Pasadena

by David Ebershoff

  Rosa appeared upset; her eyes were cast down. “I have a favor to ask,” she said. “I need your help.”

  “Why don’t you ask Bruder?”

  “I need your help,” she said. “Will you meet me in Central Park? At one o’clock?” She said that she had to make a visit and didn’t think she could do it alone, and when Linda asked where she had to go, Rosa’s eyes flooded with tears.

  “But why me?”

  “Just meet me, won’t you?”

  Linda hesitated, but Rosa’s desperation was raw, irresistible. “Does it have to do with Bruder?”

  Rosa’s body convulsed and her face twitched and her chin shook, and Linda had no idea whether Rosa was saying yes or no.

  “Should I bring anything?” Linda said.

  “I have the money,” said Rosa. “I don’t need anything else.” And then: “Don’t say anything, Linda. Promise me you won’t. Not even to him.”

  “To who?”

  But Rosa was gone.

  An hour later, Linda emerged from her room, and she was just descending the stairs when Willis intercepted her. “Lolly’s sick again. She shouldn’t have been out last night. I’m on my own today.” He asked where she was going, and when Linda said that she was running an errand in town he said, “I’ll give you a ride.” Linda declined, saying she would ride one of the rancho bicycles. Willis said again that he’d drive her, and she declined once more, but then he insisted and Linda followed him down the stairs and out the front door and slipped into the low leather seat that had first greeted her when she arrived in Pasadena.

  It was the Saturday before Christmas, and the lamps on Suicide Bridge were decorated with garland and wreath, and an electric banner welcomed visitors to Pasadena. Willis sped past the orange combine, where teenagers sat upon picnic tables drinking orange juice and a couple of girls were dancing in the sun, a circle of boys hooting around them, and the man who sold the orange juice looked bored, as if there was nothing he hadn’t seen.

  “I need to stop by the Vista,” said Willis. “Do you mind?”

  The Hotel Vista sat on the bank of the arroyo, just south of the bridge. Recent improvements—a new colony of stucco bungalows; miles of cleared bridle paths; a reservation agent who’d say Not this season, I’m afraid if he didn’t like the sound of your name—had made the Vista, even Linda knew, the most luxurious hotel in town. Each week the Star-News and the American Weekly wrote of the hotel’s new arrivals, sending reporters to lurk in the oleander and spy on the steel tycoons, the cattle scions, the railroad barons, the citrus heiresses, and the cautious or gleeful widows tumbling out of their Bugatti limousines, gloved hands shielding their faces from the sun and the cameras’ flash. But equally interesting to the newspapermen were the bee-yellow or lipstick-red speedsters supplying the Vista with head-scarfed movie actresses, gangsters in gray suits, traveling sopranos, Savoy Theatre chorines, petal-mouthed mistresses, and the Negro boys dressed up as musicians who delivered tequila and rum in saxophone cases. Since November, the hotel’s arrivals had increased weekly, and by now more than five hundred guests—“We are complet, complet, complet!” the reservationist was quoted in the paper—had unpacked in suites and bungalows, each with a private butler’s button, and scouted the lobby and the pool, discreetly asking, “Who else is here?”

  Of course Linda had seen the Vista only from the bridge, where it loomed at the western entrance to Pasadena like a great fortress, one that would admit only, as the reservationist was also quoted, “a certain kind.” A couple of the stem-throated packing girls had confided to Linda their ambition to get jobs on the hotel’s staff, where if given the right assignment they could close a week with twenty dollars in tips. “Tips to your ass,” one of the other packers had said, a girl whose taste for dresses that revealed her bread-brown shoulders would soon get her kicked out of the Webb House. “I’d do just about anything for twenty dollars,” one of the girls had said.

  The hotel lobby was decorated with potted palms and folding screens behind which men and women sat in oak rockers, their knees touching and their highballs clinking, cigarette ash drifting to the carpets. Large pillows sewn from scraps of old Persian rugs were thrown about the floor, for children or dogs or anyone with lubricated knees who felt like lying down. Arched doorways divided the lobby into a maze of alcoves and semi-private chambers; alabaster planters on the walls spilled fuchsia vines and perfumed the hotel with an odor Chatty Cherry had described in her American Weekly column as “suggestive of something ripe.” A great eyebrow of a window overlooked the terrace and the pool and the Arroyo Seco stubbled with early green, and three small girls pressed their faces against the glass, begging to be released into the children’s playground, where a high swing looped to an ancient live-oak would fling anyone under seventy pounds out over the arroyo and back. The Negro bellboys, in boxy hats and epaulets, and the Mexican chambermaids, in silky chignons and flesh-tight blouses, were more numerous than the guests themselves, and moved about the lobby with alert eyes; the stories they took in were sold, at least by the more entrepreneurial staff members, to the American Weekly at the going rate of fifty cents if the anecdote involved money, and a dollar if sex lay at its pulsing heart. The bellboys hurried across the lobby shepherding leather-trimmed trunks, and the chambermaids transported vases of white roses and freshly shampooed poodles and tea for twenty and decks of suede-backed playing cards and cubes of fudge sprinkled with gold leaf. The bellboys said, “Good afternoon, Captain Poore,” and the chambermaids nodded and curtsied.

  Down a side arcade was a row of small boutiques, each no bigger than a stable stall and specializing in a careful selection of winter jewels or touring-car hats or pleated tennis dresses. Willis stepped into a furrier’s shop while Linda waited in the hall. Through the plate glass she watched him speak with the shop’s owner, a middle-aged woman whose flouncy crêpe de chine dress revealed a V of sunburned flesh beneath her throat. The woman disappeared behind a curtain, then reappeared with a glossy white box. When Willis exited the store, its bell tinkling, he held up the box and said, “For New Year’s Eve. There’s a party at—” But he stopped himself. “Never mind. It’s all too dull to talk about. How about some lunch?”

  “I have to meet Rosa.”

  “Just a quick bite. Old Rosa won’t mind.”

  Linda protested, but Willis said they’d be fast, and she agreed because the truth was, she wanted to dine at the Vista, and she thought about the letter she’d write that night to Edmund describing the French food, the open western view, the expensive people running about. When they stepped onto the terrace, the sunlight reflecting off the pool blinded Linda, her pupils contracting like water down a drain, and Willis’s fingers were on her elbow, guiding her into a chair, and all she could do was look around and stare.

  He ordered for her a lobster farci and two cold quail legs and told the waitress, a worried-mouthed girl with a pretty, plump nose, that they were in a hurry. “Of course, Captain Poore.”

  Linda wondered whether Rosa would wait for her, but as Linda sat on the terrace, Rosa’s trouble, whatever it was, began to feel remote, as if such mysterious dangers would not—could not!—intrude upon Linda. She wouldn’t be all that late, forty minutes, no more than an hour, and what was the hurry?, and after all, why wouldn’t Rosa wait? And at this very moment, Linda couldn’t imagine anything that would require urgency. Most girls in her situation wouldn’t have agreed to meet Rosa, Linda thought. Most girls would’ve told her, “You’re no friend of mine.” But Linda wasn’t like most girls; in so many ways, she believed, she was different from the rest. Once Willis had said, “You’re a proud girl, aren’t you?” And she said that she was, unaware of the insult that perhaps lurked beneath the compliment.

  The table overlooked the pool, and some sort of swimming game called Treasure Hunt was about to begin. Twenty boys, and a few girls in bathing dresses down to their knees, were lined up impatiently along the pool’s rim. One boy jumped in the pool before
the whistle and was disqualified, which brought an explosive screech from his deep little lungs. Everyone around the pool, and the diners at the tables too, stopped talking and leaned forward. Linda pressed against the rail beside the table and saw the light flashing on the water, and then she saw something winking at the bottom of the pool like a fleck of gold in Sutter’s river, and she saw another and another. “What are those?”

  “In the pool? Coins, I would imagine.”

  The lifeguard blew his whistle and the children threw themselves into the water and swam to the bottom, where, Linda could now see, lay hundreds of coins: gold and silver dollars and quarters and nickels and a few pennies. Air bubbles rose as the children fished around the pool bottom, fighting in nine feet of water for a silver dollar. Soon the first clamped fists punched through the surface, and all around the pool, mothers and fathers and governesses were shouting at their children, screaming at them to look in the deep end or on the step, cheering when the children delivered the clean, wet, sparkling coins to their feet, yelling at them to return for more. The children, when their small faces broke through the water, screamed—I got one! I got two!—and there was as much cheering and roaring as would spill over the lip of the Rose Bowl on New Year’s Day. And Linda watched, her chin on the hot iron rail, and out of the corner of her eye she could see that Willis was watching her. Why had he brought her here? The waitress delivered their lunch and Linda picked at the lobster tail, disappointed that it was not a California rock lobster but a clawed Mainer, doubtless railroaded across the country in a sloshing water tank. She heard someone say, with an incensed tsk, “Did they really only plant a hundred dollars today?” The yelling and the cheers continued, and women who otherwise would sit straight-backed were jumping up and down and clinging to men’s arms and to one another. The men were clapping and whistling and coaching the children—“There’s a goldie just over there!”—as if they were training championship puppies. And the children themselves retrieved the coins with smiles and wagging tongues, depositing them in the slots between their fathers’ feet: towheads and pigtails and cowlicks and a shaved, deloused head diving and breaching and diving again. After a few minutes the cheering died down as the children swept the pool bottom clean and hauled themselves out of the water, heaving and wet on the concrete, their black suits glistening, like panting seal pups. After a careful tally, a little girl with fat-padded arms was declared the winner, having snatched up a total of $17.34, and Linda heard her say, “I’m going to buy myself a bunny-fur muff!” The parents laughed and the governesses toweled down the children and the diners returned to their lunches and the sunbathers leaned into their pink terry chaises and tilted the parasols and closed their eyes.

  A wall of cabanas stood on the far side of the pool, and every other cabana door had a large brass M on it, and large brass L’s were screwed to the doors in between. Men and women in swimming suits and bathing robes went in and out of the cabanas, and Linda noticed a man in a white linen suit entering a stall at one end of the row, followed by a tiny-waisted woman stepping into the cabana next to his. Five minutes later he emerged, still in his white suit, and a minute later she strolled into the sunlight, touching her crocodile belt and arranging her hat’s netting around her face. A suspendered man took the first man’s place, and then nothing happened for several minutes, until a pretty girl with an urn-shaped head entered the cabana next door. Linda studied the two closed doors, and she thought she saw one of the knobs tremble, but the door remained shut, and outside the lappers were backstroking up and down the pool and wives were coconut-oiling their husband’s lumpy chests. The children, sitting in little circles on the patio, were all eating tacos, and the lifeguard in his red trunks was talking to a widow in a white fur stole, and no one noticed the urn-headed girl rush from the cabana, one sparkling button unhooked. The suspendered man appeared a few minutes later and looked blearily into the sun and then sat down at a table and ordered minced veal on toast. By the time his lunch arrived, two others had occupied the far cabanas, a young man in baggy tennis whites and an older woman who lodged a mint beneath her tongue as she passed through the door.

  “I see you’ve noticed the sheds,” said Willis. His smirk told her that he liked her witnessing these things. He was playing with her, she realized, but she wasn’t going to let him think that he could upset her. She sat back and said, “You’re more of a devil than you let on.”

  “Linda, that’s not fair.” He offered his sincere, boyish face, apologized, and said they should leave. He wadded his napkin and half rose from his chair, and she felt something press down upon her shoulders, and she looked up but there was nothing there: just Willis across the table, in that bent angle between standing and sitting. There was nothing by Linda’s shoulders other than the breeze and a blue jay’s wing-beat. “Or we’ll stay if you want.” And Willis sat back down. A shadow descended upon their table and a breathy voice said, “Willis, I didn’t see you.”

  Linda recognized the girl she’d seen the day she arrived in Pasadena, the careless driver who’d nearly smashed into the ice wagon. A silver part cut so precisely through her yellow hair that it was almost like a gash. Her toe cap of a chin was tilted up, and she fluttered her eyelids as she spoke. “Who’s this?” Two fingers landed on Linda.

  Willis introduced Connie Muffitt. By now he was standing, leaving Linda in the shadows, and she felt like a child looking up at them. She stood and shook the woman’s hand and saw that they were nearly the same height, she and Linda, and that Connie was more beautiful than anyone else around the pool. “Stamp, is it? Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?”

  “She’s not from Pasadena,” said Willis.

  “In Pasadena for the season? Staying at the Vista?”

  Connie didn’t even pretend to wait for Linda’s response, and said to Willis that she hoped to see him New Year’s Eve. “Where will you be?”

  “I haven’t decided yet. It depends—”

  “Don’t forget to bring Lolly.” Then Connie was gone. It struck Linda, the pool throwing the sunlight into her eyes, that she hadn’t come to Pasadena for this. She thought of Bruder, alone in the groves shoveling the charred wood out of the ditches; he’d be so damp with sweat that his pant legs would stick to his thighs, to the mass of hair spreading there. His palms white with blisters and his throat hoarse after the yelling last night, and then speaking to no one today, not a soul. It was his fault, she told herself; she was here with Willis because of him. But it wasn’t too late, and the season would stretch on until spring, and she would cook for Bruder until the last orange was picked, and she imagined climbing aboard the Pacific Electric with him, waving good-bye to Captain Poore and his sister through the window. To tell the truth, Linda couldn’t imagine a future other than that one; Willis was like a game, like the Treasure Hunt itself. And she told herself that she would go to Bruder and say that she had forgiven him, and she didn’t consider that he might be incapable of forgiving her. And Linda surprised even herself when she leapt up from the table and said she had to go, she’d walk downtown, it wasn’t far, but she had to go now. Willis caught up with her in the lobby, the furrier’s box stuffed under his arm, and took her by the wrist, his fingers uncomfortably tight, and he steered her behind a folding screen painted with a pagoda scene, shushing her and whispering, “No, no, I’ll drive you. But don’t be upset, I didn’t bring you here to upset you.” She shook her head, saying that she wasn’t upset by any of this. She said she’d promised to meet Rosa, and now look at the time! Willis handed her a handkerchief, but Linda wasn’t crying or sniffling; her breath was as slow as a somnambulist’s; she felt her face harden and she stood erect and she felt cold. She returned the handkerchief, and Willis struggled to return it to his pocket while holding the furrier’s box. He snapped at a bellboy to help him, and the boy in the little square hat lay his manicured hands around the shiny white box and fell in step behind Willis and Linda, who said, “Thank you for bringing me here. Now I see.” Wit
h its own will her hand made its way to his elbow as she descended the hotel’s front steps, just as the coco-buttered hands of all the other women on the steps slid around the elbows of men; Linda Stamp was one of a dozen young women entering or leaving the Hotel Vista, hems high upon shins, silk headbands tight across brows, hands squeezed roughly in the paws of a man. As she stepped into the porte cochère, the petroleum fumes greeted her, and Linda thanked Captain Poore for lunch.

  She was almost two hours late, but Rosa was still waiting on a bench in the park, staring at the fountain and the old men throwing horseshoes. Her glassy face looked as if it would shatter to the touch and her eyes were threaded with blood. “I don’t know if he’ll still see me,” she said.

  “Who?” Linda apologized as she recognized the gravity of the afternoon that lay before them.

  They walked down Raymond Street, squinting against the glare. With each step, Linda came to sense Rosa’s fear. The skin around her eyes flinched. Linda didn’t know where they were going, and Rosa, whom before today Linda had chosen never to believe, now seemed like a different person: young as a schoolgirl, vulnerable with honesty, marooned atop the great cresting wave of fate. But Rosa wasn’t a different person. No, in fact, Linda was merely seeing more of Rosa than she had before. She took Rosa’s hand. “Everything will be all right.”

  “I’m not so sure, Linda.”

  Not far from the Webb House they crossed California Street, and before Linda knew it they were in front of the P. F. Erwin Electrical Distributorship. Mr. Erwin himself was in the window, rotating his display, plugging in an electric juicer and arranging a pyramid of oranges, and he was too preoccupied to see the two girls hesitate in front of his building. Linda finally realized where they were and whom they were visiting, and she rubbed the cold from Rosa’s fingers and they stood silently in the December sun, the City Beautiful Committee’s Christmas wreaths swaying in a breeze on the lampposts. Traffic passed, but the world felt no larger than the square of sidewalk where they rested, the cars and the exhaust pipes receding into another, distant world. Rosa’s fingers were sticky and soft like ice-plant leaves, and Linda led her into the side alley and to the door with the bubble-glass window etched with a simple sign: