by Chip Jacobs
Nick, on his third tea sandwich, covered his mouth. “I’d be honored.”
“Good, good, good. Don’t let my assistant’s quiet demeanor mislead you. She’s extremely bright and efficient at her job. She’s from Chicago and, how can I put it, unfamiliar with her new setting. Studying old reports is no substitute for hearing it from a native son. A few hours pointing out representative sights are all I ask.”
“Piece of cake,” Nick said, thinking he lifted a weight from her. But, he realized a heavier one lurked in her baggy eyes.
“Much appreciated, my dear Nick. Would it be a bother for me,” she paused, “to share an admission difficult for me to divulge to others?”
“Of course not,” Nick said, unsure what to say.
“My attention is elsewhere. Adolphus, my darling strudel bear, is not well. Not well at all. I’d be with him in Germany today, but he forbade me from traveling there because he refuses to distress me. His lungs are awful. It’s cruel enough we lost our boy, Peter. I fear Adolphus may join him soon.”
Nick went still. Peter Busch was a prodigal son who died under mysterious circumstances; there was gossip that he contracted a virulent infection after being pricked by a girlfriend’s hairpin. “I’m certain your husband has retained the best doctors.”
Lilly’s fingers quivered gripping her lemonade. Her other hand was loaded down with a bracelet enameled with that Budweiser eagle. “Yes,” she said, “the finest doctors money can buy, and yet none can quell his cough.” She cleared a sudden frog in her throat. “I doubt he’ll ever return here. Oh, how he cherished chasing his grandkids around Hansel and Gretel in the gardens. Ich bin gebrochen.”
“Pardon.”
“I’m brokenhearted. If he goes, we’ll be a ship without its captain.”
Aha. She’s suffering. I must remind her of a son. “Lilly, don’t give up hope. Your husband has defied the odds his entire life. The Rockefellers aren’t like that. I’ll pray for him.”
Nick felt horrible. One minute, Adolphus’s Pullman was smashing the land-speed record, arriving here from St. Louis in a blurring fifty-eight hours; the next Lilly is contemplating a funeral cortege aboard it.
“Bless you, my boy. Maybe my daughters are right when they assert I get ahead of myself.”
Movement from the parlor’s entryway broke her sadness. A woman in a veal-colored dress wiggled her derriere into the partially ajar French doors to open them. She was taller than diminutive Lilly. Nick couldn’t glimpse her face as she backed in to unload a fresh armful of documents on the committee-designated table.
“My regrets, ma’am,” she said. “I was unaware you were entertaining. I wanted to alert you that I finished.”
“So quickly? I assumed it’d take you a week to sort through that stack?”
“It wasn’t that onerous. I have a system.”
Lilly’s Girl Friday wheeled around, and Nick mouth fell open—again. It was her, the knockout from the church service from which Fleet nearly got them booted; the one who temporarily paralyzed Nick’s capacity to speak. Now she looked through him. Nick chugged the last of his lemonade to steady his composure.
“Jules Cumbersmith, please make the acquaintance of Nicholas Chance. He’s a fine young man who works on the bridge and hails from here. Of all the people I’ve considered to educate you further about Pasadena, he’s the best.”
Nick popped up to shake her hand with a clammy palm. She offered back a fish-cold hand, more of a side pinky than grip, and a courtesy smile. “Pleasure,” he said overeagerly for someone trying not to act eager. “Weren’t you at the memorial for Mr. Mercereau?”
“Yes,” she answered in a one-word shutdown. “Lilly: does this appear suitable?” She handed her a one-page summary of something on onion paper.
Lilly ran a bauble-loaded finger down it. “Superlative. I say that every time. You can scoot home.”
Fiery-eyed Jules gave Nick a titular nod and spun in such a rush it fanned her dress behind into a frilly bell. Nick hadn’t moved from where he stood.
“You can sit down,” Lilly said, looking cheerier. “If you can hear me.”
“Whoops,” he said. He parked his sidetracked self in his chair.
“Can you amplify further on what you’d like me to—?” Nick lost his train of thought when Jules appeared through the picture window outside the parlor. “Uh, what was I saying? Oh, yes, the educational tour.”
“Nick, my dear, I wouldn’t raise my hopes.”
“Hopes, about her? Nah. I was pondering on what side of town to commence. I prefer brunettes, anyway.”
“Your expression says otherwise.”
By the time Nick departed Ivy Wall, he came away knowing more about the woman he pretended was of no interest to him. Jules, Lilly let slip, was twenty-seven, educated at Northwestern University. She was a diehard suffragette, cryptic about her off time and past, and a literary aficionado of Upton Sinclair and the Brontë sisters.
“She’s singular, that one,” Lilly said, escorting Nick out. “I’d stick with local girls. Can you be here next Sunday for the tour?”
Nick yearned it were tomorrow. “I can squeeze that in.”
—
That evening inside Nick’s bungalow, where Royo smacked his lips impersonating a hungry Nick, Fleet pitched Saturday night dinner at the Hotel Maryland to celebrate Nick’s new job. Rose-covered pergolas, brass spittoons, elaborate sauces.
“I don’t know,” Nick said, reclining perilously back in his desk chair. “My spats are at the dry cleaners.” He suggested Debussey’s, a tasty deli up the road from Buford’s.
“Pass,” said Fleet, who leaned against a sink nowhere as tidy as Nick’s bed. “We just autopsied a bilious food inspector who basically ate himself to death.”
“Relevance?”
“Debussey’s sells cottage cheese in big scoops, and it reminds me of cadaver cellulose.”
Nick fast-balled a gasket at Fleet, who ducked just in time. “Why do you always have to be so specific about your revolting dissections when you know it nauseates me?”
“I apologize. Apologize for not sending you an embalmed cat after you hid a live toad inside my baked potato last April Fool’s.”
“’Kay. Point taken.”
“What about this place?” Fleet performed a curt bow, hands in praying position. “Understand?”
“You’re a real credit to your race, you know that? Let’s go.”
They soon were ladling wooden spoons into miso soup at a far corner table at Manako’s Japanese restaurant on upper Fair Oaks. Under paper lanterns, customers worked and fumbled chopsticks, scraped dishes, and dropped steamed rice into their laps. The bow-tied Japanese waitstaff laughed about it in private.
Fleet was peppy now that he had some walkaround money from the dowager paying him for sex, meaning he no longer needed to borrow so much from Nick. He emptied his miso in throaty slurps. He and Nick next laid waste to everything set before them: soy cucumbers, sesame chicken, and possibly squid they didn’t order.
Between bites, Nick told Fleet about his encounter with Jules Cumbersmith and Lilly’s serendipitous favor.
“You including the Hotel Green on your itinerary?” Fleet asked.
“How can I not?”
Nick immediately regretted saying this. Fleet enjoyed a semi-photographic memory that enabled him to recite blocks of text he read years ago and score well on medical school exams even if his subject mastery was so-so. Whenever he could razz Nick about what he revered—the hometown whose cape he draped himself in—he did.
“You should entertain this Chicago dame about what happened at that hotel,” he said. “It’s history, too.”
Nick twirled chopsticks while Fleet recounted the debacle. Only years after its inception, Pasadena tried impressing the first president to visit it, Benjamin Harrison, with a sw
anky, two-hundred-person dinner. On this anticipated night at the Hotel Green, high rollers clinked glasses and gave toasts amid polished cutlery buffed to Emily Post standards. What could go wrong? Liquor. Behind the kitchen doors, “colored” waiters hired from Los Angeles uncorked the hooch reserved for later. Hors d’oeuvres, as a result, were stalled, follow-up courses sidetracked. The help left a path of empty wine bottles in their wake.
“Should your Ms. Cumbersmith not be amused,” Fleet said, “I’d revisit your infatuation with her.”
Nick hated admitting it. Fleet, in all his obnoxiousness, made sense. “Benjamin Harrison is in then.”
Fleet, later in the meal, did something uncharacteristic. He turned sincere. “Look. I know we express ourselves by teasing, but I’m proud of you. Wiring cash to your mother, standing up against Otis, staying faithful to your lights, well, that’s mettle in my book.”
Nick slow-punched Fleet in the shoulder, affection for emotionally constipated men. Then he saw he left a cube of tofu in his soup. He spooned it up and beamed his pal a knavish look. “Should we try again? Tonight could be our night for a soy free throw.”
“We do have juvenile reputations to uphold,” said Fleet.
He slanted his head back and opened his mouth. The last time they attempted this, the gelatinous blob ricocheted off Fleet’s nose and onto another customer’s table, which the diners there didn’t find terribly farcical. This time Nick gave it better arc. The tofu landed directly on Fleet’s tongue.
They erupted in laughter, which now caused half the restaurant to gawk at them. Nick lofted his menu to shield his blushing face; Fleet almost choked getting the cube down. By the time they caught their breath, a woman in a crude burlap dress and Indian necklace was sashaying toward them. She sat down at their table, self-invited.
“The initiative us businesswomen have to take,” she said. “Heya, Nick. You still interested in nuts?” She raised a brown paper bag she brought over from her seat.
“Yes, I think. Meet my friend, Fleet Burdett.”
“Pleasure, Hattie Bergstron.” For a farmer unfairly maligned for witch-hood and lesbianism, she made burlap look respectable. “What do you say? For a nickel, these almonds will nourish you as nature intended.”
“I promised.” Nick dug a nickel from his trousers. Hattie dropped it in her cleavage.
“I hope I’m not intruding on you rapscallions.” She said that she and Maude were sampling “traditional city food,” minus any meat, after selling out all the nuts and fresh produce from their stand at the intersection of Orange Grove and Colorado Street.
Intruding? The instant sexual alchemy between her and Fleet was as thick as their goo-goo eyes over the table’s soy sauce. Hattie couldn’t wait to regale him with her story about her commune’s migration from Pennsylvania to the hills outside Pasadena, and how it was ostracized for eschewing dairy, spices, and war. She was an animated talker.
Fleet kicked Nick under the table to signal he intended to pursue this vegan Annie Oakley. “So,” he said, “no one inside your group consumes eggs or starches, either? I ask this purely out of nutritional curiosity, being a future doctor.”
“Nope. We do cultivate grapes for homemade wine. As a scientist, you ought to observe the fermentation process.”
“I definitely should.”
Nick prophesized where this was going: impending nudity. Fleet and Hattie agreed that they needed to dispose of that wine tonight, lest it spoil in another victory for the city’s moralizing prohibitionists. Up rocketed Nick’s hand for the bill.
While he waited for it to escape this hormones-derailed dinner, Fleet tried further impressing Hattie, who was boyishly cute for a woman and definitely self-assured. He regurgitated the Hotel Green story.
Not to be outdone, she told her own presidentially themed tale. About six weeks ago, she explained she noticed that someone stole a little-known, gold-embossed plaque near her stand. Inscribing it was Teddy Roosevelt’s warning to city politicians during his 1903 visit to the Arroyo Seco. Hattie knew neither the identity nor motive of whoever removed it. But she remembered its phrasing, which she theatrically repeated: “Mr. Roosevelt said, ‘what a splendid natural park you have right here! Oh, Mr. Mayor—’”
“Don’t let them spoil that,” Nick said, completing the sentence. “I heard him say that in person.”
As soon as his words died out, Fleet’s expression turned impish again. Just like that, Nick recognized he stepped into a self-loaded wolf trap. He didn’t need Fleet dredging up his long-ago brush with Roosevelt. Ever. Now, he kicked Fleet under the table, and Fleet took mercy on him.
Hattie didn’t notice it; she just finished her memory about the mysterious plaque. “I’ll never forget when I saw it went missing. It was the very second that I heard the explosion from that grim accident at the Pacific Electric facility.”
“Check,” Nick said again, waving his arm. He didn’t fancy rehashing that incident, either, even though it brought an inimitable dog into his life—a dog, Nick suspected, that could occasionally read his mind.
Meal over, bill divided, he moseyed along Colorado Street, where you often needed to pivot sideways to avoid colliding with nuzzling couples or messenger boys. When he entered his bungalow, there was Royo, reclined up against Nick’s headboard like a person reading a book, except he wasn’t reading. He had Nick’s belt in his chops for a good chew. Shamed, Royo dropped his leather aperitif and brought his front paws together, as if bowing in contrition.
“Nice try,” said Nick, who was getting used to this.
He clumped down at his desk to tinker in his Saturday night solitude with another gadget he wasn’t ready to demonstrate to anyone. He popped in a stick of Wrigley’s Spearmint of which he went through a couple packs a week. Royo, immediately, was at his legs, begging for his own stick. “There’s no way,” Nick said. “You don’t chew. You inhale.”
Nick changed his mind when Royo whimpered again. Yep: he could chew gum, too. “You’re some kind of freak,” he said, fluffing Royo’s ears.
Over in Linda Vista, Fleet and Hattie downed Hattie’s homegrown Cabernet at a fortuitous time. Most of the hillside colony had boarded a train to San Diego to scope out a potential new home. At midnight, the couple’s incantations echoed so far that a homeowner in Prospect Park across the valley mistook the squealing for the annoying green parrots.
Ignorant man: didn’t he know the chartreuse birds cawed youch, youch, yeow-chhhh, not a carnal yes, yes, yes, yeeees?
The Rosiest of Histories
He should’ve known better. A morning person like him never should’ve downed an entire kettle of coffee studying up to gab about one of his favorite subjects. Especially not to an enigmatic woman who made his palms sweat. Nick’s exuberance vanquished common sense, and now his bladder would pay the price.
From the moment the Busches’s luxury motorcar, an eggshell-white, brass-appointed Oldsmobile Limited, rolled off Ivy Wall’s gravel driveway, he began talking. Or, more accurately, preaching his civic gospel of Pasadena while Jules sloughed in the back with more indifference on her cheeks than makeup.
“I’ll keep it brisk,” Nick said, spying her in the rearview mirror. “I don’t want to overwhelm you.”
“I can’t wait,” she said.
Nick paid her tone no mind as Sunday church bells rang out across the quiet town. He had a promise to keep to the wife of dying man. How much Jules absorbed was up to her.
Her crash course would start on the Pasadena’s recently added eastern side.
On the drive there, he ticked off basics about California’s third-largest city. “It was thirty thousand strong and growing,” he said, “arguably the class of the San Gabriel Valley, no offense Monrovia.
“Heartland roots gave the place its essence, but its atmosphere (both cultural and geographic) attracted a surfeit of big personalities, among them
astronomers, writers, inventors, philanthropists, and social reformers. Take Owen Brown, son of hanged abolitionist John Brown, the white man who attempted igniting a slave revolt in Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. After years on the run, he landed in Pasadena, and never left.
“It was Midwesterners tabbing themselves ‘The Indiana Colony’ who first stuck their flag in this foothill plain nine years after the Civil War ended. As a whole they were educated, God-fearing people, scientifically minded and adamantly anti-alcohol. ‘How dry we are!’ one of their first banners read.
“Working for the Busches,” Nick said, “you must know that not everybody concurs with the temperance movement hard-liners. I side with Adolphus there. Didn’t he say people, not the government, should get to decide what they pour down their gullet?”
Jules didn’t answer.
“Energized as the colonists were about being here, they had a crisis on their hands not long after arriving,” Nick continued on. “First, a prolonged drought ripped through the citrus belt providing many of them employment. On its heels was a real estate bust aggravated by slick-talking speculators. They plied their targets with whiskey, women, and flimflammery about huge yields, sometimes negotiating over poker games. Lives were quickly poisoned, dreams with them, overpaying for land or buying parcels with misleading values. It was a dramatic beginning,” Nick said. “A living parable. Thousands exited town disgruntled.”
“If I may, every city has its trials,” Jules said, speaking for the second time, head squished into the Olds’ leather seat.
“Despite the setbacks, Pasadena, like much of Southern California, wasn’t a hard sell to outsiders searching for a better life. The economic opportunity was wide open, and the progressive culture was tolerant of divergent views. But there was something else, something that couldn’t be bottled: dry sunshine that boosters trumpeted in recruiting pamphlets and speeches.” Nick unfolded a paper and listed the diseases the climate supposedly improved here: TB, malaria, cirrhosis, enlarged glands, insomnia, constipation, and phthisis. Even, he stammered, “female disturbances.”