Where They're From 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.
FOR MANY YEARS, colleagues suggested that I was missing a bet by ignoring San Antonio as a subject for my work. It’s ripe for the Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil treatment, they would say, but I couldn’t see it. John Berendt’s best-seller about idiosyncrasy and mayhem in Savannah was written by an outsider. Growing up so close to the narrative, I spent most of my time in San Antonio plotting my escape. Back then, I was intent on facing forward, envisioning a future that included an apartment in Greenwich Village, subway rides, city blizzards, and big-time intellectuals—things that swiftly lost their appeal once I actually began experiencing life on the East Coast. Still, I didn’t go home. I chose Houston instead, which, I enviously tell friends who are natives, is the most underrated city in the world. When critics counter that San Antonio is so beautiful and gracious, I offer my stock treatise on opportunity and openness—for me, San Antonio had neither—and change the subject.
I’ve come to see in midlife that I have been playing an exile’s game with this uncharacteristic lack of introspection. While I thought I was just marking time in San Antonio, I now realize I was indelibly marked by the place. It’s just taken me a very long time to understand how—and to understand why, in turn, I no longer spend much time there.
When I say “San Antonio,” I am talking about a place that, unless you are over forty and grew up there, you probably wouldn’t know. The city’s image makers have done a stellar job of shaping its modern identity, touting the River Walk, Sea World, Fiesta Texas, and two very pricey spa-golf resorts. The local industries, like SBC and Toyota, are good, clean citizens. It’s a big city—the nation’s eighth largest, bigger than Detroit or San Francisco. That is not where I grew up. My San Antonio was an overgrown small town, socially stratified and inbred, controlled by a handful of old, wealthy families who clustered in oak-shaded mansions in suburbs just north of downtown, not far geographically but otherwise light-years removed from the Mexican American enclaves on the south and west sides. The winding streets of the city had an illogic that could leave a newcomer in tears—North and South St. Mary’s occasionally runs east and west—but I never felt lost. My life was circumscribed by what were then the city’s most prosperous neighborhoods: Olmos Park, where my mother was born and raised; Terrell Hills, where I spent my childhood; and Alamo Heights, where I lived until I went away to college and where, twenty or so years later, my parents sold the house and moved about a mile away to a high-rise condominium. In those days, it seemed to me that everyone knew everyone else and weirdness was an accepted part of life. You had to appreciate eccentricity—no one thought it odd that the gowns worn by local royalty during Fiesta week cost upward of $5,000 in the sixties—and you needed a tolerance for duplicity, which I saw most frequently in the exceptional number of closeted gays among the city’s upper class.
Most important, however, was San Antonio’s relationship with its past, which had to be perpetually preserved, protected, and polished to perfection: There was the Alamo; there were the other missions and the Spanish Governor’s Palace; there were the King William and La Villita historic districts. Their protectors included the Daughters of the Republic of Texas and the San Antonio Conservation Society, among myriad others. There was a collective allegiance to the notion that time could be stopped and that things should never change, ideas that appeal to entrenched powers and those able to abstain from natural human skepticism. How can I explain to you the complications of growing up in such a place?
Two of my closest friends live in San Antonio today—both from somewhere else—and I am constantly amazed by the sophistication of their lives: They have neighbors from Manhattan and Los Angeles; they lunch at French bistros; they have yoga teachers and big-city amenities. “Let’s go to Neiman’s,” I heard someone say on my last visit, and had to pinch myself. They weren’t headed to Houston or Dallas but just out Interstate 10, for Neiman’s at La Cantera, the posh, new, Hill Country—inspired shopping center northwest of town. When I was a kid, my mother and I put on our best clothes and flew to Dallas on a prop jet for a special shopping expedition, an event that underscored, to my thirteen-year-old way of thinking, that there was a far bigger, far more glamorous world outside my hometown, and damned if I wasn’t going to be part of it. No one could tell me what I was missing right under my nose. Regret is not a concept of much interest to children or teens.
“I LOVE SAN ANTONIO,” Sam says to me as we drive home. There is always a tone of defensiveness in his voice when he brings up this topic, as if he expects a debate from me. I don’t give him one. The difference between the contempt he imagines and the ambivalence I feel is not something I’m willing to get into with a smart, argumentative fourteen-year-old. San Antonio is not fraught with meaning for him. He’s amused by his grandparents, and he feels at home in Hispanic culture. “Look for the Tower of the Americas,” I tell him as we close in, an old game in which we search for the landmark that signals our arrival in town. For Sam, the tower is just a tall, thin, somewhat jaunty shaft; for me, it’s the beginning of a chain of associations that will not stop until I see it again in my rearview mirror. It means HemisFair, the 1968 international event that brought my family into the larger world just as it awakened the city to its possibilities. Of course a working-class Mexican neighborhood was displaced to do that; of course the buildings owned by old German families in the same area were lovingly restored for show. I paid more attention to my first bite of tandoori chicken and a glimpse of LBJ in a limo, intimations of life beyond San Antonio. My friends and I put our tokens in the turnstiles, walked into the future, and never looked back.
Or so I thought. This trip, with Sam, is an unusual one. Fleeing Hurricane Rita for nine hours, we arrive as wilted as any refugees, our golden retriever, Chuy, panting in the back. My husband, a journalist, has stayed behind to work in Houston, and my parents are on an extended trip to New England. For the first time in as long as I can remember, there is no one between the city and me. When my parents are here, we fall into old habits, lingering, half-dressed, around the breakfast table until it is time for lunch, talking politics, gossiping, making plans for the day and then ignoring them. Sometimes I take a walk with my father around the neighborhood, greeting people we’ve known for decades; then we visit one of three or four restaurants, always the same ones. My mother likes to show me the ducks that live in the creek behind their high-rise, sending me into a metaphorical tizzy by pointing out that they mate for life. The family pictures in every room—my father’s parents, in their seventies, touching heads; my parents in evening dress for the opening of HemisFair; my brother Jeff, now 46, long hair in his eyes at 20, a ringer for my dad at the same age; my brother Ed, 42, as a gawky high school kid; Sam, at 5, in horn-rimmed glasses, a necktie, khakis, and flip-flops. Within an hour or so, the emotional elixir of memory has taken effect. I am reminded that Sam was dressed that day for my father’s seventieth birthday dinner, that Jeff and Ed live far away with children of their own, that I am far older than my parents were in 1968. I long for a nap.
Today Sam and I head for the Liberty Bar instead, one of the four family-approved restaurants. It is located in a restored (of course) brothel, a listing, wood frame building where, if you’ve had too much to drink, walking past the crowd to your chair can feel a little like being on a pitching ship. Next door is another restaurant, which was originally Fincke’s meat market. My grandmother used to shop there for dinner, back when it had a live-oak tree growing through the center of the store. Naturally, the trunk has been preserved.
We meet my friend Jan, her husband, and their son, who diverts Sam while I try not to stare at Tommy Lee Jones in the corner. An old friend of my parents’, walking with a cane, passes by. “I’m Mimi,” I say, certain that first names are enough. I’m not sure he recognizes me. Rudy, the waiter who has ministered to my father for decades, makes a fuss over Sam the way people used to make a fuss over me—“Could that be Sam?”—and I beam as my parents used to, while Sam is friendly but disengaged. He’s growing up, as opposed to aging, not yet humbled by the effects of time.
THE NEXT MORNING, the sun wakes me up early. Dust motes dance in the light streaming through the windows. I pad across the wood floor, half expecting to find my parents at the breakfast table. My mother saved little from our previous house—the art, some good antiques—and then, for their “last home,” as she put it, set up this place with new, contemporary furniture. Spare and uncluttered, it’s as serene as a monastery. My father’s coveted special-order coffee chills in the freezer; my mother’s artwork sits on the dining room table; their books, collected over a lifetime, wait patiently for their return.
The dog and I set out for a walk, sneaking out a back way into Cathedral Park next door, where my high school friends used to smoke dope, and head up Torcido Drive, which overlooks Olmos Basin. The houses that used to be on this steep, winding road were always large, but like those in so many other wealthy neighborhoods, they’ve been replaced by even larger ones. The only difference, this being old San Antonio, is that the homes have been designed mostly by conscientious, eco-friendly architects. No McMansions in this part of town.
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