The After Party (29 page)

I
spent a great deal of time researching the colorful, storied past of Houston's Shamrock Hotel, and though I've tried to be, in most instances, faithful to the historical record, fact always serves at the pleasure of fiction in this book. One instance of note: In March of 1957, the Cork Club was moved out of its location in the Shamrock Hotel to a spot in downtown Houston. In the book, of course, it remains a part of the Shamrock. I didn't have the heart to move
it.

T
hank you to my agent, Dorian Karchmar, whose dedication to writing in general—and, to my great fortune, my writing in particular—is so passionate I am still occasionally astonished by her commitment.

Thank you to my editor, Sarah McGrath, whom I feel lucky to work with. She made this book so much better. There is no eye more discerning. Without her patient, calm presence, along with her incisive, brilliant editorial suggestions, this book would not have gotten written. I am forever grateful to her.

At Riverhead, thank you to the entire spectacular team, but especially to Geoffrey Kloske, Jynne Martin, Danya Kukafka, and Lydia Hirt.

Thank you to my publicist, Liz Hohenadel, whose love for books is infectious, and who is so good at getting them noticed. I don't pretend to understand all the hard work that goes into publishing a book, but I am incredibly thankful for all the effort Riverhead and Liz have put into mine.

At William Morris Endeavor, thank you to Tracy Fisher, Anna DeRoy, Simone Blaser, and Jamie Carr.

Thank you to the English department at Auburn University, where I am surrounded every day by fine students and colleagues.

Thank you to Tim Mullaney for reading a draft.

Thank you to Roy Nichol, for his generous help in explaining the world of River Oaks.

Thank you to my mother and father and sister, as always, for their love and support.

Thank you to my husband, Mat Smith, for everything.

This book is for the two Peters in my life: one past, one present and
future.

I
was fifteen years old when my parents sent me away to the Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls. The camp was located in Blowing Rock, North Carolina, concealed in the Blue Ridge Mountains. You could drive by the entrance and never see it, not unless you were looking, and carefully; my father missed it four times before I finally signaled that we had arrived.

My father drove me from Florida to North Carolina: my parents did not trust me enough to let me ride the train alone.

The last day, we ascended into the upper reaches of the mountains, at which point our journey slowed considerably. The road looked half made, narrow and overgrown; it twisted and turned at sharp angles.

My father spoke little when he drove; he believed one should always concentrate on the road ahead. He'd bought his first car, a Chrysler Roadster, five years earlier, in 1925, so an automobile was not a habit for him but an innovation. We stopped in Atlanta on the first night, and after we checked into our hotel, my father told me to dress nicely. I wore my lavender silk dress with the dropped waist and rosette detailing. I carried my mother's mink stole, which I had taken despite Mother's instruction not to do so. When I was a child I was allowed to wear the stole on special occasions—Christmas dinner, Easter brunch—and I had come to think of the fur as mine. But now that I wore it on my own, it felt like a burden, an accessory too elegant for me. I felt young for the dress, though it was not the dress but my body that made me feel this way. My breasts were tender and new, I still carried myself in the furtive way of an immature girl. My father, in his gray pinstripe suit, didn't look much different than usual, except that he had tucked a lime-green handkerchief in his coat pocket. Not the lime green of today, fluorescent and harsh. We didn't have colors like that then. No, I mean the true color of a lime, palely bright.

At the entrance to the restaurant, I took my father's arm like my mother usually did, and he looked at me, startled. I smiled and tried not to cry. I still clung to the hope that perhaps my father would not leave me in North Carolina, that he had another plan for us. My eyes were swollen from two weeks of weeping, and I knew it pained my father to see anyone cry.

The country was in the midst of the Great Depression, but my family had not suffered. My father was a physician, and people would always pay for their health. And there was family money besides, which my parents would come to depend on. But only after my father's patients were so poor they couldn't even offer him a token from the garden in exchange for his services. I saw all this after I came back from Yonahlossee. The Depression had meant something different to me when I left.

I rarely ventured outside my home. We lived in a tiny town in central Florida, named after a dead Indian chief. It was unbearably hot in the summers—this in the days before air-conditioning—and crisp and lovely in the winters. The winters were perfect, they made up for the summers. We rarely saw our neighbors, but I had all I needed right there: we had a thousand acres to ourselves, and sometimes I would leave with a packed lunch in the morning on Sasi, my pony, and return only as the sun was setting, in time for dinner, without having seen a single person while riding.

And then I thought of my twin, Sam. I had him most of all.

My father and I ate filet mignon and roasted beets at the hotel's restaurant. Plate-glass windows almost as tall as the restaurant were the central decoration. When I tried to look outside to the quiet street, I saw a blurred reflection of myself, lavender and awkward. We were the only people there, and my father complimented my dress twice.

“You look lovely, Thea.”

My full name was Theodora, a family name. The story goes, Sam shortened it to Thea when we were two. The beets tasted flat and dirty against my tongue; I tried not to think about what my brother was doing while I ate.

My father told me again that at the camp I would ride every day except Sunday. I thanked him. I was leaving Sasi behind in Florida, but it was just as well because I had outgrown him. I kicked his elbows when I posted. The thought of my pretty paint pony pained me terribly now. His coat, Mother always said, was distinctively beautiful, divided evenly between black and white patches. I thought of his eyes, one blue, one brown, which wasn't so unusual in horses: if white hair surrounded the eye, it was blue; black hair, brown.

Our meal, our last meal together for a year, was mostly silent. I had never before eaten alone with my father. My mother, yes, several times, and with Sam, of course. I didn't know what to say to my father. With all the trouble at home, I was afraid to say anything.

“You'll come home soon,” my father said, over coffee and crème brûlée, “after all this mess is settled,” and it was my turn to be startled by my father's behavior. I sipped my coffee quickly and singed my lips. I was only allowed a taste of Mother's at home. My father rarely spoke of unpleasantness, any kind, personal or remote. Perhaps that's why I knew as little about the Depression as I did.

He smiled at me, his small, kind smile, and I felt my eyes warm. When my mother smiled you saw all her teeth; her face revealed itself. But my father's smile was something you had to look closely for. In this moment, his smile meant he still loved me, after all I had done. I wanted him to tell me that things would be fine. But my father was not a liar. Things would not be fine; they couldn't ever be that way again.

I have never loved a place again like I loved my first home, where I was born, where I lived until the mess commenced. One could dismiss my love of place by explaining that I was attached to the people who lived there, my mother, father, and brother. That is true, I did love these people, but I cannot remember my family without remembering the gardens where they walked, the sun porches where they read, the bedrooms where they retired. I loved the house separately from my family. I knew the house, it knew me, we found solace in each other. Absurd, but there was magic in that place.

I confess that I was as sad to leave my home as to leave my family. I had never been away from it for more than a few nights, and I knew in my bones that it would be changed when I returned.

I would be changed as well. When my parents met me again at the train station in Orlando, all that time later, they might as well have been meeting an entirely new person.

I left my home, my lovely home, and was taken to the Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls, an enclave for wealthy young women, staffed by graduates of the camp awaiting marriage.

I came of age, as they say, at the Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls.

—

B
ut then, I knew nothing about the place except that it was where my parents were sending me so they wouldn't have to see me. It was dusk when we arrived, a melancholy hour I've always hated. Under the cover of enormous oak trees we drove up the long gravel road that seemed to go on forever; it occurred to me that it might be weeks before I traveled this road again.

My father clutched the wheel and squinted, completing very carefully the task at hand, which was how he had always done things. We pulled up to a square—it was indeed called the Square, I would later learn—of birch-shingled cabins and my father began to turn the automobile off; I looked around for another girl, but there was no one. I opened my own door—“Thea,” my father called, but I ignored him. I set my feet on the loamy soil, so different from the ground in Florida now, which was parched from the summer. The air smelled wet here, but not like the ocean. The ocean was always close to you in Florida, even when you lived hours away, like we did; here you were boxed in, on all sides, by mountains.

I peered up at the building in front of me while my father fiddled with the car—he would not leave it until he was sure everything was turned off properly. Even now. And this building was something like I had never seen before, half built into the mountain. The stilts that supported it reminded me of horses' legs, tall and wobbly, not meant to sustain such weight. I always had the feeling that the building should fall, would fall. Later, so much later, our headmaster told me that this was, in fact, the safest way to build in the mountains. I never believed him.

Since it was a Sunday, the camp had already eaten dinner, but I didn't know that then and I was overcome by a terrible sensation of dread and longing. This was not my home, my family was elsewhere.

A man approached, appearing as if out of thin air, and held out his hand when he was still much too far away, ten, twelve feet, for my father to possibly accept it. I thought for an instant that he resembled my brother.

“I'm Henry Holmes,” he called out, “the headmaster.”

The first thing I thought about Henry Holmes was that his title was odd: I didn't know summer camps had headmasters. Then he reached us and first my father shook his hand; next Mr. Holmes held the tips of my fingers and bowed slightly. I inclined my head.

“Thea,” my father said. “Theodora, but call her Thea.”

I nodded and blushed. I was not used to strangers, and Mr. Holmes was handsome, with dark, glossy brown hair that looked in need of a trim. His shirtsleeves were neatly rolled up, and now that he was close I could see that he did not, in fact, resemble Sam. Sam had a happy, open face, with round hazel eyes—Mother's eyes; Sam always looked kind, calm. Mr. Holmes's face was a tiny bit tense, his lips drawn together in consideration. And he was a man, with a shadow of a beard. My brother was a boy.

At that moment I would have seen Sam's face in anyone's. I had taken one of his monogrammed handkerchiefs, which was what the adults I read about in books did, gave their loved ones a memento. But of course Sam had not given me anything; I had taken it. The handkerchief lay flat against my torso, beneath my dress; no one in the world knew it was there but me. I pressed my hand to my stomach and looked Mr. Holmes in the eye, as my mother had taught me to do with strangers. I couldn't ever remember meeting a man whom I was not related to, though surely I must have.

“We're pleased you've decided to join us,” he said, and his voice seemed softer when he spoke to me, as if he were trying to show sympathy not with his words but with the way they sounded when they reached my ears. I told him that I was pleased to be here as well. He must have guessed that some unpleasantness had sent me to the camp so late in the season. I was enrolling in the middle of the summer; I wondered what excuse my father had made.

Mr. Holmes led us up the tall staircase to the Castle, and though I would only learn later that this was what everyone called this edifice, I thought even then that it looked like a fortress, imposing and elegant. The staircase was uncovered and it must have just rained, because the wood was slick. I stepped carefully. Two gas lamps flanked the door at the top of the stairs. The twin flames burned steadily, orange and red within their glass houses. Mr. Holmes opened a thick oak door, painted navy blue with yellow trim, the camp's colors, and led us through the front room, which served as the dining hall and worship site.

Mr. Holmes paused by the front bay window.

“So unlike Florida,” my father said. He smiled at me, and I could see that he was pained. He had started to gray around the temples in the past year, and I saw, suddenly, that my father would become old.

Mr. Holmes waved us into his office, where I sat on a brown velvet settee while my father and Mr. Holmes took care of the necessary matters. I could feel Mr. Holmes watching me, but I did not look up.

I coughed, and my father turned his head.

“Wait outside, Thea?” I left and wandered down the hall outside the office. From where I stood I could see the tables that were already set for the next meal, tables that tomorrow morning would surely be filled with girls. Hundreds of them. I wanted so badly to be elsewhere.

I turned back to Mr. Holmes's office, and was confronted by a wall of photographs, which I had somehow missed before. Horses, and astride them, their girls. I went closer and read the tiny script engraved beneath each photo, touched the brass and felt the words. On each plaque there was the name of a horse, and beneath that the name of a girl, and then, finally,
First Place,
Spring Show
,
and the year. There were photos from the 1800s. The horses hadn't changed much, but the earliest girls rode sidesaddle, their legs hobbled together, hanging uselessly. You could see the march of time, both through the quality of the photographs and the girls' names and clothes and hairstyles; the last two had grown shorter as time progressed. So many people had passed through this place. The most recent photograph featured a tall girl with white-blond hair and patrician features, astride a giant horse; they dwarfed the man who stood next to them, presenting the award.
Leona Keller
, it read,
King's Dominion, First Place, Spring Show, 1930.

I noticed a small, marble-topped table by Mr. Holmes's office door, two neat stacks of brochures on top of it.
Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls
,
the first one said,
A Summer Equestrian Respite for Young Ladies Since 1876.
Beneath the cursive script was a row of smiling girls, in white blouses and white skirts, each holding a horse. The horses' ears were all flipped forward, their attention earned by something behind the camera.

At first I thought the brochures in the next stack were simply older versions. Their covers featured a photograph of what must have been the entire student body, a mass of girls straightened into rows for a picture, each one of them staring solemnly into the camera.
Yonahlossee Riding School for Girls
,
the same cursive script read,
Educating Young Ladies Since 1902.

I heard a voice behind Mr. Holmes's door, and slipped away and went to the window. I held a hand to the glass, my thumb blocked half of a mountain range. The view was stunning, I had never seen anything like it. Florida was flat and hot, for as far as I could see from this window there were mountain peaks, slate-gray, snaked with trees, puncturing the clouds that hung so low they must not have been ordinary clouds. The clouds I was used to floated high in the sky.