Magnolia City (10 page)

Lockett was watching Hetty intently. “First of all, I’m here to inform you that my daughter will not be accompanying you young people to the jazz club on Dowling Street Friday night.”

“That’s all right. I’ll give her a full report.”

“I just found out about the plan at the tournament today,” Nella said. “I was so shocked, I almost forgot to shout ‘pung’ when picking up discarded tiles.”

“I’ll be perfectly safe, Mamá,” Hetty said. “I used to volunteer there, if you remember.”

“How could I forget?”

“But you never went there at night,” Lockett jumped in. “You girls shouldn’t be listening to that jungle music. Why, in its original form it—”

“Was used for voodoo ceremonies—I know,” Hetty said.

“It causes nervous hysteria and makes you lose control.”

“Oh, Lockett! Self-control is out of date. Haven’t you read Freud?”

“This is a serious matter, Esther. I’ll tell you the same thing I’ve told Belinda a million times—gin and jazz have ruined more than one girl, so beware,” she said, wagging a finger at her.

Hetty used the teacup to cover her amused smile. “Anything else? I was in the middle of something.”

“How many of your friends are going Friday?” Nella asked.

“It looks like it’s just going to be Mac and me.”

“I thought a group was going.”

“Everyone else is afraid to. So Garret’s taking me. We have a date.”

Lockett slurped audibly at her tea before setting it down with a rattle. She clutched her breast and looked at Nella with large, sad eyes. “Nella, dear, I am so sorry! I feel so responsible for this. But at least I’m doing my part to untangle things.”

“Untangle?” Hetty asked.

“Why, yes! I’d describe it as a tangle. A terrible tangle. And to think I began it all by receiving this person. Thank God I devised a way to allay my guilt—”

“I knew you’d find a way, Lockett,” Hetty said.

“I sicced Congressman Welch on the trail immediately—and it didn’t take him long to pick up the scent.”

“Really?” Hetty asked cautiously.

Lockett gazed up at the ceiling and batted her eyelashes. “The first thing I have to say is that we traced the MacBride family to their origins. They’re from—well, of all places, from Butte. A hellish place! Full of immigrants who came to work the copper mines. Drinking, gambling—
whoring!
”

“Oh, dear,” Hetty laughed. “Houses of ill repute.”

“We’re not talking about houses, my dear,” Lockett said. “We’re talking about cribs the girls lease by the night. A dark, unholy place. They say the city is so thick with fumes that streetlights have to be turned on in the middle of the day—in the middle of the day, my dear!”

“What’s all this got to do with Garret?”

“I was getting to that!” She sat forward in her chair. “His father was Termite MacBride.”

“That was his name? Termite?”

“Yes. One can only imagine why.”

“And—?”

“Don’t you see, Esther?” Lockett said. “MacBride? They’re shanty Irish!”

“They were immigrants!” Hetty protested. “Garret’s father was a senator.”

“But he didn’t finish out his term.”

“He didn’t?”

“No. Congressman Welch remembers the name MacBride. He left in the middle of the session for some strange reason. The congressman can’t remember why. I won’t rest until I find out, of course. I just know what this is liable to be.”

She had edged so far forward in her chair, Hetty was afraid she’d fall out. Her eyes burned into Hetty’s like sunlight through a magnifying glass. “What’s that, Lockett?”

“A scandal!” she hissed.

“Don’t be silly,” Hetty said in a dismissive voice to cover the anger that was boiling up inside.

“I just thought you should know what I found out.” Lockett gulped down some tea, looking a little wounded. “I’ll never forgive myself for introducing this person to Houston society. If only I’d known!”

After a few minutes of strained chitchat, she stood up. “Well, I must be off, dears. Thanks for the cup,” she said, flouncing toward the foyer with her handkerchief points bobbing. “Good-bye, Esther. I’d be leery going to a Negro club with a shanty Irish if I were you. You know he’s liable to drink.” To Nella, she said, sweeping open the front door, “I can’t believe you’re allowing it, my dear.”

“I’m not,” Nella said, and closed the door firmly behind her.

Hetty was fuming when Nella came back into the drawing room. “How dare you discuss my private life with a bunch of Edwardian dowagers in the women’s lounge.”

“And how dare you plan a trip to Dowling Street without my permission. I don’t appreciate finding out about it at a mah-jongg game, let me tell you. I felt so ashamed, I didn’t know what to say.”

“I’m old enough to make my own decisions!” Hetty said, standing up.

“Perhaps.” Nella edged up to her daughter. “But I can’t approve this Dowling Street plan. I’ll not have my daughters slumming in the Ward. Do you understand me?”

Hetty glared at her. “Yes.”

“Do I have your solemn promise?”

“I can’t give you that,” Hetty muttered and made for her room.

Nella came around the divan and snapped at her. “You’d better, young lady. If you set foot in that neighborhood, you can kiss your Garret good-bye.”

Silence. Hetty looked at her mother aghast. They had been warned by Kirby since childhood that emotion was out of place in the drawing room. They were used to polite murmurs, discreet laughter, and a mild command or two. But not this. Not Nella in a rage. Hetty found it frightening. “Don’t you dare threaten me, Mamá. I won’t stand here and let you make a dartboard out of me. You know what you can do? You can just stew in your own juice! See if I care. See!” she cried, fleeing the room.

Hetty broke the news to Garret in the elevator on the way down to the lobby. She was surprised when he wasn’t angry.

“It’s simple. We won’t go. That was only going to be your initiation. The truth is, Dowling Street’s for tourists. You want to hear the real Houston blues, baby, you gotta go to the source. West Dallas Avenue.”

Hetty looked at him wide-eyed. Dowling was not that unfamiliar to her after her stint at the clinic, but West Dallas lay across town in the shadowed backyard of the city, where a wrong left could take an unsuspecting driver right down into the dark, foggy streets by the bayou.
“West Dallas!”
she said, following him through the lobby. “Is it safe?”

“We’ll probably be the only white people there. Of course, if you’re afraid . . .”

Hetty fell into the seat of the Auburn and moaned. It was the kind of dare she loved, something really offbeat and a little dangerous. She could just hear Belinda squealing with envy when she told her about it on Monday morning. Hetty Allen, the first girl in her set to hear the
real
Houston blues. It was irresistible. Then another voice crept into her thoughts: deeper, commanding, “set foot in that neighborhood—kiss your Garret good-bye.” Hetty knew in her heart what
that
neighborhood meant: every shantytown she could think of that blistered the map of metropolitan Houston. Nella had given her a clear choice. But what she hadn’t counted on was Garret’s cleverness. He was offering Hetty an out: She could plead not guilty on a technicality by avoiding the street expressly forbidden: Dowling. She hugged Garret’s arm and bent close to whisper in his ear, “That’s what I love about you, honey. You’re in the know. Let’s do it!”

She kept snuggling up to him and nibbling on his ear as he sped all the way north on Montrose to Lincoln. When he finally wheeled the bright blond convertible onto the muddy tracks of West Dallas Avenue, its freshly polished chrome picked up and sparkled with all the colored lights from the saloons and clubs they passed. He nosed the car into a spot just past a blaze of lime and pink neon that twisted itself into the name “Andy Boy’s.”

The club inside was dark and noisy and, since it was Friday night, already jammed with a crowd that looked pretty dingy to Hetty and was busy rocking to the riffs of a combo on the glittering stage. They wedged themselves between two other tables and ordered tonics to spike with gin from a hidden flask. Shadows of the male singer crisscrossed their table as they listened.

In a gravelly croon that chased the saxophone but barely kept up, he was singing about a black snake in his bed. Garret pointed a cigarette her way, and they both lit up. No matter how unruffled she always tried to appear, she had an annoying habit of blushing at moments when she was caught off guard. She thought about the lyrics she’d just heard and felt heat rising up into her cheeks. Her forehead started to flame. She glanced quickly from side to side. Why didn’t she have on something dark and smoky like the other women in the room? Instead, she’d chosen to wear her white net over silver lamé, the one that was spangled with paillettes and pearls. She was not only the lightest woman there, but had a brunette’s incredibly pale white skin that flowed together as one with the slinky dress and made her fairly glow in the rosy beams radiating off the stage.

He topped off her drink and signaled for her to take a sip. She downed half of it in one gulp, gagged on the raw gin, and soon felt better as the blood in her veins ran warm. When the band swiveled into faster and faster tempos, she found she couldn’t fight the music but simply had to surrender to it in order to save her nerves. It was the kind of hot stuff you couldn’t stand in the path of for long. The drummer drove them unmercifully, topping off the beat with a constant
clickety-clack
sound that left the brass free to wander, the clarinet whistling in and out way over the top of it all. Finally, they all slowed down together, and the great wheels of music rolling off the stage churned almost to a stop, with only the clarinet player still climbing and circling in a flight all his own, higher and higher, on and on, till the pianist shouted at him, “Chase it—that’s what I call fried chicken!” and the voice of the audience rose up in one great cheer.

Garret worked his chair through the writhing mass till he was sitting close to Hetty. He put his arm around her shoulder and shouted into her ear: “This is real Texas boogie-woogie you’re hearing. They call it the Santa Fe sound ’cause these guys work a circuit on the railway going West.” Hetty nodded, noticing again how the rhythms they struck sounded so much like train wheels turning on an iron track. She couldn’t keep her feet still.

Later, when everybody had had too much to drink and things were getting mellow, they brought on a singer named Brown Sugar and a suave pianist to back her up. She had a sultry look and the perfect voice for blues, rich and deep. Hetty loved her dusky, honey-colored skin and the lime satin dress that dropped off her shoulders and shimmered as she sang. Her big brown eyes with heavy lids straight off a lizard reminded Hetty of something. Then she remembered her dream. The singer looked down at them after one of her songs and she said, “Hey, Mac,” then gave a throaty chuckle and added, “Ain’t no bayous going to run dry tonight, y’all.” This brought some whistles from the back of the room and a wave from Garret where he sat near the stage.

Hetty was drunk enough that when Sugar went on to sing things like “Empty Bed Blues” or “Bayou Run Dry,” she didn’t even blush, though the singer was looking right into Garret’s eyes as she crooned:

Instead, Hetty ended up sitting in Garret’s lap, hanging on his neck and telling him, over and over, that she was ready to go park somewhere. Lockett was right. This music did make you lose control. Or was it the gin?

Hetty felt slightly dizzy as Garret swerved the Auburn into the circular drive of the Warwick. She was half asleep and had no idea what time it was. She just knew it was late,
very
late. She could only hope that Nella wouldn’t still be awake to witness how ossified she was. Garret tried to park the speedster under the porte cochere, but it was already choked with Kirb’s long Packard town car. She wondered what it was doing here in the middle of the night.

He steadied her as they stumbled through the lobby and caught the elevator to the eighth floor. Its upward surge flooded her head with guilty thoughts from the evening. They had ended up parked beside the lagoon as they usually did. “Let’s get hot,” Garret had said as he steered into a dark spot and pulled out his silver flask. Ever since the tennis game, they’d gotten into some pretty heavy petting, although, like most of her girlfriends, she drew the line at intercourse. She’d gone a little further each time, letting his hands into secret places, pulling his tie off one time, unbuttoning his shirt to smell his heat the next. Now she was hooked: She always wanted him to take his shirt off completely and was even at the point of unbuckling his belt and letting her fingers slide over the tempting rise of his buttocks. Usually, she let Mac take the lead, only stopping him if he tried to go too far. But tonight, Wini’s words had echoed in her mind, how a modern woman might return the genital kiss. Hetty sat up and worked his Oxford bags down, pulling his boxers back. She’d bent over him and held his cock in her hand, then kissed the head of it. She was fascinated with how spongy and smooth it was, with the musk that rose off it and how it began to swell and stiffen between her fingers. She wished it weren’t so dark: She’d wanted him to see her brazen red lips closing over the head of his cock, adoring it.

When they reached suite 810, she started fumbling in her evening bag for keys until Garret pointed out that one of the double doors was cracked. Her heart sank. She crept into the foyer and, despite the haziness hanging over her mind, noticed several things at once: Garret’s face reflected in the pink mirror, his sleepy blue eyes peering into the suite timidly, Nella looming in the doorway in a flowing silk kimono, two dark figures standing guard behind her.

“No more petting parties for you, young lady,” she announced immediately. “You’re under house arrest for two weeks.”

It took Hetty a moment to register what she meant. “House arrest?” she asked groggily. “For two weeks?”