Sputterpub's Blog

By 1912 Sam had established himself as a business magnate and civic leader. He had married a Peralta heiress and bought his creekside mansion near the Kent estate. His sisters lived with him until tension between them and his wife grew uncomfortable. He gave them homes as much for his peace as for their own.

At first he considered a shared house for Alice and Peg. He had a small lodge in Wildcat Canyon and he thought about establishing them there. But he soon figured that wouldn’t work. They’d be too remote. Once alone they’d begin picking at one another. His sisters were particular women, very fussy. And Sam wanted to keep the canyon lodge for himself; it was where he went when he needed a break from the stress of business.

It surprised him that Alice and Peg didn’t marry. He thought Alice was a bit ugly, true, but women were scarce and she had some money; he thought she’d be a wife. And Peg was good-looking. But his sisters were single at twenty-four and twenty-two and they didn’t appear to be looking for husbands. He bought little houses for them.

So the neighborhood formed. Sam and Mary Benedict lived up the gentle slope with a view of the bay and the creek meandering by, in a gorgeous mansion which was in such a constant state of alteration and improvement that it never settled into any style before its demise in the fire of 1923. Downstream from the manor, what would be four and a half city blocks when there was a real city, the little houses of Sam’s sisters framed a big curve of the creek.

Alice’s looked like an English cottage. White stucco with a slate-like roof that curved over the small-paned windows, it stood among its rose bushes as sturdy as a bunker. But it was built of alien materials and, really, it should have faced northwest on the land even though that would have put it at an angle to the street. As it was, the house needed constant and substantial repairs. Maybe the problem was the ventilation; Alice often complained of headaches.

In contrast, Peg’s place was charmed. It was framed and walled with the redwood that had grown on its land, and most of its windows were made of its own melted dirt. It got its roof thatch from the hay field on the other side of Perkins Street. It looked like the witch’s house from Hansel & Gretel. As the years passed and Peg aged from twenty-two to forty she came to be considered a witch herself.

But that took some time. It went in two phases. Of the eighteen years Peg lived in her little house, for the first eleven she appeared quite normal. Except she was rather good-looking and somewhat rich, but she never got married.

It wasn’t that she was a lover of women. In fact, her sister Alice was that type, and Peg helped Alice keep it a secret from Sam. Alice only acted on her inclination once in her life, one summer with a charming woman who visited the area from Brussels, and Peg thought it was Alice’s self-repression, more than bad air in her house, that caused her chronic headaches.

Peg just wasn’t interested in being mated. She was a curious girl and tried sex several times, and she enjoyed it, mostly, but not enough to get married. She had an affair when she was twelve with the son of her brother’s business partner. Jeremy was fifteen at the time and completely inexperienced. In fact she seduced him. The Perkins family socialized often with the Benedicts, and Peg and Jeremy managed a regular and vigorous sex life. She was lucky to avoid pregnancy.

She had a more exciting fling when she was seventeen. The judge’s nephew visited for a month. A college man, from Yale. He was experienced; she was pleasured. But she never loved him enough to go back east with him. Peg preferred her home and her privacy. She opted for poetry and naturalism, and didn’t really have an interest in companionship.

She was quite discreet, and her brother never suspected her activities. Alice knew about some of them but of course she understood the value of a sister’s secrets.

They knew not what they did, when they built the little house. And they did it right.

The lot was rather small, downstream from the Kent estate, where the creek leveled out and zigged right in its year-round run to the bay. The property was dense with native redwoods and with live oaks and walnuts planted by the Kent family, and it just happened that the redwoods were removed to make room for the house. So it was that they built the place out of the trees that had always guarded the property. Even the window glass, bought a mile west on the edge of the bay but made, in part, from creek silica, was at home in the little house.

With that redwood, with that glass, it didn’t matter that the slope was beyond the angle of repose. That the foundation was a cattywampus sampler of different forms, nothing tied together. That the creek would swell every few years to encompass the basement for an hour, so that the little house had to more or less float on the land it covered. The designer was an unhappy unoriginal man, whose best claim to fame was to share a draftsman with Maybeck…yet the little house was built (quick and cheap) out of its own redwood and its own sand, and it stood charmed and charming.

If it were more valuable it would have been altered. It would have been bought and sold, remodeled or restored, had amenities added. If it were higher class it would have been situated to the east, with a view and a peril. But it was a modest little place, hunkering below street level, set back hidden in its oak trees. Its living room was low and shaded by the front porch, cozy and cave-like; its residents all knew they’d waste effort trying to make it light and airy, so no one painted the redwood walls or the brass window latches. It was mostly owned by single women, so no one added on to it, or drilled holes in its walls for speaker wires. In its first century it changed its roof material, added forced-air heat (cage-like around itself, with floor ducts below and ceiling ducts upstairs), and enclosed the back porch: that’s all.

It was built in October of 1912. It was listed for $3,200 but it wasn’t sold at first; it was given to a spinster sister of Samuel Benedict. They recorded a sale as if money changed hands, but Sam just gave the place to Margaret. He and Charles Perkins were the men responsible for the reservoir system that permitted development in the area, so he was well-connected with the builders. He managed to purchase his own mansion plus small houses for his two sisters, for a total of $8,493.

The three abodes were situated between the new Benedict and Perkins Streets, on the banks of the creek at the then edge of town. Sam’s place was over five thousand square feet and upstream from his sisters’ small houses. Alice’s cottage seemed English and Peg’s was like a little chalet.

Sam and Alice and Peg didn’t look like siblings. Maybe they weren’t. Their parents Abe and Helen moved to California in 1888, with eight-year old Samuel and infant Alice, and two years later, after the usual spate of summer visitors, baby Margaret just seemed to appear. No one noticed that Helen was pregnant, but she was a large woman and she wore her garments loose. Like Sam and Alice Margaret was tall, but she was dark-haired and green-eyed to their blonde-and-blue, and she seemed ingenious while they were canny.

Abe and Helen died in the influenza epidemic of 1903. Sam was then twenty-three and took charge of sixteen year-old Alice and thirteen year-old Peg. They lived together in the small family home while Sam built his fortune in reservoirs.

The kids, both boys, were in good care. The younger was rather mellow but her first-born was hyperactive. The name on his birth certificate was Wayne (for Bill’s dad), but the family called him Sudden. He was always getting into trouble. And Virginia’s office was a perpetual challenge. She was in charge of six women who all worked for a property management company, and the problems raised by the tenants, as well as some from her own employees, would have challenged Solomon.

The office. She never would have picked her career. She always thought she’d write novels or teach (at college level). She fell into the financial district, temporarily of course, when she came out of Cal at 21. She meant to move on. She even tried half a year of doctoral work. But she was too old, then, for college speed. She soon discovered that a student only gets one shot at being an undergrad. And the ivory tower simply didn’t pack the punch of her deadline-driven, where-did-the-time-go, can-you-believe-that-asshole place of business.

Even after she quit smoking cigarettes (and admitted, grudgingly, that the prohibitions about indoor smoking worked, and made that terrible withdrawal possible for her), even after the benign little darts of breast pain made her cut back the coffee to three mugs a morning, still Virginia loved the rush of the office. They called her Vee there, and she was always in motion when around, moving from desk to desk with comments and answers, almost never in her own chair.

She made a point of not raising her voice. No matter how frustrated she became, she tried to speak calmly, in questions instead of declarations. But privately Vee judged her co-workers. In fact, she sorted, ranked, and graded them, like eggs.

Vee imagined a busyness meter. It was based on a simple accomplishments-divided-by-time formula. She had herself in mind as the standard, and she put only two of her colleagues near her level. Her gauge for the others ran from 35% to 80%.

No one knew about the gauge, but her co-workers intervened anyway. They ganged up on Vee one Wednesday at lunch, and they told her she had to slow down. They managed to describe her presence as so agitating to them that Vee understood. She agreed to the yoga classes.

They call her Virginia now. She’s calmer in the office. She drinks even less coffee. But she sleeps less too. She’s down to about five hours a night. Even without speed she has to watch herself or she cows the others. She’s only her own busy fast-living self now when she’s all alone.

And she’s not done yet. She had an epiphany recently (or, as she puts it, a penetrating glimpse into the obvious). She was remembering her undergraduate days and she thought of all the games of Hearts she played with friends: how addictive that was, how often she tried to run the cards… She remembered her refusal to learn Bridge, because she reasoned at the time that if Hearts were a problem distraction, Bridge would probably become a degree-killing obsession.

What the heck? she then wondered. Was that avoidance necessary? Isn’t she old enough, now, beyond breeding or nursing or operating heavy machinery, to risk eating tuna even if it’s loaded with mercury? And what about the market? She thought of all the years she avoided researching and trading stocks because she’d already concluded it would take too much of the stamina and attention she wanted to put to other tasks.

Virginia will soon decide to stop restricting herself. She already knows that she’s at her best in the morning. That’s when the markets open, when she can indulge in bursts of almost impulsive deeds, even if they are as sedentary as placing her fingertip on the computer screen.

Virginia will evolve into a solitary day trader (“dawn trader,” will be her phrase), and she’ll succeed at it. She’s even going to meet a few people through her enterprise. She doesn’t want to get ahead of herself, but she suspects that unrestricted she’ll be fine.

Adoring speed Virginia had to watch herself.

She first encountered it in late high school: sweetened milky coffee and stolen cigarettes. She loved the buzz. She quick-addicted.

A year later, in college, she swallowed her first beans. Little white tabs of benzedrine that made her hum with energy. She felt like she could write an encyclopedia overnight.

She diversified into dexedrine and sometimes methedrine and finally, expensively, cocaine. She went from swallowing the pills at night, in study sessions with her friends (where she found she just couldn’t waste the buzz on schoolwork), to ingesting them in the morning, with ice-cold tomato juice and searing black coffee, to start herself spinning into a full full day.

Once she really went into it. She strung herself out for four days and nights, until she exhausted a big stash of bennies. She didn’t sleep and she rarely stopped moving. Her lower legs itched with a fishnet rash of poor circulation. She ate almost nothing. She produced reams of rushed writing and ragged speech. When she came down, she cried nonstop for 12 hours and then slept for 18. After that she moderated her consumption.

Cocaine arrived when she was almost done with college. Like royalty it seemed, appearing pure white on clean mirrors at parties, supplanting the cheaper raunchier stuff. Virginia never really “got” coke. She bought it, snorted it and rubbed her upper gums with it, and she acknowledged that it didn’t upset her stomach or mottle her legs. But it also never packed the buzz of good old bennies and dexies and meth. She eased away from coke before crack or crystal made the scene. She became a young adult. She drank coffee and smoked cigarettes.

She liked to live fast. Tame but fast. She was in her element in the office, smoking a Marlboro while juggling two telephone lines, checking some papers, and nodding her guidance to a hovering underling. She made a game of her walk from office to train station: deliberately lengthening her stride, slaloming among the slower pedestrians. She talked fast and argued faster, sometimes so into it that she quivered.

She raced through days, she savored days, and the days passed. In time, she couldn’t drink coffee as a bedtime beverage. As an after-dinner quaff. Any time after 2 PM. And still she sped. People sometimes made the “T = time-out” gesture at her, or floated a hand in the air before her, palm down and patting, as if to quell her.

She tried to modulate herself. She even wrote the word on the pullout shelf in her office desk, where at first she saw it whenever she used her phone. But as often as she let others talk or made herself be quiet during meetings, that often she grew bored, restless, impatient, and went from liking her job to watching the clock. After a few weeks, MODULATE prompted no reaction from her at all.

She married a relatively patient, plodding man, thinking he was silently strong and that he’d provide a model of calm for her. That only worked as long as she and Bill were experiencing debut domesticity nonstop: the first ten years of their marriage brimmed with new jobs, the fixer-upper house, the pregnancies and babies and must-have cars and appliances. Virginia kept working throughout all that (the office may have been the only thing that saved her sanity during the hormonal storm), but in the final three years of their marriage she faced their complete incompatibility. Bill lived at about one-tenth the velocity she did. He could easily fill his day with a trip to the store for dinner ingredients. She juggled the job and the kids and the nonprofit and also some exercise and painting, while contemplating graduate school. Shortly before she divorced him she concluded that Bill actually processed life so differently that he constituted an alien, compared to her. She decided that compatibility in life velocity was even more important to a relationship than agreement about humor or money.

Divorced at 40, with rights to half a house and joint custody of two kids, Virginia had to admit that marriage had enriched her. She looked around a little for a man more her speed, but she thought she might actually be slowing down, because around then the job and the children were just about all she could take.

We noticed. What we’d tended to view as blonde dippiness morphed into blatant repetition and bizarre forgetfulness. Several of us experienced her failure to show up at planned lunches. There were reports of missed appointments at hairdressers and manicurists.’ Carolyn reported that on the last girlfriends’ trip to the spa (an almost annual long weekend after tax day), Pam forgot to pack toiletries and underwear. Maybe that could happen to any of us growing-oldsters, but the oddity was Pam’s reluctance (amounting nearly to refusal) to purchase a toothbrush once she discovered the omission. When a few of us brought the memory subject up to Pam (over what turned out to be the last reserved lunch for which she showed up), she giggled and tossed her hair from side to side so it kept grazing her jawline. “Oh, I talked to the doctor about my forgetfulness when I saw him last. He laughed and said it’s completely common, at our age.” Several of us also see Lou – no way would he field a question about cognition like that.

Meanwhile, Duane was sliding too. The man continued to review and sort his photographs, the operas he attended, the cuisines he prepared, the films he screened (proud to use his TV as a monitor only – no cable or dish for Duane – informing us regularly about how many dozens of movies he was watching every week). But he started to exhibit nervous confusion when he entertained, and then he stopped giving dinner parties. The man who had regularly invited a half dozen friends to his home for a six-course all-homemade meal began to go months between hospitality. And he started misplacing nouns. That was happening to all of us of course, and at first we thought his vocabulary loss was normal but bothering him so much that he complained about it and that made it seem more frequent. But after awhile it became obvious that his lapse wasn’t just a name here and there or a weird word. Carolyn was part of a small group that attended another performance of La Boheme with Duane, and when he lost the word “usher” (“you know, the person who, who seats people”), she says she knew it was serious.

There are facts and there are theories. The facts are grim. Less than five years after Duane lost “usher,” his aphasia is almost complete. The well-read wit is silent. And that’s not all. Duane has lost most of his intelligence too. The man who used to do the Times Sunday puzzle in ink now struggles to complete the crossword in TV Guide. His twin met recently with his closest friends. Carolyn wasn’t present but I was consulted before and after, because as far as any of us can tell, I drafted Duane’s last will, back when we were at the same firm, shortly after his wife died. The decision was made to take his car keys and move an attendant/housekeeper in with him; no one could bear to remove him from the house he has loved for so long.

Pam was houseproud too, but she is no longer at home. In the same five years her memory became so degraded that not even Al, besotted with Pam and experienced at nursing a declining spouse, could take living with her any more. He and her sons recently installed her in a memory care facility. When we learned that, a few of us visited her.

It was dreadful. Al had warned us in a semi-coherent, almost-manic way (I think he’s been alone with the situation for too long, and is desperate to talk, but Carolyn suspects him of something). “She may act like she recognizes you, but she won’t have any context for the relationship,” he said. And he told us Pam had been neglecting hygiene (“It’s been over six months since she had her hair cut or colored,” he said, triggering a conjecture that Al had an unhealthy obsession with the blondeness of his wife).

He understated. As our eyes adjusted to the dim light in Pam’s room,we were staggered at how she looked. Haggard doesn’t do the description justice. Her hair hung in lank dull grey clumps. Her nails were ragged and stained. But the worst aspect was the blankness of expression in her eyes. The only life they exhibited, besides moisture, were fleeting moments of obvious confusion…windows into a brain trying to find perspective for her location, her condition, and us.

The theories are still Carolyn’s. The rest of us shake our heads, murmur statements about doing something to help, and thank our fortunes, stars, God that it isn’t happening to us, yet. Carolyn considers their cases closed – even she thinks nothing can be done now – but she won’t let up on her idea that Duane and Pam brought their early mental demises on themselves. “If only they had been willing to reassess their lives and make fresh decisions,” Carolyn says, “Duane could have learned to use his body for exercise and his heart for love. And Pam could have dropped that ridiculous veneer of culture and allowed real thoughts and feelings into her life. I’ll bet neither would be as gone as they are if only they’d tended their souls…”

But that’s all from Carolyn’s perspective. She’s got her own warp. Carolyn doesn’t exactly blame cancer victims for their condition, but she does think that if one pays enough and correct attention to one’s immune system, then one probably won’t get it. She’s been heard to describe cancer as abnormal immortal cells that must occur all the time, but that usually get wiped out by the body’s own defenses.

Carolyn thought, along with other observers, that hormone replacement therapy would be heart- and brain-protective. She was as surprised as the scientists when the clinical tests proved the exact opposite, and were ended early. For those trials revealed that hormone replacement increased the risk of significant health problems, which connection had been masked in the observational studies by the fact that the women on HRT were better educated than average and more likely to eat well, exercise regularly, and otherwise care for themselves in a way that counteracted what are now known to be the side effects of Premarin.

Why, Carolyn even bought into the public service announcements about the benefits of preschool (most high school dropouts didn’t attend school before kindergarten). She probably believes that marijuana is a gateway drug.

Carolyn’s kind of crazy. She doesn’t seem to notice, but at this point, most of us are watching her.