Magnolia City (24 page)

Hetty came to believe in omens, in a startling conjunction of events that seemed to be connected in some mysterious way. A tan envelope arrived by post the very next day embossed with a Greek temple. She knew what the letter was going to say before she ripped it open: “The board has reviewed your application for membership in the Cupola Club. We regret to inform you that, at this time . . .”

She crumpled the letter and let it drop to the floor. “It’s over,” she said under her breath. She reached for her handbag, took out her passbook, and made an entry under
Withdrawals: My place in society.

The next few months were an exercise in survival. Odell was still in jail, and his “pipeline flowing with cactus juice” had dried up. Hetty had to ration their money carefully to make it last. She was shocked when Garret revealed their bank balance: $1,030.75. Panic flashed through her like heat lightning.
We’ve been clearing over $3,000 a month since Christmas! Could we really have run through $11,000?
She dug into a drawer of her new antique secretary and found the stack of crinkled receipts for all the items she’d bought: the chifforobe and tea cart, the Victrola and fancy smoking stand with its built-in humidor, the Silvertone Radio with its own console table, her chaise lounge, the grenadine portieres she’d hung over doors between rooms, the Oriental carpets and marble pedestals, the vacuum sweeper and the hand-painted china lamps from London, the twelve-piece sets of silverware and crystal, the Lalique candelabras, the ceramic baking dishes, the pressed glass water bottle in her new electric Frigidaire. She hadn’t really kept track of how much she’d spent. Each purchase had seemed effortless at the time, a tiny extravagance to brighten the gray winter days, but when she tallied the prices, Hetty realized that her manic campaign of redecorating had cost them $4,897.99, not counting the labor she’d hired. Then there were Garret’s tailor-made suits and the jewels he kept bringing her in velvet cases: the jade pins and cameos, the long drop earrings, those endless strands of pearls. She could account for everything but a couple of thousand dollars. He wouldn’t tell her what he’d done with it. She accused him of gambling it away at the tables down in Galveston. They had a huge fight, and he walked out. She never found out what happened to the money. He kept insisting that, any day now, he’d be able to start making runs back to Duval County. Hetty wasn’t so sure. Gun smoke from the San Diego massacre still haunted the air of South Texas—hatred and fear made it gather and thicken until it began to move like a dust storm across the whole state.

When she’d walk to Sander’s Grocery on Oxford Street to do her shopping, Hetty would scan the headlines of the newspapers displayed in a rack at the front of the store. Almost all of them ran front-page stories about the capture. She soon realized that the widespread publicity was making it impossible for
El Patrón
to drop the charges against his prisoners. Pearl waited weeks for an arraignment, only to find out that no bail had been set and that the men were to be detained indefinitely in San Diego. The weather got hot. Hetty lay in the chaise lounge in her new living room with a circulating fan brushing over her, back and forth, listening for the sound of distant thunder. She kept expecting the heavens to break, unleashing one of those torrential downpours Houston was famous for. Something catastrophic had to happen. First, the US District Attorney got involved. This was the moment the government had been waiting for, they learned: a chance to demonstrate publicly that the controversial new Jones Act
would
be enforced, that Hoover’s administration would be the first to really do something about America’s drinking problem.

The D.A.’s team swept in, moving the venue out of corrupt Duval County, where a conviction would be highly unlikely. The prisoners were all transferred to the jurisdictions in which they resided, in Odell’s case, Harris County. The brutal truth became inescapable: Odell
would
have to stand trial for the illegal selling of liquor and, since it was a criminal offense, the case would be pushed through the courts in under ninety days. His only hope was to face a sympathetic jury, but alas, it was not to be.

As Hetty sat beside Garret and Pearl in the county courthouse, she grew sick of heart when the members of the jury filed in. Women with pinched faces and ramrod straight posture, men in the somber suits worn by ministers. It was high August. The courtroom was sweltering. Nobody would have much patience in this kind of weather. Odell went down in a matter of days. The maximum sentence. Ten years in prison and a ten-thousand-dollar fine. He looked pale as the verdict was read; he’d lost weight from repeated bouts of dysentery in jail. But when they went to visit him in the penitentiary at Huntsville, he was still trying to piece together scraps of dignity, quoting Thoreau: “ ‘Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.’ ”

Pearl was out of her mind with grief. She was given ninety days to raise the staggering fee. She had no idea what to do, she told Hetty, bumbling about in a confused state, weeping on and off, snatching at bits of advice that came in censored letters from her husband.

“Oh, Lord, why wasn’t I a crib death?” she asked over and over as she paced the kitchen floor in her old mules. “I told Odell not to go into this business. The wages of sin is death, I said, but he just wouldn’t listen.”

By October, the two women had managed to pull together a fairly comprehensive portfolio of Odell’s investments. It looked like there would be more than enough to pay the fine and still leave some money for Pearl to live on for a few years. Hopefully by then Odell would be out on parole for good behavior, and they could resume some kind of life together. He wrote and instructed her not to liquidate anything until she absolutely had to.

That’s why she and Hetty were puzzled by phone calls that started coming in from local brokers in the closing days of October. There had been a plunge in the market, they said, so Pearl needed to sell off some of her stock to provide additional “margin.”

“Ain’t got a head for business, sir,” she said at one point and handed the phone to Hetty. The man on the line explained that Odell, like a lot of small-time investors, had bought stocks with a marginal down payment and had let the brokers finance the rest of the purchase price through loans. It was a scheme Odell had kept secret from his wife, a way to stretch his assets by speculating on the bull market. Pearl either had to come up with more “margin,” meaning ready cash, or sell some of her stocks at reduced prices. She had no choice. She told them to sell.

That was on Friday. On Monday, Hetty bought the late edition of the
Houston Post-Dispatch
and took it over to Pearl. There had been an even bigger drop in securities that morning. Pearl had been getting more phone calls demanding “more margin.” Then Tuesday morning a frantic letter arrived from Odell, dated Friday, telling her to sell everything immediately. She tried for hours to get through to the brokers, but the lines were busy, busy, busy. Later, they turned on the radio and heard the devastating news: The market had gone through the biggest crash in history, slumping by billions in one day. Pearl grew glassy-eyed as she listened, wondering vaguely how much money she’d lost.

The next morning, Hetty went over to the big house and kept dialing all day until she finally got through to one of the brokers. After talking to him, she didn’t know how she was going to break the news to Pearl: The securities Odell had invested in were not only worthless, he owed money on top of it for “margin.”

Hetty shoved her pride to the back of her mind and called her father at Citizen’s Bank of South Texas. He couldn’t talk to her—he was batching up the accounts. But she called back every fifteen minutes until she got him on the phone.

“Yes.”

“Dad, it’s Hetty.”

“I know.” His voice sounded weary.

“I’m worried about your bank. Are you all right?”

“Keeping my head above water. Barely.”

“It’s really that bad?”

“The worst break in history. The market’s down ten billion. Everyone I know is being hit. It’s a disaster.”

“Can’t the banks do something?”

“We waited too long. Nobody expected this. Now we just have to let prices seek their own level. I—” His voice trailed off. Hetty could hear shouting in the background.

“Listen . . . I need a favor for a friend. Dad?”

“Yes?”

Hetty outlined Pearl’s problems and asked if Citizen’s could help her out. “I wouldn’t ask for myself, of course.”

“I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do,” Kirb said brusquely. “Investors like Odell are part of the reason this happened.”

“She’s going to lose her home, Dad. Can’t you—”

“I said there’s nothing we can do.” More shouting in the background. “Now I really must go. Good night.” He hung up on her. The dial tone stung her ear.
I bet if I were Charlotte,
she thought,
you’d help me.

By November, when the court fine came due, the market had bottomed out completely and Pearl had no way to raise the ten thousand dollars. Her house and its furnishings were auctioned off under a sheriff’s sale. They brought in a little over six thousand dollars.

Hetty sat in the kitchen with Pearl after the auction was over. Though night was falling, neither stood up to turn on a light and neither spoke. They didn’t know what to say. They just sat there in the breakfast nook, smoking, waiting for Garret to return with beer and sandwiches. Hetty felt spellbound with grief. Her dreams had not led them to treasure, as she’d hoped, but to trouble. To a man in prison, to two women left speechless here in a darkened room.

Hetty’s devastated dreams made her remember the old Magnolia Park. She wasn’t sure why she was thinking of that now, sitting here in the dusk, but she was. Nella used to tell her and Charlotte stories about it. She and Kirby had conducted their courtship out there, taking the trolley to the turning basin in Buffalo Bayou. They would stroll through the sixty acres of parkland, attend concerts at the bandstand, have picnics in the shade of three thousand seven hundred and fifty Magnolia grandiflora trees that had been planted there by the developers. Nella said the air for miles around hung heavy with the sweet perfume of those giant white blossoms, often thousands of them blooming at once. This earthly paradise, she told her enraptured daughters, was designed to rival Central Park in Manhattan and Woodward’s Gardens in San Francisco, making Houston known coast to coast as the Magnolia City. Hetty begged Nella to take her there so she could experience such a place for herself. When Hetty was old enough, she finally did. All around the turning basin loomed refineries, factories, warehouses, and shipping docks. The magnolia trees had been razed years before to make room for industrial development. Hetty never forgot the acrid smell of smoke that had replaced the heady aroma of those delicate white flowers.

Why was she thinking of that now? She wasn’t sure. Somehow the events of the last few days made her mourn all over again the destruction of such a magical forestland east of Houston. Hetty thought she heard something roaring in the distance, like chain saws at work. Or maybe she was just remembering Pick’s deep voice intoning the words of that hymn he sang as he painted—the one about the lamp burning down. She left Pearl alone in the kitchen and made her way through the twilight to the apartment. Stumbling about like a blind woman, she felt her way into the bedroom, thinking,
We are no longer the Magnolia City. What’s to become of us now?
She opened the window beside the bed and took the Japanese lantern out of the post oak tree. She held it in her hands as she sat on the bed and sang in the darkness, the misery in her heart welling into the words of the hymn:

T
he last great storm of 1929 came like a whisper out of the Caribbean and ambushed the Texas coast. People had already shelved their storm shutters for the winter and burned their candles at the last crabbing parties along the bay. Late editions of the
Houston Post-Dispatch
broadcast the news: TROPICAL STORM UPGRADED TO HURRICANE: Headed for Mexican Coast.

As she sat in her living room packing, Hetty absentmindedly scanned the headlines while wrapping her new china in the day’s paper. Tankers steaming out of the Ship Channel had radioed the news—something unfriendly was brewing out there, spawned in the incubator of the equator, nursed on the warm breast of the Caribbean, and bawling as it crawled its way westward toward the nearest land. It had an empty, inhuman heart: a pocket of air pressure so low that winds from all directions poured down the wall of its eye like Niagaras of air. The earth’s rotation made it turn, spinning off across the glassy sea like a child’s top out of control. It bounced into Tampico and back out, careening here and there in a bad temper, stopping only to suck more heat out of the sea and spur its winds to over a hundred miles an hour. It wore a wide whirling sombrero of clouds, hundreds of miles across.

Already, down at Galveston, Hetty read, they were seeing the long coasting waves that glide into shore before the squall itself, the ones that move like those scenes she’d seen in motion pictures where they slow the action down and everything seems to hang suspended in time. Like she was. The rooms of the garage apartment around her were emptying bit by bit, draining her old life away. All her new clothes had disappeared into trunks, the carpets had been rolled up, the drawers cleaned out. She had taken all her portieres and curtains down; through the bare dusty panes, the clouds that passed beyond the post oaks never changed. They just kept revolving, around and around, waiting to see what the storm would decide to do.

Drainpipes gurgled and eaves dripped as Hetty flapped along the driveway under a Chinese parasol. Her galoshes were unbuckled as usual, and a canvas raincoat two sizes too big hung halfway off her shoulders. Raindrops big as bullets ricocheted all around her. She made her way up the back steps, dropped the parasol upside down on the porch and, knocking lightly, slipped into the Weems’ house for what would surely be the last time. Pearl was moving to a Victorian rooming house on Studewood.

The kitchen had been cleared out completely. The only sign of where they used to sit at the breakfast nook were scuff marks on the table. A dirty glass had been left in the sink.

“Pearl . . .” Her voice echoed against bare walls.

“Yoo-hoo,” came a thin reply. Hetty followed the sound down the hall, through leaded glass doors. She found Pearl slouched wearily on boxes stacked in the living room. Around her, the few possessions she had left huddled, everything else sold to pay debts. “In here having a pity party. Pull up a box.”

“It would have to rain on top of everything else.” Hetty found a perch on a wardrobe trunk. “I hear the bayou’s flooding.”

Pearl sighed. “Like my mother used to say, ‘First it’s all roses, roses, then thorns, thorns.’ ”

“You didn’t happen to find that certificate, did you? From the oil syndicate?”

“Lord, I have messed up.” Pearl stood as though every bone in her body ached. She tore open a box on one of the piles and dug around until she found a manila envelope. “I meant to give this to y’all.”

When Hetty opened the flap and let the contents slide out, she found a letter from the Joiner Oil Syndicate in the Praetorian Building in Dallas, a certificate to a one-acre share and a scientific report entitled “Geological, Topographical and Petroliferous Survey of Rusk County, Texas.” “Sure you don’t want to keep this for yourself?”

“Ain’t worth spit to me without Odell.”

“I’ll accept it on one condition.”

“What’s that?”

“That you become a partner with us.”

“Well . . .” Pearl looked out into the sky and chuckled. “I do hail from Rusk County, you know.”

The slanted coast of Texas sent the hurricane veering into land just shy of Port Arthur, so they missed the worst of it. But there was still plenty of tempest to endure. After moving the last of their possessions into a new garage apartment, Garret cut open some of the cardboard boxes and taped them over the bedroom windows. Hetty got to the corner store just in time to grab a few emergency rations. They plugged in her hand-painted china lamps and stretched out right on the mattress because they couldn’t find any sheets. The storm roared all afternoon and all night. Garret spent the time napping and reading the papers from the oil syndicate, but Hetty lay wrapped tightly in a blanket, listening to the ominous sounds outdoors, afraid even to go to sleep.

“You don’t know what it’s like,” she told him when he teased her. “You didn’t grow up here.” His clear blue eyes shot her an amused glance, his slick black hair glistening with pomade in the lamplight.

She turned her back to him, knowing he couldn’t understand her weather phobia. He hadn’t been suckled on stories of Gulf storms like she had. The granddaddy of all such stories was the one her mother Nella told her about the terrible Galveston storm of 1900, the hurricane that had launched the new century with the greatest natural disaster in American history. It hit suddenly on a Saturday in September. When the big breakers started to roll in, crowds took the trolley out to the beach to see them. There was a party atmosphere, Nella said. Then the winds began to rise, reaching 145 miles per hour in only a few hours. A fifteen-foot surge of water swept over the island. Thousands of homes were turned into kindling. Some said the death toll reached six thousand souls; others placed it as high as twelve thousand—nobody knew for sure because they had to burn the corpses quickly to stop the spread of disease.

Hetty remembered how she and her sister Charlotte used to cry when their mother told them the story of St. Mary’s Orphanage. It had been right on the beach at 69th Street. The gale had blown it down like a house of straw. In a desperate attempt to save lives, the nuns had lashed themselves to groups of children. Hetty wondered what sounds the orphans made right before they died. She smelled something burning and realized that Garret had lit a cigarette. The thought of her husband smoking in bed as if nothing had happened comforted her and, haltingly, she let the wind carry her away.

She woke later in darkness. She could hear waves, giant ones crashing one on top of another. The winds began ripping boards off, and a wild light came in with the rain so she could see where she was. A crucifix hung crookedly in the wind. She wanted to get up and run. But she couldn’t. She was tied down. She could feel Charlotte squirming beside her. Hetty called out. But her voice was lost in the loud crack that broke open the wall between them and the sea. Hetty saw a veranda float away. She craned her neck to look out at the ocean . . . and there it was. A fifteen-foot wall of water. All the girls were told about it when they first came. It spread itself above them like a cobra about to strike, moving from side to side, taking its time. And now she knew what sounds the orphans of St. Mary’s made right before they drowned. They didn’t die praying, as she’d always hoped.

It was cold, that’s what she remembered most about the wave when it finally hit. The cold. It took her breath away. She couldn’t move. She wondered where her mother was, if she’d heard about the storm. She tasted the salt in the water as it thundered over them.

“Mommy!” she cried. “Mommy! Mommy!” Hetty longed to be back in her mother’s arms, to stop this headlong roll into the cold shock of womanhood. The wave shook her over and over, as if she were being scolded. But it was Garret shaking her—Garret had hold of one shoulder while her other shoulder was still being sucked down into the black vortex. “Help,” she cried to him, but the sound got dammed up in her throat as a moan.
I must save Charlotte!
she thought.

“Honey,” he called. “Honey, what’s wrong?” He was on the shore. He could save her. She wound an arm around his neck and let him pull her out of the ropes to a bright place of morning.

“Hey. You were moaning in your sleep.”

She looked around their bedroom wildly. The only thing flooding the room was sunlight. Garret had ripped off the cardboard. She could see clear sky opening up. “I was tied down. . . .” The effort of pulling herself and Charlotte out of the ropes made her tremble. She clung to Garret until her fear subsided. “Nella left my sister and me at the orphanage. I was so scared.”

Garret stroked her arm. “It’s all right. I’m here. The storm’s over. And guess what. I found the coffeepot.”

“That’s progress.”

The calm blue sky settled Hetty, and she kissed her husband’s neck. He let her slide back to her pillow and sat up on his side of the bed, where papers spread around, crinkled. “I’ve been up drinking coffee and reading this report from the Joiner Oil Syndicate.”

“Look good?”

“I hope to tell you!” He handed her a scientific journal. “Look, here’s an article written about East Texas by two Humble geologists. I’m telling you, honey, they’re going to discover one of the largest oil fields in the world. Listen to how he describes it—a treasure trove all the kings of the earth might covet,” Garret read from the report. “This is big. And we’ve got a one-acre share.” He kissed the certificate. “Now I hope you’ll call your dad.”

“You know he won’t talk to me,” she said, pushing out of bed. She wormed her way around stacks of cartons in the living room and peered through the window. Tree limbs scratched the street everywhere, and wires sagged. “We’ll never get a telephone now,” she muttered.

Garret yanked on his pants and snatched up the envelope on the bed. “All right! If you’re too proud to call your parents, I guess I’ll have to do on my own, won’t I?” He jammed his shoes on and tied the laces. “I’ve got ways to raise money. You just watch.” He slammed his hat on and wrenched the door open, dragging his raincoat behind him.

For the rest of the day, Hetty distracted herself by unpacking one box after another. Stacks of them sagged against the walls, making the apartment even more oppressive than it was. All her new furniture had been crammed into the middle of the living room, barely leaving a space to sit on the davenport. She’d never be able to fit it all into these two small rooms. Half the stuff would have to be stored downstairs in the garage. Hetty looked around and sighed. No one would ever refer to this place as a “carriage house.” She could still smell the old tenants in the air. The closets were scaled for dwarves and, for her new china, there were only a few cramped cupboards in the kitchen. She looked at the floor under her feet in horror.
Linoleum! My carpets will clash with the pattern!
To try and bring a little warmth into the rooms, she unpacked her fringed shades and set a couple on the china lamps. But it was pretty hopeless. Mostly the place needed a good cleaning and a fresh coat of paint on the gray plaster walls.

Garret came home late smelling of whiskey. He fell asleep across the bare mattress with his clothes on. She rifled through his wallet. It was empty. He woke with a headache around noon and emptied two or three cartons, leaving bottles strewn on the floor in a search for aspirin. When he left that afternoon, Garret had the same look of impotent rage in his eyes. He wouldn’t tell her where he was going, but he took the checkbook with him. Hetty couldn’t stand to stay in the apartment alone.

Miraculously, her landlady’s phone was still working. Hetty slouched in the hallway while the woman eyed her from the kitchen—a lumbering lady named Mrs. Cobb. Whiffs of rancid chicken fat lingered in the air. Hetty took the phone book off its nail and looked up a Courtlandt Place number.

“Good afternoon. Hargraves residence.” The sweet mellow Southern tones identified the voice immediately as Doris Verne’s.

“Hi, kiddo, it’s Hetty.”

“Hey—whatever happened to you? I haven’t seen you at any of the parties.”

“Shame on me. I guess I’m turning into a boring old married woman.”

“Not at all. Why do you think the rest of us are running around like mad women? We’re looking for husbands, honey child.”

“Fools,” Hetty said with a laugh and caught up on all the latest buzz before describing to her friend the scenes she’d just had with her husband. Doris Verne suggested that Hetty bring Garret to Ima Hogg’s benefit. “What benefit?”

“You are out of touch, girl. Ima Hogg’s giving a concert. Fifty dollars a plate.”

“What would I do without you, kiddo? Give me the number to call!”

Hetty scribbled it on Mrs. Cobb’s notepad, ripped the page off, and tossed the earpiece back onto the phone. After a hasty thank-you, she raced on her toes out the back and up the stairs, where she began ripping open carton after carton. She nosed about until she found the box she was looking for. She lifted out handfuls of jewels: long strands of pearls with a pink blush, the good ones off the floor of the Sea of Japan; her moonstones; her jade scarabs; her amethyst bracelets—the stuff that would bring some kind of quick money from the hock shops down on Preston Avenue. She pulled more and more out, piling them up, until she had enough to fill two dinner plates.

In the damp December night, fog floated over the bayou that snaked through the deep forests of River Oaks. Rising like ghostly fox fire out of the woods came globes of light rolling through the mists: the headlights of cars, one long, elegant automobile after another. They came up from the east, from the city, sweeping around the curves of Lazy Lane, their beams striking across white pillars and moss-hung trees, all slowing down to turn at the same place: into a narrow lane that looked like it disappeared into the woods unless you knew that it led to the most talked about new house in Houston, the pink stucco mansion perched on a crook of Buffalo Bayou. The family who’d carved the exclusive subdivision out of the woods around the country club—the Hogg brothers, Will and Mike, and their sister, Ima—had saved this choice spot for their own fourteen-acre estate.