Her son, familiarly known as Sam, paints. In fact, he is doing that just at the moment. He is facing one of the most terrible architectural monstrosities that the Catholic Church ever erected, for some cabalistic reason, behind our hotel. Houston, in what I trust was a surge of civic pity, displays the thing on coloured picture postals, and I shall send you one so that you, too, may marvel.
As I have intimated, Sam, being at what we like to call ‘loose ends’, decided to throw in his lot with us, and, he having a small but at this time of the world provident allowance, we decided that it would be all for the best. And so the next morning (I say loosely, having no idea just what it was next after) we went down to the car. Since one of my suitcases had been stolen, there was more room for his luggage, and at this point it matters very little whether I appear shirtless and tieless in any of the capitols of the world. We fled. Have I said that it was still raining? If so, it was stark understatement. Driving through the bayous of Louisiana was like an experimental dive with William Beebe, and, except for the shimmering streams that poured through the crevices around the ‘convertible’ top, into our huddled laps, the Cord might have been a Bathysphere. Lonely cows on the highway appeared as splendid Baracuda, and the dismally soaked Spanish moss luxuriant submarine vetch. Across one Huey Long bridge after another, until we stopped in a town called Houma, having taken a wrong turn so that we were headed blithely for the Gulf of Mexico. We ate, considered, reconsidered, and started again west, stopping at a gas station for water (as, I have neglected to say, we have been doing every score of miles since we left). There was a small dog, the black spots of his coat blending gently into the white with the aid of the automobile grease in which he slept, and eyebrows which curled distantly away from his unreasonable cheerful face. He joined the caravan, which set forth again into a downpour which would have made Sadie Thomson play the Wabash Blues until Pago Pago slid into the sea.
There is a town in Texas called Orange, for reasons which only a native could know. Here came the scene of the final depredation. The Cord began to make the most terrifying, and, to one so much attached, sickening noises, that the only thing to do was motor down a sideroad, pretend that there simply was no top on the car, and be lulled into a delicious and thoroughly sodden unconsciousness. When we awoke, the one watch in the company indicated that the morning was well along. The amount of water that was cascading down between us and any hope of heaven made the time a compleatly negligible factor. There was nothing to do but drive down the road and get stuck in someone’s driveway. That is what we did. It was cold, and the rain so near to being one mass of moving water that we stood like three creatures in different worlds, shouting to each other as one might from inside an incandescent lamp.
We eventually recovered the car, now powered only in first and fourth gears, and limped into Houston. We had such a stroke of luck here as to convince me that we are being fitted out for the most violent end — something like driving unexpectedly into a live volcano-mouth in that country to the south, for here in Houston we have found one of the only Cord mechanics in the southwest. The Cord is now hanging in his establishment, where the most amazing array of toothless gears are exhibited on the floor. The whole thing is under the constant surveillence of Houma, the folly-ridden animal who remains, in spite of his new lot, our friend, looking up from his bed of transmission grease with the ingenuous faith which I have been mistakenly looking for in human beings.
Our apartment in Houston has a living room, bedroom, bath, kitchen, and breakfast nook. Last night we prepared a magnificent dinner (hamburger-with-onion, pan-fried-potatoes-with-onion, spinach-with-onions), and are now looking forward to this evening’s culinary adventure. During the day we saunter through the streets and stare at the citizens, or stand in our parlour and stare at the atrocity which I mentioned earlier. We smoke a brand of aptly-named little cigars Between-The-Acts, and blow ponderous rings. We discuss only earth-shaking topics, such as whether or not there really is a sun, or were we brought up with a heat- and light-emanating mirage. We smile stupidly at one another, drink coffee, and nod our heads in answer to nothing at all.
While the world of fact drowns us, that of probability supplies an occasional bubble of life, and we plan (I use the world plan as an indication of my vocabulary weakness) to arrive gloriously in Laredo sometime toward the end of the week, Friday sounding as likely as any day I can call to mind at the moment. In these ensuing days I hope to work (there is another word) on something which has been on my mind (and another) for a couple of weeks, and since all of the deathless prose which I had expected to work on was purloined with the gay vestments of my formal existence, perhaps I shall be able to make a fresh start in the world of art.
Living in a world of my own, I have no notion of the US mails. This is undoubtedly Sunday, because the steepled monstrosity across the street has been breathing a regular stream of Texan Catholics in and out of its gabled nostrils all day — and you may get this message near the middle of the week. And so I cannot say whether you will find me at the Rhodes Apartment Hotel by mail, for the moment that the auto is able to stand by itself it is in for a fast drumming south. I trust that you got my frantic wire, asking for a means of proving my identity (the only other thing I had was a Harvard Bursar’s card, in the stolen suitcase, which I suppose might not have got me a visa), and even that the birth certificate is now filed under general delivery at Laredo. The picture of $ still confounds me — it continues to leak in somewhere, and until it stops no appeals will be made. I do think, as I mentioned in another letter, that once in Mexico DF, with no job immediate, that I shall have to hold out an open and empty palm. Until then, here are the probable addresses — Wells Fargo, Monteray (you might check on what county of Mexico that’s in, and also make certain that they have an agency there), and then, in perhaps a couple of weeks, W — F—, Mexico D.F., Mexico.
I hope, trust that everything is well, you, and the things around you. I shall think of NewYork tonight as I wash my socks and underpants, articles which have seen considerable service.
My love,
Bill
Mike: Mike Gladstone (see headnote to 26 June 1952), who was staying at his sister’s apartment then.
Noel Houston: an Oklahoma native (d. 1957), author of the novel The Great Promise (1946).
Alice Adams: prominent fiction writer (1926–99), raised in Chapel Hill.
The Strange Woman: 1946 film directed by Edgar G. Ulmer, about a scheming woman’s affairs with three men.
Jean Lafitte: a pirate who worked out of New Orleans in the early nineteenth century.
William Beebe: American naturalist and deep-sea explorer (1877–1962).
Sadie Thomson […] Pago Pago: a prostitute in W. Somerset Maugham’s early story “Miss Thompson” (later retitled “Rain”), best known in its movie adaptations (Sadie Thompson, 1928; Rain, 1932). Sadie works the South Pacific island of Pago Pago, and “Wabash Blues” is a popular song from the early 1920s that she plays on her phonograph.
