Midnight in the Garden of Memory
I grew up in a San Antonio that had a collective allegiance to the notion that time could be stopped and that things should never change. Now that I know better, it is hard to go back.
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But even with this new wealth, Alamo Heights feels unchanged, as if agreeing to perpetuate the behavior of the old-timers was a prerequisite for moving in. The owners still decorate the front doors of their shingled bungalows with expensive seasonal wreaths; there are still signs in front yards championing the high school football team, the Mules. Occasionally, I hear stories about the people I went to high school with: which wealthy scion is now out of the closet, who is trying to cheat his wife out of an enormous divorce settlement, who is in rehab. Mostly, though, the people I knew have gone on to lead quiet, successful lives as bankers and lawyers, dads and moms. When I think of things that have happened to my friends’ children elsewhere—driving off cliffs, arrested for selling drugs—the Alamo Heights scandal of a couple of years ago, about the cheerleaders who were suspended from school for a party that included underage drinking and their wearing bras on their heads, seems markedly benign.
My parents knew the whole city, sharing coffee with the indomitable politico Rubén Munguía on the West Side and trading intelligence with shrewd cultural impresario Jo Long on the East, but I was a teenager and refused to do anything as boring as explore my hometown. Yet even in my own small world, I absorbed the lessons of singularity from the ancient spinster who sold homemade pies out of her home—Mrs. Craig, a paler, more Hitchcockian version of Betty Crocker—and the jug-eared family who used to own the Ize Box, a zany architectural wonder where we could get ice-cold draft root beer on our walks home from school. Approaching the antebellum mansion that has housed the Argyle Club forever, I think less of my own wedding there than that of my friend Debbie Kalter’s, who came down the outdoor steps at midday in a gleaming white dress with her orange hair seemingly aflame. We were part of the disaffecteds in high school—we’d probably be on Columbine watch today—but Debbie went on to Brown, Baylor medical school, and AIDS research before dying of lymphoma before her fortieth birthday. I think that wedding may have been one of the few times in her life she did the conventional thing.
Maybe by now you are beginning to understand my problem with going home. In my day-to-day life in Houston, there are not many reminders of my past, or my mortality; in San Antonio, there is a ghost on every corner, including the girl who used to be me.
EVEN WITHOUT MY PARENTS, I uphold the Saturday lunch ritual, which is to go to El Mirador for the sopa azteca. Located on the edge of the King William Historic District, it’s one of myriad places that reflect the unself-consciously bicultural city San Antonio has become: The owners, Julian and Diane Treviño, give me a tour of their new party house—restored from an old existing home—while the line of people who look like Ralph Lauren models, eager to eat the Treviños’ authentic cooking, snakes out the door. Forty years ago, our family restaurant was La Fonda, a windowless Tex-Mex venue in Alamo Heights. It was run by the father of a school classmate, an Anglo, as they were not called in those days. My father, from Baltimore, was not then acclimated to the local cuisine, and so when he worked Thursday nights at the family clothing store (now restored as a Fuddruckers), my mother took the kids there for child’s plates—scrumptious platters of brown and orange sludge that included beans, rice, and one enchilada.
That was the way the old, white families coexisted then with the growing Hispanic population: denatured and at a distance. The Mexican American kids sat in the back of the classroom or went to school on the West Side, where the streets were paved with caliche. Or they lived in hidden pockets, like the company town that was a part of the Alamo Cement Company. That is now a shopping center known as the Quarry, where, of course, the old smokestacks have been turned into decorative elements, and the cement quarry itself is a golf course rimmed by mansions.
Everyone of a certain age remembers the turning points in the ethnic life of the city: In 1970, while the camera panned over horrific slums, Mayor Walter McAllister told NBC news that Mexican Americans weren’t hard workers, but they sure loved flowers. Subsequently, community organizer Ernesto Cortes urged Mexican Americans to clog the teller lines at the Frost Bank by changing their dollars into pennies and back again—the San Antonio equivalent of commandeering a lunch counter. Within the next two decades, Hispanic surnames were no longer mangled on TV newscasts, Henry Cisneros was elected mayor, and power eventually shifted away from the white oligarchy. As a teenager, I was obsessed with the civil rights movement but oblivious to San Antonio’s particular issues. There was no Hispanic History Month at my school. For much of eighth grade, I borrowed bus fare from Naomi Cortez, who sat behind me in social studies, never paying it back, never thinking of the implications. My part in the subtle, well-mannered bigotry of life in Alamo Heights, despite the good works of my politically active parents, went unexplored.
WHEN I DRIVE SAM AROUND SAN ANTONIO, there are things I show him and things I do not. I take him by our tiny first house in Terrell Hills, for instance, a midcentury modern number. “I don’t like what they’ve done to it,” Sam says. Of course, they’ve hardly done anything. I let Sam test his driving skills at the small park in Olmos Basin, where I learned to drive too. We pass a few men who are parked in cars, waiting for dates in the public restroom, just as they were decades ago. I wave to one of them, who has been viewing us with consternation.
Our second house, in Alamo Heights, is nearby, one of the places not on the tour. It has been redone and, in the tradition of the day, doubled in size. We moved into it when I was in middle school, and I focused all my hostile grief over the change on our sunny, unflappable realtor named Mazie Hill. I can’t imagine now what I objected to. The house had a fountain and a wishing well, and my parents gave me the room on the top floor all to myself. It was my mother’s dream house. She and my father had spent years scrounging up the cash—$48,000 in 1967 was a lot of money—and urging the elderly widow owner to sell. Situated on a bluff near the Olmos Dam, it was white stucco with a red tiled roof, the architect’s vision of a Mexican hacienda, though he’d never actually seen one, or so the story went. My parents quickly set about authenticating the place, traveling to Mexico for statuary and stone and bringing it back in the family Oldsmobile station wagon. My moving trauma passed. By the time I was a freshman in high school, my friend Jill and I would sit on the rooftop patio and smoke cigarettes and plan our lives-to-be in New York, oblivious to the perfection around us: the sun going down through the live-oak branches, a new, if fleeting, stained-glass window almost every evening.
By the time my parents put the house up for sale decades later, my brothers and I were long gone, and my mother could no longer manage the stairs. I knew I was seeing the end of something but knew, too, that I had no say in the matter. By then I had my own life, and my own family, in Houston. With the loss of the house looming, I visited more often, sleeping with my husband in my old room, eating chilaquiles in one dive or another, Spanish rolling off my tongue, abruptly, inexplicably, sorry to leave.
The other place I avoid on return visits is out the Austin Highway. Tucked behind the old northbound road and the Jewish cemetery is the former home of Robert Tobin, a philanthropist and an arts patron my father went to work for after he left a job at HemisFair, in 1968. His was second-generation wealth. Robert’s father, a World War I flying ace who started Tobin Aerial Surveys, took stock instead of cash when he agreed to survey an oil company’s holdings. Robert gave to places like the Metropolitan and Santa Fe operas and built for himself on the grounds of his family’s former country place a sprawling, flat-roofed Roman temple with, among other things, a sunken bathtub. Every spring, he had a party that included rides on his decorative herd of Shetland ponies and, at least once, a tour of a Chinese junk he’d imported and kept at the deep end of his swimming pool, which was the length of a football field and filled with icy water from a nearby creek.
Robert’s house was not stocked with Texas landscapes or taxidermy but with contemporary art and his collection of tiny, seductive boxes of stage designs, known as maquettes. Easily bored and prone to drink, he changed clothes several times during his fetes. His mother, white-haired, with eyes as blue as an arctic sky, lived on a more conventional estate in Terrell Hills. When we went to call, seated on the edge of the furniture in our best clothes, we visited in a room that contained one of Monet’s “Water Lilies.” Both Tobins spoke in an accent that was reminiscent of Lionel Barrymore.
No one ever indicated to me that there was anything at all unusual about these people. (The two went everywhere together, even buying twin town houses on the Upper East Side of New York.) They weren’t the kind of people who warmed to children; on the other hand, they provided my family with access to a world we would not have seen otherwise, the one far beyond Friday night football and dove hunts. Opera singers, museum directors, and painters joined the politicos who came to dinner, and when my family went to New York, we stayed on Park Avenue, in one of their extra apartments, as if it were ours.
Of course it wasn’t. My father worked for Robert for thirty years, then there was an unhappy parting. By then Robert’s face had collapsed due to cancer, and decades of alcoholism and recovery had taken their toll; he covered the mirrors in the house and rarely ventured out, except among a new coterie of young, gay keepers. His longtime promises that my father would always have a place in the company came to nothing. Someone else controls it now—an eager young attorney with burning eyes and a clammy handshake, a former friend of my father’s who gave me two dozen Tiffany wine glasses when I got married. I have one left after almost two decades, which I preserve on a shelf, a reminder that nothing, but nothing, lasts forever.
In fact, the last time I saw my parents in San Antonio, my father gave me a beautiful alarm clock. “It’s about as old as you are,” he said, handing me a cheery orange-and-white plastic cylinder from the sixties, with those flip-over numerals that predate liquid crystal displays. He told me it would keep the best time if I wound it at the same hour every day. When I got back to Houston, I kept up with the practice for a while, but the ticking was very loud and distracted me. Now I just keep it on my dresser, where I can be reminded of him. I already know what time it is.
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