Pasadena

by David Ebershoff

  “Do you mind telling me who you came with tonight?” asked Cherry.

  “Captain Poore.” As she said this, the car pulled beneath the portico and Willis ran to Linda, yelling at her to get in at once. When she didn’t move, his arm moved around her and she leaned into him, and the magnesium flash startled her again. Then Willis yanked Linda into the car. They drove off in the direction of the bridge. Linda looked over her shoulder and saw Cherry, her head down, busily writing in her notebook, and when Willis said under his sour breath, “Goddammit, Lindy, never talk to the gossips,” Linda understood.

  Cherry’s curls bobbed against her throat, and her pencil scratched her notebook as the car sped up the boulevard, and when Cherry lifted her head, the distance was too great, and her face, to Linda, was a blank oval. And so much had happened in the night that Linda thought maybe, just maybe, it was a ghost or a memory or a premonition, anything but the cold truth of the grinding daily news.

  But the daily news arrived the next afternoon, printed in gray ink that smudged Linda’s thumbs as she held up the American Weekly.

  ORANGE HEIR ESCORTS COOK IN BORROWED BEARSKIN!

  By Chatty Cherry

  Guess which one of Pasadena’s founding sons escorted his ranch-house cook to the Valley Hunt Club’s Antarctic Ball? The girl was snuggled into the brown fur of a bearskin coat borrowed—unknowingly, perhaps?—from the bare shoulders of the orange heir’s little sister, who remained at home, bedridden. I wonder what was ailing her?

  The accompanying photograph, blurry and dark, caught Linda and Willis in a moment of exhausted happiness, his arm around her shoulder and her head tilted toward him. It revealed, even in the dull newsprint, her glowing eyes, and anyone shaking the American Weekly out of his newspaper—for the American Weekly was distributed in the grimy folds of a thousand of America’s finest and filthiest papers, including the Star-News—would recognize the dewiness of Eros on the lips and throat of Linda Stamp.

  Certainly Bruder recognized it when he folded back the newspaper, and the ranch hands craned their necks to see the picture at the table beneath the pepper tree; they hooted and whistled at Linda’s silhouette moving in the ranch-house window, preparing their breakfast, and Muir Yuen and the other men joked about Linda not working in the kitchen for much longer. Bruder sat at the head of the table with the newspaper spread in front of him, his forehead propped in his hands. He didn’t want to believe it, but the evidence was before him. He had always hated Charlotte, or Cherry, or whatever she was calling herself, but now, even as he despised her, he was grateful for her having captured the truth. It was the same truth Linda herself had been presenting Bruder, but somehow he hadn’t been able to see it in her averted eyes. Only the newsprint clarified what he should have known for a long time, and Bruder was silent and enraged. The hands must have known that he had been betrayed, everyone must have known, and Bruder sat with his humiliation, too stunned to nurse it.

  “Don’t believe everything you read,” said Linda.

  “And the picture?” said Bruder.

  “It’s nothing. It might give someone the wrong idea.” She laughed falsely, and her voice, high and sweet, didn’t sound like her, and she didn’t know how to explain what had happened even to herself. Her future had arrived, but she didn’t know where it was.

  By nightfall, Willis had relieved her of her kitchen duties, driving her up the hill once and for all, and by the next night—although she wouldn’t know it for four or five years—a speck of flesh in her loin had reddened with chancre, and Bruder had quit the ranch, running off beneath the shattered moon.

  14

  Several weeks later, Willis bought Linda a return ticket at the Raymond Street Station and left her on the platform with his command to think about it, Lindy. What else can you do? I don’t understand why you can’t say yes right now.

  Burdened by headache and fatigue, she rode the train down the coast, her coat with the jelly-stained cuff wadded in her lap. Her fingertips pressed against the swollen nodes in her throat and wiped at her simmering brow, and she felt as if she were someone else returning to Condor’s Nest, an offshoot of her former self. She had lost weight, and her face was thin in the window’s reflection; beneath her skirt, upon her upper thigh, a mild rash blossomed red, like a colony of ant bites, but Linda thought little of it. There was the morning nausea too and her sluggish blood flow and Linda was not herself—that much she knew. She had even said to Willis, “I’m not feeling myself,” and said it to Rosa; and when she wrote Edmund, announcing her return to Condor’s Nest, she had also said: “Haven’t felt myself lately.” And then: “But nothing’s wrong.”

  Linda pressed her face to the glass as the train raced along the coast. The dimpled ocean was calm and the tide was out, and she saw fishermen wading and buoys bobbing and, on the horizon, two people in an outrigger canoe. The window was cracked and the damp, salty air fell like a veil across her face, and she smelled the beach and the heaps of drying, flyblown kelp, and the train passed a cove where a group of boys and girls were prodding with sticks a beached pilot whale, and throwing rocks at its huge, rubbery head.

  She was going home because she didn’t know what she should do. She would talk to Bruder. She would ask Edmund for his help. No one knew her better than he, she told herself, and his letters—all but one unanswered—were piled in her bag, bound by twine, smudged and ripped, the ink of one smeared by an overturned flute of champagne. After New Year’s he had written that Bruder had returned to Condor’s Nest. “He’s kicked me out of my cottage. I’m living with the boy in the Vulture House. He acts like he owns the farm, and then he told me that he does.”

  When Linda reached Baden-Baden-by-the-Sea she walked down the paved lane toward Condor’s Nest, bag in hand, the silver dress, resewn by Esperanza, folded in tissue within. She expected that Edmund and Dieter would run out to greet her, and Bruder behind them. They would hug her beside the field, and their oniony scent would flood her nostrils, and their dirty, working hands would hold her, smudging her blouse, and they would say, “You’re home at last! Welcome home!”

  But no one came to meet her, and she found herself standing next to a sign that someone had erected:

  CONDOR’S NEST

  STAY OUT

  Linda called out for her father and her brother and then Bruder, but her voice was swallowed by the grumbling ocean. She yelled again, but there was a wind running up the bluff and she could barely hear herself and Linda felt alone. Something small and sharp and laden with regret sat beneath her breast.

  She found Edmund in the Vulture House, struggling to get Palomar out of a pair of muddy overalls. Edmund looked too burdened with work to be happy to see her. The boy was babbling and fighting with his father, and his bare hips were white and aglow against the blue blanket on the bed. He was kicking, and Edmund was yelling at him to stop, and the boy kicked his father in the chest, and Edmund slapped his son.

  “Can I help?” she said.

  “I didn’t believe you when you said you were coming home.” His face was soft and tremulous. “I don’t believe you’re here right now.”

  Little Palomar ran to Linda, the overalls plunging around his knees and his flesh mottled from the cold. He wrapped his arms around her shins, nearly toppling her, and she knelt and guided him out of his overalls and into a clean pair of pants.

  Then Dieter appeared, and he struggled to recognize Linda. “Back from the war?” he said. “Back from France?” His face was snow-blue and his eyes were vacant and his right hand was a lame, flaky claw. He was old, and his brain had emptied before his body. “One day he woke up and he was gone,” said Edmund, snapping his fingers to demonstrate the swiftness of a fleeting second, of a life. “Didn’t you read my letters?”

  But Edmund appeared hollow too; the household chores that once had been Linda’s had drained him. With both Dieter and Palomar to look after, Edmund’s days were long: he rose before dawn and went to bed late, feeding his father and his son
and washing their clothes and their bodies and changing their bedding and stewing the white cabbage Dieter liked to slurp on and baking the corn tortillas Palomar sucked on for hours and lye-mopping the floors after one of them, or both, had made a mess. The endless quotidian work had left Edmund with the feeling that he had buried himself and was being forced to lead another’s life.

  “I’ve come to see you,” said Linda.

  “Why now? After all these months?”

  “I’ve come to talk to you. To tell you what’s happened—” But Linda was interrupted by something moving outside the window, in the field. She looked, and it was Bruder trundling a pushcart. Because of her fever, she almost wondered if he was a ghost: he looked just as he had when he first arrived at Condor’s Nest. She sat upon her brother’s bed and their thighs touched and he plucked her hand from her lap and stroked it with cold fingers. There was a cruel honesty: at once she realized that their lives had diverged, but at the same time their childhood felt only an hour away. She said his name. And he said hers.

  Siegmund.

  Sieglinde.

  What Linda didn’t know was that as Bruder worked the onion field in the twilight he could see them on the sagging mattress, like two old people clutching each other against the sucking brutality of life. In one of Bruder’s pockets was the picture from the American Weekly and Cherry’s article; in his other pocket was the deer-foot knife. He had left Pasadena with nothing but it and the newspaper and a hard vow of revenge.

  There’s a question that some people ask: When does a man become the man that he is? For Bruder, he would always think of New Year’s, 1925. He had believed in her, and then that day he stopped believing, and although he would always love her, he would never forgive her. Despite himself he wished her dead, but that glance into the future stung his eyes with tears, and the onions in his cart reeked and rolled around like lopped heads, and Bruder went down to the beach to roam the black night.

  He no longer wanted anything from her—except the coral pendant, which one day he would take back. He imagined his fist snapping the necklace from her throat, yanking the pendant free, and at precisely the same moment, Linda imagined this too, sitting up in her bed and touching her throat as if a hand had been squeezing her windpipe. At first she didn’t know where she was, and then she recognized the crashing surf and realized it was the middle of the night. At first she thought that she was a little girl, and that Dieter and Valencia were asleep in the cottage next door, but then Linda remembered everything. Spread around her were the gifts from Willis: a detachable polar-bear collar, mother-of-pearl opera glasses, the silver dress hanging from the window sash and fluttering in the breeze. She got out of bed and examined the rash on her thigh. It was hard and red and the pits of her arms were tender with swollen glands, and she didn’t understand what was happening, not at first. Rosa had said, “It happened to me too. It comes in the first month or two.” Then: “How’s your stomach? And your sleep? And the queasy feeling buried deep within? Are you tired before dinner, and in the morning?” Linda answered yes to all of Rosa’s queries. “Then you’ll be visiting Dr. Freeman soon,” Rosa had said.

  Something outside Linda’s window moved. When she pulled back the curtain, she saw Edmund at work in the barn with mallet and hewing ax. Leaning against the door were tiny wooden rods of white pine, and Linda couldn’t guess what he was doing. Edmund screwed the rods into a rail-board, and slowly she figured out that he was building a small bed for Palomar. The barn light cast a gold electric halo onto him, and Linda saw the smooth peace in his face as he two-fisted the mallet, his lips clamped around a pair of screws. Edmund knelt at his task, securing a rod with his screwdriver and then rubbing at it with his sander. It was as if Edmund were in a trance, protected from the reality that had descended upon all of them. Linda could see this in his concentration, his eyes open but blank behind his spectacles, in the way his hair fell round his brow. He screwed another rod into the molded rail, and Linda could sense that he was prepared to help her—there had been a detour in their lives, but all would be right soon.

  She had come to Condor’s Nest to correct things, and she would no longer wait. In her nightdress and bare feet she went to him, the dress billowing as she crossed the field. The moon spun its silver upon her face, and she moved to Edmund as if she were being carried across the yard—a young woman just twenty-two, Linda Stamp, floating moth-like to the gold light in the barn door. As she approached him she knew what she would tell him, she knew. She would ask Edmund for his advice, she would tell him the truth about New Year’s Eve, and about how her heart had sent Bruder away, and now she wanted her brother’s help in bringing him back. The night was moist with sea mist. The quake in her stomach returned with an oceanic lurch, a cold, fish-thick wave swimming through her. Edmund, busy at his task, didn’t see her approach. A pink ribbon ran through the nightdress’s collar and sleeves. It was a gift sent over from Dodsworth’s; the necklace of pea-size pearls too. “You’ll need something other than that piece of coral,” Willis had said. A woman in an oyster-white gown approached Edmund, and when Linda stood over her brother he looked up, and the peace that she had witnessed in his face broke away in chips and shards, like a mallet smashing a vase’s round cheek.

  She knelt beside him in the doorway of the barn. Their knees touched, and the moist air greased Edmund’s face. “It’s for Palomar,” he said, screwing the base of the spindle, turning the screwdriver with a thrust and then finishing with a swift smack of the mallet, a crack! in the night.

  She said it softly: “I need your help.” He didn’t stop, wrists twisting, the single grooved screw tight between his lips, its tip beneath his tongue; was the iron taste seeping down his throat? Had Edmund heard her plea?

  What she needed to say was simple, but now she feared she couldn’t bring it to words. Could the narrowness of a sentence hold the brimming truth? But her life had come to this: one man wanted her, and she didn’t fully understand why; and another man didn’t want her, and she couldn’t understand why not.

  “I’ve come into some trouble,” she began.

  Edmund’s hands stopped. His chin turned cautiously toward her. His eyes screwed up as if someone were hurting him. His mouth was an open blank hole.

  “Edmund,” she said. “I’m going to have …”

  She tried again. “I’m, I’m …” She shook with humiliation and uncertainty, and then there was a lone, horrible sob. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “What did he do to you?”

  Edmund gripped the mallet, his knuckles glowing dark and amber, and like a bird taking off he propelled himself up and soared across the field, his arms outstretched, the barrel head of the mallet catching the moonlight. His feet and the wind carried him at full wingspan: gliding, running toward the bluff, like a turkey vulture scampering into flight, his head bobbing angrily.

  Linda stood: Edmund! Edmund! She didn’t know where he was going, why he was running from her. He reached the cliff, and as quickly as a sparrow darting away, over it he ran.

  Linda began to run too, calling his name. It came to her then, as Edmund’s scream rose from the beach: “You’ll never touch her again!”

  As Edmund called out for Bruder, his voice echoing up from the sand, Linda understood. An image had entered Edmund’s head, one of her lying down in the orange grove, Bruder descending upon her. Was the image in her brother’s head similar to those that had visited her late at night, in a hot sleep, the sheets twisted between her legs?

  Linda ran to the edge of the cliff: “No! Edmund!” And then: “Leave him alone!”

  For Linda Stamp—Lindy! Lindy!—would not yet admit to herself that the decision had already been made for her; that she had made her own decision. How could it have happened without her knowing?

  “It’s fate,” Willis had said. “You and me.”

  A voice in the breeze, crawling up the cliff, struggled to reach her.

  She stood at the edge, rocks skittering down
the bluff: a calm tide, black ocean, whitecaps frothing, shooting and spraying and spilling in dollops, a glimmer on the wreckage of the staircase. She reached the beach but didn’t see anyone. The sand was soft, footprints molded deep. Linda followed them down the shore, south around the bend and past Jelly Beach. Her feet ripped up the sand and she ran until it was hard to breathe and she kept running.

  She heard them before she saw them: “I won’t let you take her from me!” Edmund cried, and there was a crack like wood splitting, a snap! like something out of memory, and then the sand gave way to a field of rocks and she arrived at Cathedral Cove and at once she saw them: Bruder’s raised arm was coming down swiftly, as if he were hurling something. Edmund was falling at Bruder’s feet. There was a strange sound, like a hoe slamming into mud. A small coin of metal winked atop Edmund’s head, and the ocean moaned. And then all was still. She saw them but she didn’t know what she had seen.

  And time would pass, weeks and months, years, before Linda could know for sure what had happened.

  She stopped at the edge of the cove. She heard Bruder crying in the darkness. He yelled at her not to come any closer. Linda was frightened and she obeyed and she stood on the beach and peered at the two figures, one standing and one lying down. Then something inside her told her to look away. She turned and looked north up the coast and thought of the beach’s long endless span, across inlets and coves and around harbors it ran, and her mind traveled up the coast with it. She thought of the orange groves and the white house on the hill and she thought of her future and she thought of her past. She made one last attempt to come to Bruder’s side, but she fell on the rocks, slippery with laver, and cut her palm, and her blood was bright on her blouse, and Bruder, a faceless silhouette in the night, hollered, “Linda, go back home! Stay away!” And then he said in a voice so soft that perhaps he hadn’t meant for it to reach her ear: “There’s nothing you can do now. You’ve come too late.”