The Autumn of Alamo Heights
In San Antonio’s most genteel neighborhood, the only frightening sound is the ticking of the clock.
(Page 5 of 5)
“Actually,” Lucie said, “Waldine’s always been more a friend of my governess’s, Septima Smith. Whenever Septima visits from Fort Worth, I invite Waldine over. Septima must be ninety-five now.”
“Perhaps you should invite them both soon,” said Lucile. She loved to help Lucie entertain.
“Yes. Septima is a remarkable woman. She taught me to read Latin, to play Chopin. I must have her over soon. She must be ninety-five now.”
Over dessert—chocolate mousse—both women fell silent. Finally Lucie said, “I’m thinking of fixing up the apartment out back again. Having someone there full time.”
Lucile brightened. “Oh, Lucie. That’s wonderful.”
“But not for the reason you think,” Lucie added. “It’s not because I’m insecure there. I’d rather feel insecure there than totally secure in a condominium or . . . something else.”
“Of course you would.”
“I need someone to drive me places at night,” Lucie went on. “There are so many wonderful things to do at night.”
“So many,” Lucile said and took a sip of coffee. “I don’ know why you haven’t gotten someone already.”
Lucie smiled. She knew that Lucile knew she had money for a hundred chauffeurs. But money wasn’t the point. Self-reliance was. “Besides,” she admitted, “I need someone to read to me.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. Today some mail arrived with print so small I couldn’t read it.”
“Not even with your magnifying glass?”
“Oh, no. The print was so small.”
Lucile paused, then asked, “Do you have someone in mind to stay there?’
Lucie nodded and dabbed her mouth with the napkin. “The people next door think they can find me a Trinity student. I could call whoever stayed out there on the phone when I needed her.”
Lucile eyed her levelly. “Lucie,” she said, “you should do this right away.”
“Well,” said Lucie with an old lady’s laugh, “it’s not that urgent.” But it was, she knew. And from the look on her friends face she could see that Lucile knew it, too.
The Dowager Dodders
For all her agelessness and seeming indestructibility, the Alamo Heights dowager is beginning to dodder. And unfortunately she, unlike most of Alamo Heights, is not recyclable. The village will mourn her, for she has contributed more to the social and cultural life of San Antonio than has any group in San Antonio itself.
Throughout the last fifty years, some sixty families in Alamo Heights have safeguarded and perpetuated everything conveyed by the words “Old San Antonio.” And most of the hard, dirty work of that safeguarding and perpetuating has fallen to the women of those families. Since the twenties it has been the families of Alamo Heights, Olmos Park, and Terrell Hills who have crowned the queens, thrown the debutante parties, danced all night at the Chrysanthemum Ball, and populated the exclusive clubs. And its still the socialite dowagers and matriarchs like Mage Tobin and Ilse Frost and Stella Herff and Ramona Seeligson that one thinks of when conjuring up images of the Order of the Alamo coronations, the distaff rites of the German Club and the Texas Cavaliers, the charity balls and fashion extravaganzas of the Junior League. They entertain artists and political visitors to the city, pump up the perennially deflated symphony and ballet, support the McNay and the Witte museums and the Conservation Society.
Mrs. Tobin has donated a heliport to the Santa Rosa Children’s Hospital, kept charities alive, and saved historic downtown buildings by going to her own purse. Mrs. Herff enabled the Witte Museum to restore the Celso Navarro House, a city landmark, and donated $165,000 for the animal nursery of the San Antonio Children’s Zoo. Others like Lucie Keblinger Whitehead, far less visible but nonetheless indefatigable, have remained active in social welfare organizations, the symphony, the Conservation Society, and women’s rights projects throughout their lives.
But how much longer can three shrinking, aging boroughs with a combined population of less that 14,000 continue to dominate the social and cultural life of an area containing more than a million people? The old families do not run San Antonio any longer—the recent victory of a West Side Mexican American, Henry Cisneros, over their preferred mayoral candidate, John Steen, and the continuing industrialization of the city prove that—and there are signs that their hammerlock on the city’s cultural life is loosening, too. Now that there finally is new money in San Antonio, its voice must be heard. Today a rich man new to the city can, for example, with enough wheeling and wheedling, buy a debut for his daughter. Previously? Never.
Where high culture is concerned, it’s the money of businesses rather than of old families that’s talking loudest. As in other cities, corporations rather than families and individuals are beginning to keep the arts above water. In the offices of the new San Antonio Museum of Art, the Society for the Performing Arts, the Arts Council, and the Symphony Society, one is more likely to hear the names of big local banks or new companies like Valero Energy and Datapoint spoken in reverential whispers than those of families like Tobin, Steves, and Oppenheimer. They are a breed the likes of which San Antonio and Texas will not see again.
Alamo Heights must wonder how the loss of its matriarchs will alter its aristocratic mystique, just as it wonders how the appearance of high-rise condominiums and apartment complexes on its low skyline will alter its Norman Rockwellian mystique as a village—a village that like the Beatles’ Penny Lane, with its lovable barbers and bankers and firemen and its blue suburban skies, exists less as a reality than as a collective memory, a dream of small-town innocence, a state of mind.
Lucie at Twilight
Near twilight, alone again, Lucie Keblinger Whitehead pulled on a sweater, then stepped out for her hike. She had walked at least a mile in Alamo Heights every day for as long as she could remember. Her enormous front yard, graced by half a dozen oaks, was dappled by shadows and bathed in an eerie, rosy glow. Lucie blinked, wishing she could see more clearly. It felt chilly; she was thankful for the sweater.
Walking slowly, she cut through an opening in the hedge alongside the house and headed south on Nacagdoches, past the drive where her 1975 white Chrysler Newport was parked. That she couldn’t drive anymore caused her great anguish. In 1911 she had been the first member of her family to drive the black Dodge her father had bought; he never once drove it. And earlier than that she’d been the first Keblinger to ride in an automobile. Pompeo Coppini’s wife –what had her name been? –had come by one day in her new red roadster and taken Lucie for a drive though Madeleine Terrace.
Having turned west on Castano, she crossed Woodway, keeping to the curb because there was no sidewalk. Her destination was a dead end two blocks from the Texas Military Institute. The houses along the block where she walked now were mostly shingle-roof cottages, with a two-story brick home here and there. How the neighborhood had changed in just three decades, she thought. Instead of only a few families there were so many, and the houses had grown smaller, closer together. The yards had shrunk and the people had become anonymous.
Laurence, her husband, had loved to hike and explore with her. They used to walk all over Alamo Heights; she could still remember the unearthly cries of the peacocks along the paths in Madeleine Terrace.
At dinnertime she and Laurence would sometimes hike from Grove Place to the Argyle and arrive with hearty appetites for the rich, heavy meals Alice O’Grady served family style on the round tables. Alice had loved flowers: they’d adorned every table, every sitting, even the food-heaped platters. Once Laurence had found himself chewing a rose petal with his roast beef. Lucie laughed out loud, remembering.
Her reveries were jostled by the clumping footsteps of someone behind her: a fat, middle-aged jogger in a gray sweat suit. As he passed, he gave her a look. She knew what it meant. Poky little old lady in tennis shoes. Occasionally motorists gave her that look too, and a young one would give her a honk to boot. As if she had no business walking alone in the neighborhood she had lived in for seventy years.
Lucie quickened her pace as the sun sank further into the horizon. She thought of Thomas Hardy’s November twilight on the heath. At La Jara the street dipped sharply, and soon she was struggling uphill. The houses were uniformly impressive now: brick homes with colonial pillars, servants’ quarters in back, iron gates and long, winding driveways in front. The branches of two oaks on either side of the street met above it, forming an archway. On one yard two boys passed a football back and forth, taking no notice of her.
And why should they? she thought. Just a little old lady. She did not fear dying and, unlike most women her age, didn’t think about it much. Death was part of life. Who really wanted to live forever? She was ready for it; she had already donated her body to science, to the UTSA medical school. She would leave everything to her daughters and nephews, though she wasn’t sure any of them would want to keep the house here. Tonight, she supposed, she would break down, phone them all. Someone had to give in.
Now from the middle distance came the barking dog. Lucie felt a tremor of fear but did not change her pace. One evening last year, as she walked to TMI, she had heard a similar bark and turned to see a blurry black shape charging her. A big dog, which had bounded over a six-foot fence, bit her ankle, drawing blood, and ran off. “My Grandma, what big teeth marks you have!” the doctor had said, laughing, and she had laughed along with him, though she hadn’t really found it funny. The next evening, she had forced herself to walk to TMI again, taking a different route.
Just past a little street named PennyLane, Castano dead-ended at a thicket behind a sheet metal fence. Through a watery haze Lucie blinked at the persimmon-colored rays slanting above the thicket and thought she could see past it to a distant hilltop. Momentarily, as if by sheer exertion of her will, the blur cleared and the scene came into focus. It blurred again, but it had been clearer than anything Lucie had seen all day. Her spirit took flight as she turned homeward. “Heavenly God,” she thought, “how wonderful still to be able to walk in Alamo Heights.”
*A fictitious name.
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