Giant

by Edna Ferber

  She awoke refreshed, she bathed, she dressed herself in one of her trousseau tea gowns, tried a dab of rouge, regarded herself critically in the mirror, decided that pallor was more effective for her purpose, even if less flattering, wiped off the rouge. She read and listened. She wrote a letter and listened. The crude clangor of the dinner gong. The voices of guests in the hall, the tap-tap of high-heeled boots. He had not come up and when she went downstairs, her head high her spirits low, he was not there. How do you do? Good evening. Howdy. Have you had an interesting day? Oklahoma! No, I haven’t but of course I’ve heard so much about it. Yes, he usually is but he is so very busy at this time of year.

  They sat at dinner, eleven in all, she could see the doorway and the great hall beyond but he did not come and she ate quite a surprising dinner and talked and listened and said I hope you will excuse me I have been a little not really ill but under the Texas weather. With a society laugh.

  Back in her room she took up some sewing. She sat near the lamp and made small stitches. The Little Mother To Be. She hated sewing. She wadded up the stuff and tossed it aside, she took up her book but a slow hard hot kernel of anger was forming in her vitals. I really hate him, she said. I hate all of it. I loathe and despise it. She leaned back and looked straight ahead at nothing, her eyes wide and staring. She relaxed, slowly. She slept again, worn out by emotion and the heat.

  When she awoke Bick was seated across the room. He was looking at her, his arms hanging loosely on either side, his legs sprawled. She was wide awake. In silence they stared at each other. Hammer hammer hammer. But the workmen had gone. It was her heart. She stood up. He stood up. They came together, they were not conscious of having walked or run or even moved. They were together. She could not be near enough. “Closer,” she demanded insistently. “Closer closer.”

  Flushed and disheveled then she lay in his arms.

  “That Gomez telephoned?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s so terrible about it! What’s so terrible about going to look at a Mexican work camp?”

  “Sh! Never mind. I talked to Adarene.”

  “Here?”

  “No, Dallas. I called her. She thinks you’re due for a change. So do I. Let’s go up to Holgado for a few days.”

  “Oh, Jordan! When?”

  “Right away. Adarene said they could start tomorrow, if we can. But I said day after tomorrow.”

  Her disappointment was like a knife thrust. “Can’t we go alone, just you and I? It would be so wonderful if we could go alone.”

  “It would. I know. But there are a lot of things I’ve got to talk to Lew about. Luz’s will and a lot of things. He knows the whole family setup. And Vashti and Pinky are——”

  “No no no! Please! Not the Snyths too!”

  “It’s ranch business, honey.”

  “I can’t see why that’s a reason for traveling in bunches, like a safari.”

  “Texans always do. It’s a hangover, I reckon, from the old days when if they didn’t stick together they’d be scalped by Indians or lose their way or get bitten by rattlesnakes.”

  “How are we going? A string of automobiles? Or perhaps all of us in big hats on palominos with old Polo in the lead like a Buffalo Bill Wild West parade.”

  “My bittersweet bride. I thought we’d drive as far as San Antonio—if you still insist on a day there, in the heat. The Moreys will come down from Dallas and meet us there. I don’t want you to take a long trip by automobile. From there we’ll go by train, a private car, San Antonio to Holgado.”

  “Like royalty.”

  “In the last fifty years that road has made enough off us to give us private parlor cars for shipping beef cattle, if we want it.”

  Before they slept she told him of her day at Nopal. It was cleansing to her, like a confessional, until he said, “But it’s got nothing to do with us.”

  “But it has! It is us!”

  Sadly, almost desperately, he said, “Are you going to keep on being like that? Are you always going to be like that?”

  “Always,” she said.

  Bick at the wheel, Pinky and Vashti following in the car behind them, they started Texas fashion two days later in the dim starlit dawn. Into the hot old romantic city of San Antonio with its hot new commercial streets like the streets of any modern American city, North or South East or West. Leslie made no comment, she was crushed by disappointment. They passed the Plaza with its towering office buildings its busy bus station its crowds milling up and down the streets.

  “Alamo,” Bick said briefly, and pointed to a dust-colored building with its dust-colored wall.

  “That.” Her voice flat.

  Ignoring the modern St. Anthony Hotel they went to the Menger because the Benedicts always stayed at the Menger. It was old Texas with its patio and its red plush and its double beds; its smell of bourbon and bay rum and old carpets and fried food and ancient dust; its tiled floor sounding to the tap of high-heeled boots and the clink of spurs.

  “Well, that’s more like it!” Leslie exclaimed, heartily. “I love it.”

  “You’re pleased by the damnedest things,” Bick said. “You turn up your nose at the Big House and here’s this hotel filled like a museum with the same kind of Texas stuff——”

  “That’s different,” she argued airily. “Who wants to live in a museum! Jordan, when we really move into the Main House let’s not have a visitor stay overnight there, ever. It will be our house. They can stay at the Big House, I don’t care who they are. Royalty or even Papa and Mama or Maudie Lou or any other Benedict.”

  “I’ve always heard about this Virginia hospitality,” he jibed.

  Vashti knocked at their door, you could hear her eager small-girl voice chattering with Pinky like a child at a party. In they bounced. Ten minutes later the Moreys arrived from Dallas. The bourbon emerged from suitcases, ice and glasses came tinkling down the corridor, Adarene, as quietly executive as a professional guide, took the plans in hand. Immediately the three men went into a small huddle. Bick made a large gesture. “Anything you girls say is all right with us.”

  “You look simply lovely, Leslie,” Adarene said. Then, hurriedly, “You too, Vashti. Now girls, we’ve only got this one day and part of tomorrow, and it’s awfully hot, even for San Antonio. Let’s get organized. Though I don’t think you two are ideally fixed for sight-seeing just now, I must say.”

  “Nonsense. We’re full of demon energy,” Leslie said. “The Alamo. That’s the first thing.”

  But Adarene had made her plans more dramatically. “No, you’ve got to work up to the Alamo. The Missions come first.”

  “Now just a minute,” Bick objected, emerging from the huddle. “Those Mission stairs. Leslie can’t go climbing those. Every step is a foot high, they twist like a rope, it gets you in the thighs and the knees and the calf of the leg. I’m not going to have my son born with corkscrew legs.”

  “That’s right,” Vashti agreed. “I never will forget the first time I visited San Antonio, Pa brought me, I was fifteen. Everything in one day. I did all the Missions, one right after another. Concepción wasn’t so hard, and then that cute little San Francisco de la—something—Espada I think. Anyway, couple others, and by the time I got to San José Mission I was beat, I didn’t know about those twenty-three stairs built like a fan so you kind of meet yourself climbing up to the tower. Next day I was like somebody had their legs cut off and pinned back on with safety pins. They wouldn’t hold me up. Crippled.”

  “I won’t do them all,” Leslie pleaded. “But I’ve got to see them and climb just one stairway. The San José one, Jordan?”

  “Not the San José,” firmly.

  “It’s sort of a novelty, being considered fragile.”

  Adarene eyed her thoughtfully. “I was just thinking. Maybe we should have gone right on up to Holgado.”

  “Stop hovering, dearies. Yes, it’s hot. And I’m having a lovely time.”

  Lucius Morey, that strange mixture of
Vermont and Texas, Lew the unloquacious, in his dark business suit and his plain black shoes and neat white shirt and the incongruous Stetson hat, had sat silent while the talk eddied about him. The bland face, the keen light blue eyes now turned toward Leslie. He spoke in that nasal dry tone that they termed his Coolidge voice. “Leslie, you’re a real fine girl,” he said gravely.

  Leslie did not share in the laugh that greeted this pronouncement. Just as gravely she said, “Thank you, Lucius. For the first time I feel sort of Texan, here in San Antonio.”

  “No wonder. This is where the whole thing began,” Bick explained. “I don’t mean the Spanish Missions and all that. This is the real beginning of Texas. This is where two old boys, flat broke and in their fifties, met up on the Plaza. One of them was the Baron de Bastrop and the other was old Moses Austin. This was San Antonio de Bexar in those days. And Americans were about as welcome in Texas then as——”

  “As Mexicans are now,” Leslie said.

  “Texas history is real interesting,” Vashti offered. “Only nobody knows anything about it only Texans. Easterners always yapping about Bunker Hill and Valley Forge and places like that, you’d think the Alamo and San Jacinto were some little fracas happened in Europe or someplace. Look how important they were! If it hadn’t been for Sam Houston, and Bowie with that knife of his, and Davy Crockett and Travis, why, there wouldn’t of been any Texas in the United States, can you imagine! No Texas!”

  “Vashti, don’t give any Texas lectures when Leslie’s around,” Bick advised her. “She began to bone up on Texas ten minutes after she met me. By now she knows so much Texas history she makes old Frank Dobie look like a dam-yankee.”

  “Let’s get going,” Pinky cautioned them. “Maybe Leslie knows more but Vash can outtalk any historian living or dead. Say, Bick, you ever tell Leslie about how Texas has got the right to split up if it has a mind to?”

  “No,” Leslie said, mystified. “Split up? How?”

  “Oh, all right,” Bick groaned. “They put it in the state constitution when Texas joined the Union. She wouldn’t join otherwise. It says Texas has the right to split itself into five separate states any time it wants to.”

  Leslie stared, unbelieving. “Like one of those bugs,” she murmured, not very tactfully, “that reproduces by breaking off pieces of itself.”

  “If we ever do it,” Lucius Morey reflected, “we’ll have enough United States senators down here in the Southwest to run the whole damn country.”

  “Never will though,” Adarene announced with definiteness. “Texas’ll never split itself because if it did it wouldn’t be able to say it was the biggest state, and being biggest is what we yell about most.”

  “Anyway, all five pieces would want to claim the Alamo for itself,” Pinky concluded, “so I guess we’re yoked for life.”

  “San Antonio’s rigged for the tourist,” Lucius Morey said, “but back of the bunco it’s the real thing anyway, somehow. It’s an old Spanish city real enough, with a flower in its hair and a guitar handy.”

  The narrow river meandered through the town like the stream of tourists, doubling on itself, turning up at unexpected places. Here in this ancient American city the brush-country Texan momentarily forgot about the miles of mesquite and the endless plain. Hermoso hadn’t this look, or Houston or Dallas or Vientecito or Austin. Adobe huts two hundred years old crouched in the shadow of skyscrapers. Blood and bravery and beauty and terror and the glory of the human spirit were written in the history of these winding streets. They had been trails stamped out by the feet of conquistadores and of padres and the early Spanish settlers. And by the hoofs of the Castilian cattle brought in by the Spaniards in 1690. Their wild offspring, caught and bred again and again through the centuries to Longhorns Shorthorns Angus Hereford Brahmans Kashmirs, were to become the monolithic monsters who fed on the nutritious grasses of Reata Ranch.

  Leslie bought a guidebook and a concise history of the city, modern and debunked. She walked about reading from these, one finger between the pages, her gaze going from book to object in approved tourist fashion.

  “You can’t do that!” the Texans protested, outraged.

  “Mmm—San Antonio,” mumbled Leslie. “Who named it San Antonio?”

  The Texans stared at one another. “Uh——”

  Her forefinger traced down the page. “Let’s see…Don Domingo Teran de los Rios, with Father Damian Massanet and an escort of fifty soldiers…June 1691…came upon rancheria of Payayas…What’s a Payaya?”

  “Indian tribe,” Bick replied briskly.

  “Wonderful word, isn’t it?—all those ya-yas in it. I never heard of them.”

  Emboldened by Bick’s success, “A branch of the Comanches, I believe,” Lucius Morey ventured. “Mean-acting Indians, the Comanches were.”

  “Look, Leslie,” Vashti objected. “This way we’ll never get to show you anything. Why can’t you just see things and not have to know about how they got there and everything.”

  But Leslie was reading again in a rather maddening mumble. “…The Indians called the village Yanaguana…”

  She looked up, speculatively.

  “Nobody knows nobody knows!” Adarene assured her.

  “…uh…Father Massanet set up a cross…christened the place San Antonio in honor of St. Anthony of Padua…. In 1718 Don Martin de Alarcón and Fray Antonio de San Buenaventura Olivares with settlers monks and soldiers…”

  She looked up from the book, her face alight. “Don Domingo de los Rios. Fray Antonio de San Buenaventura Oli——I don’t know why it makes me happy just to say all those words and to know about Payayas and those poor little fifty soldiers. But it does.”

  “It reads real pretty,” Pinky agreed. “If there’s one thing about San Antonio, it’s history.”

  “Who’s showing who Texas, that’s what I want to know!” Vashti demanded, somewhat sulkily for her. “Indians. Who cares about Indians and soldiers and stuff! The Mexican quarter is real picturesque, they wear charro outfits and play guitars.”

  Leslie tucked the guidebook under her arm and turned to a passage she had marked in the modern volume. “Uh, San Antonio is the pecan-shelling center of the Southwest. The industry employs about twelve thousand Mexican workers in the Mexican Quarter…uh…average piecework wage for a 54-hour week is $1.56….”

  Gently Bick Benedict took the book from her hands and closed it. “How would you have liked it if I’d told you how Virginia——”

  “But we stumble all around Europe with our noses in Baedekers. I don’t see why we shouldn’t know about our own sights.” The tactful Adarene to the rescue.

  Pinky settled it. “The Benedicts have been in these parts for about a hundred years now. Anybody around here see Bick Benedict with his face in a guidebook, he’s liable to be run out of the state of Texas.”

  “Oh, my land let’s get going.” Vashti again.

  So off they went to visit the musty little Missions with their tortuous stairs and Leslie produced her book again with its dry terse accounts of incredible deeds in which padres and Indians and Spanish grandees, slaughter and agriculture and sculpture and frescoes were fantastically mingled.

  “The walls of Mission Concepción are forty-five inches thick,” Leslie read. “Think of it! The Indians built them with almost no tools. And the monks.” She read on. “Acanthus leaves…front façade…Renaissance influence of the Churrigueresque school of Spanish Baroque…”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Leslie!”

  They ate Mexican food to the strumming of the Mexicans’ guitars on the Plaza. Spicy burning food. Tortillas. Enchiladas. Mole de guajolote.

  “What’s that?” Leslie asked.

  “Terrific turkey thing,” Bick explained. “It’s the top Mexican dish. Turkey with a sauce made of—oh—chiles and ground almonds and all kinds of spices and chocolate——”

  “Chocolate!”

  The musicians in their charro clothes. Shadowy figures in and out of the dim arcades. A
vendor’s soft persuasive cry. Strange exotic smells. Leslie fell silent.

  Bick touched her hand. “Come on back to us, honey. What are you thinking about way off there?”

  She turned toward him gravely. “I was thinking of Boston.”

  “Boston!”

  “I mean—it’s a kind of wonderful country, isn’t it? I mean—I was thinking about how it all hangs together somehow even when it’s as different as—I was thinking about Boston because San Antonio and Boston are absolutely the most different—the Ritz Hotel in Boston. That cool green dining room with the long windows looking out on the Garden. Those big elm-tree branches make a pattern against the glass. And those dowdy Boston women and the agreeable Boston men with their long English heads. And the lobster so sweet and fresh and tender and the heavy white linen and the waiters’ beautiful clean white fingernails. And old Faneuil Hall.” She stopped, and she looked into their disapproving faces. Lamely, “I haven’t explained very well. I just meant it’s just a kind of wonderful country altogether I mean——” Her voice trailed off into nothing.

  She was noticeably silent in the Alamo. “I guess maybe you were oversold on it in the first place,” Lucius Morey said. “All Yankees are. Anyway, the Alamo is a feeling, not a place.”

  All around the adobe walls swirled the life of a modern city. Big business streamed in and out of the department stores, in and out of the new post office, in and out of the bus station. The old tragic Alamo with its history of blood and bravery was a new Alamo, reconstructed within an inch of its life.