Hers the Kingdom (41 page)

     "Superficially it was over a feud between two tongs; one had accused the other of taking one of its women. There were so few Chinese women in those days that it was seen as a great offense. A policeman was shot, a mob gathered, it didn't take long until all it wanted was blood—foreign blood. The Chinese are hated as much as—perhaps more than—the Negroes from the American South or the native Indians. Dark-skinned peoples. The darker, the more hate."

     "What happened to you?" I wanted to know. "Who took care of you?"

     He laughed. "I had been taking care of myself for a while by then. I was always big for my age, and Grandfather had sought refuge in the opium pipe. It took away his pain, and for that I was grateful. America was a great disappointment to my grandfather. He would never have left China, had it not been for me."

     The strange, worrisome feeling prodded me again. Why "if not for me"? Before I could ask, he went on to tell me what I in fact already knew, that Judge Gray had employed him as a gardener and houseboy, that he gave him access to his library. That when
the judge died, Owen asked Wing Soong to come to the ranch and work for us, and that Soong had agreed, on condition that once each year he be allowed to return to the judge's house to tend the garden and make sure the boy in charge was caring for it properly.

     "Each year, on the anniversary of the massacre, Mrs. Gray finds offerings of silk and porcelain left on her doorstep, from those Celestials whose lives her husband saved," Wing Soong told me.

     "Do you ever wish you were in China?" I asked.

     The question gave him pause. His answer, it seemed to me, was unusually careful. "I should like one day to live in a place where I could feel that I belonged."

     I did not understand, and said so.

     "I mean," he went on with what I thought was purposeful obscurity, "equality is an idea that is peculiar to the West. As with many Western ideas, it sounds reasonable—when in fact, it is not. Not if
reasonable
is thought also to mean possible or practicable."

     "I suppose you're right," I sighed. "Certainly the Civil War did little to free the Negroes, other than to release them from the status of being mere property."

     "People of dark skin are despised in this country—whether they be Africans or American Indians or Chinese. A man's worth seems to correspond to the color of his skin, and the paler he is, the more acceptable."

     It occurred to me that he was, after all, many shades paler than most of his countrymen, by virtue of his British father. It also occurred to me that I had come to feel easy in his British presence— to what might be a dangerous degree. His next remark confirmed it. "I have my father's skin," he said, "but I am my mother's son. I belong to her country, of that I am certain."

     "Why did you leave, then?" I asked, a bit flustered. As soon as I said it, I had hit on what had been at the back of his mind. "If the sum your father left was considerable, would it not have been possible to have a better life in China?"

     Wing Soong sat back on his haunches and studied me until I began to feel uncomfortable under his gaze.

     "Ah, you have caught me out," he said. "I could have had no life at all in China. There, a half-caste is despised. My grandfather was certain that I would be accepted in American society. He reasoned that my British blood would win me admittance, and that my Chinese heritage would make me irresistible—enriching the barbarian strain, as it were." He looked at me with pained good humor, but I could not smile back.

     "What a terrible dilemma," I murmured, "rejected in China for your Anglo-Saxon father, and in this country for your Chinese mother."

     Rose came to rest in my lap, having tired of her solitary game. Wing Soong studied her solemnly. Suddenly, she reached for his large hand with her small one, and without so much as a murmur she kissed the long, sleek fingers.

     I looked into his eyes and found there something so wild and pained that I had to look away. Rose had touched a memory, I knew that. Soong raised his fingers to the baby's cheek and brushed it, gently.

     "Sweet girl," I whispered into her neck as I held her to me, "Sara was right. You are a fairy child."

Sleep would not come that night. Instead, Soong's words wound into my thoughts. I tried to understand the awful irony of it, the pity that his grandfather could not have been right. But then I would remember Soong's own sympathies—he chose to be Chinese. Yet, even while he was unacceptable in both countries, he found himself in the one he least preferred. (Still, could it be so very bad here on the Malibu? Surely he could not think so. Could he?) Restless, I walked into Rose's room to watch her asleep. I leaned close. As she exhaled, I breathed in the soft smell of her sleep breathing.

     It came to me, then, that Rose, like Soong, was half-caste. They had that in common. I wondered if it had occurred to him, and knew at once that it had.

     Rose called Owen "Father" and Willa "Mother." I was "Lema" and Wing Soong was "Wings," pronounced as an endearment. The arrangement seemed to make everybody happy. Willa and Owen were correct with the child, neither pushing her away nor pulling her close. Thad found Rose enchanting, especially since she did not usurp any of his parents' time. In fact, Rose's arrival corresponded to the time when Thad became an integral part of their lives. I had never seen Thad so happy; on those days when his father and mother were busy, he spent time with us in the garden, to Rose's great pleasure. Thad, thus, was so much in the center of everyone's life that he flourished.

On Wen's occasional visits to the ranch I searched his face for the boy I knew must be there—tender and hurting. I wanted so for him to come to me, to sit quietly next to me on the swing in the arbor and tell me, as he had so often, what it was that made him happy, and what made him afraid. But that Wen never came. More often now, when I watched the rambunctious boy who had taken his place, a peculiar, dull ache would settle into my chest. After a while, it came to me that what I was feeling was a kind of grief. I wrote in my daybook: "I mourn the Wen who might have been." What I did not write, what I did not admit to myself for a long time, was that I did not much like the Wen who had taken my boy's place.

     The schoolmates who came with him were loud and awkward and, if not monitored, were likely to be up to some mischief. They taunted the Chinese workers unmercifully, and made rude demands of the servants. Trinidad's children learned to disappear when Wen and his friends came. I tried, once, to talk to her about
Wen's behavior, but she would not let me. I suspect that she was too hurt to admit to what Wen was doing, or perhaps Ignacio and she had decided, together, how best to deal with the problem. It hurt to think that they had encountered it before, it was a part of their life that had eluded me.

     Only once did Wen get his comeuppance. He and his friends made the mistake of locking little Thad—who was afraid of the dark—in one of the gloomy corn bins in the barn, where he was bitten by a rat. The child was in a state of hysteria when they turned him loose. One of the cowboys happened by, found him, and carried him to the house, where he sobbed out his sorry story to Owen, Willa having gone into town for the day.

     To his credit, Owen sent the boys packing. He called not for the surrey, but for one of the crude farm wagons without springs, and with hard wooden planks for seats, and sent them to their elegant homes in something less than the style they expected of the master of the Malibu. Wen spent the rest of the holiday in his room, his food—in smaller portions than he preferred—sent to him on a tray. He felt the sting of Willa's wrath later that same day. I could hear her voice, full of outrage. I wondered what I would do should he come to me for comfort. I was, I am sorry to say, greatly relieved when he did not. After that, I made it a habit not to look too closely at Wen's face, knowing I would not like what I found there.

Late each afternoon Willa and I took tea together while the children were having an early supper in the kitchen. It was a pleasant, quiet time when we could exchange bits of information.

     "Thad has been biting his fingernails again," I said one day.

     "Either that or he has his hand in his pants when he thinks no one is looking," Willa answered.

     I sighed. "I think I know why," I said.

     She buttered a scone and raised her eyebrows in question.

     "Because of Wen," I said, "he's afraid of his brother."

     Willa scowled. "I know," she said. "I've tried to talk to Owen about Thad and Wen. The strange thing is, Owen rather admires Wen's bullying ways. Sometimes I think he sees Thad as the boy he was, and Wen as the boy he wanted to be."

     "A bully?" I said in surprise. "You can't mean that Owen would ever have wanted to be a bully."

     "No, not that," she went on, thoughtfully, "just part of the lively group, keeping pace. Owen's health has always prevented him from living what he sees as the active—and thus preferable— life."

     "How can he possibly think of his life as being anything less than active?" I said in amazement.

     "Yes, well," she paused, thinking hard, "it's that the matter of his health has always been preeminent, it has always been there, in control. And whenever he would think he had overcome it, well, something would happen. Like Boston, last time. He might have died, he came very close. It makes him look at things differently."

     I remembered a ride Owen and I had taken a few months before Rose's birth. He had only just begun to trust himself to ride again, and asked that I accompany him on a short half-day trip to count the cattle in Soston Canyon. It had been a bright, clear day and we had ridden a good distance in silence, until he came upon a ridge which looked down into a grassy mesa where a hawk was circling.

     "Willa would not approve, I am sure," I said, "but there are times when I want to shout to warn all the little animals that might fall prey to the hawk."

     Owen smiled. "You needn't shout today, he's giving his own warning—don't you see it?"

     I looked, but saw nothing.

     "The shadow of the hawk," Owen said. "The little animals know
that shadow, they know to scurry for cover—" he paused and in quite another voice said, "haven't you ever felt the shadow of the hawk, Lena?"

     Those words had sent a shiver through me. At tea, I told Willa of our conversation and was at once sorry that I had, it affected her so. She sat silent the rest of the time. I wanted to say something to mend any harm I had done, but there was nothing to be said.

     Rose broke the silence by running to us with her hands out—they were bright red, berry stained.

     "What's this?" I laughed, "Wait! I know. You've been helping hull the blackberries."

     She answered with a peal of laughter, opening her mouth wide to show a bright, berry-stained tongue. "And you've sampled a few along the way, you scamp," I teased.

     "Don't touch anything until you've washed those hands," Willa admonished her.

     "Mother want two nice hands on her blouse?!" Rose teased, her eyes sparkling.