Chapter One

1

The club was from another age. So was Mother.

The Woman’s Association of Northern California, Conquistadores Chapter Number XVI, was housed in a sumptuous turn-of-the-century, Beaux-Arts-touched-by-Gothic castle topped by crenellations and turrets, and constructed of massive blocks of mauve-gray Deer Isle granite from a long-dead quarry in Maine. The interior was predictable: somber and dark save for stained-glass windows featuring historical Gold Rush scenes that blew jeweled patches on the walls when the sun shone through. Antique Persian rugs softened well-worn walnut floors, the staircase banister gleamed from decades of polish, thirty-foot ceilings were coffered and rimmed with gold. The ground floor of the building held all the public rooms, the two floors above contained sleeping chambers for the members.

Mother had been a member of the Association for more than fifty years and sometimes slept over in a room far too modest for her. But the fees were nominal, and nostalgia was worth something. Her dinners at the club were frequent. They made her feel special.

They made Davida feel like a freak but she gritted her teeth and indulged Mother’s preferences because the woman was a not-too-healthy eighty.

Most dinners meant Mother and various selections of dear friends, each one of them more than a step out of time. The entire concept of the Association with its genteel Gatsby pretensions would have been anachronistic anywhere. Nowhere was it more absurd than here in Berkeley.

A stroll from the club was the People’s Park, originally conceived as a monument to free speech but reduced to a square block of homeless encampments