Impossible Owls

by Brian Phillips

  Much later, my mother gave me a more complete picture of what had happened. My parents had driven to Monument Road and let themselves in at the back door (my grandparents never locked their house). Gene’s pickup wasn’t in the driveway, so they knew my grandparents weren’t home—the question was whether they’d been home at all since we left them the previous night. My mother thought, I’ll check Mom’s bathroom sink, and if the sink is wet, I’ll know they were here this morning and just forgot about the car. The sink was dry. My mother called her sister and said, I think something is wrong. So my parents had driven with my aunt and Robert Hardee back to the cove. My grandfather’s truck was parked in the same place, and there was no sign of the rowboat. The four of them took the pontoon boat out to search the lake. My grandfather liked to use cutoff barbecue-sauce jugs as floats for his trotlines, and they saw one of these bobbing in the water, not connected to a line. Then my mother saw a speck of orange floating a long way off.

  The speck was the color of a life jacket. It took a long time, my mother told me, to get close enough to see that the life jacket was attached to a body, and then it took a long time to get close enough to see whose body it was. My grandmother was floating facedown. Her hands were flexed as if she were clutching at something. Later, when they found my grandfather, he was not wearing a life jacket. (Of course not; he never did.) The coroner’s best guess was that he had fallen out of the rowboat and my grandmother had drowned trying to save him. He had been drinking, obviously, but there were certain signs, a bluishness of the torso, that suggested a heart attack, which might explain why he had fallen out of the boat. No one really knows what happened. Possibly my grandmother drowned with my grandfather, or possibly she died later, of hypothermia, trying to get back to shore.

  I don’t remember my immediate reaction to the news that my grandparents were dead. I remember that I was calm. I was not as upset as the caretaker, the maybe-Diana, would have wanted. I said to myself, you will never see them again—my grandparents, whom I had seen several times a week since I was born—but I still felt, at the level of unconscious certainty, that this was a brief confusion, that there would be a happy ending. At some point the doorbell rang and my friend Kyle was there with his dad. They had baseball gloves and a ball. They asked if I wanted to go to the field behind the school and throw the ball around. I said okay, thinking this was a little strange, because Kyle and I hadn’t really been friends since second grade, and now we were in third grade, so that seemed like a long time ago. Kyle lived down the street. Later I realized that someone must have called his parents and asked them to take me out, to give me something to do, but at the time that didn’t occur to me. This just seemed like the next thing that was going to happen.

  Kyle’s dad drove a tan truck. The old cab smelled like his tire shop, licorice sweet. There was a soft red grease rag on the floor and behind the seat (I knew) a battered tackle box. We drove to the elementary school and parked in the empty teachers’ lot. There were eight or ten elementary schools in Ponca City and most of them were named after presidents, but ours was named after a local mortician, E. M. Trout. We were the Trout Tornadoes. E. M. Trout had been president of the school board. It occurs to me now (it didn’t then) that E. M. Trout & Sons, the funeral home he had founded, was probably where they were taking my grandmother. Kyle and his dad and I went behind the school and started throwing the ball. They had a bat so we started doing some hitting. It was a little odd, because I didn’t usually play baseball, but I seemed to have acquired a temporary ability to decide for myself how things would feel, so I decided it was fun to be there with them. Kyle’s dad pitched for us. I got some good hits.

  I thought that what might have happened was that my grandparents had gone to London. They had gone to London on vacation a year or so earlier and I remembered how much they liked it. They had brought me back a handful of funny coins. My grandmother had always wanted to see Buckingham Palace. I had never been on an airplane, but I knew that to get to London you had to ride on one. In London my grandparents went shopping for Burberry raincoats. They took pictures of each other in front of a red telephone booth. In her picture, my grandmother was wearing a raincoat and big glasses and smiling under her small cloud of dark gray hair. My grandfather was wearing red suspenders over his short-sleeved button-down shirt, and he was grinning in a private way, as if he were remembering the punchline of a joke. How was it possible to say someone was gone forever? We needed to check their closets. I would tell my mother to do it. We would find that their suitcases were gone.

  Forever would mean: No more walks with my grandmother to the gardens at the Pioneer Woman. No more rides with my grandfather on his green John Deere. No more sweet smell of bath salts. No more runners wriggling backward. No more carousels. All this lost somehow, gone somewhere, pulled down by nixie fingers to the city at the bottom of the sea.

  Which was not London.

  My brain felt light and distant, but it was okay, I thought. The sky was huge and gray over the field. The wind was coming up. The school’s flagpole kept up a steady clanking.

  That night, I later learned, Robert Hardee, my aunt’s boyfriend, the artist, who had brought in my grandmother’s body, went back to the cove and performed some kind of Indian blessing for my grandparents. At our house, a storm blew in. Rain turned dark and glittery on the glass. We could hear the wind chimes ringing.

  3

  What happened was that the prospector struck oil in an Indian graveyard.

  What happened was that one sister had money and the other sister had children.

  What happened was that in the Republican machine that controlled Philadelphia toward the end of the nineteenth century, there was an operator named Samuel Collins, born 1850, a fixer and glorified ward heeler who bounced around among official posts. His home base was the Fifteenth Ward. He was a state legislator for a while, then a “deputy collector,” then later a tipstaff at the Superior Court of Pennsylvania. His real role, as I imagine it, was to be a laugh behind a cigar, the man who knew everyone, a wise-eyed, well-dressed patriarch of the steakhouse who could recite poetry over cognac and then get down to brass tacks. Gentlemen, I know I can count on you to do the right thing. His wife, who was also born in 1850, called herself Eliza; Eliza Collins is the name she appears under in most official records. Her given name, however—the one that appears on her death certificate, and on her gravestone at Mount Moriah Cemetery—was Lydie.

  According to the Philadelphia census of 1900, Sam and Eliza Collins had five living children. One of the children who had not lived was a daughter, also named Lydie, who died in infancy in 1882. So it was a family name—one they were interested in passing on to later generations.

  Among the children who lived, the oldest were two daughters: Maggie, who was born in 1874, and Mary Virginia, who was born in 1877.

  What happened was that Maggie and Mary Virginia grew up to marry very different men. Or at any rate that marriage sent them down very different tracks.

  Maggie’s husband, a man called George Roberts, sold fruits from a wheelbarrow in Flourtown.

  Mary Virginia’s husband was an oilman who became, for a time, one of the richest men on earth.

  The oilman’s name was Ernest Whitworth Marland. He went by E.W. He was three years older than Mary Virginia—in his mid-twenties when he first met the Collins family, somewhere around the turn of the twentieth century. Sam brought him home; they were friends, despite the age gap. E.W. hadn’t yet struck it rich, but he carried himself as if he had, with a genteel swagger that made people stop and take notice. He was beautifully dressed, well-mannered, a dreamer with a gift for convincing people his plans were bound to succeed. His father was a Pittsburgh industrialist. Affluent, certainly, but not gaudy rich, not by the standards of the day. His ancestry was English—the Marlands were an old family, with a name that went back six hundred years in the village of Ashton-Under-Lyne, near Manchester—and E.W. had been raised to think of himself as a gentlema
n. “Of him to whom much is given,” his father told him, warmly, at their estate on Mount Washington, where the library was lined with Walter Scott novels, “much is required.”

  Alfred Marland, the father, had felt what was required of him so keenly that as a young man, in the 1860s, he sailed from England to enlist in the Confederate army, fired with the dream of defending agrarian gentility. (It probably didn’t hurt his feeling for the cause that the economy of Ashton-Under-Lyne, a center of textile manufacturing, relied on cotton imports.) He lost his illusions where the South was concerned, but held on to his vision of a society governed by fine manners and chivalry—by old carpets and riding crops. He invented a new kind of hoop for holding cotton bales together, then established himself in a kind of high-toned industrial earldom: Episcopal church, tweed jacket, local politics. His dream was to make E.W., his American son, chief justice.

  When the time came for E.W. to be educated, Alfred sent him to the Rugby Colony, in Tennessee. Rugby: truly one of the strangest pedagogical experiments in this nation’s history, one of those rare keyholes through which it’s still possible to spy on the late nineteenth century in the act of discovering itself. Rugby was a utopian community founded by Thomas Hughes, the author of Tom Brown’s School Days, the popular Victorian boarding-school novel. Its aim was to offer an English public-school education—think playing fields of Eton—to a mix of rowdy Americans, working-class boys imported from Britain, and the younger sons of English aristocrats, whom the law of primogeniture prevented from inheriting their father’s estates. It’s almost totally forgotten now; in its time it was a locus of enthusiasms brilliant people believed could change the world. What if the solution to inequality was to teach young men of all nations and classes the manners of a duke and the morals of a Christian socialist? They played croquet on the Cumberland Plateau, staged fox hunts through Polecat Hollow. The whole thing collapsed after a few years. E.W. loved it.

  He held on, all his life, to his father’s ardor for nobility, but he also had an American nose for hustle. After law school, at the age of twenty-one, he set up shop for himself, using his father’s money, in an office under the stairs. He was irresistibly drawn to backroom deals, ingenious exploits, get-rich-quick schemes. He did a little bit of everything. When he noticed that the advertisements in Pittsburgh streetcars were unappealing and dull, he started a side business selling brightly colored placards. He spent hours at the courthouse, poring over mortgage records for loans he could profitably transfer. He scouted potential coal lands for a pair of promoters with the Dickensian names of Guffey & Galey. He shook hands. He made friends. He played poker obsessively, and he played well, but it was when he lost that you saw his real character; it was a pleasure, his friends felt, to watch him lose. He waved off setbacks so casually. Just a little money, boys, nothing to get excited about.

  He was able to do this not because he was indifferent to money but because it played such an outsized role in his fantasies. He wanted to make money, and not just a respectable amount of money, the way his father had done, but a spectacular amount, so much that he could do anything, carry out any grand gesture he liked. Whatever he lost at poker was insignificant compared with the scale of the fantasy. One of his side businesses during this period was writing fairy stories for a Pittsburgh newspaper: Fantasy was a powerful influence on him. He knew, too, that it was vulgar for a gentleman to think about money. That was why he had to make so much of it—to free himself from the need to have vulgar thoughts.

  How could he make that kind of money? His work for Guffey & Galey had quickened his interest in geology. Everyone knew that America, the land itself, was a fathomless source of riches. The ground brimmed with coal, gas, copper, gold; best of all, it brimmed with vast pockets of oil, demand for which was about to shoot sky-high as the country surged into the twentieth century. Figure out how to find the oil reserves and your millions were there for the taking. Oil had been the source of John D. Rockefeller’s fortune; Standard Oil was one of the great commercial behemoths of the age. Perhaps a great oil strike could set him on the same path?

  His obsessive urge to know where the levers were and who really pulled them was probably what drew him to Sam Collins. His father had served in the legislature with Sam, but it was E.W. who befriended him, drank whiskey with him, sang Irish songs with him in brass-trimmed rooms. Sam wasn’t rich, not the way E.W. planned to be. But he knew how the game was played, and that made him interesting.

  E.W. and Mary Virginia were married in 1903, when he was twenty-nine and she was twenty-six. Over the next four years, E.W. made his first million, drilling for oil in Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Then the panic of 1907 hit, the banks failed, and he lost everything.

  In 1908, he went to Oklahoma—he was so broke he had to advertise for backers just to pay the train fare—where, in a few years, he would make his spectacular fortune, a fortune so vast, so nearly infinite, he’d be able to do as he pleased for the rest of his life. Or anyway so he thought.

  There’s no record of whether the Collins family came to see him off at the train station. If they did, he might have said goodbye to his oldest niece and nephew, a ten-year-old boy and eight-year-old girl, the son and daughter of Mary Virginia’s sister Maggie and the fruit seller from Flourtown. What we do know is that a few years later, sometime around 1912, the children made the long journey to Oklahoma to visit their newly wealthy uncle and aunt.

  They traveled by train, watching the changing country scroll past.

  That was how Lydie first came to Ponca City.

  * * *

  The best description I have found of Ponca City, Oklahoma, in the early twentieth century comes from a biography of E. W. Marland. Really it comes from the only biography of E. W. Marland; you can find others, but they tend to have a local-enthusiast, semi-spell-checked quality, Bible verses on the copyright page, that sort of thing, and this book, the one with the description, is the work of a serious scholar. An artist. The book is called Life and Death of an Oilman: The Career of E. W. Marland. John Joseph Mathews is the writer’s name. He published it in 1951. It’s one of the strangest books I’ve ever read. In part this is because Mathews’s vision is so uncompromising. The subtitle of the book is accurate. Mathews is intensely interested in Marland’s professional life and cold to, or at least highly reluctant to talk about, his private life. So unlike most biographies, which say, in effect, here are the public deeds of this person and the private occurrences that explain who he or she really was, Mathews presents a weirdly romanticized foreground of geological exploration and the hammering out of contracts, with almost no background at all. Marland’s marriage is mentioned maybe four times in passing. In the meantime, the angel, the goddess, the siren Petrolia, the imaginary Spirit of Oil, appears again and again, guiding Marland’s eye as he ponders the angles of anticlines.

  John Joseph Mathews—what a fascinating person. He was twenty years younger than Marland, and knew him. Mathews was part Osage, the grandson of a legendary white mountain man, Old Bill Williams, who’d married into the tribe in the early nineteenth century. He grew up in Oklahoma during a period when the Osage were making immense sums of money by leasing drilling rights to the immense reserves of oil under their land, a period about which he later wrote a novel, Sundown (1934). He flew planes with the Twenty-Fifth Squadron during World War I, studied at Oxford, traveled in Africa, and later returned to Oklahoma, where he spent a decade living and writing in near seclusion in the Osage Hills. He wrote important histories of the tribe, including one, Wah’Kon-Tah: The Osage and the White Man’s Road, that was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection and a bestseller in 1932.

  The biography of Marland is in some ways a missed opportunity. Mathews wrote at a time when many of the principal figures were still alive, and he knew them, spoke to them, yet he left out so much of the story. Mary Virginia, for instance. We know so little about her, hardly anything beyond local gossip. She was dead in 1951, but living people remembered her. Math
ews could have filled in the gaps, and chose not to. “She had the alertness of mind and the type of wit that E.W. liked,” he says. Which type was that? One detail in particular gnaws at me: Mathews says that she was working as a stenographer in Philadelphia when she met E.W. That’s confirmed in the census of 1900, where “court stenographer” is listed as her occupation. So someone in the Collins family must have told the census taker that. But we also know that Sam Collins was employed at the Superior Court of Pennsylvania in 1900, and Sam was enmeshed in the Republican machine’s patronage system. Had Mary Virginia studied shorthand? Did she go to the court every day? Record trials? Or was it some sort of phantom appointment, a way for Sam to collect two salaries? Worlds of possibility unspool around that single line, and the possibilities could be real, or they could be smoke. The Oklahoma Historical Society’s encyclopedia describes her instead as “the daughter of a court stenographer,” which is almost certainly a misreading; I simply can’t be sure. Mathews says nothing more.

  Yet the book, despite its shortcomings, is lyrically thrilling and psychologically astute, the more so for being built from such unconventional materials. Built from geological surveys and committee minutes, basically. It may be a more authentic look at the emotional life of this peculiar businessman, at the currents that shaped his lived experience, than a more traditionally complete portrait could have been.

  There’s a moment—this is the first part of the description of Ponca City—that takes place in the lobby of a hotel. This is 1912, so around the time Lydie and her brother first arrived in town. It’s night. E.W. is sitting up late at a table in the Arcade Hotel, where he’s living; his oil refinery is under construction down the street, but his house on Grand Avenue, the first and considerably less magnificent of the two magnificent mansions he built for himself, hasn’t even been designed yet. He’s talking, by candlelight, to Dr. Irving Perrine, a geologist from the University of Oklahoma. E.W. has already struck it pretty big, he has twenty oil wells going, but his interest in geology is swelling along with his fortune, and he’s thrilled to have a real scientist in town, someone he can ask questions. The hour advances.