Hers the Kingdom (50 page)

In Santa Monica each morning Owen set off from the house to walk the six blocks to his office in the Reade Building, the most modern commercial structure in the growing town, occupying a full city block. From this vantage he attended to the business interests that reached from Nova Scotia to Baja California. At age forty-one, Owen was president of the Sierra Madre Land Company, vice president of Pioneer Oil, a director of Southwestern Electric Company, president of the Guadalupe Rancho Company which, in a complicated maneuver involving buying the water rights to the whole of one large valley, opened some thousand acres in the San Fernando Valley to settlement. He was, at the same time, president of the Delta Land and Improvement Company and, through a combine of syndicates, had holdings that included two lumber mills in the redwood forests of northern California and Oregon, as well as silver mines in Nevada and copper mines in Arizona,
along with real estate in some of the country's fastest-growing cities.

     "Money multiplies like rabbits," he was fond of saying, "all you need is the first pair." And indeed, making money seemed to be quite a natural act for Owen.

     He also managed to be active in historical and benevolent societies, supporting innumerable orphanages and building more than a dozen new wings to churches. The number of boards of directors he served on put him in league with the very men who controlled a sizeable part of the commerce of the nation. Though Owen went to lengths to keep his name out of the newspapers, those with ambition managed always to find their way to his office in the Reade Building, and when they spoke to him it was in tones of reverence reserved for the rich and the powerful.

     Until fire destroyed almost all trace of their life on the Malibu, Owen had carefully divided his time between the ranch and family matters, and the businesses he saw to from his office in the Reade Building. Now, with Willa's encouragement, he turned all of his attention to his businesses, while she took on the task of rebuilding the ranch.

     We would come to speak of
before the fire
and
after the fire.
The fire became a point of reference, a line of demarcation. At first, everything was a whirl of activity. We were busy clearing, cleaning, taking inventory. My daybooks of that time are filled with lists . . . Willa was in the vortex, traveling back and forth on Princess, buying and then prodding shopkeepers, arguing with drayers, overseeing deliveries by land and by sea. At first, the men she had to deal with were politely condescending, and, at the same time, a bit reserved with the chatelaine of the Malibu. When she did not choose to take the many suggestions they made, they became querulous and, finally, begrudgingly admiring. For her part, Willa found the whole thing exhilarating. She enjoyed winning over the skeptical merchants and craftsmen. She felt a sense of accomplishment in realizing that she could make decisions, and that they were, as often as not, good ones.

     A month after the fire, with Willa's blessing, Owen traveled to the East. He had several meetings of boards of directors to attend and he was looking forward to visiting his friend in the White House. He also had to make a trip to New Hampshire, to St. Paul's. The headmaster had twice written about problems with Wen, problems that seemed to be the sort a father could best handle.

     Willa saw him off with remarkable aplomb. "It will give me a chance to get things cleaned up on the ranch. If we get the right pattern of rain, early enough, the hills will be green by spring." Her eyes were shining. I realized that she was planning to present Owen with a remarkable gift upon his return—the ranch, put together so the hurt the fire had inflicted on Owen could be repaired. It was a huge undertaking, and she relished it.

     One bright afternoon late in October, as Willa and I sat waiting for yet another load of lumber to arrive at the pier, she read aloud from the letter she had received that day.

     "Try as I might," Owen wrote, "I cannot seem to get the odor of charcoal from my nostrils. It haunts me, even here. I think of my collections and feel desolate. The study of hawks is altogether a better avocation than the collecting of rare oddments and precious antiquities. But you are right, my dear (I know what you will be thinking)—we did escape with ho loss of life, and for that we must be thankful. Still, I try not to imagine you in the midst of that blackened land.

     "You will be wondering about the boys. They are in good health, and send their love. Thad is pale, as always, but doing exceedingly well in his studies—though I do wish he knew more of the other boys, he is so often alone. Wen, on the other hand, would be better off with fewer friends so that he might spend more time on his studies. How I wish our two boys might blend their personalities . . . what one seems to lack, the other has to excess. Wen, however, has been properly chastised and he promises to reform. I will not, in all delicacy, go into the details of his transgressions, other than to say that I have, I think, impressed him with my determination
that he mend his ways. I have settled his accounts for the last time. The threat of being shipped home is anathema to Wen, while Thad would leave with me tomorrow if I would allow it. Strange, those two!

     "It is beautiful in New England. I had almost forgotten how lovely the autumn is here—the scattering of golden leaves on still-green lawns, the lovely musky odors of fall, the soft winds. There is, outside my window, a grove of birch that glows yellow in the afternoon light. If there is one thing I miss in California, it is the poignancy of fall, the last bright flame before winter."

     I frowned. Reading my thoughts, Willa said, "I suppose he may be considering a move back East, but it will pass. I'm quite sure he could not survive the winters, and he knows it. The fire knocked the breath out of him, that's all. By the time he returns, I will have started to get the ranch back together again, so he can see it is going to be all right. You'll see, his spirits will lift when he sees all we've done."

     Looking at the wild litter all about—the pier, and the great stacks of lumber and materials—I was skeptical, but in fact she was right. Owen returned to new green everywhere. The early season rains had revived the land, it no longer was scarred black like some image of hell. Owen took heart. He was amazed by the change, and I have never seen Willa so proud, so totally pleased with herself. It was, I thought, the way one must feel upon delivering a newborn child to its father.

We had our Christmas dinner on the beach that year. By then the outlines of the new ranch were taking shape. The day was bright and warm so that we took off our shawls as the sun grew high. Arcadia and Joseph were out for the day. Though everyone made a toast to the phoenix that was rising from the ashes, Owen's was by far the most touching.

     "To my wife," he said, "who has worked a miracle, and put our world together again."

     And she did put it together, but not quite as it had been. The new ranch house was built in the Mediterranean style, low and white with gleaming tiled floors and a red tile roof. All the rooms opened onto a verandah which wrapped around the house; in a few seasons the bougainvillea would wash in fuchsia profusion over the white walls. Owen's Victorian establishment had been supplanted by Willa's more natural, California world.

     All except for the old barn, which she had replaced as it was and painted red to please Owen.

     Ignacio and the ranch foremen, at Willa's request, offered suggestions on how to improve the work buildings, and she had incorporated many of their ideas into the finished plans. This earned her a good deal of respect from the men. They threw themselves into the work of rebuilding with quite amazing results. By summer, when the boys came home, we would be able to move into the house and resume our lives.

     Willa's unflagging enthusiasm, her patient good humor, drew Owen into its orbit. "Darling," she would say as she whirled into the dining room early in the morning, "can you possibly spare the time to ride out to the ranch with me this morning? I'm thinking it might be nice to plant an avenue of palms leading to the house, and I want your advice."

     It was the sort of question that Owen would have put to her a decade before. He looked at her admiringly, and said, "Yes, for you my dear, anything at all." They laughed easily, then, in the manner of conspirators.

     Wing Soong had been given the task of planting the new orchards and gardens. Willa worked with him, and for the first time got some glimpse of his extraordinary talents. "He is a virtual wizard," she said to me more than once, and I laughingly agreed. He was that, in more ways than Willa could possibly know.

     Soong had cleared and replanted Rose's grave even before I had a chance to see it. When Sara came for the first time, she brought with her a new daisy bush to plant at the grave. I had long since found it to be comforting to visit there. After the fire, I had a new stone carved which said:
Rose, she was touched by light.

     Throughout the spring Owen and Willa continued to live in Santa Monica, but to spend increasing amounts of time at the ranch. The fire loss had been great, but Owen's resources were vast enough to absorb them with little effect. Jacob Shurz had fared less well. The fire had jumped over his house in one of its spectacular quirks, but it had not spared his barn, his herd, or his crops. At Joseph Brennan's suggestion, Owen had our road crew clear the road that Shurz used to get to the beach. When Willa balked, Joseph explained, "Think how it will sound in court, Willa."

     "But we've won our court battle with that dreadful man," Willa countered, exasperated, "how can you think of helping him?"

     "He isn't going to quit that easily," Owen answered, "and the man is hurting, badly. I'll have the boys clear the road, and see if anyone else in those hills is going hungry."

     Owen and Willa were in town on the day that Shurz appeared, hat in hand, a scowl on his face. I spoke to him through the screened door. I liked him as little as did Willa.

     "Tell the mister," he said, "that Jacob Shurz didn't ask him to clear the road. Tell him it won't change my mind."

     I was careful to give Owen, not Willa, the message. Owen had dealt with stubborn men before. Willa's hackles seemed to rise at even a mention of the man.

Willa was fingering the autoharp, trying to pick out the melody to a popular new song. "Oh, the moonlight's bright tonight along the
Wabash," she sang, haltingly, in her lovely contralto. It was twilight, soon it would be too dark to see.

     "Dashed if I can figure out where the old smokehouse was," Owen said, "or the kitchen,
or
the greenhouse. I've been trying to picture the old place and everything is all turned around in my mind. It's only two years since the fire . . ."

     Willa picked away a time longer, but she was distracted. "Do you know," she said, "that really is the marvel of it."

     "Marvel?" Owen asked, puzzled. "What? How so?"

     "That we have so little impact on the land, that we sit so lightly upon it. Think—we lived here for eight years before the fire, and in one afternoon almost all of the traces of that time were gone— until now it is hard, even, to remember where things were, what it was like."