Dinner. White servants and Negro servants to wait on them. A long table seating a score or more, and many such tables. Bowls and plates piled with food all down the length of it. Piles of crisp pork, roasted in the Indian fashion over hot embers sunk in a pit in the yard, and skewered with a sharp pointed stick. Bowls of dried corn. Great fat, black ripe olives. Tinned lobster. Chicken. Piles of dead ripe strawberries. Vast plateaus of angel-food cake covered with snow fields of icing.
Sabra went through the motions of eating. Sometimes she put a morsel into her mouth and actually swallowed it. There was a great clatter of knives and forks and dishes. Everything was eaten out of one plate. Platters and bowls were replenished. Sabra found herself seated beside Mrs. Big Elk. On her other side was Yancey. He was eating and laughing and talking. Mrs. Big Elk was being almost comically polite, solicitous. She pressed this tidbit, that dainty, on her stony guest.
Down the center of the table, at intervals, were huge bowls piled with a sort of pastry stuffed with forcemeat. It was like a great ravioli, and piles of it vanished beneath the onslaught of appreciative guests.
“For God’s sake, pretend to eat something, Sabra,” Yancey murmured, under his breath. “It’s done now. They consider it an insult. Try to eat something.”
She stirred the pastry and chopped meat that had been put on her plate.
“Good,” said Mrs. Big Elk, beside her, and pointed at the mass with one dusky maculate finger.
Sabra lifted her fork to her lips and swallowed a bit of it. It was delicious—spicy, rich, appetizing. “Yes,” she said, and thought, I am being wonderful. This is killing me. “Yes, it is very good. This meat—this stuffing—is it chopped or ground through a grinder?”
The huge Indian woman beside her turned her expressionless gaze on Sabra. Ponderously she shook her head from side to side in negation.
“Naw,” she answered, politely. “Chawed.”
The clatter of a fork dropped to the plate, a clash among the cups and saucers. Sabra Cravat had fainted.
XXIII
Osage was so sophisticated that it had again become simple. The society editor of the Oklahoma Wigwam used almost no adjectives. In the old days, you had read that “the house was beautifully decorated with an artistic arrangement of smilax, sent from Kansas City, pink and purple asters in profusion making a bower before which the young couple stood, while in the dining room the brilliance of golden glow, scarlet salvia, and autumn leaves gave a seasonal touch.” But now the society column said, austerely, “The decorations were orchids and Pernet roses.”
Osage, Oklahoma, was a city.
Where, scarcely two decades ago, prairie and sky had met the eye with here a buffalo wallow, there an Indian encampment, you now saw a twenty-story hotel: the Savoy-Bixby. The Italian head waiter bent from the waist and murmured in your ear his secret about the veal sauté with mushrooms or the spaghetti Caruso du jour. Sabra Cravat, Congresswoman from Oklahoma, lunching in the Louis XIV room with the members of the Women’s State Republican Committee, would say, looking up at him with those intelligent dark eyes, “I’ll leave it to you, Nick. Only quickly. We haven’t much time.” Niccolo Mazzarini would say yes, he understood. No one had much time in Osage, Oklahoma. A black jackanapes in a tight scarlet jacket with brass buttons and even tighter bright blue pants, an impudent round red cap cocked over one ear, strolled through the dining room bawling, “Mistah Thisandthat! Mistah Whoandwhat!” He carried messages on a silver salver. There were separate ice-water taps in every bedroom. Servidors. Ring once for the waiter. Twice for the chambermaid. A valet is at your service.
Twenty-five years earlier anybody who was anybody in Oklahoma had dilated on his or her Eastern connections. Iowa, if necessary, was East.
They had been a little ashamed of the Run. Bragged about the splendors of the homes from which they had come.
Now it was considered the height of chic to be able to say that your parents had come through in a covered wagon. Grandparents were still rather rare in Oklahoma. As for the Run of ’89—it was Osage’s Mayflower. At the huge dinner given in Sabra Cravat’s honor when she was elected Congresswoman, and from which they tried to exclude Sol Levy over Sabra’s vigorous (and triumphant) protest, the chairman of the Committee on Arrangements explained it all to Sol, patronizingly.
“You see, we’re inviting only people who came to Oklahoma in the Run.”
“Well, sure,” said the former peddler, genially. “That’s all right. I walked.”
The Levy Mercantile Company’s building now occupied an entire square block and was fifteen stories high. In the huge plate-glass windows on Pawhuska postured ladies waxen and coquettish, as on Fifth Avenue. You went to the Salon Moderne to buy Little French Dresses, and the saleswomen of this department wore black satin and a very nice little strand of imitation pearls, and their eyes were hard and shrewd and their phrases the latest.
