Beyond the Grave

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 Tia 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.

“Senorita Oliverez?” she asked.

“Si”

“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 ourselves 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.

The conversation was making me uncomfortable, so I merely said “I hope so.” Then I led the topic back to the reason I had come there. “Mrs. Manuela, what happened to the furnishings that were in the old hacienda?”

For a moment she looked confused. “Oh, of course. My mother took them to our new home in Santa Barbara. After she died, they were placed in storage by the lawyer, and when Tom and I finally bought our house-we lived in the big one up front, I only moved back here and rented that one out after I found I could no longer take care of it properly-when we bought it, the furnishings were shipped to us.”

“You've sold some of them, haven't you?”

“Only recently. I couldn't keep all of them here, and I decided I should let them go to people who really wanted them.”

“Do you remember a marriage coffer, one with a crucifix design around the edges?”

“Why, yes. That was my mother's, her hope chest, as they call it now. I hated to part with it, but the dealer wanted to buy the things in a lot, and the chest was part of it.”

“I think you'll be pleased to know it has found a good home.” I went on to tell her about my job, the display Rudy Lopez and I were assembling, and the auction.

Mrs. Manuela looked both pleased and interested. “How strange it is that the chest ended up in Santa Barbara once more,” she said. “The auction house I sold it to was here in Santa Monica, but I understand they conduct sales in all parts of the state. Is it because of the chest that you and Mr. Ryder became interested in my family?”

“In a way. Mrs. Manuela, what can you tell me about the religious artifacts your grandfather hid during the Bear Flag Revolution?”

The non sequitur didn't seem to surprise her. “Ah, yes-the artifacts. That is part of the family folklore. But how did you learn of them?”

I explained about the detective's report in the marriage coffer. Mrs. Manuela's faded old eyes sparkled with excitement.

“So that was where the key to the chest was,” she said. “I never knew about that little compartment. The chest was where my mother kept her important personal papers, and she always locked the drawer, since I was an exceptionally curious child, and not a tidy one when prying into other people's belongings.”

“Then, all the years you had it, you were never able to look inside the drawer?”

“No. I thought the key had been lost.”

I said, “But you did know that your father had hired someone to look for the artifacts.”

“No, I am afraid I did not. You must remember that I was very young when he died and we moved from the rancho. And my mother never mentioned anything of the sort.”

“Did she speak to you of the artifacts?”

“No, never. What I knew of them came from Maria Santiago.”

“Perhaps there would be something about them in the box of papers you mentioned on the telephone?”

She smiled, her face a fine web of wrinkles. “Of course. Come with me, please.”

She led me through the small dining ell to the door to the bedroom. Inside was a heavily carved canopied bed, obviously one of the furnishings Senora Velasquez had removed from the hacienda. Mrs. Manuela pointed to it. “There is a wooden box under there that contains the papers. Will you bring it out, please?”

I got down on my hands and knees and peered under the overhang of the bedspread. The box was a low one and measured perhaps three by four feet, with an unlocked hasp and brass hinges similar to the fittings on the marriage coffer. I grasped it and pulled; it was heavy and cumbersome but slid easily on the hardwood floor.

Mrs. Manuela said, “The box contains many of my family's papers. The lawyer had it sent down along with the furniture. In those days I was too involved with my life as a newly married woman to go through them, and in later years whenever I started to, I couldn't withstand the pain. You are welcome to look, however. Take all the time you need. I will be in the living room watching the news.”

I waited until she had left the room, then raised the heavy lid of the box. A musty odor rose to my nostrils: dust, old paper, and maybe a touch of mold. I sat cross-legged on the floor and slowly went through the box's contents.

There were shabby leather-bound ledgers full of long columns of figures that I supposed told the story of the last days of Rancho Rinconada de los Robles. A sheaf of papers showing transfer of title to various portions of the land was a sad footnote to the numbers. I set aside several bundles of what looked to be personal correspondence, letters written in Spanish in various old-fashioned hands. A Bible was inscribed with the birthdates and death dates of Velasquez family members. I studied it for a few moments, noting that Mrs. Manuela, the last entry of any kind, had been born in 1892. In addition to the record in the Bible, there were a number of fes de bautismo, certificates of baptism, and partidas de defuncion, death certificates.

Stacks of bills from Santa Barbara merchants continued the story of Senora Velasquez and the young Sofia after they had moved from the hacienda: They were for food, clothing, cordwood, medical attention. There was a deed in the name of Olivia Velasquez to a house on a street not far from mine; evidently the document had not been turned over when the house had been sold after her death. There was also a pair of books in the box: One was a heavy, leather-bound California history in which a page about two-thirds of the way through had been marked with a white silk ribbon. I opened it and saw the name Don Esteban Velasquez. The three-paragraph account praised his bravery as a soldado and described the parcel of land granted him by the Mexican government. The other volume turned out not to be a book at all but a photograph album.

I paged through it and found it was only half-full of faded, sepia-toned photographs showing men and women in heavy old-fashioned garments striking the exaggerated, dramatic poses favored in the latter part of the last century. One of the last pictures was of a man in his fifties, a woman half as old, and an infant. The parents stood on a rocky hillock covered with live oak, the child in the mother's arms. When I turned the page, the picture came loose from its hinges, and I saw on the opposite side the notation “Felipe, Olivia, Sofia.”

This, then, was the last of the Velasquez family. I held the photograph up and studied the faces of the couple, Felipe's in particular. There was intelligence in his dark eyes and a slightly selfish, aristocratic set to his mouth. As I stared at the faded print, I found myself seeing the man as John Quincannon might have, filling in the gaps that, by its nature, the detective's report did not contain. Finally I set the album aside and began to remove the few items remaining in the box.

One of these was another accounts ledger, and I was about to set it aside when I saw the ragged edges of some yellowed vellum pages protruding from its top. I pulled them out-and recognized John Quincannon's familiar handwriting.

Excited, I dropped the ledger on the floor and glanced through the loose pages; they were wrinkled and torn in places, but they appeared to be a continuation of the detective's report. Somehow they had gotten separated from the first portion and dumped in here with the other family papers. It was a wonder they hadn't been destroyed.

Hurriedly I put the papers on the bed and began to replace the other items in the wooden box. It would be rude, of course, to rush off right away after having imposed on Sofia Manuela and partaken of her hospitality, but I thought she would understand. And I could also plead the necessity of returning to Santa Barbara so I could visit my mother in the hospital.

But Santa Barbara seemed terribly distant at the moment. I didn't want to wait until I got back there to read these reports. And I didn't have to visit Mama tonight anyway; she'd said this morning-ungraciously, I'd thought at the time-that one visit a day would suffice.

I considered what to do for a few moments longer and then made up my mind. First I would take polite leave of Mrs. Manuela, promising her a return visit when I'd looked further into the story of the search for the Velasquez artifacts. Then I'd find a drugstore and buy a toothbrush, toothpaste, and other necessities. And then I'd find a reasonably-priced motel with a coffee shop, get carryout food, and curl up in my room with this second installment of John Quincannon's investigation.