RING BELL FOR SERVICE
They waited at the door for so long that Linda rang again, and she began to fear that Rosa had missed her appointment because of her. They’d have to return another day, and Linda imagined Rosa’s horror at having to wait. Again Linda whimpered an apology: “He said we weren’t going to be—”
But just then a shadow appeared on the other side of the glass, and a walrus-size nurse opened the door and quickly waved the girls inside. “The doctor was about to leave.” The nurse heaved her tremulous legs up the stairs, her uniformed backside as large and white as an icebox. She pulled herself along by the rail and called over her shoulder, “Come on, girls.” The stairwell was dark, walled with unfinished redwood panels, and the steps creaked and Linda couldn’t see beyond the woman, her body filled the stairwell so completely. The nurse panted and said, “You coming?” At the top of the stairs she fiddled with a ring of keys at another bubble-glass door, working three locks and then scooting Linda and Rosa into Dr. Freeman’s office.
“Which one of you is it?”
Rosa took a small step forward, as if offering herself. The office was crowded with a desk and a Bar-Lock typewriter on a stand and a daybed upholstered in russet figured velour. A glass-doored cabinet held trays of pliers and scalpels and rubber-tipped pincers and wads of cotton and glass jars of clear liquids that made Linda think they might explode if dropped. On the top shelf was a sharp foot-long instrument like an ice pick, its steel handle cross-hatched for grip, and lying across it a loop-shaped steel knife.
“You’re lucky the doctor didn’t go home. I told him to wait another fifteen minutes. But usually the ones who keep him waiting never show up at all.”
Linda and Rosa sat on the daybed while the nurse squeezed around the furniture, moving so indelicately that Linda was sure she would knock something from the desk or slam into the cabinet or topple the fern stand. The nurse was humming and then looked up and said, “Don’t be frightened. That’ll only make it worse. He’s a good doctor. You’ve come to the best.”
Linda continued to hold Rosa’s hand, and they both jumped when the door opened and the doctor appeared. He was a young, darkly whiskered man, bespectacled and narrow-chested, and he shook the girls’ hands and then sat behind his desk. “You met Miss Bishop?” He nodded in the direction of the nurse, who had propped herself on a spinning stool, her body spilling over the seat, its mass rolling the casters.
The doctor looked at Linda and said, “I presume you’re Rosa.”
“No, I am.”
The doctor’s eyes remained on Linda and he said, “I’m sorry. For some reason I thought it was you.” Then he shifted his attention to Rosa. “I have some questions. Then we’ll begin.”
The nurse nodded her plush, plucked chin, and one of the coils in the daybed groaned, and Linda whispered, “If you want to go, I’ll take you home.”
“How old are you?” Dr. Freeman began.
“Twenty.”
“Where were you born?”
“In Pasadena.”
“Any family?”
“My mother’s dead.”
“Are you married?”
“No.”
“Why are you here today?”
“I have a … I’m in … Doctor, I thought you knew.” Her hand curled into a ball and rubbed her temples. The tendrils of her hair were moist around her ears, and her eyelids were dewy and her cheek was damp.
“How long has it been, Rosa?”
Rosa hesitated, and Linda wished she could answer the questions for her, help her some way at all. But Linda knew nothing more than the doctor and Miss Bishop did. She found herself leaning toward Rosa and wondering how long it had been, and then she asked herself the inevitable question: And with whom? How long ago, and with whom? But Linda knew the answer to at least one of those questions, and she was too worried about Rosa right now to unlock her own anger and hurt. That would come later, but Linda had promised to see Rosa through this appointment, and she had almost broken that promise, and now she would keep it, just as Bruder had kept his.
The doctor removed his eyeglasses and looked to Miss Bishop and then stood and leaned over the desk. “Rosa, dear. It’s important that you answer all my questions.” He grinned in a way that he must have thought friendly but that Linda found coldhearted, as if what Rosa might say next were the most fascinating news he would hear all afternoon.
“A couple of months.” And then: “I can’t really say.”
Miss Bishop began removing instruments from the cabinet: the cotton balls, a scalpel, the looped knife. She passed through the doorway behind Dr. Freeman’s desk, and Linda could see the rubber-padded examination table that waited in the back room. Miss Bishop wheeled an enormous lamp on casters to the table’s side, positioning it to spray Rosa with bitter pearly light.
“Have you had any related illnesses?” Rosa stared blankly, clutching Linda, and Dr. Freeman continued, “No? Nothing? Gonorrhea? Chancroid? Syphilis?”
Rosa let out a little gasp.
“Rosa?”
“No. Just this.”
“I’ll give you some arsenic, just to be sure.”
Next to the cabinet was a window, its shade drawn, but the sunlight pressed around it, framing the dingy sheet of canvas. It reminded Linda of the bright day outside and the Vista’s terrace where she had visored the sun out of her eyes with her hand. Had that been only an hour ago? Everything felt so far away, and she turned to Rosa, whose cheek raged pale.
“Why don’t you go see Miss Bishop now,” said Dr. Freeman. Rosa stood, and Linda got up too, and Rosa hugged Linda awkwardly, her breasts soft and her quick breath warm on Linda’s throat and her body a slender column of bones.
Rosa entered the next room and Miss Bishop closed the door, and through the bubble glass Linda could see Rosa’s silhouette as she removed her coat and then unhooked the buttons of her dress. Dr. Freeman remained at his desk, gazing into space, his glasses secure in his hands. Linda could see that he was a handsome man who suffered from a daily beard so bristly and black that by afternoon he looked forlorn. On his desk was his wedding picture, angled so that Linda could just make it out, Dr. Freeman in his Navy uniform and his bride pinned with a corsage. “She’ll be fine,” he said.
“How long will it take?”
“Not long at all. But she’ll need to rest a couple of hours. If you like, you can leave and come back for her around five.” Linda said that she would wait. “She’ll be uncomfortable, but that’s normal. I don’t want you to worry. Is she your sister?”
“A friend.”
The doctor put on the white coat hanging from the wall and entered the next room and the door closed. Linda sat on the daybed and felt a weariness overtake her, the sleepless night catching up. The dim office settled her pulse and her eyelids grew heavy and she wasn’t sure how much time passed before she heard the terrible shriek and the sob. “Nurse!” Dr. Freeman called, his voice urgent but without panic, and again a scream rose from the other side of the door and Linda moved toward the panel of bubble glass and heard his calm, firm voice, “Miss Bishop, hold her down. Keep her down.” Rosa was crying, and Linda tried to see through the glass but she made out nothing more distinct than two dark shapes moving around, and it was like seeing two patrolling sharks through fifteen feet of water. She turned the doorknob but it was locked, and the sounds on the other side quieted, the silence broken by sniffling and a heave. She remained at the door, but for several minutes there were no sounds from the other side except for what reminded Linda of the familiar clink and splash of dishes being washed in a sink. Linda went to the window and pulled back the shade and saw that the office looked across the alley and a tar-paper roof over to the Webb House. The white Victorian house gleamed in the late afternoon sun, the slanted light a pinky orange on its clapboard. The house’s scallop-trimmed turret shimmered, and two of the packing girls, enjoying their day off, sat in the turret’s window seat, the western sun lighting their faces. Their
idle poses suggested to Linda that they were chatting about anything but the orange grove. On the porch, Mrs. Webb stood in an iron-gray skirt with her hands on her hips, and she looked around as if she knew, she just knew, that some girl somewhere was getting into some sort of dilemma that only Mrs. Emily Webb could resolve. What would they do without me?, Linda imagined Mrs. Webb thinking. In her chest, Linda felt a breaching sensation, her allegiance turning on its side.
From the examination room a lone sob traveled to Linda’s ear, and she returned to the daybed and several minutes passed before Dr. Freeman appeared. “She’s resting, but she’ll be fine,” he said. Dr. Freeman sat at his desk and folded his hands and Linda tried to stay alert, but once again sleep overtook her and gradually she slumped against the bed’s round, padded head and she slept while Rosa slept behind the bubble glass. At a quarter to six, Dr. Freeman called the Black & White cab service, and a kid in a billed cap too large for his head drove them in a taxi with a black roof and a black body and whitewall tires to the rancho’s service gate.
Later, when at last she was alone in her room, Linda found on her bed a letter from Edmund. He had written again with news from Condor’s Nest—I’ve sold a few more acres to the highway men—and reiterated his careful, fraternal inquiry: “Are you all right? Please write to tell me that everything is all right. That no one has hurt you.” She would have to send word but not tonight, she was too tired tonight, and as she leaned against the pillows, her feet still on the floor, she closed her eyes. And then there was a knock on her door, followed by a second rap, and Willis was saying, “Linda? Linda? Will you be coming down to dance tonight?”
11
He didn’t like to talk about the war. One might think that Bruder had never seen battle, he said so little about being a soldier. Others might accuse him of forgetting his martial past: That scar in the forehead? Shrapnel that had affected his memory. But Bruder hadn’t forgotten anything. He thought of the beechwood forest every morning as he knocked about between sleep and the waking hour; and again when he retired to his room with Thucydides; and again, an hour later, when he gave up on the day and returned to sleep. And throughout the workday, too—especially when he saw him and the sunlight burned upon his medal, giving him an aureate, convincing—but false—appearance. They’d been soldiers together, and in a desperate hour they had cut a deal to keep a secret. I’ll give you this, and you give me that. Wasn’t that how progress came about? Progress of land and property, of possession and fortune, even progress of the heart? Someone has something that is more valuable to someone else. Bruder was a man of few words, but those words he uttered he meant and kept, and here he was on the eve of 1925, foreman at the Rancho Pasadena, a man of an indeterminate but youthful age, although already sore in white bone and blue bloody joint, living by the deals he had struck; and even now Bruder would never reveal the secrets he had promised to keep. To whom had he vowed a particular silence? First to Willis, then to Dieter, now to Rosa. Each for a different reason, each to a varying degree of selfishness, but hands had been shaken, and although Bruder had thought he was gaining by his agreements, he now saw as plainly as the snow-topped Sierra Madres before him that he was at risk of losing some things. Not property. No, that would come. He was losing Linda. He blamed himself, and he blamed her.
And one day he would speak of it all.
At twelve noon on New Year’s Eve day, Captain Willis Poore rode into the orchards on his quarter horse, White Indian, and charged up and down the middles calling to the hands that they were off duty until the second of January. The hands left the empty field boxes in the groves and threw their ladders over their shoulders and returned to the packinghouse, where the girls were nailing shut the final crates. The boys talked about where they’d go that night to find a drink, and the girls made plans to sneak away from the watchful eyes of their grandmothers, or Mrs. Webb. Some of the hands and some of the packing girls would meet up in one of the brick alleys off Colorado Street, at a plain black door through which marimba music would thump. They’d pay their entry in coins, and inside they could dance and spend more money on foamy, milky pulque, and as the night wore on most of the boys would give up hope of saving any money for the morning and they’d buy tequila for themselves and the three or four girls they were eyeing, and by midnight their pockets would be empty—unless they were lucky and someone’s pretty hand wormed its way in for a New Year’s visit, but that would cost money that most of the boys didn’t have.
After Willis dismissed the crew, only Bruder continued working, picking clean the trees one after another, moving and resetting his ladder and keeping to his work as if he had no idea that the rest of the ranch had come to a halt. But he knew, and he wasn’t going to stop midday. He wouldn’t stop until the last orange was picked at the end of the season. From the branches he had an open view of the house, and he looked to it and wondered how Rosa was today. She had been ill but she hadn’t told him why, and he wondered if it was what he feared: but what he feared wasn’t as grave as the truth. Nonetheless, Rosa had seemed to Bruder to be on a collision course with Willis, and Bruder had done his best to steer her out of her employer’s path. But Bruder had known all along that she would ignore his counsel—just as Rosa had known that though Bruder was right, she still couldn’t heed his warning. Bruder asked Linda what she knew, but Linda would only say “I’ve made a promise to Rosa not to tell.” Linda was known for many things, but keeping a secret wasn’t one of them. She said, “I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you what’s wrong.” She said, “I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you the importance of my keeping my word.”
Bruder sensed that Linda blamed him for something, and he moved to hold her. He knew that there was a misunderstanding, but he didn’t suspect its depth. If there was one thing he was certain of, it was that no one would ever mistake Bruder and his deeds for Willis and his.
But in fact Linda had done just that, and she told Bruder to leave the kitchen, that she wanted to be alone. All this time she had believed that he wanted to be only with her, with Linda, and she had known not to trust Rosa from the first day at the Pasadena. And though Linda had tried to stay vigilant, questioning Rosa’s every word, everything she did, after a while Rosa’s apparent sincerity had remained constant, and Linda’s skepticism had nearly fallen away. Until now. The hours waiting on Dr. Freeman’s daybed had taught Linda that if she wasn’t careful, her destiny would slip from her hands and she would be carried along by a cruel and manipulative fate, and she still believed that this was not how she had been meant to live; maybe others, but not she, and if she didn’t believe this, what else would she have?
And this was why, when Willis told Linda that Lolly was sick and he didn’t have a date for New Year’s Eve, Linda said, “Is that so?” Willis removed his hat and his bangs sprang up and there was a bright beauty to him, especially next to the row of dusty, half-picked trees. The day was fine, the sky bluer now that the cold had passed, and Willis was wearing the star sapphire ring that seemed to capture on his knuckle all the sun and the sky. It was a funny thing about Willis Poore and the way he carried himself. His slightness would come and go, and by now Linda could perceive the change: when news was bad around the Pasadena, his shoulders would sink and his neck would hang and he would take on the stature of an adolescent; but when Willis was in a good mood—after shooting a rabbit, say, or moving up the tennis ladder—his full size returned, and this was when Linda saw him differently, as she did now. “There’s a ball over at the Valley Hunt,” he said. “We’ll leave at eight.”
Later, up in the house, she told Rosa about Willis’s invitation.
“You’re not going, are you?”
“I don’t have a choice.”
“Oh, Linda. Don’t you understand?” Rosa began to cry into Linda’s sleeve. Her recovery had been a series of good days and bad; a drained lifelessness would send her to bed, followed by a day of vigor and fully circulating blood. Dr. Freeman had predicted this, and Li
nda interpreted Rosa’s tears as a symptom of what Dr. Freeman had described as “a heightened state of female emotionality.”
“Don’t you remember,” said Rosa, “what I just went through?”
Of course Linda remembered, and wasn’t that the point? There was comfort in a man like Willis Poore; she couldn’t be more secure than at his side. “But if you want me to stay with you,” Linda volunteered, hoping Rosa would say No, no, go ahead. For Linda didn’t want to miss this opportunity, this chance to peer further into life in Pasadena, and she’d be on Willis’s arm and she’d meet—she’d be introduced to, presented to!—the people she had read about on the society pages, in Chatty Cherry’s column, and wasn’t there a chance of Linda’s name appearing in the paper too? And in her imagination, Linda herself wrote the headline: MYSTERIOUS BEAUTIFUL WOMAN VISITS PASADENA.
But Rosa said nothing at all, exhaustion and pity causing her face to fall. She turned in her bed and began to pick at the wallpaper. Beneath the thin blanket she was a tiny mound; the blanket was old and dingy and frayed, and it wrapped Rosa like a shroud, and her breathing was slow, and Linda waited for Rosa to say something, and Linda waited for a long time, for what felt like a minute and then like forever. “Rosa? Rosa?” But Rosa had fallen asleep and Linda left her, a girl drowned by fatigue and scar.
Later that afternoon Linda was downtown, making her way up Raymond Street, alone. She had never been into the city by herself, and with each step she inhaled the conifer-minty air of Central Park and felt free in a way she had never before. She was thinking of no one—not Willis or Bruder or Edmund—no one but herself, and her mind was clear and her breath was loud in her ears. As she passed the Hotel Green, its veranda filled with people in wicker chairs, Linda became more and more aware of the isolation she had endured during her months at the Pasadena—the world reduced to the isolated fortress of the rancho. Rosa had said, “The city’s no different than the rancho. It’s a small, walled-off place too.” But again, Linda didn’t believe her—how could this be true? Why, look at the city before Linda: men and women filling the sidewalks, children walking small white dogs, and other girls like Linda out alone, out for an errand or a stroll and dependent on no one at that particular moment. Free to go wherever they wanted! No one looking at them, no one expecting anything from them, no one but themselves aware of where they were, what they would do next, which shop they would enter, what would happen to them next! It would have overwhelmed her if Linda didn’t feel as if she’d been waiting for this her whole life, and roaming the heart of Pasadena nearly made her forget why she was there and what she was looking for.
Pasadena Page 39