The Madonnas of Echo Park (27 page)

And here
I
am, amid the sounds of locking metal pins, grilling meat, and hammering nails, sitting next to a palm tree carved up with English graffiti on an ornate movie palace throne. Crescents of fountain mist drizzle over me while I watch families of ducks waddle into the lake, their feet creating delicate ripples of water that swirl together into dizzying, hypnotic patterns. This is the first chance I've had to sit down this morning and
think,
think about whether there's any way out of delivering this chair, or finding my mother's dog. There's a sense of deflated tranquillity and acceptance, the calm that comes right before tackling an impossible problem you know has one painful solution.

Across the lake, what appears to be a trail of floating white dots, the bouncy kind you see on kids' shows that follow in time the words of a song, drift along the water's edge. The glare's too strong through
the fountain mist to see what the dots are, but there's a musicality to their movement, a slapping of the pavement in time to their own percussive beat. They're runners, a graceful, fluid caravan of young boys, jogging around the lake, stretching their legs back and forth in place, bodies standing still on a long conveyor belt, yet moving closer. They're shouting a call-and-response chant between themselves and an older voice that's leading the way, set to the tune of a popular rap song, whose tune itself was borrowed from another song:

Approaching the boathouse, the boys slow down in unison, like a train edging to a stop at a platform. Their crisp white-collared, short-sleeve shirts have a red-stitched insignia that says
ST. GOTTESCHALK'S
. The leader, a rangy man with a military crew cut and gray stubble poking through his four o'clock shadow, yanks off a pair of aviator sunglasses and makes a whirring motion with his hand.

“Take five, boys,” he says and lights up a cigarette.

The boys yell and shout while they bend, flex, and stretch in tight clusters. They ignore me; a woman sitting next to the lake in a gilded throne chair doesn't seem out of the ordinary to them.

The older man walks over and stares at me in the chair.

“Hope?” he asks.

Mr. Charles MacArthur, or Crazy Mac, the track coach at Downtown High, where I was on the varsity squad, is now the coach at St. Gotteschalk's, an old Catholic school built over a razed convent and located next to the expanded freeway off-ramp and a strip of renovated luxury condominiums. Crazy Mac had an incandescent reputation in school. His jogging songs were littered with obscenities, he drank and smoked on campus, drove an expensive sports car
no teacher could afford on their salary, and because of his long, unexplained absences, was rumored to be a government spook.

“Like a queen on her throne. Glad to see nothing's changed, Hope,” he says, calling me by my nickname. “Bet you still remember how orgasmic a smoke is after running. Want one?”

“I don't smoke anymore.”

“Ah, so you don't run anymore,” he says.

I flinch because he's right. It was the one thing that brought me joy in high school.

“How's life at St. G's?” I ask.

“Less bullshit than the public schools, at least until they get shut down and turned into condos. I've brushed up on my Bible. ‘In our hearts, we seek compassion. In our souls, we look for grace,'” MacArthur says.

“That's pretty,” I say.

“It's a load of shit,” he says. “But God keeps the alimony payments on time.”

“Another divorce?”

“When it comes to relationships, women are chess players,” he says. “They see several moves ahead. Men are playing checkers—jump, jump, jump, king me.” He motions to the chair. “So this is what happens when you quit running. You become so lazy you need to carry your own chair around.”

“It's not mine.” I laugh. “It's for someone called the ‘Coat Queen.'”

“Have fun,” MacArthur says. “She soaks us with a garden hose whenever we jog by her house. Two minutes, guys!” he screams over his shoulder, and the boys dissolve back into a pair of straight, ordered lines.

“We gotta move, Esperanza. In training for the fall invitational. You're welcome to join us. You could show these plebes what a runner looks like.”

“I can't,” I say. “I'm looking for my mother's dog. Have you seen him? Small, fast border collie? Jesus, he's not even
my
dog.”

“Can't help you. And knock off the blasphemy,” MacArthur says, “or you'll have to answer to the Lord.”

“You're crazy, Mac.” (This is what
anyone
would say to MacArthur after talking to him, hence his nickname.)

“Not about this. The Lord's for real,” he says, and I can't tell if we're talking about the Lord from Echo Park or the Good Lord Above. “But it's a good thing you're looking for a dog,” Mac says and stubs out his cigarette. “Dog's a symbol for envy, one of the seven deadly sins. Okay, boys, mount up!”

The boys walk up a sloping path, waiting for Mac to take the lead. They break into a synchronized jog, floating dots once again, singing a brand-new song:

When I'm sure Crazy Mac's out of sight, I do a short jog carrying the chair. Twenty steps later, I'm winded. I follow the ducks' example and waddle up the hill to Kensington Road.

On a street that borders Angelino Heights lies the Coat Queen's magnificent three-story emerald green and candy-cane red Victorian mansion, one in a row of over two dozen magnificent Victorian mansions lined up next to one another like a storybook lane. Her house sits on a corner that intersects with a street that dead-ends in an open field enclosed with a chain-link fence where
trabajadores
are working and dotted with surveyors' flags and colorful banners announcing the construction of a new housing development.

The sky above her home, punctured by an intricate weather vane, is as blue as the waters off a Caribbean island. A wrought-iron fence guards a razor-sharp front lawn and a wall of immaculately trimmed twenty-foot hedges. Chrysanthemum, bluebell, and lily
flower beds, with birds of paradise peeking out from underneath an overgrowth of trumpet vines, grow alongside a cobblestone walkway. On the front porch is an antique bench swing, swinging in the breeze over elaborate marble tile arranged in a Spanish-style mosaic. It is difficult to imagine this house looking any different at the turn of the twentieth century. Could this be the home of an antisocial lunatic?

I knock on the door and set the chair on the porch next to a row of potted strawberry plants. Their scent makes me think of Gerald. He was sweet to me in ways that I appreciated—like taking me on picnics and bringing me baskets of fresh strawberries because he knew they were my favorite—but that also left me feeling vulnerable, dependent, and conceited, like making me mix tapes with “love” songs from bands that made him want to drink all day (the Replacements, the Clash, and Bob Marley & the Wailers). When he proposed to me, with a mix tape of course (U2's “All I Want Is You”), he said he wanted children. Lots of children. And for a moment I saw them—a beautiful but ragtag band of mixed children, struggling to find an identity between Mexican and American. I was trying to find a way to do it, and not feeling very successful. If their mother couldn't find a way to do it, what hope was there for them?

I told Gerald to get up and go so many times, when he got up and left for good, I felt stunned and heartbroken. When I found my courage late one night in a wine bottle to get back in touch, I saw a photo online of Gerald posing with his fit, athletic wife sitting on his lap at a company picnic, a baby in her arms. I drank several more glasses and dreamt of running my hands through his blond hair as the smell of strawberries filled the room.

I knock on the door again. No one answers. After I left Echo Park, I lost my impulsiveness, the need to answer questions, the ability to not take no for an answer. The instinct to push open closed doors without knocking. But now I have no fear or compunction. Something speaks to me in a whisper, and had there not been a breeze
carrying away the street noise—the sounds of cars, buses, construction, machinery; neighborhood progress—with it down the block, I might never have heard it.

It says, “You belong here.” I bring the chair inside.

The floor-to-ceiling double front doors with carved angels, pineapples, and frosted glass, several inches thick, open onto a parlor with a brass and ivory-cushioned sitting bench, a pair of thick oak end tables, and a miniature glass chandelier hanging low over a stairway with a grooved balustrade, channeling running water down into an iron chalice littered with fresh rose petals. I've walked into the lobby of a grand movie palace from the 1920s, a meticulous construction that is a seamless illusion of a separate and more opulent life. Had I missed a split in a dividing wall, I'd have set down the chair and walked out. Instead, I place it next to a velvet sitting bench, pull the sliding doors apart, and wander into a shapeless room without windows.

A crack from the door spills light in like flames itching the corners of the darkness, eating away at its edges. Stuffed onto a maze of conjoined rolling chrome coat racks are overcoats and cutaways, box coats and mackinaws, maxi coats and morning coats, shrugs, basques, and frocks, along with a panoply of wraps, tunics, ulsters, toppers, manteaus, and stoles. Layers upon layers of coats, arranged in unsteady, vertiginous stacks, threaten to topple over and crush anyone reckless enough to pull a garment from its Byzantine placement to try on. It's summer, so the temptation is small, but in this black, airless room, a sweaty chill flutters across my back and scampers down my forearms. I shiver while I finger textures both rough and soft through sheets of protective plastic.

“Who are you?” she asks. In a far corner of the room, a woman silhouetted in an ankle-length evening coat stands by a doorway.

“I'm sorry,” I say. “I delivered your chair. From Lorenzo's? I left it out in your front parlor.”

“Do you expect me to believe that?” she asks.

“I'm sorry,” I stammer. “I'll leave.”

“Come out of the dark,” she says.

I sidestep through the room, following her as she sweeps into a large formal room like a movie star at a red carpet premiere. Her chocolate-trim fur coat ripples as she makes sweeping arm gestures. She ushers me into a dining room with a grand table that has twelve chairs and thirteen place settings. Disappearing behind another “fake” split wall, she returns with Lorenzo's chair and slides it in at the head of the table.

“Thirteen chairs. Now I can use this table again,” she says. Dust coats my finger as I run it across the tarnished silverware. “Oh, but I haven't had guests in years.” Her laugh makes me shudder.

“Are you cold, dear?” she asks.

“No, I'm fine,” I say. “My mother made me bring a coat. She's crazy . . . um, I mean, she worries too much.”

“She made you wear it this morning?”

“Mothers do that kind of thing.”

“Not all mothers,” she says and reaches out to brush my fur collar. “This is a beautiful coat,” she says.

“Thanks,” I say. It feels like time is creeping away from me in this house.

“You carry your mother's warmth wherever you go,” she says.

“Um, I guess?”

“That's so lovely. I'm very happy for you,” she says and starts
to cry.

“Oh,” I say. I'm anxious to find a way out of here. Then it hits me. “Would you . . . like it?”

“You would give me your coat?”

“Uh, sure,” I say, sliding it off. “It's been sitting in a closet.”

“You would give the coat off your back to a complete stranger?”

“Yeah,” I say and hand it to her.

“Why would you do this?”

“I don't know. I never wear it. I don't need it. And you're letting me give it to you.”

She weighs the coat in her hands. “I . . . don't know what to say.”

“Well, enjoy it. I have to go now. I'm looking for my mother's dog,” I say and walk to the front door.

On the front porch, I hear Crazy Mac's runners in the distance. The Coat Queen touches my shoulder. “I want to thank you. But I don't know your name.”

“Aurora. Aurora Esperanza.”

“Esperanza?” she says. “That's a beautiful name. It means ‘hope.'”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Esperanza is my last name, too,” she says.

“Really? That's . . . neat,” I say. “It's a common name.”

“There's nothing common about hope.”

“No, I meant—”

“I understand what you meant.”

“Hey, maybe we're related.” I shrug.

“That would be something, wouldn't it?” she says and touches my cheek. “The Lord does indeed work in mysterious ways,” she says and closes the door behind me.

That name again. Am I hearing things that aren't there?

I walk across the street in a daze to the now deserted construction site, where I hear a radio play an old Spanish
ranchera.
The workers are gone. How long had I been in the Coat Queen's house? The song drifts above a barley sea of weeds, dead brush, and garbage, an unfamiliar melody paired with a recognizable voice. I can't place it, though. There's a plaintive loss I feel whenever I walk past a construction site, or a kitchen in a restaurant, and overhear one of those ancient Spanish songs playing through a pair of cheap transistor radio speakers. The pain in the balladeers' voices in those songs; it's like picking up an emergency broadcast from a world that exists only in my peripheral vision.