by Edna Ferber
The contrast between the blazing white-hot atmosphere of Hermoso’s streets and the air-conditioned chill of every Conquistador room, restaurant, hall, was breath-taking, like encountering a glacier in the tropics. From every corridor, hurtling out through every room whether open-doored or closed, you heard the shrieks of high shrill laughter, booming guffaws, the tinkle of glass, a babble of voices; and through and above it all the unceasing chatter of radios, the twang and throb of cheap music, the rumble of rolling tables laden with food or drink trundled along the halls by stiffly starched blue-and-gold waiters or tightly tailored blue-and-gold bellboys bearing themselves like the militia, discreet as secret service men; wise, tough, avaricious, baby-faced.
Tee-heeho-ho yak-yak. Wham. Whoop-ee!
“I wish we had friends as amusing as that,” Leslie Benedict said to her husband across the vast spaces of the Coronado suite.
“No you don’t,” said Bick Benedict. “And don’t be like that.”
“Like what?” Leslie said. She was standing at the window which was tightly closed because of the air conditioning, and looking out at the view which consisted of nothing—unless one found refreshing an endless expanse of flat prairie pushing the horizon into obscurity.
“Like the kind of person you aren’t. Like dear Lady Karfrey your bitter bitchy sister. Bitterness doesn’t become you.”
“What’s the opposite of lebensraum, Bick? That’s what’s the matter with them. They’ve got too much space. It gives them delusions of grandeur. In the plane they kept on yelling about it being the most wonderful place in the world—the most wonderful people in the world, the biggest cattle, fruit, flowers, vegetables, climate, horses. It isn’t. They aren’t. And what’s so important about bigness, anyway? Bigness doesn’t make a thing better.”
“All right. I’ll bite. What is?” He was at the telephone. “Room Clerk…. Well, I’ll hold on…. Don’t say that damned Riviera. Or California.”
“No. No, I think the temperate climate of the United States. New York, or Pennsylvania, or Virginia or even Ohio. Cold in the winter with lemon-yellow sunshine and enough snow to make you long for spring. Hot in summer, cool in the spring, tangy in the autumn. You know where you are and you don’t have to explain about it all the time and try to sell it as they do here in Texas.”
“…Hello! Room Clerk?…This is Bick Benedict…. Oh, fine fine!…No, I don’t want to speak to the Manager, I just want to know if…Oh, God, he’s connecting me with the…Hello there, Liggett!…Yes, everything’s wonderful…yes, she’s here looking at the view…yes, she thinks the furnishings are wonderful…no, don’t bother to send anything up thanks just the same we brought a lot of stuff with us…sure sure if we need anything we’ll…Look, I called the Room Clerk to find out if my daughter Luz—uh—Miss Luz Benedict you know—had come in yet, I…Oh, for…he’s putting me back on the Room Clerk…. Hello! Look, can you tell me if Miss Luz Benedict…”
They were in the enormous bedroom. Blond wood, bleached like a Broadway chorus girl. Their feet seemed to flounder ankle-deep in chenille. “They ought to give you snowshoes for these carpets,” Bick said. “Or skis. Liable to get in up to your neck and never get out.”
A half acre of dressing table laden with perfumes, china, glass. A dining room of bleached mahogany but vaguely oriental in defiance of Coronado. The dining table could seat thirty. There was a metal kitchen complete and as virgin as the culinary unit in a utilities company window. Vast consoles in the entrance hall and living room. Overpowering lamps with tent-size shades. Three bedrooms. Terraces. A bathroom in pink tile, a bathroom in yellow tile, a bathroom in aquamarine, and here deference was done to Coronado in terms of brilliant varnished wallpaper depicting conquistadores in armor dallying with maidens of obscure origin amongst flora not now indigenous to Texas.
Leslie had taken off the blue shantung and was making a tour of the vast and absurd living room, so cold in its metal and satin and brocade and glass and pale wood and air conditioning. She surveyed this splendor with an accustomed eye. It had been theirs on the occasion of the hotel’s opening a year earlier. With one hand Leslie hugged her peignoir more tightly about her for warmth while with the other hand she patted cold cream on her face, walking slowly the length of the room and pausing now and then before some monstrous structure of porcelain or carved wood or painting.
“There’s no JR on the Meissen or the pictures,” she called back to Bick. “What must Coronado think! Except for a few liquor spots on the carpet and cigarette burns on the wood everything has stood up wonderfully this past year. I hope Hernando de Soto has done as well for the King and Queen.”
“You were all right on the plane. You promised me you would be and you were.” He stood in the great doorway in shirt and shorts and bedroom slippers, a costume becoming only to males of twenty and those in the men’s underwear advertisements. “I know you didn’t want to come but we had to and you damn well know why. Even if millions are dross to you. I don’t bother you with business affairs but you had to know that and now I’m telling you again…. And where’s Luz I’d like to know! And Jordy and Juana. Why couldn’t they come with us the way other people’s kids would! No, Luz had to fly her own, and Jordan and Juana had to drive. And now where are they! And you stand there and talk about the climate of Pennsylvania and Meissen and Coronado and what’s the opposite of lebensraum. And spots on the carpet.”
She went to him, she had to stand on tiptoe, tall though she was.
“If you don’t mind the cold cream I can stand the shaving soap.” She kissed him not at all gingerly. “No soap there, at least.”
“You hate the whole thing, don’t you? As much as ever. That’s why you talk like a—like a——”
“Like one of those women in the Marquand novels you don’t read. Very quippy. Don’t worry about the children. They’ll make the dinner. Their behavior is odd but their manners are beautiful.”
“Like their mother, wouldn’t you say?”
“That’s right, amigo. We’d better dress. Entacucharse, eh?”
“Now listen, Leslie. It’s bad enough having Luz talking pachuco. Where do you hear it? The boys on our place don’t talk like that.”
“Oh, yes they do. The young ones. The kids in the garage. And on the street corners in Benedict. Just today in the kitchen that young Domingo Quiroz, Ezequiel’s grandson, was looking at a leaky pipe that needed welding. He said, ‘La paipa está likeando hay que hueldearla.’ That’s the sort of Spanish the kids are speaking.”
“Entacucharse, eh? Dress to kill. Well, I haven’t a zoot suit, have I?”
“I had Eusebio pack your white dinner clothes and black cummerbund and I’ve even ordered a deep red carnation for your buttonhole—probably the only red carnation in Texas. You’ll be smart as paint.”
He glanced down at himself, he contracted his stomach muscles sharply. “Riding does it. Everybody else lolling around in cars all the time. Even the vaqueros ride herd in jeeps half the time.”
“Just remember to tuck in like that when you wrap your lithe frame into your cummerbund or you’ll never make the first button. Look. We’ll have to dress.”
Here in southern Texas as in the tropics, there was little lingering twilight. It was glaring daylight, it was dark.
“Where’re those damned kids!”
“Luz is probably out at the airfield chumming with the mechanics. Perhaps Jordy and Juana decided not to come. And even if they did, you know they’re driving. That takes——”
“Thanks. I know how long it takes. I’m kind of from Texas too, remember?”
He was like that now. On the defensive, moody.
“Yes, dear. Get into our clothes and then we’d better give our Noah’s Ark a roll call. Shall we go as we came out—you with the King and Queen and I with—doesn’t it sound silly!”
Hermoso’s old airport, so soon to be discarded, seemed a dim and dated thing huddling shabbily, wistfully, outside the glow and sparkle of the Jett R
ink palace. Planes were coming and going on the old strip. Against the solid fences that separated the two fields were massed thousands of townspeople staring, staring, their white faces almost luminous in the reflected light. They talked and milled and shoved and drank Coca-Cola and the small children chased each other round and about their elders’ legs, and the men shifted the sleeping babies hanging limp on their shoulders. “Lookit,” they said. “Lookit the big lights up yonder…. I bet that’s the Governor coming in there…. Stop that stompin’ around, Alvin. Come here, I say, afore I whup you.”
“Biggest airport in the whole state of Texas. Texas hell! In the whole United States Hermoso’s the biggest. They say it makes anything they got in the East—New York or anywheres—look like a prairie-dog hole.”
And in the deeper shadows stood the Hermosans of Mexican heritage, their darker faces almost indistinguishable in the gloom. These were quiet, the children did not run about with squawking catcalls; the boys and girls of sixteen, seventeen, sometimes stood with their arms about each other’s waists, but demurely, almost primly, with their parents’ eyes approvingly upon them. The roads beyond were choked with every kind of motorcar and in these, too, the people stood up and stared and wondered and applauded in their curious psychological consciousness, which was a mixture of childlike hope and provincial self-satisfaction.
“They lease that piece I got up in Tom Green County and it don’t come in a duster I can be in there next year along with any of ’em, Jett Rink or any of ’em. All you need is one good break. What was he but a ranch hand, and not even a riding hand. Afoot. And now lookit!”
Lookit indeed. The guests came in cars the size of hearses and these were not stuck in the common traffic. Each carried a magic card and whole streets and outlying roads were open only to them. The women had got their dresses in New York or at Neiman’s in Dallas or Opper-Schlink’s in Houston. Given three plumes, they could have been presented just as they stood at the Court of St. James’s. Their jewels were the blazing plaques and chains you see in a Fifth Avenue window outside of which a special policeman with a bulge on his hip is stationed on eight-hour duty. Slim, even chic, there still was lacking in these women an almost indefinable quality that was inherent in the women of the Eastern and Midwestern United States. Leslie Benedict thought she could define it. In the early days of her marriage she had tried to discuss it with her husband as she had been accustomed to talk with her father during her girlhood and young womanhood—freely and gaily and intelligently, lunge and riposte, very exhilarating, adult to adult.
“They lack confidence,” she had said in the tones of one who has made a discovery after long search. “That’s it. Unsure and sort of deferential. Like oriental women.”
“What do you think they should be? Masculine?”
“I was just speaking impersonally, darling. You know. Even their voices go up at the end of a declarative sentence, instead of down. It’s sort of touching, as though they weren’t sure you’d like what they’ve said and were willing to withdraw it. Like this. I asked that Mrs. Skaggs where she lived and she said, ‘Uvalde?’ with the rising inflection. It’s appealing but sort of maddening, too.”
“Well, you know the old Texas saying. In Texas the cattle come first, then the men, then the horses and last the women.”
Now, as they drove into the vast airfield and stopped at the floodlighted entrance, Leslie was thinking of these things without emotion, but almost clinically as she had learned she must if she would survive. Mindful of their two most distinguished guests in the crush and glare and clamor of the entrance, they had somehow lost the South American. “It’s all right,” Bick said. “We’ll pick him up inside. And we’re all at the same table.”
“Oh, Bick!” Leslie called through the roar and din. “Did you give him his card, I think it would have been better to give everyone a card just in case they were lost—oh, there he is in the doorway. Why—what——!”
The olive-skinned aquiline face, the slim and elegant figure in full evening dress, was easily distinguishable in the midst of the gigantic Texans in cream-colored suits, in dun-colored tropicals, in Texas boots and great cream Stetsons, worn in arrogance and in defiance of the negligible universe outside their private world. Even in the welter of waving arms, the shrill greetings, the booming laughter, the shoving and milling, the handshaking the backslapping, “Well, if it ain’t Lutch, you old sonofagun! You telling me you left that wind-blown sand-stung Muleshoe town of yours and all those cow critters to come to this——” even in the midst of this hullabaloo it was plain that something was wrong.
“Hurry, Bick. What is it?”
The men behind the door ropes were none of your oily headwaiters full of false deference and distaste for the human race in evening clothes. Giants in khaki guarded the entrance, and on their slim hips their guns, black and evil, gleamed above the holster flaps. And now, as Bick Benedict elbowed his way through the throng near the doorway, he heard one of the most gigantic of these guardians say, as he snapped with a contemptuous thumb and middle finger the stiff card in his other hand: “Well, you sure look like a cholo to me, and no Mexicans allowed at this party, that’s orders and besides none’s invited that’s sure.”
“Oh God, no!” cried Bick Benedict, and battered his way past resistant flesh and muscle to reach the giant cerberus. He called to him as he came. “Hi, Tod! Tod! Hold that, will you! Hold on there!” And the other man’s head turning toward him, a curious greyish tone like a film over the olive skin, his dark eyes stony with outrage. Bick reached them, he put a hand on the faultlessly tailored sleeve, the other on Tod’s steely wrist. “Look, Tod, this gentleman is one of the honored guests this evening, he’s going to be the new Ambassador from Nueva Bandera, down in South America. He’s come all the way from Washington to——” His voice was low, insistent.
Tod’s sunburned face broke into a grin that rippled from the lips to the eyes, he spoke in the soft winning drawl of his native region. “Well, I’m a hollow horn! I sure didn’t go for to hurt your feelings. I made a lot of mistakes in my day but this does take the rag off the bush.” He held out his great hand. “Glad to make your acquaintance. Sure sorry, Bick. Pass right along, gentlemen. Hi there, Miz Benedict, you’re looking mighty purty.”
There isn’t anything to do, Leslie said to herself as she slipped her hand through her guest’s arm, there isn’t anything to do but ignore the whole thing unless he speaks of it.
She chatted gaily. “It’s going to be a shambles, so crowded. We don’t have to stay late after the dinner if you want to leave—you and the others. It’s just one of those things—everybody’s supposed to show up—you know—like a Washington reception when you can’t get near the buffet. You’ve probably never before in your life seen Stetsons worn with black dinner coats or women in Mainbocher evening gowns escorted by men in shirt sleeves and boots.” She looked about her. “Perhaps escorted isn’t exactly the word.”
Dinner, presaged by a jungle of tables and tables and tables, was to be served in the great domed main concourse. A bedlam, designated on the engraved invitations as a reception, was in progress in great sections and halls and rooms that next week would be restaurants, lunch rooms, baggage rooms, shops, offices. Every ticket and travel counter tonight was a bar. Travel signs were up, neat placards bearing the names of a half dozen air lines. And off the main hall were arrowed signs that said LADIES and others that said COLORED WOMEN. Orchids and great palms and tubs of blossoming trees. Banners, pennants, blinding lights. The reception now was spilling over into the concourse, into the patio and out to the runways. Kin Kollomore’s Band over there. Oddie Boogen’s Band over here. The loudspeakers were on, the blare was frightening, it beat on the brain like a pile driver.
Perhaps escorted isn’t the word, Leslie had said somewhat maliciously. The men—the great mahogany-faced men bred on beef—who somehow had taken on physical dimensions in proportion to the vast empire they had conquered—stood close together, should
er to shoulder, as male as bulls; massive of shoulder, slim of flank, powerful, quiet and purposeful as diesel engines. On the opposite side of the room, huddled too, but restless, electric, yearning, stood the women in their satins and chiffons and jewels. The men talked together quietly, their voices low and almost musical in tone. The women were shrill as peacocks, they spread their handmade flounces and ruffles; white arms waved and beckoned.
“Ay-yud!” a wife called to a recalcitrant husband. “Mary Lou Ellen says at Jett’s big bowil last year at the Conky opening they was ten thousand——”
“Sure nuff,” Ed calls back, nodding and smiling agreeably, though no sound is heard above the din. He remains with the men.
“Ay-yud’s had the one over the eight he’s feelin’ no pain,” his wife says philosophically, turning back to her women friends.
The Ambassador regarded this with an impassive face. “It is interesting,” he said, “that the people of this country of Texas——”
“Country!”
“It is like a country apart. It is different from any other North American state I have seen and I have traveled very widely here in the United States. It is curious that the citizens of Texas have adopted so many of the ways and customs of the people they despise.”
“How do you mean?” Leslie asked as though politely conversational. She knew.
“In Latin countries—in Mexico and in Spain and Brazil and other South American countries including my own Nueva Bandera—you often will find the men gathered separately from the women, they are talking politics and business and war and national affairs in which the women are assumed not to be interested.”
