Hers the Kingdom (42 page)

     "Don't be naughty, Rose," I said, going for a wet cloth, but the child was away before I could wash her hands. We watched her run across the green in search of Wing Soong, doubtless to show him her red hands.

     Willa had always been guarded in Rose's presence. Now she watched the child, and suddenly her face was bared of its usual careful pose.

     "How can she be the product of such shame," she whispered, "and yet be so perfectly beautiful? How can that be?"

     "Willa, don't," I pleaded, "don't make her what she isn't. She is just a baby, a very sweet baby. No more."

     I wanted to make her understand something that I could not put into words. The set of Willa's face told me it was no use, but I had to try. The child with her blonde ringlets and blue eyes was becoming an increasingly painful reminder of the one time in Willa's life she was determined to put behind her, to bury.
Somehow, some way, I had to convince her to detach Rose from that memory.

     Owen and Willa seemed to be companions once more; still, whenever Rose entered the room I could feel the air contract. They did not, I think, see what the rest of us saw: a lovely child, the light catching in her golden hair. Willa saw the betrayal of which Rose was a living proof. And though no word had been spoken between them, Owen knew. Owen knew, and for reasons of his own let the matter lie.

     When Owen began to travel once more, Willa went with him. At first it was to make sure he did not overtire himself, to watch over him. Sometimes, when they were staying at especially lovely places like the big Del Monte lodge up in Monterey, or the Coronado Hotel in San Diego, they would take Thad along. These trips were good for them, I came to think, though I wondered if those journeys were taken to avoid a small, blonde girl.

     That Willa achieved some peace on these travels was apparent from her letters. "We had the oddest, yet most enjoyable evening with some of Owen's acquaintances," she wrote from the Del Monte lodge, "I was hard put not to laugh, however, at the rather peculiar table manners of some of the gentlemen. The menu included double Southdown mutton chops with baked yams. We had two bottles of vintage champagne with it—the gentlemen putting on their reading spectacles to examine the labels, of course. As the Haut Brion and the Perrier Jouet bottles emptied, the cries of 'Woof! Woof!'—signs of appreciation, you understand—increased. It all struck me as marvelously funny, so much so that I finally did begin to laugh and could not stop. The gathered company, at first, seemed rather embarrassed at my hilarity. After a time, they too began to laugh (woof! woofing! all along), and we all were gasping and holding our sides with laughter and pain. Later, in our rooms, Owen remarked that he doubts his San Francisco friends will ever again refer to me as the Ice Queen. I detected a note of poignancy in his voice. I think Owen was rather fond of the Ice Queen, at that.

     "Last evening we strolled along the pier at Monterey, a group of us, to catch a glimpse of the Great White Fleet then anchored offshore. Over the water we could hear the sounds of the sailors singing, their voices somehow sad as they echoed over the water. I thought of our brothers—young men like them were out there, waiting to go to war, singing now of home, and you knew how lonely they must be."

     The summer before, the fleet had been off our own shore on the ranch. One evening we went to the beach to watch them at target practice. We saw the flash of fire before we heard the resounding boom. Owen explained the phenomenon to Thad. The boy turned the idea—that light travels faster than sound—over in his mind for days afterwards, driving everyone but Owen to distraction. Owen was delighted by the boy's curiosity.

     My preoccupation with Rose meant that I spent much less time with the bookkeeping chores. A young man named Pringle was hired for the purpose—Owen's business dealings had become too intricate for one spinster aunt. Willa undertook to instruct the new man. He was a strange, fussy creature, scrupulously neat, but he did, as Willa said, "a thorough job and he keeps to his corner." He dressed all in black and had long fingers with great knuckles, which he often cracked as he worked. He lived in a small apartment of his own, fashioned in the loft of one of the bunkhouses—separate from the cowboys as befits a clerical worker. He spent all of his time in these rooms, or in the office in the ranch house, going out of doors only to cover the distance between the two. Once each fortnight he made a trip into Santa Monica in a small dog cart, always returning before nightfall.

     Charles and Sara were frequent visitors to the ranch. Owen and Charles served on many of the same boards, and their ventures were so intermingled that I had long ago lost track of them.

     Willa was better aware of Owen's business transactions now than ever she had been. She had kept a sharp eye on Charles' machinations, too, ever since he expressed an interest in running a railroad between Santa Monica and San Francisco, a route that
would bisect the ranch. "I told him no, never," Willa said to me, "and do you know what he said to that? He said, 'I don't believe in never.'" Willa could become angry just talking about it.

     That summer, Willa and Owen sailed for Hawaii, taking Thad with them. Wen elected to stay with one of his friends from school. Thad, of course, was elated when Wen turned them down. So, too, was I—the trip would surely be a success, if only the three of them were to go.

     A polite invitation had been tendered to me, and I did as I was expected to do and turned it down. I would not leave Rose, and Rose would not be welcome. The tensions did not seem to ease as time went by, but only to gather. If the truth be told, I was rather happy that we were to have the rest of the summer before us, alone on the ranch. I worried a great deal about the tensions, and tried to think how to resolve them. Perhaps they would choose to send Thad off to school in the fall, and I would go along with Rose to keep him company. I could get lodgings nearby that would be suitable for us. After all, Owen had seen to my financial independence, for which I was increasingly glad. But would it seem strange, my leaving with the two youngest children? Would Owen and Willa allow it? I doubted they would. There was one thing of which I was certain, however. Whatever pain Rose's presence gave Willa and Owen was overshadowed by the pleasure she provided for me, and for Wing Soong and Sara.

     Sara came to the ranch soon after the family's departure for Hawaii, bringing with her an inordinately large supply of sketchpads and pens. She was, she announced, going to do a portrait of Rose. She would stay until she got the necessary sketches and then she would return to her studio to finish it.

     Sara's studio was a makeshift cottage on the grounds of Charles' house in Pasadena. Rose and I visited her there whenever she was at home, which had not been very often in the past few years. Sara's natural talent at sketching, once no more than an avocation, had been developed through private lessons with Cecilia Beaux, in
Philadelphia—one of the foremost women painters in America, whom she had met through the good offices of Owen's family in Boston. Miss Beaux then sent Sara to study at the Académie Julian in Paris, which meant that she was much away from Pasadena, and her husband, though now and then their paths did cross in the house they shared. I say "shared" because it seemed to me, always, that she was but a guest in that house. Charles' travelings had little to do with hers. Occasionally they found themselves scheduled to spend a weekend at the Malibu, one not knowing the other was expected. They left messages for each other with the English butler, a Mr. Garvey, who managed the Pasadena household. He was a strange, stiff man of limited tolerance for Americans, an attitude that seemed to make him much sought after by wealthy families of the West. Quite clearly, he saw Americans as an inferior race, an attitude that seemed to entertain Charles. (Though I could not but think how this same attitude, in the Chinese, was not in the least amusing.)

     On one of our trips to visit Sara, upon leaving, Rose turned and with the great sweetness of a two-year-old thanked Mr. Garvey "for your nice house." The man did not so much as twitch, not even when Sara laughed and said, "Of course, of course—that's whose house it is. Garvey's!" Garvey did not approve of Sara. But then she did not approve of Garvey, either, as she liked to say, which almost made things even.

     Now, contemplating her spending the weeks with us that it would take to get the necessary sketches for a portrait of Rose, I clapped my hands and said, "Wonderful!" By now I had seen enough of Sara's work to know that she would give us something extremely interesting to see, some weeks hence. Or months. I loved watching Sara at work, loved seeing the kind of concentration of which she was capable, as well as the pleasure she took from her skill. And skilled she was, indeed.

     "I want to do something more than a likeness," she tried to explain, "I want to catch the light that seems to radiate . . . the child's magic quality. What the Andalusians call the
duende."

     Sara wished to portray Rose in the garden, in her favorite place, next to the daisy bush Wing Soong had planted for the child. Soong and I worked to keep Rose content in that region, so that Sara might make all the sketches she needed. I devised little games for her to play and Soong would carefully pull, scrape, and wash a carrot for her to nibble on, or sometimes he would work nearby building the traps he needed to catch the pesky moles that had been ravaging our garden.

     "Where go the little moles you catch?" Rose asked him one day. Soong was careful not to give her a direct answer, since the vicious scavengers were taken to the stream and drowned before being buried. "Don't you know about the mole family which lives on a hill on the other side of the mountain?" he said to the child, and proceeded to make up a long story about a mole kingdom burrowed into the mountain. In this way, Rose acquired the idea that all of the moles caught in the cages—and these numbered quite a few of late—were transported to this kingdom where they lived together in perfect harmony.

     Sara returned to Pasadena with a large stack of sketches, directing me to come into town in three weeks time, when she would have completed the portrait. I should, she said, bring Rose with me, and we would have a tea party in celebration. It was not like Sara to be so sure that the portrait would go well, which I took to be a good sign.

Garvey opened the door and greeted us, stiffly. "Why, hello," Rose said to the towering figure, as if she was marvelously happy to be seeing him again, "are you feeling well?" She had only recently learned these niceties, and tended to use them with everyone she met. Most people found it charming. Garvey only sniffed.

     Sara, the color high on her cheeks, ran to greet us.

     "Is my picture finished?" Rose wanted to know.

     "Yes, sweet one, it is, and I do hope you are going to like it, because I do, immensely."

     She took me by the hand, and would have ushered us at once to the studio had I not pulled her back and insisted on taking off my linen carriage coat first. Rose had managed to get her hand caught in her sleeve, and was struggling with it.

     My eyes took a minute to grow accustomed to the shadows in the old shed. Then I saw the canvas, and caught my breath. "Oh," I gasped, "oh, Sara, you
have
done it."

     She had painted the child as if from eye level, so that the viewer would see her on her own terms. The blue eyes looked out as they often did—laughing, purely innocent. Sara had caught the magic and had transferred it onto canvas. She had explained everything. I could not take my eyes from the figure on the canvas.

     "It's me!" Rose cried in delight, "and my daisies. And Wings and Lema."

     I laughed. "It's you, darling, but I don't believe I see either Wings or Lema."

     "Oh, there," and she pointed to a place just off the canvas, "there is Wings, working on the mole cage, and there," again she pointed to a place to the right of the canvas, "you are, sitting in your chair."

     "I'm glad you put her in the yellow frock," I said. In fact, Rose had worn several different dresses for her sittings—the yellow had been a gift from Arcadia. It was Rose's favorite, and mine, too.

     "It's the perfect color for her, the color of sunshine," Sara said. There was something glowing about the face, with her bright blue eyes and the saucy, direct way she had of looking at you. Sara had created an opalescent color, whites shimmering with pinks and violets and yellows, that gave the whole of the canvas a radiance. It was like nothing so much as the essence of all the summer afternoons spent in the garden, and it brought tears to my eyes.

     Rose laughed and slipped her little arm into mine. "My sunshine dress," she said, delighted with the idea.

     "I do think it is the best thing I've ever done," Sara said.

     "I wish your friend—your teacher, Miss Beaux—could see it," I said.

     "I was thinking that myself," Sara answered, slowly, "But it is your portrait, I did it for you. And now that it is finished, well, it is even more yours. There is something almost private about it, isn't there?"