Anyway, I had genuine work to do this time, so I settled in with one of the catalog computers and began seeing what I could find on Donya Sepanta. I checked on the other couple of names, too, just to be careful, though I was pretty sure that Sepanta was the one. I kept the reference folks busy bringing me old magazines that hadn’t been digitized and lots of newspapers, in screen-ready form and the old-fashioned, crackly kind.
After half an hour I gave up on the other names and really focused on the Sepanta woman, doing my best to assemble a biography. Considering that she was a major player in the city, especially in the Persian-American community, and very much alive and living only a few miles away, it turned out to be pretty damned hard work.
Despite conflicting information, everyone seemed to think she’d been born in the early 1950s. I found ’52, ’53, and ’55 listed in various who’s-who lists and in those little automated bios that pop up on the screen, primarily as an excuse to rub more advertising against your forebrain. But they all agreed that she was born in Hamadan, which rang a few bells with me, and turned out to be a contemporary city of about half a million in the northwest of Iran. More interestingly, though, it was built on the ruins of Ecbatana, original capital of the ancient Medean Empire and one of the oldest cities in the world.
Her years in Iran were difficult to trace, again because stories conflicted or just left things out, but most of the capsule biographies agreed that her parents had been wealthy, that they’d spent a lot of their time in Europe and America, and that they left Iran for good after the 1979 revolution. Strangely, I couldn’t find any other mention of those parents, or their names, or what happened to them. Well, “strangely” if they were real, because their daughter Donya began to leave a fairly large track in the public record starting in the middle of the 1980s, when she moved from Southern California to little old San Judas.
Since then she had been involved in numerous charity benefits for the creation of community parks and buildings, and was listed as a donor for nearly every single project of any significance to the Persian-American community. She had long supported the resistance to the rule of the Ayatollahs in contemporary Iran and had been listed as one of the backers for the Shah’s son, but (according to one article in a Persian-language newspaper) had fallen out with Reza Pahlavi’s camp over their unwillingness to criticize militant Islam itself.
So she didn’t like the new religion. New to her, anyway, if she was indeed Anaita.
The more I studied, the more Ms. Sepanta seemed to fit. What made me feel almost certain was her unwillingness to be photographed. In picture after picture she was represented only by stand-ins, generally board members of the Sepanta Foundation, her main charity. But everyone who spoke about her personally seemed to mention her beauty and grace as well as her generosity. I’m not saying there’s no such thing as shy philanthropists, but the personal touch helps a lot with fundraising, I’m told—the desire of the hoi polloi to mix with the important and the glamorous. So it felt at least slightly out of character for the life Donya Sepanta lived. Also, though the fact itself was not given much attention, there was no mention anywhere of her having a family of her own, only her long-gone, largely anonymous parents.
Almost certain I had cracked it, I started looking for anything that might tell me where to find her, but beyond near constant hometown boosterism in the local papers, which usually referred to her as “one of San Judas’s leading citizens,” I couldn’t find much of anything. A few articles suggested she might live in the hills. One article mentioned the Los Altos district, another Woodside, without ever going so far as to say she actually lived there. And based on many mentions of her “frequent travel” and “worldwide circle of influential friends” she wasn’t even at home very much.
I looked up and realized it was getting dark outside. I was just about to pack it in when I stumbled across something very, very interesting in one of the last pieces I’d requested—an old issue of Sunset Magazine, believe it or not. For those of you who’ve never lived in California, Sunset was originally a travel magazine for Southern Pacific Railroad, but it outlived that long ago and is still going strong. It’s a travel, home, and cooking magazine that appeals particularly to the upscale and those who would like to live that way. If you want to know how to make a perfect crab cioppino for eight people, and how to serve it outdoors in your garden pergola on a summer evening while surrounded by the twinkling light of dozens of Mexican luminaria, well, Sunset’s your bet.
And there, to my astonishment, in the June 1988 issue, between articles on pattern-punched aluminum cabinets, tapas bars (still fairly new back then) and managing an extensive garden during drought (a frequent California worry) I found an article titled, “A Persian Oasis in the California Hills.” And the oasis-garden in question belonged to—yes—none other than “Bay Area socialite and philanthropist Donya Sepanta.” I leafed through the article eagerly, not so much admiring the images of the garden, its low walls and pools, cypresses and fruit trees, but looking for a picture of the elusive Donya. I found one, but it was only of her shoulder and hand as she held a pomegranate for the camera. She had a perfectly nice, prettily manicured hand, but that told me almost nothing. A quick read didn’t add anything else useful—a lot of information about Persian-style gardens but nothing else about Ms. Sepanta except a few references to “her view from the rolling California hills” and “looking down on the golden Santa Clara Valley” which was what they used to call the area before it became known primarily for silicon-related reasons.
But just as I was going to give up and go meet the Amazons, one of the smaller pictures in the article caught my eye. It showed a group of square ornamental pools that had been built at the front of the house—its caption mentioned looking down on Santa Clara Valley—and right down in the corner of the picture, beyond most of the roads and greenery filling the space between the nearest pool and the distant bay, a little white finger poked up above the trees, like a shy person trying to summon a waiter. It was Hoover Tower, at the heart of the Stanford Campus. More importantly, it was a landmark with four sides, and thus an orientation to the compass. I emailed the image to myself in the largest format I could find, then went over to the train depot to meet my ride.
• • •
The women were in a boisterous mood.
“We get everything!” said Halyna. She was squinting, leaning so far forward as she drove that her nose was almost against the inside of the windshield. I guessed I should have asked her if she was supposed to wear corrective lenses before giving her my keys, but it was too late now. “Everything. No problem.”
“No, one problem—Packages Plus guy,” Oxana reported cheerfully. Her English was improving, but I still had to work to make out what she was saying sometimes. “He make face, don’t want to give silver powder. ‘Your name not on this!’ he say. ‘This say Robert Dollar. You not Robert Dollar!’” But Halya tell him, “Just because we not Americans don’t mean we not work for American!”
“He’s always careful,” I said. “That’s why I keep a mailbox there. I gave you a note—didn’t you show it to him?”
“I told you,” Halyna said to Oxana. “I say to her, ‘Where is note, Bobby give us note,’ but she tell me no you didn’t.”
“I forgot.” Oxana shrugged and looked guilty. “Leave it in other clothes.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I see the stuff here so he must have given it to you.”
“After while,” Oxana said, then brightened. “Halyna said, give it or Mr. Dollar will angry, plus I pinch you in the nose.”
“Punch!” said Halyna, indignant. “Word is ‘punch.’”