Lillian Seguin

Spouse of Edwin Menger Proctor, married into the Proctor (Yorkist) line from a local family.

The rules of the boarding house on Navarro Street were painted on a board in the front hall in a firm black hand, and the family still quotes them. Meals at six, noon and seven. No guests above the first floor. No candles. No lodger to be admitted after dark without a name, and no lodger who gave a name to be asked for another. They were the work of Lillian Seguin, who was born in 1891 in New Braunfels, Texas, and spent thirty years as a boarding-house keeper in San Antonio, feeding, housing and quietly protecting a very odd assortment of travellers. In 1917 she married the dockworker Edwin Menger Proctor, and they had two sons, Norman Proctor, who became a slayer, and Clifford Proctor, who did not. She died in 1943 of kidney failure, aged fifty-two. She belonged to no house of the Ledger and was not a hunter, and she married into the White Ledger of the Proctors, which descends from Isabel Proctor, who married Thomas Faulkner in January 1486. What she gave it was a roof, and for a generation the third-floor back rooms on Navarro Street were the surest place in south Texas for a tired slayer to sleep. New Braunfels, where she was born, was a German town on the Comal and Guadalupe rivers, founded in the 1840s by emigrants under a prince, and in 1891 it was still more German than Texan, with a Turnverein, a brass band, a beer garden and a very large number of people who disapproved of waste. Her mother was a Rodenbeck from the Hill Country, a broad, silent, immaculate woman who ran a kitchen with an iron hand, and her father was a Seguin, one of the old Tejano family of the Guadalupe, a thin, courteous, melancholy man who kept a feed store and a library of Spanish poetry and was seldom seen to finish either. The household spoke three languages and agreed on none. Lillian, the elder of two daughters, learned to cook in German, to pray in Spanish and to argue in English, and she grew up with the useful conviction that a thing could be said in at least three ways and that the plainest was usually the best. She was a tall, fair, big-boned girl, with a square jaw and her father's dark eyes, and she was known in New Braunfels for two things, her bread and her refusal to be hurried. She was taught the first by her mother and the second by herself. At fifteen she took charge of the family kitchen when her mother fell ill with a fever that lasted a winter, and ran it, with the feed store's accounts and her small sister's schooling, so efficiently that her father, who had been planning to hire a housekeeper, forgot to do it. She learned, in that winter, how to feed twelve people from a pot meant for six, how to make a loaf last three days and how to tell, from a lodger's boots, what he had walked through and where. Her mother, who recovered in March, looked at the neat kitchen and said that it would do. It was the highest praise she gave. At twenty she went to San Antonio, thirty miles down the old road, to keep house for an aunt who had a boarding house on Navarro Street, a tall, narrow, three-storeyed place of yellow brick, with an iron balcony on the front and a courtyard at the back with a well in it. The aunt, an irritable widow, handed her the keys in the first week and went on a pilgrimage to Lourdes. She did not come back for eleven months. Lillian, who had been given a house, twelve lodgers and a cook who did not speak to her, managed the whole concern on her own, and by the time the aunt returned, the place had a waiting list, a spotless register and a rule board in the front hall. The aunt, to her credit, retired, and Lillian took the boarding house for her own. She met her husband in the autumn of 1916, when he came to board for a week. Edwin Menger Proctor, a cheerful, round-faced young man of nineteen, with his mother's blue eyes and a stevedore's shoulders, was the son of the court clerk Barnabas Proctor and of the milliner Ada Menger, and he worked on the docks at Galveston, three hundred miles away, on the cotton wharves. He had come to San Antonio to see his mother, and had been refused a bed by the family on account of a christening, and a cousin of the Ledger had sent him to Navarro Street. He was given the back room on the third floor. He read the board in the hall, and said that he supposed he had better obey it. She said that it would make a nice change. He stayed six days, ate everything she put in front of him and asked, on the last evening, whether she would marry him. She said that he had not been there long enough. He said that he would be back. He came back, on every leave, for ten months. They were married in 1917, in the church of the Sacred Heart on the Westside, in the presence of his mother, who looked at the bride, looked at the boarding house and said that it would be a very good arrangement. He kept his job at Galveston. A dockworker in the war years was, in the eyes of the draft board, doing work of national importance, and he stayed on the wharves, loading cotton and army stores for the ships bound for France, and came home to San Antonio by the night train once a month, on a Saturday, and left on the Monday morning. Lillian ran the house. She wrote to him, every Tuesday, a list of the lodgers and the state of the roof. She told him what the Ledger asked of her in the first year of the marriage, and he told her, in the next, what it asked of him, and they agreed that it was a very reasonable bargain. A boarding house is a house that takes in strangers, and she took in the right ones. A cousin from the Kentucky chapter, who needed a bed for three nights and no questions, was put in the back room on the third floor. A hunter of the Texas roll with a broken arm was given the one with the lock. A young woman with a long grey coat and a red-rimmed look was admitted at two in the morning and left at four the following afternoon, having eaten two plates of stew. Lillian, who kept the register, wrote a name in it for each and never the same name twice. The register, which was kept in the kitchen drawer, was a model of discretion. It was also the most accurate record in the city of who had come and gone in south Texas in thirty years, and she knew every line of it by heart. Her sons were born in the first years. Norman Proctor was born in 1918 in Austin, a hundred miles from home, because Lillian, who was seven months gone, had gone up on the train in the spring to stay with a Proctor cousin during a bad stretch of work at the house, and had not expected the baby until July. He arrived in June, in the cousin's front bedroom, in a thunderstorm, and was a large, grave, silent infant, who looked at his mother as though weighing a bill. He lived until 1960 and became a slayer of the White Ledger. Clifford Proctor was born in 1919, back in San Antonio, a cheerful, round-faced boy who lived until 2003 and was not called to the work, and became a baker. The influenza of the autumn of 1918, when Norman was four months old, closed the schools of San Antonio and filled the hospital at Fort Sam Houston. She nursed her lodgers through it on the first and second floors, in shifts, with her cook, a pot of broth on every landing and a bottle of eucalyptus oil on every sill, and lost not one of them. It was said that the boarding house on Navarro Street was the only place in the city where nobody died that month. The Depression was a harder test. The lodgers could not pay, and she did not ask them. She kept the house full, the pots on the stove and the board in the hall, and she took in, in the worst winter, every unemployed man who came to the door and put him to chopping wood in the yard. She was never without a chopper. Her husband's pay, which had been cut by a third, went on the roof. When the war years came, and the city filled up again with young men in uniform from the camps and airfields that ringed it, she let her rooms to officers' wives. They were a very different class of lodger. They complained, and they asked for their breakfast on a tray. She disciplined them in a week, and took their rent, and watched, from the corner of the courtyard, with an expression of grave contentment, as her son Norman, who was by then in his mid-twenties and a cotton factor, went out of the front door in the evening in his good coat and came back at dawn. She died in the spring of 1943, at fifty-two, of kidney failure, after a year of quiet decline that she had not mentioned to her husband, who came home from the coast in time. She died in the front bedroom, with the rule board on the wall in the hall below, and her sons at the foot of the bed. She was carried out of the house on the street door, in the afternoon, past a row of lodgers who stood in the hall with their hats in their hands, and who included, it was afterward noticed, three of whom she had no record. Lillian Seguin is remembered in the Proctor family as the keeper of the boarding house on Navarro Street, the woman who gave a bed to anyone the Ledger sent and wrote down no name twice. In the Slayerverse she stands for the innkeepers and housekeepers of the White Ledger, the people who never took the field and who made a safe place in a hostile city, by serving hot meals, keeping the door shut and telling no one anything.