Pasadena

by David Ebershoff

  “Why hasn’t Willis become ill?”

  “I’m sorry, what was that, Mrs. Poore?”

  “My husband? Why isn’t he sick as well?”

  “Your husband? Well, not having examined him, I can’t really say. You know for a fact it was he who gave this to you?”

  The question shocked her: Who else, if not Willis? There was no one else. Lindy told Dr. Freeman she was sure.

  “In that case, sometimes it’ll lie latent for years and years,” said Dr. Freeman. “There are many who never become sick. It’s another one of the disease’s great mysteries. Who it chooses, I suppose you could say. Who it singles out.” Dr. Freeman led Lindy back to the daybed, settling her against its humped headrest. “I trust you’ve discussed this with Captain Poore.”

  She didn’t answer, thinking of the night she had gone to Willis, saying, “There’s something I need to tell you.” He had looked through her, somber with shock and certain of his innocence. He denied that he had known anything about this: “How do you know you didn’t get it before? From him?” She told him she knew exactly how the spore had first settled in her blood, but Willis demanded that she tell no one: You haven’t told anyone, have you, Lindy? It could ruin us, Lindy. Ruin you! But who was there to tell? “I don’t want to hear you mention it again,” Willis had said. “I want to pretend you never told me any of this. I’m going to pretend I’ve dreamed this and it’s a bad dream and now I’m waking up.” And he hurried to the sink, where he scrubbed his hands with a wire brush. Long ago, Lindy had learned that she’d married a coward. To expect more of him was to deny this simple, awful truth.

  Dr. Freeman returned to the chair behind his desk and said, “Now, Mrs. Poore. If you’re willing, I want to try something new.” Miss Bishop looked up from Lindy’s chart as he said this, as if this was news to her as well. “Mayo is reporting success with malarial treatment. The reports are promising.” He continued, “It’s a form of fever therapy. You come in, and I’ll give you an intravenous inoculation of five to ten milliliters of malarial blood.” Dr. Freeman explained that she would become ill with chills and fevers and eventually go into a febrile convulsion. “It runs in cycles, a convulsion every two or three days. Optimally I’d want you to undergo ten or twelve convulsions, and then I’d abort the attacks by administering quinine.” He added, “You’d be sick on and off for a little more than a month.”

  Lindy leaned into the daybed. She would continue to bear this alone. Not out of shame but because she had no choice—the same way when, years ago, she hadn’t wanted anyone to know that she could bleed. She wasn’t yet thirty and refused to become an invalid. Yet more acutely, she refused to admit that there’d been a mistake; that perhaps she had made a mistake. After Sieglinde was born she had returned to the room with the canopy bed, and for a year or two Willis would knock on her door late at night when he wanted her. He was always polite, asking if she minded. And at first she didn’t mind, his fingers kneading away the loneliness, releasing the longing. But it had been a long time now since he’d kissed her, and Lindy hoped, the velour soft on her cheek, that he would never try again. From time to time she liked to close her eyes and imagine herself as a young girl in the grove, a fishergirl graduated to the orchard, with her life ahead of her, a future unfurled; but it was no longer true. What was it Lolly had said when they were in Dodsworth’s last week? “You’ve become just like the rest of us, Lindy. Most people can hardly believe you weren’t born in Pasadena.”

  “Mrs. Poore?” Dr. Freeman was saying. “Mrs. Poore?”

  Lindy shook herself back to this August day, to the office above the alley.

  “I’d like to begin right away,” said Dr. Freeman. “Next week.” Miss Bishop flipped the appointment book and proposed a time. “Will that be all right, Mrs. Poore?”

  “What?”

  “Can you come back next week? You’ll have to make some arrangements in advance. You’ll be out of sorts for the month. Can you do that, Mrs. Poore?” The voices trailed away, and Lindy saw in the window’s reflection that she had misbuttoned her blouse. She fixed it, but the reflection was of someone else; was it really she? Another woman stared back, pocketbook hooked over wrist, hair cut and pinned in place, mouth grave and expressionless, and something came for Lindy, a large gentle hand, and led her through the office door and down the stairs and into the alley, where the sun reflected off the garbage canisters, and past Erwin’s empty window, and the exhaust from the traffic rose around her and Lindy found herself behind the wheel of the Gold Bug, the seat scalding, the dash burning her fingertips. In the heat wave that had spilled from July into August and would burn toward September a fever came on its own to Lindy; she was damp with sweat and her eyes spilled over with tears and she turned the ignition and prepared to nudge the car forward, to drive blearily home, but then Lindy looked up and saw, across the hood, a man.

  This time there was no doubt.

  It was Bruder.

  He was in a seersucker suit, and the five years had dusted the hair in his temples with early gray. He moved to her window as she hurried to roll it down and pushed his face into the car and said, “Lindy,” and she said, Yes, yes, and he said, “What have you done to yourself?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What’s become of you, Lindy?” And the question remained in her head as she drove out of the city to the ranch, Bruder behind her in his Pierce-Arrow, his face alive in her rearview mirror.

  3

  He followed her, through the hills and to the overgrown gate, and in the rearview mirror Lindy watched Bruder, and she thought of those evenings years before when they would return together to the ranch, she in the wagon and he in the truck behind her. But Bruder, his hair wired with gray and a deep frown carved around his mouth, now appeared as if more than five years had passed. His skin had darkened and coarsened, and his beard was dense and woolly, and he looked uncomfortable in his suit. He was visoring out the sun with his hand, but he couldn’t take his eyes off the Gold Bug’s rounded back and the sight of Lindy’s dark hair above the driver’s seat. She glided the car up through the curvy hills, and the sun seeped through the live-oaks, their trunks nearly encased in pavement. He knew that she was thinking that he looked older, but the same was true of her, although her beauty remained. A part of him had expected it to have faded by now—she’d pressed her face too close to the sun—and it would have been easier for him to return to Pasadena if she’d thickened in the middle and her posture had sagged under the life she’d chosen. She was thin, he noted—Cherry had alerted him to that—but the contrasting beauty was there: black, beautiful eyes darting fast in a somber face.

  But Bruder had come to Pasadena not to pursue what he’d already lost, and he shook the longing from his mind, a shiver traveling down his spine.

  Lindy’s hands were trembling on the wheel; it was like seeing a ghost. She had assumed that she wouldn’t meet him for another fifteen years—if ever. She had assumed that by the time he emerged from the gates of San Quentin and ferried across the bay to the railroad station and then traveled south, she would be old and Bruder would be old too. She had assumed that all those cruel cold years would snuff the final flicker of desire, and that it would be safe to greet her former lover in her husband’s house, and the two would share a memory of twenty years before—there’s nothing as harmless as a tempered memory, thought Lindy. But she’d been wrong, for here Bruder was right now, holding his hand up to blot out the sun, and she wondered if he’d bought the seersucker suit to impress her. Had he escaped, had there been a riot, prisoners digging to freedom with coffee spoons? A secret swim across San Francisco Bay, his head in the water as black and slick as a harbor seal’s?

  And in the Pierce-Arrow, Bruder knew that she was turning over the possibilities of how he’d come to arrive in Pasadena. He couldn’t see her face, but he knew; just as he knew that the reason for his freedom was the one reason she’d never suspect.

  Lindy got out of the car and
opened the iron gate, a cloud of yellow dust rising, veiling her, but through it she could see him, and he never lost sight of her, of the whites of her eyes peering out. The sun was hot and Lindy’s headache remained, but the fatigue that had mounted in her the past several weeks was receding. She thought that if she had to, she could run up the hill—all the way to the great lawn and the loggia—and her blood was racing. And she thought it would be fun if the two of them left the cars at the gate and ran up the hill together, and she imagined their chests rising and falling with panting breath, and she imagined their hands clasping as she slowed before the lawn, and she imagined the great heat each of them would cast upon the other and she imagined the smell of sweat, the musk of a working heart.

  She was standing next to her car dreaming of all this when the Pierce-Arrow’s door opened and Bruder got out: “Linda? Are you all right?”

  “Lindy.”

  Bruder cocked his chin.

  “They call me Lindy now.”

  “Lindy?”

  “Lindy Poore.” Bruder got back into the Pierce-Arrow and yanked the door shut. Her daydream collapsed upon itself, and she got back in her own car and they drove up the switchbacks, like any two cars in traffic. Her radio lost reception at the turn just before the hillcrest. She drove around the brittle summer lawn with no sound but the wind flushing through the car and the grind of the Pierce-Arrow behind her. As she approached the house, she felt the tent of her soul collapse with disappointment: Willis and Lolly would be on the loggia, listening to music and reading the newspapers, the children playing at their feet. Already Lindy felt duplicitous, and she grew quietly angry at Willis for making her feel this way. Her husband would be alarmed that she had brought a fugitive to the house; Lolly would blanch with fear, a balled hand fluttering upon her breast. They had always found Lindy reckless; “My girl of the Wild West,” Willis would say. “I pulled her off the frontier,” he would proclaim, shuddering at the thought of what California had once been, and comforting himself by what it had become, what it was on its way to becoming. They say that the only constant in California is its rapid rate of change, and Willis had tried to track down who had said it first, but he hadn’t found the answer; the researcher over at the Romanesque library on Walnut called back with an unspecific response: “My guess is they’ve been saying it since long before the Spanish arrived, Captain Poore.” Nonetheless, Willis would use the quote in his next presentation about the proposed parkway.

  Now, as Lindy approached the house in her car, she feared her husband’s reaction to Bruder. Willis would study Lindy as she talked to Bruder; he would note that she hadn’t smiled in months and that now, on this afternoon in early August, her cheer had returned, her shoulders pulled back and her head leaning in to listen to her visitor. Lolly would coo and fan herself and look at the man through her fingers; she would rise from her chair and turn and offer a silhouette so thin in crêpe de chine that one might wager she wasn’t even there, or was merely a delicate pillar of bones held together by translucent flesh. She weighed only eighty-five pounds, and Lindy had heard the screams behind the bathroom door when the round-faced scale told Lolly that a new pound of flesh had latched on to her fragile pile. Lindy had seen Lolly’s lips seal upon themselves as the platter of filet de boeuf au jus moved around the table. Now Lindy imagined Lolly offering Bruder a lemonade and a licorice stick, and she and Willis would inspect him as if he were a delivery man from Model’s.

  But Lindy couldn’t anticipate what Bruder would do. She still didn’t know what he was entitled to. She didn’t know that the scrap of paper with Willis’s written last will and testament was in an envelope in Bruder’s breast pocket; she didn’t know that it was all he had arrived at prison with, and that it was the only thing they’d returned to him when he departed last week.

  She drove the Gold Bug through the porte cochère, and there they were, her family: Willis in a fan-backed chair and Lolly on the swinging bench, one foot hooked beneath her. She was reading and he was examining papers and they had a soft, clayish appearance in the heat. The children were building a house of wood blocks, and Sieglinde was insisting that Pal didn’t know the correct way to erect a barn. Lindy had never felt it so distinctly, but the sensation pulsed through her that she did not belong to her family. They were strangers, except her daughter, and her heart felt what a heart feels for a stranger—very little beyond common compassion. Did Lindy feel even this? No, she felt even less for those who had become her own. She tried to stamp out the embers of this smoldering pitilessness, but she failed. Every now and then we stop loving those whom we love, she told herself, Bruder’s face still filling her rearview mirror. Love isn’t constant, it skips across a gap—does it not? She thought so, knowing also that more than once she had failed to navigate those bottomless ravines. In the mirror was Bruder, but it might as well have been her entire past, a memory sailing from one edge of the mind’s sea to the other. He’d come in a new seersucker suit, but he’d brought everything with him, every last memory.

  When Willis saw Lindy, his face folded grimly upon itself. Lolly lifted her head and waved childishly and the Arcadia orange trees planted in the porcelain saki barrels were so sweet in the heat that their perfume caused Lindy to gag, and she didn’t stop the car but continued to steer through the pillars and past the house, down the other side of the hill to the ranch. She didn’t wait to see her family’s reaction to who was following her, and she sped along and Bruder remained behind her, the Pierce-Arrow clearing the pillars by a few inches and then emerging free from the porte cochère, and both cars gathered speed down the hard dirt road into the valley where summer sat in a haze.

  They parked beneath the pepper tree and Linda got out of her car and Bruder slammed his door and the afternoon was silent, the grove dry and aching, the leaves parched and crisp, the irrigation ditches dead, the sun flashing off the packinghouse’s corrugated roof. Through the haze the mansion appeared white and faraway in a smudged white sky. “Nothing’s changed,” said Bruder.

  And she said he was wrong.

  He inspected himself and shrugged, as if excusing the suit and the tonicked hair. He had his reasons, and they didn’t have anything to do with Lindy, not anymore. He reminded himself of this each time the wind lifted her hair and pressed it against her throat, each time her face opened up and she said, “I don’t believe you’re here.”

  She asked where he’d come from and he said Condor’s Nest and she said she didn’t understand. “I sold a couple of acres and bought myself a suit and a car,” he said, and again Lindy didn’t know what he was telling her. There’d been no word since the wadded apron arrived in the mail more than five years before. She’d written him two, maybe three times, but each letter was returned unopened, stamped REJECTED BY PRISONER. Over the years, whenever she read in the newspaper an item about San Quentin—another convict sent away for life—a precise vision would press upon her of Bruder in a colorless jumpsuit standing alone in a bleak yard, fingers curled through a fence, the clear, blank sunlight bringing a permanent squint to his eyes. He would be looking to the bay and the yawning mouth of Golden Gate, where the sea lions paddled with silver fish in their mouths. On some days she did her best not to think of him, but she almost always failed, and there was a terribleness to what she had done, or hadn’t done. Yet hadn’t she seen what she had seen, and what she hadn’t seen? Hadn’t she testified as precisely as she could? And she reassured herself that she hadn’t chosen Edmund over Bruder; no, she had chosen the truth, or what she knew of the truth. But even as the years in Pasadena had passed, and especially in the 109-degree summers when it was hard to think plainly at all, Lindy never forgot that Bruder had testified after her. She hadn’t been there, but Cherry had told her afterward: he took the stand and he was wearing a tie for the first time in his life and he told a story of Edmund’s eyeglasses flying from his face and his tripping over a lobster pot and the mallet twirling in the night sky. He carefully recounted his version, but it
was too late: the jury had reached its conclusion even before he laid his hand atop the court’s warped Bible. “If this is the case, then why didn’t Mrs. Poore tell us about it yesterday?” Mr. Ivory had asked. He was a man with fleshy ears that had made Lindy think of a hound’s, and his quivering nostrils too, and what else could have happened that night other than what she thought she saw, and what the jury had agreed she must have seen? She had come to realize that Edmund and Bruder had always been destined to destroy each other, each in his own way, each to remove the other from her life. All in one night her path to the rancho’s gate had been cleared. And now it all felt like fate—as the inevitable always does. It now felt as if she’d never lived anywhere else; as if Edmund and Bruder were men she had read about in a book pulled from Willis’s library or selected for her by Mr. Raines at Vroman’s—characters who remained in her head through her dreams and who felt more real than anyone she knew in Pasadena. Real because they weren’t real, not anymore. And yet, look there now, here was Bruder circling the ranch house, Panama hat in hand … And oh, Lindy, Lindy! Why were you saddled with the burden to never really know the men around you? To never really know yourself?

  “You’re free,” she said. She said she didn’t understand what had happened—hadn’t the sentence been for twenty years?—and the fever in her hips caused Lindy to wince. Did Bruder see it, her creased eyes? Yes, for he came to her and said, “I’ve been back at Condor’s Nest almost a week.”

  She wondered if he knew that earlier in the summer she had thievishly visited the farm, lurking in the yard and stealing memories? Had her fingers left prints in the dust on the knobs? Prints waiting for him as he returned? He didn’t say. Instead, he spoke of catching a barracuda almost five feet long, and of the lobster pots he had mended and returned to the ocean floor. He asked where she had sent Dieter. “I want to bring him home,” Bruder said, and she wondered if his voice held an accusation within it.