Hers the Kingdom (98 page)

     It was a bittersweet homecoming. He was changed by Spain, you could see it in his eyes, in the way he entered a room or lifted a glass. He had learned a hard lesson in Spain.

     He needed time to recover, spiritually and physically. Kit kept strict account of his exercises. She saw to it that he walked the prescribed number of miles each day on the beach, that he swam in the saltwater pool she added to the beach house, that he slept.

     Porter started writing again and, when his leg was completely healed, accepted a job with the International News Service—Hearst's wire service.

     All the while I was working on my family "history," convincing myself that when it was finished I would give it to him to read, that any less of an explanation would not do. And each day the story got longer as more and more details were needed to explain all that has happened, to explain the deception.

     Porter was to be in Los Angeles for two years. He was at the townhouse the morning that Willa did not appear in the library as usual, and he was there with us, at her bedside, two weeks later when she opened her eyes and said, "Lena, do you remember my telling you about waking in Cousin Minnie's house in Newton Center, and seeing the yellow rosebuds on the wallpaper and not knowing where I was?"

     "Yes, darling," I murmured, taking her hand, "I remember."

     She looked at me as if she meant to say something more, but before she could she lapsed into the sleep from which she would not awaken.

     Willa knew, in the last months of her life, that Kit had put on the market two large blocks of land on the Malibu. She knew the earnings were enough to recoup losses and put the Reade
Land Company on a firm footing. The family still owned vast tracts of land in the Malibu, land that was certain to increase in value so that, eventually, the family fortunes would be more than replenished.

     Willa knew, but she chose not to acknowledge the sale. She did not leave the house in those last months, not until the day of her funeral.

     I sold the townhouse then. It had served its purpose, and Kit wanted me to move back to the beach house with her, while Sara continued to prod me to come to San Francisco. I decided that as long as I was able, I would divide my time between the two.

     Trinidad moved back to her old house on the ranch, to live with her daughter Marcella and her family. She was apologetic, telling me over and over again that she would worry about me, that she would be sure to come to see that I was eating properly. Porter and I drove her out to the old house in his big Buick. She cried all the way until finally I gave her a stiff poke in the ribs and said, sternly, "Trinidad, you are going to dry up and simply blow off into the hills if you don't stop leaking all those tears!" That made Porter laugh and Trinidad cry even harder, until I promised I would see her every week, and told her once more that if living with Marcella's family did not prove happy, she would always be welcome to come live with me.

     Porter talked about Spain in the abstract; he spoke of campaigns and strategies and international politics. He did not talk of the people he knew, he did not speak of death or of disillusionment. When, once, Lucy blurted, "Did you ever have to shoot anyone?" his eyes had, for a flicker of an instant, a haunted look. He did not answer her question.

     I believe he talked to Kit. They spent long hours together in the months following his return. Once they saddled horses and took enough supplies to camp deep in the canyons for five days. Kit was as responsible for his recovery as were the doctors.

     She was another reason I delayed telling Porter. I could not know what it would do to them, to the way they thought about
themselves, if they believed that being twins was the source of their almost mystical closeness.

     December 7 was a particularly balmy winter Sunday in 1941. Kit and Porter had been invited to play roque, a game something like croquet, on the court at the beach colony. They insisted I go along, and took a folding chair for me to sit and watch the game. The roque court was laid out behind the row of beach cottages. I recognized one or two of the players from the moving pictures—a man with a neat little pencil mustache, a pretty girl in red slacks. It was a bright, sun-splashed afternoon, deceptively calm. The game was proceeding at a slow pace with a good many clever comments from the participants when a woman in a polka-dotted dress came running from one of the cottages, calling to us.

     I can see her still, stumbling in her high heels—one arm raised ineffectually, as if to signal us—the attitude of her body telling us she had news of great moment.

     "Pearl Harbor," she gasped, out of breath, "they've bombed Hawaii."

     "The Japanese?" someone demanded, and the girl in the polka-dotted dress, out of breath, simply pumped her head up and down.

     We followed her back to her cottage and gathered round a radio to listen to the news bulletins.

     "This is it," the actor with the thin mustache said dramatically, "we're at war."

     Someone giggled nervously at the voice of doom he affected, and the rest of us shifted uncomfortably, not knowing what to say.

     "Could we be in danger here, on the coast?" a woman asked. "I mean, could we be invaded?" She glanced at her children playing in a teahouse on the beach, and I saw her check an impulse to gather them to her.

     My own fear was mixed with dread. Porter would be leaving now. These two years with him had been the trough between the waves, as Soong would have said.

     I sat up all that night, from Sunday and into Monday, sifting through the pages I had typed and stored in boxes. I put a towel under my door so that no one would knock to see why my light was on so late, and I went through it all, removing those few passages that seemed, in retrospect, too terribly private. In my resolve to be forthright, I had managed to become too graphic in certain delicate matters.

     I finished before daylight, and thought to close my eyes for an hour or so. When I awakened at ten, Porter had left for the INS office and Kit was already on her way to San Francisco for a meeting planned weeks before.

     After dinner that night I asked Porter if he would take me for a drive. I wanted to see the old house on Seaside Avenue in Santa Monica.

     "I haven't been here in years," Porter said as he stopped the car in front of the house. "It looks a little run-down."

     "Don't we all?" I tried to joke.

     I took a deep breath. "I was seventeen years old when I first saw this house. Can you imagine that?" I asked him. "Fifty-odd years ago now. It changed my life forever."

     "Are you glad?" he asked.

     "Yes," I answered. "Oh, yes."

     Then I said what I had to say. I told him I had something for him to read, that it was important to me—extremely important— that he read it as soon as possible. I could not trust myself to say more. We returned to the beach house and I handed him the box. He looked at it and nodded. He did not ask what it was, or why he should read it.

     I could not sleep. I could see the reflection from the lamp in Porter's room from the balcony. It lit a small part of the coral tree that was outside of his window. He was reading.

     I walked. I wrung my hands. I listened to the ocean and matched the steady glow of light on the coral tree until the sky turned a steel gray, and then so light a gray that I could no longer
see the reflection of the lamp. I lay back on my bed then to wait for the day, and for Porter.

     When I opened my eyes he was sitting beside my bed, his elbows propped on his knees, chin cupped in his hands, and he was watching me.

     My heart lurched, sank.

     He was looking at me and there were tears in his eyes.

     "Porter . . ." I tried to say, but the words wouldn't come.

     He took my hand, he kissed my gnarled fingers.

     "I should have known," he said, in a voice that was husky. "I should always have known from the way I felt. You . . . are . . . my mother. Dear God, I've wanted it all my life!"

     "Forgive me," I started again, but my voice stuck like a lump of porridge was in my throat.

     "Forgive you?" he said, whimsically. "For what? For risking everything to give me life? For having the courage to love Soong? Soong . . ." he said, and his voice cracked, ". . . my father, after all."

     He hugged me then, as he did when he was a little boy, and I put my arms around him and let myself cry.

     I cried, and he rocked me and told me that he had been sitting there, watching me sleep, trying to decide if he felt differently about me . . . and finding that he did not, that he could not love me more, even if he had known . . . but that knowing was a gift for which he thanked me.

     Porter, my son, thanked me!

     Porter, my son.

     In the following days we talked. He had questions, more than I could have imagined. Many of them were about Soong. He was overwhelmed, and overjoyed, to learn that Soong was his father. It was unbelievable, he said. A child's dream come true. I tried to answer all of his questions. I told him there were no more secrets, none at all. My only concern was Kit.

     "I've been thinking about Kit too," Porter admitted. "I have to tell her, and I've been trying to decide how. In some ways Kit—the
change from brother to cousin—is more difficult. She has always been my other half, in a way. I remember thinking once, in Spain, that if I didn't come back, Kit would still be here . . ."

     "Must that change?" I asked.

     "I don't know," he answered, "I really don't."

     We decided that Porter should meet Kit's train, that he should tell her before they returned. It was late when I hear the car on the gravel drive. I was waiting in the kitchen.

     "Auntie," Kit said, smiling shyly and putting her arms around me, "at least, you are still
my
auntie."

     Kit accepted the new order with amazing calm.

     "It doesn't change anything," she said, "except that Porter now has a father to find."

     That was when I learned of Porter's resolve to see Soong. "I have to," he told me, "I can't explain why, but it is important that we meet as father and son."

     "I don't see how," I said. "Not now, not with the war."

     "I've got to try," he insisted.

Porter left for Hawaii in the last week of December, just after Christmas, as an accredited war correspondent for the International News Service—INS. He had convinced his editors that with his command of the language he could best serve in the China theatre. His personal objective, we knew, was to go to the communist stronghold in Shensi province in the northwest of China. For the time being, he told no one of his personal connection to a high-ranking member of the Chinese communist regime. It would not, he reasoned, put him in good graces in Chungking, where Chiang Kai-shek held forth.

     His letters, during the months in Hawaii, were filled with details of life in the islands after the bombing of Pearl. He spoke of red tape and bureaucratic confusion, of a military in disarray, of
the wangling he was doing to try to position himself in China. He asked that we pull any strings we could. Lucy got some help from the Nimitz family, with whom she had become acquainted when she was in graduate school at Berkeley. Kit suggested that Porter might look up Lieutenant Commander Flannery. She had seen him last six months before, when he was stationed in San Diego, but she knew that he was scheduled for another tour of duty in Hawaii.

     Porter's return letter told her that he was sorry to have to report that Lieutenant Commander Flannery went down with the
Arizona
during the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

     When Kit read of Michael Flannery's death, something seemed to harden inside her. He had made her laugh. They had danced together, had held close on the beach at Waikiki eight years before. They had seen each other, now and then, since. Now he was dead, and she knew it was only the beginning.

     It was not until Porter wrote to tell us he had managed to get himself assigned to General Stilwell's staff and would be on his way to Chungking in a few weeks that he wrote us about Ch'ing-Ling.

     "I had not thought to see her. I told myself it would be better not to, but the moment I set foot on the islands again, I knew I would. She is a doctor now, a pediatrician working in the children's hospital. She is more beautiful than I remembered, if that can be.

     "The war has had a marked effect on Ch'ing-Ling. The day of the bombing—December 7—was a horror she will never forget. She was on duty, and saw the worst of it—the dead children.

     "In a peculiar way, the practice of medicine and the war have accomplished what I could not. They have brought Ch'ing-Ling out of her traditional Chinese protected life and into mine. And still, she is Chinese enough to tell me that it has all been ordained. That she has moved, inexorably, in planned patterns to this time, this place, to me.

     "She has been waiting for me. I cannot believe it, but that is what she says. She has been waiting, all this time. And I feel, when I am with her, that she is right. That everything is right.
Even though we cannot be together for long, and perhaps will not be again."