Beyond the Grave

by Muller, Marcia

  I held up a hand. “I don't want to know about it. Susana's getting mighty expensive tastes for the salary we pay her.”

  “Well, she's going to be a millionaire's wife, so I guess she's practicing.”

  “Wife? We'll see about that.”

  “She has a ring.”

  That startled me. “A ring? She called him her ‘fiancé,’ but I had no idea it really was that serious.”

  “She received it this weekend. Muy grande y caw.”

  “The man's taken leave of his senses!” But Susana hadn't; she was being as pragmatic as ever. She'd been married once before, to a thieving Colombian who had run off to Bogota when his crimes had caught up with him. Susana, also a native of that country, had chosen to remain in the U.S., in spite of the fact that she had been only sixteen at the time. She would prefer, she had said, to make her way alone here rather than return to “a backward land.” So far, she was making her way splendidly.

  Rudy shrugged diplomatically. “Time will tell whether it's a good match or not. You still haven't said what you're doing here on your vacation day.”

  “Oh!” I got up and crossed to the door. “Come on out to my car. I brought a marriage coffer that I found at that auction on Saturday. A very good piece. Did you have any luck in L.A.?”

  He waggled a hand from side to side. “Un pocito. A couple of chairs. This display is going to be more costly than we'd anticipated, I'm afraid.”

  “I'm afraid of that, too, from the prices several other pieces brought at the auction I went to. We'll just have to go slowly and buy carefully. Maybe if we assemble an impressive small collection, the board will release more funds. Or perhaps we can interest one of our patrons.”

  We went out to the parking lot, and Rudy helped me bring in the chest, exclaiming over its fine condition. We carried it down to the basement where the conservation laboratory was, and I left him debating whether he should use an oil soap or some heavier solvent to clean the wood.

  Back in my office, I looked at my watch. It was almost one, time to call Sam Ryder for the name and address of the Velasquez descendant. I dialed his number in Las Lomas, but it rang ten times with no answer. After setting the receiver down, I began to doodle on my desk blotter, taking my mind off my troubles by thinking about John Quincannon.

  His agency, Carpenter and Quincannon, had had offices in the Flood Building in San Francisco. Was it possible that the firm still existed? The report I'd found had been dated 1894; that would make the agency nearly a hundred years old. Was it possible that Carpenter and Quincannon had remained in business, been passed down to the heirs of either John Quincannon or his partner? If so, how could I find out? Dave would know …

  And then I remembered that I couldn't ask Dave anything—ever again.

  How long would this go on? I wondered. How long before I stopped thinking of Dave as if he were still a part of my life? How many weeks or months before I stopped wanting to ask or tell him things, before I stopped making plans for two when I was only one? I tried to remember the aftermaths of my other love affairs, but the pain of those seemed slight compared to what I was feeling now.

  Stop this, I told myself. Think about Quincannon. Who else would know about tracing what happened to his agency? For one thing, there were business directories. I picked up the receiver and called the public library reference desk; they checked the current San Francisco directory for me. There was no listing for Carpenter and Quincannon.

  It was disappointing, because it would have been so simple merely to contact the agency, tell them I was doing historical research about one of their former clients. They probably would have been glad to help me; I doubted the reports of the investigation would be considered confidential after all these years.

  I wondered what had happened to Quincannon's files. Perhaps the agency had been absorbed by another firm, and the papers still existed in some musty cabinet. Wasn't there a state bureau that could tell me what had happened to the firm? They kept records of businesses even in those days. I'd have to think this through, figure out who to contact. But right now, I'd try Sam again.

  This time he was home; he'd been visiting the old lady across the square before, and she'd given him the name of the woman who was descended from the Velasquezes: Mrs. Sofia Manuela, of Manzanita Way in Santa Monica.

  “I had the city wrong but was correct about everything else,” Sam said. “She is a very old lady, the daughter of Don Esteban's son, Felipe. She does own the land down the road from here and is the last surviving heir, as she was an only child and had no children herself.”

  Felipe Velasquez'si daughter! This woman was not only a family member but someone who might even remember Quincannon's investigation. “Is she willing to talk with me?” I asked.

  “My friend said she would welcome the opportunity. Just call and say you got her number from Rosa Jenkins.”

  I scribbled the name on the blotter and then, to be polite, asked, “Did everyone calm down after I left last night?”

  “More or less. Dora stomped off in a huff, forgetting all her Tupperware. Gray went home to pass out. Arturo helped me with the cleaning up.”

  “I like Arturo very much.”

  “Me too. I just wish he wasn't so depressed.”

  “How long has this been going on?”

  Sam hesitated. “Six months or more.”

  “I'm going to try to organize a showing of his work here at the museum. Perhaps it will help if he gets some positive critical attention.”

  “Maybe.” Sam sounded faintly hopeful. He made me promise once more to let him know anything I might find out and then hung up. I depressed the cradle button on the phone and made a call to Santa Monica.

  Mrs. Manuela told me—in a voice made high-pitched and tremulous by age—that her friend Rosa Jenkins had already called and mentioned my interest in the Velasquez family. She would be glad to talk with me and had a whole box of papers I might like to look at. When could I be there? she asked.

  I said I could leave Santa Barbara right away. Would mid- to late-afternoon be all right?

  Any time would be muy bueno, she said She would be expecting me.

  FIVE

  I FOLLOWED ROUTE 101 along the edge of the ocean, barely taking notice of its placid waters or the blight of the offshore oil drilling platforms. Ventura and Oxnard and Camarillo were soon behind me, and I began the long ascent before the freeway dropped down into the Los Angeles Basin.

  This was familiar territory, traveled hundreds of times over the years; I'd often gone to Los Angeles to visit museums and attend plays and concerts. For a while there had been a man I'd stayed with in Redondo Beach. But mostly my journeys south had been to see the Aunts in East L.A.

  The Aunts—I always thought of them as capitalized—were Mama's sisters, Margarita and Constanza. There were two other aunts—Florencia and Claudia—who sometimes came for visits from the Mexican state of Sinaloa, but they were unmemorable: silent, faded women who only seemed alive when laughing and chattering behind closed doors with Mama and the Los Angeles Aunts. There were uncles, too—macho men from either side of the border who gathered apart on the front porch of Constanza's little frame house to drink beer and discuss important things in their deep, booming voices. And there were the cousins—the exotic L.A. cousins.

  Most of them were older than Carlota and me. Older and more worldly-wise. This was in the last days of the pachuco, that knife-wielding, hip-talking scourge of barrio life in the forties and fifties. My male cousins were a little young to be true pachucos, but they wore the trademark pegged pants and outrageously poufed hair; they called each other ese (“man”) and vato (“dude”), and sometimes they were bien prendidos, which translates into “well- lit” and means drunk. Next to them and their hard-faced, gaudily dressed sisters, Carlota and I seemed mere Girl Scouts (which we actually were—Santa Barbara Troop 49).

  The cousins suffered our presence because—I realize now—we were a perfect audience, easily awed. They
would strut up and down the sidewalk, talking of gang fights and marijuana and calling their girlfriends “chicks.” And all the time they'd watch Carlota's and my expressions out of the corners of their eyes. It didn't matter to us that these same cousins became peculiarly docile when Tía Margarita would call them in to supper, nor that they would mind their manners at the table as much as we did; we still went back to Santa Barbara with intoxicating visions of big city life dancing in our impressionable little heads.

  As the years passed, we went to the Aunts' for different reasons: children's birthday parties gave way to weddings and baptisms, and later there were funerals. And as we grew, Carlota and I went less frequently; when we did, there were fewer cousins on hand. Donny, Margarita's son, had been killed in Vietnam; his brother, Jimmy, was a contractor and now lived in Illinois. Constanza's son, Tom, we didn't speak of; he'd gone to prison many years before. Rosalita had lots of babies, Patty worked as a nurse in San Diego, Josie had a drunken husband, and Lisa had turned out bad. And so it went year after year, the family drifting apart. I supposed it was the American way in the 1980s, but now—as I turned west on the Santa Monica Freeway, rather than going east—I felt a sharp stab of nostalgia for those afternoons on the cracked sidewalks of East L.A.

  Manzanita Way turned out to be a block-long street within walking distance of Santa Monica's beach, and it actually had manzanita growing alongside it. The evergreen shrubs were in full bloom, and their waxy bell-like flowers were a subtle contrast to the showier yellow blossoms of the forsythia bushes in many of the yards. The houses were typical California stucco bungalows like my own, but they sat farther back from the street and many were on double lots. Mrs. Manuela's address was 1121 A, which meant she probably occupied a cottage behind one of the larger homes. I parked at the curb under a big purple-flowered jacaranda tree and found a concrete path leading between numbers 1121 and 1119. There was a second building back there, built on the style of the main house and containing two units. I knocked on the door of unit A, and it was soon opened by a small, very old white-haired woman in a pink candy-striped dress. Her seamed mouth curved up in a smile when she saw me, and her eyes began to sparkle behind silver-rimmed glasses.

  “Señorita Oliverez?” she asked.

  “Sí”

  “Buenas tardes.” She held the screen door open and motioned for me to come in. “Por favor.”

  I stepped into a tiny living room that was decorated in blue-and-green floral-patterned wallpaper; the furnishings were upholstered in a Wedgwood blue. Two tortoiseshell kittens lay on one cushion of the loveseat, curled in a yin-and-yang position, and a third was licking its paws on a hassock. The room was clean and uncluttered, and everything in it—including Mrs. Manuela—seemed diminutive. I sat down on the love seat at her request, feeling strangely big and awkward, in spite of being a slender five-foot-three.

  Mrs. Manuela said, “Lo siento.… I am sorry. Do you wish to speak in English?”

  In Spanish, I replied, “I am at home in either language.”

  “Then, we will speak Spanish. As I grow older, I find the language of our people comforts me. In it, I know who I am. And since your interest in my family is what has brought you here, it is fitting.” She moved toward a door at the rear of the room. “I have coffee brewing. Will you have some?”

  “I'd like that, thank you.”

  “Then I will bring it. While I am gone, you may make the acquaintance of Laurel and Hardy and Chaplin.” She indicated the kittens. “They are: Hollywood cats, abandoned there and rescued by a young friend of mine. And they are all comics.”

  I smiled as she left the room and got up to pat Chaplin, the one who was licking his paws. He may have been a comic, but right now he seemed to have misplaced his sense of humor, because he glared at me and went on licking. I decided not to bother Laurel and Hardy, who were still sleeping.

  Mrs. Manuela returned in a few minutes with a pot of coffee and two mugs—blue, like the room. She poured the steaming liquid, handed me one mug, and said, “Do you wish cream or sugar?”

  “Neither, thank you.”

  “Good. You will live a longer life for abstaining.”

  Por Dios, I thought, she's a health nut like Nick. And—again like him—her appearance indicated she knew what she was talking about. She had to be in her nineties, but she moved like a much younger person.

  She sat in a chair opposite the love seat, tasted her coffee, and then nodded approval. “I have a new percolator,” she said, “and I am only learning how to use it. This is good, is it not?”

  “Very good.”

  Looking pleased, she set her mug on a coaster on the table beside her and said, “Now. You are interested in my family.”

  “Yes.” I had thought of ways to explain what otherwise seemed like plain nosiness and had come up with a story that had the advantage of being at least partially true. “I am assisting a historian who lives in the village of Las Lomas in writing a paper for a journal.”

  She nodded. “Mr. Sam Ryder, who is a neighbor of Rosa Jenkins.”

  “That's right. So far I've done little more than visit the land you own near the village—what remains of the rancho.”

  Mrs. Manuela's face gentled when I mentioned the rancho, and her eyes softened until they had a misty quality. “Rancho Rinconada de los Robles. The land you speak of is the old pueblo and the site of the hacienda.”

  “I understand you still own the property.”

  “Yes. I doubt I could ever bring myself to part with it. But frankly, no one has asked me to. While the rest of the rancho—those portions that were sold off many years ago—is excellent agricultural land, the pueblo itself is good for nothing. Don Esteban Velasquez—my grandfather—built the rancho as he did so as not to waste usable land. The pueblo was in a rocky area, as you have seen; the hacienda stood on a hill above. My father, Felipe Velasquez, claimed that Don Esteban loved the site because it reminded him of his native home in Oaxaca, Mexico.”

  “Did you live at the hacienda when you were a girl?”

  “For a time, yes. But my father died when I was very young, and my mother and I moved to Santa Barbara. I was not there for very long, either. When I became of school age, my mother became concerned about me. I was not a happy child, and did not make friends easily. In fact, my only playmate was Rosa Jenkins—she was Rosa Santiago then, daughter of our servant, Maria. Finally my mother decided to send me to the school my father had attended in Mexico.”

  Mrs. Manuela paused and smiled faintly. “I was so shy that I would not go alone, so my mother had to send Rosa with me. She received a good education on account of my backwardness, and we have been friends all our lives.”

  I said, “Why did you and your mother leave the hacienda?”

  “It was very lonely there after my father's death. He was a great man, and my mother loved him very much. Maria Santiago once told me that before my father died, my mother was a very strong woman. Too strong, perhaps, because she and my father fought frequently. But after we moved, she became more and more withdrawn and reclusive. I have always suspected that she sent me away because secretly she wanted to be alone.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “She died—those of my generation would say of a broken heart—when I was sixteen and still at school. Although I had seen her only on vacations, I was shattered by the loss. I had no one left in the world but a stuffy old family lawyer who was to dole out what I considered stingy payments from the estate. I started to pine away, as was fashionable with young girls in that day.”

  The cat on the hassock—Chaplin—stood up and jumped into Mrs. Manuela's lap. She pushed it into a lying-down position and began to stroke it, continuing as if there had been no interruption. “One day, Rosa decided she had had enough of my languishing. She came to me and said, ‘Look, we are all alone in the world’—her mother had also recently died—‘and we are of age, so let's do something daring. Let's run off to Los Angeles and get jobs and find ourselve
s husbands.’ Naturally I was shocked—but not so shocked that I didn't think about it. And within a week we were on our way north.”

  I said, “Did you get jobs and find husbands?”

  She smiled gently. “We did. Not the jobs we'd envisioned, of course; we did not become silent-movie queens. But we did make ends meet, working as shopgirls in the barrio and living in a rooming house run by a kindly woman who liked young girls and looked after them. Rosa met Tom Jenkins first; he was an Anglo, but that didn't matter—Rosa always was daring. Ironically, Tom was from Lompoc, he owned a drugstore there. The store prospered, and he bought her a little summer home in Las Lomas, and when he died, she moved up there for good.”

  “And you?”

  “My husband was called Tom also. We met at a dance and married within a month. Then we moved here because both of us had always wanted to live close to the sea. Tom was a good provider; he worked for a warehouser, the same one for forty years. We were able to buy this property cheaply, and with his salary and what was left of my family's money and the rental from these units, we had a fine life. My only regret is that we never were able to have children. Tom has been gone sixteen years now, and I miss him as if he had died yesterday.”

  I felt a sharp twisting sensation deep inside. I hadn't been with Dave long enough that I would still miss him after sixteen years. He hadn't given me the chance.

  Mrs. Manuela must have seen the pain on my face, because she said, “What is the trouble?”

  “Oh.” I made a gesture of dismissal. “Oh, it's nothing.”

  But she didn't believe me. “Have you been disappointed in love?”

  “Well… yes.”

  She shook her head sympathetically. “That is always painful, and when one is young, it is even more so. Time will heal your hurt, however. There will be others for you, and eventually you will find the One.”

  The One. That brought back memories. I pictured the little bedroom Carlota and I had shared—the one that was now my guestroom—and remembered the long-ago nights when we'd been tucked into bed and were supposed to be sleeping. One of us would creep into the other's bed, and we'd pull the covers over our heads so Mama couldn't hear, and then we'd speculate on the men who would one day arrive to claim us. What would their names be? What would they look like? Would they be rich or handsome? And—most important of all—when and where would they appear? We'd been terribly anxious for them to do so, but so far they hadn't—neither for me nor for my sister.