?”

  “Dead.”

  “Oh … that’s too bad … I mean, I guess—”

  “It doesn’t matter now …” he continued more slowly, “seems she made quite a habit of going about the country breaking up families. I discovered four husbands after my own father. Finally she—oh, well, it’s all in the past as you say. My big brother was right about one thing—he always told me she wasn’t worth looking for. I used to want to kill him for saying that. It was the beginning of many an argument between us, I can assure you.”

  Before I had a chance to ask more questions, Emory said, “I’ve had some good luck in land deals over the past few years. I picked up some property in New Mexico because an acquaintance of mine swore there was water under it. I took a chance on him, and when it turned out he was right—the land was irrigable—the price went off like a bullet. I sold a lot of it before it peaked, and put my money down in South Texas before the big land boom really got going there.

  “Late in 1908 I went down into Mexico, and bought some ranching acreage not too far from Vera Cruz. The land just happened to adjoin that of one of the richest families in Mexico—Fernando D. Barrista. You’ll probably meet him before long because he comes through here occasionally.”

  He told me then that he later borrowed money to buy mining properties in lower Sonora and Chihuahua and began Cabot Consolidated Copper, hiring one of the best American mining engineers down there to run things. But then in 1910, about the time he was ready to invest some more money in deepening the shafts, the biggest revolution in thirty years threw the whole country into chaos. “My mines closed down while I still had to meet the loan payments. I came close to pulling out, but Barrista convinced me to try and hang on because he felt things would get better under the new regime.”

  “Did they?”

  He laughed bitterly. “Hardly. The leader of the new regime was double-crossed and murdered by his star general—a son-of-a-bitch named Victoriano Huerta—before there was time to get the country together again, and from then on it has been divided into warring factions.”

  “Is General Huerta still in charge?”

  “Officially he is, but our government won’t recognize him because of his underhandedness. And our recognition is all that counts because we’ve got more money invested down there than any other country.”

  “Are your mines still closed?”

  “They’re operating for the moment. Pancho Villa is strong in that territory, and I’m paying him to keep an armed guard on my properties. But I’m producing only enough to meet payments on the original money I borrowed, so I’m having to empty some other pockets to keep going.”

  “It sounds pretty hopeless,” I said, then, noticing his downcast expression, I added, “But surely the fighting can’t go on forever.”

  His eyes brightened. “Someday, when Mexico is a fit place to live again, we’ll have a hacienda down there with a fine casa, stables and gardens, long drives—anything you want.”

  I laughed. “I haven’t even had a good look at our house in San Antonio.”

  He shrugged. “It’ll do for now.”

  On the way out of the restaurant I insisted we take a walk before going to the hotel. “Just as far as that bridge up there,” I prodded him. “I haven’t had a look at the river.”

  “It’ll be there tomorrow.”

  “But I want to see it under the stars; please, won’t you indulge your bride?”

  When we stood in the center of the bridge together, leaning against the rail, I thought if ever there was a moment I would wish to keep, surely it was now. The river below shimmered like a piece of silver cloth rolled out at our feet. The moon hung above as though placed there to make a path of footlights on the water.

  “It’s almost magical, isn’t it,” I said, drawing closer to Emory. Yet his perception of the river was obviously different.

  He was silent for a few moments, then said, “Hurry up, the wind’s chilly off the water this time of year.”

  4

  In the next few weeks, during which we lived in the second-floor suite at the Menger while Nathan readied the house, Emory was more wholly mine than he was ever to be again. The days were long and lazy, drizzled with frequent rains, and while Emory worked at his office on Commerce Street a few blocks away, I spent my time reaoing in a comfortable chair. The deep branches of a great old magnolia in the garden below unfolded but an arm’s length from the window nearby, and often I would look away from the text in front of me to watch the rain plip-plop on ivory blossoms big as dinner plates, and soon be lulled into sleep.

  Although matters in Mexico didn’t seem to be improving from the newspaper accounts I read, and April brought a confrontation between President Wilson and Huerta when the hard-nosed general mistakenly arrested some of our Marines stationed in Mexican waters at Tampico, Emory did not seem too worried and remarked, “I knew they’d come to blows before long.… Wilson will either force that bastard into a formal apology, or die trying.”

  “Who will take over then?”

  “That’s a good question. The strongest leader down there right now is Venustiano Carranza, a former governor. His forces control the whole north, with the help of Pancho Villa. But that may not last. Carranza calls himself the ‘First Chief,’ and I don’t think he’ll stop till he gets to the top. He needs Villa now, because nobody can muster troops like that old guerrilla fighter, but he’ll ditch him in the end.

  “At least, that’s my opinion,” he added, then changed the subject. He was more concerned at that time with interpreting the confusing new income-tax laws, and was constantly calling Nathan off the house-remodeling job to discuss them. In fact I was astonished the young man could manage so well to fill a myriad of needs for Emory, while making remarkable progress with hammer and nail. By mid-April the rains had subsided, and almost every afternoon I walked to the corner of Washington and Beauregard to see what he’d accomplished. In drawing a map for me, Nathan explained, “Roughly speaking, the neighborhood is rectangular. One long side is bound by the river.
The other abuts South Alamo, three blocks away.

  “You enter through one end, turning off Garden onto King William Street. The first house has a tall square tower—you can see it from a long way off. Walk past that, then past the triangular park with Spanish oaks around it, then go one full block to Beauregard. Turn right. It’s one more block to the Washington intersection.

  “Don’t worry about getting lost. King William is the main thoroughfare, going from one end to the other, and it’s only about four blocks long. The neighborhood dead-ends into Pioneer Flour Mills there—some people still call it the Guenther Mill—but you can see the big plant all the way from Garden, anyway.”

  Nathan’s outline indicated the area was rather small—which was true, but misleading because it left me unprepared for its spaciousness. My first impression upon making the diagonal turn down King William was that I had closed an invisible gate behind me, and left the hustle-bustle of downtown a few blocks distant for a spot of absolute isolation.

  On the day Emory drove me to the house, he had short-cut down a cross street so that I had completely missed the view now ahead of me. The wide King William thoroughfare led into a community of scaled-down castles. Each of the two and three-storied structures with wide galleries and fancy ironwork was like the palace of a small kingdom unto its own. Sprouting up between were just enough smaller cottages to make the grand Victorian mansions all the more majestic and distinctive, and to make the unusual array of towers—some round and pointed, some square and flat, some multisided—more awesome to the eye. Along the way were well-pruned shrubs and abundant shade trees, with wide trunks and thick branches, just taking on their spring foliage.

  Looking up and around, I felt at once like a tourist and a trespasser. Many times I lowered my gaze, certain that eyes were looking out upon me from hooded windows and belvederes. I knew my imagination was playing tricks. These people were not out to judge me … not yet, anyway … and I saw many reassuring scenes. A group of boys were setting up a tennis net at the end of one street; two ladies talked together across a fence adjoining their properties; a young man was busy polishing the trim of a magnificent black automobile at the rear of one house; a small girl rode a wheel, her hat ribbon flying behind and her spaniel loping alongside, his sights fixed upon her ice cream.

  Yet there was a quiet splendor about it all, an air of dignity that I supposed must have been the reason for its continued prominence as newer suburbs sprang up around the outskirts of the city. Walking through was an experience akin to turning the pages in a picture book.

  I wondered if Emory’s choice was a way of thumbing his nose at society, more so than a means of staying close to his work downtown. We were counterfeits here, without the customary lineage. Would I ever chat with a neighbor across the fence, or have someone over for tea?

  Our house, I found, was neither as imposing as the larger structures nor huddled out of intimidation as the small ones seemed to be. In fact there was nothing particularly interesting about the two stories of sandy brick and white wood trim, except the main entry was in the corner, with a walkway jutting diagonally across the lawn. Nathan had built a side entrance for his own quarters that, to my mind, was lodged too close to the odd front entrance to look right. Emory swore this was the only way it would work, however, and since the house was by far the nicest I’d ever have hoped to live in, I did not complain. While I still had not grown used to the idea of having an extra man living with us, I did have to admit the way the house was planned, Nathan’s quarters—from inside and out—would seem entirely separate from ours.

  The house had a deep-pitched shingled roof, and several chimneys which appeared from the outside to have shot up haphazardly as wildflowers in a field. Nathan was busy repairing one of these the first time I stood alone in the dooryard.

  Seeing me, he spread his arms wide and said, a little hesitantly, “I hope you like it.”

  I peered around. “We have our share of good shade trees, haven’t we, and that looks like a good pecan. With all this rain, we ought to have a good crop in the fall. I’m going around in the back,” I told him, unaware that what I would see was to enrich my whole outlook on the house.

  The back yard stretched only about fifteen feet deep—half that of the front—before breaking in a steep incline down to the river’s edge. The trees in back were so thick they defied grass to grow along the ground, and in its place grew gnarly, determined vines. My first thought was to have Nathan cut down some of the trees, and provide enough sunlight to encourage grass to grow, but that was before I sat down at the base of one old tree, took off my hat, and gazed idly upon the river for a while.

  Undisturbed, that was the word.

  Graceful magnolias, cypress trees with knobby trunks, weeping willows stretching their slender boughs out past the banks, tall, moss-hung oaks with straight trunks reaching high as monuments—all made shadows down the wide corridor of water swaying lazily between. Rays of sunlight poked through, glinting off the surface.

  Sitting there, forgetful of time passing, was for me a gradual reawakening to a kind of wild, natural beauty which I had forgotten since childhood. I began to hear sounds around me: rustling leaves, snapping twigs. Oddly I never caught sight of any birds that afternoon, yet I heard their brief, high-pitched songs and callings, and now and again their big beating wings, muffled by the roof of tall branches.

  I must have been there nearly an hour, when the more ordinary sound of Nathan’s voice interrupted the serenity which had possessed me. “I have to get back to the office soon. I thought you might like to go into the house before I leave. Cabot said you’d be picking the wallpaper, and I’ll be ready to hang it soon.”

  “Yes … I like the new soft-colored hues. I want lots of light around me, and plants in hanging pots in all the windows, since we don’t have much of a porch. And no heavy draperies. I want to be able to look out the back and see what’s before me now. In Colorado my … apartment … was small and confining.

  “By the way, what’s beyond those trees across the river?”

  “The old San Antonio Arsenal is nearby that metal bridge down the way … but it isn’t used anymore, except as an ordnance depot. Most activity’s been moved to Fort Sam Houston up on the north side of town.”

  “Hm … you’d never know anything was out there except wilderness. I hope it’s always this calm and peaceful. I’m really glad Emory found this house for us.”

  He sat down and mopped his brow. “I think I’ll enjoy it too, especially the breeze off the water.” He took off his eyeglasses and wiped them, then replaced them on his face.

  “Emory doesn’t seem too taken with the river.”

  “Oh? Well, he doesn’t get excited over simple things.”

  “Regardless, I’m going to make the most of it. I had no idea the prospect of living near the water would please me so much.” He was silent, so I added, “Maybe that sounds like foolish talk to you—did you grow up here?”

  “No. I was raised in a sawmill town up in East Texas timber country.… I always figured I’d stay there, and grow up to become a sawyer.”

  That raised the question of how he came to know and work for Emory, but before I could ask he was rising, claiming he had to hurry.

  “I’m sorry … I guess the river makes me kind of dreamy,” I told him.

  We spent our first night in the house on April 30, although I expected Nathan’s projection of the middle of May would have been accurate. Emory had to leave for Mexico on the morning of May 1, and, in one of his sudden blazes of urgency, insisted we must be moved in before he left. Nathan was already dividing his time between working on the house and figuring Emory’s complicated corporate franchise tax—due a month after income tax, by April 30—but the fact that he was forced to close up the books and work for four straight nights until the early morning hours to finish the house seemed of no concern to Emory. Puzzled, I asked Nathan if he wasn’t obligated to meet the tax deadline.

  “Of
course,” he answered calmly, while brushing varnish on a baseboard.

  “When will you work on it?”

  “While the rest of the world is sleeping.”

  I shook my head and walked past him with an armload of chintz curtains.

  Most of the furnishings did not arrive in time, and the pantry was bare except for coffee and some cinnamon rolls Nathan brought from the bakery. However, I was no less eager than Emory to get moved, and was thankful when we had shut the door at last and sat down to rest our tired bones.

  It must have been nearly three o’clock before we finally closed our eyes, and even then I slept fitfully. As long as Emory was awake I could fend off unwelcome thoughts of his leaving, but as soon as he fell asleep I was hounded by the fear he wouldn’t return. It was a nightmarish feeling I was destined to face time and again in the months to come, and perhaps if I’d known this I would not have wasted my time making up arguments in my head to keep him from going. Yet I did, and finally around five in the morning I fell asleep only to be wakened by a muffled, distant sound of notes that I thought may have been part of a dream. Emory, his arms still around me, was sleeping soundly. How could he, I wondered? If I were the one going to Mexico, my stomach would be in tight knots for days in advance.

  It took me a while to nudge him awake and when he finally yawned and nuzzled his face in my neck, I was near to tears. I swallowed hard and said, “I guess you have no choice but to go … but I want you to know you have made me very happy.”

  He opened one eye and said, “Good Lord, woman, I wasn’t planning on coming back in a coffin.” Then he noticed my pained expression and added, “I’ve been getting out of scrapes since I can remember. Don’t worry about me. If there’s one thing I can do it is take care of myself.”

  I lay back on the pillows while he bathed and dressed. I already missed him. In a few short weeks I’d grown happily accustomed to his attentiveness, and the consistency of waking up in the morning next to him. As hard as I tried convincing myself it wouldn’t be so bad if he were not to be in danger, the truth glared back at me. Wherever Emory was, I wanted to be.