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. The Osage Indian women had learned about these Little French Dresses, and they often came in with their stately measured stride: soft and flaccid from easy living, rolls of fat about their hips and thighs. They tried on sequined dresses, satin dresses, chiffon. Sometimes even the younger Osage Indian girls still wore the brilliant striped blanket, in a kind of contemptuous defiance of the whites. And to these, as well as to the other women customers, the saleswomen said, “That’s awfully good this year.⁠ ⁠… That’s dreadfully smart on you, Mrs. Buffalo Hide.⁠ ⁠… I think that line isn’t the thing for your figure, Mrs. Plenty Vest.⁠ ⁠… My dear, I want you to have that. It’s perfect with your coloring.” + 

The daughter of Mrs. Pat Leary (née Crook Nose) always caused quite a flutter when she came in, for accustomed though Osage was to money and the spending of it, the Learys’ lavishness was something spectacular. Handmade silk underwear, the sheerest of cobweb French stockings, model hats, dresses⁠—well, in the matter of gowns it was no good trying to influence Maude Leary or her mother. They frankly wanted beads, spangles, and paillettes on a foundation of crude color. The saleswomen were polite and acquiescent, but they cocked an eyebrow at one another. Squaw stuff. Now that little Cravat girl⁠—Felice Cravat, Cimarron Cravat’s daughter⁠—was different. She insisted on plain, smart tailored things. Young though she was, she was Oklahoma State Woman Tennis Champion. She always said she looked a freak in fluffy things⁠—like a boy dressed up in girl’s clothes. She had long, lean, muscular arms and a surprising breadth of shoulder, was slim flanked and practically stomachless. She had a curious trick of holding her head down and looking up at you under her lashes and when she did that you forgot her boyishness, for her lashes were like fern fronds, and her eyes, in her dark face, an astounding ocean gray. She was a good sport, too. She didn’t seem to mind the fact that her mother, when she accompanied her, wore the blanket and was hatless, just like any poor Kaw, instead of being one of the richest of the Osages. She was rather handsome for a squaw, in a big, insolent, slow-moving way. Felice Cravat, everyone agreed, was a chip of the old block, and by that they did not mean her father. They were thinking of Yancey Cravat⁠—old Cimarron, her grandfather, who was now something of a legend in Osage and throughout Oklahoma. Young Cim and his Osage wife had had a second child⁠—a boy⁠—and they had called him Yancey, after the old boy. Young Yancey was a bewilderingly handsome mixture of a dozen types and forbears⁠—Indian, Spanish, French, Southern, Southwest. With that long narrow face, the dolichocephalic head, people said he looked like the King of Spain⁠—without that dreadful Hapsburg jaw. Others said he was the image of his grandmother, Sabra Cravat. Still others contended that he was his Indian mother over again⁠—insolence and all. A third would come along and say, “You’re crazy. He’s old Yancey, born again. I guess you don’t remember him. There, look, that’s what I mean! The way he closes his eyes as if he were sleepy, and then when he does look at you straight you feel as if you’d been struck by lightning. They say he’s so smart that the Osages believe he’s one of their old gods come back to earth.” + 

Mrs. Tracy Wyatt (she who had been Donna Cravat) had tried to adopt one of her brother’s children, being herself childless, but Cim and his wife Ruby Big Elk had never consented to this. She was a case, that Donna Cravat, Oklahoma was agreed about that. She could get away with things that any other woman would be shot for. When old Tracy Wyatt had divorced his wife to marry this girl local feeling had been very much against her. Everyone had turned to the abandoned middle-aged wife with attentions and sympathy, but she had met their warmth and friendliness with such vitriol that they fell back in terror and finally came to believe the stories of how she had deviled and nagged old Tracy all through their marriage. They actually came to feel that he had been justified in deserting her and taking to wife this young and fascinating girl. Certainly he seemed to take a new lease on life, lost five inches around the waist line, played polo, regained something of the high color and good spirits of his old dray-driving days, and made a great hit in London during the season when Donna was presented at court. Besides, there was no withstanding the Wyatt money. Even in a country blasé of millionaires Tracy Wyatt’s fortune was something to marvel about. The name of Wyatt seemed to be everywhere. As you rode in trains you saw the shining round black flanks of oil cars, thousands of them, and painted on them in letters of white, “Wyatt Oils.” Motoring through Oklahoma and the whole of the Southwest you passed miles of Wyatt oil tanks, whole silent cities of monoliths, like something grimly Egyptian, squatting eunuch-like on the prairies. + 

As for the Wyatt house⁠—it wasn’t a house at all, but a combination of the palace of Versailles and the Grand Central Station in New York. It occupied grounds about the size of the duchy of Luxembourg, and on the ground, once barren plain, had been set great trees brought from England. + 

A mile of avenue, planted in elms, led up to the mansion, and each elm, bought, transported, and stuck in the ground, had cost fifteen hundred dollars. There were rare plants, farms, forests, lakes, tennis courts, golf links, polo fields, race tracks, airdromes, swimming pools. Whole paneled rooms had been brought from France. In the bathrooms were electric cabinets, and sunken tubs of rare marble, and shower baths glass enclosed. These bathrooms were the size of bedrooms, and the bedrooms the size of ballrooms, and the ballroom as big as an auditorium. There was an ice plant and cooling system that could chill the air of every room in the house, even on the hottest Oklahoma windy day. The kitchen range looked like a house in itself, and the kitchen looked like that of the Biltmore, only larger. When you entered the dining room you felt that here should be seated solemn diplomats in gold braid signing world treaties and having their portraits painted doing it. Sixty gardeners manned the grounds. The house servants would have peopled a village. + 

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 the brave pioneer men but the sunbonnet as well as the sombrero has helped to settle this glorious land of ours.⁠ ⁠…” + 

It had been so many years since she had heard this⁠—it had sunk so deep into her consciousness⁠—that perhaps she actually thought she had originated this speech. Certainly it was received with tremendous emotional response, copied throughout the Southwest, the Far West, the Midwest states, and it won her the election and gained her fame that was nation wide. + 

Perhaps it was not altogether what Sabra Cravat said that counted in her favor. Her appearance must have had something to do with it. A slim, straight, dignified woman, yet touchingly feminine. Her voice not loud, but clear. Her white hair was shingled and beautifully waved and beneath this her soft dark eyes took on an added depth and brilliance. Her eyebrows had remained black and thick, still further enhancing her finest feature. Her dress was always dark, becoming, smart, and her silken ankles above the slim slippers with their cut-steel buckles were those of a young girl. The aristocratic Marcy feet and ankles. + 

Her speeches were not altogether romantic, by any means. She knew her state. Its politics were notoriously rotten. Governor after governor was impeached with musical comedy swiftness and regularity, and the impeachment proceedings stank to Washington. This governor was practically an outlaw and desperado; that governor, who resembled a traveling evangelist with his long locks and his sanctimonious face, flaunted his mistress, and all the office plums fell to her rapscallion kin. Sabra had statistics at her tongue’s end. Millions of barrels of oil. Millions of tons of zinc. Third in mineral products. First in oil. Coal. Gypsum. Granite. Livestock. + 

In Washington she was quite a belle among the old boys in Congress and even the Senate. The opposition party tried to blackmail her with publicity about certain unproved items in the life of her dead (or missing) husband Yancey Cravat: a two-gun man, a desperado, a killer, a drunkard, a squaw man. Then they started on young Cim and his Osage Indian wife, but Sabra and Donna were too quick for them. + 

Donna Wyatt leased a handsome Washington house in Dupont Circle, staffed it, brought Tracy Wyatt’s vast wealth and influence to bear, and planned a coup so brilliant that it routed the enemy forever. She brought her handsome, sleepy-eyed brother Cim and his wife Ruby Big Elk, and the youngsters Felice and Yancey to the house in Dupont Circle, and together she and Sabra gave a reception for them to which they invited a group so precious that it actually came. + 

Sabra and Donna, exquisitely dressed, stood in line at the head of the magnificent room, and between them stood Ruby Big Elk in her Indian dress of creamy white doeskin all embroidered in beads from shoulder to hem. She was an imposing figure, massive but not offensively fat as were many of the older Osage women, and her black abundant hair had taken on a mist of gray. + 

“My daughter-in-law, Mrs. Cimarron Cravat, of the Osage Indian tribe.” + 

“My son’s wife, Ruby Big Elk⁠—Mrs. Cimarron Cravat.” + 

“My sister-in-law, Mrs. Cimarron Cravat. A full-blood Osage Indian.⁠ ⁠… Yes, indeed. We think so, too.” + 

And, “How do you do?” said Ruby, in her calm, insolent way. + 

For the benefit of those who had not quite been able to encompass the Indian woman in her native dress Ruby’s next public appearance was made in a Paris gown of white. She became the rage, was considered picturesque, and left Washington in disgust, her work done. No one but her husband, whom she loved with a doglike devotion, could have induced her to go through this ceremony. + 

The opposition retired, vanquished. + 

Donna and Tracy Wyatt then hired a special train in which they took fifty Eastern potentates on a tour of Oklahoma. One vague and not very bright Washington matron, of great social prestige, impressed with what she saw, voiced her opinion to young Yancey Cravat, quite confused as to his identity and seeing only an attractive and very handsome young male seated beside her at a country club luncheon. + 

“I had no idea Oklahoma was like this. I thought it was all oil and dirty Indians.” + 

“There is quite a lot of oil, but we’re not all dirty.” + 

“We?” + 

“I’m an Indian.” + 

Osage, Oklahoma, was now just as much like New York as Osage could manage to make it. They built twenty-story office buildings in a city that had hundreds of miles of prairie to spread in. Tracy Wyatt built the first skyscraper⁠—the Wyatt building. It was pointed out and advertised all over the flat prairie state. Then Pat Leary, dancing an Irish jig of jealousy, built the Leary building, twenty-three stories high. But the sweet fruits of triumph soon turned to ashes in his mouth. The Wyatt building’s foundations were not built to stand the added strain of five full stories. So he had built a five-story tower, slim and tapering, a taunting finger pointing to the sky. Again Tracy Wyatt owned the tallest building in Oklahoma. + 

On the roof of the Levy Mercantile Company’s Building Sol had had built a penthouse after his own plans. It was the only one of its kind in all Oklahoma. That small part of Osage which did not make an annual pilgrimage to New York was slightly bewildered by Sol Levy’s roof life. They fed one another with scraps of gossip got from servants, clerks, stenographers who claimed to have seen the place at one time or another. It was, these said, filled with the rarest of carpets, rugs, books, hangings. Super radio, super phonograph, super player piano. Music hungry. There he lived, alone, in luxury, of the town, yet no part of it. At sunset, in the early morning, late of a star-spangled night he might have been seen leaning over the parapet of his sky house, a lonely little figure, lean, ivory, aloof, like a gargoyle brooding over the ridiculous city sprawled below; over the oil rigs that encircled it like giant Martian guards holding it in their power; beyond, to where the sky, in a veil of gray chiffon that commerce had wrought, stooped to meet the debauched red prairie. + 

Money was now the only standard. If Pat Leary had sixty-two million dollars on Tuesday he was Oklahoma’s leading citizen. If Tracy Wyatt had seventy-eight million dollars on Wednesday then Tracy Wyatt was Oklahoma’s leading citizen. + 

Osage had those fascinating little specialty shops and interior decorating shops on Pawhuska just like those you see on Madison Avenue, whose owners are the daughters of decayed Eastern aristocracy on the make. The head of the shop appeared only to special clients and then with a hat on. She wore the hat from morning until night, her badge of revolt against this position of service. “I am a lady,” the hat said. “Make no mistake about that. Just because I am a shopkeeper don’t think you can patronize me. I am not working. I am playing at work. This is my fad. At any moment I can walk out of here, just like any of you.” + 

Feminine Osage’s hat, by the way, was cut and fitted right on its head, just like Paris. + 

Sabra probably was the only woman of her own generation and social position in Osage who still wore on the third finger of her left hand the plain broad gold band of a long-past day. Synchronous with the permanent wave and the reducing diet the oil-rich Osage matrons of Sabra’s age cast sentiment aside for fashion, quietly placed the clumsy gold band in a bureau drawer and appeared with a slim platinum circlet bearing, perhaps, the engraved anachronism, “M. G.-K. L. 1884.” Certainly it was much more at ease among its square-cut emerald and oblong-diamond neighbors. These ladies explained (if at all) that the gold band had grown too tight for the finger, or too loose. Sabra looked down at the broad old-fashioned wedding ring on her own gemless finger. She had not once taken it off in over forty years. It was as much a part of her as the finger itself. + 

Osage began to rechristen streets, changing the fine native Indian names to commonplace American ones. Hetoappe Street became the Boston Road; very fashionable it was, too. Still, the very nicest people were building out a ways on the new section (formerly Okemah Hill) now River View. The river was the ruddy Canadian, the view the forest of oil rigs bristling on the opposite shore. The grounds sloped down to the river except on those occasions when the river rose in red anger and sloped down to the houses. The houses themselves were Italian palazzi or French châteaux or English manors; none, perhaps, quite so vast or inclusive as Tracy Wyatt’s, but all provided with such necessities as pipe organs, sunken baths, Greek temples, ancient tapestries, Venetian glass, billiard rooms, and butlers. Pat Leary, the smart little erstwhile section hand, had a melodramatic idea. Not content with peacocks, golf links, and swimming pools on his estate he now had placed an old and weathered covered wagon, a rusted and splintered wagon tongue, the bleached skull of a buffalo, an Indian teepee, and a battered lantern on a little island at the foot of the artificial lake below the heights on which his house stood. At night a searchlight, red, green, or orange, played from the tower of the house upon the mute relics of frontier days. + 

“The covered wagon my folks crossed the prairies in,” Pat Leary explained, with shy pride. Eastern visitors were much impressed. It was considered a great joke in Osage, intimately familiar with Pat’s Oklahoma beginnings. + 

“Forgot something, ain’t you Pat, in that outfit you got rigged up in the yard?” old Bixby asked. + 

“What’s that?” + 

“Pickax and shovel,” Bixby replied, laconically. “Keg of spikes and a hand car.” + 

Old Sam Pack, who had made the Run on a mule, said that if Pat Leary’s folks had come to Oklahoma in a covered wagon then his had made the trip in an airplane. + 

All the Oklahoma millionaire houses had libraries. Yards and yards of fine leather libraries, with gold tooling. Ike Hawkes’s library had five sets of Dickens alone, handsomely bound in red, green, blue, brown, and black, and Ike all unaware of any of them. + 

Moving picture palaces, with white-gloved ushers, had all the big Broadway super-films. Gas filling stations on every corner. Hot dog, chili con carne, and hamburger stands on the most remote country road. The Arverne Grand Opera Company at the McKee Theater for a whole week every year, and the best of everything⁠—Traviata, Bohème, Carmen, Louise, The Barber of Seville. The display of jewels during that week made the Diamond Horseshoe at the Metropolitan look like the Black Hole of Calcutta. + 

Social events of the week just closed were worthily concluded with the smart dancing party at which Mr. and Mrs. Clint Hopper entertained a small company at the Osage Club. The roof garden of the club⁠ ⁠… + 

Mr. and Mrs. James Click honored two distinguished Eastern visitors on Wednesday at the small dinner at which they entertained in courtesy to Mr. and Mrs. C. Swearingen Church, of St. Paul, Minnesota. There were covers for eighty.⁠ ⁠… + 

Mr. and Mrs. Buchanan Ketcham and Miss Patricia Ketcham left for New York last night, from which city they will sail for Europe, there to meet the J. C. McConnells on their yacht at Monaco.⁠ ⁠… + 

Le Cercle Français will meet Tuesday evening at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Everard Pack.⁠ ⁠… + 

The sunbonnets had triumphed. + 