It had been a year since Isabel Aragon Tennyson moved with her family to Los Angeles from Mexico City. A year of private tutors and home schooling. A year learning to speak, read and write English. A year aligning her knowledge of math and science and history with her age group at Blackburn International, the private girls’ school where she was now enrolled.
She met Carmen Sandoval only days after her family arrived in Los Angeles. Carmen’s father worked at Southern California Trust and Savings, the bank Isabel’s father, Malcolm Tennyson, was sent to Los Angeles to manage. Isabel was Carmen’s project to “Americanize,” to mentor for peer acceptance. In a few days Isabel would be leaving the secure nest of personal tutors to enter Blackburn and a world of preteens, a world that could be cruel for newcomers. Carmen was doing her best to manage the transition.
“You see, they call me Carmie, not Carmen. It’s friendly. It’s easy. Hey, Carmie, not hey, Carmen. That’s what we need for you. We can’t say, hey, Issy. That’s weird. Don’t get me wrong. Isabel’s a nice name. I like it. I’m just thinking it’s too formal or something. It should be friendlier for right now. Later on it won’t matter.”
The friends were sitting on Isabel’s front porch, lazing the last days of summer freedom, sipping lemonade, idly scanning the molded green hills and traffic patterns of the San Fernando Valley, appearing from this height like animated plant rows. The Tennyson home was on a high perch near Mullholland Drive. Often, smog made the vista a ghostly gray apparition. On many mornings coastal fog poured down the hills like steamed casement. Today, a brisk and comforting breeze had cleared all obstructions. The world below was in sharp focus, changeable, watchable.
“My brother calls me Bell.”
Carmie could not help laughing at that.
“What’s wrong with Bell?”
“Cow bell? School bell? Tinker Bell?” I can hear ’em all laughing. Not in front of you for sure, but when you’re not there. Don’t be mad. This is stupid, I know. But it’s the way it is. You’ve got to get started right. We start meeting people and I say this is my friend blank. We need to fill in the blank.”
“So what are the other girls’ names?”
Carmie thought for a minute.
“Suzy for Suzanne. Lindy for Linda. Becky for Rebecca. You see, how it works. Problem is we can’t use your first name.”
They sat quietly for a few more moments.
“Oh,” said Carmie, finally struck with an idea she liked, “We’ll use your last name.”
“Tennyson? That doesn’t sound fun and friendly.”
“No, no. We’ll make it Tenny. Hi, Suzy. Meet my friend Tenny. Tenny. Yes, that’s it. I like it. We’ll call you Tenny. Do you like it?”
“I don’t know. It’s different. I’ve never known a Tenny. It sounds a little stupid. To me Tenny sounds like an old shoe. But if you think it helps...”
“That’s why it’s good. It’s familiar. Like you’ve been around a while. Like an old friend.”
2
Decades later the world would know her as Tenny. She accepted the name as an easier entry into the world of new school friends. Later she would live with it for its political value. The name was a lever, a tool, a verbal masquerade. But it was never a name that appealed to her. She was an Aragon, a direct descendent of the Duke of Aragon, whose wife, Queen Isabella of Spain, was venture capitalist to Christopher Columbus. Aragons sailed to the New World with the conquistadors and built a legacy of economic and political power in Mexico. Her grandfather, Miguel Aragon, had vastly expanded the family’s fortune through deft assembly of a business conglomerate known as Groupo Aragon.
Groupo Aragon was Miguel Aragon’s life mission. His travel bags were always packed. Even when in Mexico City Miguel was a rare sighting in his family home. His wife, Alicia, accepted his absence as one of the bargains of their marriage. She had long since come to terms with a comfortable life that seldom included her husband. Their daughter, Maria Rosa, was not as charitable. No one asked Maria if she would accept childhood and adolescence without a father. If they had, she would have declined permission. Each passing year deepened her core resentment like rings on a tree trunk.
Maria paid back her father’s years of separation by separating herself from him as soon as she completed high school. She enrolled in NYU as an art student and moved into a tiny apartment in New York’s Greenwich Village. Maria’s arrival coincided with one of the Village’s most memorable eras, a time when it served as a birthing cradle for Beat Generation writers and abstract expressionist artists. Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko were neighbors. Jack Kerouac was a frequent presence. The bar scene was alive with free spirits from the New York School of Poets.
In Maria’s rebellion from family tradition and opulence, the Village was an ideal escape. Within a year she moved in with a fellow rebel, Malcolm Tennyson, a one-time Yale business major from Boston turned poet. When Maria learned she was pregnant, she and Malcolm married. News of the marriage came to Miguel in a brief and formal letter. No family member had been invited to the wedding. In fact, there had been no wedding, just a brief civil ceremony.
Malcolm was the antithesis of the husband Miguel had always envisioned for his daughter. An American, of little means, and without the courtesy to even ask Miguel for permission to marry his daughter, a request that Miguel most certainly would have rejected.
Soon there was the birth announcement. Federico, six pounds, three ounces, also had joined the family. Then, silence with infrequent contacts. Until five years later news of a second Tennyson child, a daughter, Isabel.
Isabel, for Isabella, queen of the Aragon dynasty. Years and distance had softened Maria’s resentments. Maria meant the name as a peace offering to her father. Miguel, whose life had been a collage of deals, understood the gesture and was prepared to make his own offer. If Maria and Malcolm would move to Mexico City, he would arrange a fine home for them in the family compound and an executive position for Malcolm in the family business. After years of struggling financially in New York, and with another child to care for, and with loneliness for her family and friends a constant companion, Maria accepted.
Mexico City’s Lomas de Chapultepec neighborhood was the first home Isabel knew. Wide gardened streets, arbors of flowers, homes that to a little girl’s imagination evoked the magic and mystery and grandeur of castles. Papa Miguel had built four large classic California Mission style homes on adjoining wooded and terraced lots. They backed onto nearly an acre of enclosed courtyard, a private park, really, shaded by violet jacaranda trees and alive with blankets of bougainvillea.
There were many places for young Isabel to play, to hide, to be alone with her dreams. Mexico City once was known as the City of Palaces. In Isabel’s young world, her home was a palace and she was a princess. How could she not be, when Papa’s home, where she spent so much time, greeted her with an entry wall of Aragon history? Portraits and photos of Aragons past, Beautiful women with glittering tiaras. Tall and handsome men in uniforms, swords at their sides, infallibility on their oiled lips. And always the stories, the greatness of the crest, the expectations.
Papa told Isabel and Federico tales of his father and grandfather and ancestors going back to colonial times. He could trace them. He knew who they had been and what they had become. That he was the principal heir and guardian to this legacy Papa had no doubt. He reveled in the challenge of guardianship even as he bore its weight. Papa never tired of recalling the past. The children never tired of listening. Adventure stories, not written by others, but by their own family. Not fictional characters, but Papa and all others memorialized on the walls of their home. Papa made sure they understood, one day this would be theirs.
Despite the fact that the Tennyson family was now living just steps away from Miguel, there was little thaw in the icy barrier between Maria and her father. Miguel tried at first. Not hard and not well. He tried, but long-held resentments were too deeply embedded to be excised. While he could not
unwind the past he could avoid repeating past mistakes. He could write a new chapter much more easily than trying to edit an old one.
That he did, with his grandchildren. He was able to give them the world—most importantly, his time and love. Federico and Isabel returned that love to Papa, as they called him. His pet name for Isabel was his little treasure, pequeño tesoro. It wasn’t only the gifts, the toys, the clothes, and the adventures money could buy. He became the person closest to their lives. Maria was a kind and loving mother, but she was authority while Papa was pure joy. Their father, Malcolm, shared his wife’s love for their children, but he was cut from grayer cloth than Miguel and the comparison was not to his advantage. Isabel knew there was tension. Her mother seldom visited next door when Papa was home. When they encountered one another, Isabel heard the harsh words. At those times she would just run away to her trees and flowers and dolls and dreams. If there was trouble in the adult world, in Isabel’s there was only happiness.
Tension eventually overcame paradise. Friction between Maria and her father festered into open wounds and finally into the intolerable. A new bargain was struck. Malcolm would be reassigned to manage a minor Los Angeles bank, the only U.S. investment in Groupo Aragon’s portfolio of assets. The Tennysons would move to Los Angeles, but Federico would remain, continuing his education with Miguel’s guidance, apprenticing to one day replace Miguel as the next generation’s keeper of the Aragon flame. Maria was trading her son, temporarily she hoped, for her freedom.
A year later Isabel was entering school, speaking a new language, responding to a new name, Tenny. Was the name change necessary? She could never be sure. What she did know was that “Tenny” was easily accepted. Her transition was seamless. Her command of English quickly evolved into the idioms of young life. She loved her classes, her teachers, the world of information and thought that was opening for her. Her bonds with Carmie tightened with each passing year. As they came of age together they shared each other’s clothes and deepest secrets. Together they experimented on the edge of adolescent danger, with boys and alcohol and drugs. Maria had passed along her rebellious genes to her daughter.
Classmates called them the salvajes, the wild ones. When partying with those who didn’t know them well Tenny and Carmie would often call themselves las hermanas, sisters. Not that they looked alike. But they were about the same height and body builds. Each had chestnut hair that they wore shoulder length. More than appearance, it was the similarity of their personalities that gave credence to the sisters’ ruse. They were perpetually buoyant, moving with confidence and usually with infectious good humor, feeding off each other’s energy.
Tenny had dark, deep-set green eyes common to generations of Aragons, strikingly similar to those who in earlier centuries had stood for portraits, or who allowed a single instant in time to shape their identity through photographs. Her eyes were unusually large for her oval face, eyes you noticed immediately, eyes that didn’t just see you, but locked into you, reading you, storing information about you. Her lips also pressed the boundaries of normal, shaped like the Man-Ray painting, “The Lovers.” As she transitioned from the world of boys to men her lips often became lures to the unwary. She understood their attraction and used them to tease, taunt or reel in, as she pleased. Her five foot eight body veered from the overstuffed flesh of the Aragon line. Having grown up among relatives whose tortilla consumption she considered excess, and whose bodies showed it, Tenny was determined to stay trim. For most of her life she succeeded. While not born beautiful, Tenny, by the way she dressed, wore her hair, moved her body and exuded confidence, evolved into the attractive young woman she believed a princess should be.
High school ended for her on a high note, and then it was on to the University of Southern California. Her parents preferred Stanford, where she had also been accepted. But Carmie was enrolling in USC, and Tenny would go with her.
Both were excelling in their undergraduate classes. At the other end of the candle they were in high demand on the fraternity party circuit. It was just after the start of their sophomore year, a time when the new car feel of college life was giving way to the comfort of established friends and routine. Carmie and Tenny had developed a party protocol. One or the other would drive, drink moderately and see that to it they both got home with lives and honor intact. In theory it was a sensible plan. In practice it had worked well. Until the Phi Iota party and Andres Navarro.
Andres was a six foot three god of a male, as sharp as a sling blade in his tailored blue suit, an expanse of curly black hair framing his blue eyes and GQ cover smile. Tenny actually felt her knees buckle at first sight.
“I saw you across the room,” said Andres in a rich baritone. “You’re beautiful.”
Carmie was not there for protection. Tenny was very much alone as Andres held out his hand. Every alarm bell inside her went off as she reached for his.
“Thanks, so are you. I’m Tenny.”
“I know. My sister Bettina’s told me about you. She thought we should get acquainted. ”
“Dance?” said Tenny.
“Let’s go over to the bar and talk for a while,” he answered.
In a crowded room there’s little white space. They drank standing close, heads even closer to be heard. They danced. They drank again.
“I’m going to leave with Andres,” Tenny told Carmie when they took a break together in the bathroom.
“Really? Think that’s a good idea? How much have you had to drink?”
“Not much. I can handle it.”
“I don’t know. You look pretty shaky to me. He’s got you going.”
“Well, he’s gorgeous, but don’t worry. I’ll be okay.”
Actually, she didn’t want to be okay. Inside she was on fire.
They parked on a dark street off of Coldwater Canyon road. Boy-girl sex? Yes, she had been there. This was different, this was real. This was like nothing she had ever experienced. Half-clothed, insatiable passion that steamed the windows and vaporized reason.
Near dawn she quietly edged through the door of her home, body and mind in turmoil as she made the transition from girl to woman, her head somewhere other than its usual sensible place on her body. Heaven, maybe.
Sleepless, sleep not even considered on this first morning of her new life, she showered, dressed in shorts and tank top and dropped onto a patio lounge chair to watch the rising sun turn hilltops gold. At 7:00 a.m. she phoned Carmie.
“I’m in love, Carmie. In love.”
Carmie mumbled a reply, unintelligible, from residual sleep.
“I mean it. This is real.”
Carmie’s eyes and lips were now open, her head still stuffed into her pillow, reluctant to move.
“I knew I shouldn’t have left you alone. Backseat, front seat or what?”
“It was fantastic. But so’s he, Carmie. Smart, funny, the talk was as good as the sex.”
“What time should I pick you up? You can tell me all about it before classes.”
“I’m not going to class today. Andres and I are going for a drive along the coast. I would have followed him home if I could.”
Carmie was awake now, sitting up.
“Hey, don’t get carried too far with this. He’s a guy and you fell for him. Work him into your life. Don’t change your life for him.”
“Can’t help it, Carmie. He’s all I can think about.”
Within a month Tenny and Andres were engaged, a month when Tenny did little but be with Andres or dream about being with him. It was a month when she became devoted not only to Andres but to sex.
Maria and Malcolm Tennyson readily accepted young Navarro as a suitable match for their daughter. Andres was a pre-med student, planning to join his father’s lucrative private orthopedic practice. For grandfather Miguel it was more than acceptance. Relief that Isabel had chosen to continue the ancestral bloodline with one of their own. The Navarro family, like the Aragons, traced roots back to the early colonial days. Andres’ grandpa
rents had emigrated to Los Angeles from Puebla, Mexico, lured by the opportunity to own land in the San Fernando Valley just as the city was being transformed from a sunny agricultural outpost to one of the nation’s metropolitan magnets. The Navarro orange groves had long since become shopping centers.
Miguel barely tolerated Malcolm Tennyson for marrying his daughter without even meeting the family, without going through the ritual of asking pedir, or acceptance. He blamed Malcolm for the years of estrangement, even for the all-too Anglo name he had given his daughter and grandchildren. Now he would have the opportunity to welcome a proper young man, one who understood the courtesies of age and position. Someday, Miguel could only hope, Isabel and their children would return to their Mexico City roots.
As a wedding gift for his granddaughter, Miguel purchased a two-acre property near Isabel’s parents’ San Fernando Valley estate. That’s where the new couple set up housekeeping and planned to start a family. Andres completed his medical training and moved into residency. Isabel settled in to await the arrival of their first child. At five months, Isabel miscarried. She quickly became pregnant again. Four months later she miscarried again, this time requiring a hysterectomy.
The failed pregnancies took their toll on the marriage. So did Andres’ long nights away in residency, his growing interest in surgery and a new residency in San Diego, which now meant he was away during the week, flying or driving home for weekends, and not all of those. The glow tarnished. The fairy tale faded into tedium for Isabel. Andres was too handsome, too vital, too easily aroused to remain alone when not at home. His extracurricular anatomy sessions became too apparent to be ignored. The divorce came just four years after the wedding. Not a divorce, really. The Catholic Church wouldn’t permit it. But arrangements can be made, particularly with families as prominent and as generous to the Church as the Aragons and Navarros.
What can puncture daydreams? For Isabel, the sharp lances were the realization that she would never have children of her own and the end of a marriage she had once considered perfection. Her turmoil all the greater for the want-not serenity of earlier years. How to handle adversity when your mental immune system hasn’t been reinforced by prior exposure? How to adapt to life in the valleys after so many years at the mountain top?
The Latina President...and the Conspiracy to Destroy Her Page 2
