Trip to Texas- Part 3, in which we go to San Antonio and visit the McNay

May 17, 2005

We said good-bye to my cousins this morning after breakfast. My mother and I drove with my grandmother to San Antonio, while my father and my siblings drove back home.

We drove south through the pine woods. We passed clusters of houses huddled close to the woods, “Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf in the forest,” as my grandmother said. Then the land changed, and instead of pine trees, there were little, scrubby mesquite trees and live oaks everywhere. We stopped for lunch at a bakery in Caldwell. They had excellent sandwiches, and for dessert, my mother bought a kolache for each of us. Mine was blueberry, and the gooey filling stuck to my teeth as I bit through it. We drove for miles through comparatively-uninhabited country. There were lots of black vultures and lots of historical markers (some historical nut seems to have gone through Texas and put a marker every couple miles or so), and lots of cattle, but that’s about it.

Suddenly, we came out onto a line of cities: San Marcos, New Braunfels, and San Antonio itself. The cities were industrialized, with malls and businesses lining the bustling highways. There were gravel quarries, opening like hideous gashes in the green cloth of the land, showing the pale skin beneath, and there were ticky-tacky houses (as my mother calls them)- apartment complexes thrown together that would blow away at the first hurricane.

But the loveliest, thickest, lushest patch of coreopsis that I saw on our whole trip was nestled in an empty quarter-acre between two malls- a golden slice of glory set between the blank white walls.

After we checked into the hotel, I went swimming for the first time this summer. We went to the Cracker Barrel for supper. The yellowed screens in the windows made it look as though the world outside had reverted to an older, colorless age. After supper we drove through my grandmother’s old neighborhood, past her old house. The thick bushes around the house had been cut down, and the house looked as naked without them as a woman looks without her hair, but other than that hardly any changes had been made. We went to visit an old friend of my grandmother’s, who welcomed us gladly into her little house. Two dogs barked cheerfully at us from under the front porch. We sat on the front porch and talked while the colorless sunset faded into blue behind the black lacy patterns of the phone lines. When we returned to the hotel, we settled down and spent the rest of the evening watching basketball games on TV. The players looked like the powerful hawks that medieval lords used to keep- muscular, with the same broad, hooked noses, the same tense, terse, dangerous energy, the same quick eyes and sudden movements.

I listened to Loreena McKennitt, “The Book of Secrets” as we drove through the city today. San Antonio and California go with Loreena McKennitt- she makes me think of Moorish arches and tiles, and cool rooms between barred windows- just the way Enya goes with Quartz Mountain, and Kate Rusby goes with Violin and Swan-Elf and Princess, and “The Village” soundtrack goes with the pine woods in east Texas, and Mark O’Connor goes with Oklahoma.

May 18, 2005

My grandmother ran errands this morning, but my mother and I visited the Marion Koogler McNay Art Museum. It’s one of our old favorites. We wandered on the grounds for a while. My mother showed me a mountain laurel tree, and pulled off one of the fuzzy, silver-green “mice” for me (the “mice” are the tree’s seed pods). Koi flickered through the milky water of the lily pond like shreds of saffron cloth blowing in the windless depths.

After a while, we went through the cool entrance hall into the courtyard garden that sits in the middle of the original house, which was built like a Mediterranean mansion. The whitewashed walls had colorful tiles set in them, instead of tapestries. Along the stairs, the tiles told the story of Don Quixote, and beneath one of the windows, an enormous peacock spread its blue and green glazed plumes against a yellow background. The doors and stair railings and windows were barred with intricate iron fretwork, like twisted seaweed or peacock’s tails. This iron work was part of many of the other details of the big house: the chandelier in the entry area was decorated with tiny metal peacocks, swans, horses, dogs, and boars.

In the garden, a snarling clay lion’s head spouted water into a tiled basin fringed with ferns. The water the flowed down a tiny, tile-lined channel into a larger, tiled pool. Gardenias bloomed in one of the beds, filling the garden with the exotic smell of roses and citrus fruits. Palm trees cast fringed shadows on the brick walkways, and one of the cycads had produced a honey-golden seed cone, as it does once in perhaps fifty years. A wooden crucifix hung on one of the garden walls near a clay bell, and a little iron bell hung behind a metal screen.

We went indoors to visit the galleries. We passed through a gallery lined with paneling from an old European chapel, and through galleries of modern Impressionists- Monet, Courbet, Picasso. Monet’s “Waterlilies” floated on one of the walls, and on another wall was a painting by Courbet of a black pond overhung with autumn trees, in which the reflection of the trees flickered like koi in the dark depths. We found the sculpture gallery that I have remembered over these years- at one end stand the miniatures for the “Burghers of Calais” (I saw the full-sized statues at the Norton Simon Museum of Art in California a couple of years ago). The faces of the burghers were creased with pain and sorrow- some proud and dignified, others terrified and ashamed- in contrast to the sleek, youthful faces of the statues of Hercules and Theseus that stood in other parts of the room. As we left the museum (rather disappointed because so many of our favorite paintings had been taken down to make room for exhibitions of modern Japanese art), we stopped to chat with a pair of Hispanic nannies near the fountain in front of the museum. Their two charges, a couple of blond, fair-skinned children, clambered over the elegant rocks while the nannies prepared sandwiches for them for lunch. The two women greeted us gladly, and my mother joked with them about wishing that they’d brought along sandwiches for her. “If we’d known you’d be here, we would’ve!” one of them called.

My grandmother picked us up and took us to the Olive Garden to eat lunch with a couple of her friends. When lunch was over, we drove out to Fort Sam Houston to visit my grandfather’s grave. We wound along the road between narrow rows of white gravestones- lines and lines of gravestones. My grandfather’s grave is far out in one of the new sections, where the trees are still young. We stood and stared at it while the wind fanned our hair. The stone stood simple, stark, alone, undecorated: “Olin S. F---, Lieutenant JG. Beloved Husband and Father”. I thought about his skillful hands mouldering under the green grass at my feet, and the sorrow sat on my chest so heavily that I could hardly breathe. We were very quite as we drove back to the hotel, and my mother’s and grandmother’s voices had a harsh edge to them when they spoke. Back at the hotel, we hibernated like bats in the dark, cool room. My mother and I went swimming after our nap, and then we joined one of my grandmother’s friends at a Bill Miller restaurant for supper.

After supper, my mother and I walked around the track behind the hotel. The lot near the hotel is shared by an independent evangelical church and a Hasidic Jewish synagogue, and one of the two has thoughtfully built a walking track on the remaining couple of acres. We passed a friendly Hispanic woman who greeted us as we passed her, and an Asian father and his daughter, and an elderly man taking his Scottie dog out for a stroll. Boat-tailed grackles cawed jovially at us, their metallic feathers glistening in the westering light.