Impossible Owls

by Brian Phillips

  The traveling salesmen would one by one leave for bed. The soundlessness of those days can scarcely be imagined. A horse’s hooves thudding the dust, or the creaking of a late wagon, occasionally the shout of a drunken Ponca or cowboy, nothing more. Lights would go out all over the little plains town, except for a few gas street lights, and only the night breeze of the plains would be astir as the two men sat and talked of the wonders of the geological past and the formation of the Red Beds, upon the thin edges of which their hotel stood.

  Mathews was a teenager in 1912, living forty-fives miles away, in Pawhuska. He remembered that darkness. How the gas lamps looked against the prairie. Oklahoma had been admitted to statehood just five years before. We’re on the threshold—literally, in this conversation—between the Old West and what came after it.

  The other part of the description is set four years earlier. It’s 1908; E.W. has just gotten off the train. Ponca City is at this point just fifteen years old. In 1893 the Cherokee Outlet was opened for homesteading—that’s the famous land run, the scramble to stake claims on the vast territory the government had forced the Cherokee to sell—and the town was founded. So when E.W. arrives, everything is still new, the city has barely been scraped out. (In fact, it isn’t even called Ponca City yet; it’s still New Ponca.) Downtown is the sketch of a few streets, “which terminated suddenly,” Mathews says, “in a limitless plain of close-growing grass.” To the south is the Ponca Indian Reservation. West of the reservation, there’s an enormous ranch, known as the 101, which covers more than a hundred thousand acres. “101”: That’s the mark the ranch brands on its cattle.

  The ranch is the real center of the region. It’s owned by the three Miller brothers, Joe, Zack, and George junior, and it’s famous for more than just its size: It’s also the home of the 101 Ranch Wild West Show, a traveling extravaganza that in the course of its history will employ a young Tom Mix and an elderly Geronimo. (Geronimo’s act involves shooting a bison from the front seat of a car.) Also Bill Pickett, the great black cowboy, who dazzles crowds by leaping from horseback onto the back of a running steer, biting the steer’s upper lip to subdue it, and wrestling it to the ground. That year, 1908, the show will tour Europe, where in Germany some of its performers, a group of Oglala Sioux, will be arrested as Serbian spies. Mathews writes,

  Buffalo stood and looked stupidly at the passer-by through a game fence, and out on the tawny swells camels grazed, blending so perfectly in this strange habitat that they could scarcely be seen. Circus wagons stood immobilized among the manure and mud-stained workaday wagons. Along the railroad siding stood the circus cars, less gaudy than the wagons.

  What we’re watching here, in other words, is not only the end of the West. It’s the West memorializing itself, performing itself in the moment of its own ending. There are real cowboys in New Ponca, but one of the ways to make a living as a cowboy now is to become a “cowboy”—to pretend to do, for a crowd, the thing you actually do. There are Indians still living in traditional ways on tribal lands near town, and the region itself is one of the nation’s great hubs of Native American heritage—mostly for tragic reasons, but still—yet the Indians who play “Indians” for the 101 are arguing with the Millers about their overtime pay. The citizens of the town are living out an authentic drama of frontier settlement; at the same time, silent film studios are already cranking out Westerns, and the citizens know this, and have seen them.

  The point being: This was an exceptionally fertile place and time for anyone interested in trying on roles, making dramatic gestures, and experimenting with various narratives of civilization.

  And this was the setting when E.W.—penniless, genteel, ambitious, headstrong, an American, an Anglophile—stepped off the train, looking for a hotel room.

  Of course he fell in with the Miller brothers. They were all showmen, just of different centuries. E.W. leased the rights to drill for oil under the ranch. They rode out together, on horseback, to scout the terrain. (There are pictures of this; E.W. wore spats.) For a couple of years, their wells turned up nothing but gas. Then, in 1911, E.W. found a promising spot, a kind of sea swell on the plain, Mathews says, a hill on an allotment belonging to a Ponca Indian named Willie-Cries-for-War. The hill was a sacred burial ground.

  The Ponca, like the Osage, had never buried their dead until persuaded to do so by the white man. The Ponca had bound them and laid them upon scaffolds, or swung them into trees where they could be seen by the Great Mysteries.

  With help from the Millers, whom the Indians knew and respected, E.W. persuaded White Eagle, the chief of the Ponca, to grant him the lease to the allotment. History says that White Eagle, who was then in his nineties and who agreed to the deal with extreme reluctance, told E.W. the well would be “bad medicine,” for the tribe and for E.W. himself.

  Equipment came by train. Oxen dragged heavy loads from the depot across the muddy plains. Soon the derrick was rising on the hill. E.W. slept there, ate there; while the drilling was under way, he ran out of money.

  He gave Mrs. Rhoades, owner of the Arcade Hotel, promises, and she, a realistic, kindly, profanely compassionate soldier in the ranks of men against the temperamental plains, allowed him credit.

  When the well finally struck oil, E.W. was some distance away, in the middle of the Salt Fork of the Arkansas River, where he was helping to lay a gas pipeline. Everyone remembered that he’d taken his pants off to wade into the river and had to shimmy back into them when the news arrived. He raced to the well. A black feather of spray was standing up and over the derrick and trailing away in the wind. He stared, hardly believing it. He was rich! His hands shook.

  4

  I have in my possession a copy of a diary that Lydie Marland kept in 1921, beginning in July, three months after her twenty-first birthday, and ending in late September. The diary is a travel journal—I mean the book is, physically; each page opens with the printed heading “Places Visited” and includes blank lines for the date and locale. Lydie wrote, with a few exceptions, one entry per page, in small, rounded, sharply angled handwriting. The period of the journal coincides with a vacation to Europe that she took with E.W. and Mary Virginia. They sailed from New York Harbor on RMS Olympic, the sister ship of the Titanic, on July 16, bound for Southampton via Cherbourg, France.

  July 17—slept late, walked deck & killed time generally.

  The day before the ship sailed, a massive electrical storm roared over New York City. Lightning struck buildings. Block after block went dark. The Times reported that two oil tanks had been hit in the yards at Bayonne, New Jersey, causing huge fires despite the heavy rain; “pillars of flame,” the reporter wrote, “stabbed hundreds of feet toward the sky.” In Manhattan, a fourteen-year-old girl named Sadie Stone, who worked in Samuel Kamininsky’s kimono factory at 171 Wooster Street, collapsed in hysterics during the storm and had to be treated by a doctor. The lights went out in the Essex Market Police Court, terrifying the hundred or so people in the courtroom; Magistrate Simpson, the Times assured its readers, restored calm.

  Lydie watched the storm from high up in the Plaza hotel, where the Marlands now kept an apartment. Or else she was out shopping, buying things for her trip, and had to dash into a store to escape the rain. Or else she was lunching with friends and thinking of the gifts she’d bring back from Paris. Lydie and her older brother, George, had gone to live permanently with E.W. and Mary Virginia in Ponca City soon after their first visit. When Lydie was sixteen, the Marlands legally adopted them. (Lydie’s birth parents appear to have embraced their role as poor relations with an almost Victorian relish; their two younger children, born after E.W. made his first millions, were a boy named Marland and a girl named Virginia.) Having been raised as the daughter of a pushcart vendor, Lydie became an heiress. She lived in the mansion on Grand Avenue, with its eight acres of private gardens, its hanging staircase, its indoor swimming pool. E.W. organized English fox hunts on the prairie; Lydie rode in them, wearing a jacket and tie. E.W. or
ganized a polo league; Lydie went to the matches. She had books, gowns, jewels, horses. She went dancing. She drank champagne.

  The Marlands’ parties were still remembered, were still written about, decades later.

  An orchestra would play on the terrace and Marland’s blocks of gardens were softly aglow with blue lights. They would dance, go on giggly walks down this lane and that, and sip bootleg scotch and bourbon.

  A few years ago, there was talk in Hollywood about a Lydie Marland movie, which was going to be called The Ends of the Earth. Jennifer Lawrence was supposed to play Lydie; Harvey Weinstein and David O. Russell, probably the last people you’d want anywhere near Lydie’s story, would produce and direct. Nothing came of it, but if it had, these would be the scenes you can imagine the camera loving, the soft montage of opulence: clods flying from the polo ponies’ hooves, the red coats of the fox hunters, the trumpets, the gardens, the glow of the blue lights.

  What was she like, this girl whose life seemed lifted from a fairy tale? It is easier to say what she saw. She saw Ponca City transform, fill up with fountains, fine houses, crystal decanters, electric chandeliers. She saw her uncle—that is, her father, though she never called him that—grow astoundingly, impossibly rich: By 1920, when he was in his mid-forties, he controlled 10 percent of the world’s known oil reserves. She saw the insides of the private train cars that carried her to eastern boarding schools. She saw the Pacific Ocean from the deck of E.W.’s yacht. She saw Hawaii. In photographs from this period she appears high-spirited, giddy in proportion to the times. She never stops laughing. Here she is in a stylish dress, striking a comical pose on the veranda. Here she is holding a horse by the bridle, grinning hugely, with her riding hat pulled down over her eyes. Yet her friends later remembered her as somehow reserved, shy in a way that was hard to identify, as if some part of her were always hanging back to observe her own experience from the outside. As if she were consciously testing the fabric of the romance to see if it would hold.

  This is the voice that comes through in the diary:

  The sun didn’t rise to flood the entire world in gold as it seemed to on the morning we entered that never to be forgotten harbor at Honolulu; but rather half heartedly, now here & now there, it chose a small Gothic church almost smothered on the hillside, or one of the fairylike sail boats which lazily bobbed on the deep green water bosom of the harbor. On our way across the channel to Southampton we passed the Scarborough Castle where Queen Victoria died.

  In 1921, she was sufficiently accustomed to luxury that she could write about the Olympic, probably the most glamorous ocean liner in the world, the ship Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks had chosen for the return voyage from their honeymoon, without bothering to mention the orchestra, the Turkish baths, the swimming pool, the lounge patterned after Versailles. What struck her instead was an incident she witnessed among the lower-class passengers.

  July 22nd—We stood on the after deck & looked down into the steerage, while two Jews handed over some candy and nuts. A scene ensued in which babies got mashed while their mothers tore at each other in mad desire to have the good food for their own. Poor children groped & snatched & shed the tears—poor women lost hands full of hair & mighty near blood.

  This voice—intelligent, observant, and precise, but not critical, permeable to cliché—belongs to a reader, to someone whose first frame of reference for her own experience is the stories she knows from books.

  Aug. 25—Thursday

  Had dinner alone upstairs & started Evan Harrington which Ed left for me with his letter.

  Aug. 26—Friday

  Unpacked this morning & read a little. Walked around dear London this afternoon & bought some soap & ordered two pink match cases.

  Monday—29th Aug.

  Read “Evan Harrington” all day.

  Aug. 30th

  read myself to sleep.

  Thurs. Sept. 1st

  E.W. wanted me to have some things from Burberry’s, namely a hat & plaid coat. As I told him, those things are impracticle. Why arm myself for rain & wind when doing the same thing for a dinner dance is so much more invigorating. I am still reading Evan Harrington.

  Sat. Sept 10th

  Fitting this morning. Am still reading Ainsworth’s Tower—& cannot drag myself away from it.

  The sun is meant to flood the world in gold when the princess sails into the harbor. The poor women are meant to be grateful when the Jews give them candy and nuts. These are picturesque features of reality, and she has been taught to expect that reality will be picturesque. She came to the lesson late, however, and has not entirely been able to absorb it. She knows what it is to be poor; she remembers what it is like not to be a princess. And so she cannot help noticing that the magic often wavers, and that even when it does not, its effect on her is not always what convention might have led her to suppose.

  I’m in London and it tells me one thing: I’ve been suffering, unconsciously, nostalgia all my life.

  Her days are a whirl, full of luncheons, fittings, cocktails, museums, shows. What fun to walk along the Strand, to order pink match cases, to dine at the Trocadero, to see the crown jewels.

  Lady De Freyne gave a dinner at the Ritz & I felt almost at home with the orchestra. It tried to be American and jazzed Bright Eyes and a few more good old home tunes. Lady De F. says “Topping rooms you have!” I believe they are topping—K. & Q. of Belgium occupied this same suite a few weeks ago.

  Yet she is sometimes caught out by a sudden gust of melancholy, surprised, even in rooms recently occupied by the king and queen of Belgium, by a sense that something is missing.

  Gen. Kenley took me to Buckingham Palace this morning to see the guards in formation. Their high black bearskin shakos look most hot & top heavy—red coat, black trousers—all in all the veritable tin soldier of the nursery. The Savoy is superb—just the sort of place you expect—especially gay at Luncheon—excellent service, food & music—a Princeton son here & there or an east Indian maharajah or Turkish sultan—and en costume! To the National Portrait Gallery alone this afternoon & to Westminster Library. What I don’t know appalls me.

  In Paris she dines at Maxim’s and visits the Louvre to see the Venus de Milo. In Edinburgh she is interested in the closes, the dark alleys off the Royal Mile. E.W. tells her that this is where most of the city’s murders happen.

  In Ashton-Under-Lyne, the ancient seat of the Marlands, E.W. takes her to the old church, where she walks “over all the dead Marlands from 17th cent. on.” Perhaps he wants her to feel that this is her history, now, as well as his. Perhaps she does feel it. If she has any thoughts about this glimpse into the Marland past, however, she does not tell her diary what they are. She notes, instead, that she was driven that same afternoon to see Shakespeare’s birthplace. She writes that Stratford is “a veritable dream spot.”

  * * *

  In my parents’ house in Oklahoma City, there is a painting by Robert Hardee of E. W. Marland’s second mansion, the walled manor on Monument Road, which was built between 1925 and 1928. I’m not sure how the painting came into my family’s possession. My aunt and Robert Hardee broke up not long after my grandparents died. I remember him only slightly, a thin, dark man in a tight flannel shirt and black jeans. He had long hair and a heavy black beard and his eyes were serious and strangely hooded, so that from one angle they might look wounded and from another angle they might look cruel. Yet he was gentle, almost painfully so. Once he brought a horse to my aunt’s backyard and led it around in circles while my sister and I sat on its back. Their whole existence, his and my aunt’s, seemed inaccessibly adult, and therefore intensely mysterious. My aunt had parties to which children were not invited. Objects you had to be careful not to break. Strange books. Skinny Legs and All on a glass end table, under an exotic-looking lamp. Not long ago, I learned from the Internet that he died, Robert Hardee, in 2008, at fifty-five, and that he had been teaching art at a public high school in Tulsa, and that he was an Indian activis
t, and that years ago he had been adopted into the Ponca nation. He is described in one biographical statement, apparently written by him, as “a human being who happens to be non-Indian.” The biographical statement mentions that he raised an Arabian horse named Khalifa and rode him bareback, with no saddle or bridle, on the plains.

  I hadn’t known any of this, because at a certain point Robert Hardee vanished from our lives. Except that in the late 1980s and early 1990s he painted a series of historic buildings in Ponca City. For years, you’d see these works hanging in local businesses. Over supper-club doors, near the gumballs. My parents somehow acquired signed and numbered prints of each of them. I have no idea how or why; we’re not art-buying people. Possibly they were a gift? A few years ago, I helped my parents repaint their kitchen, and when the job was done I rehung the prints in their places over the cabinets. They looked newly strange against the pale green walls, with the light shining on them.

  Of all the prints, the painting of the mansion is the one that always draws my eye. It comes back to me like a remnant from a drowned city: the Renaissance palace, with its light brown sandstone walls, its crinkled red-tiled roof. Its porches. Its gargoyles. Its four roofed chimneys that as a child I confused for prison towers. In the painting, there are 1920s sedans parked outside, as if for a party. A family in period clothes holds hands and walks toward the house.