The season of 1925–26 was the last rainy winter for several years, and it would also turn out to be the last Willis would permit Lindy to work. “Lindy, sweetheart, you can do anything. Why do you want to spend the day in the orange grove? It doesn’t suit you.” For a while she defied him, returning to the grove each morning and sharing coffee with Hearts and Slay as the sun rose. She continued to oversee the packing, carefully monitoring the girls: when one became too hot upon her stool, Lindy would lead her to the fan standing in the corner and to the water spout. She’d bring Sieglinde with her, and the baby would sleep in an orange crate Hearts had lined with flannel. Sometimes, Willis would send Lolly to request that Lindy return to the house. Sometimes, Lolly would say, “He’s worried about you, Lindy.”
During the first year or two of his marriage, Willis had urged his sister to bring Lindy into Lolly’s social world. “Now that we’re sisters,” Lolly would say, telling Lindy what to wear and where to shop and that her women’s clubs, while limited in membership, would only expand Lindy’s mind. Lindy went along to the tea dances and the cotillions, her husband and her sister-in-law hooked to her elbows. They took her to all-night jazz parties on the Vista’s terrace or around the Midwick’s swimming pool. Willis took her to balls where she had to strangle her arms in elbow-length kid gloves and stand within her husband’s clasp, unless he excused himself “for some fresh air on my own.” There had been a period of time when Lindy wanted to fit in, and she learned from Lolly how to curl her hair with an iron and from Willis how to get tipsy from lemon-wedge fruit punch. Lolly took her to Dodsworth’s for evening dresses and to Nash’s for linen suits, but almost immediately upon opening the boxes on her bed Lindy would discover a familiar loneliness, one she had tried and failed to tuck away. Once, when Lindy and Lolly were strolling through Carmelita Gardens, Lindy spotted a man on a bench beneath a conifer. His back was to them, and his black hair spilled over the collar of his suit. A robin bobbed around on the bench beside him, inching its way closer. It’s Bruder, Lindy thought, and she stopped as the sun throbbed and the heat rose from the garden path and the small great instant Lindy had known would come finally arrived: Bruder had returned. “Do you know him?” said Lolly, and she looked to the man as well and then said, “Is it Bruder?” Both women, now sisters, approached the bench, the anticipation between them palpable, like heat radiating from sunburned flesh, and just as they reached the bench the man turned around and revealed himself to be no one they had ever seen before.
No, it couldn’t have been him, for Bruder was sitting on a wooden bench beneath a barred window, the breeze rank with salt and the stench of the mudflats. Her husband’s words remained with Lindy: “You put him away.”
It had been in the autumn of 1929, not long after the Crash that had kept Willis up late at night in his library, that the fever returned to Lindy. It arrived swiftly and vigorously, with sweat and chills and the sensation of a vise clamped to her head. As Lindy lay in bed, Sieglinde would tug on her sweaty hand—“What’s wrong, Mommy?” But Lindy didn’t know what was wrong, and neither did Dr. Birchback, who held his talc-soft finger atop her pulse and said, “Female trouble?” Then he saw himself out, careful not to investigate further—“I’m not that kind of doctor, Mrs. Poore.” There was no reason to think that the fever wouldn’t simply come and then go, as they do; there was no reason to believe that the open sore where her leg met her hip wouldn’t fold itself up and heal. Lindy didn’t really know what was happening, and so she wasn’t worried. She kept herself from Willis, who in any case heard Dr. Birchback’s report of a female malady and stayed away. No, it wasn’t until Rosa said “We should see Dr. Freeman” that reality, with all its infectious truth, presented itself to Lindy.
Just as it was doing right now.
And in the July heat wave of 1930, three years into a drought and several years before its end, at the western end of Suicide Bridge, a couple of miles from the Pasadena’s gate, Lindy Poore leaned her head against the Gold Bug’s steering wheel. Her headache thumped and the sunlight flashed through the combine’s canopy and the volumes of Gibbon sat upon the passenger seat and all of her past sat up in her mind, jumbled but there. History presented itself to her as a great dark light behind her eyelids and she looked into it, seeing nothing but sensing everything that had once touched her. The past was there, more firmly rooted than her present life, than this very day, more real than the breath leaving her lungs just now, and then someone was rapping a knuckle on the Gold Bug’s window and at first she thought it was the headache but then came the Hello, hello?, and for a moment—a tiny moment when her overturned heart uprighted itself—she thought that Bruder was at last free; after all these years, he had come for her, on the other side of the glass.
But the knuckle continued to rap and the blur cleared from her eyes and Lindy looked up and there was Cherry, saying, “Lindy? Are you all right?”
They hadn’t seen each other in years, not since Cherry reported on Bruder’s trial, and Lindy felt a sudden tenderness for her old friend, someone who had known her before her present life. Lindy told Cherry that she was merely tired, that she had had trouble sleeping in the heat, but Cherry interrupted her, saying, “Lindy, I’ve seen you driving around town. You haven’t looked yourself.”
“Myself? What do you mean, Cherry?” She paused. “Have you been following me, Cherry?”
But Cherry denied this, saying she was giving up reporting. “I was worried about you.”
Lindy asked why she would give up being a reporter when she had always loved it as much as anything.
“I’m getting married, Lindy.”
“Married?”
“To George Nay. Do you know him? He moved to Pasadena a few years back. The real-estate developer? He and Willis are working together on the parkway.”
Lindy had only heard Willis sniff at the man’s name.
“He told me he wouldn’t marry me unless I gave up reporting,” said Cherry. “He says it’s not a lady’s pursuit, writing stories about other people’s lives.”
“And you’re listening to him?”
“George is right. It’s a crummy business, living off others. I’m ready to give it up.”
Lindy said she didn’t understand—and maybe it was because she was feeling dizzy; everything around her was dimming.
“Just one more story, Lindy,” said Cherry. She lowered her voice. “One more that I hope will do some good. After that, I’m putting down my pen.” Lindy said that she had to get back to her daughter, and Cherry said, “I can tell something’s wrong with you, Lindy. You’ll let me know if I can help? You’ll call me, Lindy?”
Through the glass, Lindy promised that she would.
2
By August, many people had left Pasadena for the cooler airs of Santa Barbara or Balboa or La Jolla cove, and those who remained in the city made up their cots and hammocks on their sleeping porches. Cherry’s inquiries had startled Lindy—it dismayed her that her old friend could sense her decline—and a week later, Lindy passed through the rancho’s gate and drove into town. The sun was hot and she was thirsty, and near the entrance to Suicide Bridge she pulled over at the orange combine. The juice stand was in the shape of a giant navel orange, with a dirty awning, and a radio was playing a song Lindy had heard a trio play at Connie Ringe’s the night before. Lindy had danced with Willis by the pool, beneath the pink paper lanterns strung between the oaks. The trio played My girl with the blue, blue eyes, and Willis was cold to her touch, but he held her tight and it felt as if he wouldn’t let go and then he said, “You haven’t seemed yourself lately.” She asked what he meant, but then Connie cut in, shooing Willis away, and Lindy swayed in Connie’s arms while across the yard Willis pushed himself in a swing in the sycamore. “Everything okay?” Connie said, lifting Lindy’s chin with a gloved finger. “I can see you’ve got the five-year blues.” No, Lindy said. It was more than that. “It’ll pass,” Connie assured her, fox-trotting Lindy around the pool w
hile the man in the coat with the plum-silk lapels sang “Jazz Me, Baby.”
The girl behind the counter dropped an orange into a machine and it tumbled down a metal chute and was pushed against a triangular blade, the two halves carried along a conveyor belt to the juicer. The girl asked Lindy if she wanted to try the new orange sherbert: “Tastes like heaven in your mouth.” At a picnic table next to the stand, a boy was spooning sherbert into his girl’s mouth and she was giggling and swinging her feet and saying, “That’s enough, Billy. Okay, stop.” But the young man, his broken nose reset crookedly, continued feeding the girl and she kept laughing, her mouth open and her tongue orange and creamy and the sherbert dripping down her throat. “You’re too much, Billy!” she was saying, and then: “No, Billy. I mean it this time, please stop. Billy! Stop, it’s too much, you’re making me sick—” And then a voice: “Ma’am, nothing but the orange soda?” A pause. “Ma’am?”
Lindy parked not far from the Webb House. As they always would, a new crop of girls had moved in, and the two frizzy-haired girls on the porch didn’t recognize Lindy Poore when she passed. A year or so ago Mrs. Webb had run into some sort of trouble, something about taking a cut from the girls’ wages. There’d been headlines and a picture in the papers of Mrs. Webb in a high-collared cape, and one girl charged her with the often-repeated accusation: “Twentieth-century slavery!” Mrs. Webb no longer ran the home; she was retired, they said, to a cabin outside Avalon, where she tended a herd of wool sheep.
Erwin’s had closed at the beginning of the summer. There’d been an EVERYTHING MUST GO sale one afternoon, but no one had turned up, and Mr. Erwin had stood at his door and asked people in from the sidewalk. Two days later, he turned over the sign in the door—CLOSED—and moved to Flagstaff, leaving a display of electric vibratory devices in the window, there to catch the dust and stares. Now the dark window offered Lindy a reflection of herself, thin in a belted dress, her hair recently cut short in a style the hairdresser had called “the Downturn-Do.” “It’s very you, Mrs. Poore. Very, very you.”
She rang the bell and waited in the hot alley, and then a figure appeared on the other side of the bubble glass, dark and slow. The locks turned and Miss Bishop waved Lindy up the stairs. “He’s running late,” the nurse said, fiddling with her key ring at the top of the steps. Lindy recalled how heavy Miss Bishop was the first time she had come to Dr. Freeman, but now Miss Bishop was a skeleton swimming in a suit of loose skin. The folds of flesh hung from her like laundry on the line and she looked exhausted, as if scooping up the hems of her skin had worn her out.
Lindy sat on the daybed and Miss Bishop watered the fern, saying, “You’re feeling all right?” The same, said Lindy, describing the feverish aches, the fatigue. “Poor you,” said Miss Bishop. “Let me check on the doctor.” She disappeared behind the bubble-glass door and there was a muffled conversation and then the door opened and Dr. Freeman appeared, asking Lindy to come in. He left the examination room while Lindy undressed. She hung her dress on the coat-tree and sat on the padded table in her slip, the rubber warm against her thighs. Miss Bishop, standing in front of a black-bladed fan, bought on sale at Erwin’s closeout, commented on the heat. “I told the doctor to get two,” she said, her bangs fluttering. Miss Bishop said that the doctor had been inexplicably busy lately, tsking about his workload and the stress it put upon him. “He had to cancel his holiday next week,” Miss Bishop said, recounting her own vacation plans, a drive down the coast to San Diego, two nights in Tijuana, a third in Ensenada Beach. Miss Bishop had a friend named Molly Pier, and the two rented a bungalow together in Altadena, and they would drive to Mexico and back in Molly’s Dodge Delivery. Miss Bishop was going on about needing some sort of special insurance to cross the Mexican border when Dr. Freeman reentered the examining room.
“How’ve you been, Mrs. Poore?” She said again that she was the same: no better and no worse. “No new symptoms?” She described the headaches and the aches in her joints and the occasional pain in her eye. “Like a needle going through it. It’s hard to see at times. The left one.” Dr. Freeman looked into her eye with a penlight and made a note.
“You’ve been taking your bismuth and the salvarsan iodide?”
She said that she had, and she wondered if they had made her feel even worse. Flipping through her file, Dr. Freeman said, “I’ve given you both arsenics, haven’t I?” Lindy nodded yes: arsphenamine and neoarsphenamine administered intravenously, long afternoons on the rubber table with a needle in the crook of her arm and a distant cold sensation running through her. He had administered mercurial rubs, the cold paste massaged into her pores by Miss Bishop, who had worn a blacksmith’s apron. Dr. Freeman had put her through fever therapy, two hours baking in a lightbulb-lined coffin called the Electronic Cabinet of Kettering. Dr. Freeman had had an arrangement with Mr. Erwin to rent the cabinet, and when Erwin’s closed, Freeman had said he might give up on that particular hyperthermia treatment anyway: “In the end, I’m not sure how much good it does.” For almost a year Dr. Freeman had instructed Lindy to soak in near-scalding baths, a habit that Willis had found peculiar and wasteful. From time to time she would fall asleep in the green-glazed tub, waking only when her nose slipped beneath the water.
“Any new lesions?” asked Dr. Freeman.
“Just the one on my thigh.” She opened her legs for the doctor and he bent to inspect the rubbery tumor. He pulled a ruler from his pocket and pushed it against Lindy’s flesh and said, “Miss Bishop, the gumma is one third of an inch in diameter.” Miss Bishop wrote this down, and Lindy leaned back on the examination table and looked to the ceiling as Dr. Freeman poked at the tender lump. She had learned that Dr. Freeman did this sort of work for no other reason than the money, wads and wads of it collecting in his pocket. Once, in an unusual moment of intimacy, Miss Bishop had said, “He’s glad he can help out all these girls, but he wouldn’t be here if it didn’t pay so well. He’s earning so much money now, he can’t walk away.” Lindy understood this; she wouldn’t be here either. Their lives wouldn’t have crossed; how far Dr. Freeman’s office, down the little alley, felt from the rancho’s gate. It was like traveling forward in time, Lindy sometimes felt when she sat on the velour daybed. She was warm, the moisture sticky beneath her breasts and in the pit of her arms, and then Dr. Freeman asked her to remove all her underclothes and he turned to his chart while she stepped out of the ivory silk; her clothes were in a pile on the floor and it made her think of Sieglinde, who liked to strip down to nothing at the pool. Dr. Freeman’s left hand lifted her right arm, and his free hand traced the flesh around her breast. He lifted her left arm and did the same, gently pushing her breasts one way and the other, inspecting the flesh in between. She found the examination neither humiliating nor exciting, only numbing, as if she had stepped out of herself as the doctor pushed her back onto the table, eyeing her, prodding, taking notes, checking her reflexes with a rubber-headed mallet.
After she dressed she returned to the velour daybed, and Dr. Freeman sat behind his desk and Miss Bishop perched on the windowsill, the Webb House’s shingled turret behind her. The fan’s blades whirred in the black cage and the limp fern fluttered in its gust.
“You’ve been coming to see me for almost a year,” Dr. Freeman began. “I’m afraid we’ve seen very little progress.” He explained his regret, as he had before, that she had not sought treatment when she was first exposed, when the first chancre had erupted on her loin. But Lindy hadn’t known, she said, as she said every time she visited Dr. Freeman. “It looked like nothing more than a few spider bites.” He scolded her gently for not looking after herself, lumping her with “all the women who inexplicably fail to do so.” Miss Bishop’s gaunt face shook, as if she knew that in these matters the doctor lacked insight. The second lesion, eight or nine weeks after the first, had gone unnoticed in the spring of 1925. There had been a fever and a flu-like exhaustion as she watched Edmund’s coffin sink into the soil out by the tulip tree, no one th
ere with Lindy except Dieter and Father Pico and Margarita and Cherry Moss, taking notes and eyeing Bruder, who stood fifty feet from the grave, awaiting the deputy sheriff’s arrival. Palomar had cried, grabbing at Lindy’s hair. And Willis had sent word that he was sending a car to retrieve her. No, she hadn’t tended to herself, Lindy admitted to Dr. Freeman. “There wasn’t any time.” And then, “I didn’t know.”
“You’re entering what we call the early tertiary stage,” said Dr. Freeman. “There’s now more of a chance the disease will advance from chronic to … well, to a more debilitating phase.” He said that at this point the spirochetes would concentrate in either her cardiovascular system or her nervous system. “Or both. Cardiovascular syphilis degenerates the aorta and other tissue around the heart; the heart itself too. Neurosyphilis can damage the brain, resulting in—” He stopped, as if wondering if he had already said too much. “I suppose the best way to describe it is personality change. A change of the self. You may be Lindy Poore, but you might act like someone else. Sometimes the patient doesn’t recognize herself.” He must have seen the bloodless fear in Lindy, because immediately he was stumbling: “But I’ve seen no signs of this in you, Mrs. Poore. Nothing suggests that your case has turned that particular corner. Everything about you suggests you know quite well who you are.”
The daybed was soft, and it nearly swallowed her. She inched herself to its edge and with great effort stood. Once again, the inconsolable doubleness of life hit her: Dr. Freeman’s news was at once shocking and expected. All those years ago the red chancre, no more dense or fierce than a boil, had both looked like nothing and alerted her to her future. There were times when Lindy could see the clarity of today and the vision of the rest of her life, like seeing at the same time ten feet in front of the car and the long white strip of the road ahead.
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