Hers the Kingdom (18 page)

Owen's words proved to be prophetic. Three days after his departure for Nevada City, Wen came to me in the afternoon, his eyes bright, his face flushed.

     "What is it, darling?" I asked. He whimpered and crawled into my lap, where he lay listlessly. I ran my hand under his blouse to find that his small body radiated heat. With a start I realized that he had been clinging to me all that morning. I was annoyed with myself for not having thought of it.

     I glanced at the clock; it was four. Willa had gone sailing, but she was usually back by this hour. Wen became very still, his eyes were shiny with fever. Trinidad and I bathed him with cool cloths and tried to coax him to take some water, but he would not open his mouth, he seemed not to understand us.

     "Send Ignacio for the doctor," I said with an urgency that caused Trinidad to clap her hand over her mouth to stifle a cry. She did not even ask if we should wait for Willa, but left to find her husband, who would be in the stables, behind the house.

     I continued bathing the child, afraid at how still he was, wishing beyond all reason that he would look up at me and smile as he always did, knowing he would not, could not. My fear translated to anger, and the anger began to be concentrated on Willa.

     Where was she? What right had she to be out in the water in a sailboat? Why wasn't she here to help? I made several trips to the window which looked down on the avenue, and cursed the tall trees which blocked my view. Nothing, no Willa in sight. I began to think that she was not going to come, would not return.

     Such was my agitation that when the doorbell rang, I told Trinidad to stay with Wen while I went to answer it. In my haste, in my fear and excitement and need to have help, I slipped on the last step and went sprawling. The sound of my fall brought Trinidad running, crying
"Madre de Dios!"

     I convinced the doctor that he had to see Wen first. I had
fallen before, and I felt certain it was no more than a bruise. The pain was almost welcome. I turned my anger in on myself. I had been so stupid, so very stupid, hurrying so, risking so much, when Wen needed all the attention, all the help.

     The child had influenza. He was a sturdy, healthy little boy, the doctor said. We could only hope . . . perhaps it would be a mild case. You couldn't tell. Perhaps . . .

     When the doctor left, I felt afraid again. With Ignacio's help—amid Trinidad's worried scolding—I got back up the stairway and stationed myself in the child's room, looking onto the road, searching for some sign of Willa. She had never been so late. I began to worry that something might have happened to the boat. It was too much to consider, too much to bear. When the light began to fade, I decided to send Ignacio to look for her, though I regretted his leaving, because of all the servants, he was the one who inspired the most confidence.

     It was dark when she came in. "Where have you been?" I snapped, furious. "Wen is very sick. What could possibly have kept you?"

     My words stung, I could see. She did not answer, but went to Wen. "Let's have a look at this sweet boy," she whispered to him, but Wen turned away from her. His eyes were on me, pleading.

     "I am truly sorry, Lena," she said, and her voice was so desolate that I began to cry. She sat for a long while next to his bed. When finally he slipped into a troubled sleep, she kept watch.

     My hip was aching so that I did as she said, then, and lay on the settee in the sitting room that adjoined Wen's, close by should he wake and want me.

     I woke to see her standing in the doorway, the single lamp from the child's room creating an aura behind her, so that the soft roll of her hair was lit from behind like a halo. The awkwardness between us was new. I couldn't think what to say.

     She broke the silence: "I am sorry, Lena. I should have been here, you shouldn't have had to do it all alone."

     "It was just," I began, "I thought that you might have had an accident . . ."

     "I didn't mean today," she interrupted, "I mean I've let you do everything for Wen. I've tried to tell myself that you want it, need it, when really I'm the one who needs you to do it. Wen prefers you, and it doesn't matter to me. I don't know why, Lena. I love him, but I don't love being a mother. It's not that, either. It's that . . . it seems as if I haven't had time to be a wife. I want so to be with Owen, to share his life, all of it, and because I'm a mother, I can't. I remember that when I wrote asking you to come to live with us, I said we would share the children. But I haven't done my share, and the truth is, I don't want to. Until tonight, I've been able to avoid that truth, because you never complained. You haven't once hinted that it was hard for you."

     She sat down next to me, thinking so deeply that the silence threatened to become suffocating. I forced myself to break it, to ask the question I had not wanted to ask.

     "Is that why you don't want another child?"

     Willa shivered, quietly at first, then uncontrollably. The tremors affected her voice and made it difficult for her to speak. Finally, with difficulty, she said, "I'm afraid for what I am not. Owen wants another child, he wants one desperately. Sometimes I think it is the only reason he sees for coming together, to make children. But I avoid that now, though I want it—more than he does, I want it. I love him, and I want to be with him, but I'm not ready for another child, not yet. And Wennie, poor little boy, so sick. If something should . . . if he . . . I am so afraid for him, and if . . . Owen would . . ."

     The child's fever held for three days. All that time we sat near him, Willa and I, in turn. Sometimes he would cry out for me, and Willa would call me to come. On the third night, his small body seemed finally to find a comfortable position in the bed. We had sent a telegram to Owen in Nevada City. By the time he arrived, the child was sleeping peacefully, his breathing normal, his body almost cool to the touch.

     With Owen home, I could with a clear conscience retire to my own bed to sleep the sleep of the weary and sore. Two days later, everything seemed almost normal. On the third morning, before full light, I felt a familiar rocking of my bed, a tickling of my face. Wen had crept into my bed and was waking me by rubbing my face with one of the small fur toys Owen had brought him.

     "Oh, Wennie," I said sleepily, "I am so happy to see you smiling at me."

     "Papa brought this to me," he said, poking the animal at me again. At that moment Willa appeared at the door. "Wen, dear," she said to the child in an inviting tone, "come with me and we'll have something nice to eat. Let's let Auntie sleep some more." I smiled up at Willa, knowing that she would have been listening, even in deepest sleep; knowing why she had come, and being glad that at last we would be sharing the pleasures, as well as the pain, of rearing her child.

Trinidad's face was set. Her eyebrows formed a solid line across the wide forehead and one thick hand pulled at her earlobe, always a sign of distress. Since she pulled at her ear throughout our Spanish and English lessons, I could only surmise that she was in a continual state of distress whenever she attempted to speak English. The tongue that rolled so rapidly through Spanish tripped and stumbled and sometimes even got stuck trying to speak English.

     "Aiii, Aiii, Aiii," she would wail then. I was determined to be optimistic, to praise her whenever possible, since criticism sent her into torrents of tears, but the most I could find to praise her for was her tenacity. "Let us please to
hablar inglés
," she would say.

     "Speak," I would correct her. "
Hablar
means 'to speak.'"

     "Aiii, sí," she would moan, "to speak
inglés
." Trinidad was only a few years older than I, but in some ways it seemed as if she had
lived forever. She and Ignacio had been married for several years. I had yet to see them speak more than a few words to each other. Willa told me once that she had hired Trinidad because "she is too stubborn ever to be subservient."

     "You mean you don't want subservient servants?" I had asked. Owen had laughed out loud at that, and said how refreshing it was to have someone brave enough to point out Willa's inconsistencies. Willa had glared at both of us, then, and she did not laugh. Later I apologized to her for making the remark in Owen's presence.

     "But you don't apologize for the remark?" she had asked, then, and I had said no, that I didn't.

I found out for myself that Trinidad was not so much stubborn as she was dogged, thorough. Perhaps proper is the better word to describe her, though not proper in the usual sense. She imposed an order on her life that we neither knew nor understood. She did not question, I think she could not. The old ways were so deeply ingrained that to change them required all of her will, all of her concentration. Learning the language of her employers was such a change: an impossible task, but one she would not abandon.

     The lesson must be long on this day, she told me, because of those missed during Wen's illness. Then, in the middle of reciting vocabulary, which included the words
pen, paper
, and
letter
, her eyes registered alarm, and she pulled from her pocket a letter addressed to me, apologies for her forgetfulness tumbling out of Trinidad in a torrent of Spanish.

     It was from Sara. She was coming to Los Angeles within a fortnight. She would be staying with Charles in Pasadena for a time, then she would like to visit with us, if that would be convenient. Her asking was merely a formality. Sara Hunt was always a welcome guest. The house on Seaside Avenue had, in fact, a room we called "Sara's."

     "How wonderful," I said out loud, "Sara is coming for a visit."

     
"Buena!"
Trinidad said, "her room I will make ready now."

     "No," I explained, "she won't arrive for another week or so, but I am truly glad that she is coming."

     "
Sí
," Trinidad answered knowingly, "is good you have
la amiga."

     "Friend," I corrected her.

     "
Sí
," Trinidad smiled.

     It was true, Sara Hunt was my friend, my dear friend. We visited often, usually at the house on Seaside Avenue, but now and again in Phineas Emory's mansion on Nob Hill. Once, when Sara and Helen Emory and I were chatting together in the red parlor of the mansion, I started a sentence which Sara interrupted me to finish. Helen said, "Sometimes I think you two are really just one person."

     "Do you mean two halves make a whole?" Sara replied. Helen did not answer, but left the room abruptly.

     "Sara," I said, surprised, "she didn't mean that . . . she meant . . ."

     "I know what she meant," Sara interrupted, "but I also know she has absolute disdain for weakness, any kind of weakness, if you aren't whole, Helen has no use for you. I simply wanted her to know that I know, and this seemed as good an opportunity as any to do that."

     I must not have seemed convinced, because she added in a voice barely audible, "Cripples cannot afford illusions."

     "So all stepmothers are wicked?" I asked.

     "No," she answered, "not wicked. But in this case, shrewd. And determined. Charles has spoken to Father Emory about creating a separate inheritance for me from my father's part of the business, but nothing has been done about that as yet. So I am dependent on my adopted parents. She knows I am weak, but I want her to know I am not stupid."

     Helen Emory and Sara made frequent trips to Los Angeles to visit Charles. Usually they traveled in the Alhambra. At all the little stations down the San Joaquin Valley, people would stand on the
station platform and try to peer into the sleek private car, would strain to see the two women settled in the plush chairs, reflected in the high bevel-edged French pier glass, two women in a state of truce. Phineas seldom ever traveled. Business kept him in San Francisco, at the center of his financial empire. He was glad, he told his wife, that she found Sara such an agreeable traveling companion. The truth, Sara confided, was that he found any woman tiresome after the first half hour, and he was glad to have Sara act as Helen's companion.