Hers the Kingdom (47 page)

     "Have a drink, instead," Joseph answered, working to make the words come out straight. "Your so-li-ci-tor is second-rate anyway. Better find another."

     Joseph stumbled just as Willa reached to take the bottle from him. She raised it to the morning sun, said, "To the year 1900!" and
took a long swig, though it was the last thing she wanted. "Hear! Hear!" the others answered automatically, there had been so many toasts. "And I say that's the end of the toasting," Willa went on, at which Joseph and Arcadia sank onto the blanket Willa had spread on the sand.

     The sun was high, it had warmed the top layer of sand. Willa and Owen made no move to leave, but neither did they join the couple on the blanket. Rather they leaned against the rock, and spoke in desultory tones.

     "Quite an affair, Owen," Joseph said with a soft belch, "I doubt we'll see another like it in this century." His face was flushed with wine and lack of sleep, but still he smiled.

     "What do you think the new century has in store for us?" Arcadia asked.

     "In this century," Joseph answered in a parody of his sonorous courtroom voice, "I intend to make this fair lady my own."

     He turned and reached for Arcadia, missed, and rolled over in the sand. Laughing, she reached to help him up, and only succeeded in being pulled over with him. "We shall totter up the aisle together," Joseph said, holding her loosely in his arms. "I shall be ninety-eight, my fair bride will be ninety-six and the flower girl, the Señora, will be one hundred and fifty-two."

     Arcadia was not smiling. She extricated herself from Joseph's arms, stood and brushed the sand from her dress. "You forget," she said in a taut voice, "the Señora will not be there. The Señora will have to be dead."

     Joseph lay back in the sand, as if spent. He put his hands, palms up, over his eyes. Willa touched Arcadia's arm, she saw tears waiting to well. They were all too tired, she told herself. They had had too little sleep and too much wine. Everything was too close to the surface.

As a social event, the Reades' New Year's party made society columns as far away as Denver. In San Francisco, the
Chronicle
noted that Sara Hunt Emory, identified as the adopted daughter of the late Phineas Emory and an heiress to the Emory fortune, had gone south for the event, and had made her private railway car, the Golden Eagle, available to a large group of friends from the city's first families, in which to make the trip.

     Willa and Owen had loved the mention of the Golden Eagle. It was one of the items Joseph Brennan had managed to secure as part of the extraordinary divorce settlement he had arranged for Sara. Joseph called it "one of the little extras." So among Sara's closest friends the car became "The Golden Extra."

     The settlement had made Sara one of the richest women in the West. This would have surprised anyone who saw her in the weeks before the big party. She had decided to paint a huge mural at one end of the pink barn, above the stage erected for the band. She put Thad, who with Wen was home for the holidays, and several of Trinidad's children to work helping her. All of them were happily paint-spattered for days.

     "It is not what you would call a work of art," Sara said of the big wall painting, "but you must admit, it has a great deal of vigor."

     "And it's colorful," Arcadia ventured to add, a comment that had us all laughing, since the color choices were limited to bright red, blue, and yellow.

     The bunkhouses had been sprayed to get rid of the fleas, then they were scrubbed and whitewashed and fitted with cots for the male guests. The women were staying in the big house, and various beach and guest houses close by. Tents had been set up for the servants, including a corps of new people hired for the occasion. The barn had been brushed and watered down, fresh straw was spread, banquet tables lined the length of the room, and a new floor had been put down for dancing. Everyone had been pressed into service. The orchard men had a wonderful time stringing Chinese lanterns from tree to tree. The cowboys dug deep pits for
the barbequed lamb and pig and steer that would be needed to feed such a large number.

     Owen had managed to entice several chefs from New York, one from Delmonico's even, and all were immediately enchanted with the variety of vegetables that Soong was able to supply them. For a time it seemed as if Owen's old friend, Theodore Roosevelt—who seems certain to be the country's next president—would join us, but in the end he sent a telegram regretting that he could not come, and asking instead if he might send a young friend, a woman photographer who, he assured Owen and Willa, "is known to me, and does good work." Frances Benjamin came, with her load of heavy camera equipment, and painstakingly recorded the whole event, which she quickly proclaimed "Quite unlike anything I have ever seen, a curious and interesting mixture of the Eastern and the Wild Western cultures." Miss Benjamin was quite serious when she said this, so we tried very hard not to smile.

     We prayed it would not rain for the celebration, and it did not. The thirtieth dawned bright and clear, with not a cloud to mar the horizon. The open cars of the La Chusa, Malibu and Southern Railway were draped in bunting (red, white and blue, as if the new century belonged to our country) and shuttled back and forth, delivering guests and mounds of baggage.

     Hunting, hiking, fishing expeditions, balls and beach picnics had been planned, as well as sailing parties. Each would require a separate costume, and the guests came well prepared. Some brought their own servants, only a few traveled without a trunk.
"Wild
West, indeed," Joseph snorted, watching the unloading, "this might as well be Saratoga."

     It was a marvel of organization, there was a place for everyone and everything. It had occupied Owen for the past several months, and as usual he had done a superb job.

     "This party is to be elegant," he was fond of saying during that time, "with humorous overtones." Indoor toilet facilities would be overtaxed, so a quaint little row of old-fashioned outhouses were
built, one row for men and another for women, each with its own flower box and each with an assigned servant to clean it several times each day.

     The only person of any note who was absent was Charles. Owen had incurred Willa's wrath by suggesting Charles should be sent an invitation, even though we knew he was on an extended wedding trip with his new bride, formerly his aunt. Willa would not hear of it, and Owen did not press the matter.

     Charles and Helen were the subject of interminable gossip, and Sara was not spared. "Imagine," an assistant editor of the
Los Angeles Times
, a young man recently arrived from New York, was heard to say, "he divorced his cousin to marry his aunt!" An older hand took the man aside to explain just why that particular joke, which was circulating, would not be considered funny on the Malibu.

     It didn't matter, however. Sara knew about it, but it did not diminish her sense of triumph. Sara had done what she set out to do—she was financially independent, at last. In becoming so, she had proved herself to be every bit the equal of Helen, every bit the equal of Charles. She was just as clever, just as strong. She had shown them she was their match, and she had done it the only way that could matter to the two of them: She had secured her inheritance. Having done so, she could dismiss them from her life. Which is not to say that she did not expect to have to deal with them, in one way or another, in the years to come.

"Has it ever occurred to you," the tall young man who had claimed the third waltz said, "that you live in Paradise?"

     Willa laughed—the full, thrown-back and throaty laugh that made people turn and look. "You've discovered the family secret," she said as they glided over the dance floor, "I told Owen
we should never let all of you come out here—that you'd be clamoring to get in."

     "Exactly, that's it," the young man rallied, "now that we've seen Paradise, you won't be able to keep us out . . . such beautiful mountains, such beautiful seas, and such extraordinarily beautiful women," he said, lowering his voice.

     Willa smiled engagingly; she liked bantering with this attractive young man. She wasn't the least interested in knowing anything more about him, but she liked it that he found her exciting.

     "I suggest you continue to enjoy yourself," she said with mock gravity, "because once all of you leave, we are going to wave our wand and the Malibu will vanish, just like all good magic kingdoms."

     He was looking at her with ill-concealed awe; she had made a conquest. She could hardly wait to tell Owen; he would enjoy knowing the young Vanderbilt was smitten with her.

     At the last note of the waltz, a young lady in a white dress with blue ribbons materialized to claim the young man. His face told Willa that he would rather stay with her. "I relinquish him, with regrets, I must confess," Willa said, sighing theatrically as she disengaged his hand, "I think to console myself I shall claim a dance from that handsome gentleman," she said, nodding toward Owen.

     "He is divine," the young woman gushed, "every woman here envies you, Mrs. Reade," she continued, until her partner whirled her off in an explosion of annoyance.

     Sara, having heard the exchange, tucked her arm in Willa's and said, "Why is it that the empty-headed ones insist on opening their mouths to reveal pure air inside?"

     Willa laughed. "If they don't," she said, "if they say nothing at all, some poor man is going to marry them before he knows the head is empty."

     The two stood arm in arm for a moment, watching Owen, who was in the midst of a knot of people including the governor and his lady.

     "It seems to me that Owen has changed not at all since I first saw him. Do you think? I mean when we first met you, on the train. Do you remember how he looked?"

     "Oh, yes," Sara said, squeezing Willa's arm, "I thought he was beautiful then, and I think so now. I believe that was the happiest meeting of my life. Otherwise, I would never have found my family."

     Willa looked at her with affection and said, "I do not think this family would have survived without you, little one. But we were talking about Owen."

     "Owen," Sara said,
"has
changed. Not so much physically, but in other ways."

     "What do you mean?" Willa asked. "Tell me how." And Sara was sorry, at once, that she had said it, but now there was nothing to do but extricate herself.

     "I don't think he is quite so afraid as he once was . . ." she began, trying to be vague.

     Willa's face said she didn't understand. "I only mean," Sara went on, "that he seems to have made peace with some of the things that once seemed to drive him . . . Don't you see it too?"

     Willa thought about it. "I suppose so. He isn't in such a rush to accomplish everything today. He is more at leisure, I think. Except he can still fly about like some whirlwind—this party is proof of that."

     Feeling their eyes on him, Owen looked up and waved. Excusing himself, he began to make his way around the dance floor to them, but midway a couple stopped dancing to speak to him. He was caught, Willa could see. For a moment she felt a point of anger, almost. Their life had so often been like that—dreamlike, Owen trying to reach her across a crowded room, a sea of people preventing it.

     She caught herself. "How silly of me," she thought; they were no longer separate, they had never been so very much together since . . .

     . . .
since the baby's death
, she admitted to herself.

     The baby's death had brought them together. She would never say it out loud, not ever. But it was true.

     She turned abruptly, colliding with a man and sending his champagne splashing over both of them.

     She cried out. "No mind, Mrs. Reade," the man said, "none at all." He had a sharp face and a hooked nose. She looked at him to place him, and felt as if she might faint. Wen was dancing nearby. She put her hand out to him, "Son," she said, her voice tremulous. Wen quickly took his mother and guided her outside, where he sat with her for as long as he deemed necessary. Thad would have seen the confusion in her face, the pain. Wen was simply anxious to get back to the dance. "I'm fine," she told him, waving him away. "Truly, you can go." But she wasn't fine and she didn't know if she had actually seen Amos Proctor, the Treasury agent who had caught Connor McCord here, on this very ranch, almost five years ago—or if her thought about the baby, the dead baby, had created the illusion. She lay back against the rough side of the barn, out of the circle of light, and closed her eyes. Did she dare go look for him? Could he be real? No, she decided. His name certainly had not appeared on any guest list. He was a terrible creation of her own mind.