‘The clerk looks up and asks: “When did you go to A&M?” and the former Aggie sobs: “How did you know?” and the clerk says: “Son, this is a hardware store.” ’
He had barely stopped receiving congratulations on his latest masterpiece when a folded note was passed along the table to him:
I don’t think Aggie jokes are funny. My brother teaches there and says it’s a fine school. Next you’ll be telling Mexican jokes, and I won’t like that, either.
Your new friend,
Simón Garza
Quimper flushed, recognized the propriety of this complaint, and concluded that the new regent was not going to be anybody’s pushover. Bringing his palms together under his chin in the Buddhist gesture of deference, he nodded to his friend of the previous evening, then, using his right thumb in a gesture of cutting his throat, he indicated that there would be no more Aggie jokes.
Then he submitted his report as chairman of the finance committee, informing his colleagues that with the unexpected increase in oil prices, Texas now had a much higher return on its endowment than places like Harvard and Stanford: ‘This has enabled us to bring onto our faculty winners of the Nobel Prize, outstanding figures in science like John Wheeler of Princeton, and a whole bevy of notable experts in law and business. We’re headin’ for the very top ranks of academia and will not be denied.’
As for the other financial aspects, he said: ‘Like the comedian, I have good news and bad news. The good news is that the program we launched to underwrite our professors has enjoyed amazin’ success. As of today we have no room to accept any more five-hundred-thousand-dollar endowments in law, business or science, because all the chairs have been funded.’ This brought applause from the board, some of whose members had funded endowments.
‘The bad news is that we have not received one endowment in the liberal arts such as English, poetry and philosophy.’ Allowing time for this striking news to percolate, he added: ‘I’ve argued fruitlessly with successful lawyers and businessmen, till my tongue has cleaved to the roof of my mouth, remindin’ them that they are able to succeed in life not because of the technical trainin’ they received at our university but because of the solid instruction they had in the meanin’ of life … in their basic courses in the liberal arts. They haven’t understood a word I said.
‘Gentlemen and ladies, if this continues, the great universities of Texas are goin’ to become trade schools, places to train mechanics, centers for the crunchin’ of numbers in computers. The ideas which will govern our society will be delivered to us from Harvard and Oxford and the Sorbonne.’
He became eloquent, Texas-ranch style, in defending those values which his father had outlawed, and after prolonged discussion he said: ‘I’ll tell you what I’m goin’ to do. I’m goin’ to accept ever’ one of the proposed contributions for additional endowments in law and business and divert ’em to the humanities.’
‘But, Lorenzo,’ a cautious regent asked, ‘what will you tell the donors?’ and without hesitation he snapped: ‘I’ll lie.’
‘I think we’d better consider this,’ a lawyer said, and the others laughed, but Quimper silenced them: ‘I feel so strong about this that I am herewith establishin’ full endowments, half a million each, for two chairs, one in philosophy, one in poetry.’
It was in this spirit that Regent Quimper, Il Magnifico, started to reverse the damage done by his father, that inspired builder of the university campus.
When Maggie Morrison, forty-seven years old, discovered how easy it was to borrow large sums of money in Texas, especially from big oilmen, she studied the real estate market in Houston with special care and learned that after the savage devaluation of the Mexican peso many fine buildings were near bankruptcy, so that remarkable bargains were available, but only if one had faith that the market would rebound. She had that faith.
Her fourteen years in what Houstonians liked to call ‘our go-go town’ had almost obliterated memories of Detroit. She no longer made comparisons between Michigan and Texas, being content to accept her new home as sui generis, obedient only to its own rules. She had grown to like Western dress, the informality of social life, the Texas brag, and she positively adored Mexican food, especially the tang of a fresh chile relleno or a really well made enchilada. And her affection for Houston itself had grown solidly, so that when the figures for the 1980 census were extrapolated to 1981, she found positive joy in learning that Houston was now the fourth largest city in the United States, having displaced Philadelphia, with every prospect of surpassing Chicago before the century ended.
But now Houston’s unoccupied office space had grown to 43,000,000 square feet: The builders have built too much, too fast and with funds that carried too high a rate of interest. With mortgages at seventeen percent, somebody must go broke.
Wherever she looked she found telltale signs of the city’s perilous position. The big oil companies were cutting back on personnel; the little ones were solving that problem more simply: they were in bankruptcy. And this sent echoes throughout the business community, as leasing experts closed shop, drilling rigs were sold for ten cents on the dollar, and banks foreclosed loans. Registration at local colleges dropped because parents could not scrape together the tuition, and retail stores began to lay off salespeople.
But the crunch that interested Maggie was the one in real estate, and in the late afternoons when she sat in the fifteenth-floor condominium overlooking Buffalo Bayou, her attention focused on that splendid set of tall buildings erected by Gabe Klinowitz’s Mexican politicians—The Ramparts. Their wraparound glass facings shone in the sunset, but they were only fifteen percent occupied; had rentals continued at the spectacular levels of 1980 the Mexicans would have made a killing, but now they faced disaster. ‘I’m sure they have at least a hundred and seventy million dollars in the three towers,’ Maggie had told her husband, but he was so involved with Roy Bub Hooker in their exotic-game ranch that he could not pay full attention to the interesting proposal she was making, so she sat alone and stared at the mesmerizing target.
One night as the moon shone on the shimmering glass she made up her mind, and early next morning she dressed in her best business suit and flew up to Dallas: ‘The poor Mexicans have made this enormous investment, Mr. Rusk …’
‘Never feel sorry for the other guy. If he’s made an ass of himself, gig him while he’s bent over.’
‘There’s no way they can diminish their debt, and they may be paying as high as nineteen-percent interest.’
‘You’re sure they have a hundred and seventy million in it? What would they listen to? If we bailed them out?’
‘I have a gut feeling we could get it for fifty million, maybe even forty.’
‘See what you can do.’
She returned to Houston with a tentative deal much like the one before, for Rusk had said: ‘Maggie, I’ll chip in as much as thirteen million if you add your two. But you must convince the Houston banks to lend us the rest at a decent interest.’
Her first job was to confront the Mexicans with their perilous situation and convince them that in bankruptcy they might lose everything. Wearing her gentlest and most feminine clothes, she minimized the staggering difference between the $170,000,000 they had obligated themselves to pay and the mere $40,000,000 she was offering, and quietly she assured them that they had no reasonable alternative: ‘Besides, gentlemen, as you and I well know, a great deal of what you call your loss is paper money only. This is a drying out of the market, and if you’d had your funds in oil, you’d have lost even more.’
With the banks she was soft-spoken but relentless: ‘What alternative have you? Your loans are bust, but so are the ones you have in oil. Help my partner and me to refinance this disaster and you’ll get back more than you had a right to expect.’
Just when she had everyone on the edge of the chair, each ready to jump forward if the others did, Beth announced that she was going to have a baby, and so Maggie dropped her negotiations for
about a week, leaving Mexicans, Houston bankers and Ransom Rusk dangling; she had not planned it this way, but it was the cleverest move she could have made, for by the time she returned to the bargaining table, all the players would be nervously eager to reach a decision. Said one banker: ‘Trust a woman to play a trick like this. We could use her on our board.’
But Maggie did not engage in tricks. For several years now, she had been aware that she was a much stronger person than her husband, much more attuned to the pressures and responsibilities of Houston finance; although she would never express it in this arrogant manner, she had character and he did not. If these delicate negotiations regarding The Ramparts evolved as she hoped, she would back them with every penny of her small fortune, every minute of her working life. Her deal would be meticulously honest and as fair to each participant as the exigencies of the economic situation allowed. She wanted a just share of the profits, but was prepared to suffer her share of the loss if her calculations were in error. A Michigan schoolteacher who believed in George Eliot had become a Texas manipulator who believed in Adam Smith.
In growing into this status, she was conscious of how far behind she had left her breezy, glib-speaking husband: he played at games; she juggled with empires. He had been a good husband and a better father, but she could not escape realizing that under pressure he had revealed himself as a shifty, small-caliber man. She hoped he would stay out of trouble and hold on to some of the easy money he had made, but on neither point was she confident.
And finally the tears came. Toughened in the brutal world of Houston real estate, she had not allowed herself this indulgence since weeping with joy at Beth’s wedding to Wolfgang Macnab, but now that she reviewed her own life with Todd, remembering how it had started with such love and mutuality, she could not ignore the sad loss she had suffered: Oh, Todd! We should have done much better! And in this lament she generously took upon herself, improperly, half the blame.
While the Mexican politicians and the Texas businessmen fretted, she spent her days with her daughter, talking about marriage, and children, and responsibility, and one afternoon when Beth was visiting her mother, Maggie called her attention to The Ramparts: ‘The buildings are not only beautiful, Beth. They’re in excellent physical condition. But they’re only fifteen-percent occupied. Frozen tears. Monuments to dreams gone wrong.’
‘Mummy, why would you want to get mixed up with such a failure?’
‘Because I’m convinced that Houston is the liveliest spot in America. Because I know it’s bound to snap back.’
‘But if you know this, don’t you think they know it, too?’
‘Yes, but I’m the one that has faith.’
‘Are you gambling all your money on these towers?’
The two women looked at the shimmering beauty of The Ramparts, admiring the subtle manner in which the three spires formed a unit, with the curve of one iridescent expanse linking with the other two and complementing them. They formed a work of art, Houston modern, and Maggie would be proud to be its owner if she could acquire it, as seemed likely, at twenty-four cents on the dollar.
‘Are you doing this out of vanity, Mummy?’
Maggie pondered this. It was exciting to operate in what had been considered a man’s field and to perform rather better than most of the men; of course she felt proud of her achievements. And it was breathtaking to gamble with such large funds, hers and other people’s, and she was prepared to acknowledge this to her daughter, but at this critical time in both their lives she felt it improper to operate from such trivial and almost degrading impulses.
‘Beth, you really do like Texas, don’t you?’
‘I’m in love with it. I can’t even remember Detroit.’
‘Do you want to remember?’
‘No! This is freedom, excitement, the future. Wolfgang and I see unlimited possibilities. I don’t mean life in the fast lane, or any of that nonsense. But a man like Wolfgang, with me beside him, he can do anything from a Texas base. Anything.’
‘I feel the same way, Beth.’
‘But Daddy isn’t at your side.’
‘No, he isn’t.’
They dropped that subject, and after a while Maggie confided: ‘I’m gambling most of my savings.’ Before Beth could reprimand her, she took her daughter’s hands: ‘But do you think your mother … you know me … how cautious I am. Do you think I’d take such a gamble blind?’
‘I’m not sure I know you any more.’
‘Look at yourself. The way you were when we came down here. Lady poet and all that. Then lady baton twirler. Now lady socialite. I don’t know you.’ Quickly she added: ‘But I’m very proud of you just as you are. Resplendent transformation.’
‘What safeguards have you, Mother?’
‘Mr. Rusk is in this with me, and we’d be out of our minds to buy that turkey.’ She flipped a thumb contemptuously at the towers: ‘We could never make it pay … all that unrented space.’
‘My conclusion too. All that glass with nothing behind it.’
‘However!’ And here Maggie smiled. ‘I’ve found a group of potential buyers. Canadians. They have a hotel chain behind them. They believe that if they can get title at a low enough figure, they can install an operation that will pay out.’
‘Why don’t they buy it themselves?’
‘Because they need someone like me to honcho the details.’
‘If the second tier of deals works, do you make a bundle?’
‘You always phrased things delicately, Beth. Yes.’
‘And if you can’t unload to the buyers and the hotel chain …’
‘Now wait. The hotel chain puts up no money. Just a managerial contract, but a very enticing one, I must say.’
‘How do you know about the contract?’
Maggie Morrison smiled softly: ‘Oftentimes, Beth, a dumb-looking peasant from Detroit can learn things a billionaire like Ransom Rusk could never learn.’
‘But if your clever plan falls flat? If your secret buyers drop out?’
‘I lose everything.’ In the silence Beth looked across to the glorious towers; they seemed almost to sway with the wind, and she understood why her mother would find exhilaration in this game of Houston roulette, and she understood her gambling everything on such a precarious toss, but then her mother said: ‘I wouldn’t lose everything. We’ll be buying this for twenty-four cents on the dollar. If we did have to bail out, we could probably get back eighteen cents.’
When Maggie turned her attention from her pregnant daughter to the long-pregnant purchase of The Ramparts, she found the other players almost thirsting to conclude the deal, so she finished things off with a flourish. For $42,000,000 she acquired buildings worth $170,000,000, and she and Rusk had had to ante up only $12,000,000 between them, the banks being happy to carry the rest. Even the Mexican politicians showed relief: ‘Only paper money, as you said. We feared we might lose it all.’
In July 1983, when things were looking slightly better in Houston, she sold The Ramparts to the well-heeled Canadians, who would convert the top floors of the buildings into superpenthouses for their wives. The price that Maggie was able to swing for this part of the deal was $62,000,000, which meant that she and Rusk had picked up $20,000,000 for about a year’s work. Generously, he split this fifty-fifty with Maggie, telling her that it was the traditional finder’s fee.
When the sale was completed—finalized, in Houston jargon—Maggie took Beth to a victory lunch: ‘Why did I risk so much? I wanted to give you and Lonnie the best start possible in Texas life. I’m afraid your father will lose everything with his exotic ranch.’
‘Mummy! Wolfgang and I earn a good living. Far beyond what I dreamed.’
‘For the time being. Linebackers don’t last forever.’
This meeting occurred in August of 1983 and as it ended, the television in the posh restaurant was broadcasting continuous alerts regarding the first hurricane of the season, Alicia, which stormed about in the Gulf, with wi
nds exceeding a hundred and twenty miles an hour, presumably heading toward Galveston. The two women stopped to listen, and Maggie, who studied such storms because they could influence real estate values, said: ‘Poor Galveston. In 1900 it was wiped out by a storm like this.’
‘I’ve heard about it. Was it bad?’
‘Are you kidding? Six thousand drowned. Worst natural disaster in American history.’ When Beth gasped, she added, professionally: ‘But they built a seawall afterward, and it’s been impregnable.’
‘I would hope so,’ Beth said.
During the next two days Maggie followed the tropical storm, but only casually, for the winds dropped to a relatively safe eighty miles an hour, which the Texas coast had learned to cope with. She had almost forgotten the threat when the storm stopped dead, about fifty miles offshore, and whirled about upon itself, as if uncertain where to land.
Now those who understood the rudiments of tropical storms became apprehensive, for this stationary whirling meant that the eye of the storm was picking up terrible velocities, perhaps as much as a hundred and sixty miles an hour, and with such accumulated force the hurricane could be a killer wherever it crashed ashore … and it did head for Galveston.
By the grace of a compassionate nature, the wild storm veered off during the final moments of its approach to land and struck a relatively unpopulated area of the beach, so that instead of killing thousands, as it might have done, it killed only twenty. With a sigh, Galveston went to its churches and gave thanks for yet another salvation. The great storm of 1983 with its violent winds had passed inland.
Through a curious trick of the winds aloft, when it was well past the coast it turned back on itself and struck Houston, not from the east as might have been anticipated, but from the southwest, and as it came roaring in at velocities no architect or builder had foreseen, it began to whip around the tall buildings, creating powerful currents not experienced before.