Pasadena

by David Ebershoff

  “Meet me anyway,” she insisted. “Come at three, and I’ll show you the rose garden and the empty swimming pool and …”

  “And?”

  “And I’ll tell you the rest of the story.” She paused; and then: “Don’t be late, Mr. Blackwood.” She returned the receiver to its cradle and hurried to the tennis courts, where, once her mind was clear of all this talk of the past, she would continue her winning streak, completing her climb up the ladder. She acknowledged that Blackwood was a curious and inquisitive man, and she anticipated their conversation. He would ask her: “If Mr. Bruder had become the heir to the Rancho Pasadena, why did he go to Condor’s Nest in the first place? Why didn’t he just return to Pasadena and the land that would one day be his?”

  And Cherry Nay would reply: “From the day he met Dieter Stumpf by the stream, everything Bruder has ever done has been for her.”

  “For who?” Blackwood would say.

  “For the girl we used to call Linda Stamp.”

  Thou didst purchase by thy fall

  Home for us and peace for all;

  Yet, how darkly dawned that day—

  Dreadful was the price to pay!

  EMILY BRONTË

  1

  On an October afternoon in 1924, Linda Stamp—now twenty-one and almost six feet tall—stepped off the Pacific Electric at the Raymond Street Station. Since the death of her mother, her coltishness had given way to a handsome solidity: her ankle descended sturdily to the platform, her sea-worn fingers held tight the handle of her kettle-pot bag, and her hair was cut pragmatically away from her face. On the platform Linda stood erect, her head large atop her throat, and anyone kneeling to tie his shoe or to jiggle the latch of his traveling trunk would look up and see her almost as a giantess before the brittle Sierra Madres, her profile in line with the pale dry mountain range. For more than four years she had lived alone with her father, assuming her mother’s farm and kitchen chores, and what Linda didn’t know about herself was the lust-inspiring nature her beauty had acquired. The mirror told her nothing of what she could stir in the hearts of others, and her life since the landslide had been so solitary that there was no one to tell her of it either. It was a beauty of contrasts: the pelt-dark hair against the pale cheek, the high, wide brow above the narrow but deep eyes, the unsettled soul of a girl now inhabiting a woman’s body. Her hair, which had once grown in ropes down her back, thick enough to lose pencils and fishing hooks in, had gone unshorn since Christmas 1919, and now that she’d cut it she couldn’t get used to the lightness of her head or the fact that she could no longer hide behind the curtain of her bangs.

  On the train, Linda had worn an overcoat with a green felt collar and her hat with the white eagle feather, which she had purchased, at last, for the journey, and the coral pendant around her throat. In the car’s window she found her reflection agreeable, dressed smartly as she was for what Margarita had called a fancy-pants town. But Margarita’s tales of Pasadena and its luxury hotels—the Vista above the arroyo, the Maryland with its long pergola, the Huntington with its distant ocean views—and its civic societies—the Twilight Club, the City Beautiful Committee, the 100 Percenters—sounded as if everything she knew had come from the society page. “You can learn a lot from the American Weekly,” declared Margarita. “You wait and see. Won’t be a soul up there who doesn’t read every last word. There’s a columnist named Chatty Cherry who keeps everyone abreast of the goings-on. Linda, you should look her up,” Margarita suggested, although Linda couldn’t imagine why.

  But on the train, the scab-kneed boy next to Linda had left a thumbprint of guava jelly on the wrist of her coat; and when she opened the window, the eagle feather loosened and blew away. By the time she’d arrived in Los Angeles, dust and soot powdered her nose, and the coat hung limply on her arm. While waiting in Union Station for the four o’clock to Pasadena, Linda was asked for money by a burn-scarred man in an army uniform. When she said that she had very little, he yelled at her, his voice echoing. A heavily made up woman farther down the bench looked up from her compact and said, “Don’t make him mad, doll.” It was warm for October, summer’s final sticky grab, and during the long day on a woven-wool train seat and, now, this depot bench, she had heated up, a dewiness collecting on her throat, and she hoped he wouldn’t notice the weariness the trip had brought her.

  The miles of track from Los Angeles to Pasadena cut through scrubland and arroyo, crossing a bridge spanning a dry riverbed and running alongside acres of orange grove. Through the open window came the scent of citrus bud and green waxen leaf and the singed odor of soil that had gone without rain for more than six months. A team of men—hoes and hooks in hand, burro idle in yoke and cart—was clearing the brown, brittle fennel weed from the lanes between the orange trees, readying the orchards. The harvest would begin soon, and the lanes would fill with men buttoned into shoulder picking sacks. Then the train tracks curved away from the orange grove, the trees retreating. Linda’s window sped past an abandoned grape orchard and a dairy and a sign promoting THE WORLD FAMOUS SOUTH PASADENA OSTRICH FARM & HOTEL. Another billboard advertised the VALLEY CASH FEED & FUEL CO.: HAY!——WOOD!——COAL!——80 LB. SACKS OF SCIENTIFICALLY MIXED MASH! Two or three houses with red-tile roofs appeared next to the fields, then more houses, Victorian in eave and turret, painted fescue-green and sunshine-yellow and scarlet. Soon paved streets ran neatly out of the fields, and the fields gave way to empty lots bordered by quartered sidewalks, and the empty lots gave way to more houses, now side by side, white stucco and iron grate and Tudor beam, wooden porch and cedar eave, and then the conductor called, “Pasadena! Next stop, Pasadena!”

  She hadn’t seen Bruder in more than four years. The landslide had buried him in a foot of mud, the bulbs of his onion-white eyes peering through. Once free, he had dropped to his hands and knees and dug like a dog, mud shooting behind him. He said he knew exactly where she was, as if he’d caught her scent: “I knew I’d dig the hole and pull you out and you’d be there. I knew it more certainly than I’ve ever known anything.” When he did, Linda was crying and he wiped the silt from her lips and held her, her suit of mud cracking away. But only then did she ask: “Where’s Mama?” This time, however, Bruder’s hound skills failed. They didn’t find Valencia, curled into a delicate, hard ball, until the next day. He departed before they could bury her, the Vulture House door snapping behind him. Linda followed him across the field to the road, but when he reached the pavement he told her to turn around. She asked where he was going, and he said, “Home.” “I thought you didn’t have a home,” she said, and then he was gone, and atop her pillow Linda found the piece of coral.

  Had she known where Edmund was, Linda would have sent a telegram—MAMA’S DEAD—but he might as well have been dead too, gone and with no word, off with Carlotta. Accompanied by Father Pico’s trembling recitation of the rosary, Linda and Dieter buried Valencia beneath the tulip tree, in a field just beyond the shadow of the Vulture House. She held Dieter, frail in his epaulets, the winter sun blazing in a cloudless sky. “You’ll take care of me?” he asked; she said she would, and that first night she worked Valencia’s apron strings around her waist and shucked a pot of beans. She rolled the tortillas and fried the eggs while Dieter sat at the table, napkin tucked into his collar, his eyes fluttering with sleep. “Papa? Are you all right?” He snorted piggishly and woke up and sucked on the long white whiskers around his mouth. A sense of dread overcame Linda: not only was Valencia dead, but now Linda would have to assume her mother’s life. She thought of how Valencia had changed after landing at Condor’s Nest; the girl brave enough to dance at Café Fatal and swim the Pacific had learned—and this Linda was beginning to understand—to yield. How disappointing it was to Linda; and rinsing the beans at the sink, the apron strings tight on her waist, Linda shuddered at the suddenly limited possibilities of her future.

  After Valencia’s death, little changed at Condor’s Nest, little except that Valencia’s many duties�
�how had Linda not known there were so many?—were now Linda’s own. She cooked for Dieter—baking the conchas, boiling the onion kraut—and strung his yellow-stained wash and mended his trouser knees and sacked the onions until she thought she would never be able to scour the odor from her thumbs. She rinsed the dishes and repaired the curtains and stacked the furniture on the table when it was time to lye-mop the floor. She maintained the farm log: eleven hens, three roosters, two burros—Tristan and Isolde, Dieter called them. She hauled the onions to the market on the pier and sold her catch at the gutting house to a wholesaler named Spencer, whose thick, square face, the shape of a book, always made Linda think he was cheating her. At night she eased Dieter into bed, tucking the sheets around him, pulling his stocking cap over his ears, tamping the ash in his pipe, propping the pillows to help him sleep upright. Quickly she came to know better than she might ever have hoped Valencia’s life, the life gifted to her mother as recompense for a brief moment in Dieter’s barn; had it been a moment of pleasure? Linda would never know. It occurred to her, after living in Valencia’s apron for many months, that her mother would never have stayed at Condor’s Nest had she not become pregnant with Edmund. She’d been on her way to someplace else, to another life. Over the years, Linda had wondered how her mother had transformed from a girl smuggling herself in the ocean to a hausfrau, and now Linda understood: There’d been no choice. It was a hard, jagged thought to tuck into the soft folds of her mind, but there it sat, pointed and true. The only comfort came in Linda’s certainty that it wouldn’t happen to her—even after it already had.

  During these long months, and then years, Linda tried to imagine how Bruder was spending his days. She guessed he worked in a field, on a farm or a ranch somewhere, and with an inexplicable certainty she knew he wasn’t far. Beyond Baden-Baden-by-the-Sea, surely, but not far away, Linda would tell herself; sometimes she’d write it in the margin of a book: her daydream guess of where he might be. The books had belonged to Bruder, and the elegantly scrawled annotations she found here and there were as foreign to her as another language. In La Vita Nuova, she wrote:

  Gone! Lost! Down the hill or out to sea!

  Gone now—but he’ll come home to me!

  On Don Quixote’s endpaper, she scribbled:

  In California, up the coast or down,

  In a cove, in a cave,

  But please, God,

  Not in a marble grave!

  Did she feel abandoned? No, Linda wouldn’t allow herself to believe that someone had betrayed her. She was waiting. For what, she couldn’t say precisely. But she would wait, and as time passed she turned the notion around in her head so that it came to feel as if someone were waiting for her. She remained at Condor’s Nest so that she could be found; she grew another two inches and filled the bust of her mother’s apron and spoon-fed her father the delicate pink flesh of apricots and trembling cinnamon rice and his beloved sweet apple butter. Her someone would wait, and so would she. The sun crossed the farm and the full moon halved itself, then quartered, then started again, and Linda remained patient at her old father’s side.

  And so it wasn’t a surprise when the postcard had arrived in the summer of 1924: a picture of a navel grove in blossom with snowy Mt. Baldy in the background, and the words in wedding-cake letters: Pasadena, Crown of the Valley. Bruder’s note seemed incomplete, referring to information she didn’t know: Captain Poore can never get to me. He leaves me alone, which he knows he has to. We always need help around here. Don’t tell Dieter. For a month she carried the postcard in her apron pocket to the gutting house, where she flayed her daily catch, earning twenty cents a pound. It was the first time in her life that the money she earned was hers, but with it had come little of the satisfaction she had anticipated. The coins sat shiny in a jelly jar above the sink, no one but she and Dieter witnessing the sunset glinting off them. Only vaguely did she understand that Bruder had left because of Dieter, and she hid the postcard from her father, and soon the card chipped and creased in her pocket as she pressed herself against the rubber conveyor belt that transported the pale fillets from her place on the line. Then a letter arrived, Bruder’s longhand straight across the page. It divulged more than she would have expected from Bruder: he did not say it in so many words, but he missed her; he thought of her often; did she think of him? No, Bruder wrote none of these sentiments, but Linda interpreted his commentary—The girls of Pasadena are either silly snobs or gossipy maids, but I have a friend—as Bruder’s longing. A second letter arrived, and it included a request for Linda to join him at an orange grove called the Rancho Pasadena.

  She knew she couldn’t go. She had Dieter to look after, and the farm, but it was not a week after she posted her reply—I would come if I could, you know that, don’t you?—that Edmund returned to Condor’s Nest. One evening he appeared in the kitchen yard, Carlotta’s fevered cheek on his shoulder and their son heavy on his hip. He had lost his eyeglasses, and he was squinting in a way that made him look old. Edmund said that his lungs were hungry for ocean air, and he and his son, a boy named Palomar, had the dull eggshell complexion of people who lived far from the sea. Carlotta, whom Linda remembered as all bust and mane and red-glass bead, had cut her hair down to a fine cap, and she clutched a handkerchief hard with dried sweat. Edmund ordered Linda to straighten up the Vulture House for his family, “Make us a home, won’t you?”

  She obeyed, scrubbing the floorboards and polishing the windows, mending the rocking chair’s spindles and planting rust-colored chrysanthemums at the front door and hanging red chilies from the eave. Soon enough, Carlotta climbed definitively into Bruder’s old iron-spring bed, whence she gave feverish and increasingly demented commands—most of which involved Linda minding Palomar—and never again did she climb out, not even to wash or eat or to see her son on the beach writhing like an overturned tortoise.

  Palomar was lumpy like a forty-pound sack of onions, with a barnyard smell. His head sat heavy on his sweaty neck, and his wiry black hair stood up, and his gray eyes moved slowly in slanted sockets. Linda wondered whether the boy was right in the head, and if his eyes were as bad as his father’s. He’d sit for hours propped against the feed sacks staring at the flyingfish dying on the bed of ice, his glazy glare imprecise and unchanging. He rarely cried except when Linda transported him about the farm in the wheelbarrow. She loved the boy, but more from pity for her brother than anything else. And just as she was growing accustomed to Edmund’s return—the Stamps glued together almost as they once were—another envelope arrived from Pasadena. Again, Bruder told her not to mention the letter to anyone (Linda had snuck a letter into the post informing Bruder of Edmund’s return), but, Bruder insisted, with Edmund back home, wasn’t she now free to join him on the ranch? “The woman that deliberates is lost,” wrote Bruder, and he said there was a job for her at the ranch, and a narrow bedroom behind the kitchen, and he wrote, “Neither Dieter nor Edmund once hesitated when they left you.”

  As Linda was preparing to leave for Pasadena, Carlotta, frail and gone mad with syphilis, suggested to Linda that she lop off her hair. “You’ll look more like a woman,” she said. “And less like a girl.” A deathbed beauty tip it would turn out to be, Carlotta boiling in the forehead and wheezing her final Lieder and clutching Palomar to her lesion-speckled breast. In the kitchen yard, Edmund cut Linda’s hair and it blew in clumps from the bluff, small black ghosts lifting above the ocean and flying off, lock after lock curled at the tip like a talon. Later, Linda would wonder whether Edmund—who had hobbled back to Condor’s Nest with a pocket crammed with debt—was in fact shedding his tears over Carlotta’s final song or over Linda’s hair, tufts of youth carried away, his face broken up with regret. The very fact of moonfaced Palomar explained everything to Linda, everything about Edmund and what he had done and where he had been. She understood that a mistake had transpired at the Cocoonery, maybe even in the greasewood shrub, and in the span of a minute or two, maybe less, his life had been determined for
him. Edmund had never really loved Carlotta—he had been trapped by her, a young man handcuffed by obligation and offspring and a justice-of-the-peace marriage certificate. And on the train to Pasadena, Linda had sat rigid on the Pacific Electric seat, certain that the error of passion—a dark hole so many fell down—would never trap her. She had told her father and her brother that she had taken a job on an orange ranch. When they asked why, her throat straightened upon her shoulders and she said, “To see what it’s like to be free.”

  And now, on the platform at the Raymond Street Station, Linda was thinking that so far Pasadena looked just as it had in the postcard, the orange trees round and dense and green, the early fruit glowing like lanterns on the branch. Mt. Baldy rose to the east, its dome pale and brown and awaiting the first cap of snow. She smelled the lavender and the minty eucalyptus, and the sun in the afternoon’s corner cast a yellow-pink glow against the tracks. The station wasn’t crowded, but the street was busy with cars and clerks in shirtsleeves and black elastic armbands hurrying back from coffee breaks. A long-hooded Sunbeam, driven by a young woman with a shiny yellow bob and a sterling cigarette holder clamped in her hand, maneuvered recklessly between the Model T’s and the balloon-tired bicycles. The girl was busy lighting her Violet Milo cigarette and failed to notice until the very last instant the Pasadena Ice Company wagon directly in her path. The Sunbeam skidded and the wire wheels shrieked, causing the wagon’s brindled horse to buck and bray and stamp its feet. The girl screamed, and when she finally managed to stop the car she was so close to the horse that its cavernous nostrils were fogging up the car’s twin headlamps. “Get that beast off the street!” shouted the girl, and she honked and drove off.

  The commotion transfixed Linda, and at first she didn’t hear the man’s voice saying, “You must be Linda Stamp.”