Judith Krantz (10 page)

Mike Kilkullen decided to draw back into the shadows under the grandstand and just observe his party for a while. He could see clearly across the width of the great natural hollow in the mesa, for it was illuminated by the flames of the glowing barbecue
pits, by thousands of candles in windproof glass hurricane lamps and by twinkling white lights that had been strung everywhere. Every precaution had been taken against fire, but he had stationed vaqueros along the perimeter of the bowl lest an airborne spark escape and start a blaze.

How he wished his grandfather could be with him tonight, he thought with a sudden and unexpected ache. Hugh Kilkullen was the first Kilkullen child born on the ranch, in 1867, and he had lived to be eighty-five. He had been in his still green and vigorous sixties when he started taking his six-year-old grandson out on a pony, beginning to train him in the many duties of a rancher as they rode the seemingly endless pastures that rose gradually upward from the bluffs above the Pacific, the rounded, grass-covered mesas separated by the steep-sided, wooded arroyos where oaks, sycamores, laurel and melaleucas grew.

Hugh Kilkullen had grown up in the era when the ranch was run much as it had been from its first days; he had seen the coming of the Santa Fe railroad and the passing of the great teams of forty-two horses that drew a single giant threshing machine during the grain harvest. He remembered the decades when there was no running water inside the hacienda; when kerosene lamps were lit at sundown; when a year of low rainfall meant that the women of the family had to sacrifice their precious flower beds while water, stored in great tanks aboveground, was used only for the cattle. He had seen stately stags and the honey-stealing bears who once inhabited the lower slopes of Portola Peak.

Portola Peak rose abruptly near the inland border of the Kilkullen Ranch. It was an unexpected mountain to find so near the coast, a mountain that was geologically considered the westernmost extension of the Santa Ana range. The mountain, which had given the ranch its original name, Rancho Montana de la Luna, pointed one steep finger toward the sky, and from certain angles observers could see the moon rise directly behind the summit of Portola. Every soul who lived within sight of the summit, up and down the
coast, had been marked by the glory of sunrise as it touched that point, beyond which range after range of the higher, snow-capped mountains in the Cleveland National Forest were often clearly visible.

Sometimes, as they rode back to the hacienda, Mike Kilkullen’s grandfather had told him stories of the era before and after the turn of the century when he and his wife and children had filled the many rooms of the Hacienda Valencia with his own four married sisters, their husbands and their children, as well as with two of his beautiful, unmarried sisters-in-law who lived with them while they waited to be claimed by suitors. Hugh Kilkullen had married Amilia Moncada y Rivera, who was descended from another old California Spanish family, rancheros like the Valencias and related, in one way or another, to a number of the few families who had once owned all of California: the Avilas, the Ortegas, the Vallejos, the Corderos and the Amadors.

The Hacienda Valencia itself had stood firmly at the center of their family traditions, a home place which had been, during the time of the Valencias, a small village. It had possessed its own school, a family chapel, a smithy, a tannery, a slaughterhouse and a dairy. Almost a hundred employees had worked for the family alone: shoemakers, cheesemakers, seamstresses, carpenters, bakers and even a resident jeweler.

Sailing ships frequently rode at anchor off the Valencia harbor, bringing ice from Alaskan glaciers to cool their summer drinks, a grand piano from Germany for Mike’s great-great-great-grandmother, Irish crystal and English porcelain for the dinner table. That lavish and intensely hospitable epoch had vanished when Spanish ranchero life had ended, as dead as plantation life in the South after the Civil War, but much of its open-handed spirit lived on into the late Victorian and Edwardian days. Hugh Kilkullen, a dedicated amateur photographer, had captured it in thousands of photographs which were now preserved in their own fireproof storeroom.

Those rooms of the hacienda spilling over with children and their nurses, relatives and friends who visited for months at a time, those days of merriment, of passionately contested horseraces, of day-long picnics, of great balls, of brilliantly celebrated marriages, of music-filled evenings and weekly fiestas—how had all that fun and life so quickly dwindled down to himself, one solitary man who gave this big party once a year so that he could have an excuse to gather all his daughters and grandchildren around him? Shouldn’t something more of the past have been preserved for his children’s generation than photographs and his memories of his grandfather’s stories, Mike Kilkullen asked himself.

But something did remain, he answered silently and defiantly, something that was infinitely more important than the individual history of any one family. The land itself remained, the land itself was unchanged, the land that his grandfather had always told him must never be sold, because the land would always take care of the Kilkullens. Yes, the land had been preserved for the future.

From his vantage point in the shadows he picked out Valerie at a table surrounded by a group of his neighbors and oldest friends. Most of them had become millionaires many hundreds of times over in the last thirty years, turning their land into shopping malls or industrial parks, or developing it into vast housing tracts. There was no end to the hunger of people to live in Orange County. Whenever new homes were to be sold, huge crowds would gather at special lotteries to allow them a fair chance to buy. They undoubtedly considered him a backward fool for not joining them in that certain route to membership in the Forbes Four Hundred, but the Kilkullen ranch still belonged, every last acre of it, to the family. It would remain a working ranch as long as he had anything to say about it.

Watching Fernanda, clad in deerskin jeans and a denim halter embroidered with turquoise beads, dancing with an eager boy half her age, Mike Kilkullen wondered, with a familiar pang, what the future would
hold if he had had a son, someone to carry on the hardworking tradition of the cattleman.

What if he and Lydia had never been divorced? Or what, for that matter, if they’d never met back in 1947? He’d been a big, cocky, lusty kid of twenty-two, who joined the Army at seventeen and emerged, three years later, with a chestful of medals and the idea that he was an adult. Seven-league boots would have looked too small to him then, he remembered grimly.

Before his mother died during the war, she had often told his father that young Mike must get an education when the war was over. Although he’d wanted to get back to the ranch as fast as possible, his father had insisted on carrying out his mother’s wishes. He’d spent two years at Stanford, and it was during the late summer vacation, just before the start of his junior year, that he’d been invited up to the party in Pasadena where he’d first laid eyes on Lydia Henry Stack.

She was just eighteen, blooming with the perfection of a flower that had been cultivated for a flower show, her eyes brimming with calm self-confidence, as she waited for the beginning of what was certain to be a triumphant debutante year in Philadelphia. Her best friend from Foxcroft, the Virginia boarding-school, had persuaded her to come out West to visit for a few weeks. It had taken him only a half hour to talk her into leaving the party with him.

He could still remember how entrancing Lydia had been in her full-skirted, pale blue taffeta dress with its matching jacket; so maddeningly proper with her little white gloves and her satin pumps; so enticingly graceful in a slender, reined-in, precise way; her shining dark brown hair falling in absolutely disciplined waves to her shoulders, her smiling lips a perfect shade of pink that made all the other girls look overly made-up.

Yes, she had knocked the daylights out of him with her finishing-school sophistication, a unique brand of polished poise, an unmistakable stamp of class, for want of a better word, than he’d ever seen
in any of the nice Southern Californian girls he’d dated up till then.

And he must have represented something equally fascinating, new and irresistible to her, or else why would she have allowed him to take her away from a party? Why would she have spent every day of her visit with him, permitting him to kiss her for hours on end in the front seat of his convertible, until their lips were abraded and swollen and they were both feverish and sick with desire?

He’d never been allowed to touch her naked breasts. No contact below the collarbone had been her rule. Oh, he could still remember the violence of that frustration, more powerful than the best fuck he’d ever had, a frustration that neither of them knew what to do about because in 1947 anything more than kissing was unheard of for a Philadelphia aristocrat. Or for a nice Californian girl, for that matter.

So they had eloped, Mike Kilkullen and Lydia Henry Stack. Two criminally stupid, infatuated, sex-obsessed kids who should never have laid eyes on each other, let alone gotten married, had eloped because they couldn’t jump into the sack and screw themselves blind for a few weeks. Half his generation had probably done the same thing, but that didn’t mean, looking back, that it wasn’t a catastrophic way to make a decision, particularly when an easy divorce was out of the question with his Catholic background and her strict Episcopalian upbringing.

Looking back, he knew that he hadn’t realized to what extent their marriage had been a mistake until far later—years later—than she had. It had seemed to him to be working in the beginning, when they rented a little apartment in Palo Alto after college started. True, once it was legal to go to bed, the lovemaking was never as wonderful as both of them had ignorantly imagined it would be. Liddy, who had so loved to be kissed, didn’t enjoy sex. The real thing frightened and distressed her, and no matter how gentle he was, she never got over an essential distaste for what she considered a messy, intrusive act. But he was convinced
that her attitude would change in time, especially when she became pregnant so soon.

During those early months he often found her weeping, hidden away in the bathroom so that he wouldn’t hear. She’d insisted that she was only upset because she hadn’t wanted to have a baby so quickly, or because her parents were still furious with her for eloping, but later he’d understood that she was in a hopeless, unending, voiceless rage with herself for ruining her life, getting stuck in an impulsive,
unnecessary
marriage when she should have been back East where she belonged, in the city she loved, among people of her own kind, with everything ahead of her.

They had been far, far too young to get married without a great passion. Or even
with
a great passion, Mike thought bitterly. Their attraction was based on incomplete arousal and equally incomplete fantasies about each other. She’d been the princess treasure he’d won from the Eastern heart of American civilization and culture; he’d been the embodiment of the phonied-up glamour of the Wild West, heir to a great ranch, a wartime hero, already a man in her inexperienced eyes. Their great romance had been nothing more than a better-dressed, richer version of the Cowboy and the Lady.

It had been one woeful big bitch of a mistake, but Valerie was born eleven months after their elopement. Then, before the last year of college started, his father had had a fatal stroke. Overnight, prepared only by what he had learned before he’d gone into the Army, he, the last male Kilkullen, had become the big boss of the ranch. Emilio Hermosa, an old man, had been the Cow Boss at the time, and he’d attached himself to Emilio to absorb every detail of the operation of the ranch. During those early days they’d driven a pickup truck, for the area he needed to learn about was too great to cover on horseback. Liddy had found herself in charge of the running of the big hacienda, supervising the servants and the gardeners as well as caring for Valerie. Both of them had been too busy to face their misery with each other. Fernanda had been born
two years later, and the girls had managed to hold them together for a few years longer.

“Dad, what are you doing standing back here?” Jazz said, appearing at his side.

“Remembering,” he said, startled into honesty.

“What?”

“Anaheim red wine. All that champagne and vodka and white wine that everybody’s drinking tonight—do you know that once the only stuff anybody ever drank here was a plain red wine from the vineyards in Anaheim?”

“Disneyland rouge?”

“Disney wasn’t born. And ladies didn’t drink except maybe once a year or so.”

“You’re having an attack of ancient racial memories.”

“Probably. It was something your great-grandfather told me.”

“How about a dance?” Jazz asked.

“Nothing I’d like more,” he said, and led her out of the shadows onto the dance floor.

I fancy myself madly tonight, Jazz thought euphorically, as she moved through the crowd after dancing with her father, stopping to greet everybody, for not one guest was unknown to her.

She had decided to wear a precious and seemingly simple dress that she’d bought at a fiercely contended auction of great old clothes, bidding with a reckless determination to win. It was from Madame Grès and dated from the early 1960s, a long dress made of white silk chiffon, classically Grecian in style, with one shoulder draped and the other bare. This understated triumph of the most elite house in all of haute couture was so finely worked that dozens of yards of pleated chiffon fell into a slim column that moved around her gently as she walked or danced. Even standing still, Jazz seemed to be touched by a lyric breeze. Yet to the uninitiated it was just another evening gown, appropriate for any big party.

The night air had dampness in it, as it always did
so close to the ocean, and over her shoulders Jazz had thrown a magnificently embroidered black Spanish silk shawl that her great-grandmother, Amilia Moncada y Rivera, had worn a hundred years ago as she presided over special occasions at the Hacienda Valencia. It was a coveted family heirloom; none of the three sisters owned it, but her father had let her borrow it for tonight.