Authors: Michelle Huneven
Sally Morrot, Henri’s youngest child, had taken her allotted, lady-sized inheritance of 250 acres without dispute and repulsed all suitors, claim jumpers, and obsequious volunteer heirs for the next sixty-five years. On the west end of her property, she built for “her Mexicans” nine unplumbed, unheated, yet sturdy wooden bungalows, a packing house, outbuildings, and a company store. Her workers lived there year round, raised children, planted perennials, considered the place home. Half a mile away, on a knoll surrounded by two acres of rolling lawn, Sally Morrot constructed a three-storey mansion as spindly and delicate as a wicker throne. A prototype of already outdated Victorian whimsy, the house sported narrow bay windows, gables, balconies for every bedroom, finials, crest work, scrolls, and a wide portico that wrapped around three exposures. Six chimneys and two turrets were pink limestone block. The architect took lace from his wife’s undergarments, reproduced it in wood, and mounted it along the eaves and ridges of the roof.
Aloof and iron-willed, Sally Morrot managed her groves like a
feudal lord. She made money through both world wars and the Great Depression. When avocados became a viable commodity, she planted 30 acres of the Haas and Bacon varieties. She put over 130 acres in citrus. She gave generously to charities and sent her disenfranchised nieces and nephews through college. She allowed the University of California to use her ranch as a field station and, in exchange, was the first in the valley to implement technological innovations in the citrus industry. She credited her vitality and advanced age to a series of pagan rituals and herb teas provided by her chauffeur, Rafael Flores, who was a
curandero
—a healer—among his people.
Sally Morrot was savvy and indomitable and an institution, but old age eventually wore her out. On her ninety-second birthday, deaf and half-blind, she packed a single suitcase, put her bug-eyed papillon lapdog in a picnic hamper, and took a taxi to her favorite nephew’s house in Oxnard, never to return. Even as she lived on, her relatives plundered the nineteen furnished rooms, sold off the valuables, and abandoned the rest, including dirty dishes on the drain board and the dog’s bowl on the floor. When Sally Morrot died at the age of ninety-five, her nephew hired a corporation to oversee the groves, and the first corporate decision was to evict the nine families from the village.
Organized by a young firebrand in their midst named David Ibañez, the so-called Mexicans—most were third- and fourth-generation Californians—took their case to court in the spirited style of the Morrots themselves. Unlike their luckless Anglo role models, the workers won, in a manner of speaking: though not allowed to stay in their village, they did receive abundant compensation for the inconvenience and trauma of relocating. Many went off and purchased their own land and homes. This settlement put the first big dent in Sally Morrot’s estate. Court battles over the will made further inroads. The corporate overseers continued this downward trend, and in less than five years, the ranch went on the market to pay off accumulated taxes, debts, and court costs.
An associate in Red Ray’s San Francisco law firm eventually handled some of the more difficult probate proceedings and tipped off Red to what he described as “the steal of the century.”
The ranch didn’t look like a steal. The trees had been neglected and whole groves had withered. The mansion had been thoroughly
ransacked. An attempt had been made to hammer plywood over the downstairs windows, but vandals had pried it off and entered at will. When Red first walked through, it looked like a stage for cult depravities, gang wars, snuff films. Mattresses and sofas were disemboweled. Half-burned clothes and draperies clogged every fireplace. Obscenities were spray-painted on the walls and shotgun patterns pocked the wainscoting and recessed ceilings.
Such heinous disfigurement of aging beauty caused a great hope to awaken and lumber through Red’s thoughts. His marriage of twelve years was faltering—in fact, his wife was conducting a house hunt of her own—and he saw in Sally Morrot’s defiled kingdom the groundwork of his own salvation.
Yvette Ray was an urban planner. She sat on the San Francisco planning board and lobbied for historical preservation at any and all costs. A slim, muscular woman with prematurely white hair and a crisp, patrician manner, she had been a promising ballet dancer until family pressure and a foot injury sent her back to college. Thereafter, her histrionics were staged in zoning battles and a few instances of civil disobedience. She’d grown up in the architectural wonderland of Pacific Heights, and as an adult, she fought to restore it to a glory that neither she nor possibly the district itself had ever known. Red had seen her weep with rage at the sight of a bulldozer near the Presidio. Yvette was articulate, militant, and convincing, and her cause was fallen elegance. She was, in short, a rich girl who loved a shambles. Providing, that is, that she could set to and clean it up.
Red Ray made the down payment on the old Sally Morrot ranch with the fat contingency he’d received from helping a quadriplegic become a multimillionaire quadriplegic. He didn’t breathe a word of his plans to Yvette, just lured her to a spa in Ojai for the weekend and, on Sunday, took her for a drive through the nearby countryside. He drove up the Victorian’s palm-lined driveway and, parking by the sweeping front steps, handed Yvette a key at the exact moment that her mouth started working in silent outrage at yet another crime against architecture. The oxidized, slightly bent brass skeleton key had no function, of course, as there was no glass in any of the windows and any child or dog could’ve pushed open all the downstairs doors. The key, obviously, was purely symbolic, and it inspired Red to an even greater act of symbolism. He reached in front of a shocked
Yvette, opened the glove compartment, pulled out a bottle of Dewars, and emptied it out on the ground. Joe, their three-year-old son, was asleep in the backseat; Red woke him to extract a pint of Johnnie Walker Black from the accordion file he’d been using as a pillow. Red poured out this scotch as well. Then, he took the keys from the ignition, went to open the Mercedes’s trunk, and did likewise with another bottle of Dewars and a liter of clear mirabelle brandy.
Yvette was impressed—stunned, really—by the house, though skeptical about what had already become something of a ritual disposal of booze. She agreed to make the move, take on the restoration, but refused to quit her job, taking a year’s leave of absence instead. She also made Red put their Filbert Street townhouse in her name. “I just need a place to run,” she said, “if you ever start drinking again.”
Red had no official program, no medically supervised detoxification. He simply hoped that in the shuffle of moving his addiction would get lost, like a misrouted box of books or a disoriented house cat.
Yvette decided to serve as her own contractor and hired a crew of carpenters. She subcontracted the plumbing and electrical work. In a gleeful fever, she tore up rotten floorboards, sanded and polished mahogany baseboards and cocobolo mantels. She hired five craftsmen to replace the stained-glass work alone, and drove clear to San Diego to talk to a ceramicist who could copy the destroyed Italian kitchen tile.
Red rented a storefront in the sleepy hamlet of Rito and opened a law office. No more boilermakers for his lunch. He bought homemade tamales and tart pineapple
paletas
at the Ibañez Grocería and washed them down at his desk with Diet Pepsi and selections from a tattered copy of
Shakespeare: The Complete Works
, a book he’d always wanted to read. He’d exchanged big-time for simple—simple personal injuries, simple divorces, simple tax work and wills, and just enough of each to keep him busy five or six hours a day. He came in at nine or ten and left his office at three. Sober as God. Yvette met him in the front hall of the house and, after a few weeks, even stopped sniffing at his breath before giving him a quick kiss. That kiss was never quite what he wanted, not as long or as deep as he felt befitted a dried-out man coming home to a ransacked castle: just the taste of a kiss, a vague and disheartening promise. When he lunged
for more, she’d slip from his path, fasten onto his elbow, and guide him through the morning’s progress to whatever project she’d singled out as his.
Sweating copiously in the summer heat, closed in by membranous plastic drop cloths, inhaling paint and varnish and lacquer fumes, he puttied and slapped on latex with furious energy. Renovation! Restoration! Preservation! He worked without pause, through what was rightfully the cocktail hour, and prayed to the forces of parallel development that somehow his home and soul and family would come back into shape. When Yvette finally called him to dinner those nights, he was crazed with hunger: ten thousand little mouths sagged open in his veins. She cooked out on the porch using an hibachi and Coleman camp stove, and it seemed to Red that the steaks and canned baked beans and sliced tomatoes could taste so good only to a starving man.
At one time, when they were first married, Yvette used to say Red was the only man she’d ever met to make intelligent use of alcohol. “It brings out the poet in him.” Hah! That was before she saw him pass out and crack his head open on the glass coffee table. Before he slugged her on the ear. Before he ruined the new linen wallpaper in the Filbert Street dining room with an attack of projectile vomiting. Before he began disappearing for three or five days at a stretch. Really, Red was grateful for his twentieth or thirtieth second chance, and he forgave Yvette even if her crispness had turned brittle, if her generosity was now grudging. He forgave her for being unforgiving. Just wait: he’d make it up to her, turn it all back around.
During the twilights, they took walks in the groves, an ostensible family. Joe raced circles around them, threw fruit, dug into anthills. Red concentrated only on the flex of distance between Yvette and himself. He took her hand and worried over her reciprocal grip. He did battle with an unceasing urge to drag her to him. Even outside, with miles of room, she could make him feel as if he were crowding her. He felt huge as a haystack, a plow horse, a dump truck—stupidly huge. When she sprang from his side to join Joe, he stood bereft until she returned.
They slept in the spacious parlor of the house on a foam pad with sheets. When he reached for her, she collapsed against his chest obediently, a well-oiled folding chair. This was not the grab and gasp of
first love, or even the friendly exchange of familiar intimacy; it was, he feared, good sportsmanship. Afterward, when she curled away from him, he would still be wildly awake, restraining himself from reaching out for her again. He hovered over her instead, paw poised, a bear baffled by a tortoise. He monitored the fluttering of her eyelids, the depth of her breath, and calculated how far she fled from him in her dreams.
Sleep eluded him. With the not drinking, his body was on tilt. He could feel his blood and juices trickling and eddying and sloshing in confusion. He lay wide-eyed and electric for hours on end. He followed the progress of a vigilant moon from frame to frame in the bay window. The house surrounded him, a many-chambered hope.
In the morning, her capable hands tugged him from sleep, pinched him awake. She’d be dressed, her hair hidden under a scarf, sleeves rolled up, breath steamy from coffee. Time for Home Improvement! Fix It! Do It Yourself! And in the middle of this mad race toward perfection, Red Ray decided to go on a diet: one thousand calories a day.
When he told Yvette, she grabbed a handful of his abdominal sag. “I won’t object,” she said.
In the first week, he lost eight pounds. “I set them free,” he told Yvette, “like Prospero released Ariel and all the sprites on the island.” The second week, he lost four more pounds. He grew twitchy. His mouth stung from a steady diet of pineapple
paletas.
The iambs in
Coriolanus
thumped in his head, spilled over into unworkable legalese in his briefs.
The client wishes only for some justice. A settlement of forty grand will do …
The rumblings in his stomach gave him visions of a Dantean Hell.
When he closed his eyes or gazed at a blank piece of paper, the word “diet” floated there, a photographic afterimage; a diminutive of “die,” it occurred to him. In the fourth week of this self-imposed starvation, self-pity staged a coup and took over as the governing factor in Red Ray’s life.
“I’m only drinking until I drop twenty more pounds,” he informed Yvette. She had already turned her back on him and was striding deep into the house. He stumbled after her, bumping off the hallway walls. From various rooms, workmen stared out at them. He caught up, gripping her shoulders. “Listen,” he said. “It’s very self-regulatory. I can’t possibly get drunk. If I can only ingest a thousand calories a day, that’s at most ten shots of scotch or six and a half cans
of beer. Or four beers and three shots of bourbon. And that’s assuming I
eat
nothing at all!”
T
HE TOWN
of Rito, population 750, had grown up around a large packing house. Most of the inhabitants were descendants of original Morrot serfs who, in one of “Don” Henri’s fits of benevolence, were allowed to buy small plots of land. Homes in Rito were modest and varied; a small wood frame house sitting next to a pink cinderblock cube, which neighbored a river-stone cottage whose yard stretched into a weedy vacant lot. Beyond the lot were two shacks sided in asphalt shingle and a fifties stucco tract home replete with fancifully scalloped plywood trim. Then another lot, a whitewashed wood bungalow, and so on, until the orange groves took over. The vacant lots served as a kind of village green where townspeople staked goats and ponies, and chickens roamed freely. If the community ever felt any pressure to cultivate the well-barbered suburban look found farther south in the bright new developments of Simi Valley and Newhall, nobody in Rito responded. Still, there was plenty of front-yard one-upmanship: birdbaths abounded, as did plaster animals of every species and whirligigs made of bleach bottles. There was even a half-ton pair of concrete tennis shoes, and in front of one home, ornamental bombs were planted nose-up and painted Caterpillar yellow and John Deere green. Cacti and the more prickly and primordial succulents proliferated, making the lush yards lusher and the austere, swept-dirt ones more forbidding. The favorite planters were old rowboats and red Cudahy lard buckets. Prized by every household, however, were round rocks from the Rito River. Some specimens were as small as walnuts, others as large as wrecking balls. They were placed atop fieldstone pillars or in gradated rows along flower beds. Boulder-sized matched pairs flanked the entrances of driveways. They were perfectly, naturally, remarkably round! The one coveted variation had a kind of hourglass shape and, depending on its size and who was describing it, looked like a bulbous bowling pin, a model of the moon pulling out of the earth, or a seamless two-tiered snowman. But the most popular rock by far was purely round. The very presence of these granite miracles in a yard was said to ease headaches, lessen female troubles, attenuate baldness, and nip melancholia in the bud.