Pasadena

by David Ebershoff

  “What are you talking about?”

  “We’ll go west. We’ll go to California. We’ll marry on the way. Out there, no one will ever know. We’ll arrive on the train as Mr. and Mrs. Andrew Blackmann. Way out there, no one will ever guess the truth!” She was playfully pounding her fists upon his breast and he took her wrists and cuffed them roughly and her face fell still as she became afraid. Would he not go to California with her after all?

  “We’ll leave at dawn,” he said, and the smile returned to her face and she buried herself within his thin, strong arms. And Mr. Andy Blackmann, groundsman, and Miss Edith Knight, daughter of a lobsterman, slipped beneath the covers of a bed wide enough for one, the money repoured into the sack and stored within his boot. They fell asleep while the winter wind blew old snow across the path and Edith dreamed of a land of sunshine and orange trees and her baby in a shaded carriage, and Blackmann closed his eyes and pretended to sleep. His mind turned not with notions of elopement but with plans of escape, and it was while he lay there, as the charred logs shifted in the fire, that the name “Blackwood” first came to him, and an hour before dawn, while Edith lay curled like a kitten, he slipped out the door with nothing but his coat and the sack of money and boarded the first train headed west, transferring in Albany and again in Chicago and then scarcely budging from his seat until he spotted the billboards twenty miles outside Pasadena advertising the hotels JUST LIKE PARADISE and the endless orange groves and the available LAND! LAND! LAND! By the time he stepped down to the platform at the Raymond Street Station, the young groundsman from the women’s college in Brooklin, Maine, Andy Blackmann, had reimagined himself as Andrew Jackson Blackwood, a real-estate man eager to invest in the right piece of land.

  “Daydreaming, Mr. Blackwood?” Mrs. Nay reappeared on the landing with its view of the mountains.

  “I’m afraid you caught me, Mrs. Nay.”

  “You look as if something had just carried you back to the past.”

  “Yes, something.”

  “So there you have it, Mr. Blackwood. Chambermaid gossip and a little reporting helped fill in the stories over the years.”

  “And that’s how you know all this?”

  “Of course, some things Linda and Bruder told me themselves.”

  “Mr. Bruder doesn’t seem like the type of man who would say anything about himself.”

  “Oh, but he is. All you have to do is figure out what it is he’s bursting to say. All silent men are like that: Find the key, Mr. Blackwood. Find the key!” And then, with a face clearing itself as if it had been wiped clean with a rag, she added, “But I don’t want you to think that all I do is trade in dirty laundry. It’s only that this house has a history so very different from any other.”

  Together they crossed the threshold and stood beneath the portico and looked at the Imperial Victoria, which somehow looked somewhat less between the pillars. “You’ll call me if your interest continues,” Mrs. Nay said. Blackwood sensed something skeptical in her voice.

  “I will call, Mrs. Nay. Once I find another free day.” He would be careful to wait a week or so before ringing back. “The house is ready for delivery, I presume. There’s no one residing here at all? Not even a maid in an attic somewhere?”

  “Not a soul but the jays in the coral tree.”

  “Good luck with your match, Mrs. Nay.”

  “Thank you. In eighteen matches against Becky Touchett, I have yet to lose a set. And I don’t intend for that to change today.”

  “No reason it should, Mrs. Nay. No reason there’s anything different about today.”

  “Good to know you, Mr. Blackwood.” A supple hand extended itself, bangle bracelet tinkling, diamonds dull in the shade. His hand met hers, and Blackwood’s callused roughness surprised her, and Cherry Nay took note. She would have to think carefully about what she would report back to Bruder: “Yes, I showed it to him. His interest is difficult to gauge. What’s that? Does he have the necessary funds? You might not think so, but he does. The funds and the will. What I mean is, Mr. Blackwood has much to gain from buying a property like the Pasadena. Yes, that’s right. He’s keen on moving up. Of course he’s wrong, but he thinks that moving into a mansion will help him along in this town.” She and Bruder would share an informed, but not cruel, laugh. But already she anticipated that Bruder would say he was inclined to do business with Blackwood. After all, did Bruder have a choice?

  “Until next time, Mrs. Nay,” said Blackwood.

  “That’s up to you. As they say, the ball is in your court, Mr. Blackwood.” On the hood of his car they found a white-faced kestrel crying killy, killy. Its black, hawkish eyes turned to them and its blue-gray wings opened. “Oh, look!” said Mrs. Nay, and the bird flapped and flew off in the direction of the orange grove.

  In the front seat of the Imperial Victoria, Blackwood put his hands to his head and found his temples damp, as if from nerves, which wasn’t like him at all: as if the house had extinguished his usual sunniness. In his rearview mirror he saw Mrs. Nay fiddling with the flap of her purse. He backed the car between the portico’s pillars and slowly made his way down the hill, and when he reached the bottom and passed through the gate, the radio found its reception and the announcer on the afternoon news reported further advancement in Germany and the young man reminded one and all to do their part. “The more we do, the sooner the boys’ll be home.” And, ever efficient, Blackwood noted that he would have to get to work if he was going to be ready to take advantage of their return.

  But he had a hard time drafting a legitimate plan for the Rancho Pasadena’s future. Instead, he returned over and over to the story of Linda Stamp: the girl had made her way to Pasadena, but how? Blackwood realized that Mr. Bruder had something to do with it. From the way Mrs. Nay had told it, theirs was a doomed love; why they hadn’t seen this from the get-go, Blackwood couldn’t understand. Two ambitious hearts can never unite; if Blackwood knew anything, he knew this. He repeated in his head Mrs. Nay’s description: “She loved him but at first refused to hand over her heart,” Mrs. Nay had said. “Some are like that. Nothing frightens them more than surrendering. As if love were about being taken prisoner, or being smothered by a pillow.”

  Mrs. Nay had said, How about you, Mr. Blackwood? Always a bachelor?

  That was when Blackwood had said it was time to go, leaving Mrs. Nay to her stories and her impending tennis match, returning to his sycamore-shaded house, where he lived alone with his advancing plans for the future and with the wall mirrors that reflected a man who was not who he claimed to be.

  2

  Stinky was unimpressed with Blackwood, and his dissatisfaction came through the telephone line. It transferred to Blackwood himself, who sat in his echoey house—he had lived there for years, but there were so few personal items it looked as if he had moved in the month before—not entirely certain how he had left the Rancho Pasadena without visiting the orchards—the most valuable part, Stinky declared, to Blackwood’s annoyance (for he was well aware of that). “It’s just that Mrs. Nay kept me busy with some old story,” Blackwood tried to explain. “How much are they asking?” Stinky asked, and even more surprising, especially to Blackwood himself, was that he had left Mrs. Nay without obtaining the price. “All in all, it sounds like a wasted morning,” said Stinky, hanging up.

  But Blackwood disagreed.

  For the next few days, the stories about the fishergirl and the onion farm stayed with him. In his second-floor office on Colorado Street, running his pencil tip down the green-lined ledger, he couldn’t think of much besides what Mrs. Nay had told him. He couldn’t say why, but he felt certain that Mrs. Nay had chosen him, had found him more trustworthy than most, and he took pride in the knowledge, unconfirmed but true nonetheless, that she didn’t unfurl upon just any old one. Mrs. Nay had seen something in Blackwood, he was sure.

  In fact, she had seen the hesitancy behind his still youthful, typically confident eyes, and the flushed cheeks wounded by rejection, and,
not least important, the swollen wallet of a man ready to invest. Mrs. Nay knew that life would not move on, either hers or Bruder’s, until the Pasadena was sold and reincarnated. “The dead must be buried,” she sometimes said. Anyone who works in real estate knows that properties house ghosts, and Cherry felt obliged to free Bruder of his past, to release him on his way. She was thinking of this as she drafted a letter to Blackwood on Nay & Nay stationery; and the next day, Blackwood was thinking of Linda and Bruder buried in the landslide when, shuffling through his mail in his office chair, he came across the soap-blue envelope from Nay & Nay.

  In a fine penmanship, Mrs. Nay thanked Blackwood for visiting the Pasadena, saying that she was always on the stand-by should he have further questions. If his day had begun with doubt, all that fell away by the time he reached Mrs. Nay’s closing sentence: Mr. Bruder remains anxious to sell. Blackwood folded the letter into his breast pocket, thinking again and again of Mrs. Nay’s postscript: You seem like the type of man who understands the responsibility of carrying this property out of the past.

  On Christmas morning, Blackwood realized that Stinky’s vaguely promised invitation for the Sweeney family crispy-skinned holiday goose would not come. Nor had any of the men Blackwood knew professionally asked him into their homes for hot grog and rounds of hearthside carols. Blackwood woke up without an engagement, and he tried not to let it overwhelm him with sadness or a windy sense of isolation; but he asked himself, as he did on occasion, what it would take for Pasadena’s triple-bolted doors to open to him; never could he have guessed that a community could seal itself so tightly. He wondered whether a grander life—residence in a mansion rather than in his modest (albeit satisfactory and well-built) bungalow—would make others realize that there was more to him than met the eye. Hadn’t one of the clerks at the bank let it slip to anyone just how many zeros yawned bold and black on his well-thumbed passbook? For the first time he thought about upgrading the Imperial Victoria—she was hardly new, after all—but that would be too much for Blackwood.

  He lay about in bed, something he frowned on in others, and the birds shrieked in the cypress that pressed against his window. It was a sunny morning, not especially warm, and he supposed that the best part of having nowhere to go on Christmas was the freedom from the endless civic discussion that was circulating on how New Year’s wasn’t really New Year’s without the Tournament of Roses: “This damn old war!” On the rear wall of Vroman’s Bookstore, someone had painted this: “No Milk or Meat, OK. But Bring Back the Parade on New Year’s Day!” No, he wouldn’t have to participate in the citywide tsk! of regret over how the Germans and the Japs had reached their sneaky hands all the way into Pasadena civic life! No one was expecting Andrew Jackson Blackwood, not anywhere. He didn’t think of it this way, but the truth was: Blackwood was on the mind of no one this morning, no one in the world.

  But Linda Stamp was on his, and so was Mr. Bruder: how had he come into so much property—Condor’s Nest and the Rancho Pasadena? Bruder, who had started off with even less than Blackwood? Nothing impressed Blackwood more than a man who had made himself, and he was keen to learn how Bruder had gone about it. He was sorry they hadn’t gotten on better. Standing at his living-room window, Blackwood surveyed the arroyo, the sycamores green and glassy with dew. He thought of his parents, dead and buried beneath the Maine snowdrifts. Lungs sopping with influenza all those years ago, but Blackwood had managed on. When he thought of the past, his memory became imprecise. He had forgotten that he had been a thievish child, that in fact he had stolen first from his father: eggs pocketed from the hen’s nest, cream skimmed from the cold-handled pail, potatoes smuggled to market in his long yellow stocking cap. On an especially busy day, with deals ringing through the telephone and deeds transferring from one vault to another, if you were to ask Blackwood what had happened with the red-haired girl at the women’s college, he would say he didn’t remember. Everything about those days Blackwood did his best to forget, and he proved adept at his art.

  And so on Christmas morning Blackwood went for a drive, the Imperial Victoria offering its own company. The radio played nothing but Christmas symphonies and holiday carolers and church services broadcast from cathedrals in New York City and Washington, D.C. On KNX, a clergyman by the name of Father Crean asked everyone to remember the boys, their feet ice blocks in their dicebox boots, and indeed Blackwood remembered the boys, he thought of them every day. One thing he had said to Mrs. Nay: “I’m cautious, but once I make up my mind, I move fast as a hawk.” He had swooped his arms in emphasis.

  Under the weak Christmas sun, the car crossed Suicide Bridge. The Rose Bowl sat idly, waiting for the football enthusiasts—of which Blackwood did not count himself a part—to return. His was the only car on the bridge, and the sky was a flat winter blue, and he saw no one in the arroyo beneath him. The city felt empty to Blackwood, and he enjoyed the sensation as if it were a sign of things to come: the world his for the taking. The morning was crisp, the air brittle with pine and cedar, and Blackwood drove on, listening to the Christmas sermon and then the on-the-hour news from the front, where the bombs continued to fall and the boys ate rations of foil-wrapped chocolate and navel oranges “shipped from the great state of Cal-ee-for-nye-aye!”

  Blackwood found himself at the gate of the Rancho Pasadena. He nudged it, and it opened as easily as before. As he drove up the switchback road, once again the radio’s reception fell away. He hadn’t planned on returning to the property but here he was, driving by the great lawn—a total of eleven acres, Mrs. Nay had finally revealed—and carefully steering between the portico’s columns.

  But Blackwood didn’t stop at the house as he had before. Today he continued along the drive, which returned to dirt as it descended the hill into the narrow valley of the abandoned orange grove, where stillborn fruit clung to the branch. At the foot of the hill, Blackwood parked at the camp of outbuildings and barns and sheds and the long ranch house shaded by a pepper tree. The buildings were not in an advanced state of disrepair but they looked sadly empty; dust frosted the windows and sweet clover sprouted at the foundations. Beneath the pepper was a worn wood table and a bench and a rusted steel drum overturned and spilling old coal and ash. The outbuildings and the ranch house sat in a corner of the orange grove, and the trees, with their knuckled orange-and-black fruit, appeared, through squinted eye, like those along Christmas Tree Lane, decorated and gaudy and a child’s delight—except not this year; no excessive lights anymore, by rule of law.

  Blackwood justified his trespassing with the knowledge that he could not make any investment decisions without a full set of facts. On foot he followed a road into the grove and soon saw that nearly a third of the trees were dead and leafless, their trunks gnawed by fruit rats and their bony roots pushing through the soil like a corpse’s arm rising from the grave. The other trees grew bushy and unkempt, their skirts of leaves dragging in the soil. The irrigation ditches had eroded into shallow ruts and a few wood-slat crates lay on their sides, their stenciling faded: RANCHO PASADENA, THE SOUTHLAND’S BEST. They looked a bit like lobster pots, and again Blackwood thought of the girl.

  Except for the wind chiming in the waxy leaves and a woodpecker’s busy drilling, the morning was silent and Blackwood was alone. He walked between the trees down a narrow lane, and soon he saw only grove. It did not occur to Blackwood that he might become lost in the orchard; his sense of direction was too great for something like that. Besides, the grove, for all its display of former wealth, wasn’t all that vast. It was only a little more than a gentleman’s ranch, Blackwood sniffed, and when he stopped and held his ear aloft he heard more than the wind and the woodpecker: from beyond, in what direction he couldn’t be sure, Blackwood heard the cars careening down the Arroyo Parkway. Blackwood took comfort in the noise of progress, in the din of development. More than once he had regretted that he hadn’t known enough to get in on the parkway at the beginning. Someone had once said to him, “Nothing like the business of r
olling out roads.” But, unusually for Blackwood, his ear had turned away from the tip.