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Pasadena

Page 27

by David Ebershoff


  Bruder had worked at the Rancho Pasadena for more than four years, and he and Willis Poore had come to an agreement. As foreman, Bruder would oversee the growing, picking, and packing operations uninterrupted, and as long as Willis held up his end of the bargain, Bruder would hold up his. The four years had passed slowly, and when the nights blanketed the little valley and Bruder retired to his room in the ranch house with the swallow’s nest in the eave, he would pull his knees up on the bed and read the ancients past midnight, and at the sound of an animal digging or dying outside his window he would look up, and his hardened, lonely face, reflected back in the glass, would startle even him. He had left Linda in order to reunite with her. And after four long years she was at last on the ranch, his ranch.

  The orange season ran from November to late March or early April, and during the harvest he was too busy to think of much other than picking a tree clean of fruit, and this had helped his loneliness. But in the long, dry summer months, life at the Pasadena was quiet: Willis and Lolly would spend July and August in Santa Barbara or Balboa, and Bruder would be in charge of the property, and he would have the long blazing days to think about Linda. He liked nothing more than walking the groves and the rose garden in the middle of the night, guided by the moon, imagining all of it as his—and sharing it with her. He wasn’t a dreamer, simply a man aware of his future. And he hadn’t craved the ranch as a hilltop palace to rule from in isolation; no, he’d imagined it as a place where one day he would bring Linda. But as the years passed, the silence from Condor’s Nest had grown louder and louder until one day Bruder had decided he could no longer wait. He wrote to her, and though he knew at first that she would say no, and that he would have to ask her many times, he had been thunderstruck by his great fortune when Edmund had returned to Condor’s Nest. Many years later, Linda would wonder if Bruder had had something to do with Edmund’s return to the farm, but he did not: it was nothing more mysterious than fate’s turning, clicking dial. And if there was a difference between Linda and Bruder, it was this: he believed in the cruel inevitability of fate; and she believed, even now, that the future was hers to invent.

  Bruder recognized his place at the Rancho Pasadena, and knew that his voice held as much authority there as Willis’s. Rarely did he have to demonstrate this—the others sensed it and respected it. A few, mostly the gossips, didn’t like Bruder because he said little beyond his daily recitation of orders; but most were happy to work for him, because if a job was done properly, he left them alone. He made sure that salaries were paid on time and that meals were hot and plentiful. He made sure that thieves went punished and liars were sent away.

  The maids in the mansion liked to whisper about Bruder, and he was aware of this. The head maid, a girl by the name of Rosa whose mother had worked at the Pasadena, and died there too, was smart and efficient and could fold two days of work into one, and she and Bruder had become friends. At night they’d sit on a hillside lookout and smoke and talk about their days. Bruder told Rosa about Linda, but Rosa was less open, and perhaps it was her reserve that caused Bruder’s own instinctive reticence to fall away. She had encouraged him to invite Linda to the ranch, and promised to look after her, and together in the streaking dusk of late summer, their faces still warm from the day’s sun, they had made a plan to bring Linda to the ranch. “She’ll come and you’ll be together,” Rosa had assured him, and her clear-sighted optimism ate at Bruder’s hardness, and he posted the first card, affixing the stamps with a summer-dry tongue.

  He was thinking of this on Linda’s first night at the ranch, as he watched her through the window. She moved expertly around the kitchen, and the restlessness that he had recalled in her, and that she had briefly demonstrated with her stamping foot, was no longer there. Bruder saw a serene young woman whose heart had finally quieted from its adolescent pant. He had been right to ask her to the ranch, and he didn’t worry for her, nor for the two of them, and he relaxed with what he thought of as a western sense of relief: that all would work out over time, that things were meant to be.

  He had given her a couple of cabbages and several carrots and half a peach pie, and in the cupboard Linda had found a case of canned beef, and with these she prepared her first supper at the Rancho Pasadena. The boys liked to eat outside, holding their hands to the orchard-heater and wrapping themselves in horsehair blankets. They ate their beef and cabbage, and Hearts declared Linda superior to last season’s cook, a gentle-faced man who left town after trouble with one of the packing girls. Slaymaker pulled a flask from his pocket and pushed it to his lips and then handed it to Hearts. He offered it to Linda, too, but she declined, and though she knew that she was supposed to report the men, she also already knew that she would never do it. Hearts and Slaymaker laughed at nothing in particular, and Slaymaker said that he hoped Linda wasn’t like Licorice Lolly. “I’ll bet my last dollar she’s a spy for the city council, ready to report the first drop of bourbon on her ranch.” Bruder insisted that Lolly Poore was no spy, but Slaymaker said he wasn’t so sure, and he pretended his tin plate was a fan and pursed his lips and giggled girlishly, saying in falsetto, “Volstead or death, that’s our motto around here, Mr. Slaymaker! You should try licorice, not liquor, Mr. Slaymaker!”

  “If she weren’t so silly,” said Hearts, “some man would come along and marry her and take her away from us.”

  “She’s pretty enough to get married,” said Slaymaker. “And God knows she’s rich enough. But the trouble with Lolly is she’s in love with her brother. It’s as plain as a story in the paper.”

  “What do you think of her?” Linda asked Bruder.

  “I don’t think of her very much.”

  “Maybe you should ask what she thinks of Bruder,” said Slaymaker.

  Bruder threw a log into the fire pit and said that he didn’t have much to do with Lolly. “I usually talk to Willis.” Slaymaker and Hearts laughed, but Linda would learn that each of them laughed about almost anything, except when a cruel word was said about the other.

  “You two know each other from before?” Slaymaker asked, a finger pointing to Bruder and Linda, back and forth. This surprised Linda, for she had assumed that every day since Bruder had left he’d been talking about Condor’s Nest; she had imagined her own myth passing from his lips, embellished but true. Why had she thought this? She didn’t know, except for the simple fact that every day since his departure she had retold herself the story of the boy who had arrived with Dieter from the war.

  “I knew her father first.”

  “War buddies?”

  Bruder’s chin cocked as he thought about this and other things, too many for Linda to guess. He was carving a little whale from a bar of soap, and the thin, long shavings flew into a pile at his feet. “We met in the war.”

  “Ah, yes. Captain Poore’s famous Saint-Mihiel.”

  “I took it in the thigh in a communication trench at Beaumont-Hamel,” said Slaymaker. “Missed my soldier by a quarter of an inch.”

  “Half an inch,” said Hearts.

  Linda rolled her hands in her lap. She could feel the blood in her cheeks, and she was looking away from the orchard-heater hoping the others couldn’t detect that she felt out of place. She was determined to fit in; she had always hated it when down at the gutting house the fishermen had teased her with talk of poles and catch and she had wanted to be able to laugh it off but somehow she couldn’t; once, their talk had filled her with such a rage that she had hurled a ten-pound chicken halibut at a boatman, thumping it against his breast. Sometimes the fury would take hold of her and there’d be nothing she could do. “You’re ugly when you’re like that,” Edmund had said years ago. But Pasadena was a new town where no one but Bruder knew her and she could shed the parts of her past that didn’t sit well with her idea of herself. Once she’d overheard a lobsterman say of another man’s wife, “She’s a tough one, that señora,” and Linda had deciphered the compliment in the statement and hoped that one day someone would say the same
about her. Already she knew that no one would ever admire her for her delicately crossed ankles or her straight silky hair. No, she wanted to be a woman whom men stood back from and watched with awe. Like Valencia had been. Oh! the night when the guard drops and everything changes! Oh, the night.

  Linda asked how long Willis had been running the rancho. About five years, Slaymaker said; maybe less, added Hearts. Hearts was the quiet one, and his shyness suggested that he was the one in the pair who remembered facts more firmly. His ears stuck out from the side of his head like handles on an urn. He squinted when he looked at her, and when she asked if there was something wrong he said that he’d lost his glasses last season and was sure to have enough money for a new pair by the end of harvest. He and Slaymaker had been at the Pasadena since 1919, watching it through the idle months when the blossoms bulged and the whorl of leaves folded inward, forming the early tight knot of fruit. The two of them were Bruder’s deputies in leading the picking teams who arrived each fall, and were responsible for keeping track of each tree’s productivity. During the summer months, Hearts and Slaymaker grew cover crops of vetch or clover down the grove’s alleys—the middles, they called them—plowing them under in September to add humus and nitrogen to the soil.

  “But that’s not all we do around here,” said Slaymaker.

  “Oh no,” said Hearts. “There’s a whole lot more.”

  “We work every day but Christmas and New Year’s.”

  “We never work New Year’s,” said Hearts. “Every year, Slay and I enter the chariot races. I think this year’s going to be our lucky year and we’ll take home the hundred bucks and the wreath of yellow roses.”

  Linda asked Bruder if he had ever entered the chariot races, and he said that Willis wouldn’t lend him a horse.

  “That’s not the reason,” said Slaymaker.

  “It’s not the reason at all,” added Hearts. “It’s because Miss Lolly says it’s too dangerous and she won’t let her foreman risk his life.”

  Bruder turned his shark knife in his palm, the heater’s flames catching the blade, and he hurled the knife across the table and over Hearts’s head into the trunk of the pepper tree. “Stop telling lies, boys,” he said softly, and he walked off into the dark grove. He didn’t want anyone revealing him to Linda; he would do it in his own careful way. The story of the ranch and his life there was his, and he would tell Linda over time. As intelligent as he was, Bruder didn’t realize that the stories inevitably would come from all mouths, not only his, and that any myth he hoped to create would be embellished and retold by more eager tongues.

  By the time Slaymaker and Hearts went to bed, Linda had cleared the table and washed the dishes and found the oats and the eggs and the coffee for breakfast. She returned to the yard, where Bruder sat with his feet on an orange crate. A low blue flame burned in the heater, and he was motionless, looking heavenward. She didn’t know if he saw her standing there in the doorframe, but without turning he said, “Ever see the Little Dog?” His finger led her eye to three stars. “It’s Orion’s other hound.”

  “Where’d you learn that?”

  He pulled a chair close and offered it to her. “The constellations? I guess I learned about them at our depot in the beechwood forest.”

  “Were you with Papa?”

  “Not until the very end. But I was with Willis, and he and I would lie on the ground on the late-summer nights and stare up at the black sky and we wouldn’t talk about much except the stars.”

  “You were with Captain Poore?” Bruder said nothing, and Linda said, “It must have been lonely.”

  “No more lonely than everything else.”

  She didn’t believe him; or, rather, she wouldn’t allow herself to believe him. His letters had been a call to soothe an isolated heart. She had to believe this. What else did she have? “Captain Poore must’ve been a brave soldier.”

  Bruder shrugged. “You should ask him yourself for the real story.”

  “Why don’t you tell me?”

  “When we got to France, he didn’t know much about fixing an ignition’s trembler coils, and he barely knew how to dig a hole. He could shoot all right, but his head was small and his helmet kept slipping off and he was too vain to report that the smallest regulation helmet was too big for him. The only good thing about him were the crates of oranges that would arrive from the patriotic committee of Pasadena’s Board of Trade. He loved to hand them out to the other boys, and they were so desperate for fruit that they’d shower Willis with cigarettes and spare socks and iron rations in exchange, anything for an extra orange. One boy swapped six oranges for Willis’s spot on a raid into a no-man’s-land to fetch a broken-down Mark IV tank. And poor Willis watched the boy blow up before his very eyes. In fact, the boy’s helmet blew all the way back to our trench, and it ended up fitting Willis better than anything else. He was upset about that, and though some people say his skin is thick, it’s really very thin. But he wore the helmet, and over time he was given his chance to show his bravery. I’m sure he’ll tell you about it one day.”

  “He already has,” said Linda.

  Stars crowded the sky, the Milky Way a stain of light, and the full, cinereous moon exposed itself like the mouth of a lit passageway. A breeze rustled the pepper tree and prodded the orange leaves, and every now and then a scamper arose in the grove, dirt and leaves and dead stalks of clover kicked in chase. The mellow coo-coo of the burrowing owl crossed the small valley. Above them on the hill the white mansion gleamed, gold light pouring from its windows, and if Linda wasn’t mistaken, jazz was thin on the breeze: probably the aluminum whine of a disc graphophone.

  “Most nights they have a quartet playing on the terrace,” Bruder said when he noticed her foot tapping. “Sometimes eight players, and dancing beneath paper lanterns. For no occasion at all. Simply to put an end to the day.” The mansion’s world was too unfamiliar for any sort of envy to rise in her throat just then. She knew nothing of the marble busts of Roman gods and British naval officers, of the blue-and-yellow Savonnerie carpets and the faded Beauvais wall tapestries, of the aviaries stocked with blue-crested Victorian pigeons and Brazilian parrots taught to say Captain Willis Poore, Captain Willis Poore, of the lawn-croquet set with the balls crafted of ivory, the wickets of bent sterling, the ebony mallets. In the mansion lived Willis and Lolly, but Linda knew nothing yet of the pencil-mustached French cook or the puttering Scot valet; of the morning-coated secretary, Mr. Coren, whom Willis would eventually fire because of Mr. Coren’s annoying insistence on punctuality and penmanship; of the chambermaids pinned in wool and lace, a tiny-ankled crew led by Rosa; of the Japanese gardeners pruning the acres of lawn with hand shears and tending the thousand rosebushes and the camellia trees: the two-hundred-stamened Snow, the anemone-shaped Splendor, the C. japonica ‘Willis Fishe Poore.’

  The music they heard drifting down the hill was in fact a burl-walnut piano rolled onto the terrace accompanied by a trumpet, a pair of bongos, a wet-reed clarinet, and a singer in sherry-colored velvet—a common entertainment for the Rancho Pasadena, where guests gathered two or three nights a week, the bare shoulders and throats of the women protected by fox wraps and pearls. Societies and clubs made up of friends of Captain Willis and Miss Lolly Poore, clusters of citizens with birthright and acreage in common, often gathered on the terrace, with its view toward Los Angeles. They’d lean against the balustrade and tap their cigarette ashes down the kindling hill and pretend that the fizz in their grapefruit juice came from soda water and not from the crates of Oregon champagne hidden in the cellar behind a trick door. More than a couple of these clubs Willis’s father had chaired: the Valley Hunt Club, the Shakespeare Club, the Twilight Club, the 100 Percenters, this one made up exclusively of men descended directly from Pasadena’s one hundred original settlers. Willis knew that one day he too would keep a sharp eye over the membership lists. What was the motto the 100 Percenters toasted to? “City Beautiful, for one and for all.”

  But
on her first night at the Rancho Pasadena, Linda knew nothing yet of this world. Up on the hill the music stopped, and the night crackle and call of the ranchland grew louder, and Bruder said, “Sounds like they’re sending everyone home.”

  “Do you ever join them?”

  “He asks me up.”

  “Do you go?”

  “When I feel like it.”

  “Why did you want me to come here?”

  “We need a cook. The boys get hungry.” He paused. Should he say more? “Same for me.”

  “You could’ve hired anyone.”

  “You’re good enough in the kitchen.”

  Again, Linda tried to stem her disappointment; but hadn’t his letters promised more? Why did he insist upon withholding? And why did she? On the train she had told herself to expect nothing: even before seeing it she had envisioned the narrow room on the other side of the stove wall; and a long line of famished pickers, empty plates and tin cups in their grubby hands; and the pots nearly big enough to curl up in where the Burbank potatoes, a hundred at a time, would boil. That’s all she had expected of the job on the ranch, and yet somehow a small polished stone of hope had sat atop her heart. What did she hope for? She couldn’t say, that first night; but the cool breeze and the creamy stars and the fruitwood perfume and Bruder’s face haloed by the rim of his hat left Linda anxious for a future other than the unremarkable one unfurling before her. What had Willis said before he left her in her room? Hadn’t he said, I want you to be happy here. You’ll tell me if there’s anything I can do to make you happy? She had nodded and touched the coral pendant. The long day had made her think of her mother climbing the bluff from the ocean, surrendering her former self. Linda thought of the nights, after Edmund and then Bruder had left her alone with Dieter, when she had swum in the ocean: breaststroking out to sea as Condor’s Nest fell away, a mile out to ocean, maybe farther, Linda indistinguishable from any other fur-coated creature of the sea: an elephant-seal hunter would have spear-shot her from his prow. But the years had passed and Linda had taught herself to inter the longing, and on that first night in Pasadena she cleaned up the kitchen and dried the final plate—and Bruder closed the door to his room, eyeing her through the narrowing crack—and after the mansion fell dark and the ranch house quiet, Linda went to bed alone.

 

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