In “Annunciation,” (The New Yorker, Feb 14 & 21, 2022) a new story by Lauren Groff, the main
character, young, impoverished, and recently arrived on the west coast, finds lodging in exchange for
chores in an abandoned poolhouse on a large estate ruled by a larger-than-life character, Griselda.
In the mid-1980s my wife and I were in an uncannily similar scenario. We lived for fifteen months in the “party house,” a large single room attached to the garage of a much larger southern California estate. In exchange for rent our main duties were to water the extensive rose gardens and care for Duke, the estate’s much neglected pit bull. The owners, a couple in their 80s, travelled a lot.
I refer to Duke as “the estate’s” because I don’t believe he had ever been inside a human home or felt any human affection from anyone, ever. He was wary of us at first, but soon became friendly with Yida, our shepherd-husky and us. Soon he was sleeping inside with us and hanging out as if we were his owners. One of my favorite photographs of that era is of my wife and the two dogs napping in parallel on the coolest (literally) place on the estate, the concrete floor of our house.
To find how the character Griselda is larger than life I refer you enthusiastically to Groff’s story. Our own employer/landlady Bea, had three names, her first, followed by her first husband’s surname and then Paul’s, her current late-in-life husband’s surname. We always referred to her by all three names, as if it were a title. I think she was widowed for many years before Paul signed on. Once when I was driving Bea to LAX she remarked, as if from a reverie, “I remember riding down this road in the parade after the war in the tank that my husband designed to drive Rommel out of Africa.”
Paul was a reserved southern gentleman who had earned his living as a golf pro, including a couple PGA championships. He was a local retired country club pro and still gave lessons. I remember one day he was heading out to give lessons to a very wealthy man, the owner of the largest manufacturer of kimonos in Japan. Somehow I teased the fee out of him, he certainly wouldn’t have offered it otherwise: $10,000 per day. So although the estate belonged to Bea, it’s not as if Paul were not, of his own accord, a man of means.
One of Paul’s clients was Bob Hope, who often called us to find out when Paul would be in town. Whenever I answered the phone, he asked to speak to my wife, and I could hear her laughing at whatever he was saying in their brief conversations. I love the idea of Bob Hope working on his golf game well into his eighties, not to mention charmingly flirting with my wife.
Bea and Paul were a bit aloof; we were, after all, of the servant class. But that Christmas we flew to Michigan to visit my family. “But they have winter there!” Bea fretted, “What will you wear?” It wasn’t an issue that concerned us, but Bea insisted we take their fur coats, each one of which was of about equal worth as our car. We arrived in Michigan dressed like Joe Namath and the starlet of the day.
The “party house” had a patio that was shaded by a large fragrant wisteria that would soon crush the trellis that supported it. We often took our meals there. That summer Los Angeles was terrorized by “the Night Stalker,” a serial killer who broke into homes, often through windows. Thus we kept the windows locked and the little house was stiflingly hot. Sometimes to escape the heat we went to the Rialto Theater in South Pasadena, a grand venue, “an odd mash-up of Spanish Baroque and Egyptian kitsch.” Its air-conditioning was a form of resuscitation. We arrived early and before the feature started they only ever played one artist on the sound system: Sade. I think we saw Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise there two or three times. One of the characters loves Screaming Jay Hawkins’ “I Put a Spell on You.” And, it almost goes without saying that we were under some kind of spell during this time. The Rialto has been closed close to twenty years.
Eventually the Night Stalker was chased down by enraged citizens in East Los Angeles after an attempted car-jacking. He was known to have killed fourteen people. We opened the windows in relief.
I remember that time as mostly idyllic, but it was never meant to be permanent. When we were loading up the vehicles, Duke, the newly domesticated pit bull, crawled into the car and curled around the gas pedal and brakes under the steering wheel. He knew he wasn’t going with us, but wanted to make sure we know he wanted to come. We asked Bea if we could take him, but she would not hear of it. To this day both my wife and I regret not having dognapped him.
A few months later we heard that Duke had to be put down. We didn’t believe it and our hearts were broken. Yida would hold on four more years. Bea and Paul are long gone now, of course. And Bob Hope. The Night Stalker, in death row in San Quentin for twenty-three years, of cancer. As of this writing, my wife and I remain here, among the living, still under a spell and thinking about getting new dog, aware of the possibility that she may outlive us.
