Poinciana

by Whitney, Phyllis A. ;

  Now and then I would catch him studying me with a look of appreciative delight, yet no hint of warning touched me. No one had ever appreciated me before, so how could I not respond? How could I possibly suspect what lay hidden so terribly in the background?

  We could stay in Kyoto as long as we liked, since Ross was thinking of early retirement, and there were many executives in charge of Logan interests. He had already stepped down as chairman of the board of Meridian Oil. And the great Logan trusts and foundations, the philanthropies, were in the hands of others, though under the advisorship of a man named Jarrett Nichols, Ross’s principal aide and consultant. He had taken Jarrett on some years ago as a young lawyer and molded him into his most valuable assistant and executive. I would meet him when we returned to Poinciana, where he had his headquarters at present, awaiting Ross’s return.

  There, Ross said, was where we would live. Perhaps even in the summer, if I could face it. He’d always hated his mother’s habit of flitting around from season to season, living in different houses. His daughter Gretchen was there now, and it was the house he had grown up in and most wanted me to love. I would be the one to restore it from shabbiness to new beauty. I would understand Poinciana and what Allegra Logan had built. He already knew that about me. What he wanted most of all for himself when our honeymoon was over was to return to Florida and write the book on Japanese netsuke that he had long been planning, and on which he’d done too little work.

  I still felt dazed and unable to resist the avalanche that was sweeping me along. What he expected of me in Florida, I would not think about now. A line had been held out to rescue me, and all I could do was cling to it for my very life. If at times I found Ross a little moody, if some communications from the States caused him to be preoccupied at times, I made nothing of this. The oil business was, to say the least, in a state of unrest, and this must cause him considerable worry.

  Nevertheless, Ross decided to put all business matters away from him for now, and this time he would travel with no entourage. He sent the young man who was his personal secretary off on a long holiday, and told Jarrett Nichols by phone to handle all mail and messages at that end, unless something very important came up. I was delighted at the prospect of traveling unencumbered and having my husband all to myself.

  Our wedding was quiet, with only a few of Ross’s friends present, and the press for once evaded. There was no one whom I especially wanted to invite. Before I quite knew what was happening we were on our way to Kyoto. Long plane flights were a familiar enough experience for me, but to travel on Ross’s private jet was something new and exhilarating. Every luxury was at our disposal, and I became increasingly aware of the strange world of the super-wealthy that I had married into.

  At the airport outside Tokyo we were besieged by reporters, but welcoming government officials were on hand to take us through. We went by one of Japan’s crack trains to Kyoto, and stepped into a quieter and older world. I could understand very quickly why Ross had wanted to bring me here.

  The Miyako Hotel was set on a hillside with mountains all around, and I loved it at once, as I loved the temples and gardens, the narrow streets of the older part of the city that had once been a capital, and which had never been destroyed by war. The reality of Japan was even more fascinating than all my reading had led me to expect. Teahouses and Japanese food were both attractive under Ross’s tutelage, and not a cloud marred my happiness.

  One day in a curio shop, Ross held up a lovely ivory figurine and said it was like me—exquisite. He bought it for me, and told me that we would both grace Poinciana on our return. For just an instant, standing beside my husband in that dark little shop with its unfamiliar, not unpleasant scent—was it camphorwood or sandal-wood?—a question flashed through me. What was I doing here? I was no ivory figurine. Nothing so perfect as that. What did Ross really know about me? But reality was dangerous. Reality was a theater in flames and screaming children and the terrible pain of loss. I put it away from me quickly.

  Only sometimes when Ross made love to me there was a return of uneasiness. In this one aspect I could only feel that I disappointed him. Inexperienced as I was, I knew only a passive, submissive role, expecting him to teach me, feeling very little myself. He sensed my concern and was gentle with me. Wait until we reached Poinciana, he said. Everything would be better there. I didn’t understand, and I wondered uncertainly why it should be different in Florida.

  Unexpectedly, I didn’t always have Ross to myself during our honeymoon. There were certain Japanese businessmen who came quietly—almost secretly—to consult with him at the hotel. On these occasions I was sent off in a car contributed for my pleasure, to sight-see, or wander in temple gardens. The first time this happened, I asked questions, wanting to share all that interested my husband. But Ross had been curt and preoccupied, and I began to realize that there were some interests he didn’t want to share with me. I knew without rancor that this would be a fact of marriage that I must accept.

  Then something shattering happened in Kyoto, cutting our visit short. A long-distance call came from Jarrett Nichols, and I was with Ross in our suite at the hotel when he picked up the phone. I saw the dark flush of anger rise in his expressive face.

  “We’ll come home at once,” he told Jarrett. “I’ll cable arrangements as soon as they’re made.” When he hung up, he turned to me, more shaken than I’d ever seen him.

  “Gretchen has married Vasily Karl,” he said. “Totally against my wishes. And they’ve moved into Poinciana.”

  I wondered to myself how he could expect anything else, considering that he was so seldom with his daughter, but I said nothing, watching his anger in alarm. I had never seen him in a rage before, and it was frightening. When he stamped out of the hotel and went walking alone in the streets of the city, I went into the garden beyond the glass walls of the dining room and sat trying to be quiet and calm, watching goldfish dart about in a small pond.

  Again I found myself thinking about Gretchen. After all, her father had given her no warning of his marriage to me. He was foisting an unknown stepmother upon her with no preparation. A stepmother only a few years older than Gretchen herself. He had never even told me how his daughter felt about Brett, her mother. Now I couldn’t help wondering if Gretchen’s sudden marriage was a deliberate slap in the face for a father she might both love and resent.

  I knew what that feeling could be like. Love for one’s parents could very well be mixed with a flavoring of resentment. I had been raised to recognize that Ysobel’s career was all-important in our lives. Yet sometimes I’d thought rebelliously that she and Ian might have come for a birthday, wherever they’d left me, or even have brought me to them. Christmas at school, with Ysobel and Ian across a continent, could be utterly lonely, even though they phoned and sent me wonderful gifts. As I sat waiting for Ross’s return, I began to hope that I could win Gretchen’s liking, let her know that I could understand, that perhaps we weren’t too far apart and might be friends. I longed suddenly, unexpectedly, for a friend, and knew with disturbing clarity that true friendship was something I would never find with Ross. A man didn’t make friends with an ivory figure on a shelf. Certainly not a forceful, vibrant man like Ross.

  We were to have stayed in Japan through cherry blossom time, but when Ross returned to the hotel he was the man of action again. All had been arranged. We were going to Tokyo tomorrow, flying home the day after. First, however, we would make one more visit here in Kyoto.

  We took a taxi to a small Japanese house off a side street and enclosed by a high bamboo fence. There were dwarf pines and the usual fishpond in the garden, with a little red lacquered bridge arched across it.

  A bowing Japanese woman wearing a kimono led us to stone steps, where we could sit and remove our shoes. Then we followed her into the house, through sliding paper shoji, padding across springy straw tatami, climbing polished stairs to a room that opened upon a narrow wooden gallery overlooking the garden and nearby roof
tops of gray tile. An old man with a fringe of white hair rose from his cushion to greet us. He was dressed in the old-fashioned way in a fine silk kimono of charcoal gray, with a small white crest on each sleeve.

  He bowed deeply, then gave his hand to Ross Logan in a warm clasp of friendship, and I knew there was respect between these two. I was presented to Gentaro Sato with a formality that emphasized this respect. Cushions were brought for our comfort and I sat cross-legged, unable to fold my knees under me for long, as Japanese women did. A low tray-table was brought in by the woman, set with a flowered teapot that had a curved bamboo handle, and accompanying small, handleless cups. She poured our tea and offered a plate of bean paste cakes shaped like four-petaled flowers of pink, green, and white.

  I looked for the alcove I’d read about, with its single treasured vase and flower, the hanging kakemono, and other spare ornaments of art. But in this room something different was evident. On shelves here and there were displayed tiny carved objects, some with cords threaded through them. These were netsuke. I’d seen them occasionally in museums here and there.

  “Sato-san is a sculptor who makes fine netsuke,” Ross told me. “Not for sale to the public as a rule, but to satisfy his own creative talent and preserve an old art form that is being lost.”

  Mr. Sato rose, went to a shelf and made a selection, returning to hand me a tiny wood carving. “For you,” he said.

  I thanked him warmly, and turned the beautiful little thing about in my fingers. It was no more than an inch and a half wide—a carving of a mother frog with a baby frog clinging to her back, one foot set carelessly over its mother’s eye. There was humor and great delicacy in the carving, and the detail in so small an object was amazing. The eyes of both frogs were inlaid in shell and black coral.

  “Netsuke aren’t popular in Japan any more,” Ross said. “When men used to wear the kimono, they tucked pouches into the obi band around their waists, with the netsuke on a cord with a sliding bead, hanging outside to anchor the pouch.”

  As I listened, I had no idea that these little objects were to become so important in my life—and so disturbing. But I realized that the art had fired Ross’s imagination, and he was ready to go on talking about them.

  Unfortunately, the creation of so utilitarian an art had not been properly valued in the past, and the carvers were often neglected and unappreciated. Even the museums of Japan had been negligent about collecting them, so that it had been the foreigner who had delighted in this miniature art, and taken most of them out of the country into private ownership. Ross himself had a fine collection at Poinciana, which he was eager to show me.

  When I commented on the charm of the little frogs Mr. Sato had given me, he motioned gently toward the garden, where there were undoubtedly real frogs in the fishpond.

  “My teachers,” he said, and I looked about at the carvings with new eyes. Some were pure fantasy, or based on myth or legend, but even those were glimpses of life and nature as one man perceived them.

  Apparently Gentaro Sato now sold some of his own modern work to a few respected collectors, but he also kept an eye out for such ancient netsuke as surfaced from time to time around Japan. He harbored a slight bitterness against his country for not having placed sufficient value upon such artists and their work in the past. Ross had promised him that someday his own private collection would be given back to the government of Japan, to form a nucleus of netsuke art.

  When his business with Gentaro Sato was concluded, and a neat wooden box had been packed with several carvings Ross had chosen, we returned to the hotel and prepared for our journey home.

  All that evening, Ross continued remote and preoccupied. Once I tried to talk to him about Gretchen, but he closed me out with a coldness I hadn’t seen in him before. It was as though he said, “Keep your place. Don’t touch my real life,” and I found myself alone again. Alone and bewildered. It was his very directness that I’d most admired, and now he seemed coolly evasive.

  That night I put on a kimono of golden chrysanthemums that Ross had given me, and that he’d been delighted to see me wear. But when I went to him he looked at me as though I were suddenly a stranger, and turned away. Later, I lay on my side of the bed, finding that I was still shut out, and that for the first time since our wedding there were no loving arms to hold me. I told myself that his strangeness was not due to me, or anything I had done. Undoubtedly the news about Gretchen had upset him, and he would come back to me in time.

  Nevertheless, I lay awake for a long while that night. Once during those hours when he became aware that I wasn’t sleeping, he touched me lightly and repeated those strange words he’d spoken before: “It will be better when we reach Poinciana,” and again I asked myself: Why?

  From Tokyo we flew to New York for a brief business stopover—a trip many hours long, even by private jet. Ross was still preoccupied and distant. This time we couldn’t avoid the press and we were besieged with questions that Ross handled skillfully out of long experience. He spoke for me and I said very few words and smiled a lot. We stayed overnight at the Pierre Hotel, rather than open up the New York apartment, and the next day we continued on the short flight to Florida. It was midafternoon when we reached the West Palm Beach airport.

  There I had my first glimpse of the elegant Rolls that was only one of the cars that would be at our disposal at Poinciana. Albert, the Logan chauffeur, met us, attended to our baggage, and answered Ross’s rather testy questions as to why neither Jarrett Nichols nor Gretchen had come to meet us.

  It seemed to me that Albert, after his first smile of greeting, was edgy and uncomfortable.

  “Miss Gretchen had an accident this morning, Mr. Logan,” he said. “I understand it was nothing serious. She—uh—fell on the stairs coming down from the belvedere. Mr. Nichols thought he should stay at the house until you arrived.”

  Ross was anything but satisfied. “Gretchen is as surefooted as a goat, so what happened? Where was this new husband of hers?”

  Albert busied himself putting our bags in the trunk of the car. “Sir, he seems to have gone out. I’m sure Mr. Nichols will explain.”

  Albert was past middle age and belonged to an older era, his behavior impeccable and correct. Ross had told me that he had been with the family for a long time, and I suspected that he knew very well what had happened to Gretchen, but he would say nothing at this time. Especially not in front of me.

  Ross helped me into the luxurious back seat and plumped himself down beside me. I had looked forward to having him show me Florida, but Albert’s news had disgruntled my husband, and I watched the passing landscape in silence, continuing to feel a little lost.

  This was one state I had missed in my travels with Ysobel and Ian, and I found it different from any place I’d known. The country seemed to be made up of palm trees and sand, and a land as flat as the ocean we had flown over, its rises marked only by condominiums.

  At least I had done my homework on Palm Beach, and I knew that the Intracoastal Waterway flowed into Lake Worth, which bordered most of Palm Beach on the west. The island was only thirteen miles long, and a mere three quarters of a mile at its widest. Beyond, to the east, lay the ocean.

  We crossed at a bridge near the Bird Sanctuary and drove along South Ocean Boulevard. On our right, as the road dipped near it, ran a continuous stretch of beach, and I had glimpses of whitecaps out on the water. Large houses, most of them dating back to the twenties or earlier, came up on our left, and I saw the trademark of red-tiled roofs that belonged to the Spanish revival that architect Addison Mizner had created here. Most of the houses were of stucco or stone, since wood rotted easily in the salt air, and they were painted pink or cream, or a dazzling white. Between the houses and the ocean a natural sand dune rose in protection, and sea grape grew rampant everywhere, its big tough leaves a dirty rust color at this time of the year. Inland they were greener.

  The houses faced the ocean behind walls and hedges, though only Poinciana and one or two
others occupied property that ran through from ocean to lake. Behind most of these ocean houses were streets and other houses that fronted on Lake Worth. Those that faced the ocean had marvelous views of the Atlantic from their upper windows, but their residents had to cross the boulevard to reach their private beaches.

  Everywhere, palm trees grew tall—the stately royal palms as well as slender coconut palms that leaned away from the prevailing wind.

  “Here we are,” Ross said, and my heart jumped. I hadn’t lost my sense of uneasiness about coming to Poinciana.

  A high wall of coquina rock, with bright hibiscus growing against it, ran along on our left until it reached wide gates with pillars of the same coral rock on either side. Once these gates must have been fashioned of wrought iron, but now they were modern steel, and were electrified. At a beep from Albert’s horn, they swung open away from us, and a man came out of the gatehouse and touched his cap to Ross Logan. We drove in, following a curved way that led between well-trimmed ficus trees, and I had my first unimpeded view of the house.

  Allegra Logan’s fantasy had indeed been just that. Poinciana was built of rosy stone brought from the Spanish Pyrenees, and decorated with roofs of red tile. This was not Spanish architecture, however, nor, in fact, any sort of identifiable architecture. It jutted here, and indented itself there, in a rapturously experimental way, inviting amazement, inciting in me an eagerness to explore. Commanding the entire rambling structure was a high, curiously domed cupola, with windows and a tiny balcony all around. This must be the belvedere, on whose stairs Gretchen had fallen. What a view there must be up there, I thought, and planned to climb it as soon as I could. Off to the right, beyond the house, I could glimpse smaller cottages, with their own red-tiled roofs. The grounds, Ross had told me, occupied some thirty acres, and the house was rooted sturdily into an ancient reef of coral, hurricane-proof.

  As we neared the porte cochere, he slipped an arm about my shoulders, and I turned to him eagerly. Ever since we’d left the airport I had felt alone and increasingly anxious.