I said, “I won’t be in the least bit rough, Melissa. She’ll be fine.”
“I hope so.”
“Melissa, part of what you’re dealing with- a lot more important than money management- is breaking away. Finding your own identity and letting your mother do things for herself. I know it’s hard- I think it’s taken lots of guts for you to go as far as you have. Just
“I hear you,” she said. “It’s just hard. Loving someone that much.”
9
The stretch of freeway that connects L.A. to Pasadena announces itself with four tunnels whose entries are festooned with exquisite stonework. Not the kind of thing any city council is likely to approve nowadays, but this bit of progress was carved into the basin long ago, the city’s first conduit to ceaseless motion masquerading as freedom.
It’s a grubby and graceless asphalt belt now. Three narrow, street-level lanes, bordered by exhaust-warped maples and houses that range from Victorian Relic to Tobacco Road. Psychotically engineered ramps appear without warning. Concrete overpasses that have browned with time- L.A.’s stab at patina- throw spooky shadows across the blacktop. Every time I get on it I think of Nathanael West and James M. Cain- a Southern California history that probably never really existed but is gloomily gratifying to imagine.
I also think of Las Labradoras and how places like the upper-crusty parts of Pasadena, Sierra Madre, and San Labrador might as well be on the moon for all their cross-pollination with the urban tangle at the other end of the freeway.
Las Labradoras. The Farm Girls.
I encountered them years before I met Melissa. In retrospect, the similarity between the experiences seemed obvious. Why hadn’t I made the connection before?
They were women who called themselves girls. Two dozen sorority sisters who’d married very well and settled into estate living at a young age, gotten a couple of kids off to school, and started looking for ways to fill time. Seeking comfort in numbers, they banded together and established a volunteer society- an exclusive club, sorority days renewed. Their headquarters was a bungalow at the Cathcart Hotel- a $200-a-day nest they obtained gratis, including room service, because one of their husbands owned a chunk of that hostelry, and another, the bank that held the mortgage. After composing bylaws and electing officers, they searched for a
Then the son of one of their members was diagnosed with a rare and painful disease and transferred to Western Pediatric Hospital, the only place in L.A. where the ailment could be managed. The child survived but suffered chronically. His mother dropped out of the club in order to devote more time to him. Las Labradoras decided to offer their good services to Western Peds.
At the time, I was in my third year on staff, running a psychosocial rehab program for seriously ill children and their families. The chief of staff called me into his office and suggested I find a niche for “these girls,” talking about budgetary problems for the softer sciences and emphasizing the need to “interface with positive forces within the community.”
One Tuesday in May, I put on a three-piece suit and drove out to the Cathcart Hotel. Ate boiled-shrimp canapEs and crustless sandwiches, drank weak coffee, and met the girls.
They were in their mid-thirties, uniformly bright and attractive and genuinely charming, projecting a noblesse oblige tainted by self-consciousness and self-awareness: They’d gone to college during the sixties, and though that consisted, typically, of four sheltered years at USC or Arizona State or some other place where the foment hadn’t really taken hold, even protected
I wore a beard back then and drove a Dodge Dart that teetered on the brink of death. Despite the suit and my fresh haircut, I figured I had to look like Radical Danger to them. But they accepted me warmly, listened intensely to my after-lunch talk, never removed their eyes from my slide show- sick kids, IV poles, surgical theaters. The one we staffers, during the blackest of moments, called the Tearjerker Matinee.
When it was over, they were all wet-eyed. More certain than ever that they wanted to help.
I decided the best way to make use of their talents would be to have them serve as guides for newly diagnosed families. Psychosocial docents whose goal was to cut through the procedural red tape that hospitals produce even faster than debt. Weekly two-hour shifts in tailored uniforms that they designed themselves, smiles and greetings and guided tours of the misery. Working within the system to blunt some of its indignities, but no swan dives into the deep waters of trauma and tragedy, and no blood and guts. The chief of staff thought it was a great idea.
So did the girls. I set up a training program. Lectures, reading lists, tours of the hospital, debriefings, discussion groups, role-playing.
They were first-rate students, took detailed notes, made intelligent comments. Half-jokingly asked if I planned on testing them.
After three weeks they graduated. The chief of staff presented them with diplomas bound in pink ribbon. A week before the docent rotation was scheduled to begin, I received a handwritten note on ice-colored stationery.
LAS LABRADORAS
BUNGALOW B, THE CATHCART
PASADENA, CALIFORNIA 91125
I found Ms. Brown’s home number in my Rolodex, dialed it the next day, at eight in the morning.
“Oh, hi,” she said. “How are you?”
“Hanging in, Nancy. I just got your letter.”
“Yes. I’m so sorry. I know how terrible this looks, but we just can’t.”
“You mentioned strategic problems. Anything I can help with?”
“No, I’m sorry, but- It’s nothing related to your program, Dr. Delaware. Just your… setting.”
“My setting?”
“The hospital’s. The environment. L.A., Hollywood. Most of us were amazed at how far down it’s slid. Some of the girls think it’s just too far to travel.”
“Too far or too dangerous?”
“Too far
