Impossible Owls

by Brian Phillips

  Part of the mystery was the nature of her marriage to E.W. Had it been a real love story? Some people tried to say it had, but there was something in the basic character of the relationship—the age difference; the family connection, which was intimate even if not precisely incestuous: there are photos of the two of them together when Lydie was twelve years old—that made the claim feel inadequate. Was it a story of coercion, of abuse? That might have been convincing in a different way, but Lydie herself never presented it as one, and there were other indications, memories from the 1920s and before, that seemed to suggest a less awful version of events. Many people had noticed a change in their relationship, noticed for instance that she glowed in E.W.’s presence, noticed that they were spending much more time together, in the mid-1920s, when Lydie was already an adult. When he came back from business trips, she insisted on meeting his train at the station. When he took up with other women after Mary Virginia’s death, she was furious and fled to California. These were not definitive details, certainly, particularly given her obvious mental distress in later years. But wasn’t there also a danger in simply assuming that she had no agency—in simply assuming the worst?

  She had been a radically displaced girl, whisked away to a strange sort of Edwardian frontier-kingdom ruled by a man whose whims had the power (briefly, but during most of her childhood) to reshape reality. Are we not already, here, a good deal beyond simple questions of love and propriety and consent?

  We didn’t know. We couldn’t say.

  Had the affair begun before Mary Virginia died?

  Same answer.

  In any case, no one asked these questions directly. But you felt them, even children felt them, below the surface.

  One way to describe such questions is to say that they were the implicit cause of an unstated anxiety about frontier conquest, about civilization building, about who and what we were.

  Another way to describe such questions is to say they were nixie fingers.

  When I think, now, about what happened, I return to the fact that Lydie was a reader. She had been taught she was living in a romance. E.W. was the center of the romance. E.W. was the organizing principle, the closest thing her story had to a writer. Is it strange to imagine that the emotional logic that led her to marry him was essentially the logic of searching for an ending to a story? Of joining herself to the strongest trunk of a narrative whose essential fragility she must have long since begun to perceive?

  All I have of her are fragments. A copy of a century-old diary. A painting by the artist my aunt did not marry. A worn magazine. If you turn left in the grand foyer of the Marland Mansion, away from the gift shop, and then pass through the formal dining room, you come to the service kitchen. In the kitchen there is a safe. Once it held the family silver. Today, it’s full of boxes. Some of the boxes contain photographs or mementos, relics from the mansion’s past; most are full of papers. The papers are a patchwork, covering everything from Marland Oil committee minutes to the death certificates of family members, and covering them unevenly, because so much has been destroyed or lost. (I have never seen a personal letter written by E. W. Marland, for instance.) One of the boxes contains the contents of Lydie Marland’s desk at the moment of her death in 1987. It is perhaps only because of this box and the overstuffed folders and envelopes contained inside it that I sometimes have a sense of her as a mind literally exploding into text, fracturing into thousands of newspaper clippings. She read constantly, peering through her magnifying glass, and she cut out whatever interested her, and she underlined the key passages in red pen.

  So, for instance, she saved articles on the Founding Fathers, on appreciating wine, on scotch, on an “amazing new arthritis treatment” whose rate of cure, according to a Dr. Toshio Yamauchi, “is 100 percent.” She saved a map of the planets, an advertisement for the smallest alarm clock in the world, a story about the Mother Jones collective being framed on drug charges in Baltimore.

  The complexity of a single human brain is comparable to all the telephone switchboards, exchanges and wiring patterns of computers, radio, TV and other electronic equipment in the world.

  She had discovered radical politics (I am thinking here of the antiwar rally where she was supposedly spotted in Washington), but her politics lacked focus. She saved many articles about the environment, in which she seems to have taken a passionate interest, along with granola, the youth serum of Dr. Ana Aslan, the prices of real estate in Big Sur and Puget Sound, water filters, Vitamin E Complexion Soap, and scientific inquiries into human hair: Would lanolin make it grow? Rocking back and forth in a swing could perhaps improve one’s vision, and solar power could possibly solve the energy crisis, and here is a Japanese prayer book and here a bookmark with the text of the Magnificat. She made notes on the backs of envelopes:

  Some places to migrate to—or visit, or—see—go—live—Iceland—no police, no crime—

  What I don’t know appalls me, she had written in 1921.

  She spent her life trying to find things out.

  Only I think that somehow she could never get the picture to make sense, could never quite locate the key that would resolve the fragments of her reading and experience into a comprehensible whole. The shocks were too great. The surveillance was too terrifying. The changes were too immense.

  Later people said her decline had begun with E.W.’s death, that she had loved him so much and relied on him so entirely that she was lost without him.

  “The light just went out of her life,” the executive director of the Marland Estate told a reporter for the Tulsa World.

  I don’t believe this, which doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

  Cause and effect.

  6

  Once, when I was eleven or twelve years old, a therapist asked me if I had cried when my grandparents drowned. My parents had taken me to see this therapist, a child psychologist whose name I no longer remember, after I told them I felt nervous all the time, a true statement if not, clinically, a particularly interesting one. The therapist I recall as a sagging man in his late thirties with large clear aviator glasses and shaggy straw-colored hair. He wore baggy suits. His office was in a sort of prefab office park just outside town. I liked going to see him because at the end of one fluorescent hallway in the medical suite there was a small refrigerator, and at the start of every session I was allowed to take out a Coke. After that we sat in his office and talked, or else he gave me little tasks to perform and watched me do them. I had to arrange blocks in a certain way, or he’d show me how to draw triangles in a pattern that would create an infinite series of triangles, then tell me to “stop when it’s finished.” I didn’t see how any of this was supposed to help me feel less nervous. I didn’t see how questions about my grandparents were supposed to help me feel less nervous, either. They had died a long time ago, two years, and what did that have to do with anything? But I was used to being given quizzes and tasks, and I liked the Cokes, so mostly I went along and made things up only if I thought he wouldn’t understand the real answers.

  I told him that I had cried when my grandparents drowned, but only alone, in the bathtub, where no one could see me.

  This was one of the times when I made something up in order to seem understandable.

  In fact I had not cried when my grandparents drowned. In fact I had not even felt sad when my grandparents drowned, at least not in the way I understood the word. What I felt was something else, a big, loose, empty feeling, and the right words for it didn’t seem to come from the language of emotions at all. I didn’t think I was wrong to feel this way, exactly. But I sensed that in some way it was a wrong answer, an answer that lay outside the interpretive paradigm we were meant to be working within, so without really thinking about it I told the therapist a story I thought he would know how to explain.

  Note that I never imagined I might not understand what he was looking for. Only that it would be impossible for him—for other people, possibly for anyone—to understand me.

/>   Where on earth, at eleven years old, had I gotten the idea that it was my job to be easily understood?

  I spent a lot of time dreaming about leaving Ponca City.

  This, too, was something I had to be careful about expressing, because it could so easily be taken the wrong way.

  The problem wasn’t that I didn’t like Ponca City; it was simply that I did not belong there. Liking Ponca City, even loving it, as I sometimes thought I did, was a trap, because I could only relate to Ponca City from a kind of sideways angle, and if I loved it too much, I might end up never finding the place where I was supposed to be. I was not supposed to be in Ponca City. I was not supposed to be surrounded by churches. I was not supposed to have science teachers who believed in the gospel of creation, was not supposed to hear commercial country music on every radio, was not supposed to spend my life cruising down Fourteenth Street with its strip malls and chain restaurants, was not supposed to see distant searchlights from the Ford dealership at night. I was not supposed to feel obscurely haunted by the half-ruined and mostly abandoned downtown, full of crumbling relics of the oil boom, or by the residential streets that bordered it, where what had once been the grand houses of Marland Oil lieutenants were now going to seed among old cars and trampolines. I could see that these things suited other people, somehow fit the DNA of other people, often people I loved. But when I imagined spending my life among them, I felt a wild desire to escape to the ends of the earth.

  When I was a little older, the place where I went to escape was the Marland Mansion. I would drive there, past my grandparents’ house, which had long since been sold, and park in the little parking lot beside the hedge garden. Then I would go in through the heavy wooden door under the porte cochere. I opened and closed the door as quietly as I could, because I had to sneak past the admissions desk in the gift shop. I had to sneak past the admissions desk in the gift shop because I could not afford the entrance fee. Also because I liked imagining I had the freedom of the place, that I could come and go as I pleased. I would walk straight across the grand foyer, stepping softly on the hard floor. I would climb the vaulted stone stair. The stair was dark, like something in a castle, and on the landing a pair of stone owls stood on pale columns. They looked down on you as you climbed. There were tiny red lights in the eyes of the owls. The owls’ eyes, in the dim stair, were four bright red points.

  For me, climbing the stair was like passing into another world. What my grandmother had found in the idea of England, I, having hardly ever left Oklahoma, found here. A place where things felt old. Where things were beautiful. The mansion made me feel a bit of what I’d felt when I discovered the 1960s book-club copy of Poems of Byron, Keats, and Shelley in my parents’ bookcase, a book I’d read so often it was now almost in tatters. I hadn’t known anything like that existed before. I wanted more things like it. The mansion was a link to the larger, richer world—the place where books like that came from.

  Upstairs, I didn’t have to be so quiet. I walked among the bedrooms, trying all the doors. Especially the ones with NO ENTRY signs stuck to them. Sometimes I’d get lucky and find one unlocked. Mostly that just meant I’d see a closet full of folding chairs or boxes, but once I found a narrow stair to an attic I hadn’t known existed, where there was a cart that held several antique hats.

  Always, when I went upstairs, I visited Lydie’s room, which was my favorite in the mansion. Not because it was the grandest—it was modest compared with the spectacular public rooms downstairs—but because the quality of its loveliness was the hardest to define. The delicately carved lime-wood paneling around the walls had been contrived in such a way that there were no sharp corners anywhere in the room, only curves. The effect was serene, yet somehow also unnerving, as if the very fineness of the design blurred out something that might otherwise have been apparent. I thought about the young woman who had slept here, some of whose clothes were on display in the hall outside, and I thought about the old woman in the raincoat I remembered from when I was small, and I shivered a little.

  Lydie, who had lived in the mansion.

  Lydie, who had almost escaped.

  At around this time they brought her statue back to the foyer. The one she’d ordered the monument worker, Glen Gilchrist, to destroy. The one he’d buried in pieces behind his barn, telling no one the secret. Smash the face first, she’d said. As it turned out Glen Gilchrist did tell someone the secret, but only on his deathbed. On September 11, 1987, D. J. Van Nostrand, the husband of a niece of Gilchrist’s, mailed a letter to an executive at Conoco, disclosing the probable whereabouts of the fragments:

  You may not be interested in doing anything about this, but possibly you know who would be. Perhaps nothing can be done now since a total stranger owns the property.

  When the curator of the Marland Mansion, a man named Paul Prather, went to the site to dig, he took special sensing equipment donated by Conoco. The first piece he found was Lydie’s hat, where it lay among a maze of oil pipelines. He got down on his knees and began to dig with his hands. When he found the first piece of Lydie’s face, he later claimed, he experienced “an unexplained two-and-a-half-hour blackout.” This stretch of missing time, so similar to what the victim of an alien abduction might report, was, he thought, “an omen,” a sign that Lydie, if she could know that this final shred of her privacy had been violated, “would be displeased.” Possibly he was joking when he said this. He dug up the rest of the fragments. He hired art restorers from Washington University in St. Louis to plan a reconstruction. Monument workers pieced the statue back together over two years. The reconstruction was unveiled in 1993.

  The artist, the American sculptor Jo Davidson, has depicted Lydie at the age of twenty-seven, in a thin dress through which the outlines of her nipples are visible. She has one hand on her hip and the other hand, which holds her hat, behind her back. She is standing with her left leg slightly in front of her right, and the dress’s skirt clings to her left thigh. The first time I encountered the statue, in the mansion’s foyer, I came close enough to see the pale lines crisscrossing Lydie’s white stone face where the sledgehammer struck it. I tried not to notice them. The hopes I had invested in the mansion, which I saw, impossibly, both as a means of escape and as a power capable of bringing lost things back, made it seem unwise, almost rude, to notice them. You see I was still so young that I thought I should be looking at the statue. I should have been looking at the cracks.

  Acknowledgments

  This book would be immeasurably different, and worse, and probably nonexistent, and I would certainly have run into the woods and starved to death, without the kind assistance of the following:

  Sandy Baldwin, Theodore Baskaran, Alex Bates, Sarah Bolling, Alyssa DeBlasio, Priyvrat Gadhvi, Alfie Goodrich, Spencer Hall, Noriko Hayashi, Eva Holland, Jackson Howard, Jane Hu, Jerry Jaleel, Raza Kazmi, Evan Kindley, John Knight, Emily Ryan Lerner, Janaki Lenin, the Marland Estate Foundation, Joshua Mathew, Paul Murphy, Supriya Nair, the Oklahoma State Archives, Steve and Sheila Peiffer, Dan and Janie Phillips, Mahesh Rangarajan, Leah Reich, and Emily Sovich;

  Everyone at Grantland and MTV News, especially Monica Schroeder, Dan Fierman, Sarah Larimer, Rafe Bartholomew, Holly Anderson, Megan Creydt, Jay Caspian Kang, Sean Fennessey, Patricia Martorana, Danny Chau, Alex Pappademas, Molly Lambert, Emily Yoshida, Taylor Trudon, Caitlin Wolper, and Bill Simmons;

  Everyone at FSG, especially my wonderful editor, Emily Bell;

  Chris Parris-Lamb;

  Siobhan Phillips, most of all.

  * * *

  I am grateful to Yuri Norstein and his assistants for opening their studio to me in the spring of 2016. “The Little Gray Wolf Will Come,” the essay I wrote based on that experience, is further indebted to the work of Clare Kitson, whose book Yuri Norstein and Tale of Tales: An Animator’s Journey is an invaluable source of information on Norstein in English.

  * * *

  My friend Jay Baldwin, who taught me to fly in Alaska, was killed in the su
mmer of 2015 while leading a training expedition in the Alaskan wilderness. “Out in the Great Alone” is included here in his memory.

  Praise for Impossible Owls

  “There is a section in Impossible Owls where Brian Phillips writes about tigers, and he notes that what’s most astonishing about the animal is not its size or power or beauty, but its capacity to disappear. This is an excellent description of a tiger, but also an excellent description of how Phillips writes. These are big, powerful, beautiful essays—but no matter how personal the content, he just seems to disappear into the paragraphs.”

  —Chuck Klosterman, author of But What If We’re Wrong? and Eating the Dinosaur

  “The journeys that make up Impossible Owls lead us to some remarkable, unpredictable places, from the Alaskan wilderness to a supermarket parking lot in southern Japan, from an old movie palace in Moscow to the underground histories of northern Oklahoma. But these far-flung tales all share the same inspirational spark: Brian Phillips’s soulful, intrepid spirit, and his masterful ability to turn everyday curiosities into epic quests that you can’t stop reading.”