Part 14 (2/2)

Each of the rooms in the hotel is named after someone famous who stayed in it. There's the Lady Bird Johnson Room, the Grant Presidential Room, the Jay Gould Room that so spooked Steven Spielberg, named for the railway baron who stayed here in 1870. Oscar Wilde rested here, as did George and Laura Bush, though no room bears their names. There is a Blalock Room, in honour, I a.s.sume, of Hank Blalock, designated hitter for the Texas Rangers. Ours is called the Diamond Bessie Suite, for a woman who was apparently murdered while staying here.

”They say her ghost still walks about,” the woman at the desk says matter-of-factly, handing us a skeleton key after our dinner at Auntie Skinner's. ”Her murderer was never found.”

”My father would never sleep in a murdered woman's room,” I say to Merilyn as we undress.

”You are not your father,” she replies. Which is true, although I am not entirely unsuperst.i.tious. I toss spilled salt over my left shoulder. I don't cross cutlery on a table or name the Scottish play in a theatre. I like baseball, which is rife with superst.i.tions. In matters of religion, I am like the filmmaker Luis Bunuel, who when asked about his beliefs replied, ”I'm an atheist, thank G.o.d.”

Diamond Bessie's bed is so high off the floor we need a footstool to get into it, but we sleep soundly in its rarefied atmosphere. During the night I climb down to go to the bathroom and on my way back pa.s.s a floor-length mirror in the dark, nearly frightening myself to death. In the morning, we both wake up.

Across the courtyard from our suite is the Plantation breakfast room, its shutters open to the morning light. Coffee in our sunroom first, we decide, certain there must be a little bell pull somewhere that will make a fresh pot appear magically at our door in seconds. But we can't find it, so I get dressed and go out on my first mission of the day.

In the 1850s, when the Excelsior was built, Jefferson was a growing concern, on its way to becoming the sixth-largest city in Texas; only the port of Galveston saw more trade. The population peaked in 1872 at just over seven thousand. Many of those were carpetbaggers and Union soldiers sent to Texas to ”reconstruct” the rebels after the Civil War. Today, its population has dwindled to a few thousand, and although the town is quaint, its quiet streets lined with live oak, cottonwoods drooping over the bayou, it does not appear to be thriving. Then again, it's mid-winter.

Lee Marvin's establishment is called the Big Cypress Coffee House. Sidewalk-to-ceiling windows, eight tiny tables piled with newspapers, tin ashtrays, and plastic cups; except for these and the c.o.ke machine by the door, it looks very French. The Louisiana influence, no doubt. Marvin is standing behind a handsome oak counter at the back, his arms crossed. He looks as if he's about to tell me that the place isn't open yet, but since it obviously is, he seems at a loss for words. I go up to the counter and order two decafs.

”I don't do decaf,” he says, as though it's a matter of principle with him. He busies himself shuffling things about on the countertop: cigarette pack, matches, chipped cups, some dubious-looking biscotti, tip jar. His hands are trembling.

”What do you do?” I ask.

He considers the question. ”I can fix you a double espresso latte Americano,” he says.

”How about just a regular coffee,” I say. ”To go.” I can take caffeinated coffee in the morning, but Merilyn can't. It makes her sick.

”Sure,” he says, and disappears, under a banner that reads Happy New Year! down a hallway to the back where, judging by the noise of the machine he turns on, he makes me a double espresso latte Americano.

”Do you take cream?” he calls out over the machine.

”Yes.”

”I ran out of cream last night,” he responds jubilantly. ”My friend likes White Russians. I can't keep cream in the place. Milk okay?”

”Milk is fine.”

When enough time has pa.s.sed for me to sit at one of the tables and read a lengthy newspaper account of the recent pa.s.sing of Gerald Ford (I'd forgotten that Ford served on the Warren Commission, investigating Kennedy's a.s.sa.s.sination in Dallas), Marvin reappears with a paper cup of coffee and two jugs of milk, all three of which he holds triumphantly toward me. ”Go nuts, young man,” he says and nods to the sugar and stir sticks on a sideboard, below an array of rather bizarre costume jewellery. ”My girlfriend's work,” he says. I wonder if she's the friend with the weakness for White Russians.

I don't want to go back to the hotel without a decaf for Merilyn, so I wander farther up Austin Street, guiltily sipping my latte. Everything else is still closed, so reluctantly I return to the hotel and find Merilyn in the sunroom, happily pouring herself another decaf from a pot she procured from the hotel kitchen.

MERILYN AND I stroll across the courtyard to the Plantation room, where the tables are laid with white cloths and heavy silver. Breakfast is served by a beautiful young black woman who confesses that she doesn't know why they don't make hash browns and she doesn't like hominy grits very much. She keeps her eyes studiously averted from ours as she talks. I try the grits anyway. When she comes back, I tell her they taste like wallpaper paste, and she admits a shy smile.

Afterwards, I visit the used-book store across the street from the hotel. Books on the Bayou is the kind of used-book store I like: crammed with books, books piled on chairs and boxes, books drooping from inadequately supported shelves, books scattered on floors and tables and windowsills, books seemingly suspended from the ceiling.

Behind the counter by the front window sits a small man with a big head, a white beard, and oversized horn-rimmed gla.s.ses. He looks a bit like George Burns playing the Wizard of Oz. I nod and sidle past him into the mayhem, but the books themselves are disappointing, mostly beat-up copies of bestsellers. On every available wall surface there are framed photographs of the owner, Fred McKenzie, in various phases of his apparently peripatetic life.

One of the photos gives me pause: it shows Fred and an unidentified woman on a tandem bicycle, with a wire basket carrier full of a dozen copies of Fred's book: a two-volume history of Hickory Hill. Fred is an author. There are more copies of the book near the front door, and I pick up volume one, a hefty tome, and look through it. Hickory Hill is a tiny town, now called Avinger, just up the road from Jefferson. Population 464. How can anyone write two thick volumes about such a small place? Why not write about Jefferson? I am about to ask Fred when my eye is caught by another of Fred's books: The Abe Rothschild Story. It is an account of the case against Abe Rothschild for the murder of one Diamond Bessie. This one I buy.

”We're staying at the Excelsior,” I say to Fred as I make my purchase. ”In the Diamond Bessie Suite.”

”That so?” Fred says. ”Diamond Bessie never stayed in that hotel,” he adds.

”She didn't?” I am half relieved and half indignant.

”No, she and her husband stayed in the Brooks House. It's long gone.”

”But her ghost . . .”

Fred gives me the look.

I recross the street to Marvin's cafe, order a double espresso latte Americano, sit at a table, and read Fred's book. On Friday, January 19, 1877, a couple arrived at the Jefferson train station and registered at the Brooks House as ”A. Monroe and wife, Cincinnati, Ohio.” Mrs. Monroe wore so much jewellery that local citizens referred to her as Diamond Bessie. That night they were heard quarrelling in their room, and on Sat.u.r.day, Monroe bought a pistol at a Jefferson gun shop, unremarkable in a Texan but a little suspicious for a Cincinnati man. Later that day the couple went for a walk in the country. On Sunday, Monroe took the train back to Cincinnati alone, wearing, it was reported, his wife's rings. On February 5, the body of a woman resembling Diamond Bessie was found less than a mile from Jefferson; she had been shot in the left temple. The circ.u.mstantial evidence was overwhelming.

Investigators discovered that A. Monroe was in fact Abe Rothschild, the ne'er-do-well son of the Rothschild diamond family from Ohio, and that Diamond Bessie was Bessie Moore, a one-time prost.i.tute who had been Rothschild's mistress for several years. Rothschild was charged with murder and spent three years in the Jefferson jail awaiting trial. He was tried three times and finally acquitted. The corpse found was not sufficiently decomposed to have lain outside for two weeks, ”exposed to Texas weather,” as the coroner put it. It was a particularly cold winter, and the body was found lying in two feet of snow, but it wasn't frozen. Rothschild's case must have been among the first in American legal history to be decided solely on forensic evidence, flimsy though it was, but that didn't change the general feeling around town: that nothing good ever came to Jefferson by railroad.

MY gut tells me Jefferson is a small town. I don't care what the population sign says. The size of a town is determined by the speed with which news travels.

While Wayne wanders the town, I peruse the parlour of the Excelsior, where the hotel's history is on display: old menus, invitations to b.a.l.l.s, registers opened to significant signatures. I pause over Jay Gould's, a jaunty blue jay penned in place of his first name. In the comments column, his cursive curse slants across the line: ”The End of Jefferson!”

Gould came to Jefferson after the Civil War intent on buying land to build a railroad, but the people who lived here liked the riverboat trade. It made the town what it was: the only inland port in Texas. They refused to sell. Despite Gould's prediction, even without the railroad, the place continued to thrive with the hordes heading west, fleeing the ruin that was the post-bellum South.

What killed Jefferson was the Yankees. In 1873, traffic on the Big Cypress Bayou (the river is still called a bayou, in the Louisiana tradition) came to an abrupt stop when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers removed a log raft from the Red River above Shreveport, Louisiana. The raft had kept water levels in the Big Cypress high enough that boats could travel from Jefferson to Caddo Lake, entering the Red River south of it. When the raft was blasted free, the riverbanks collapsed, rendering the Big Cypress all but impa.s.sable. The railroad was built after that, though not with Gould money, and the main trunk line bypa.s.sed Jefferson on its way from Texarkana to Marshall. A small branch line eventually reached Jefferson, but the town never made the economic s.h.i.+ft from steam to rail. Jefferson became, quite literally, a backwater-beautiful and genteel, a sleepy Louisiana time capsule tucked in the eastern hip of Texas.

I love backwaters. I love history. I love buildings that wear their stories on their facades.

I am very happy in Jefferson.

”Who owns the hotel?” I ask the woman behind the desk. I'm thinking of all the lovely old hotels Wayne and I have stayed in, most of them, during our short twenty years together, moving from private hands into the maw of the chains.

”The Garden Club,” she answers, with a slight toss of her head, a gesture that for some reason reminds me of Archie's Veronica.

”Excuse me?”

”The Jessie Allen Wise Garden Club owns the Excelsior-and half of Jefferson.”

In the 1950s, she tells me, a group of women, wives of affluent Jeffersonians, formed the club as an excuse to get together. They hadn't been meeting long when they heard that Excelsior House was about to go up for auction. They decided to pool their resources and buy it, as a rescue project. Each member of the club took charge of a room, restoring it to its original elegance. ”George Haggard's wife did your room,” she says, straightening the sign-in register with a certain proprietary air. Suddenly, I understand the revolving door of well-dressed women of a certain age standing behind the desk.

I've barely walked a block when a white van pulls up beside me and a yellow-haired woman pokes out her head, calling, ”You the one wants to know about the Garden Club?”

See what I mean about small towns?

”Git in,” she orders, and I do. ”I have some errands to run but I shouldn't be but just a minute.”

Mary Kiestler is the current president of the Jessie Allen Wise Garden Club. It runs a quilt exhibition, a Mardi Gras, and a spring heritage-house pilgrimage every year. Mary tells me she retired here a few years ago from Fort Worth, moving into the house her husband helped his father build when he was twelve, using materials from an old schoolhouse that was being torn down.

”I don't garden,” she laughs, ”but I hate to see our history disappear like that.”

This Garden Club is about a different kind of growing. Determined to stop the decline of Jefferson and to restore it to its former glory, the women have bought and sold other buildings through the years to save them from the wrecker's ball. With delicious irony, they had Jay Gould's private Pullman car, Atalanta, brought back to Jefferson and mounted under an awning, next to a house with turquoise beauty-salon chairs lined up on the verandah. They bought the historic Jewish synagogue and are converting it into an old-time playhouse. Today, there are sixteen Jefferson buildings listed in the National Register of Historic Places. I doubt these women have time for gardenias: they're too busy being real estate tyc.o.o.ns, architectural restorers, and town saviours.

”I could live here,” I say to Wayne when we meet to go for a walk.

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