Life In Ordinary Time

More Murder

On Sunday, after our tour of the murder site, etc., my sister and I went on our own little tour before setting out for home.  We drove to Pico Rivera by way of the old bus route on Whittier Blvd, and went by the old house, the old school....  I call it ground zero.  Then we went on to Whittier and La Mirada,  and did the same there--a real trip down Memory Lane, as my sister calls it. 

Periodically, I have to do it--visit the scenes of the crimes, as it were.  Everything looks so ordinary now, the houses and streets so small and nondescript.  We stopped in front of the old house in Pico so my sister could have a cigarette.  I wonder how anyone could live there.  But they have, continuously, for all these 46 years we've been gone.    It's hard to believe that our unhappiness there didn't leave some sort of indelible print of misery on the house.  I wrote a poem once about being a prisoner there, and I remember this line: "Our fingers write dark messages on the walls".  They should be there, those messages, the suffering of five souls should seep from the walls in a thick miasma.

On the way home, after we finally got on the freeway, my sister and I talked about whether we thought we had behaved acceptably in front of the writer and her friend.  We decided we had.  We both thought we had handled seeing our grandmother's death house well, at least in the short term.  We hadn't freaked-out, at least.

Somewhere along the way we got silly, which was bound to happen, and I really don't know in what context, but I began to imitate the child in the film version of Steven King's, The Shining, as something made him try to warn the others of impending doom.  It's somewhat of a running joke between my sister and I.  Anytime we're bored, or idle somewhere, say in the car or at home, for entertainments sake either of us might suddenly burst forth with: "R-e-druuum!".  Like the kid in the book,  I tried to sound spooky but only managed to sound like someone with seriously sick vocal chords, "Re-e-edruuum!", and then with more excitement, "Redruum! Redruum! Redruum!  Re-e-e-e-ed-Ruuuuuuuum!"  My sister giggled.   So did I.  We always do.

A Murder

This brick building on Union in Los Angeles, very close to downtown, is the place my grandmother, my mother's mother,  was murdered in 1929.  It's been there all this time, and I had never seen it or even really knew it still existed.  We never bothered to find out,  and our mother certainly never showed it to us.  Maybe she never bothered to find out, either.

It's within viewing distance of a Catholic bookstore I used to frequent, and for some reason that fact dumbfounds me.  I can't believe I was so close to the place and I never knew.

We went there this weekend, in the company of a person who says she is writing something about the murder.   It was a very famous  case in 1929--it made the headlines, huge, sensationalistic headlines, all over the country. 

My sister and I did a little research on it a while back, we found some of the newspaper articles and photos, but that's as far as we went.  And more than 30 years ago while doing genealogy research I figured out what my grandmother's name had been at the time, as she had remarried, so I could find the rest of the info.  I actually talked to an LAPD detective in Homicide who had found a description of the case in a book he had with unsolved cases in it.

The writer's grandfather was my grandmother's chauffeur at the time.

We also went by the Asbury Park Apartments which was where she was living at the time, and it

apparently was a very ritzy place.  It's a massive building, about 12 stories, and the outside looks as if it's in great condition.  The inside isn't too bad either.  Someone let us into the building and we prowled around,  wanting to get inside the apartment where she lived.  We knocked on the door, but no one answered.  The place has what used to be a beautiful view of what was then called Westlake Park, later it became the famous McArthur park of the song.  The view isn't so beautiful these days as the park is always crammed with people, many immigrants live in the area now, and they take full advantage of the park.

I remember going there once, to the park, with my Mother and Mac and a little friend of mine, Joanne.  We rode on the lake in a paddleboat, and I remember I was  bad and didn't want to give my friend a turn at the paddling.  Mother and Mac's relationship was pretty new at the time, and he was still pretending with me that he was a nice guy, a nice normal guy. He acted as if he had a right to say,  with all the affronted innocence of an Alfred E Neuman, "What, me crazy?"

But I digress, as they say.

Did my mother know we were so close to where her mother used to live? So close to the place where the  chauffeur would drop her off  to see this woman who had given birth to her, so incidentally?  Did she care?  I don't suppose I'll ever know.

I don't think she could cope with any of it, thinking about it, knowing it.  Best to pretend she'd never had a mother,  much less had lost one to murder.  There's no coming back from murder,  it cancels out all chances,  most especially the chance that someday the scales would fall from her mother's eyes and she would see,  and love,  the daughter who had the misfortune of loving her.