1 Alice lived in her great-aunt's large bungalow on Wren Street in a desirable neighborhood known as Los Feliz. A hundred and fifty years before, Corporal Jose Vicente Feliz was awarded a Spanish land grant for his role in civilizing the unruly new pueblo of Los Angeles. Rancho Los Feliz--or the Happy Farm as it was often called--was a small, wealthy fiefdom with two thousand acres of mountainous wooded terrain teeming with game, a thousand more in flat arable fields and pastureland, and several miles of riverbed. Corporal Feliz enjoyed this windfall for eight short years. His savvy widow, Dona Verdugo, remarried and held on for decades, establishing legal title to the land once Mexico gained independence from Spain. Her heirs were less tenacious; several daughters sold their holdings at a dollar per acre, and the primary heir, Antonio, bequeathed his major holding to the family lawyer. Today, the mountainous area is more or less intact as Griffith Park, but the rest of the Happy Farm went the way of most Southland ranchos: subdivided again and again into residential home sites. In 1919, an Arts and Crafts architect built half a dozen homes in the lower hills of the district.
432 Wren Street was a four-bedroom, three-bath bungalow set deep in a double lot; its selling points included river stone and clinker brick masonry, teak wainscoting sanded to a skinlike smoothness, cedar-lined closets, large porches--one of them for sleeping--and a two-car garage. The kitchen was unusually, gloriously large--the architect's mother talked him into this as well as a potting shed and wood-lath greenhouse. 432 sold to a prosperous young couple from Milwaukee, who raised three children there before selling it in 1946 to Alice Black's great-aunt. When Aunt Kate made her offer on the house, there was consternation at the bank. Here was a single twenty-five-year-old woman from San Francisco intending to live alone in a family-sized residence at a time when there was an acute housing shortage for returning GIs. Thousands of these GIs, in fact, were living with their wives and young children not two miles from Wren Street in tin-roofed Quonset huts in Griffith Park. Still, if the truth be told, few if any of the families could afford the Wren Street house, and Kate Gordon could; she had both an independent income and a teaching position, so ultimately the bank had no good reason to turn her down. Kate did not live alone for long.
No sooner had she filled the rooms with furniture than she drove up to Palo Alto, sprang her older brother Walter from a private sanitarium and brought him south to live with her. Some years before, in his mid-twenties, newly married and teaching political philosophy at Berkeley, Walter Gordon lost his ability to think clearly or tend to himself in a responsible manner. The diagnosis was dementia praecox. Though his parents tried caring for him, he exhausted them with his wild talk until, in the end, they had to institutionalize him. By the time Kate signed his release, he'd found an outlet for his most insistent energies in gardening and happily transferred his talents to Wren Street, turning the prosaic lawn and barbered shrubbery into a densely wooded private botanical garden. Except for short stints back at the sanitarium for "stabilization," or when Kate went traveling, he lived with his sister for forty years. Walter remained tractable and pleasant, so long as he took his medication. He was well into his sixties when he started sinking into what Kate called his "hibernations," dozing for days on end in his Barcalounger and rousing himself only as physical needs dictated.
When he stopped getting up to go to the bathroom, Kate had to put him in the VA home. Now eighty, Walter had been fully catatonic for years. Kate herself retired from teaching at seventy-one, determined to finish a book she'd been writing since college, a no.