The Texicans, Part 2
January 30th, 2009The Texicans
Part 2
1988, April, San Antonio. I telephone Frances Kallison from the hotel. I want to know if I can arrange an interview with her.
She cuts me off. “No arrangin’ necessary, darlin’, I’m comin’over to the Menger this afternoon and get you and your husband and show you around. Stay right there. Don’t go away.”
“We can’t go far,” I said. “My husband threw his back out a few hours after we got here and can’t get out of bed.”
“I’ll take care of it, darlin’, don’t you worry.”
About an hour later she shows up with a doctor, her good friend and personal physician, Milt Jacobs. The doctor, a homely man in his late fifties, has a stammer and an ingratiating personality. He gets to work examining Marv while Frances sort of supervises him. Frances is 79, is wearing white gloves like the ones women wore in the fifties, a pale yellow suit, and has her dark brown hair swept into a severe bun on top of her head. She was warmer on the telephone. In person she’s icy, resists easy banter, doesn’t seem to be listening, eyes wander, but she hears everything, answers everything, expounds and pontificates, is opinionated and confident to the max. I decide that the warmth I heard on the phone was the Texas accent. No one is cold over the phone who says “darlin’” and talks with a twang.
Doc Jacobs gives Marv a bottle of pain pills and tells him to stay in bed.
Frances takes me for “a little sightseein’” around San Antonio.
She drives like a maniac. She cuts people off, runs red lights, seems to forget she’s behind the wheel of a car. I comfort myself with the thought that her driving hasn’t killed anyone yet, and today probably won’t be the exception.
She talks while she drives. She has plenty to say and it’s all interesting. She’s part of Texas society, a university graduate who wrote her master’s thesis on the history of Jews in Texas, is an authority on everything Texan, is active in Texas political life – a founder of the temple, a patron of the arts, a benefactor of the public library – comes from a well known ranching family, rode horses till she hit sixty, she and her husband owned the largest western outfitting store in San Antonio – Kallison’s Farm and Ranch Store – her husband broadcast the Old Tradin’ Post show from the store, which was next to the “Big Red Court House,” and farmers all over Texas listened to the show and especially to Perry Kallison’s singing turtles and their weather forecasts, and now Perry’s housebound with Parkinson’s and tended by a full-time nurse. In between all this she recites a recipe for black beans and garlic, tells me about her daughter’s wedding – she was married at home and had a reception at the Menger Hotel – and remarks that the heat in April is starting already and asks me if I can feel the sweat tang.
“Sweat tang?” I ask her.
“When it’s hot and humid the sweat stays unevaporated on the skin and you steam, darlin’,” she says. “That’s sweat tang.”
I finally manage to get in a few words about the novel I‘m planning to write about present-day Texas, and that I’m mainly interested in the sanctuary movement.
She takes both hands off the wheel and waves them at me.
“Oh, that,” she says.