Pasadena

by David Ebershoff

  With this counsel Valencia had boarded the Santa Susana. After the ship laid anchor in San Pedro Harbor she would slip ashore and never be seen again—at least that’s what she told herself on the voyage out, belowdecks, in an old side chair upholstered in bald velvet, where she slept sitting up. Soon, however, she learned that the captain, Señor Carillo—wide-pored and broader in the middle than at the shoulders—never intended to allow Valencia to leave the ship again. In the first month, Valencia sailed to San Pedro and back to Mazatlán, all the while studying the endless turning, denting, jagging line of the coast. When she returned to the waters off Mazatlán, the captain wouldn’t allow her to visit shore; from the ship’s rail she could see the distant Sierra Madre and the city’s red pantiles and she’d wonder, Where is Pavis? Beneath a fern hanging from a window? On a lap at the San Poncho? On one of the other freighters floating lazily in the harbor?

  “It was on that second voyage,” Valencia told Linda, “that I swam ashore to Condor’s Nest. I thought I was swimming to Los Angeles. Turns out I was wrong.”

  Wrong indeed, thought Linda. Her mother handed her a bundle of laundry wrapped up in a shirt, the sleeves tied like a bow. When Linda opened it she discovered a pile of undershirts made from a ribbed cotton that wasn’t sold at Margarita’s. Edmund’s undershirts were long-sleeved and of a thin wool that pilled; more than once, Linda had held up one of them and peered at the sun through the tiny holes in the wool, his faint odor fresh and warm on her face. But these undershirts were Bruder’s, stiff with sweat. They were larger than Edmund’s, hanging to Linda’s knees, almost as big as the sail she used to pitch on her dory. “He’s tall, isn’t he?” she said.

  Valencia murmured, busy with Dieter’s long johns, unbuttoning the flaps.

  “He’s got a funny smell, doesn’t he?”

  “Who’s that?”

  Linda, under her breath: “Oh, never mind.”

  She wondered about it, about what type of body would heat up and boil over in the pit of the arm like this, releasing an odor so powerful that it would have to pass twice through the roller. She pulled the shirt over her head.

  “What’re you doing?”

  Linda didn’t answer.

  “Take it off. There’s work to do.”

  “Look, Mama! It’s as big as a dress!” She held out her arms and twirled around, the ocean and the bluff and the fields becoming a blur, blue and sand and brown and green. She shut her eyes, and the roar of the ocean increased and the scent of the undershirt flooded her nostrils. It brushed her shins, the buttons tickled at her throat, and Linda continued to spin. Valencia said, pausing from her task, “Ay, Linda. Don’t you remind me of me.” She snapped her tongue nostalgically.

  And that was what Linda was thinking, too. She wondered how her mother, who had proceeded with her young life so bravely, who had been beautiful too … how such a girl—a girl who could leap into the sea!—had settled into life at Condor’s Nest, hoeing the garden and feeding the mules and grinding the wash through the roller. How had her mother become her mother? Yes, that was the question Linda asked herself. How does anyone become who she is? Yes, the stories of Valencia’s youth reminded Linda of herself, but then something had happened. Valencia had become someone else—had it occurred overnight?—and all of this, while she twirled in Bruder’s undershirt, made Linda ask herself: What will happen to me?

  “Give me that shirt.” Valencia pulled the shirt over Linda’s head, and Bruder’s scent drifted away.

  Linda wondered what had changed since Valencia first swam ashore. El Camino Real had widened since then, the shoeless burros and the horses making way for the macadam and the automobiles. Not long after Linda’s birth, Dieter sold his easternmost land to a man expanding the width of the road to two lanes. The transaction reduced Condor’s Nest to twenty acres, including the arroyo. “Those automobiles are changing the world around us,” Linda could recall Dieter saying excitedly when she was very young. But by the time she was seven or eight, he began to say sourly, “Those automobiles are ruining everything around here. Next thing they’ll do is pave up the lagoon.” And that turned out to be almost true, as a bridge was run across Agua Apestosa so that the cars could save two miles rather than have to skirt its edge. Linda learned that she liked the notion of progress more than her father did, and it puzzled her, her father’s grumpy acceptance of the future—the way his forehead would wrinkle and his nose would seemingly extend into a hook and his spiderweb beard would flap in a sunset breeze. He was becoming an old man, Linda could see.

  Of course, Dieter resented the roads and the automobiles because, as he put it, everyone got rich on them but him. “That man made me hand over my land,” he’d say as he stood in his fields and watched the traffic hurry by.

  “Why’d they make Papa sell his land?” Linda asked her mother as they continued with the wash.

  “Nobody made your Papa do anything. He sold it to the first man to come along. If he’d waited another month, he would have gotten twice as much. Another year, four times.”

  The clothesline was a triangle of rope staked to three cottonwood poles, protected from the wind by a screen of fan-palm fronds. The mayweed was in bloom, clusters of it around the poles, and Linda, soon bored, stopped pinning the clothes. She plucked the flowers, which looked like daisies but were, according to Edmund, poisonous—which had seemed unlikely to Linda, but since Edmund insisted it was true, she believed him. She linked the mayweed into a wreath and crowned herself, the flowers’ tiny weight as imperceptible as a tick on the scalp.

  She returned to Bruder’s undershirts. They were heavy with water and now smelled of lye and the barrel’s hooped oak. The stains were gone, his smell was gone. She held a shirt up against the sun. All she could smell was the ocean and the light burning the shirt dry. She took two pins from her lard tin and clamped each shoulder to the line.

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  “Who else is going to do it?”

  “I’ll do it myself,” said Bruder.

  “That’ll be the day.”

  “I didn’t ask you to do this.”

  He was leaning against one of the poles, his dungarees wet up to the knees, and staring at her in that way of his, with his chin hard with whisker, the corner of his mouth up as if he were about to make a rude sucking noise. What did he want? He sometimes wished Linda would cough up the question. If she were to ask, he would tell her. What no one knew about Bruder was that he was a cautious man, careful not to step into unfamiliar danger. He had learned as a boy in Pasadena to know his enemy; it had saved his life at the Children’s Training Society, and in the beechwood forest in France—his enemy had never been who he seemed.

  “Why are you wearing daisies on your head?”

  Linda touched her hair and felt the wreath. She must’ve looked silly, like a girl who thought she was a princess. “Oh, this …? Why, these aren’t daisies. You don’t know very much, do you? This is mayweed. And you better be careful, because it’s poisonous. You better be careful if you can’t tell the difference.”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  “No, it isn’t what?”

  “Mayweed isn’t poisonous.” And then, “No more poisonous than you or me.”

  She was about to curl her fist and say, Oh yes it is! But she stopped herself. Yes, Bruder would ask her where she had learned something like that, and she would have to tell him it was Edmund; and Bruder would laugh, his mouth open so wide that she could see into the black cave of his throat.

  From behind his back he produced an orange, and he began tossing it in the air and catching it. “Come with me.” Bruder moved to her. He threw her the orange. Imprinted on its rind was a faint blue stamp:

  PASA

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I want to show you something.”

  “What?”

  “Just come.” His shadow fell across the laundry basket. Linda felt a rise in her pulse as he stole the orange from her
palm.

  “I’ve got laundry. What about Mama?”

  “We’ll be back.”

  “Where are we going?” His hand took hers, and it seemed as if her hand belonged to someone else: a free little hand caught in Bruder’s hot paw.

  He ran to the edge of the bluff and Linda followed, the basket of laundry turning over behind her. She wondered if anyone could see them, if Valencia, whose eyes were puffy and bruised with fatigue, was standing in the kitchen and looking out to the ocean, witnessing them sprint away.

  He had seen something on the beach that frightened him and he wanted to show Linda, to see if it frightened her as well. They would share their apprehension, and Bruder predicted that Linda would reach for him and then he would hold her and his arms would fall around her and he would have her and they would rock as the tide ran over their feet.

  They ran quickly down the path, Bruder’s feet kicking dirt and rock, his hands, extended for balance, grabbing vines of ice plant, the fleshy triangular leaves snapping. Linda followed, losing her balance and grabbing for the purple flowers. She didn’t stop, she slipped and ran farther, one pace behind Bruder. When he turned and called “Are you all right?” she hollered, “I know this path better than you.” The truth was, she’d never run down it so fast, and there was a part of her, a dark pulsing part, that feared she would lose her balance and tumble forward into Bruder and pull them both off the face of the cliff to the rocky beach below. This didn’t scare her, only sent her heart racing faster, so that she became overwhelmed by her own heat, her forehead releasing a sheet of sweat across her face. Her blood was flowing so fast through her body that it felt as if something in her was changing just then, as if what she felt for Bruder was somehow replacing an earlier emotion. Bruder’s arms stretched parallel to the earth, as steady as the line of the horizon, and he transfixed Linda: the smooth bump of bone that grew at the base of his neck, the tendril of hair creeping down toward his spine, the chapped elbows, pink and white like valentines, the rear pocket in his dungarees stuffed with an old kerchief that Linda had seen him use to pull back his hair in a warrior manner. She was wet with her own perspiration and dizzy, and then she lost balance, the soil crumbling beneath her. Linda fell forward against Bruder, and he fell as well, downward, their bodies pressed, but they were only a few feet from the beach and they landed, chest to chest, in the sand.

  Her eyes were closed, and her heart slowed. Bruder’s pulse reverberated through her breast. She felt something she had never felt before, and she told herself she’d never forget it, whatever it was. Bruder felt something too, but he knew precisely what it was; he jumped to his feet and pulled her up. “Come on now. She won’t be there forever.” And then, in a quiet voice she nearly didn’t hear, “My Linda.”

  “Who?” Linda called, trailing Bruder. He had scraped his elbow in the fall, and it was red with dots of blood. He dabbed at it with the kerchief and then held it up for Linda to see the stain.

  She chased after Bruder and grabbed the kerchief. It was stiff with sweat and now spotted with blood and heavy with the smell she’d been wringing out in the washer barrel. Linda hurled the kerchief toward the ocean. The wind caught it, the white cotton fluttering, and Bruder and Linda stood, shoulders touching, and watched the kerchief dip and rise, like a lazy gull, like a pelican loitering before its plunge, until the wind, as it sometimes does over the lip of the Pacific, died, fell flat immediately, and the kerchief, white with red stars of Bruder’s blood, collapsed on itself and sank into the sea.

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “You’ll see.” He was hurrying along the sash of the tide, the lacy foam collecting on his ankle. “Down in Cathedral Cove,” said Bruder. “There’s something you should see.” He said they should hurry and he offered his hand, but Linda didn’t take it, instead running ahead and leaping over the driftwood logs and the clumps of kelp. One other thing Dieter had told Bruder about his daughter: “She doesn’t know herself. She doesn’t know what people think of her and she doesn’t care. She’s free that way. But then, so are you!” But Bruder knew himself, and running along the beach one step behind Linda, he thought of the girls who had sent him notes bound in Belgian lace handkerchiefs: I love you! Not too many girls, but one or two from the whitewashed mansions along Orange Grove Avenue, one girl slipping away from a governess and rushing high-waisted into the crowd on Colorado Street and taking Bruder’s hand and forcing his fingers around an orange-oiled square of lace. I love you, Bruder, and you must love me! The girl vanished into Dodsworth’s dress shop, and Bruder was left with a hand reeking of an heiress, the citrus perfume sickly sweet, and he rinsed his palms in the lily-pad fountain in Central Park. He threw away the note and burned the handkerchief in one of the grove-heaters at the City Farm. He never knew the girl’s name, but he knew enough about the rich girls of Pasadena to be sure that she, whoever she was, assumed that everyone in the valley knew her name. He knew that somewhere a girl was resting her chin on an iron balcony rail that even at night radiated the heat of the day’s sun, waiting for him, and he laughed, for he knew that he would never go to her. He would sleep with the dogs before bedding a woman like that; even as a boy bursting out of his teens, Bruder knew himself enough to know that a girl with pearls choking her windpipe would never mean anything to him. He had assumed that no one would, but now here he was, running down the beach, at Linda’s heels.

  Cathedral Cove was almost a mile south of Condor’s Nest, around the far bend, past Jelly Beach, where the helmet-shape by-the-wind sailors hovered like incandescent ghosts in the summer waves. For as long as Linda could remember, Dieter had warned her not to swim there, Edmund repeating the words of caution: You could lose your leg to a sting. Linda, whose natural inclination was to run past any NO TRESPASSING sign, had heeded their advice because one of the few things that frightened her was a jellyfish. Shapeless and colorless—blobs of nothing that you can’t put your hands around! She used to ask Edmund, “If a jelly is nothing, how can it hurt me?”

  The previous night’s moon had been full, and the tide on Jelly Beach was so low that it revealed a table of tidal pools Linda hadn’t seen in nearly a year, a plane of shallow puddles undulating with red-mouthed anemone and paved with abalone. Linda noticed a small orange globe bobbing in a wave far out in the water, and then a second, and a third, came into focus. In the glare she saw more oranges floating atop the tidal pools and out in the waves, at first dozens but then hundreds and then thousands of oranges floating on the horizon, the sea decorated with perfect round knobs of citrus, as bright as the goldenorange garibaldi. Suddenly they were all over, as if dumped from the crate of the sky, and Bruder picked one up from the sand. He threw it high into the air, and together they watched its long arc and its faraway plunge into the surf, its disappearance, then its reappearance, as it popped through the water, perpetually afloat.

  Linda asked where the oranges had come from, and Bruder said, “A wreck.”

  The sea was littered with oranges, and the pelicans had found them and were diving in noisy swoops, mistaking the oranges for rare fish, the fruit bulging obscenely in their black pouches. How could there have been a shipwreck on such a fine day? Maybe a freight car had overturned on the bridge spanning Agua Apestosa, its load of citrus spilling into the marsh and then drifting out to sea.

  Far out in the tidal pools, a figure in a broad hat stood bent over the shallow water, collecting something, kicking the oranges, turning over shells and crabs. Linda couldn’t be sure, but she thought it was a young boy. She didn’t recognize him, but things were changing so quickly in the village that lately she could walk down the beach and pass people she’d never seen before, people who had motored over from Escondido and Julian and stumbled down the paths to swim and fish and chase one another in the surf. The world that she had once assumed belonged only to her was quickly opening itself to a surging crowd of strangers, with their car exhaust and their trammeling beach sandals and their habit of leaving wax
paper and pipe ash in the sand. “The ocean will sweep up after us,” they would say.

  “Is he waving at us?” Bruder asked about the boy in the tidal pools.

  Linda couldn’t be sure; he was more than fifty yards away, shaded by a white straw hat. His hand moved quickly, and Linda wondered if the boy was saying hello or if he had discovered something, maybe an oyster with a pearl the size of a baby’s fist; or maybe the boy needed help, maybe his foot was trapped in a moray’s cave. The figure waved again, this time with his entire arm, but Linda thought she saw the flash of a smile. She thought she heard something, but with the wind skimming the water and the flushing waves and the gulls crying as if they had lost something, she couldn’t be sure.

  “Did you hear anything?”

  Bruder shook his head. He had heard nothing, and he wanted to get to Cathedral Cove. “We have to hurry. She might be gone.”

  “Who?”

  Bruder tugged Linda, his hand around her wrist; a hand as big as her face, Linda knew, because once he had held it over her nose and his pinkie had touched one ear and his thumb the other; through the mask of Bruder’s hand she had seen Edmund avert his eyes.

  The oranges distressed Bruder, for he knew where they had come from and he knew what kind of mismanagement would lead to such a spill. In the beechwood forest of France, he had promised to keep a secret, and he couldn’t tell Linda that the spilled oranges had anything to do with him, with us, Linda. Sometimes when Bruder was restless, he would remind himself that only patience would ferry him into the future, and this would slow his overworked heart.

  Cathedral Cove was a small inlet, its waters churning with riptide, potato-size rocks covering the beach. At the back of the cove, a row of boulders covered in velvety moss attracted green-eyed flies. The cliffs rose sharply to a bluff above, where an abandoned Lutheran church lurched in the wind, its planks stripped and rotted and occasionally pried free for a bonfire set by ranchless rancheros. A small passage opened in the cove’s back wall, an arched hole that forced even young children to crouch to get through it. Inside was a small cave lit by a rose-shape hole above the passage, a cave smaller than Miss Winterbourne’s schoolroom, but with a vaulted ceiling and, at one end, a flattened rock like an altar. When she was seven or eight, Linda had wandered from Condor’s Nest down the beach, reaching the cove for the first time in low tide. She’d always remember her own little-girl’s gasp as she peered into the cave, seeing the sunbeams slanting through the hole above the passageway, landing on the altar rock. It was like a miniature church, a dollhouse cathedral, like the pictures in Dieter’s book on the Catholic churches of Germany; the book was illustrated, tissue paper shrouding each print of the cathedrals—in Köln, in Dresden, in Leipzig, in a place called München. Someone had tinted the prints with colored pencils. In the book, each cathedral’s nave lay lit in a slanted column of sunlight, just as the sun fell into the little cave on the beach. Its discovery—A chapel on the beach! A cathedral in a cove!—had excited her so much that she ran all the way back to Condor’s Nest to tell Edmund. I’m going to call it Cathedral Cove, she’d decided. She ran so fast that she could nearly see her heart leaping against her dress, and when she finally reached Edmund, who was lying on his bed reading an agricultural dictionary, she found it difficult to put the words together to explain what she had come across. “Down the shore …” she tried. “I found something, I discovered something. Come and see!” “Did you make it to Cathedral Cove?” Linda’s heart fell quiet as Edmund explained that she wasn’t the first to discover the little cave; in fact, she may very well have been the last.