Hers the Kingdom (90 page)

     Had not Charlie Rich appeared at that precise moment, things might have gone differently. But he did show up—stouter, bald, and older, like the rest of us, but with the same old evangelical claim to a first-rate, sure-fire, can't-fail solution to all of her problems. "Here's what we do," Charlie said with his big, know-it-all smile, and Willa listened.

     She would sell off one section of the Malibu, Charlie explained. No plot would be less than two acres, none more than four. Building would be restricted, highly restricted. They would cut as few trees as necessary, so the homes would be hidden in the woods and hills. It would be a section close to the road, very tasteful, very discreet. No one would even know they were there.

     But right now, speed was the good word, said Charlie in his rapid-fire speech. He must have power of attorney if he was going to get the money together for her as fast as she needed it. Otherwise it could take weeks, months, going through Joseph with all the paperwork. Willa hesitated for perhaps two minutes. Then she announced that Charlie Rich had helped get the Malibu for them, and now he would help her keep it. I wanted to remind
her of what Owen had said, once, about Charlie—I didn't, because I knew she wouldn't believe me. I knew she needed to believe Charlie.

     Within the week, newspapers in Los Angeles carried a remarkable advertisement. A limited number of homesites on the exclusive Malibu Ranch would be available for development. Charlie called in no time to say that people in limousines had been lining up at his office door, that the homesites were going like hotcakes.

     Charlie had another idea that Willa liked even more—one that would bring in quick money without her losing control of the land. The pretty beach near the point would be offered for lease—that is, beachfront sites would be made available to anyone willing to put up a cottage. The lease could be renewed in ten years, but only if Willa wished.

     "Who would want to put up a cottage for just ten years' time?"

     "Lots of folks," Charlie had chortled, "Hollywood is full of crazy folks right now, all those people making moving pictures."

     "I'm not sure I'd want them on the Malibu."

     "They won't bother you, Mrs. R.," Charlie assured her, "count on me."

     Count on me, Charlie kept saying. And Willa did.

     As little as I liked the man, he did seem to be solving Willa's dilemma. As he had said, the moving picture people, as well as a shoe salesman from Baltimore and a dress manufacturer from Hoboken and any number of other wealthy, retired people, leased the beach property and started to put up little wooden cottages, each with a teahouse fronting on the ocean. (It was Willa's edict that these teahouses must be open on three sides and none must block the view of any other.)

     I took over the ranch office for Aleja so that she could return, once more, to spend a month in Washington with Sally. This was her fourth visit in as many years. I was happy to take over the office duties, since there was little reason to go to San Francisco
that summer. Connor and Kit were in Ireland. Sara was in Italy. I never knew where Porter might be.

     Porter had written three long articles on the plight of the stevedores on the docks in San Francisco. The longest article had appeared in
The American Mercury
and had made Porter
persona non grata
on the docks. The owners labeled him a troublemaker. The men were afraid to be seen in his company.

     "Will the articles make a difference?" I had asked him, and he had answered, "No. Not really."

     And that was why, he explained very carefully, he had decided to give up writing for the time being, and take more direct action. He intended, he said, to become a labor organizer.

     "Organizers get beat up," Kit had said, voicing my worry, "regularly. And they get killed."

     "Somebody has to do it," Porter answered, "and I don't plan to get killed."

     I sighed, and said nothing. He was his father's son. He would do what he had to do.

     It was the beginning of what Porter called his "phantom life." We never knew where he was because he could never stay in any one place very long. When we had to reach him we called a number. A man with a rough accent would answer, listen. He would never acknowledge that he even knew Porter, but the message always got through. He traveled up and down the coast, between Seattle and Portland and San Pedro, sleeping who knows where—sometimes in flophouses that charged a quarter a bed, sometimes in the homes of longshoremen.

     Once he came walking up the beach at the Malibu, a pack on his back like one of the transient workers who more often of late wandered into the ranch looking for work. He was grinning a big grin, which was not all that easy to see through a three-day growth of beard.

     "I figured I'd be safe here for a while—that you would turn your
vaqueros
loose on anybody who came looking for me," he said to Willa. "If your own mother won't protect you, who will?"

     "We read about you in the newspapers," Willa answered drily. "At least, we assumed the 'rabble-rousing labor organizer' they talked about might be you. Owen would turn in his grave if he knew a Reade was stirring up all that trouble."

     "Beats working," Porter teased, and Willa threw up her hands in mock surrender. "I quit talking sense to you when you were thirteen," she laughed.

     "Ah, yes, the disinheriting scene . . . smartest move you ever made, Mother." He was in good spirits, which made my own soar. Trinidad hovered over him making small clucking noises and sniffling at the same time so it was hard to tell if her joy at seeing him was overcoming her worry that he would be hurt.

     "Have you been tarred and feathered yet?" Willa wanted to know.

     "Chased out of town a few times—that's all."

     Porter stayed only a few days, enough to hear me spill out my concerns about Willa and the ranch, about Thad, about everything. He listened carefully, nodding at times, asking a question now and then. He had no answers for me, but we explored possibilities together and I was aware, once more, of his capacity for reasoned thinking. It was comforting. When he left I felt relieved, somehow; I know I had a better understanding of what my own role might be. Certainly I knew how limited it was.

     Aleja returned from her summer trip with startling news. At one of the embassy parties she and Sally attended she met the vice consul of the Argentinian embassy, Antonio Rodriguez de Cambon, a widower with two young children. He had, after a three-week courtship, proposed marriage. She had, she said, accepted. "Imagine," she added, "a bride at age forty."

     Willa's response was to open her arms and hug Aleja. Trinidad's was to burst into tears. We were, all of us, happy for Aleja. Seeing her, beaming as she was, made it difficult not to be glad, even if it meant her moving across the continent and, one day surely, to the Southern hemisphere.

     "My work here . . ." Aleja had said, "I will stay as long as . . ." Willa had interrupted to tell her that, as valuable as she was, it was more important to us to see her happily married and with a family of her own. We would, Willa said, find another young woman to take over the ranch office.

     Aleja and Antonio were married at the old Franciscan mission in Santa Barbara on a bright afternoon in September 1929. We were all there for the wedding—Arcadia and Joseph, Willa and Porter and Kit and Connor, Philip and Sara and Sally, and Trinidad in blue lace. A friend of Porter's from college days took moving pictures of the group as we milled about the mission garden after the ceremony. I would view that film many times the following year. I can't say why, but it gave me a deep sense of calm to look at us as we were that day, happy to be together on a joyous occasion, a family event.

     The film jumps in the beginning, a bit of grass and a stone step coming into view. And then Porter appears, raising his hand in salute to his friend who is behind the movie camera. Porter— tall, trim in his summer white suit. He smiles; his face is finished now. At twenty-five it is sharply chiseled, the gently shaped eyes, the high cheekbones seem so perfectly Eurasian to me. I cannot understand why others do not see it, but they don't. The camera follows Porter as he walks over to Willa, bends to kiss her on the cheek, says something that makes her smile. Then he turns to Trinidad, who throws her arms about him in one of her great hugs. Trinidad, her mountainous body covered in lace, an orchid corsage perched on her shoulder. Trinidad is laughing and crying and hugging everyone, in her happiness.

     The bride and groom move into view. Antonio is a pleasant-looking man, gracious in the way of professional diplomats.

     Aleja, wearing the ivory chiffon dress with its long, flowing sleeves that Sara and I helped her choose at the City of Paris, smiles modestly at her groom, and then they smile together for the camera, posing as if for a still photograph.

     Sara says something that makes us all turn to her, laughing. She talks with her hands, waving them in the air as if directing a pageant. It seems to me that Sara, at sixty, is much handsomer than ever she was as a young woman. Celebrity has helped. It is as if her face has rearranged itself, has settled into softer, more interesting lines. Her eyes sparkle. She is dressed with her usual exotic élan, a paisley shawl with long silk fringe tossed over her thin shoulders, the flowered turban that has become her trademark framing her pixie face.

     The camera moves to Arcadia and Joseph, who stand talking to Connor and Kit. Arcadia throws her head back and I can hear the laughter. That has not changed, even if Cadie has. The curves are gone now, her body has become thick with age. She colors her hair, and the blonde curls seem an echo of the sprightly girl of thirty years ago. Joseph has not been well for some time. He is much too heavy, his legs do not allow him to stand for long. Cadie flutters about him like a mother hen. She leans to whisper something in his ear, no doubt asking if he wants to sit down, if he is feeling well.

     Kit comes into focus, Connor standing just behind her so that we look full in his face. Unaware of the camera, he is looking at her with such adoration that she bends toward him and, at that moment seeing the camera, stops and smiles, instead, into the lens. A dazzling, happy smile. At twenty-five, Kit is beautiful as a woman is beautiful. Connor, more than twice his wife's age, has managed to age flawlessly, if that is possible. His body is strong, trim in his perfectly tailored suit. Since his marriage, a look of contentedness has come into Connor's eyes.
Dear Connor
, I think when I see him on the film. I don't know why—just
dear Connor.

     At the end of the film, as it is beginning to run out, I glimpse myself walking across the garden with my awful, awkward side step. I raise my hands to my face, as if to hide. Then Porter rushes up, pulls me to him and makes me take my hands from my face. I do as he says, and his lips form the word "smile." I smile; we both
smile into the camera together, our arms around each other. We laugh, and the film runs out.

     I would look at that film in the years to come and remember that day in Santa Barbara with the bougainvillea spilling, blood-red, over the whitewashed garden walls, when Aleja became a bride. She stood erect, her olive skin lovely against the ivory chiffon gown, a triumph over the girl who had sobbed in my lap on the barn floor twenty-six long years ago.

     No more than a week after Aleja left for Washington, I received a letter from Soong. It was not like him to complain, though he had much to complain about, I knew. But in this letter he recounted a long series of failures and frustrations. "The saying here is that the revolution is in a trough between two waves," he wrote. "The truth is, the revolution is becalmed. So, too, is the Chinese Communist party. The Kremlin insists that any revolution must arise from the proletariat because that is what happened in Russia, in spite of the fact that Chinese society bears no resemblance at all to pre-revolutionary Russia. It is like a religion with them, the scriptures according to Lenin. If the revolution fails, therefore, it is not the fault of those who give faulty orders, but of those who fail to carry them out.

     "And the poor of China die . . . death is so much a daily part of life that one does not consider, after a time, the body of a child left in a frozen ditch alongside the road. One does not rummage through a pile of clothes left in a city alleyway, knowing that a frail body is collapsed inside.

     "There is little that gives me hope. Mao Tse-tung, in a singular act of courage, has written a report on the peasant movement in Hunan. He is saying what nobody else is willing to say: that the peasants are capable of leading this revolution; that in China, any revolution must come from the countryside—not the proletariat. Mao is building a Red Army in Hunan near the Kiangsi border.

     "I continue to be attached to the Central Committee in Shanghai. I cannot say how long we will be allowed to stay here.
But now it is safe, perhaps more for Westerners than for Chinese. Shanghai is a comfortable city, there are many foreigners here, many Americans. What I am suggesting—knowing full well I have no right—is this: Should you be able to travel here, it may be the best opportunity left us to see each other again. I do not wish to put undue pressure upon you to come. I should definitely not want you to make the journey alone. If Porter could accompany you, that would be the most agreeable possible arrangement. I should feel you protected and, at the same time, I am selfish enough to want to see him now that he is grown and a man.

     "I know that I ask too much. Forgive me. But if, by some miracle, it is possible, come quickly."

     
If it is possible.
It had been seven years since the summer in Macao. Seven long and lonely years.

     I would make it possible. I would go, nothing could stop me.

     Not only did the prospect of seeing Soong lift some heaviness from my heart, but I also felt a need to come together, the three of us, one time. One last time.