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hands of negative cutters Gladys and Grace. Nor was today’s destination outside those studios’ gates, where a surplus of set designers’ fantasies seemed to have spilled forth into the animated streets and picturesque hillside roadways of surrounding Hollywood, making there an Alhambresque backdrop against which the two flappers had lived and laughed and loved away the halcyon days and nights of their flaming youth. No, bypassing all this, the Dougherty sports coupe skirted bustling downtown, coursed beyond the sleepy Los Angeles River with its plethora of railroad tracks along both banks, and climbed gently upward to the comparatively ancient neighborhood of Boyle Heights.
    This place possessed for them, as Berniece would later express it, “the aura of a trip in a time machine.” Dissolved before their eyes was the present-day fastness of synagogues and delicatessens beloved for more than a generation by Jewish folk arriving in successive waves from New York and eastern Europe. Instead, in imagination, the occupants of the Dougherty Ford peered deeper into the past, at a wholly different era closer to the turn of the twentieth century. They fixed on that charmed time before the astonishing rise of automobiles had revolutionized everything. When Southern California’s movers and shakers had still inhabited the fashionable Queen Anne mansions dotting all this higher ground just a quick trolley ride from their power bases of downtown. When in identical pattern, all these same streets had still comprised a booming preserve for the heirs, culturally if not literally, of the Yankee tradesmen and lawyers and real estate brokers who’d first bargained the happily situated little pueblo of Los Angeles out of Mexican hands.
    Into this earlier Boyle Heights, the two sisters learned, Otis Monroe had fit reasonably well—Otis having been their grandfather, Gladys’ father. Aunt Grace had told each of them before about certain papers she held as Gladys’ conservator, showing exactly how Otis Monroe was descended from no less a family than that of James Monroe of Virginia, the chestnut-haired fifth president of the United States. Not that in the sandy-haired Otis’ own brief life, with its swift and calamitous end, there was to be found anything to outwardly match the status of such a vaunted ancestry. But inwardly he’d evinced one trait suggestive of something of that exalted kind. Otis Monroe had once dreame d with exceptionally bold freedom.
    He’d aspired to the world of high art. He would soon be studying painting in Europe—so he’d confidently told Della Hogan, whom he’d courted in Missouri upon appearing there rather mysteriously out of Indiana while in his midthirties. Then perhaps the two of them might unmoor themselves from all the pestilent restrictions of time and space by floating down the River Seine in a houseboat, while Otis executed watercolors of the French countryside which might well be the securing of his artistic reputation. There was, he’d told the rapt Della, the whole of the Old World to see and to portray in landscapes perhaps rivaling those of the glorious Cézanne. Then, aboard steamships, they’d circle the rest of the globe while he added luster to his creative standing via depictions of Earth’s farthest and most exotic climes. For if any of the details along his life’s planned trajectory had been left fuzzy, Otis Monroe had made its end point crystal clear. Here was a man destined to be respected, to be looked up to for as long as he lived, and to be remembered long after he was gone.
    Della Hogan had been powerfully swayed. As much by the fine cut of his manly frame as by what she called his “wanderlust charm.” Never mind that Otis was ten years her senior and was still earning his survival by digging postholes, patching roofs, and painting houses. His genteel appearance while at his leisure spoke for itself. He was “neat as a pin,” she would later write, “always turned