“The techie will be here sometime between noon and two tomorrow,” Charlie says. “He’s fast and highly skilled, but to ensure he has enough leeway, I’d say hold off on picking up the prints until about three.”
She leans down and hugs him around the neck and kisses his ear and cheek. “My handsomest, smartest uncle can do anything!”
“Yeah, yeah, right. Come on, let’s get out there with the others before they drink the place dry.”
Charlie’s at his desk and the prints are ready when she shows up at three o’clock the next day. She takes them out of a manila envelope and studies them with such absorption that he can’t refrain from asking, “You know her, this Kitty Quick?”
She sighs. “No questions.”
“You can’t even say if you know her?”
“No.”
“No, you don’t know her, or no, you can’t say if—”
“Will you quit?”
She puts the prints back in the e velope and gives him a kiss on top of the head. “Thank you, Charlie. I love you.”
She goes out to her Jeep Liberty, parked in the shade of an oak on the far side of the Doghouse lot, and starts it up to engage the air-conditioning. She then takes an envelope from under her seat and withdraws two black-and-white photographs from it.
When she and Charlie joined the others at the bar last night, she could see they were all going to make a late night of it, and after one beer she took her leave on the pretext that she had to finish a report her editor expected the next morning. She’d then gone home to the beach house she shares with Rayo, and from a bulky carton in her closet she took a shoebox of old photographs and searched through the pictures until she found the two she wanted, the two that had come to mind during the tail-end part she’d seen of The Love Tutors. One photo is a six-by-eight-inch studio close-up portrait of a girl named Sandra Little, taken in San Luis Potosí, Mexico, in 1909 to memorialize her quinceañera, the traditional celebration of a girl’s fifteenth birthday. The other picture, a four-by-six, was taken the following year at a country estate not far from San Luis Potosí, by an itinerant photographer who must have been a wizard at every element of his art to have produced a picture whose clarity has so well withstood the passage of a hundred years. Like the studio picture, it is black-and-white. It depicts two girls in medium close-up, huddled side by side in a dark-water pool that Jessie recognizes as a stone watering tank for ranch stock. They are holding to the tank’s rim and smiling at the camera, only their sodden-haired heads, their hands, and their bathing-suit-strapped shoulders visible above the rim of the tank. One of the girls is Sandra Little; the other, her younger sister, Catalina. They are Jessie Juliet’s great-great-grandaunts.
She puts the two pictures on the passenger seat and then alongside them sets the two Kitty Quick prints made by Louie-Louie. She looks from one pair of pictures to the other several times and whispers, “Damn.” The moment she’d seen the Kitty girl on the screen last night she’d been flabbergasted by the resemblance between her and Sandra Little. Then the poolside scene near the end of the movie—with the Kitty girl posed so much like Sandra in the stock tank picture—really brought home their surreal similitude. She’d wanted the Kitty girl’s prints in black-and-white in order to make the comparison with the older pictures as much on a par as possible. She checks her watch, then scoops up the pictures, puts them all in one envelope, and gets rolling out of Wolfe Landing.
She had phoned Aunt Catalina late this morning, said she had something she wanted to show her, and asked if it would be all right to drop by her house around four. Catalina said of course. Jessie’s certain that Aunt Cat, the family grande dame—and, at the age of 115, very likely the oldest living person on earth—will be as awed as she herself is by the seemingly impossible similarity between Sandra Little and Kitty Quick. It isn’t easy to present Catalina with some sort of surprise anymore, but Jessie’s always on alert for anything that might do the trick. She can’t wait to see Aunt Cat’s face when she gets an eyeful of this girl.
II
THE GIRI
CATALINA
It is long past dispute that Catalina Luisiana Little Wolfe is a preternatural wonder of longevity. If any other person who has achieved the age of one hundred years or more was possessed of a vitality equal to hers, no one has uncovered evidence of it. Judging strictly by her appearance and bearing and acuteness of mind, one might guess her to be, at the most, an unusually energetic eighty. It’s as though when she turned seventy she ceased to grow old at the same rate as the rest of the human race. She is still lean and of erect carriage and, owing to the Celtic-Irish origins of her paternal line—a long-boned clan incongruously surnamed Little—taller than most women of the family she married into. Her silver hair is cut close and trimmed at the nape. Her face is the envy of women half her age, its crow’s-feet and other creases but lightly etched. Her blue eyes are bright with intelligence and curiosity and very often the suggestion of some private amusement. Even now she needs spectacles only for reading and sewing, which together with tending to her garden are her preferred recreations. She still maintains the routine of a morning stroll around the block, although the walking stick she once carried solely to ward off overly frolicsome dogs now serves to some extent the purpose for which it was made. Her hearing remains so keen that the rest of the family are careful of what they say about her when she’s under the same roof. It has been frequently remarked among them that such singular aural acuity well warrants their nickname for her in both English and Spanish—the Cat and La Gata. None of them, however, would ever presume to address her by either soubriquet.
The local community largely views her with civic pride, although no one outside the Wolfe family has made her acquaintance in the last forty years except for the sequence of live-in maids Catalina has employed over the decades and her next-door neighbor Señora Villareal, who moved in eighteen years ago. Ever since her one-hundredth birthday, journalists, historians, anthropologists, and various stripes of medical specialists have repeatedly requested interviews with her and have repeatedly been turned down, at first with polite refusals, then with more assertive insistence that they stop annoying her, and finally with cold disregard. A sign on the front gate of the chain-link fence enclosing her yard reads TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED. Charlie Fortune put it there at the behest of Harry Mack in an effort to dissuade petitioners who sometimes showed up at her door in hope that she might relent to a direct personal plea to answer just a few questions. But the other residents on her street are also highly protective of her, and more than one importunate interview seeker has been run off from Catalina’s gate by a neighbor’s bellowed threat to call for the police with a report of elder abuse.
A few years ago a young professor at the university learned of her daily walk and one morning intercepted her at its midway point, curbing his car and jumping out, beseeching a few minutes of her time. Unbeknownst to him, the troop of dogs that trailed her by a few yards—having learned from swipes of her stick not to follow too closely—were her customary retinue, and on seeing her accosted by a stranger, they attacked the man in a snarling fury. He barely made it back into the car, his trousers in shreds and both legs bloodied, but managed to drive himself to the emergency room. Fortunately, as Catalina liked to point out in retelling the adventure at family gatherings, all the dogs had been duly vaccinated and hence were in no danger of contracting some professorial disease. The episode caught the attention of the local news media, and public reaction was almost unanimously in support of Catalina Wolfe’s right to be left alone and in favor of the dogs that defended her. In consequence of the incident, the university’s faculty senate passed a resolution prohibiting its members from any further solicitations of her except by way of the postal service.
While her age is the most awesome of the few public facts about her—and the record of her marriage into the Wolfe family in 1915 the most mundane—the most sensational is that she shot her husband dead at a party in
1931, was sentenced to thirty years in prison, and served thirteen before she was granted parole. The shooting made all the major Texas newspapers, but none of the reporters was able to elicit information about her from any member of the family other than those who worked for Wolfe Associates and represented her at trial, and they limited their statements to matters of the case. The family has always rigorously safeguarded even the most basic details of her life.
Her mother died giving birth to her on New Year’s Day 1895, at Patria Chica, the Little family’s sprawling ranch in Central Mexico, where she spent her first sixteen years and where most of her blood kin still reside. Her father was an officer in the Guardia Rural—the national police force that patrolled the countryside—and was killed in the line of duty when she was still a young child. Her godfather was Porfirio Díaz, who ruled Mexico with iron resoluteness for over thirty years until the Revolution of 1910 put an end to his dictatorship. But no one has ever heard her speak of anyone with higher admiration than she has always expressed for her great-grandfather, an American named Edward Little, who was a close personal friend to Díaz and the chief of his secret police. She has often said that the most important things she knows about the ways of the world were taught to her in childhood by her great-grandfather Edward.
Yet much about her life remains unknown even to the Wolfes—except perhaps to Jessie. Catalina has always openly favored Jessie Juliet and Eddie Gato over all her other kin, and she assumed a third pet when Rayo Luna came to live with the Texas side of the family two years ago. But as fond as she is of Eddie and Rayo, they know that Jessie is her only true confidante. Seven years ago she agreed to let Jessie write her biography on the strict condition that she promise not to publish the book or reveal any detail of it to anyone until after, as she put it, “they stick me in the ground.” In full collaboration with the project, Catalina not only submitted to innumerable hours of taped interviews but also granted Jessie access to her store of personal letters, plus a collection of photographs of herself and many of the people central to her life. She would not, however, allow any of the tapes or letters to leave her house for fear that they might get lost or stolen, and so most of Jessie’s work on the book had to be done at a desk in the corner of Catalina’s living room. The only resource material she was permitted to take home were the pictures, though again only on the promise of not showing or even speaking of any of them to anyone else while Catalina still lived.
Despite these exacting conditions, and notwithstanding her full-time duties with the newspaper, Jessie completed the book three years ago. She told Aunt Cat that it was really an autobiography because most of it consisted of Catalina’s own words from the tapes. Except for segments of historical background and other bits of exposition that Jessie inserted here and there, Catalina had created the book. “You told the whole thing in your own way,” she told Catalina. “All I did was write it down.”
When she asked Aunt Cat to read the manuscript and see if she wanted to make any changes, she said no. Then said, “But tell me truthfully, child, what do you think of it?”
Jessie told her she thought it was a hell of a tale. Catalina smiled and said, “Yes. I suppose it is.”
Ever since they first heard that Jessie was writing Aunt Catalina’s life story and learned of the conditions imposed on its publication, the family has enjoyed the running joke that the book will never see print for the simple reason that Catalina will never die.
CATALINA AND JESSIE AND CHARLIE
She stares at the four photographs Jessie has laid out on the coffee table. Her intense blue eyes shift from one picture to another and back again.
“Isn’t it amazing?” Jessie says. “I mean, really, señora, a century apart and they look like twins, don’t they? I thought you’d get a real kick out of it.”
“Yes. The similarity is very hard to believe,” Catalina says. “You say this young woman is an actress and these pictures came from a movie?”
“Yes, ma’am, some silly thing on DVD. Something about nurses or some such. I dropped in on some friends and they were watching it and I only saw the last part. I told the fellow who owned it that I just couldn’t believe the likeness between one of the girls in the movie and a distant cousin of mine and how I wished I had a picture of the actress, and he was good enough to offer to make some prints off the video for me. I specifically asked that one of those prints be this swimming pool one because the minute I saw it I remembered this picture of you and Aunt Sandra in the tank. I thought you’d want to see for yourself just how incredibly alike they look and . . . I don’t know. I just thought it would tickle you.”
“What is her name, this actress?”
“Oh, God, you’re gonna laugh. Kitty Quick. An acting name, of course. Who knows what her real name is.”
Catalina looks up from the photos. “And who is the friend who made the pictures for you?”
Only now does it occur to Jessie that in her eagerness to surprise and delight Aunt Cat she’s neglected her own common sense. How could she not have anticipated that Catalina might ask for specific details about the source of the prints, and that if she did, there would be no way to keep them from her? Lying is out of the question. She can sometimes shade the truth a wee bit with her, as she’s done so far with the Kitty pictures, but only once, years ago, has she ever told her an outright lie, and Catalina easily recognized it as such.
“You’re blushing, my dear, and the cat seems to have stolen your tongue. Why?”
Jessie tells her everything. That she and Rayo walked in on Charlie and Frank and Rudy watching a pornographic movie in the Doghouse office last night. That she’d been stunned by the Kitty girl’s resemblance to Sandra and was sure Catalina would be, too. That Charlie had called on an expert technician to make the two stills—and no, she did not tell Charlie why she wanted them, nor has she spoken of them to anyone else, not even to Rayo Luna, not yet. She concludes with an admission that she is totally embarrassed about confessing to her, the person she most respects in the whole world, that she and Rayo viewed a porn movie with an uncle and two male cousins.
Catalina laughs. “My dear Jessica,” she says, “why on earth should you be embarrassed? Am I of such frail sensibilities? Can you possibly have forgotten the things I’ve told you about my own escapades with males from the time I was a girl? Things that I have confessed to you in such shameless detail? Of course, I’ll be dead before anyone reads the book, but have I seemed to you to be terribly concerned about what anyone will think of me after reading it? For you to believe I would be offended because you and Rayo watched a sex movie in the company of males, well, don’t you see the silliness of that notion?”
“When you put it that way, ma’am, yes, I do.”
They both laugh, and Catalina reaches out and pats her hand. “Thank you for the pictures, querida. They’re very interesting. But I must ask you something more. This actress, this Kitty person, does she have a voice a little deeper than most women?”
Jessie stares at her. “Well, yes . . . yes, ma’am, she does. Why—? Oh, God, don’t tell me Aunt Sandra had a deep voice.”
Catalina smiles. “An astonishing coincidence, no? Another astonishing coincidence, I should say.”
“Yes, ma’am, it most certainly is.”
“I would like to hear her voice. Where is this video now?”
“I guess in Charlie’s office. It’s where the tech made the stills.”
Catalina takes out her phone and asks the title of the video and makes a face when Jessie tells her.
“He’ll know I told you,” Jessie says.
Do not fret, daughter, Catalina says in Spanish. She scrolls through her phone contacts to the Doghouse number and taps on it.
Charlie answers. “My esteemed Tía Catalina. I nearly swooned at seeing your name gracing my phone screen. How wonderful to receive a call from you. It’s been far too—”
“Cease the foolishness, Charles. You have in your possession a DVD entitled The Love
Tutors. I would like to see it. Have someone bring it to me right away.”
“The Love Tutors,” Charlie says. He clears his throat. “I hardly know what to say, señora. Why would, ah . . . how do you even know about such a . . . an entertainment?”
“That is no one’s concern but my own. Nor why I want to see it. I need only to know that you’ll send it to me at once or I will contact Harry McElroy and have him give you a call.”
“That won’t be necessary, ma’am,” Charlie says. He’s baffled by her demand and he needs a moment to ponder things. “Just hold on a second while I make sure I still have it. Sometimes a tech will take a DVD home to make a copy for himself. I don’t want to say yes and then find out it’s not here.”
“Do not trifle with me, Charles.”
“No trifling intended, señora. Won’t take a minute. Hold on.”
His thoughts speed. This is Jessie’s doing. That’s why she wanted those frames. To show to the old woman. He can’t think of any reason she’d want to do that, but how else would the Cat have come to know about the video? But why would she want to see it? Christ, who the hell knows the why of anything with that unkillable crone. He’d love nothing better than to hang up on her without another word and then not answer any more calls she might make, which would really piss her off. But either he gives her the disc or his father will order him to do it and be irked at having to be involved. Harry Mack has many times told him that no battle of wills with Catalina can be won. Well, whatever that ancient grimalkin and Jessie are up to, it can’t be anything major or they’d need his help. The hell with the old bone bag. But Jessie’s got some things to explain.
The Bones of Wolfe Page 8
