Pasadena

by David Ebershoff

  Mrs. Yuen, old but strong, helped Bruder oversee the packinghouse. Every morning she welcomed the girls to the ranch with a dish of burning incense and a gleam in the braid coiled atop her head and a little yellow steaming bean bun. She assigned packing stations to the girls, most of whom traveled by truck and wagon each morning from Titleyville or the Webb House, an orphanage and boardinghouse that each Christmas raised money by sending to the finer Pasadenans, including the Poores, pamphlets describing the home as a place where “everything is done to develop the Little Mexican Women into useful American citizens.” At the height of the season the packinghouse would employ more than fifty girls, and Linda would stay up late each night stuffing the tamales for the next day’s lunch. It shocked her the first day she went to the packinghouse and found Bruder yelling at one of the packers, a girl with frizzy hair around her brow. Her name was Constanza, and she held down her pear-bottom chin as Bruder complained about undersize oranges slipping into a packing crate. When at last he stopped she lifted her head, and her watery eyes, lit by the slender shaft of sunlight coming through the window beneath the eave, made Linda think of diamonds, like the teardrop stones she’d seen pinned to Lolly’s ears.

  “Do you have to yell at everyone?” Linda asked one afternoon in the ranch-house kitchen.

  “If they don’t do their job.”

  “I’m sure at least once someone’s yelled at you, and I’ll bet it didn’t make you feel all that good. I should think you’d try to remember that the next time.”

  “No one’s ever yelled at me. No one but you.”

  But Linda knew this wasn’t true, and she said, “What about when you were a boy? I’ve heard the stories.” She added, “Sometimes I think I can’t believe you.”

  She wasn’t sure who was more startled by her having said this, Bruder or herself. He was holding a glass and his knuckles whitened as anger ran through him; she flinched, knowing that the glass would momentarily shatter, but then Bruder set it down and left her. Since her arrival in Pasadena, so many people had told her so many things about Bruder—shards of history that contradicted his own version—that she wondered if she could ever believe him again. “You’ve succumbed to gossip,” he said when she asked him about his life at the Training Society. “Did they really used to call you ‘El Brunito’?” “No one’s ever called me anything but my name.” But this, too, wasn’t true—he just wished it were true, and he wished that Linda knew him only as the man he was today. The shame that came from memory struck Bruder, and he was sorry that Linda couldn’t perceive it blowing him about; if she were to stroke his cheek she would have felt the heat in his flesh, the blood rising in concussion. He was a wounded man, and sometimes it was all he could do to protect himself.

  “I’m just trying to run the ranch,” he’d say.

  Every morning before dawn Bruder picked up most of the packing girls at the Webb House and drove them to the Pasadena. The girls were fifteen or sixteen years old, many of them born in East Pasadena and abandoned at the Pasadena Settlement House because their mothers, whoever they were, knew that the Pasadena Hospital not only refused adult patients whose flesh wasn’t dairy-white but also turned away babies with any flecks of cocoa in their skin. The Settlement House was at California and Raymond, and its black-clothed administratrices prayed at Our Lady of Guadalupe and arranged for milk for any and all babies of Pasadena no matter the origins of the suckling mouth, and eventually these ladies—who prayed for a sighting of the Virgin Mary in their wall mirrors—placed the infants in the orphanages around town. This was how most of the packing girls first came to the Webb House, and even though they were natives to Pasadena, no one who ran the city considered them as such—for the girls were familiar with little beyond the orphanage and the neighborhoods of Lamanda Park and Eaton Wash, where Spanish floated from casita to casita through the jacarandas. The girls who packed the oranges weren’t refined enough to work in the mansions along Orange Grove and Hillcrest—or so they’d been told most of their lives and now they believed it. “I’ve raised my girls to be workers,” the Star-News quoted Mrs. Emily Webb, the Webb House’s headmistress, in an article about the Community Chest. Along with the girls from the Webb House, there were packers from all over the valley, from the Junior Republic and the Rosemary Cottage, where girls of a certain slowness studied kitchen crafts; from the Altadena foothills, where adobe houses burrowed into the chaparral, abutting mountain-lion dens; from East Pasadena bungalows where every child, no matter the age, contributed to the shallow, well-scraped pot. They came from the cottages tucked behind mansions, where extended families slept in bunks and hammocks and bedding rolls, and where a grandmother with arms as soft as avocados woke everyone before dawn to send them off to their jobs: the men to the citrus ranchos and the alfalfa and corn fields that still grew along the underbelly of Pasadena, the women to hotel laundries and galleys, through the back doors of mansions, down to basements where washtubs waited, spitting suds. But the girls with the strongest arms and the ugliest hands and the faces that didn’t look pretty beneath a maid’s pastry-puff cap met up with Bruder’s truck at the Raymond Street Station and rode out to the Rancho Pasadena, where a long day in the packinghouse paid slightly less than a chambermaid’s wages at the Hotel Vista.

  Every day at one o’clock in the packinghouse, the rubber belts stopped and the water-spray washer hissed to a trickle and an exhausted silence fell over the sizing bins as Linda arrived with lunch. A packer named Esperanza would help her distribute the tamales and the orange soda, passing the stations with a bottle opener. For thirty minutes the packers sat slumped on their stools, their canvas caps askew and their cheeks damp. A few would step outside into the pepper tree’s shade for a cigarette, but most ate inside and gossiped and wiped their throats. Esperanza, whose sister was a wet nurse in the home of a chocolate-bar heiress, aspired to become a seamstress, and practiced her needlework on her apron and the other girls’ aprons too, embroidering them with a bunch of red grapes or a climbing rose or a yellow-sailed schooner cutting a wave. As she helped Linda pack the tamales, she told her that one day she hoped to work in the mansion, hemming Miss Poore’s clothes and embroidering Captain Poore’s handkerchiefs with gold stitch.

  It seemed like a strange ambition to Linda, who spent more and more time imagining the house’s silent and dark hallways, brocade drapery beating back the sun. Life in a cage, she thought, but Esperanza had heard from her sister that being on a mansion’s staff meant warm meals in winter and cold drinks in summer and a tiled bath shared with only three others and a bed shared with no one at all. Every time Willis passed through the packinghouse, Linda would notice Esperanza tucking her hair up into her cap and shaking out her apron so that he could properly see the navel orange stitched to her breast. Whenever Willis spoke to Linda, she felt Esperanza’s eyes on her, and she slowly realized that more eyes than Esperanza’s studied each interaction between the captain and his ranch-house cook. What they were looking at, she didn’t know.

  Just as she didn’t know that no one’s eyes followed her as closely as Bruder’s.

  That year’s harvest began as one of the best in memory, and the Naranjo boys and the other teams of hands sent to the packinghouse hundreds, eventually thousands, of boxes of oranges. In a typical year the Pasadena’s most mature trees each produced enough oranges to fill two field boxes, but this year the boys were clipping from the best trees enough oranges to fill almost three. Slay and Hearts’s wagon was on a constant run between grove and packinghouse, a blue tarp across the boxes to protect them from the sun. At the packinghouse door a mound of oranges almost nine feet tall waited to be processed, and this backlog etched a new crease across Bruder’s brow. He would shout to the girls to work faster, but it was clear to Linda that they were already at capacity, and when she suggested that he hire a few more packers, Bruder told her to stay out of it or he’d put her on the packing line as well. And she would have joined them if she wasn’t so busy in the kitchen, fin
ishing breakfast and turning immediately to lunch, then to supper. Her first quiet hour came just before midnight, her last ended in the pitch-black at a quarter to five.

  Once hauled in from the groves, the field boxes stood for two days at the packinghouse, to allow some of the rind moisture to evaporate, enhancing the oranges’ sturdiness. The sight of hundreds of boxes laid out tested Bruder’s patience even more—Idle!, as he put it—especially when Willis inspected the boxes, turning the dimpled oranges in the sun: “When will you get to these?” Once, Willis brought Lolly with him. They were on their way to a tennis match, he in a white vest and calico pants and she in a pleated skirt with a white band across her forehead, and she refused to get out of the car, instead peering into the packinghouse with hand-visored eyes.

  “He’s a fool,” Bruder would say of Willis.

  “He’s got a lot on his mind,” Linda would reply.

  “So do I.”

  When she wasn’t helping Linda, Esperanza worked as a washer, submerging the oranges in a warm bath and scrubbing the dust from the rinds with a soft brush. She’d rinse the oranges in a cold shower, and then rollers would carry them beneath a blast of hot air, so that they were dry by the time they reached the grading table. At first the packinghouse reminded Linda of the Fleisher gutting house, but the packinghouse was more sophisticated than that, the graders as precise as jewelers sizing orange diamonds. During the harvest, Willis spent much of his time surveying the grading table, for he knew that this was where his money came from. He’d watch the canvas belt carry the oranges past the graders, who examined them for size and quality, separating them into classes. The graders were experts, trained under the oily eye of Mr. Griffith, and Willis liked to stand behind them and watch how they scooted the different grades of oranges onto the four separate belts that carried them to the proper sizing machines. “These people pay for the ranch,” Willis was known to say. Or, on a bad day, “Those graders are going to make me a poor man one day.” The graders wore white lab coats and gloves, and they inspected the fruit with a seriousness that impressed Linda, in part because they seemed to ignore Willis when he disagreed with them: “That orange was perfectly fine!” One grader, a red-nosed man named Mr. Foote, pretended not to hear Willis at all, and when Willis demanded that he be fired, Bruder refused. “Then I’ll do it myself,” Willis declared, but Mr. Foote remained firmly at his station atop his stool, running his gloved hands over the rolling oranges and pulling out the dross.

  After they rolled by the graders, the oranges passed between two wood rollers that ran alongside each other like the arms of a V. Each orange shuffled up between the V’s yawning limbs until it reached the place where it no longer touched either roller, and then it plopped into a canvas bin collecting exactly that size of orange. It was an efficient procedure, refined over the years by Willis’s father, who had always searched for methods to remove manpower from the harvesting process. “He hoped to one day run a handless rancho,” Willis would say. “Get rid of everyone but his family.”

  The packers at the collecting bins quickly wrapped each orange in tissue and then carefully placed it in the shipping box. If they were slow, or if the orange haul was too heavy, the bins were emptied in piles on the floor while the girls, their skin reeking of orange oil, packed crate after crate. They would complain about the scent, and Bruder would tell them that there’d been a time in France when no bride would think of marrying without an orange blossom upon her breast. “Think of the French girls,” he’d say, dismissing his packers’ dissatisfaction.

  A packer might be expected to fill almost seventy-five boxes in a day, but by the beginning of December, Bruder was telling each girl she’d have to nail lids into ninety crates before the wagon would return her home at dusk. It was Bruder’s idea to require the packers to deposit a ticket in each crate so that he could trace lazy work. More than once on the packinghouse floor he ceremoniously opened a crate returned from the Growers Exchange, publicly firing the girl whose careless packing had spawned a pretty green wrapping of mold. It was an awful sight, his big hand enclosing the girl’s wrist, holding it up as if she were the winner of some sort of contest, while the other girls stood around in their aprons silently loathing him and the packinghouse and everything about the Rancho Pasadena. Sometimes they wished the pay were worse so they could quit without hearing the screams back home at the kitchen table, the ¡Maldito sea! from the soft-armed grandmother, from the pencil-mustached brother, from the father in the yellow-collared shirt, from the slutty sister, from the toothless, milky mouth of a newborn. The girls who lived at the Webb House had it even worse: were they to return to the orphanage having lost their job, Mrs. Emily Webb was likely to fold her mole-dotted arms and say, “Well, then. I’ve been thinking a few things over. Perhaps it’s time you thought about leaving the Webb House.” Her narrow shoe-shape face, its leathery texture attacked nightly by a generous application of Ingram’s Milkweed Cream, would remind the unemployed girl what she already knew: that the Webb House shut its doors upon the indolent, the dishonest, the syphilitic, the pregnant, and the whore—not necessarily in that order. It did not occur to Mrs. Emily Webb—and why should it?; she was born in a taffeta-draped nursery on Orange Grove Avenue and married a banker whose only fault was long ago to have stepped in front of a Pacific Electric trolley on New Year’s Day—that a girl could lose her position at the Rancho Pasadena for any reason other than insouciance or laziness; no, Mrs. Emily Webb was unfamiliar with the subtleties of injustice. “Lost jobs are our own faults,” she was known to say, each morning at a quarter to six, ringing her cowbell to wake the girls in the dormered attic. “In our world, a girl is given but one chance in life. After that, her fate is sealed.”

  Linda learned this when she took the girls back to the Webb House one night. It was the first time she had driven the buckboard on Pasadena’s streets, and only from the vantage of the plank bench did she see how the city no longer accommodated horse and wagon. The roadsters and the Tin Lizzies buzzed around her; the cow-spotted mare shied from the honking and the tailpipe shots. Linda drove down into the arroyo and up the opposite hill, over toward the intersection of California and Raymond. Esperanza sat on the bench with Linda, and a dozen girls rode in the wagon bed. The early-winter evening blanketed the valley with timid dusk as the horse clopped along and the yellow lights in the store windows flickered on. The bird rouge on Esperanza’s full cheeks had turned waxy during her packing shift, and her teased bangs sprang from her cap. She was no taller than five feet, but she was one of the older girls at the Webb House, almost twenty, and she was careful to stay in good standing with Mrs. Webb, who thought enough of her to have given her a tiny muffin-size sewing box on her last birthday. “Sometimes Mrs. Webb says I’m the only one of her girls who’ll manage to stay out of trouble,” Esperanza confided to Linda.

  The wagon continued down California Street, past the diaper laundry and the enormous window of the P. F. Erwin Electrical Distributorship, where footlights shone on a display of its endless electrical wares: Telechron clocks, plug-in waffle irons, coffee urns, casserole dishes, hot plates, Hoover uprights, lamps with skin shades painted with scenes of hummingbirds, massaging pads, torchères, and silver-plate milk warmers. The store was so modern and brightly lit that it, and all of California Street, felt to Linda like another world. The wagon passed through the pool of yellow light cast from Erwin’s window, and Esperanza leaned in toward Linda and whispered, “You know what’s above Erwin’s, don’t you?”

  But Linda did not.

  “It’s where Dr. Freeman is,” Esperanza said, pointing at the brick building. “He’s the only one in town, and the trouble is, he charges a month’s wages for a visit.” The three windows on the second floor were blacked out by roller shades, but Linda saw a crack of light at the sill. As the wagon passed the building, a girl in a slip-on sweater emerged from a door in the side alley that Linda guessed led to the upstairs office. The girl was arranging a china-blue beret on
her head, and her face was pretty and round and her eyes were turned up. The light from Erwin’s window bathed the girl in a gold glare as she stood in the alley, her arms extended and her palms out—as if she was startled to find herself there. In the golden light the girl seemed to be presenting herself to the alley: a creamy school-age cheek half hidden by mink-brown hair, fluttering eyelids, ankles wobbly in gunmetal-leather shoes. She dug through her purse for a handkerchief, and Esperanza said, “They say that Dr. Freeman was in love with his own sister, and after she died he went into this sort of business. They say he only does it for the money. They say—”