Judith Krantz (68 page)

“How many thousands exactly?” Casey turned away from her with a flinty look that she ignored. “And why?”

“Well,” Jazz said, dreamily lying back against him, “I’ve been thinking … you have no idea how much I’ve been thinking, ever since we started to look for the Sentinel Rocks. I decided to make two plans: Plan A, what to do if we never found them, and Plan B, what to do if we did.”

“What if we’d never found them?” Against his will, Casey found himself lured into going along with her, for the potent magic of her voice was too compelling for him to resist.

“I couldn’t even focus on Plan A because it was unthinkable. You know how sometimes you just block out something because it’s too awful? It was like that. So I concentrated on Plan B. First I thought about what my father would want to do if he were alive, and I discovered something.”

Jazz sat up and looked into the fire. “He was only half-right. He wanted to keep the land just the way it is forever, and that’s not possible for one family in this day and age. In his time … maybe … but not anymore. The Kilkullen family can’t own over sixty thousand acres of land all for ourselves unless it’s somewhere so remote that no one else wants to live
there. But in California, where so many people want to live, it’s not fair. We should share it … but in the right way.”

“I never thought I’d hear you say you wanted to share the land.”

“I never seriously imagined it before. But now … I think that the part of the land that can be developed, the part that lies to the south of the rock with the twin points … there’s about twenty-five thousand acres there, and you could take, oh, let’s say eight thousand or ten thousand acres of it, and build a new town where about sixty or seventy thousand people could live and still be surrounded by open country on all sides.”

“My sweetheart, the urban planner.”

“You don’t have to be an urban planner to know that—all you have to do is read the papers. It’s the new ideas that count, the ideas that would restore what’s been left out of most developments.”

“Like what?” Casey was interested in Jazz’s take on a subject that had been in the back of his mind.

“Community.”

“How do you restore community? Always assuming that you are building a town for seventy thousand people, and it’s not that solid platinum parking lot for Rolls-Royces that Valerie and Fernanda want.”

“Without the beach they haven’t got a chance, and the whole beach and the harbor were excluded by the map. Listen, Casey, this is how you get a community.
You leave out malls and you put in main streets!
In one stroke you’ve got a community again! Each neighborhood will have a main street, a real, honest-to-God, old-time main street, with soda fountains and Bijou movie theaters and bakeries and grocery stores with real, live butchers and hardware stores and bowling alleys and dance studios and hamburger joints and dry cleaners and delis and barbershops and beauty parlors and bookstores and drugstores and pool halls and lots and lots of cafes, outdoor sidewalk cafes, and shops of all kinds and places to loiter and gossip and bike racks everywhere
because that’s how people get from the different neighborhoods to the main streets, unless they walk or ride a horse.”

“What different neighborhoods?” Casey asked.

Jazz was pacing around the living room, so carried away by her vision that she had left the warm spot by the fire, the warm spot where she had been so close to him, and Casey felt that the only way he could keep in touch with her was to ask her questions.

“People won’t live in streets with houses you can’t tell apart; they’ll have neighborhoods, like there used to be, like some New England towns, or even San Juan Capistrano, places where some people have houses and some have apartments and some have one-room studios, and some pay a whole lot less rent than others, and some own their own houses and some are young and some are old and some are somewhere in between, with children of all ages … but, Casey, they have porches and verandas and window boxes and courtyards and patios and backyard gardens and attics—I have the feeling that attics are very important, although I don’t know why—and all the houses are near enough together so that people have neighbors and they can sit out on their porches and say hello to each other, and everything is on a human scale, a pedestrian scale, and there’ll be places to picnic and play chess, and horses to rent everywhere, and baseball diamonds and playgrounds just for the little kids, and basketball hoops all over the place!”

“What about the ranch, the herds?”

“But, Casey, don’t you see? We’ll still ranch, with a few less cows, but the idea is to have the ranch and the town
coexisting
, so that everyone who lives in the town can see cattle grazing when they look out of their windows. They’ll be able to ride horses everywhere, right down the middle of Main Street, but we’ll discourage them from holding their own roundups.”

“How are you going to run this town?”

“With town meetings and a city government in the town hall on the town square—did I mention the town square?” Jazz waved the question of running the
town away. “There’ll be a big public library and a bandstand with live music on the weekends so everybody gets to know everybody else, and lots of fountains, so that there’s always the sound of running water, and more cafes, and art galleries and arcades with columns so people can walk anywhere and be sheltered from the sun and everybody can walk or bike or ride down to the beach and swim or surf or sit and listen to the waves and look at the sunset but they can’t change it,
not ever
, or—”

“Schools?”

“Naturally,” Jazz said, “naturally schools, churches, synagogues, and light, clean industry and businesses so that people can work near their homes. City planners are thinking along these same lines all over. I kept reading about it, but I never paid attention till Phoebe tore down the Purple Tostada Grande.… ” She paused by the window and shook her head at the memory.

“Come over here and sit down. What did that have to do with it?”

“She took away a part of Dazzle’s neighborhood. Overnight, just like that! Venice is a real neighborhood, one of the last, and Phoebe destroyed a piece of it, something that we all took for granted, the way people used to take their main streets for granted. So when I saw that we had the chance to build a new town, I knew that it had to have neighborhoods and main streets … and from there it’s easy, all you have to do is remember what it used to be like twenty-five years ago … twenty-five years ago … that’s about how long ago it was before it all started to change …”

Jazz sounded as if she were in a trance, Casey thought. She hadn’t worked out any of the formidable problems of actually building such a town, either financially or in any other practical way, nor had she asked herself for one minute how she was to become appointed the master planner of this new, Utopian town, given the existence of her non-utopian-minded sisters.

“Jazz,” he asked, “do you know what infrastructure is?”

“Vaguely,” Jazz said, deep in her vision.

But she’ll find out, Casey thought. It won’t take her long before she’s a mistress of infrastructure. She may be dreaming out loud and a little drunk, but she’s not talking about anything impossible. She makes sense. Damn good sense. He knew a thousand times as much as she did about land development, and he knew her ideas were the wave of the future. Oh, she’d get caught up in this new town, she was so enthralled with it already that she’d forgotten a life’s career as a photographer; she was so involved that she didn’t even know he was in the room except as a listener; she hadn’t wondered if he’d participate in the new town, or even asked if he was interested. She was no more concerned about his nonexistent three ex-wives than she was about his role in this newly born project, as if being Cow Boss were the limit of his ambitions. Jazz will keep not having time for getting married, or even talking about it, and pretty soon the real city planners and architects and builders will move into her life, and then what? Was this the moment to mention his own feelings? Was this the moment to bring her down to earth, when she was in such a state of rapture? No, he couldn’t do it. Was it the selflessness of love, or was it fear of what she might say? Maybe the answer to that was something so awful that he should block it out, the way Jazz had blocked Plan A. All he needed now, Casey told himself harshly, were stronger powers of denial, as strong as hers.

They won’t like this, Jazz gloated, as she arranged a pile of papers and photographs on the bare top of the desk in her father’s office. They won’t like it at all, but they can’t refute it. It’s official, with all the power of the United States government behind it, no folktale this, no straw grasped at in desperation. Nothing was missing but the photographs of the Pepsi can.

In a few minutes, Jazz was expecting the visit of Jimmy Rosemont and Sir John Maddox. She had summoned
them—no other word than
summoned
was equal to the manner in which she had informed them that she had matters to discuss with them—as soon as her documentation was complete, six days after finding the Sentinel Rocks.

At first, Jazz had thought of offering them tea and showing them the evidence of the covenant afterwards, but she had rejected this idea almost as soon as it came to her mind. No tea, no coffee, not so much as a glass of water unless they asked for one. This was business, as downright inhospitable as any business that she could imagine, and she didn’t intend to give it a veneer of false feminine graciousness.

She was dressed to do business, as much like a man as possible, like a rancher, a proprietor. She wore straight, dark brown leather trousers tucked into fine lizard Western boots and a man-tailored shirt of heavy white cotton with a string tie of black leather. On her head she wore an old Western hat that a vaquero had given her for her eighteenth birthday. It had been a joke to him, but on Jazz’s head it had a terrifying panache, a hat like a battle flag. The simple pieces of Jazz’s clothing came together to form a martial look as unmistakable in its own way as a bullfighter’s suit of lights.

Today, Jazz walked with none of the feminine, long-legged grace she normally possessed; the boots ensured a steady, authoritative tread. Her insouciance, that light, carefree balance of a tightrope walker, was countermanded by the unexpected severity of her hat, set straight above her eyebrows. She could almost have passed for a young man, for she had done away with her hair, braiding it and tucking the braid out of sight at the back of her neck.

She had weighed the idea of asking Casey to be present at this interview, but had decided that since he had no formal connection to the land, it would be out of place. She hadn’t asked her sisters to come, since Jimmy Rosemont and Sir John clearly acted for them, and they would only be a distraction from what she planned to say. Jazz stood behind her father’s
desk and tapped the heel of one of her boots impatiently. In two minutes they would be late.

Jazz heard a car drive up, heard Susie open the front door, heard the footsteps of two men approaching the office. At last! She stood her ground, not advancing from behind the desk, unsmiling, letting them come to her to shake hands.

“Make yourselves comfortable, gentlemen,” Jazz commanded. She sat down in her father’s chair and tilted it backwards so that her booted feet, crossed at the ankle, could rest on the desk. She looked around the room, at the walls hung frame-to-frame with photographs taken over the last hundred years, with bills of sale for prize bulls, and cherished letters from various Democratic leaders, and felt herself surrounded by the presence of Mike Kilkullen.

“When we first met,” she said, looking calmly from one to the other, “the two of you unfolded a plan for the disposition of the Kilkullen Ranch, or, as it was called in the early days of California, the Rancho Montana de la Luna. Do you know why it was called that, Mr. Rosemont?”

“No, Miss Kilkullen.”

“It means Mountain of the Moon. For as long as men have lived on this land, and it’s been a longer time than we know, they’ve seen the moon rise directly behind the mountain, the one we call Portola Peak, and no doubt some of them, in their ignorance, thought that the mountain gave birth to the moon. But you, Mr. Rosemont, and you, Sir John, are intelligent men, too modern to deal in such ancient fancies. When you see a mountain, you see an
opportunity
for it to give birth. To condos.”

“Touché, Miss Kilkullen. But times change,” Jimmy Rosemont said, “and mountains change with them.”

“Not as much as you imagine, Mr. Rosemont. I loathed your idea—”

“So we noticed,” Sir John said dryly.

“And I still do. But I didn’t know then what I
could do to prevent it from happening. I undertook a search to find out just how much legality there might be in my father’s homemade will, and I discovered something very interesting indeed. He left land to his daughters that he had no right to give us.”

“You don’t say.” Jimmy Rosemont had a small smile, a condescending, bantering smile.

“Land,” Jazz continued steadily, “to which he did not have a clear title, land on which there lies a covenant that prohibits him from leaving it to anyone without including the facts of the covenant.”

“What sort of nonsense is this?” Sir John’s voice was unconcerned, genial.

“Not nonsense, Sir John.” Jazz stood up. “I have a number of items to show you both. First, a letter from my great-great-grandmother, Juanita Isabella Valencia Kilkullen, to her future daughter-in-law.”

Slowly Jazz read the translation of the letter, a translation that had been prepared by a professor of Spanish at UC Irvine and then notarized. Rapidly but precisely she took them step by step through the history of California land grants, and she explained the significance of the enlarged black-and-white reproduction of the document she and Casey had found at the Huntington Library, translating the vow Bernardo Valencia had made, and the signatures of the four witnesses. Again, it had all been notarized. She showed them the presidential seal that finally validated the claim to the land, as well as a photocopy of the title deed signed by Antonio Valencia and Michael Kilkullen. She displayed the photographs taken from the Sentinel Rocks, enlarged to ten-by-twelve. Finally, using a modern topographical map of the present land, she showed them the outline, traced in red, of the area of the land that must remain “unchanged by the hand of man,” the covenant that had been respected by the Kilkullens as closely as it had been by the Valencias.