Sabra Cravat rarely came to visit her daughter’s house, and when she did the very simplicity of her slim straight little figure in its dark blue georgette or black crêpe was startling in the midst of these marble columns and vast corridors and royal hangings. She did come occasionally, and on those occasions you found her in the great central apartment that was like a throne room, standing there before the portraits of her son’s two children, Felice and Yancey Cravat. Failing to possess either of the children for her own, Donna had had them painted and hung there, one either side of the enormous fireplace. She had meant them to be a gift to her mother, but Sabra Cravat had refused to take them.
“Don’t you like them, Sabra darling? They’re the best things Segovia has ever done. Is it because they’re modern? I think they look like the kids—don’t you?”
“They’re just wonderful.”
“Well, then?”
“I’d have to build a house for them. How would they look in the sitting room of the house on Kihekah! No, let me come here and look at them now and then. That way they’re always a fresh surprise to me.”
Certainly they were rather surprising, those portraits. Rather, one of them was. Segovia had got little Felice well enough, but he had made the mistake of painting her in Spanish costume, and somehow her angular contours and boyish frame had not lent themselves to these gorgeous lace and satin trappings. The boy, Yancey, had refused to dress up for the occasion—had, indeed, been impatient of posing at all. Segovia had caught him quickly and brilliantly, with startling results. He wore a pair of loose, rather grimy white tennis pants, a white woolly sweater with a hole in the elbow, and was hatless. In his right hand—that slim, beautiful, speaking hand—he held a limp, half-smoked cigarette, its blue-gray smoke spiraling faintly, its dull red eye the only note of color in the picture. Yet the whole portrait was colorful, moving, alive. The boy’s pose was so insolent, so lithe, so careless. The eyes followed you. He was a person.
“Looks like Ruby, don’t you think?” Donna had said, when first she had shown it to her mother.
“No!” Sabra had replied, with enormous vigor. “Not at all. Your father.”
“Well—maybe—a little.”
“A little! You’re crazy! Look at his eyes. His hands. Of course they’re not as beautiful as your father’s hands were—are …”
It had been five years since Sabra had heard news of her husband, Yancey Cravat. And now, for the first time, she felt that he was dead, though she had never admitted this. In spite of his years she had heard that Yancey had gone to France during the war. The American and the English armies had rejected him, so he had dyed his graying hair, lied about his age, thrown back his still magnificent shoulders, and somehow, by his eyes, his voice, his hands, or a combination of all these, had hypnotized them into taking him. An unofficial report had listed him among the missing after the carnage had ceased in the shambles that had been a wooded plateau called the Argonne.
“He isn’t dead,” Sabra had said, almost calmly. “When Yancey Cravat dies he’ll be on the front page, and the world will know it.”
Donna, in talking it over with her brother Cim, had been inclined to agree with this, though she did not put it thus to her mother. “Dad wouldn’t let himself die in a list. He’s too good an actor to be lost in a mob scene.”
But a year had gone by.
The Oklahoma Wigwam now issued a morning as well as an afternoon edition and was known as the most powerful newspaper in the Southwest. Its presses thundered out tens of thousands of copies an hour, and hour on hour—five editions. Its linotype room was now a regiment of iron men, its staff boasted executive editor, editor in chief, managing editor, city editor, editor, and on down into the dozens of minor minions. When Sabra was in town she made a practice of driving down to the office at eleven every night, remaining there for an hour looking over the layout, reading the wet galley proof of the night’s news lead, scanning the A.P. wires. Her entrance was in the nature of the passage of royalty, and when she came into the city room the staff all but saluted. True, she wasn’t there very much, except in the summer, when Congress was not in session.
The sight of a woman on the floor of the Congressional House was still something of a novelty. Sentimental America had shrunk from the thought of women in active politics. Woman’s place was in the Home, and American Womanhood was too exquisite a flower to be subjected to the harsh atmosphere of the Assembly floor and the committee room.
Sabra stumped the state and developed a surprising gift of oratory.
“If American politics are too dirty for women to take part in, there’s something wrong with American politics. … We weren’t too delicate and flowerlike to cross the plains and prairies and deserts in a covered wagon and to stand the hardships and heartbreaks of frontier life … history of France peeking through a bedroom keyhole … history of England a joust … but here in this land the women have been the hewers of wood and drawers of water … thousands of unnamed heroines with weather-beaten faces and mud-caked boots … alkali water … sun … dust … wind. … I am not belittling
