Pasadena

by David Ebershoff

  Now Charlotte said, “Did I mention that I’ve got my nose into something else right now? I’d tell you if I was sure you could keep a secret.” Linda assured her that she could, and Charlotte summed her up with her steel-colored eye. “Did you know that something funny’s going on out at the Cocoonery?” Linda asked what, and soon Charlotte, like a split melon, was spilling what she held—for even more exciting to Charlotte than discovering a good story was passing it on.

  The Cocoonery—every town has one or two such buildings—had risen opulently years before for a purpose long since gone obsolete. Sometime around the turn of the century it first opened as a silkworm farm. A Minnesota real-estate developer by the name of Mina Van Antwerp, birch-faced and set with a Nordic jaw, had settled one hundred acres in the hills east of Baden-Baden-by-the-Sea, establishing what she called the Minneapolis Beach Colony. She arrived in California with a plan to turn the soil into gold or, in this particular case, raw fluttering spinneret silk. Miss Van Antwerp placed ads in the newspapers of dug-in snowy northern towns, Duluth and Boulder Junction and Fargo and even Winnipeg, offering five-acre get-rich-quick plots to anyone interested in growing mulberry trees. With a team of ranch hands she built the Cocoonery: thirty feet high, crossbeams of ponderosa tied with strips of leather soaked in oily water, tin roof, sliding barn doors on all sides to let in the sun and, eventually, a railroad car. Inside, the trays of silkworm larvae were stacked to the ceiling, each drawer incubating hundreds of thousands of silkworms. But Miss Van Antwerp was a better saleswoman than sericulturist, and—to her great shock—the silkworms hatched while the mulberry trees were still saplings. With nothing to eat, the hundred million worms devoured themselves, and the most Darwinian cannibals, engorged for a single night, proceeded to starve to death. The collapse of the Minneapolis Beach Colony followed immediately, homes abandoned months after they were built, deeds to worthless land crinkled up and tossed from fleeing buckboards. For years the Cocoonery stood empty on the hillcrest, where the winds blew from every direction and the grasses dried to every shade of gold. Then, just before the war, Herr Beck, whose inheritance had come in the form of gladiolus bulbs, bought the building and reestablished the Cocoonery, this time as a co-operative where the growers brought their plants and cut flowers. Under Beck’s organization, the produce was sold to distributors from Los Angeles and Riverside who backed their railroad cars into the building and pulled out with their perfumed freight: poinsettias in autumn, secreting narcissus in winter, ranunculus in spring, honking gladiolus in June, bird-of-paradise flapping across the yellow span of summer; and asters and blue-belled delphiniums and cabbage-size peonies and roses as big and white as eggs on two-foot stems. Those trains, chugging along a special track that ran to the Cocoonery’s gate and up its little hill, hacked coal-cough across the surrounding farms, including Condor’s Nest; the engineers tossed their Hapsburg root-beer bottles into the gully along the tracks and, embarrassingly, the limp, deflated balloons of their syphilis-avoiding condoms. And now a fleet of pickup trucks pop-gunned their way across the fields out to the Cocoonery: crack! crack! crack!, their wheels digging rutted shortcuts into the scrubland around the hill. The trucks drooled tarry oil into the roads, leaving Linda with another farm chore, to scrape the black gunk from the hinny’s hooves. And the girls who worked at the Cocoonery, cutting stems with dull knives and potting three hundred poinsettias a day with bloodied fingertips: sometimes they’d come into the village and smoke on Margarita’s porch and whistle at the traffic. Even Linda knew that the Cocoonery had rapidly changed the eastern hill country. Last year, one of the girls had been stabbed in the throat with a pruning knife; and every few months a girl fled, her swelling stomach hidden under the folds of her apron. No, flower distribution wasn’t all that went on out there, Charlotte explained. “It’s turning wild.”

  Linda asked Charlotte what, exactly, she meant.

  “Why don’t you come with me on Saturday night, and together we’ll have a look-see.”

  It was a few miles past the village, beyond the lettuce fields and the dairy farms and up in the folds of the foothills. On this Saturday night in October, stars and the dimpled moon lit the way along the railroad track, and it was colder inland than by the shore. She and Charlotte didn’t speak, the gravel loud beneath them. Charlotte had told Linda to wear shoes she could run in. “Run?” “Just in case.” Charlotte said that they shouldn’t take the main road out to the Cocoonery—“Then they’ll see us, and we most definitely aren’t supposed to be there”—and Linda’s heart quickened over what they might find.

  She had lied to Bruder: she’d told him she was spending the night with Charlotte, and she hadn’t been prepared for him to ask, “Doing what?” “Doing what?” she repeated, wondering if her promise not to tell anyone included him. “We’ll be mending socks. Her Pup’s coming home soon.” As it slipped from her mouth, the lie stung her with regret, and she knew he didn’t believe her. “I’ll tell you later,” she tried, but the lie was told, and what was it Valencia used to say when Linda was little? “You can’t unsay a lie.” Was that it? Was that what Valencia had said?

  “Do you hear the music?” said Charlotte.

  It greeted them, running down the canyon, a fast river of rhythm. Linda and Charlotte continued along the tracks in a ravine between two hills, and then the tracks turned and the hills fell away and they saw the Cocoonery. It sat atop a lone hillock surrounded by live-oaks, its glass walls lit and glowing, and Zeltmusik throbbed from the open doors. The tin roof reflected the torches staked around the building and on the hillside, the flames bent and broken in the wind and snake-black oil smoke slithering through a hole in the sky. Linda and Charlotte crept closer and found a sycamore’s Y-branch to sit upon to inspect the scene. Through the glass walls they saw a banda on a stage, the musicians in white silk shirts with ruffled sleeves: one man at a 750-pound parlor piano, a boy surrounded by bongos, a man in spectacles with a Sevilla mandolin on his lap, a fourth plucking a nickel-shell banjo. People were dancing in a line, men she didn’t recognize and girls more or less Linda’s age, their faces shiny with heat and their blouses split open to reveal their breasts. For the most part the men looked like the fishermen and hands and migrants who traveled with the seasons; their shirtsleeves were rolled past their elbows, their denim jeans crusted with field soil, and their eyes bright with greediness and a vulnerable uncertainty and awkwardness about how to dance. Linda guessed they’d come from Oceanside and Escondido and maybe even from the apple orchards in Julian, and perhaps some of them were the bachelors who lived in the earth-hovels on the slope of Mt. Palomar, men who formed a disorganized but heavily armed regiment that made its living charging tolls to the Sunday drivers who ascended the mountain’s peak.

  On the hill around the Cocoonery were dozens of motorcars, reflecting the torch flames in their spoked wheels and running boards and in the brass-trimmed bulbous horns screwed to their dashes. More cars than wagons, and Linda knew that the cars belonged to men who weren’t hands—men perhaps all the way from San Diego, shop owners and insurance salesmen and maybe even one or two of the real-estate developers who’d been turning up at Margarita’s counter in recent months, asking around about the ocean farms. At the foot of the hill, horses were hitched to the rail fence; the torches caused them to stamp nervously, and their rubbery nostrils flared, and the horses looked out of place. The music floated down the hill car-rum-dum-dum! car-rum-dum-dum!, the melody mixing with the men laughing and the loud girls telling jokes with punch lines Linda couldn’t hear and a happy, stumbling brawl over a bottle. There were four or five fishermen Linda knew from the pier, Barney and Beet Pete and H.D., who was really just a boy, too young to shave, as hairless as a honeydew, which was where he got his name. The fishermen were sitting outside the Cocoonery on overturned crates labeled live plants, rolling cigarettes and passing around a small jug; fish-faced men with popping, gelatinous eyes and mouths shaped like O’s as they tilted the jug toward their pout
s. Other men sat outside on logs and crates, in circles lit by a fire in a ditch, and dogs were snapping at the sparks and chasing one another, and a pair of mongrels were stuck together in intercourse and a couple of men had to pull them apart. Men were humming and pouring wine from bottles and whiskey from burlap-wrapped flasks, and the torches revealed the wink of drink in their eyes.

  “Look over there,” whispered Charlotte. “It’s Mr. Klift.” She wrote his name in her notepad, the first in a list entitled “Who I Saw.” Marcel Klift was a lawyer with offices in both Baden-Baden-by-the-Sea and Del Mar, and he was dancing with a woman with a red fox tippet around her plump shoulders and a net-veil hat. Next to them was Dr. Copper in the black suit he wore when visiting the dying, but tonight with a cactus rose in his lapel. On his arm was not his doctor’s bag but a girl in a carelessly sewn dress. She was twirling around him, trying to get him to dance, saying, “Come on, Hal, move your feet!”

  “What are they doing here?” whispered Linda.

  “They’re drinking.”

  “Who are all these girls?”

  “They’re the girls who work for Herr Beck.”

  “Why are they here at night?”

  “To get paid. To earn a living.”

  Linda and Charlotte scuttled over to a greasewood shrub near a window, the needles pressing into them. Charlotte warned Linda to be quiet as they parted the shreddy branches: “No matter what happens, be still!”

  And from here Linda could see everything: the banda with their shirts sweat-pasted to their chests; men’s hands on the girls’ narrow hips; a huddle of girls in a corner, each with a rope of baby-clam shells around her throat; six boys in the opposite corner, their bangs slicked down and on their feet shiny new trench boots made for the war but never shipped over. “You see Margarita’s nephews over there?” Charlotte noted it in her pad. They were sucking whiskey from root-beer bottles and they swayed awkwardly, their arms around one another, propping themselves up.

  The banda was playing a German maritime Lied—Der Sturm ist da, die wilden Meere hupfen—that Linda knew from Dieter’s violin. Many years ago, Dieter used to come to her and Edmund at bedtime. He’d stand between them and play his fiddle, singing more and more softly until at last his voice trailed off … Guten Nacht. Linda would pretend she didn’t understand the lyrics, and after Dieter left she’d beg Edmund to translate the songs, and though now it seemed like another lifetime she could still recall how he would sit up proudly and recite the words like poetry and teach her how to sing. “No,” he’d say gently. “It goes like this …” And finally he too would say, Guten Nacht, Sieglinde, Guten Nacht.

  Next, a woman joined the banda on the stage, her green velvet dress dragging across the mandolin player’s shoes. The sight of her caused all the men to stop, their hands falling from their dancing partners, and the hall fell silent except for gulps and pants and a whispered “There she is!” The woman moved to the center of the stage and raised her arms, presenting herself to the crowd: black hair oiled up in a swirl, glass earrings catching the light, a generous display of breast, a ring set with jade, a mouth like a small tomato. The mandolin player introduced Fraulein Carlotta to the crowd, and the men cheered and the girls applauded skeptically and Carlotta shifted her velvet-draped hips from one side to the other and began singing:

  Das Leben froh geniessen

  Ist der Vernunft Gebot.

  Man lebt doch nur so kurze Zeit

  Und ist so lange todt.

  Through the window, Linda heard one of the men say to his pal, “She’s famous round San Diego, but one day every man in California will know her.” And his pal said, “You can know her tonight if you got the green.”

  Carlotta clenched a fist as she brought her song to climax:

  “Enjoy your life, my brother,”

  Is gray old Reason’s song.

  One has so little time to live

  And one is dead so long.

  The green velvet shifted like a dirty stream passing over a rock. She was older than the other girls, powdered and plucked, waxy eyebrows drawn in place, and unlike any other woman Linda had ever seen, Fraulein Carlotta seemed entirely aware of the power she held over men. She possessed the voice of a sad but experienced woman, and her breasts rose and fell as she sang, and her hand with the ring—the jade cut into a rose—swabbed the base of her throat as the audience applauded and hollered and someone yelled, “Carlotta, will you marry me?”

  Carlotta leaned from the lip of the stage and said, “How much money do you have?”

  The men hooted even more, especially the men who had no money in the world and never would, and feet began to stomp and the Cocoonery ripened with a warm compost smell. “Danke, danke,” she said. “Muchas gracias, boys and girls.” The crowd clapped and whistled, and the boys sitting on the windowsills swung their feet and kicked the walls, and even the shy girls who were making promises to themselves to run away from Baden-Baden-by-the-Sea before the dawn applauded vigorously. And the more noise everyone made, the larger Carlotta appeared on the stage, and she seemingly towered over the members of the banda, and the spotlights transformed her stinky sweat to glitter. “How ’bout a little mayate?” she called. The crowd cheered, and the men took the girls’ wrists, and together the dancers formed a line. To whistles and howls, Carlotta left the stage, and the banda took up a rumba accented with tambourine. The music shook the glass walls and the dancers flapped their arms like wings, imitating a swarm of June bugs aflight in the night and drawn to the great electric bulbs hanging from the Cocoonery’s ceiling.

  A carved figure of Miss Van Antwerp hung over the door like the wooden bust on the prow of a ship, and her stingy smile looked as if she were enjoying what her silkworm hall had become. The mayate was one of the favorite dances of the day, and Linda watched more men and girls pour into the Cocoonery beneath the oakwood face of the failed real-estate developer: railroad men too sooty to clean up properly; travelers with half-smoked cigars tucked beneath the bands of their hats; men in suit trousers and suspenders, with greedy spittle on their lips—these men looked like the developers who Charlotte had said planned to string electricity lines out into the open scrubland “on spec.” “They’re speculators,” Charlotte had said in a way that had made Linda envious that her friend knew so much. And now fans suspended from the ceiling pushed warm air around the dancers’ heads, and the great greenhouse ripened the spirits of all its revelers—or of the men, at least, for Linda saw the bloom in the girls’ faces fold tightly against the oncoming, pawing night.

  “Here’s my story,” said Charlotte, busy taking notes. “It’s got all the goods: bootleg, debauchery, and girls bought for a price.”

  Linda watched a fat man in a hat too small for his head pull a gold-eyed girl from the dance floor and out into the torch-lit night. She was pounding his doughy chest, but he was smiling and no one seemed to notice that the girl didn’t want to go. A narrow-nosed girl struggled for breath in hairy arms. Another girl sniffled into a handkerchief embroidered with a violet as she slotted several coins up her sleeve. In a corner, a group of boys groped themselves as they surrounded a girl with an overbite and a frail tin crucifix about her throat.

  “I want to go,” said Linda.

  “I’m just beginning.”

  Linda was climbing out of the greasewood when Charlotte took her by the shoulder and said, “Linda! Look in there.” Linda followed Charlotte’s pointing finger through the crowd, and she was just about to say “I’ve seen enough” when she saw the small thick frame of Edmund.

  His hair was slicked behind his ears, and his collar was starched and erect, but more shocking than the very sight of him was who he was dancing with: he was in the arms of Carlotta, who had changed into a tuxedo and now wore a white rose behind her ear. Her hair was pasted to her skull with pomade that made it look like the skin of a black plum, and Edmund hung from her chest like a small boy clinging to his mother and his fingers gripped her lapel and her arms held his fa
ce to the cushion of her breast. Carlotta plucked Edmund’s eyeglasses from his face and tucked them deep within her blouse. They moved in a circle, and Edmund’s eyes were dreamy with blindness as his face rose and fell with her breath. The violinist was playing a waltz, and after a few bars Linda realized it was “The Leipzig Fancy,” one of Dieter’s favorite songs, and Edmund’s mouth was moving, as if he was singing to Carlotta.

  Even more people were dancing now, the floor crowded and shoulders bumping, and the pulse of the music rose as shoes and boots shuffled and dress hems rippled against stockings that would shred before morning light. Ropes of wood-clack beads rattled, and all at once many of the girls handed themselves over to the night’s duty, and in pairs men and girls left the Cocoonery for the privacy of bushes or a backseat or a back-numbing felled oak or, for those who didn’t care, a firm bed of dirt. The lapel of Carlotta’s tuxedo was shiny and her large hand ran down Edmund’s back, and they danced and turned and then shifted toward the window by the greasewood shrub; and when the music lunged, Carlotta turned her hips and the white rose behind her ear came within a few feet of Linda, its heart stained red.

  And there Edmund was on the other side of the glass, the grain of his beard greasy, his shoulders spread in his church suit. His hand cupped one of Carlotta’s breasts through the tuxedo jacket, fondling it clumsily, and she smiled not out of pleasure but out of the satisfaction of a job completed, and Edmund’s face had gone blank and Linda knew there was nothing in the world that could pull him out of his reverie. In the Cocoonery’s warm damp air he had been transformed, and her brother was a man she no longer recognized.