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 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.