Hers the Kingdom (10 page)

     "I remember crying out at the
perfection
of it.

     "Lovemaking is like that. Perfect.

     "Lena, destroy this letter . . . please!

     "Oh, but why are we not told? Why are we made to think of mating as something dark and furtive? I remember that I said to you that there is something coarse and raw about it. I could cry at my ignorance.

     "I think I know why we are not told. We must be made to wait, and if we knew we would not want to wait.

     "How terribly unfair it is. Men are not made to wait. Owen did not wait. I asked him outright. It seemed not so great an intimacy, after sharing his bed. He looked at me oddly; a vein in his forehead stood out. Then, without a word, he left our room. When he returned an hour later he told me, with something akin to formality, that he did not feel he could come to me without 'experience.' He then added, as if it were an entirely distasteful subject, that he had sought only enough 'experience' to be able to understand his 'husbandly duties.'

     "Duties! Such a strange word for so great a pleasure, I told him, at the same time assuring him that I did not in any way find fault with him for his 'experience.'

     "Owen refuses to be shocked by me. Still, I think, this time I caused him some concern. He looked at me for quite a long time, it seemed (though in fact it may have been only a few seconds), and finally he shrugged and smiled a wry little smile and said, 'Are we then to have no secrets, you and I?'

     "'Exactly,' I said, throwing myself at him with such force that
we went tumbling, and Owen said the proprietors of the august hotel might very well ask us to leave for wrestling on the premises.

     "I know I make Owen wonder. But he must know what I know, how exquisitely the joining of bodies defines all that we feel but cannot find words for. And how perfect a way to create new life.

     "New life . . . that is a subject Owen does not tire of. I have never thought a man could be so enchanted with the idea of fatherhood. (I suppose I would be more enchanted with the idea of motherhood, had I not had so very many young brothers. Even that Owen sees as an advantage. I have had so much practical experience, he says. As indeed both you and I have.)

     "I am sitting at the desk in our suite at the Lick House looking now at our wedding bed. It is immense, a great mahogany bed with a headboard that reaches, quite literally, to the ceiling. It is massively carved, with what seem to be mythical creatures—fauns and griffons and water fairies. The bed is warm, still, from our bodies. A blue ribbon loosed from my gown is entwined in the rumpled sheets. I thrill to the intimacy that bed has brought us.

     "Owen is off, now, at another of his business meetings. I am to meet him at eleven at a ladies' tailor on Mission Street. He has given me such intricate directions on how to get there involving the Polk and Central Avenue cable car and walking several blocks. Before he left this morning he announced, with what I now know to be not so much tact as a way to get what he wants, that he admires the originality of my 'uniform'—my corduroy skirts and blue blouses, and that he would like my permission to have the idea executed in a variety of different fabrics by a French seamstress. I will wear my brown taffeta to dinner at Sara's home tomorrow evening; it will have to do.

     "But I didn't tell you . . . no sooner had we become settled in our hotel, than we received a formal invitation asking the pleasure of our company for dinner tomorrow evening at seven, formal attire specified. We are to dine at the celebrated Nob Hill mansion of Phineas Emory.

     "Perhaps it is all a fairy tale. Certainly, I felt like a water fairy when we at last sighted the city of San Francisco. Because it sits on a peninsula, the train journey ends on a boat, thus the approach is by water.

     "We arrived in a fine white fog, much welcomed after the heat of the Sacramento Valley. I envisioned us as rising out of the sea—though of course it was not the sea, but San Francisco Bay. As we crossed on the boat we could see very little and it was amazingly chill for June. The foghorns were blowing low over the water. It was an exciting sound and made me feel curiously elated. Best of all, I felt isolated with Owen. We held fast together on the deck, listening to the water slap against the hull, squinting for a glimpse of the city. It came rising out of the fog, the palest, most silvery city shimmering in a sudden glint of sunlight. It seemed as if Owen and I were the only ones alive in the universe. I had this most remarkable feeling . . . I cannot even describe it. Los Angeles is yet another four hundred and fifty miles to the south, yet I feel we are
here.
In California, at the farthest point. Illinois seems so much more than a mere few weeks in the past.

     "San Francisco is only partly what I expected. There is a vitality, an urgency, here that I have seen in no other city. Yet one block will look as if it were transplanted from Boston or even Springfield, while around the corner you will feel as if you had stepped into the Orient. Celestials, as the Orientals are called, are everywhere, scurrying about, always busy, it seems, always moving.

     "It makes me angry—I cannot explain why, but that is the feeling, anger—that it has been here all of this time, and I haven't known about it. It was as if San Francisco didn't exist (or, perhaps, it was as if I didn't exist, I am not sure which is right). All I can be sure of is the anger, which was . . . is . . . real. Lives have been lived in houses I am seeing for the first time, cable cars move up and down the avenues, families take picnics to the sandy stretches by the Pacific. And I didn't know about any of it until now. When I said this to Owen, he only looked at me and said, quite evenly,
'But my dear, I brought you here as soon as I knew about you.'

     "We will stay at the Lick House for a few days, perhaps a week, depending on how many business meetings Owen wishes to pursue. As I may have mentioned, we came from Sacramento by riverboat. A channel has been cleared between that inland city and San Francisco along the Sacramento River. At the place where the river enters the great bay is a sprawling delta. Owen was fascinated by the expanse of marshland that could, he says, be reclaimed for agricultural purposes. He is not the first to think of these possibilities, he has learned. Already he is meeting with other men who are eager to pursue the reclamation.

     "I shall write to you again after our dinner at the Emorys'. In some ways it is my 'coming out' as Mrs. Owen Reade. This is all make-believe. A fairy tale. I only wish you were here so I could tell you, see your face, hear you tell me in that quietly determined way of yours when I am flinging off in the wrong direction entirely. I count on you as on no one else. I wonder, at times, if I may simply fly off into the sky some day without you to pull me back to earth."

At supper that night I was there, and not there. I suppose I did not answer when spoken to, for after a time Mama heaved a great sigh and said, "Where
are
you, Lena?" I flinched as if caught, wondering if she knew—if any of them could know—that I was, in fact, in California, that I had been there for weeks.

     Willa and Owen and their new life occupied my thoughts during the day; at night, they moved into my dreams.

     Willa's letters were filled with wonderful details. I could imagine myself with her and Owen on the evening they went to the Emory mansion on Nob Hill. From the heights, they looked down on the city. As they pulled up to the door in the hack which Owen had rented for the evening, Willa had smiled when he whispered, "You can smell the self-importance."

     Willa was wearing a gown of the palest grey watermarked China silk, finished that day and delivered to the Lick House by the French dressmaker Owen had engaged. Willa had marveled at Owen's persuasiveness, which she assumed had been complemented by a rather large sum of money. Madame Odile would have had to work throughout the night to finish the dress. Her already dark-rimmed eyes had seemed shades darker when she came to the hotel for a last fitting. Willa had exclaimed, "Oh, but you look so very tired," with such genuine concern that the dressmaker had blinked, and waved her hand in the slightest of gestures, which seemed to say, "Ah, well, you are good to notice." When she saw the dress on Willa, she allowed herself a sharp intake of breath and a smart clap of the hands. Words, clearly, would not come.

     Owen provided the words. "Madame," he said to the Frenchwoman, "the dress is beautiful, on my wife it is more than beautiful."

     Willa's bones were long but not large, which caused her to move with a delicate awkwardness. Using the medium of watered Chinese silk, Madame Odile had transformed that awkwardness into elegance.

     "Our old friend Thomas Sully should see you now," Owen said admiringly. For the first time in her life, Willa felt what it was to be considered handsome.

The Emory mansion was a brownstone on the very crest of the hill. There was no mistaking it. The great red pile dominated the other mansions in this most prestigious part of the city. The grounds were filled with a profusion of roses, all full-blown, and the grass was an obscene color of green, Willa thought. They walked up one small flight of stairs to an iron gate, then up another to the entrance hall. Willa felt a flutter of apprehension; Owen, sensing this, stopped on the bottom step and said
in a low voice, "Well, love, shall we pay our respects to the hardware king?"

     Willa giggled. "If I can't think of a thing to say, shall I engage him in conversation about nuts and bolts?"

     "By all means," Owen answered, moving her up the stairs, "you must do that."

     Sara was there, in the shadowy depths of the foyer, waiting. She put both of her hands out to Willa. In the heavy context of the room she seemed even smaller than she was; her physical presence was at once so insignificant that, had it not been for her great hurt eyes, she would not have been noticed.

     Willa took her hands, then hugged her.

     "You're here," Sara said with what seemed to be surprise, adding,
sotto voce
, "welcome to Gloomy Caverns."

     "Of course we're here," Willa laughed, "I've missed you already, and it's only three days since we left you in Sacramento."

     "Think what a welcome you'll get when we've been parted the whole of a week," Owen put in, then lowered his voice too as he said, "But Gloomy Caverns?"

     "That's what Charles calls it," Sara said. "He's here, someplace, you'll get to meet him too."

     Charles, they knew, was Charles Emory, the nephew—and heir apparent—of Phineas Emory, and a favorite of Sara's.

     Owen tucked Sara's hand under one of his arms, and with Willa on the other, moved the two women toward the drawing room where a gathering large enough to create a low drone of conversation was waiting.

     Willa was surprised, and disappointed. She had not expected so large a crowd. She had supposed—presumptuously, she realized now—that they had been invited to meet Sara's family, and she had been prepared for a small, rather intimate evening. Instead, it seemed obvious that Sara had prevailed upon her adopted parents to add Willa's and Owen's names to an already long guest list.

     Willa glanced at Owen. There could be no doubt at all that he
was perfectly delighted with the crowded drawing room. His face was set in a smile that would make people turn to look at him, as they were indeed already doing. "If we should happen to have a large earthquake this evening, Sara," he said, "and be swallowed up on the spot, there would be nobody of importance left in California."

     Sara grinned, pleased. "I thought you might like to meet some of Father Emory's friends, Owen," she said, "and in a moment you are going to meet his new bride . . ."

     Helen Emory, smiling, was moving across the room toward them. There was a burnished look about her, her copper hair matched the deep tones of her dress; her skin seemed almost to glow. In the low cut of her gown a perfect, great diamond teardrop lay in the declivity between her breasts, in a nest of freckles. Willa thought that Helen Emory was as full-blown as the roses outside the gate.