Hers the Kingdom (9 page)

     I can't tell you how sorry I am that we allowed this ridiculous brother-sister charade to happen. When I say this to Owen he only laughs and reminds me what a scandal I would cause if he should now suggest we get a
double berth. Sara knows our secret; when I told her she only shook her head and smiled a little.

     Owen is much the more even-tempered of us. I sometimes think he could weather any kind of storm with his charming smile and easy laugh.

     Oh, but speaking of storms. Out of Omaha, at midday, we were moving alongside the Platte River when suddenly it became ominously dark. The wind rose until we began to scramble to close all of the windows. Soon it grew so close, and so dark, that the carriage lamps were lit. The storm came upon us in great, roiling clouds that moved across the plains. They were like something alive, something gargantuan. We watched the storm come; great sheets of rain overtook us, blowing so hard that the train slowed to a crawl. Owen and I went to Sara, thinking that she would be frightened.

     She was. We found her huddled in a chair, shivering. "Come," I said, "let's sit together on the chaise," and she did as I suggested, like a child, trembling all the while.

     The sky lightened a bit and the rain was not so driving. We were infused, then, with a curious yellow light. Far away on the plain we could see lightning crackling through the sky. We counted . . . one . . . two . . . three . . . and then felt the great rumble of thunder shake through us. We could hear the sound of the hail before we saw it—first, as a staccato drumming on the roof of the car and then, as the storm gathered fury, as balls of ice smashing at us from all sides. I pulled Sara away from the windows as Owen rushed to draw the shades as protection from flying glass. The hailstones were as big as India-rubber balls and the noise was deafening. It felt as if we were about to explode, to crack wide open. Sara had her hands over her ears and her eyes tight shut. I pulled her into the shelter of a pantry, where we huddled with the Chinese girl.

     One of the plate glass windows shattered, spilling glass all about, and a shard narrowly missed Owen. Sara screamed; her face was utterly white, her eyes enormous. Owen quickly moved back to us. (He looked at me, and I could see that he was not at all afraid, but rather excited. It is hard to explain, but I knew what he was feeling. We may even have smiled at each other; I can't imagine why.)

     As suddenly as it had started, it was over and there was utter quiet, the train having stopped completely. Through the broken window we could smell the wet plains grasses, the wildflowers, the earth. It was a fresh, new smell, and for the flicker of an instant I was in the real West, not enclosed in a metal container and catapulted through space.

     On a path that is alongside the track came two men on horseback. They had been through the worst of the storm, in the open, and seemed not to realize that it was over. They were drawn up still as balls, tucking their heads under them for protection. In that instant I
did know
the uncompromising harshness of this land, of life outside the Pullman palace car or Phineas Emory's Alhambra. And I have been trying not to forget, but to hold on to that bit of knowledge.

     Soon we will cross the great Rocky Mountains, then the Sierra Nevada. Do you know that sometimes little bands of prairie dogs sit up and bark at the train? They do! They truly do. This is the West I have dreamed of for so long. Why do I feel so insulated, so out of time in this railroad car? It is as if I am in another place, another time, as if a crucial step has been missed.

     Sara has invited us to visit her in her father's home in San Francisco, I think out of gratitude for our coming to her aid during the storm. I was prepared to make our apologies, knowing how important it is to Owen to be on our
way to Los Angeles. But when he heard of the invitation he was ecstatic. "We would be delighted, absolutely delighted," he told Sara, and she said, "Good." Just when I think I am beginning to understand Owen, he surprises me.

     But I am delighted, too. Sara is the dearest of girls, and I am happy to spend more time with her. Too, I want to see San Francisco, the mecca of the West, before we go to what is charmingly called "the cow counties" down south. Most of all, I am happy to stop in San Francisco to put an end to our courtship, to have this marriage consummated. I touch Owen and feel a sharp electric shock, a warmth in the lower center of me. I wish the Rockies and the Sierras were behind me, I wish we were even now arriving at the City by the Golden Gate.

     My love, dear one,
     Willa

Reno, Nevada

     My dear Lena,

     Forgive the brief nature of this note. I have not been feeling well. I did want you to know that you might write me in care of Sara Hunt, Number 14 California Street, San Francisco. She has promised to see that your letters reach me, and I know that she will.

     Out of the window this morning I watched an eagle circle and soar. I must see that this is posted in Reno, a city which is said to be "neither hawk nor vulture."

     My love,
     Willa

     "I have not been well," she wrote, and it was true. It would be a year before I learned, from Sara, what had happened as the train rolled across Wyoming and into Utah and Nevada.

     At first, Sara would say, Willa had simply fallen silent. The two spots of color that were always high on her cheeks disappeared, making her look strangely wan. She ceased to eat, though Owen tried to coax her and the Chinese girl rummaged through the assortment of tins of delicacies that were kept on the Emory car.

     Sara was alarmed; Owen was panicked. He hovered over Willa, fretting and worrying. When Sara suggested she stay in one of the polished Satinwood folding berths in the private car, Owen readily agreed. As the fever mounted, they took turns bathing Willa with cool towels.

     Willa said nothing at all, but only lay there. Her skin was hot to the touch. At times she lost consciousness altogether, or she would see things that they did not see. At Salt Lake City Owen made a frantic effort to get a doctor. None would come, and he only got back on himself by grabbing hold of the last car at the last moment, his heart pounding and his breath coming in hard gasps, so that Sara was frightened for him, too.

     They took turns sitting with her; "She will be all right," Owen said—sometimes as a question, sometimes as a statement.

     And then Willa had looked at them, and smiled weakly, and they knew it was going to be all right. Owen had kissed his wife's hand and held it to his cheek. Then he gently put it back under the coverlet, and turned to Sara and hugged her to him, while Willa smiled from her bed at them. For the first time in her life, Sara Hunt felt connected to another . . . to two others. It was to be important to all of them.

LETTERS FROM CALIFORNIA, with and without the tiny
o
in the corner, arrived with astonishing regularity. I say "astonishing" because Willa was not organized and she did not believe in routine. It was, she said, dull and dulling. Rather, she functioned in bursts of energy so intense they could not be long sustained. I could only wonder at the reasons for my rich harvest of letters.

     It became my habit to walk to the Four Corners to the post box. I told Mama I did this for the exercise, knowing she could not deny that need. I did not tell her that I needed the solitude as much. Often enough, the things Willa saw fit to commit to paper made me feel as if I had stolen documents on my person. I knew that Mama would not venture beyond the rose garden at the rim of the yard, so I was safe to read Willa's letters, hidden by the big elm in the abandoned churchyard, through all of that summer and into the fall.

     Willa was sly enough to send, in the same post as an
o
letter, another addressed to Mama and Pa, so that no one suspected my bounty. Outwardly, my days were little changed. No one guessed
that my life shifted that summer. The letters were at the center of my thoughts; they occupied me. The most important moment of my day was the opening of the post box. The deepest pleasure was settling down to read page after page of Willa's large, rushed handwriting.

     I do not mean to say that Willa told me everything. She did not, for instance, speak of fears or doubts—I think that she did not often allow herself to think of them. But she did confide surprisingly intimate matters. More than once my face would flush as I sat in the churchyard, leaves falling all about me.

     She told me, in vivid detail, about her wedding night. "It has happened," she wrote, "I am a wife, I am truly, wholly, wonderfully a woman. I never knew, had no idea, how it would make me feel, this physical merging with a man. I know, I know, I know what I said, but I was wrong. What did I really know? Nothing. I wish I could make you understand the exquisite pain of it."

     The letter, thicker than most, arrived on a warm Wednesday, a somnolent summer day that wrapped close around me. Settled in the churchyard, near a chinaberry tree, I read—ignoring the stickers from wild oats that had embedded themselves in my stockings, ignoring everything but the words on the paper.

     "We came to the rooms that had been arranged for us at the Lick House (much the most
exclusive
and without a doubt the most
aristocratic
hotel in the city—Owen's words). I stood in the doorway and took a long look at the whole of the large room, as if it were a stage setting. In truth, the most important scene of our wedded life was to be played there. A new timidness came over me; I felt awkward in the presence of the man who was my husband in name, but not yet in body.

     "As soon as the door closed behind us and we were alone—wonderfully alone—I stood in the center of the room feeling wickedly free. My husband busied himself with our valises. I watched him with a cataclysmic fascination. He turned and, seeing me, stood perfectly still. I do not know how long we looked at each
other, perhaps not long.

     "The room itself was almost too perfect, too exquisite, the scene of an illicit encounter, except that we are licit. The appointments were exquisite, neat, and in perfect place. Perfect, perfect, perfect . . . you see how often I use that word? There were elegantly embroidered towels hung on the washstand, each precisely folded. The massive bed was all carved and gleaming. I ran my hand over the shining wood and felt . . . sinful.

     "I felt as if we were alone, at long last, for the first time in our married life. Private, removed, out of reach, out of time. I felt dizzy with excitement.

     "Owen touched the back of my neck and I felt something hot flash through me. He kissed me then, my first true kiss. I felt as if all the time in the world had gathered in the room, and that I could stay on forever.

     "Except that we were dusty and vile from the long journey, and I could not abide the thought of going to my wedding bed smelling so abominably. (If the room was in perfect order, clean, and sweet-smelling, its occupants were not; occasional dabs of rosewater do not cleanliness make.) Owen called for water, and two small Chinamen, who seemed to be giggling, filled the tub with steaming water, and left us to our pleasure.

     "A bath, and then bed.

     "After years of hiding from Pa and the boys during our Saturday night ablutions, it felt strange to be naked in the room with a man. I liked it. I even, I believe, paraded, happy as a beetle. Owen washed my back, lathered me completely and laughed until I blew soap bubbles into his eyes and made them smart. (Unfortunately, Owen was not so willing that I should see him in his entirety, though perhaps that is understandable since there is so much more to see of the male of the species.)

     "Oh, Lena, if you could but know the
wanting
. . . My hair was damp from the bath and my gown cold against my skin, but that didn't matter at all. I sat in the open air, which was chill after the
heat of the bath, and shivered—but not, I think, from the cold.

     "But you see, my darling husband had been thoughtful enough to order, in advance, a wedding supper and nothing would do but we wait for it to be delivered to our room. Wait! I was sure I could not eat. Oysters and champagne duly arrived, and I was ravenous. I drank my champagne too quickly, I think, liking the bubbles more than the taste, and I began to hiccough frightfully. Owen laughed at me for a while, then he gave me his special hiccough cure which I am sworn not to reveal, and shan't, since it is rather more intimate than any other hiccough cure I have ever heard of.

     "I suppose we looked extremely silly, sitting there—Owen in his elegant red silk dressing gown, me in Owen's elegant, cream silk dressing gown. (I am, he says, to order a wardrobe while I am here; he won't have me roaming about in his clothes!)

     "And then, at long last, to bed.

     "It would have been romantic had he carried me, but I am too heavy. Instead, we held close together, only the fabric of the silken gowns between us, and, filled with a terrible excitement, tumbled together into the bed.

     "As I thought, his chest is smooth, hairless, lovely . . . oh.

     "He lay on me, and I touched that wild part of life that I had not known to exist. Beautiful, soft, and hard at once. Lena—there is at the center of the wildest storm a most wonderful core of absolute design. Absolute.

     "Oh, the wonder and the glory.

     "The only time in all of my life that I have felt anything in the least like it was once, two years ago, in the far meadow, when I was watching two golden eagles during mating time. First one and then the other executed a magnificent dive, wings half closed, plummeting from the sky as if thrown with great force by some sky giant, reaching amazing speeds. Then, at the last possible moment, each eagle pulled out of the dive before crashing to earth—only to soar skyward again, riding a thermal up and up and up, until after a time it was no more than a dark point against the blue. I
remember that the mating flight went on for a very long time and I sat, mesmerized, with everything inside of me in motion. The two eagles rolled and dived and raced the wind, until at last they were rushing at each other on a collision course—at unimaginable speeds. Just as they were about to crash into each other, the male rolled over onto his back and, from below, touched talons with his speeding mate.