Tales of the City 03 - Further Tales of the City

Grass Valley—one of seven children raised by a tractor salesman and his Seventh Day Adventist wife.
    When she met Reg Giroux, then president of a medium-sized aeronautical engineering firm, Prue was still a fledgling dental hygienist; she was, in fact, flossing his teeth at the time. Reg’s friends were horrified when he announced their engagement at the Bohemian Grove summer encampment.
    Still, the marriage seemed to work for a while. Prue and Reg built a sprawling vacation home in the Mother Lode country which became the site of many lavish, theme-oriented costume galas. At her Pink-and-Green Ball Prue played hostess to Erica Jong, Tony Orlando and Joan Baez, all in the same afternoon. She could scarcely contain herself.
    That, eventually, became the problem. Complacent in his aristocracy, Reg Giroux did not share or comprehend his wife’s seemingly insatiable appetite for celebrities. Prue’s weekly Nob Hill star luncheon, which she had grandly labeled “The Forum,” was so universally scorned by the old-liners that even her husband had begun to feel the sting.
    So he had bailed out.
    Luckily for Prue, the divorce coincided conveniently with the arrest and conviction (on indecent exposure charges) of Western Gentry society columnist Carson Callas. So Prue invited the magazine’s editor to lunch and made her pitch. The editor, a country boy himself, mistook Prue’s studied elegance for patrician grace and hired her on the spot.
    She was her own woman now.
    Prue’s three-year-old Russian wolfhound, Vuitton, had been missing for nearly a week. Prue was frantic. To make matters worse, the man at Park & Rec was being annoyingly vague about the crisis.
    “Yes ma’am, I seem to remember that report. Where did you say you lost him again?”
    Prue heaved a weary sigh. “In the tree ferns. Across from the conservatory. He was with me one moment, and the next he was …”
    “Last week?”
    “Yes. Saturday.”
    “One moment, please.” She heard him rifling through files. The jerk was whistling “Oh Where Oh Where Has My Little Dog Gone.” Several minutes passed before he returned to the phone. “No ma’am. Zilch. I checked twice. Nobody’s reported a Russian wolfhound in the last …”
    “You haven’t seen any suspicious Cambodians?”
    “Ma’am?”
    “Cambodians. Refugees. You know.”
    “Yes ma’am, but I don’t see what …”
    “Do I have to spell it out? They eat dogs, you know. They’ve been eating people’s dogs!”
    Silence.
    “I read it in the Chronicle,” Prue added.
    Another pause, and then: “Look, ma’am. How ‘bout I ask the mounted patrol to keep their eyes open, O.K.? With a dog like that, though, the chances of dognapping are pretty high. I wish I could be more helpful, but I can’t.”
    Prue thanked him and hung up. Poor Vuitton. His fate lay in the hands of incompetents. Somewhere in the Tenderloin the Boat People could be eating sweet-and-sour wolfhound, and Prue was helpless. Helpless.
    She took a ten minute walk in Huntington Park to calm her nerves before writing the column. When she returned, her secretary reported that Frannie Halcyon had called to invite Prue to lunch tomorrow “to discuss a matter of utmost urgency.”
    Frannie Halcyon was the reigning Grande Dame of Hillsborough. She had never even communicated with the likes of Prue Giroux, much less summoned her to the family estate for lunch.
    “A matter of utmost urgency.”
    What on earth could that be?

The Matriarch
    S OMETIMES FRANNIE COULDN’T HELP WONDERING whether there was a curse on Halcyon Hill. It made as much sense as anything when she stopped to consider the horrid consequences that had befallen the members of her family. At sixty-four, she was the sole surviving Halcyon, the last frayed remnant of a dynasty that had all but capitulated to death, disease and destruction.
    Edgar, her husband, succumbed to “bum kidneys” (his term) on Christmas Eve, 1976.
    Beauchamp, her son-in-law, perished the following year in a fiery crash in the Broadway tunnel.
    Faust, her beloved Great Dane, passed away shortly thereafter.
    DeDe, her daughter and Beauchamp’s estranged wife, gave birth to half-Chinese twins in late 1977 and fled to Guyana with a woman friend of questionable origin.
    The Jonestown Massacre. Even now, three years after the event, those words could pounce on Frannie from a page of newsprint, prickly and poisonous as the fangs of a viper.
    Edgar, Beauchamp, Faust and DeDe. Horror