Magnolia City (5 page)

“So I’m to call on your family first?”

“You got it, buster. I shouldn’t even be here today.”

“That’s what I like. A girl who takes chances.”

“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been housebound. And my sister never is.”

“That doesn’t seem fair.”

“Fair? Ha! She’s the one who tattles on me. Which is why Dad likes her better. They’re in cahoots, I think.”

“Traitor!” Garret pronounced, making Hetty laugh. He poured them a fresh slug. “I wouldn’t let anyone stand in my way. Even my sister. I believe in risk. It’s what keeps me going.”

“Then you’ll like it here. As my father’s always saying”—she lowered her voice as much as she could—“Houston’s a young man’s town.”

“So if Houston’s a young man’s town, what’s No-Tsu-Oh?”

“That’s only for Old Houstonians.”

“Are we there now?”

“Yes.”

“So it includes the park as well as the hotel?”

“Sometimes.”

He eyed her suspiciously.

“Here—you have to see it in writing.” Out of her shoulder bag came some linen stationery and a tortoiseshell pen. She unscrewed the cap, printed the word
NO-TSU-OH
in letters big enough for him to decipher in the pale light, and flashed the paper in front of his face.

He read it, then shrugged.

She continued to hold the name in front of him. “Spell it backward, silly.”

Garret chuckled after a moment and looked a little sheepish.

“It’s the opposite of what people expect, you see.” She folded the stationery back into her bag.

“Is your family a part of this inside-out old Houston?”

“Of course, I’m an Allen.”

“Am I supposed to know what that means?”

“The Allen brothers were the founders of the city. John Kirby and Augustus Chapman Allen.”

“Daughter of the founders—wow!”

“Great—” Hetty stopped. She had started to say great-granddaughter, but realized she was sounding boastful. It wasn’t the pedigree that she cared about anyway; what stirred her blood was the kind of entrepreneurial daring the Allen brothers had shown in founding a city on this godforsaken prairie, flat as an ironing board and hot as the iron in high summer. Kirb made sure she had some starch in her as a girl. If her mother recited legends, her father spouted slogans.

“Houston started as a real estate deal!” he would roar at Char and her. “Remember that!”

“It’s a rainbow town, part reality, part mirage!”

“Your forefathers built cities! Remember that!”

Hetty told Garret the whole story of the founding of Houston, how the Allen brothers took a city that didn’t even exist and made it the first state capital. She quoted some of the slogans. As she talked, she looked across the lagoon at the statue of Sam Houston on his triumphant arch, leader of the Texas Revolution, barely visible in the dusk, pointing into the distance with his forefinger.

The light began to ebb around them, pulled away by the retreating sun. A tide of darkness rose and washed into the car. Neither of them spoke for a few moments, knowing she had to go soon.

“I think I came to the right town,” Garret said.

“I think you did,” she answered, and tried to find the whites of his eyes in the night.

S
aturday afternoon, the matinee crowd streamed out of the new Loew’s Theater onto glistening sidewalks. Hetty and Charlotte snapped open their umbrellas and headed up Main Street without talking. Hetty’s yellow slicker fell off one shoulder and, over her head, she twirled a paper parasol decorated with a dragon. She’d bought it last year at the Pagoda Shop even though the salesclerk had insisted, “No good for rain.” Hetty’s eyes were as glazed as the streets, she was so under the spell of the moving picture they’d just seen:
A Woman of Affairs
with Greta Garbo and John Gilbert. She hoped Charlotte wouldn’t say anything to spoil her mood.

They waded through the gutters at the corner of Main and Texas Avenue. Cold water flooded Hetty’s unbuckled galoshes. She shivered, thinking of the look in Garbo’s eyes. She learned so much from studying her face—how to give a man a sidelong glance that made your intentions clear. That’s what the movies were for as far as she was concerned: lessons in love. Where else was she going to find out about these things (other than the marriage manuals Winifred liked to read out loud to shock everyone)?
I must go back to see this movie again, at least three times,
she told herself.
I must.

They stood under the wrought iron veranda of the Rice Hotel and waited for Henry Picktown Waller to fetch them.

“Pick better get here soon,” Charlotte said. “Look at those clouds.”

Hetty’s gaze was drawn up. Strung on wires over the intersection, huge letters made of electric lights spelled out the name of the stage for vaudeville and melodrama:
MAJESTIC THEATER
. She thought how well that word—in all caps!—described the city,
her
city. There really was something MAJESTIC about Houston—the rainbow town she’d told Garret about earlier in the week. The fact that it existed at all was a marvel. When her forefathers had disembarked at Allen’s Landing just a few blocks from here, they’d envisioned a great acropolis on the shores of Buffalo Bayou. And now Hetty could look down the street and see the buildings they’d dreamed of, disappearing into the mist. They’d longed for greatness, the Allen brothers, and their descendants had been driven to do the impossible ever since.

Houstonians had taken the snake-infested bayou and dredged it out for thirty or forty whole miles, all the way to Galveston Bay, creating the Ship Channel and a “port” many miles inland. Hetty chuckled whenever she thought of the Japanese who’d come to her father for loans to buy land, immigrating here because the Gulf marshes were so perfect for rice farming. They could look up now from their flooded paddies south of the city and hear fog horns echoing, see huge ocean liners floating in the distance like mirages over the flat land.

Yes, there was something surreal about her city, leaving Hetty preordained to a belief in miracles. She was a Houstonian head to toe, growing up on these sandy grasslands, eyes turned to the sea. As a girl, her hair had been combed by bay breezes that came whistling through sedge and sea oats, her skin kissed by a supple beauty bred only in this kind of moist subtropical clime. Her childhood wasn’t subject to the laws of nature: She played in the shade of trees that never lost their leaves, heard birdsong at Christmas, and had yet to see snow on the ground. Wildly converging climates waged an endless war in the heavens above her head: Warm tropical rains could be routed instantly by a Blue Norther dropping the temperature fifty degrees in one day.

“The earth and sky don’t meet properly here,” Nella used to say. And Hetty knew she was right. Mystery and whimsy came and went like fog over Hetty’s homeland. Birds out of legend alighted on their waters: great egrets, roseate spoonbills, the elegant white ibis. Hers was a vast delta of migration and magic, prone to flood waters in the fall but, in early spring, flickering with the shadows of land birds—millions of them descending at dawn from their nocturnal passage over six hundred miles of open sea. “They navigate by the stars,” her father told her. Vast wheeling flocks of flycatchers, swallows, and blue-winged warblers would ripple overhead like pollen scattering on the wind. Hetty longed to take wing with them in their journey northward. Once in Hermann Park, she’d sat spellbound as hundreds of ruby-throated hummingbirds had darted by her, funneled back into the Central Flyway from Mexico and Panama.

Houston was a hub for more than birds, Hetty knew. Kirb called it “the city where seventeen railroads meet the sea.” She couldn’t imagine being anywhere else at the moment. The ambitious, the unemployed, and the hungry all flocked here to find work. Freighters choked the Ship Channel, oil clogged the pipelines, and the avenues roared with commerce. Everything swarmed and teemed in the great tropic heat. Even more so in the rain, she thought as she looked up Main. This was Hetty’s favorite time to be downtown, when the streets gleamed like fingernail polish with the red taillights of Model As whizzing by.

Two trolleys clanged along the tracks in the middle of the street before an endless black town car, glistening with raindrops and wax, came cresting up to the curb.

“Finally!” Charlotte said.

Henry Picktown Waller emerged, leaping over the trickling gutter to open the back door. Charlotte ducked in, pulling her wet black umbrella behind her, but Hetty climbed in the front so she could sit beside Henry Picktown and tease him if necessary. “We’re pals, Pick and I,” she told people. Her mother, Lockett, and Charlotte all thought this was highly inappropriate, which made Hetty want to do it all the more. She had a proprietary interest in Pick, as she’d been the one who’d discovered him and talked Kirb into hiring him.

When he got into the car and slammed the door, Hetty pulled four crinkling bags out of the pocket of her rain slicker. “Look what I found at the movies—buttercream candies! I got some for your brother and sisters. There’re bears for Addie, dolls for little Ollie, lions for Lewis, and pigs for Minnie because she
is
one. Can we stop by?”

Pick made a face. “Miss Charlotte ain’t going to want to.”

“Want to what?” came the voice from the backseat.

“Stop by the Wallers on the way home,” Hetty said.

“You’re not taking me to Settegast!”

“You can stay in the car!”

“I hope to tell you I’ll stay in the car. And you’d better lock the doors.”

Pick turned left at Texas Avenue and headed east toward the Ward. Hetty cracked her window and let the scent of rain flow into the car. She could hear Charlotte sniffling in the backseat. “I don’t understand this morbid curiosity you have with slums, sis,” she said.

“Char, Pick lives there.”

“You should move, Picktown. Really.”

Hetty shot her a dirty look.

Charlotte huffed with resentment. “It’s not regular. Ever since you worked at that clinic, you’ve got a complex. Savior of Dark Town or something evangelical.”

“My complexes are none of your business.”

“Says you! Pick, did you know my sister was treating coloreds with syphilis? We found that out after. And to think, I was sharing a bathroom with you!”

Henry Picktown Waller gripped the steering wheel with both hands when they hit the puddles of Dowling. He exchanged a wry smile with Hetty while Charlotte went on muttering in the backseat. As they rumbled over the railroad tracks, Hetty felt again the shudder of horror the Dowling Street Medical Clinic had brought up in her. She would never admit this to her sister, of course. She had maintained her usual confident stance, the stance that had gotten her into the clinic in the first place.

The debutantes of last year had been gathered around the table at the Blue Bird Circle, nibbling on shrimp salad. In Houston society, blue bloods and Blue Birds were practically synonymous: All were expected to serve the community out of a Southern gentlewoman’s inbred sense of noblesse oblige. The president of the Birds had passed out sheets listing their charities and the various duties the girls could sign up for: planting azaleas for the Garden Club, throwing boat parties aboard Camille Pillot’s yacht, or sewing hems on cup towels. The Blue Bird cup towels were quite popular, they were told; restaurants bought them by the dozens. Hetty had scanned the list, but her finger kept being drawn back to a name under the list of charities.

When called upon, Hetty said, “I want to work at the Dowling Street Medical Clinic.”

Hetty’s request caused the kind of furor among the Blue Birds that she’d hoped for. The committee was appalled, Charlotte was mortified, and Nella was furious. But Hetty had her way. In good conscience, none of them could deny Hetty her wish. She became the first white girl in history to volunteer at the Dowling Street Medical Clinic. Weekdays, it was housed in the small auditorium of the Recreation Center in Emancipation Park. She imagined a single gold trumpet announcing her arrival the first day. She was percolating with importance as she took the steps two at a time—drunk on insurrection. The black physician in charge, Dr. Jarvis—a kindly but harried man—seemed dubious that any white girl would be able to stick it out there for long. “This is going to be worse than you reckoned,” he told her.

Hetty had taken a deep breath and, shimmering with idealism, said, “I’m prepared.”

But she wasn’t. She’d never seen patients in the final stages of syphilis. Dr. Jarvis wouldn’t let her dress the skin rashes because he said they were contagious. But he did teach her how to identify the ulcers and how to administer the mercury treatment. Having gotten herself into this just to shock her mother, she now had to carry through with her dare. How pleased Nella would have been to know that she, Esther Ardra Allen, quavered when she went into that auditorium where the stench alone had caused her to pause at the threshold before she could bring herself to enter the room. She assisted Dr. Jarvis in draining the lungs of tuberculars and helped him fit braces to polio victims. They gave out remedies for hookworm, influenza, and pneumonia. Hetty often had to steel herself to keep from vomiting. She smoked a lot of cigarettes. She pilfered her mother’s liquor. She made it through.

“If I hadn’t worked at the clinic, I wouldn’t have met Pick,” she reminded her sister in the backseat. The car swerved onto Garrow Street, bringing the odors of the Ward through Hetty’s open window. “You
do
know that’s how I met Pick,” she taunted her. “His poor mother—”

“I don’t want to know what went on in that clinic. Just roll up your window—do you mind?”

Pellagra was rampant in the Ward due to malnutrition and chronic diarrhea. Dr. Jarvis had asked Hetty to help with a desperate case: a woman with the blackest skin she’d ever seen who brought her family in every couple of weeks with the “summer complaint” as she called it—Velma Waller and her four children: Addie, Ollie, Minnie, and Lewis. There was an older brother but no father, Dr. Jarvis told Hetty. They were all so skinny their clothes hung on them like scarecrows, and their mouths were full of canker sores. When Hetty asked why the children had diarrhea so often, the doctor had said, “The water’s gone bad.”

“You mean their well’s polluted? Why?”

“You ever been to Settegast, ma’am?”

She shook her head.

“You wanna go?” he chuckled.

And she had. In his rattling, smoking Model T, the doctor had driven her one afternoon up to the Ward that grew like a fungus along the eastern edge of the city.
Settegast.
In her crowd, the name was never mentioned, or if it was, only with a lowered voice. Now she saw why. As they drove along the dirt streets, Hetty looked out the window and saw rows of two-room shacks crowded together along muddy ditches. She looked for a street sign or an address, but could see none. Only rickety porches, rocking chairs, morning glory vines. The tin roofs were all rusty. Something rank haunted the air—old garbage perhaps, or rancid grease. Men in white undershirts sat on the stoops while out in the dusty streets, children played a game of tag the doctor identified as Chickamy, Chickamy, Crany, Crow.

They stopped by the house of the Waller family, although how the doctor ever found it Hetty couldn’t imagine. First, he took her to the shed that served as a kitchen and pumped up some water. She cupped her hands under the spout. It smelled vaguely of sulfur. “I don’t suggest you drink it.”

She glimpsed an outhouse in the back and heard the buzz of flies.

“Rats outnumber folks here three to one,” the doctor had said.

But you never see the rats,
Hetty thought as the Packard turned onto North Innis Street. Rain pelted through the window. She rolled it up and glanced over at Pick. He was looking so handsome in his chauffeur’s rig, beaming as he pulled up in front of his house. He always drove the long black Packard into his own neighborhood with such pride, eager for his people to see how far he’d come up in the world. He kept the car buffed like a piece of fine jewelry—onyx perhaps, like his own black black skin—and displayed a natural charm and courtesy to all his passengers. As Hetty stepped out to go visit Pick’s family, she heard two things: her sister clicking the locks on the back doors and the rain drumming on tin roofs all up and down the street.

When Velma Waller heard that Hetty was there, she rushed in from the kitchen shed, wiping her hands on her apron. Hetty studied her face.
Not as gaunt.
She asked her to call the children into the living room and have them line up on the braided cotton rug: Lewis in his overalls first, then Addie with her black shiny hair in finger coils, Minnie—barefoot and bold as ever—and finally, little Ollie with a pink bow tied in each one of her nappy braids. Hetty drew the four crinkling bags out of her slicker pocket.

“What you got for us, ma’am?” Minnie asked.

Pick patted his brash sister on the head. “Shush now.”

“It’s all right, Pick—buttercream candies!”

Minnie thrust her palm out, but Hetty wanted to feed them the first candy so she could have a good look inside their mouths. “Open up!” she ordered.

An hour later, Hetty trailed Charlotte into the foyer of their suite at the Warwick Hotel. Shrugging their rain slickers onto the marble floor for Lina to hang up, they checked their makeup in the round mirror with the pink tint that was so flattering to a woman’s complexion. Nella had hung it there, of course. She loved tinted mirrors and had scattered them all over the apartment in various hues and shapes: blue trapezoids, immense rose-colored circles.