Pasadena

by David Ebershoff

  “My father didn’t care much for music,” said Willis. “He always said it required too much sitting around.” Willis’s father, he said, was a strong, compact man who sneered at fanciness even as he surrounded himself with marble and gilt. From years of his riding about the rancho, his skin was as tough and rich as hide. Picking oranges had bulked up his forearms to the firm shape of two meaty drumsticks. He talked with one corner of his mouth cocked and made sucking noises as emphasis, and he almost hadn’t gone to the concert at the opera house that night. “Who is this Bluehill Baby anyway?” But word reached Willis Fishe Poore that a young woman of exceptional beauty was singing and that every night she caused the audience to stomp its feet and shout for more. As an encore to the Donizetti and the Bellini on her program Annabelle would sing two songs of a more folksy quality: “The Girl with the Crab-Red Hair” and “Sweet Casco Bay.” Between the bel canto and the Maine folksongs, Annabelle would change out of a leaf-colored dress sewn with Bohemian crystal and into a velveteen gown the color of blueberries that revealed a ballerina’s neck and small, beautiful shoulders. Across these shoulders lay a patchy brown stole of indeterminate fur, like a dead deer slumped across the rump of a mule. Annabelle Cone’s voice wasn’t especially big, and it wobbled like a truck as she drove up the peaks of the high C’s. Nor was her diction impressive; in fact, most of the time she couldn’t be understood, and not just because the songs were in Italian. This was Donizetti and Bellini, and the audience was filled with Pasadenans, and women, and men too, in this town were known to study up on a libretto before going to the opera house. No, her vocal talent was limited, destined to earn her a living as long as she was healthy and young but—and Annabelle Cone knew this better than anyone else—the day her beauty began its inevitable retreat, her career would end.

  What was all the fuss?, Willis Fishe wondered impatiently in the audience. But then in the interludes Annabelle would lift her hem and display ankles in pinky-brown stockings, and she would dance across the stage in a quick, proud trot, her calves as pretty as sweetmeats beneath the lights. As she finished each song she’d throw a prop—a country-white rose, a paper fan, a handful of peas—into the audience, which swayed en masse trying to catch them. And on that fateful night her leopard-lily corsage landed in Willis’s lap, the rusty stamens staining his fly. The man next to him received a dark, wet handkerchief that smelled like old roses fallen to the ground. Three rows back, a man caught an empty Eau-de-Moi perfume bottle shaped like a mermaid, with a pretty fake-gold cap.

  But it was during the encore—as the Bluehill Baby belted out “She had crab-red hair, that made me long and stare!”—that Willis Fishe Poore knew he must meet the soprano. After the recital he went to leave his calling card with the opera house’s manager, a bald, happy gentleman who walked home every night with his cash in his boot. But to Willis Fishe’s surprise, the manager told him that Miss Cone was waiting for him backstage. Willis Fishe found her at her mirror, pinning her hair into a plump chignon. Years later, he would often describe the scene as virtually the reunion of a brother and sister: “It was as if we had known each other all our lives, separated at birth or something of the such.” Their eyes met thrice in the three-panel mirror, and never again did they look away. But in fact they didn’t speak that night. They kissed on the dusty backstage and Willis Fishe repinned the leopard lily to Annabelle’s bosom and stroked her cheek, which he always said was as cold as north-face snow.

  After that, Annabelle and Willis Fishe began a short-lived correspondence, his letters delivered by wagon from the ranch, the driver instructed to wait for Miss Cone’s reply. “One long furious week of love written on the page,” said Willis Fishe’s son. After one week the marriage proposal arrived, in Willis Fishe’s nearly illegible hand. Annabelle Cone accepted it at once and arrived at the Pasadena on a September morning in 1898 in her bridal gown, ivory lace hiding her face. The mayor of Pasadena was fetched, and in a little ceremony on the lawn, Willis Fishe Poore and Annabelle Cone were married, the maids, including Rosa’s mother, throwing rose petals and whispering behind their cupped hands. As the mayor read through his rigmarole, Willis Fishe realized that he had never heard his bride-to-be speak, and he anticipated the voice of the smallest, prettiest bird. But when she declared “I do,” he learned how wrong a man can be. Only then did he discover that her beautiful if somewhat strained soprano coexisted with a speaking voice not of liquid gold or fruitwood oil or the small trill of a songbird but as fierce, and as difficult on the ear, as a peacock’s scream.

  But this last part Linda didn’t learn from Captain Poore. No, this aspect of the story came from Rosa, who had learned it from her mother. “It’s how mistakes are made,” said Rosa. “And lives ruined.” She described the lawn wedding as rushed and private—“Annabelle was so thin, she would show within the month”—and how several weeks later the police shut down the Grand Opera House after discovering that it was the front for a brothel. Linda said that she didn’t believe her, and Rosa said, “Fine, don’t.” But during the raid, it seemed, the police had discovered a secret chamber, occupied à deux, that the arrested house manager, in confession, called “Annabelle’s Attic.” And a second room, with walls padded in blue velveteen, identified as “Miss Cone’s Candy Cove.”

  9

  During her first days in her new room, Linda learned more and more about life in the big house and in the little city endlessly expanding nearby. The more she discovered, the deeper her interest ran, and the further Bruder felt from her. Despite herself, everything about the Rancho Pasadena fascinated her, nothing more so than Captain Poore himself. Each morning he walked her down the hill—and often he’d walk her back up again at night—and once or twice he visited her in the ranch-house kitchen and leaned against the table while she dressed the chickens or chopped the onions; and the sweet, eye-burning odor would rise to her nostrils, carrying her back to Condor’s Nest. Willis would comment, “Even after growing up on an onion farm, they still make you cry,” and she’d dab her eyes with her sleeve. He asked about her mother, and she told him the stories; twice he asked how she had died, and the third time she described the landslide. This was on a cold December night when the kitchen’s warmth draped the windows with opaque moisture and the ranch on the other side of the glass was blurry. Linda realized that no one could see clearly into the kitchen, that anyone passing by would see only fuzzy shapes of movement. She talked of the steady ache and said she doubted it would go away. Willis said that his heart too had collapsed when he saw the dirigible deflate, the silver balloon sinking in the sky.

  But on many nights Willis was busy with meetings and committees and hearings about various issues, including a proposed motor parkway connecting Pasadena to Los Angeles (he was in favor) and the Bakewell & Brown design for the new City Hall (he was in favor of a belfry, but others wanted a dome).

  Lolly was equally busy in her own pursuits. The Monday Afternoon Club would meet in the Ladies’ Lounge of the Huntington Hotel to discuss literature and geography, and the Women’s Committee of the Valley Hunt Club gathered to put the finishing touches on the New Year’s ball and the flower-draped carriage for the Tournament of Roses. Lolly was as aware of her responsibilities to Pasadena’s civic advancements as her brother was, and the seriousness with which she pursued them gave her a tight-faced appearance, like the skin atop a cup of warmed-over milk. Despite her slightness, and her frequent but unspecified infirmities, Lolly was an energetically organized, determined, and carefully bunned woman who kept a tidy appointment book and, folded and tucked into her sleeve, a list of things to accomplish during each day: write the mayor about the dangers of the chariot races; discuss Christmas goose with Cook; beat the carpets; “swim 1 mile”—the 1 then crossed out and changed to a 2. Her efficiency—she could be a tall, slender blur in the hall—further contradicted Rosa’s description of a soft-fleshed invalid, gasping for breath and strength. It was true that there was a silliness to her repeated recitation of her i
ron deficiency and her struggle to stay afloat in the pool because she lacked “a normal person’s buoyancy of fat.” But she was not the little girl frozen in time Rosa had depicted; nor was Captain Poore a selfish little boy.

  They were rich and they were spoiled and they were eccentric, but they were always kind to Linda.

  On her own, Linda came to this conclusion—that Rosa depicted the Poores unfairly—just as she realized that the ranch and the city constituted a whole, full world, one that she believed more and more could make a small place for her. Each evening as she rested her cheek upon the spiny down pillow, the silk canopy stretching above her and the little clock ticking, she grew ever more accustomed to the room that had seemed so foreign that first night. And just as she had grown used to living in the house—referring to the pretty little room as “mine” without knowing she was doing so—Bruder asked when was she moving back to the ranch house.

  “I can’t return there.”

  “I understand. But you don’t want to get too used to it. It’ll be hard to leave when the season ends.”

  “I’ll be ready to go when the time comes. It’s just a big old house.” And she put her arms around him and tilted her head in that way she had discovered could affect him more than anything she could say. She didn’t know that she wasn’t speaking the truth—she didn’t know her heart well enough to be so calculating. No, she simply said things she knew she should, even if they were false. She implied that she would return to the ranch house if Willis would permit her, and against his best judgment Bruder believed her. He said, “I’ll talk to Willis.” “I’ve already tried,” Linda said quickly. “He won’t budge. Besides, what difference does it make after all? Nearly all my time is spent right here in the kitchen, where I’ve always been.” And then: “With you.” The raw, unpainted shelves, the floorboards so widely spaced that they perpetually trapped the dirt, and the stained oilcloth suddenly depressed her; was this really how she’d been meant to spend her days? But she continued, “Nothing’s really changed. I might as well be sleeping in the little room back there,” and she pointed to where they had shared their night; but now that Linda knew better, she realized the room was nothing more than a closet; in fact, Lolly’s closet, shown to Linda by Rosa, was more than twice as large.

  But just as something almost imperceptible was shifting within Linda, a new sense of trust was taking shape within Bruder. He hungrily believed her, just as he recalled every detail of her body: the strong lines on the inside of her arms, her narrow, moon-white hips, the pink nipples upturned and greeting him, the flash of dark, dark hair between her thighs. He had been only with whores, and he never really looked at them, never wanted to look into their eyes, and with them his hands would find cool, hard flesh in the dark and he’d go about his business and finish up and always he’d say thank you. He was the type of man to pay in advance, so that the girl would know his word was good and his money real and so she could relax a little—if that was possible; Bruder didn’t fool himself about what the girl was thinking. But it was as if he had found an entirely different type of pleasure in Linda, and the short hours holding her had left him desperate for more. Nightly he reminded himself of the virtue of patience, and once or twice he thought that if he was to marry her, they could at last be together and Willis would have to let Bruder build a cabin at the far end of the grove, and there, together, they’d wait for fate to run its course. No matter what, Bruder remained committed to his belief in fate: they were meant to be together, and the time would come, and if he didn’t have this, what else would he have? He would say to her, “We’ll be together.”

  And she would say, “I know.”

  When there were moments to steal, they kissed, and rubbed the dusk-cold from their hands, and Bruder failed to taste the hesitation on her lip or feel it in her fingertips. When she asked about Rosa, why he was spending so much time with her, he failed to hear the skepticism in Linda’s voice. “How many times do I have to tell you? She’s my friend, and I’ve made a promise.”

  When he said that she should be careful around Willis, Bruder was oblivious to her averted eye. He never saw the joy lifting Linda’s chin when Willis stopped by the ranch house. Bruder might have been suspicious of others, but not of her. “There’s nothing duplicitous about Linda,” he confessed to Rosa, who replied, in a distracted way, “I’m sure you’re right.”

  One night, Bruder asked Linda to stay with him. “Let’s sit by the fire and watch the stars,” he said. “There are so many tonight.” And she agreed. “But let me go up and wash my face and change my dress.” He told her that she looked beautiful right then, and she said, “I’ve been working since five o’clock. Let me go and change.” And he tugged her hands and she slipped out of his grasp and ran up the hill.

  In her room there was an oval mirror in a wooden stand, and in front of it she changed, and brushed down her hair, and tried a little of Rosa’s lipstick and clasped the coral pendant around her throat. The dress was old, but Esperanza had embroidered pink and yellow roses on the cuffs and the collar, and Linda unwrapped the stockings she had bought all those weeks ago, the silk now flimsy and dead-feeling in her hand. She wished she had a new dress and a new pair of stockings, but she didn’t; and she reminded herself of what Bruder was always saying about patience. He would say that it would bring both of them their true fate. She liked to challenge him: “But what if I’m meant for something else? Shouldn’t I hurry up and chase it? Grab it?” And she’d clutch his shirt and pull Bruder toward her, and if no one was around they would kiss. Once Hearts and Slay saw them in an embrace, and one of them said, “Uh-oh. Looks like trouble,” and the other laughed, and Linda and Bruder, holding on tight, each laughed into the sweet musk of the other’s hair.

  Then there was a knock on her door. “Linda? Are you there? Lolly wants to know if you’ll come down and join us.”

  Through the door she said, “I can’t tonight.”

  “What can’t wait until morning?”

  She thanked Willis and asked if she could join them another time, and he said, a bit impatiently, “Why not tonight?”

  She said she needed to return to the kitchen. Willis promised there’d be music and he lowered his voice and said he had a good bottle of champagne on ice and Lolly wasn’t going to have any and wouldn’t it be a shame for him to have to drink it alone. “Linda? For a little bit?”

  She hesitated, and the reflection in the mirror showed a beautiful girl dressed for an evening grander than a night by the ranch-house fire. “I can’t,” she tried again.

  But then Willis was saying, “Do this for me?” He knocked impatiently on the door, and then the knob turned (when she’d first moved in, she’d noticed that there had once been a lock on the door but that it had been removed), and Willis was standing at the threshold. He was dressed in his dinner jacket, and his hair was tonicked down, and he was handsome and held a white-hearted rose in his palm. “For a few minutes?”

  And Linda, who sometimes lost track of herself, agreed. “Just twenty minutes. Then I’ll have to go back to the ranch house.”

  She stepped into the hall, and the music greeted her. They followed it, descending the stairs, passing the window with its view of the mountains; the lights from the observatory burned like low-hanging stars. On the loggia was a graphophone in a richly oiled wood box, its great petunia horn pumping jazz. Lolly was on a wicker swing reading the newspapers. Willis said, “May I get you some cider?” He winked and disappeared and, in a minute, returned with two brown mugs filled with champagne. Linda brought her mug to her lips and sipped; she coughed then, the bubbles tickling her throat, and it felt as if at once a bubble rose and popped in her head. Giddiness took her by the hand.

  “Have you been ill, too?” asked Lolly. “That cough of yours?”

  “Let’s get some real music going,” said Willis. He switched records, resetting the hummingbird needle. A rhythmic version of “Rumble, Tumble” began to play, and Willis kicked his feet a l
ittle and the champagne sloshed in his mug. His shoes were shiny, and his medal looked as if it too had been polished. He had gone to the barber recently, and the shell-pink scar was exposed and he mindlessly rubbed it with his handkerchief before wiping the spilled champagne from his thigh.

  “Do you like to dance?” he asked Linda.

  “Of course she likes to dance,” said Lolly. “What girl doesn’t?”

  “You don’t, sister.”

  “That’s different.” Lolly rolled her eyes and they turned in their sockets like two large, handblown marbles. It was as if she had said, Men! Or, What will I ever do with him? She pulled the American Weekly insert out of the Star-News and shook back the pages and burrowed into the stories with an Oh goodness me, like a sighing dog curling up for sleep. But soon she was emitting noises as she read the gossip: Aha and Mmm-hmm and Uh-huh and Tsk-tsk and a short, whiplike “I knew it.” Her commentary continued as she read along:

  “That figures.”