by Martin Brown
Perhaps it was time for Warren to take action on the matter of Randolph. He was, after all, the only one among Alma's inner circle who had a newspaper column delivered weekly into every Sausalito home.
When feeling pressed by unexpected events, Warren would go to his kitchen and make himself a treat. Food preparation gave him time to consider his next step.
To relieve his worries, Warren made himself a crepe, with eggs, milk, vanilla and a half-cup of brandy, topped with apricot jelly and sprinkled with powder sugar.
A half hour later, his outlook on life had brightened. Sipping a cappuccino, he felt empowered to do as Alma had instructed.
He had no concern about building a case against Randolph, but if the ladies were going to ask him to press for Randolph’s removal as commission chair, he’d need more than the idle chatter he often spun in his column.
Warren was not naturally given to the life of an investigative reporter: gathering facts, checking and re-checking sources, and digging through files. But Alma was pushing him to lead the effort to expose Randolph and press for his expulsion.
It wouldn’t hurt if he came to the battle armed with a few facts.
Chapter Four
Grant Randolph and his wife, Barbara, had moved to Sausalito less than two years earlier. They were still newcomers in the eyes of their long-established neighbors.
They managed to create a minor buzz upon their arrival. Grant had run a successful art gallery back in New York City and sold it for a handsome profit.
This was a part of his backstory, but certainly not all.
Randolph was a native of Providence, Rhode Island. Degreed at Brown University in art history, he came to New York City during the struggling economy of the early1990s. After two years of working at a long-established Upper East Side gallery, he, along with two equally young and adventuresome partners, made a bold move into the emerging art scene in the lower Manhattan neighborhood of SoHo. The area, south of Houston Street and north of Canal Street, was in transition at the time, with one block showing the promise of a coming new century and another block still suffering from the neglect of the 1960s.
Their gamble turned out to be a wise one. As the city began to emerge from a decade of slow growth, their gallery, The Discerning Eye, became a destination for artists on their way up, and for buyers looking to purchase the art of a select few painters and sculptors with promising futures.
Barbara Stevens came to work as a sales associate for The Discerning Eye just at a time the gallery—thanks to a feature in The New York Times—was gaining awareness. She had a newly minted degree in art history from nearby New York University. That, and her twenty-five-year-old body, soon attracted the eager eyes of the then thirty-year-old partner and gallery director, Grant Randolph.
They were both attractive people. Grant had thick, dark, wavy hair, brown eyes, and a sweet smile that, to Barbara, seemed to say, “I’m a lot more dangerous than I look.”
And Barbara was a young woman who defined the word “Wow” to her legion of admirers. Her light brown hair was cut short in the style of the times, and her dark green eyes held the stare of anyone who looked her way. In very little time, she became a topic of admiring comments and conversation in the tight circle of New York’s art gallery world.
Barbara’s carefully presented appearance—proper, but with a hint of mischief—attracted Grant’s intellectual and carnal appetites. At the same time, Grant’s intelligence, charm, and purposeful demeanor were wildly attractive to Barbara.
Within six months of Barbara’s arrival at the gallery, Grant had kicked his Jamaican artist girlfriend to the curb and moved Barbara into his lower-Manhattan condominium. It was in one of a crop of new high rises that offered views of the harbor and the massive twin towers of the World Trade Center.
Years later, on the day before 9/11, Grant begged off an eight o’clock breakfast invitation for the following morning at Windows on the World with a London art broker. He and Barbara had planned to sleep in, take in an exhibit at yet another new SoHo gallery, and then enjoy a leisurely day in celebration of their fifth wedding anniversary.
Because of the double-paned windows that helped soften the din of a city that never sleeps, the Randolphs never heard the plane that crashed into the North Tower at 8:46 AM. But the scream of sirens that began moments later caused both Grant and Barbara to bolt out of bed. They didn’t think to turn on the TV until eighteen minutes later when they looked on in silent horror as a second plane flew directly into the 80th floor of the South Tower.
“Oh my God!” Grant screamed as Barbara’s knees buckled watching the unfolding horror. The South Tower fell first in an explosion of dust that gave it the appearance of an upside down volcanic eruption. Both were staring in stunned silence, mumbling tearfully, “Oh God! Oh God!”
Thirty minutes later, they gasped and held their breaths with the same sense of stunned disbelief as the North Tower collapsed in an equally thunderous roll, releasing a second mushroom cloud of dust that added to the particles of gray powder accumulating on Grant and Barbara’s windows.
Barbara wept, tormented by the senseless destruction of human life, a short walk from their home.
Grant remembered as a college student coming down from Providence for a weekend trip to Manhattan. Walking the quiet streets of lower Manhattan on a Sunday when all the bulls and bears of Wall Street had gone home to rest, he looked at the ancient gravestones next to Trinity Church, then walked toward the massive twin towers. They were viewed at that time as grossly out of scale with their surroundings. But over the years, the twin giants became an accepted, if not welcome, part of the landscape of lower Manhattan.
On weekend walks through their Tribeca neighborhood, Grant and Barbara often made it a point to stand at the very foot of one of the twin giants and look straight up while shaking their heads in wonder. Against a deep blue sky, the endless structure of shining steel and glass seemed like a stairway to heaven.
The horror of that day was something neither of them could forget. It was one thing to watch the disaster on television hundreds or thousands of miles away. It was an entirely different experience living so close to ground zero.
For two additional days, they stayed inside their home thinking of nothing else. The gallery remained shut for the balance of the week.
On Friday, they made their first venture outside. Both were prepared with cloth handkerchiefs to place over their mouths and noses, fearing potentially toxic particles that were still floating through the air. Their walk didn’t last very long. Seeing people desperate for information, posting pictures anywhere they could of missing friends and loved ones, made the loss of innocent lives all the more overwhelming.
The London gallery owner chose not to dine alone at Windows on the World located on the 102nd floor of the North Tower. It was a fortunate choice; no one in the restaurant at 8:46 that fateful morning survived. The following week, Grant’s London friend, now back home, sent him a note that concluded, “I imagine the only reason we’re both alive today is that you and Barbara decided to marry on September 11, 1996. I know for certain I will always remember your wedding anniversary!”
In the years after the tragedy the city recovered, but Grant and Barbara never entirely did. The tragedy changed them forever. While not directly in harm’s way, the proximity to the event left them both with an odd sense of survivors’ guilt. They would never know how many of the tragedy’s victims they’d sat next to at a lunch counter, a coffee shop, or passed on the street in the weeks, months and even years before that dark day. The thought of missing neighbors with whom they never thought to exchange a nod, a small smile, or any form of recognition, haunted both of them. Precious souls ignored, anonymous, and now vanished forever.
With each person Randolph watched placing a picture on a door or a lamppost of a loved one, he thought of Barbara doing the same if he had not turned down that breakfast invitation.
Both he and Barbara had always enjoyed casual
evening cocktails, but alcohol after that tragic day became a refuge for both of them. A place where they could put life’s disappointments aside and find peace in the soft embrace of a stiff drink.
The sentiment, “We’re here today and gone tomorrow,” they repeated often to each other when hesitating for a moment about mixing that second, or third, cocktail.
As for the gallery and the surrounding area, life went on. Profits soon returned and then kept heading upward—bigger and better than either of them ever imagined.
More than a decade after 9/11, Grant and his partners got an offer to purchase their business that was too outlandish to refuse. Grant, blessed with an uncanny sense of timing, chose as well to sell many of the art pieces he had acquired over the past fifteen years. He sold off all but his personal favorites and parked the profits in a low-risk cash management fund until he and Barbara could decide what to do with their lives.
Unofficially retired and still relatively young, Grant suggested they take a road trip along the California coast. It was May, a perfect time for the two of them to enjoy this picturesque part of America.
In their professional lives, they had visited Los Angeles and San Francisco on several occasions. But neither of them had taken the time to enjoy and explore California’s coast. They started at the busy beaches and yacht-filled harbors of San Diego and La Jolla and took all the time they wanted heading north.
They passed the mansions of Montecito and strolled along Stearns Wharf in the town of Santa Barbara. They stopped at the old mission city of San Luis Obispo, and the small coastal town of Los Osos on Morro Bay. They were wowed by the old Hearst Castle in San Simeon and held their breaths as they proceeded along the winding and treacherous curves of Highway 1 between San Simeon and Big Sur.
They stopped at Nepenthe, a restaurant that hugged a cliff south of Carmel, for an early dinner while they took in incredible ocean views from the restaurant’s expansive outdoor patio.
After enjoying the adjacent communities of Monterey, Carmel-by-the-Sea, and Pacific Grove, they spent three days on the Sonoma Coast, north of San Francisco. Nearly three weeks into their trip, they parked their car along a deserted two-mile stretch of beach, north of Fort Bragg and south of the small town of Westport, in Mendocino County. Walking barefoot, enjoying a warm sun and a crisp breeze, Grant looked out and caught the unforgettable view of an enormous gray whale breaching out in the blue Pacific, perhaps no more than two hundred yards from the spot where they stood. Less than a minute later, he and Barbara, at the same time, said, “Did you see that—” as a second whale, also traveling south to north, breached as well.
They spread a small blanket and sat down on the dry, warm sand. For nearly an hour, Grant and Barbara held each other while they watched a parade of whales putting on a show just for them. Later, at a bed and breakfast inn they had booked in Westport for their last night on the coast, they learned about what they had seen. "That was a feeding frenzy for krill by a pod of gray whales making their spring migration from Mexico’s Baja Peninsula to the Gulf of Alaska," the small hotel's operator explained. “You could wait years to see a show like that. You were just at the right place at the right time.”
It was that night, sitting on the porch outside their bedroom, listening to the relentless waves of the Pacific hitting the shore and looking up at a star-covered sky, that the Randolphs decided to leave the East Coast for the West Coast. The next morning at breakfast, their appetites driven by new possibilities, they began planning their move.
They quickly decided that they would look for a home in the Bay Area. But while they had made several visits to San Francisco for studio openings, they didn’t know much about the communities around the world-famous city. They resolved to take whatever time they needed to learn about the East Bay, South Bay, and North Bay before making a choice.
Traveling back south to San Francisco along Highway 128, they made several stops at wineries along the Anderson and Alexander valleys. By the time they reached the Hotel Healdsburg, they had enjoyed one too many tasting rooms along their way. Wisely, they booked the last available room at the upscale hotel, deciding to spend the night before driving any farther.
Shortly after opening the door to their room, both Grant and Barbara flopped down on top of the king-sized bed and fell sound asleep. They woke to the first rays of sunlight coming through the room’s heavy drapes, which they had neglected to close entirely. Sitting up on the bed, Grant looked around and gave a long, low whistle.
“Barb, wake up. This has got to be the nicest room I ever woke up in without remembering checking into.”
"Jeez, you’re right, Grant," Barbara said peeking out of one eye. "I wonder what we spent?”
Neither one of them was pleased when they found out the room cost nine hundred dollars for the night.
“I guess it’s cheaper than a DUI, and all the headaches the car rental company would have put us through if I’d run over a deer while driving the back roads of Napa County,” Grant offered.
“And, God, what beautiful country this is!” Barbara added. “Not to mention all the great wines!”
“Maybe we could be happy living here?” Grant wondered aloud.
“I think 70 miles north of San Francisco is a little too far for you to be from a major city. You may love fresh air and vineyards, but you’ve got steel, glass, and concrete in your veins,” Barbara said with a laugh.
“You’re right, but there’s something to be said for finding a little more peace in our lives.”
“I agree, darling. But too much peace, and I could see you losing your mind.”
It was still early when they stepped out to meet the day, discovering, thankfully, that they were at least sober enough to have parked their car in a legal space.
They wandered every street around Healdsburg's charming town square and found the perfect place for a relaxing breakfast.
They fell into a conversation with the couple sitting at the two-top table ten inches away from their own. Patrons of the popular eatery happily sacrificed some extra space and greater privacy for the efficient service and excellent food.
Between generous cappuccinos, yummy omelets, and homemade biscuits, they got to know the couple seated next to them: Ray and Debbie Sirica, who they learned had relocated to Sausalito from their native Chicago ten years earlier.
“Some of the locals can be a little quirky,” they explained, but they both agreed that the town was a great place to live. “It’s a quick trip into San Francisco, but none of the hassles of life in a big city,” Ray announced with a smile.
Grant reasoned that Ray—a big man, tall, broad-shouldered, with big hands, and a large frame to match—was five or so years older than himself. Debbie was closer to Ray in age than Barbara was to Grant. She was slim, with a pleasant, smiling face. Her hair was tinted to cover its emerging gray, and her brown eyes never wavered in their focus. Her manner was kind, and cautiously sincere.
Grant dealt with a lot of personalities in gallery sales. He had convinced himself over time that he was a reasonably sound judge of character. Ray was one of those rare people, who from the moment you met seemed like someone you had known for years. His relaxed smile said, “What you see is who I am.” There was trustworthiness in his open manner. It was a quality that Grant took a liking to instantly.
Both of the Randolphs felt comfortable enough with the Siricas to exchange contact information. Before they went their separate ways, Ray and Debbie asked if they would be in Sausalito on Friday night. “If so, come and join us for a reception we’re holding for the city’s fine arts commission,” Ray suggested, and added, “Given your backgrounds, they’re all people I think you’ll enjoy meeting.”
An hour later, as Grant and Barbara began the nearly two-hour ride south to San Francisco, he and Barbara agreed that Sausalito, a town they knew of but had never spent any time in, might indeed be the perfect spot to begin their new and hopefully happier future.
Chapter Five
To both Barbara and Grant, Sausalito seemed to answer many of the desires they had difficulty verbalizing when they first imagined moving to California.
For starters, like their new friends and former Chicago natives, the Siricas, they would be putting bone-chilling winters and uncomfortably hot summers behind them.
After settling into their room in Sausalito’s Casa Madrona Hotel, the Randolphs reached out to the Siricas and invited them to dinner at Poggio, the popular trattoria adjacent to the hotel.
The afternoon before their dinner engagement, the Randolphs took a leisurely stroll along the Sausalito marina, which held seemingly endless rows of piers lined with motor yachts and sailing sloops. Turning south, they walked past the small tourist district, busy as usual with day visitors. Farther along, they strolled the south end of Bridgeway, which hugs the bay until it winds its way up towards the Marin Headlands and onto the Golden Gate Bridge.
The tourist district itself lasts less than a mile. Where it ends, the Randolphs found themselves in a quiet, quaint setting of mostly small to moderately sized homes. They were mesmerized by the houses stacked on hills. In the soft blue air and bright light of a May afternoon, it could have been a painting of a small, seaside Mediterranean village.
“It’s a little too perfect to be real, don’t you think?” Grant said to Barbara as they began walking up a steep path.
They turned right onto Third Street, which was an even steeper incline that leads to a small neighborhood park called Southview. There, they sat down on a bench to recover from a climb neither was accustomed to making. From there, they looked out on a vista that included the San Francisco skyline, the Bay Bridge, and the golden hills of Berkeley, and Oakland beyond. They could even see the clock tower at the center of the Berkeley campus. Closer to them was Angel Island and the Belvedere/Tiburon Peninsula. Sitting in the middle of the bay was iconic Alcatraz Island, home of the long-closed infamous prison, known simply as “The Rock.”