Pasadena

by David Ebershoff

“I saw it coming.”

  And once, “I always knew she should’ve been more careful.”

  “Anything good in the paper, sister?”

  “Just the usual odds and ends,” she said, although her perusal of the society page was performed with an earnestness and exactitude that swelled beyond casual interest. On the days when she opened the newspaper and found neither herself nor Willis mentioned, she was both relieved and disappointed. “But the last place you want to end up is in Chatty Cherry’s column,” Lolly would say, pushing her face into the newsprint and clearing her throat and saying, more to herself than to anyone else, “Now let’s see what old Cherry’s dug up this time.”

  She read the column while Willis fiddled with another disk, and Linda felt the champagne rise in her head. “Listen to this one,” said Lolly, who, Linda could see, managed to tap endless reserves of energy to make her way through the gossips. Lolly denied that she was hooked. “I only read Cherry’s column with any regularity. The others I just skim. Besides, the American Weekly recently gave her twice the space, so now she coughs up all sorts of useful news.” As if to prove that Chatty Cherry’s column was of greater merit than those pecked out by other society reporters, Lolly opened to it, cleared her throat, looked up to make sure Willis and Linda were listening, and began:

  ANOTHER WEEK IN THE VALLEY

  By Chatty Cherry

  I wonder whose daughter didn’t fit into her debutante dress the other morning when she went to try it on? They say screams could be heard across several San Marino estates, all the way down to the old mill, I was told, disturbing even the swallows. Was it one too many “ile flotantes,” this season’s dessert of choice at the Valley Hunt Club, or was it something of an entirely different nature? Meanwhile, did anyone notice which railroad man’s wife was strap-hanging on a competitor’s line last Monday? Where was she going anyway, and what was in her Broadway Brothers bag? I didn’t know she shopped there, did you? Could the not unattractive woman have been on her way to that young bride’s first attempt at throwing a ladies’ luncheon? Probably not, but in any case sources say the naive hostess spent too much time preparing her hair and face and not enough worrying over her canapes and her tennis-special punch. All in all, a failed afternoon, many women agreed as they walked in wet ivy to fetch their cars since the valet boys either forgot to show up or were never hired. But it provided plenty to talk about the next day on the Garden Club’s tour, didn’t it? That is, until the tour reached the Linda Vista yard where a workman was found sleeping shirtless and sweaty in a cart. The Garden Club, made up almost exclusively of ladies, collectively averted its eyes, except for one pretty blue pair belonging to a not old woman who has shown previous interest in household staff. The man was fired and the Garden Club left before viewing the narcissus patch behind the tennis court. And while we’re on the topic, guess which ladies tennis champion seems to think there’s room for her at the Mid-wick’s bachelor bar? They say even the club manager can’t throw her out, but who am I to say what’s right and wrong?

  “Where is that reporter from?”

  “Who, Cherry?” Lolly brought a ringed finger to her chin. “I don’t really know. She turned up only a few years back. But I don’t know anyone in town who doesn’t read her.”

  “Have you met her?” asked Linda.

  “Met Cherry? Of course not. You never want to meet Cherry. She’s a lurker. Hanging around a hibiscus shrub to get a story—that sort of business. No one wants to talk to her. No one answers her phone calls.”

  “Somebody must talk to her,” said Willis. “Somebody’s feeding her the news.”

  “The maids are, that’s who,” said Lolly. “It’s a problem for everyone. You’ve got to watch your gals.”

  “Not ours,” said Willis.

  “I wouldn’t trust that Rosa with my middle name.”

  “Be kind, sister. Rosa’s a good girl, and you know it.”

  “I’m sure she’s the one who spilled the news about my anemia.”

  “Ah, sister, put the paper down and let’s dance.”

  Willis pulled Lolly from the swing and she complained about her legs and protested that she really shouldn’t, the doctor said … Yet as soon as they began to two-step, her eyes narrowed and her lips pressed together and she concentrated on the task of dancing around the loggia. The song had a long refrain—Rollick frolic! Frisker whisker!—and each time it came around Willis would plunge his sister so low in his arms that she’d become a board nearly horizontal above the floor and her hair would loosen from its knot and fill out like fruit swelling on the branch. Linda watched them, and she wondered what was the likelihood that her old pal Charlotte Moss had moved up the coast and reinvented herself as Chatty Cherry. It seemed unlikely that she could have attained such influence in four short years, but after all, weren’t transformations often seemingly completed overnight? You go to bed one person, and wake up as someone else. Wasn’t that the point? To shed the past like a layer of grime running down the drain?

  When the record ended, Willis redeposited his sister in the swing. Lolly was flushed, and her chest rose and fell as she caught her breath, and she swabbed her throat with a piece of lace. Her eyes were pale and sensitive and trained on Willis.

  “Now it’s your turn,” he said to Linda.

  She moved to him, but Lolly said, “Oh, she doesn’t want to dance with you. She must think we’re so silly. She’s too grown-up for such horsing around.”

  But Linda said that indeed she did want to dance, and soon Willis’s arms were around her and holding her close. His hand upon the small of her back made a subtle circling motion as he guided her around the loggia, and it was as if he had found a spot on her flesh she herself didn’t know: his strong fingers working the flesh beneath her cheap, thin dress. Willis hadn’t even noticed the embroidery, Linda realized; it was as if he had seen right through everything she wore, as if she might as well have worn nothing at all.

  And Linda closed her eyes and imagined that it was Bruder holding her, leading her round the loggia. No, what she imagined in fact was more complicated than that: she dreamed that Bruder was Captain Poore, that Captain Poore’s world was Bruder’s, and that she and Bruder could live like this, together and alone and comforted by the vastness of the ranch cradled in the valley. It was simple for her to envision, an entire world formed bright and green behind her eyelids, and it couldn’t have been further from reality, but there it was in Linda’s mind, every last detail of her desired world conceived.

  The evening continued, but every time Linda said she had to be going, Willis would bring her a refilled mug and say, “One more dance.” Linda would refuse, but he’d pull her hand and she’d relent, and she wanted both to leave and to stay and her impulses were crossed and confused. Willis put on a new record and took turns dancing with Linda and Lolly. While he danced with Linda, Lolly would return to the gossip columns and she’d read the especially good items aloud, and her gleeful chuckle was as close to a cackle without being a cackle as was possible. And while Willis danced with his sister, Linda would lean against a pillar and listen to the breeze in the philodendron leaves and the trickle in the fountain. After almost an hour he said, “I’m worn out,” and he plopped onto the wicker sofa and lay on his back with his feet on the floor and he looked like a teenager slouched and drunk. Then he popped up and refilled his mug, and Linda’s as well, and Lolly said, “Maybe I’ll have a little cider after all.” But Willis was quick to say, “Sister, do you think you should? Didn’t the doctor say to count your sugar? Cider’s nothing but.”

  “Maybe you’re right.” And Lolly tugged a long woven-silk sash that hung from the ceiling, and a tinny little bell, like the kind on a shop’s door, jingled. She yanked it until Rosa scurried onto the loggia, asking what she could get Miss Poore.

  Lolly ordered some tea. Before she left, Rosa looked at Linda in a way that embarrassed her, and Linda felt that she was being accused of pretending to be someone she was not. She wa
nted to defend herself: He invited me! I didn’t ask to be here! She wanted to go to the kitchen with Rosa and help with the tea; she wanted to touch Rosa somewhere where her flesh was bare and vulnerable and say, “Promise me one thing? You won’t mention any of this to Bruder? I’m not trying to hide anything, but you know how he is.…” But Rosa had turned on her heel too quickly for Linda to say anything at all. She and Bruder had never discovered how Willis had learned about their night together in the narrow bed, and Linda had concluded that it was Rosa. “She’s spying on us,” Linda had said to Bruder. “She told him.” But Bruder held her fists and kissed her forehead and said, “Don’t be silly. You don’t know Rosa the way I do.” He said, “It was just a coincidence. He doesn’t know what happened. He’s a suspicious man. He could see something between us, that’s all. That’s why he made you move up the hill. Don’t think about it. And don’t blame Rosa. Linda, she wants to be your friend.” But Linda said, “I know how a girl like Rosa can be.”

  It was an unkind thing to say, and Bruder told her so, adding, “I don’t like it when you’re cruel.” And this pricked Linda sharply and she pulled back and said, “I didn’t mean to be. You’re right. I won’t think about Rosa like that anymore.” But Linda couldn’t stop herself; the accusation swelled in her mind every day.

  While they waited for Rosa to bring the tea, Lolly and Willis began arguing over what Linda quickly surmised they’d been arguing about for several days: whether or not to pave the road that ran from the front gate up one side of the hill and down the other to the ranch house. “I refuse to live through another year of mud,” said Lolly, folding her arms.

  “You make it sound like the mud lasts forever. We have our rainy days, and by February the skies are mostly clear and the mud dries and it isn’t all that bad. We’re not living back east, after all.”

  “Even so, when it’s muddy, the road can become impassable. Dangerous, even!” Her fingers fell on Linda’s hand in emphasis, or warning.

  Willis changed the record again, and soon the Bubb Brothers were singing, according to Willis, “authentic Harlem jazz-a-roo!” The song was about a girl named Maggie who’d been lost on a street corner, and the Bubbs crooned and their voices were more intoxicating than the champagne. When Rosa returned with the teapot, Linda asked if she could help, but it was an ill-timed question, for what was there for her to do now that the tea had been delivered? “I’ll see you in the morning,” said Rosa, and the look on Willis’s face suggested that he thought that was a rude thing to say to Linda, no matter that it was true—unless, of course, something were to happen to Linda between now and the morning. But what could happen? she thought, reminding herself that she’d have to emphasize to Rosa and to Bruder and to Hearts and Slay that it was only by chance that she had ended up in the room at the end of the mansion’s hall, and not one of them. It hadn’t been her doing at all.

  Once Rosa was gone, Willis pulled Linda up again and held her firmly to his chest. The space between them narrowed to a nearly imperceptible gap, and soon his heartbeat echoed in her breast. Willis said that he wanted to teach her a step called the Grizzly Bear. It involved two or three low sways and then a heavy pounce. “And be sure to curl your fingers like claws.” Together, Linda and Willis swayed and pounced, and he growled like a cub.

  She had never known anyone like Willis, and she couldn’t yet anticipate him. Once, Willis left a note on her pillow for no reason at all: “Sleep well. Dawn will be here soon.” The next night he left a second note, and Linda tore it open, her heart racing over their flowering friendship, but then stopping with disappointment: “We’re having sixty for dinner tomorrow night. I’m sure Rosa could use an extra hand.”

  They continued to dance, and the wind rose in the yews, and then rain began to patter in the fountain and on the carpet of ryegrass. Rosa emerged from the house and began to roll down the canvas shades that enclosed the loggia like a tent. Linda moved to help, but Willis pulled her and said, “Let Rosa do it.” Linda said that it would take only a minute—the shades needed to be fastened down, like sails, to the floor and to the side pillars—but when she tried to take one of the shade’s corners, Rosa shook her head. “No, keep dancing.”

  Soon the rain had turned heavy, pelting the canvas and shaking the fabric in gusts. The loggia had the feeling of a sultan’s grand tent, candlelight flickering against canvas wall and orchids folding demurely in the chill, and as the rain grew in intensity it seemed as if the tent were under siege. It had turned even colder, and Rosa rolled out a heater—the same kind used to warm the orchards—and lit a blue flame in its chimney. But Willis wanted to continue dancing; he riffled through his stack of record disks and held up one and said, “You’ll love it.” And he was right, Linda loved the music, the soft cry of a song called “Valley of the Night” and the harp in the ballad “Mountaintop for Two.”

  The storm was pelting the canvas walls so hard that Linda was sure it must be hailing too. She shivered, and Willis rubbed her spine in a friendly way, pressing out the cold. Their bodies touched in many places, their chests and thighs and knees and the simmering skin of their cheeks. The orchard-heater’s gem-blue flame burned clear and hard, and something warm spread across Linda, a seeping feeling, and Willis was saying something—Isn’t it nice to have you here, she thought it was—and for some reason Linda was confused by this: she wasn’t sure if he meant her or Lolly, who remained on the swing enjoying the news, her fingertips now smudged with ink. The record ended, and the music gave way to the blowing night. The rain was falling in waves, and it made her think of the nights she used to lie awake, Siegmund at her side, listening to the surf. A clap of thunder startled her, and Willis too, and they pressed together, and it felt as if something passed from Willis to Linda, nothing more visible or tangible than a current of electricity or the pulsing wind, and whatever it was, it was small and hidden from the eye, but nonetheless it was there and had transferred, between them. The needle continued to scratch, and Lolly got up and changed the disk. “This one’s my favorite.” Soon a creamy-voiced man was singing about the night he found his love, Up in the air! Up up in the black, black air! Linda had never heard the song before, but it was beautiful, and Lolly must have sensed the pleasure on her face because she said, “Why don’t you and I dance? It’s time we kick old Willis aside.”

  The two girls danced in circles and took turns leading each other, and the song started off slowly but broke into a stomping, giddy cakewalk, and the next song was a Virginia reel. Lolly’s skin was cold, and up close she appeared both old and young at once, and it was easy to imagine sixty years into the future when she would appear, except for her surely sugar-white hair, nearly the same as she did tonight. “You’re a good dancer,” she complimented Linda, the flattery sounding sticky on her lips. “You should teach me some time.” Linda said that she had learned from watching her brother. “He used to go to the dances at the Cocoonery,” she said. The girls said nothing more as the song and the rain continued. The canvas flaps shook somberly, and the wind tried to snap them from their hooks, and Linda worried that the rain was coming down too hard for December. Was the ranch ready? The grove protected? “I should get down to the ranch house and check on things.”

  Willis was lying on the swing with a cigar lodged in his mouth. “We pray for nights like this. It’ll be snowing in the mountains.”

  Lolly said, “But, Willis, maybe she’s right. Maybe you should look to see if Bruder has everything under control.” And not a single second passed after she said this—not even a heartbeat in the fastest, most excited heart—when one of the canvas shades flapped open and Bruder appeared, his shirt pasted wet to his skin. His arrival was so abrupt that Lolly gasped, and simultaneously she and Linda let go of each other, as if guilty of something.

  “Get your coats,” ordered Bruder; his face was calm but serious, and if the music hadn’t already ended, his grave stare would have brought it to a halt. The rain dripping from his brow smudged his eyes. Th
e scene before him was what he had expected—the stuttering graphophone’s arm and Lolly’s newspapers thrown about and Willis’s champagnepickled breath and the dancing-scuffed tiles—all of it was familiar and expected, except for Linda. He noted the embroidery on her dress and the arrangement of her hair, something she must have learned about in one of Lolly’s beauty magazines. The pink lingering in Linda’s cheek, and the oil on her eyelid, suggested champagne too. If the freezing rain weren’t driving down so hard, he would have accused her then. But with every passing minute the ranch could be losing another tree, and he cared about the land as much as he cared about anything; it was where he believed his future lay—their future—and he would confront her later. His hurt would have to wait, as it always would.

  “Everything’s freezing over fast,” he said. “We need everyone.”

  The road down the hill had already turned to mud, and Bruder’s half-ton truck began to skid, and he and Willis got out to inspect the slick dirt while Linda sat at the idling wheel. They told her to try the truck again, and when she released the brake and pulled the choke, she feared the truck would glide off the road and over the hillside. Even in the dark the icy crystals in the hard mud were bright, and the road looked like a slow, dark river. Eventually she got out of the truck and told them they were wasting time, and the three ran down the hill, hunched in their coats, the balloons of their breath pelted and popped by the rain.

  Behind them they heard, “Wait for me!” Lolly was running toward them, her beaver coat swinging heavily. Willis told her to go home, and she said that it was her ranch too and she was going to help, and a tiny goddammit! peeped from her mouth, and even Lolly seemed surprised by her assertion. “There’s no time for this,” said Bruder. “There’s no time.”

  Down in the yard the hands were busy pulling from the shed the smudgers and the portable tanks of distillate oil, the tanks’ caps lost long ago and replaced by potatoes. The men tried to fight the cold in their hats, and their tight Stockinette jackets buttoned to the throat, and their ponchos worn over aprons worn over knit sweaters worn over nightshirts on top of their Sunday solesette shirts. They stamped the cold from their feet and stood with their shoulders close to their ears and dragged the smudgers into the yard and up into the wagon’s bed. The base of each smudger was disk-shaped, like a curling stone, and painted red, but the years had dented the steel and scarred the paint. From the base rose a four-foot chimney with a sheet of mesh over the flue. The chimneys were black and, soon, so were the men, the soot imprinting their gloves and their thighs, their guts, the skin around their eyes.