Pasadena

by David Ebershoff

  When they reached the cove, Bruder and Linda stopped at its edge. The oranges sat brightly atop the black rocks like planets in the sky, and Bruder’s hand fell to her shoulder tentatively; he had warned himself against touching her, but his hand moved to her neck nonetheless. He had wanted to feel her flesh since the first time Dieter had said of his daughter, “Her eyes are as black as yours.”

  “Maybe we shouldn’t,” said Bruder.

  “Shouldn’t what?”

  “I brought you here to show her to you.”

  Was there a grounded ship just beyond the cove? A beached dolphin, bloated and heaving in the sun, a fin flopping desperately? Those seemed possible, or maybe a sea lioness mourning a lost pup, wailing in the tide, her eyes weepy and her whiskers limp. And then it occurred to Linda that just maybe Bruder had brought her here to be alone with her. Maybe his hand would lead her through the mouth of the cave and into the damp hole in the bluff. What would she do were he to lay her upon the stone altar? Her longing for him had been deep, a remote ache rising within her at night.

  Then she saw something on the beach. “What is that?”

  Fifty feet away, in the passage that led to the cave, something white and blubbery lay sprawled, a few oranges glowing around it. At first, Linda thought it was a baby sperm whale caught in the riptide and thrown ashore. But there was something about the shape—long but tapered at the end, with something resembling a head—that told Linda it wasn’t a sperm whale. A dolphin perhaps, or a bluefin tuna, its belly silvery white in the afternoon. And maybe that would explain the smell, which just then reached Linda’s nostrils—a black odor of decay and rot and overripening beneath a fat sun. Her hand took Bruder’s.

  “Do you want to see her?” he said.

  He moved and Linda followed, her hand over her nose and mouth as the odor erupted, the way a light you’re inching toward widens and floods the eyes with its whiteness. Except that this smell was black, it was dead, but not like a dead fish—already, Linda could tell that it, she, wasn’t a bluefin tuna or a dolphin astray from its swimming grounds off San Clemente Island. No, she was something else. Someone else.

  Bruder picked up a stick smooth and glossy from the tide. “I found her like this,” he said.

  And as they approached, Linda began to wonder who the girl might be: a girl like her mother, flinging herself from the stern of a ship; a girl praying in the abandoned Lutheran church above who slipped at the bluff; a girl pulled under by the greasy hand of the riptide; a girl not unlike herself, traipsing and hunting the ocean and the beach, who somehow found her death.

  She was a tall girl, naked, with her arms at her sides and her knees at an awkward angle and her ankles crossed. Her mass of mossy blond hair fell over her shiny cheek. Her back was a silvery-blue hump, and Linda, now only a few feet away, could see that hours in the water had bloated the girl, filling her flesh with a layer of saltwater that made her look something like an oversize doll: arms padded and soft, feet white and jellyish. Her hair reminded Linda of the horsehair sewn into the porcelain heads of the dolls kept on the upper shelf at Margarita’s, behind the register. How frightening were their painted blue eyes, following Linda round the store whenever she went to try on the eagle-feather hat.

  Bruder poked at the girl with his stick, nudging her shoulder, releasing a cloud of flies.

  “She’s dead,” Linda heard herself say. “What happened to her?”

  “She must have been in the wreck.”

  “Who do you think she is?”

  “Probably a captain’s girl.” He nudged the girl’s head with the stick; it flopped heavily, waterlogged; her spine was limp, apparently snapped—and the thought of it filled Linda’s head with the bright crackle of an imagined snap! She could hear it, the girl’s neck cracking in a thrust, in an unexpected jolt, the girl once alive and pretty and fearless and proceeding happily with her young life, expecting nothing, expecting everything, and then a sudden whip that snapped her throat; it was as if Linda had been there when the girl’s life had come and gone, and now she watched the neck turn limply with the shove of Bruder’s stick, and suddenly Linda realized that that horrible sound, that sound she had actually never heard, would linger with her for as long as she lived, and that this day, with the tide creeping forward and the gray gulls hanging motionless in the wind and the sun shifting perpetually and Bruder’s hand falling to her hip and his voice, deeper than any boy’s she had ever known, saying, “Are you all right?”—that all of this, the foul black odor and the shimmering hump, and the puffy ankles crossed and the golden flash of pubic hair as Bruder continued to prod the girl’s body, trying to flip her over but, when they saw the swollen stomach, the expectant stomach, eventually giving up: “Oh God, she’s pregnant!” Yes, she realized that all this would someday come to mean something to her, and to Bruder, too, and then the boy with the stick, the boy who had come home from the war with her father and slipped into her former bed and snatched away Dieter’s filial affections for Edmund, and maybe her feelings for her brother too, the boy with the hair as black as her own and the body—once, through the window of the cottage, Linda had seen him undress—like a roan’s, strings of muscle in the thigh, across the breast, in the black pit of his groin, then this young man named Bruder pulled Linda to his chest. His heart knocked against her breast, and she felt it echo within her and sobbed softly into his shoulder, and he stroked her head; and Linda wanted him to hold her forever, but the stench was too much for them to remain at Cathedral Cove, and she said, “We’ll come back on a nicer day,” and Bruder released Linda, and he hoped that that would be true but he couldn’t be as sure as she, and they moved up the beach in silence, and each imagined the future differently.

  On Jelly Beach, the tide had begun to move in and the waves were throwing hundreds of oranges onto the sand. Linda and Bruder saw the boy from before sitting on a rock taking inventory of what he had collected from the tide pools. His back was to them, and the disk of his straw hat hid him completely as he bent over his task. Bruder said, “Let’s not tell him about the girl. It’ll frighten him.” Bruder called to the boy, and Linda called out as well, and as they approached him he turned around and they were surprised to see that he wasn’t a boy at all. No, in fact the boy in the hat was Charlotte Moss.

  On the rock she was examining a freshly broken piece of teakwood and a silver fork and a coil of rope and two or three oranges. “There’s been a wreck,” she said. She was busy writing in her notebook, a pencil behind each ear.

  “Do you know the ship?”

  “A freighter out of San Pedro. Carrying half a million oranges to Maine.” She seemed pleased with her acquisition of facts and pointed out the flotsam as if to prove her story. Then she said, “Everyone lost, it seems.”

  “How do you know?”

  “It came on the wire. The Bee sent me down here to see what’s washing in. Where’d you two get off to?” Charlotte asked.

  “A long walk,” said Linda.

  “Boy, I’d say. You passed by here more than an hour ago.” Charlotte’s chin, soft and soon to require plucking, twitched, and an idea struck her and she wrote it down.

  “We went to Cathedral Cove,” said Bruder.

  “Anything down there?”

  “A few more oranges,” he said. “And a girl.”

  Charlotte opened her mouth skeptically and said, “Then I must get to work. It might be my biggest story yet.” And she returned to the debris, holding it to the light. She screwed up one eye as she thought of the best phrase to describe the washed-up sterling filigreed hairbrush that must have belonged to the captain’s wife or the ship’s owner or a rich patroness seeking clandestine passage to another world. Only then did Charlotte say, “You mean an actual girl?”

  Linda and Bruder said good-bye to Charlotte Moss, who moved in the direction of Cathedral Cove. She called, “Look for me in the paper tomorrow!” Their throats burning with salt, Linda and Bruder returned to Condor’s Nest. At the foot of
the bluff, Bruder reached to kiss Linda, but she instinctively looked up the cliff and saw Edmund peering over. A cloud of uncertainty shadowed her face as Linda left Bruder and climbed the bluff. She ran to tell her brother about the wreck and the thousands of oranges and the silver-fleshed girl.

  7

  Over the years, Bruder had learned that nearly everyone wanted to tell a story—forging the past and inventing the details along the way. The boys at the Training Society wove their family histories around the few scraps they knew: “My mother had green eyes and a beautiful mouth, and she fought off a hundred and one men before she accepted my father’s plea for her hand.” The soldiers in his company had told stories of the girls waiting for them at home: “She works as a telephone operator, and she’s so beautiful that men ring her up just to hear her voice—but she loves me, only me.” And on the long journey home from France, Dieter had described Valencia and Linda as “my little mermaids.”

  And this was how Charlotte described the drowned girl in the Bee. “Her hair grew in long kelp-like strands, and she lay curled on the beach. She was a child-maid, whose life ended before she knew what had happened to her. She went down with the ship, and no one will ever know her name, nor her baby’s.”

  “Charlotte made up most of her column,” said Bruder.

  “In the end, what difference does it really make?” said Linda.

  Her response touched him with regret, and one night he was studying her as she opened the case that held Dieter’s violin and wondered if she was like the rest: inventing the past to invent the future—ready, eager to tell a lie.

  But Linda studied him as well, confused about why he never told his own stories. Since that day on the beach, Bruder had ignored her, working late in the fields and eating alone in the Vulture House. “Are you afraid of Edmund?” she teased. “No,” he said. And this he withheld: I’m afraid of you.

  She handed the violin, burnished red with ebony pegs, to Dieter. These were the nights she used to love, when Dieter clamped the violin between his chin and chest and the Lieder wept from his bow and Valencia told stories of Mexico, and Dieter told stories of Germany; of California when the scrubland stretched endlessly, untouched, untrampled.

  When Dieter began to play one of Linda’s favorite songs, “Frühling,” she pulled Bruder up to dance with her. He refused, but Dieter prodded, saying, “Go on. She doesn’t belong to anyone else.”

  Bruder held Linda, her breast against his. He kept an eye on Edmund, who was reading on the window bench, doing his best to ignore them, his pout reflected in the glass. Years ago, Bruder had peered through the Valley Hunt Club’s kitchen-door window into the white-tie balls, and he had seen men’s fingers intertwined with women’s, hands guiding hips, but he didn’t know how to dance and Linda sensed this, guiding him around the cottage. He was clumsy and self-conscious and wanted to please her, and she wanted him to trust her. “Follow me,” she whispered. And he did. Outside the window, the moon was full over the ocean and the waves crashed gently in the low silver tide.

  Dieter continued playing the Zeltmusik and described how back in Schwarzwald at the end of harvest he and his brothers would use their mallets to pitch a canvas tent in the barley field. For three days they’d play their violins while a pair of singers, usually lovers, would perform Lieder and Spiele, and the village would dance through dusk and dawn, but the singers wouldn’t stop until Dieter was the last one standing in the tent. It was a contest—who could fiddle the longest—and Dieter always won. They used to call his mother Der Waldvogel, and his nickname had been “the Chickadee.” His brothers would ask him to play his violin in the tin shop to help the hours pass, and when the orders had flooded in from the American armies and the hammering in the tin shop lasted through the night, sometimes it was Dieter’s music that would keep the mallets tapping.

  Bruder returned Linda to her chair, and he took Valencia’s hand and asked her to dance.

  “Mama never dances,” said Edmund.

  Bruder could see that the subject had touched Valencia, like a finger stroking the cheek, and it made him wonder about his own mother; he tried to hold back the longing, to fight down the curiosity. More than once he had told himself that it was a waste of time to wonder about the void of the past. But in spite of himself, Bruder couldn’t always resist.

  “It was years ago,” said Valencia.

  “What was?” asked Linda.

  “The world I swam into, on that night long ago.”

  “Why did you leave Mexico?” asked Bruder.

  “It’s a long story.”

  “Tell us,” he said.

  “It’s late. Bed is calling.”

  “Then start now,” said Bruder.

  “And then you’ll tell us how you first met Papa,” Linda said to Bruder. “First Mama, and then you.”

  He said nothing, he did not make a deal, but Linda misread his grimace as agreement, and perhaps Valencia did as well, or just maybe, weary from the endless months of sun, she thought that there was no longer any reason not to tell her daughter. Did Dieter know? Yes, although he had forgotten the details over the years. And what about Edmund? He had heard from his father that his mother was an orphan; that was as much as he cared to learn. This scrap of history Linda had already collected. When Dieter picked up his violin again, Valencia said, “It reminds me of the music in the hall in Mazatlán, just off the Plaza de la Luz, where on the first Saturday of each month, a three-member band opened their velvet-lined cases and played to a crowd of sailors and miners, banditos and mercenaries, at a fiesta that the regulars called Café Fatal.” There, years ago—estaba una otra centuria, un otro mundo—young Valencia, not much older than Linda was now, first learned to dance.

  She had been tall for her age, with the legs of a crane; she wore her hair pulled from her face, and her skin was softened by a weekly smear of butter. She first attended Café Fatal with Pavis, who was two years older, already full in the blouse, the suede pouch she wore around her waist already filling with silver. Pavis wore a turquoise ring, a child’s ring that no longer fit, but she would grease her finger in a jar of lard to slide the ring past her knuckle. Valencia would watch this ritual, the finger sinking into the mass of pearly grease, as she ran the butter knife over her arms and legs, over her throat and the thickening pad of her heel. Both girls were orphans, Pavis having never known her parents, Valencia having watched hers, when she was seven, drown in the flash flood that swept away the village of Villa Vasquez. Thirty-seven villagers disappeared, along with the village itself, which had been known for its hammered silverwork and necklaces set with coral. Valencia’s mother, in the few minutes before the flood, just as the village realized that it was about to drown, had taken Valencia to one of the adobe bell towers of the Cathedral of Magnificent Salvation and then returned to the casita to fetch Valencia’s crippled younger brother, Federico. It was from that height that Valencia witnessed the brown water pounce toward the village like an enormous beast, two boulders as its eyes, and swallow the houses and the silver factory and the chimneyed smelter and the stables and the market where Valencia’s mother bought corn oil and dried beef and jars of pickled sea bass imported from Mazatlán; Valencia watched the churning water inhale the wagons and the cottonwood trees and the shrubs of wild mustard and the thirty-seven villagers, each running frantically, squealing like a nest of mice scurrying at the meow of a cat, the entire village reduced, from the viewpoint of the bell tower, to fleeing squeaking rodents. But not Valencia’s mother and her father and young Federico: the three of them did not turn into mice at the moment of their death; no, instead they looked toward the wall of water and simply leaned against a ponderosa pine and crossed themselves and let the water crash over them. As she watched the flood swallow them, Valencia was terrified for her family, and for herself: for the cathedral, with its twin bell towers, was in the flood’s path as well, and only seconds after it consumed the ponderosa pine, the water rushed toward the cathedral’s iron-studded doo
r, where Padre Cid shielded himself with a Bible. The church disappeared, and the water rose to the bell tower’s rail; and surely it would rise beyond the rail, Valencia assumed just then, waiting, crossing herself, and praying. But the water peaked, and Valencia, who never once shut her eyes, watched the flood’s froth, a stew of debris—porch chairs and latticed shutters and wagon wheels and iron ice tongs, and over there was a horse tossed about like a twig, and just up there was old Señora Viquario, fat as a cow, chained to her bull, Carlos, the two of them dead and bobbing like buoys—Valencia watched the flood’s churn slow and settle and retreat, so that by the following dawn, all glittered in the sun and all was gone, nothing left but the twin bell towers and the lone, stripped trunk of the ponderosa pine.