The Jane Austen Book Club Part 15

SUBJECT: Re: re: Mom DATE: 8/5/02 11:15:52am PDT FROM: [email protected] TO: [email protected]; [email protected]

I just want us all to be clear that this is exactly what Mom wants. She knows Mrs. Grossman will call and then we'll all look like shocking, neglectful daughters and someone will be dispatched post-haste. I mean, of course someone has to go, but she's a cunning old woman, and why can't she just ask us? I say she should be locked up in a nursing home until she prom-ises to stay off the roof.

As to Grigg, am I the only one who thinks he's in love again? And about time? How long ago was Sandra?

love all, Cat

SUBJECT: Re: re: re: Mom DATE: 8/5/02 12:27:59pm PDT FROM: [email protected] TO: [email protected]; [email protected]

I blame us for Grigg's love life. We set a standard no woman can possibly live up to.

A.

SUBJECT: Mom andGrigg DATE: 8/5/02 1:02:07pm PDT FROM: [email protected] TO: [email protected]; [email protected] Things are slow here so I don't mind going and dealing with Mom. (Weare shocking, neglectful daughters.) I'm pretty sure Grigg likes some woman in his book club. I'm not so sure she likes him back. He called me, too, last night, so very late, so very down. I worry that Sandra left him even more fragile than before.

(What's that girl scout motto- Leave the campsite better than you foundit? Sandra was no girl scout.) I always thought she was just using him for his computer skills.

Love to the husbands and kiddies, Bianca

SUBJECT: Re: Mom and Grigg DATE: 8/5/02 1:27:22 pm PDT FROM: [email protected] TO: [email protected]; [email protected]

Sandra was a piece of work. You remember your Christmas party, Amelia? Just step away from the mistletoe, lady. Keep your hands where we can see them. We did try to warn him. One pretty face and he just doesn't listen to his sisters any-more.

x.x.xx.x.x, Cat

SUBJECT: Re: re: Mom and Grigg DATE: 8/5/02 5:30:22 pm PDT FROM: [email protected] TO: [email protected];

If Grigg's in love again, one of us better go take care of that, too.

A.

CHAPTER SIX.

in which we read Persuasion and find ourselves back at Sylvia's house

Atany given time, most of the people in the California His-tory Room were looking up their own families.

Sylvia had worked in the state library since 1989; she'd helped hundreds and hundreds of people load rolls of microfiche into the feeder, ad-just the image, master the fast-forward. She'd opened the bride, groom, and death indexes and gone spelunking for great-great-great grandparents. Today had started with a failure-a common name (Tom Burke), a big city (San Francisco), a certain vagueness as to dates, all resulting in a p.i.s.sed-off descendant who felt Syl-via simply wasn't trying hard enough. Her resources, her sheer will to succeed, were compared unfavourably with those of the Mormons.

It made Sylvia reflective. Had there always been this level of in-terest in genealogy, she wondered, even in the sixties, when every thing was to be made from scratch? What did it mean, all this per-sonal looking backward? What were people hoping to find? What bearing, really, did their ancestry have on who they were now?

She supposed she was no better than the rest. She felt a particu-lar pleasure whenever anyone asked for Box 310, a collection of archived Spanish and Mexican doc.u.ments. She herself had re-cently translated the "Solemn Espousal of Manuel Rodriguez from Guadalajara, parents deceased, to Maria Valvanora E La Luz, daughter of a soldier and a resident of Cynaloa." The date on the doc.u.ment was October 20, 1781. The information, dry. Did they love each other desperately? Were they friends, or did they eat each night in icy silence, have resentful s.e.x? Did they, in fact, go on to marry? Were there children? Did one of the two then leave with little warning, and if so, who left and who was left behind?

Other items in the box included an invitation to a grand ball at the governor's house in honour of Antonio L6pez de Santa Anna; a photocopy of Andres Pico's Articles of Capitulation to John C. Fremont at Cahuenga; a letter to Fra Jose Maria de Zalvidea discussing marriage laws among the Indians. This last was ten-tatively dated 1811. A world away, Jane Austen was finally pub-lis.h.i.+ngSense and Sensibility, on a similar subject.

We were here first, Sylvia's father used to say to her, although her mother was only second-generation, and even so, of course, they weren't even close to first, just earlier than some.

For California is a Poem!

The land of romance, of mystery, of wors.h.i.+p, of beauty and of song.

Ina Coolbrith had written it, and the words were now chiselled into the wall near the staircase to the second floor. But the sign Sylvia preferred was upstairs and done in Magic Marker.Quiet, it read.Research in progress.

Sylvia had never come to this library as a child, but she'd grown up not far away, in a grey wood house on Q Street. They'd had a large yard with lemon trees in the front, tomatoes and chilli pep-pers in the back. Her mother was always in the garden; she had the touch. Her mother's favourite saint was Therese, who had promised, after her death, to shower the world with roses.

Sylvia's mother was doing her bit. She had rosebushes and rose trees and roses that climbed on trellises.

She washed them for aphids and fed them with compost and wrapped them in the winter. "How do you know what to do?" Sylvia asked her once, and her mother said that if you only paid attention, the roses told you what they needed.

Sylvia's father wrote for the Spanish language paperLa Raza. At night men would come and sit on the porch, play guitars, talk politics, farming, and immigration. It was Sylvia's job the next morning to clean up the bottles, the cigarette b.u.t.ts, the dirty dishes.

Her second job was to hurry straight to her grandmother's house after school and provide a running translation of the day-time soapYoung Dr. Malone. Such goings-on in the small town of Denison!

Murder, incarceration, drink, and despair. Adultery and hysterical blindness. Thrombosis. Throat cancer.

Crippling accidents. Forged wills. And then came episode two.

Afterward Sylvia's grandmother would a.n.a.lyze the show for character shadings, themes and symbols, useful moral lessons. The a.n.a.lysis took most of the rest of the afternoon. Women had affairs and went blind. Nurses loved doctors with quiet and un-requited devotion, opened paediatric clinics, did good works. Life was made up of medical emergencies, court cases, painful love affairs, and backstabbing relatives.

Sometimes Sylvia's father read her European fairy tales at bed-time, changing the heroines' hair from blond to black (as if Sylvia could be fooled by this, as if Diego Sanchez's daughter would identify with a brunette named Snow White anyway), pointing out cla.s.s issues whenever they arose. Woodsmen grew up to marry princesses. Queens danced themselves to death in b.l.o.o.d.y shoes.

Sundays her mother read to her fromThe Lives of the Saints, about Saint Dorcas, and all the others who'd given away their fortunes, devoted themselves to charity. Her mother flipped hur-riedly past the martyrs-Saint Agatha (her b.r.e.a.s.t.s were cut from her body), Saint Lucy (her eyes were put out), Saint Perpetua (she guided her executioner's blade to her throat with her own hand). For years Sylvia didn't even know those other stories were there. She merely suspected them. But neither the fairy tales nor the saints had the lasting impact ofYoung Dr. Malone. Sylvia dated her grandmother's decline from the day the show was cancelled.

Most of what we knew about Sylvia came from Jocelyn. They'd met at Girl Scout camp when they were eleven years old. Little Jocelyn Morgan and little Sylvia Sanchez. "We were both in the Chippewa cabin," Jocelyn said. "Sylvia seemed very grown up compared with me. She knew stuff you would never have imagined a little girl would know. History and medicine. She could tell you more things about comas.

"But she always thought the counsellors were scheming be-hind our backs. She was always seeing the most elaborate plots in everything they did. One day four of us Chippewas were taken on a hike away from camp and left to find our own way home. It was part of some merit badge we were getting, or so the counsellors said. Sylvia was suspicious of the whole thing. 'Is there any reason anyone would want you out of the way?' Sylvia asked each of us. What little girl thinks like that?"

No one in Sylvia's family knew that her father had stopped drawing a pay check and started putting their money into the paper until the money was gone. They moved then to the Bay Area, where Sylvia's uncle gave her father a job working at his restaurant. Sylvia and her brothers traded their two-story Victo-rian for a small apartment, private school for the large public ones. Her older sister was already married and stayed behind in Sacramento to have babies her parents complained they now never saw.

Sometimes they drove all the way to Sacramento for Sunday with Sylvia's grandparents. More often Sylvia's father had to work, and they didn't. Her father wasn't used to waiting on people and struck the customers as unfriendly. He had to be re-minded not to partic.i.p.ate in their conversations, not to talk about unions with the busboys and cooks. The whole tipping process is designed to humiliate. On her mother's birthday when he sere-naded her at five-thirty in the morning just as the sun came up, as he'd done every year since their wedding, Sylvia had seen cu-rious, irritated Anglo lights coming on in the house behind theirs.

One of the cooks at the restaurant had a daughter at the pub-lic high school. Sylvia's father arranged for them to meet so Sylvia would already have a friend when cla.s.ses started. The daughter was named Constance; she was a year younger than Sylvia. She wore white lipstick and ratted her hair so it cush-ioned her head like packing material. She'd sewn the name of her boyfriend into the palm of her left hand. Sylvia could hardly look at this, though Constance said it hadn't hurt; the secret was in shallow st.i.tches. It fell to Sylvia to explain the dangers of in-fection, the risk of amputation. Plus, it was really gross. Obvi-ously they were not going to be the best of friends.

But there was Jocelyn. And then there was Daniel.

"Is he Catholic?" her mother asked the first time Daniel drove her home from school.

"I'm not going to marry him!" Sylvia had snapped back, be-cause he wasn't and she didn't wish to say so.

After their wedding, on the night when Sylvia and Daniel had had their first big fight and she'd driven to her parents' house and stood on the doorstep with tears on her face and an overnight bag in her hand, her father wouldn't even let her in. "You go home to your husband," he said. "You live there now. Work things out. Non-Catholics, on the other hand,they believed in divorce. They would become miserable for one reason or another, and then they would leave, and their parents wouldn't even try to stop them, which was why you didn't marry non-Catholics in the first place.

And sure enough, thirty-plus years later, wasn't that exactly what Daniel had done? It was a shame Sylvia's mother hadn't lived to see it. She so enjoyed being right.

In all fairness, probably no more than anyone else did.

A stout woman emerged from the Microforms Room and came to the desk. She was dressed in jeans and a green Squaw Valley sweats.h.i.+rt. She had a pencil balanced between her ear and her head. Since she also wore gla.s.ses, the s.p.a.ce behind that ear was crowded. "There's a date missing from the 1890 San Francisco Chronicle," she told Sylvia. "It skips from May ninth to May eleventh. I looked at the Alta, too. And theWasp. They just don't seem to have had a May tenth in 1890."

Sylvia agreed that this was strange. Since the microfiche came from a central service, she guessed that nothing would be solved by going to another library. Sylvia sent Maggie to the bas.e.m.e.nt to see if she could find the missing date among any of the actual papers.

In general, librarians enjoyed special requests. A reference li-brarian is someone who likes the chase.

When librarians read for pleasure, they often pick a good mystery. They tend to be cat people as well, for reasons more obscure.

A black man in a grey turtleneck requested an oral-history in-terview regarding public policy in the Lieutenant Governor s Office from 1969 to 1972.

An elderly man in a velvet beret called Sylvia over to his table to show her his work. He was lettering his family tree in meticu-lous and beautiful calligraphy.

Maggie returned, having failed to find the missing date. She offered to put in a call to the Bancroft Library in Berkeley, but the woman who had asked for theChronicle said she had to go; there was no more time on her parking meter. Maybe next week when she'd be back.

A man with bad skin asked for help printing a copy from the microfiche reader. It was Sylvia's turn to do this.

The main room was a lovely s.p.a.ce, with curving walls, large windows, and red-tile-rooftop views. If you sat at one of the ta-bles you could see the top of the Capitol dome.

The Rare Materials Reading Room was lined with gla.s.s book-cases filled with rare books and was, in its way, equally pleasant. You worked there with the door locked and outside noises hushed. Only the librarians could key you in and out.

But the Microforms Room was windowless, lit by overheads and by the screens of the readers. There was a constant hum, with images inevitably warped on one side or the other, no way to bring the whole into focus at once. All very headache-inducing. You had to love research to love the Microforms Room.

Sylvia was threading the feeder when Maggie came to get her. "You have a phone call from yourhusband," Maggie said. "He says it's urgent."

Allegra had been having an excellent day. She'd spent the morn-ing working and put several orders in the mail. She'd thought of a birthday present for Sylvia and was figuring out how to make it. To aid in this she went to the Rocknasium, a local climbing gym. You couldn't really think about anything but climbing when you climbed, but Allegra always found it a fruitful not-thinking.

She strapped herself into a harness. She was supposed to be meeting her friend Paul; they'd been belaying each other for the last couple of months. Allegra's level was somewhere in the 5.6 to 5.7 range, Paul's a bit better. The regulars were almost all men, but the few women who came were Allegra's sort of women- strong and athletic. The place smelled of chalk and sweat, and those were Allegra's sort of smells.

The Rocknasium had only nine full-sized walls. These were k.n.o.bbed and creviced in many places, the holds marked with bright-coloured drips like a Jackson Pollock painting. Each wall contained a variety of routes-a red route, a yellow, a blue. You were always pa.s.sing up a closer hold to find the correct colour for the course you were on. The correct hold was inevitably small and far away. Paul had called Allegra the night before to say the routes had just been changed. And about time.

When Allegra first started climbing, she would hang in one spot for too long, contemplating the best way to make her next grab. Her arms and fingers would begin to burn with exhaus-tion. She noticed that the experienced climbers moved very, very quickly. Staying still was more work than moving; thinking too much was fatal. Allegra supposed there was a lesson there. She learned things quickly, but she didn't much like lessons.

She'd never been to the Rocknasium during the day. Gone was the intimidating soberness of the regular climbers, the fo-cused quiet. Instead someone was screaming. Someone was sing-ing. Someone was throwing chalk. There was laughing, shouting, all the chaos of a ten-year-old's birthday party echoing off the fake paint-splotched rocks. Children, sugar coursing through their tiny veins, were everywhere, fastened to the walls on their ropes like spiders. There was so much chalk in the air it made Allegra sneeze. This was intimidation of a different sort.

Allegra liked being an aunt. Her brother Diego had two girls; that was all the kid time Allegra needed.

Probably. All she wanted. Mostly. There would certainly be something challenging in a ge-netic code that made you gay but left your reproductive urge fully functional. Some days Allegra hardly noticed how the years were floating by. "Come on," some kid shouted impatiently to someone who wasn't coming on.

Allegra went to warm up on the solo wall while she waited for Paul. This wall was low enough to climb without ropes, no more than seven feet. At the bottom was a very thick mat. Allegra put her foot on a blue hold. She reached for a blue hold above her head. She pulled herself up. Blue hold to blue hold to blue hold. Toward the top she saw some enticing orange paint, farther than the next blue-she'd have to leap-but glittering at the edge of what might be possible. Things worked best if you didn't think about them. Just jump.

To her right the birthday girl came rappelling down at top speed, her belayer playing the rope out to give her a ride. "Wire work," someone called. "h.e.l.lo, Jet Li." An adult at another wall was giving instructions. "Look up," he said. "The purple's just on your left there.

You can reach it. Don't worry. I'll catch you.

I'll catch you.

n.o.body was catching Allegra, but Allegra had never needed catching. She reached back with one hand into the pouch on her harness for chalk. Kicked off and grabbed.

Sylvia called Jocelyn from the car. "Allegra fell at the climb-ing gym," she said. She was trying not to picture all the things that might happen to someone who fell. Wheelchairs. Comas. "They've taken her to Sutter. I'm on my way, but I don't know anything. I don't know how far it was. I don't know if she's awake. I don't know if she's broken a nail or broken her neck." She could hardly get the last part out, she was crying so hard.

"I'll call you as soon as I get there," Jocelyn said. "I'm sure it's fine. They don't let you climb in those gyms without a harness. I don't think it's possible to really hurt yourself."

Jocelyn always thought things were fine. If they weren't fine when she got there, she made d.a.m.n sure they were fine before she left. Jocelyn didn't think about those things she couldn't make fine until she was forced to. There were days when Sylvia thought about nothing else. Jocelyn had no children; Sylvia had three, plus two grandchildren; that was the difference. Why would Allegra be at the hospital if things were fine?

Bad things did happen, after all. You could be lucky only so long. Sylvia and Daniel had been parked in his car just a cou-ple of blocks from his house on the day his brother died. It was their senior year of high school. They were kissing some and they were talking some. Both the kissing and the talking were fraught. They'd begun to have the same conversation over and over. Would they go to the same college?