Hers the Kingdom (11 page)

     She greeted them in a voice that matched her looks, all low and throaty, and it carried. Willa felt as if they were, all of them, part of some studied theatrical production. She felt, in fact, a moment of stage fright, a tightening of the throat.

     In the years to come, she or Owen would meet one or another of the guests of that evening, and invariably that person would remember Helen Emory sweeping toward them, saying, "Ah, the young Mr. and Mrs. Reade, how very nice." Before Helen could say more, a young man materialized behind Sara, put both of his hands on her head so she could not turn around to look at him, and said, "I suppose you've all heard the scandalous news about Sara Hunt?"

     Sara's face flushed with pleasure.

     "Charles!" she laughed, reaching to pull his hands down, holding them for a moment in her own, "This is my mad cousin-of-sorts, Charles Emory."

     "How very nice of you to think of us," Owen said to Helen Emory, bowing to her and smiling warmly before turning to shake hands with Charles. He accomplished this with such ease that
Sara's oversight in introductions went almost unnoticed. Before Sara could recoup, Helen, smiling indulgently, said, "I will leave you cousins-of-sorts to entertain the Reades," and moved languidly away to greet another guest.

     "You heard the Queen," Charles said, shrugging. Sara gave him a cautionary glance which she did not bother to hide from Willa and Owen.

     "Charles spends a good deal of time polishing his sarcasm," Sara told them. "It is his one great talent."

     The affection she felt for him was obvious; they seemed at ease with each other, the ersatz cousins. Willa knew they had spent parts of every summer together for as long as Sara could remember. He was as much a confidant as Sara had ever known. The sarcasm surprised Willa, in large part because Charles Emory was already running the southern branch of the Emory empire, out of Los Angeles.

     Charles, it turned out, was Willa's dinner partner. The two of them were seated near their hostess, while Owen and Sara were at the host's end of the table. As they were seated, Willa caught Owen's eye. Holding her gaze, not letting it go, he bent to say something to Sara, who also turned to look at Willa with an especially affectionate smile, all the while nodding in agreement to whatever it was that Owen had said about Willa. She could feel herself flush with pleasure.

     Willa had never seen such a profusion of silver and crystal and china. Candlelight made the whole of it glitter. Now and then, reflections from the diamonds worn by the women sent a glint of blue across the room. Willa felt as if she had wandered into a pleasure dome. Overwhelmed, she said on impulse, "This seems quite unreal to me."

     Charles looked at her, amused.

     "Do you mean unreal," he said, "or do you mean grotesque?"

     Willa was startled by the question.

     "Why should I mean grotesque?" she asked.

     "Cultivated young Eastern ladies sometimes do," he answered,
smiling disarmingly. "Sara, for instance, finds these supper parties macabre. Didn't she warn you?"

     Willa looked at him, trying to understand what he was saying. She had had no disparaging thoughts at all about the gathering. She had, in fact, been enjoying herself. But now Sara's favorite relative was telling her that, perhaps, she was being naive. Or was he? She looked down the table at Sara, who, at that moment, was listening with what seemed to be total attention to a small man whose hair was plastered sideways, in strands, across his otherwise bald pate. On her side, Owen was talking with his usual animation to a portly man with muttonchop whiskers.

     "You are wrong," she said to Charles Emory, "I am not a cultivated young Eastern lady. I was born on a farm in the northern part of Illinois, and I grew up there. I have been East only two times, once to go to college and once this past month, to meet my husband's relatives."

     Nodding toward the man who had Sara's attention, he said, "Levi Strauss and Company, and your husband is talking to the Bank of California."

     Willa turned to look at him. She did not smile back at his quizzical smile. "Surely," she said, more primly than she had intended, "surely those men have names?"

     "They do, but it doesn't matter," he answered calmly, "your husband knows that."

     "I'm not sure he does," Willa said, "and I'm not sure I like the notion."

     "Would you call it grotesque?" Charles answered, pointedly, as if he had won a game.

     Willa smiled a very small smile, a way to end a conversation she didn't particularly like. She chatted with the gentleman seated to her left, and was perplexed when he introduced himself as "a mining engineer who worked with Mr. Hearst on the Homestake" without bothering to say who Mr. Hearst was or what the Homestake happened to be.

     After a time she turned back to Charles, only to find him so intent a part of conversation which centered about Helen Emory that he didn't notice Willa. In fact, she was relieved. Willa was not at all sure of herself with Charles Emory. She was prepared to like him because Sara did, but he confused her. A whole new life was washing in upon her, and she did not want to have to look at it critically, not yet.

     Later that night, propped in their big bed at the Lick House with a tin of crackers and a bottle of mineral water to aid the digestion of the enormous supper they had consumed, Willa and Owen shared impressions of the evening. When she asked him about Mr. Hearst and the Homestake, Owen roared with laughter. "Welcome to the West, my love," he had said. "Lesson number one is that George Hearst—Senator Hearst—was the most successful mining engineer in the country, having discovered both the Cornstock in Nevada and the Homestake in South Dakota, not to mention the Ophir and the Anaconda, all of them enormously rich mines. Legendary strikes, actually."

     Each told the other which of the Emorys' guests they had met, and what had been said. They talked into the night, enjoying themselves, feeling, for the first time, the camaraderie of marriage.

     "What did you think of the new Mrs. Emory?" Willa asked, with only a very slight wrinkle of the nose, enough to give Owen a clue.

     "I think the new Mrs. Emory is one dance-hall girl who won the sweepstakes," Owen answered.

     "But Sara said she was with the Royal Shakespeare Touring Company," Willa said, ignoring for the moment his allusion to their host of the evening.

     "Yes, well," Owen replied, his voice saying she had a lot to learn, "quite a lot of the gold towns did build what they called opera houses, and touring companies did come through regularly, but as often as not those companies would go broke somewhere along the way, and the actors and actresses would have to find whatever
work they could. It was not a particularly easy life for a woman, as you can see if you look hard at Helen Emory."

     Willa did not know what he meant.

     "Just that she works very hard, and is adept at stage makeup," he told her, somewhat vaguely.

     "Sara says her new stepmother is only a few years older than she."

     "I would say that Sara is giving you the official story," Owen answered. "I would be willing to bet that she celebrated her thirtieth birthday some years back," he went on.

     "But why?" Willa wanted to know. "Why would it matter? Mr. Emory is an old man . . . a fat old man, as a matter of fact."

     "A fat old, shrewd old, rich old man," Owen added, "which doesn't mean he has given up on having an heir of his own. I imagine that might worry Sara's cousin Charles some."

     "Ah," Willa said, as if she had found the piece to the puzzle. "I wonder if that's it."

     "That's what?" Owen wanted to know.

     When Willa repeated her dinner conversation with Charles, Owen munched thoughtfully on a cracker for a time. "You should understand," he started, slowly, "you should know that the people there tonight—except for Sara, who knows you now—took you to be someone else entirely. Someone more like what I suppose your grandmother to have been, from what you've told me about her: a snob, an Easterner who looks down on these grand Western excursions into 'society.'

     "People are funny about social customs. You meet them on the street or in the mines or wherever they work, and they are fine—energetic and pleasant, good-natured, just plain nice to be around. Then one or the other strikes it rich, and suddenly they figure they have to
act
rich—they don't know how, it turns out, so they do the best they can, and no matter how good that is, they are sure that every Easterner is looking at them askance. It strikes me as all so foolish.

     "My grandfathers—both of them—fought in the Revolutionary War, so my family is about as old as a family can be in this country. Yet that is scarcely a hundred years now. I wonder if my grandfathers worried about the English looking down on their social pretensions? I suppose they did. I do have to admit, I don't think either of my puritanical grandfathers would have seen fit to have a thirty-karat diamond dangle down into Grandmother's bosom. I kept thinking tonight that if one or two of those rich old rascals had any more wine, they were going to make a grab for that big rock of Helen Emory's."

     He caught Willa off guard. She had been chewing a cracker, and the laughter rising made her choke. Owen slapped her hard between the shoulders, sending a mouthful of crumbs spewing over the coverlet. He gave her a glass of water, which she promptly spilled, since she was shaking, still, with laughter. A towel was placed over the wet place in the bed, crumbs were brushed off, and after the flurry of activity, the two of them lay back, resting in each other's arms, thinking.

     "
Do
you understand? Charles said you did," Willa said.

     "You mean that business about knowing men by what they do, not by what they are? That's not such a new idea, and I'm not at all sure what is wrong about assigning importance to what a man does. I suppose what he meant was that there were some very powerful, important men there tonight, and that I was aware of it. That is true. I was aware, and so was Sara—that's why she asked us, as a matter of fact. I don't think there's anything shameful about that.

     "This is an exciting time to be in this particular part of the country. It is just taking shape, it is possible to play a part in shaping it. That, to me, is exciting. The men who will play major roles in California in the next few decades were there tonight. I will need to know them, that's all. I probably would have met them anyway, but meeting them at the Emorys' makes it that much simpler.

     "As for social pretensions, well—I'm not distressed by them.
Social forms have never interested me very much, anyway. I've never been able to understand their importance. What is important, it seems to me, is the chance we have out here. We can make our own plan, we don't have to live by someone else's."

     Owen turned off the lamp, felt to make sure the towel remained over the wet place on the bed, and then, touching Willa's face with the tips of his fingers, he said, "Sara is fond of Charles Emory, you can see it, so I am inclined to think there is something more to him than we saw tonight. He does seem to be a sardonic chap. Maybe that has to do with his being a nephew rather than a son, knowing you are an heir unless . . . I suppose nothing can be certain for him until the old man dies."

     "Is it different for Sara, do you think?" Willa wondered.

     "Sara doesn't seem to expect much," Owen answered sleepily, "I believe she really was surprised that we came."

     "I know," Willa said quietly. "That made me feel sad. I thought she knew we cared for her."

     Owen did not answer. She knew he was sleeping, from the sound of his breathing.

     The last thing she remembered, before finally falling asleep, were Owen's words when they climbed into the hack on their way home. "We couldn't have had a better introduction to California," he had said. "Think how lucky we have been already!"

They were three weeks in San Francisco. While Owen moved about the city, "making inquiries and meeting people" as he put it to Willa, she spent most of her time with Sara. By the day they boarded the train for Los Angeles, Willa was known by the servants in the Emory mansion, and even old Phineas recognized her well enough to nod and cough and generally acknowledge her existence.

     After the excitement and glitter of San Francisco, Los Angeles was not all that Willa had hoped it would be. The first letter I
received from the southern city was almost petulant. "It is brown and arid," she wrote, "the sun shines all day long and the breeze, when it blows, is hot. Brown and dry, and the streets full of invalids. Ninety percent of the population, I do believe, walks or wobbles along with a cane. Everybody coughs and wheezes and the talk is interminably about health, or the lack of it. All shops sell tonics. Undertakers do a thriving business. Those who do not die, live and get better and act as testimonials to the miraculous cure this climate effects, so that the next train is even fuller than the one that came before. I am so sick of the sicklings, and the doctors who send them here for 'the cure.'"