Pasadena

by David Ebershoff

  But then Bruder broke the spell. “Imagine it,” he said. “Lolly Poore and me.” If Lindy had opened her eyes she would have seen the predatory smile and the frozen, preylike fear in Sieglinde’s face. But she sealed her eyes against the hot reality of the day, and then Bruder laughed, and his laugh echoed in the canyon, a dark chuckle climbing up from somewhere deep and filling the brown, burned hills above Devil’s Gate.

  5

  A week later, Lindy drove to Dr. Freeman’s, this time with Rosa. The sun-whitened dirt in the arroyo was blinding, and the KHJ radio news said that the afternoon’s temperature would reach 110. The hot wind rushed around them as they crossed the bridge and drove into town. There was more talk of the future speedway up the arroyo and an even wider bridge spanning its yawn. Lindy could imagine the pavement running endlessly, strips crisscrossing and eventually filling everything in, every last gopher hole stopped up with concrete; she shut her eyes and then opened them, and in the dark instant she had seen a narrow white road running from the Pasadena’s gate to Condor’s Nest. It was free of oil and rubber stain and it seemed as if someone had rolled it for her.

  In Dr. Freeman’s office, Lindy and Rosa waited on the daybed. Over the years its velour had gone bald in spots, and the fern had grown into a large tattered shrub that filled the window and spilled across the file cabinet. The fern filtered the sun, casting a green light on the office and on Lindy’s hands and legs. It gave them a sickly color, Rosa’s face too, and while they waited for Dr. Freeman behind the bubble-glass door, Rosa took Lindy’s fingers in her own. Miss Bishop was with the doctor in the examining room and the two young women were alone, the heat touching them everywhere, the thin velour bristly, the fan blowing, its neck clicking. They didn’t need to say it but both were thinking about Rosa’s mother, and all the other women felled by the reeking, weeping tumors. “Somebody gave it to her,” Rosa said, “and she gave it to nobody, and she didn’t know what she had until she was sick and then she knew exactly what she had.” But then Rosa realized what she was doing to Lindy and she said, “But she never took mercury. She had nothing but her rosary.”

  And what did Lindy have?

  “Due to your somewhat advanced stage,” said Dr. Freeman, “I’m going to give you the full ten milliliters.” She was lying on the rubber table, her blouse hanging limply on the coat-tree, and the rubber was almost gooey against her back. Lindy stared up. Since her last visit, someone—Miss Bishop, no doubt—had taped to the ceiling tiles a picture of a beach, gentle waves rolling in, children playing. It looked like Dana Point, but it could have been anywhere up or down the coast, fat-kneed children crouched in the wet sand and two mothers standing watchfully behind them, hands on hips.

  “One good thing about the times we’re living in,” said Dr. Freeman.

  “What’s that, Doctor?” said Miss Bishop.

  “Plenty of donors willing to sell their blood. I had no trouble getting a pint that’s smear-positive for Plasmodium vivax.”

  Miss Bishop nodded, agreeing that that was fortunate, and through the bubble glass, Lindy saw Rosa’s blurry black figure. “Can she come in?”

  “Who, your maid?”

  Miss Bishop opened the door, and Rosa came in and seated herself on a steel stool; the stool’s plate-shape seat looked like the only cool thing in the examination room and Lindy longed to press her cheek against it. Even without her blouse she was warm and sticky, the rubber mattress sucking at her. She thought of Willis, who’d be sweating it out down in the groves. He had spent the past week figuring out what to do about the spreading decline. The worms had taken no more than thirty trees, but there was no way to know where they would stop, burrowing deep until they found cold, moist soil and the teat of a root tip. They had tried spraying, Hearts and Slay and Willis misting the trees with zinc, borax, and manganese, which left the dying trees covered in a brittle gray film. The nematode lived in the soil, and flooding the rootstock with six parts water to one part chlorobenzene had done nothing either, the flammable runoff collecting in the ditches and sitting in the sun as combustible as gasoline.

  Dr. Freeman nodded indifferently in Rosa’s direction, and Lindy could tell that he didn’t recognize her. But Miss Bishop did: she had said, “And how are you?” Miss Bishop once said that she never forgot any of the girls who visited Dr. Freeman. While they lay on the examination table, humiliated by Dr. Freeman’s probe and prod, Miss Bishop would study each girl’s face, and she’d store the memory in a carefully indexed mental file. Sometimes Miss Bishop would scold Dr. Freeman by saying, “The girls might be coming to you with the same problem, but don’t forget, Doctor, if you asked each girl what happened, each time you’d hear a different story.” “You’re right, Miss Bishop,” Dr. Freeman would say. “But there isn’t time to ask, is there?”

  On the wall was a diploma, Old Throop, class of 1914. Lindy imagined Dr. Freeman buttoning himself into his white coat for the first time, taking up his scalpel with intentions of bringing good to the world. Lindy was struck by the sadness of a man’s inexorable transformation—from the bright hope of youth to the dull, limited options that come from years of compromise. No one could imagine for himself a future that entailed the daily walk up the dark staircase, the turning of the lock in the bubble-glass door. Yet here was Dr. Freeman, Miss Bishop too; and here was Lindy as well, and her future and her present life had long ago parted ways. Sieglinde would be five in a few weeks; when Lindy was five she was trapping puma and casting her lancewood rod into the surf and chasing Siegmund up the arroyo. At once it felt as if it were both yesterday and a lifetime ago, and again the relentless doubleness of life stroked Lindy, soothing and frightening her in the same grasp.

  Miss Bishop swabbed the crook of Lindy’s arm, and the alcohol was cool and the fan blew on it and Lindy began to relax. She looked again to the picture of the beach, and in it the ocean waves stretched to the horizon and far out she saw a little boat and she couldn’t be sure but it looked like an outrigger canoe, two people paddling to shore and cresting a wave. Miss Bishop saw Lindy looking at the picture and she said, “I bought it on my vacation.”

  “Where is it?”

  “A little run-down beach village. Baden-Baden-by-the-Sea. Do you know where it is? Down south of Capistrano and north of La Jolla cove. You ever go down to that part of the coast, Mrs. Poore?”

  Dr. Freeman told Lindy to release her fist and to breathe deeply. He said that the inoculation wouldn’t take long. He flicked a syringe and prepared a vial of blood, and before she knew it he had inserted the needle into her arm and something warm seeped toward her shoulder just beneath the skin. While he held the vial in place and the blood transferred to Lindy’s vein, he said that the first ague would set in at any point in the next three or four days. “It’s a quartan malaria. The chills will return every fourth day.” He said he hoped that Lindy would be able to hold out until the tenth or even twelfth bout. “You’ll feel hot and cold all at once, and an icy sweat will cover you, and it’ll be hard to think straight. But I don’t want you to worry because that’s normal, that’s what’s to be expected, Mrs. Poore. It’ll pass within a few hours and you’ll be tired, and the next day you’ll feel a little better.”

  “Should I give her anything?” said Rosa.

  “A cold rag and some water and, if she wants it, some ice chips, in case she’s gnashing.” Lindy thought of what she might say to Willis if he was to find her shaking and drenched in her bed; she’d only have to say that it was a woman’s problem to send him scurrying down the hall, his curiosity squelched. She would tell Rosa to keep Sieglinde away during the ague hours. “Tell her that Mommy’s gone to bed.” Lindy couldn’t quite envision it now, on the rubber pad, but she had a vague, misty sense that those words would echo in the house over and over during the next few months, up the dumbwaiter and down, transported by aluminum heating duct: Mommy’s gone to bed.

  Dr. Freeman removed the needle, but this felt no more uncomfortable than a hand relea
sing her arm. “Rest for a bit, Mrs. Poore,” said Miss Bishop.

  “Whenever you want,” said Dr. Freeman, “I’ll interrupt the treatment and administer the quinine. But I want you to try to hold out. The fever is burning the spirochetes out of your blood. The longer you let the agues run, the better chance we have.”

  She was both hot and tired, the warm, fan-prodded air holding her against the rubber pad. Rosa took her hand and they waited together while Dr. Freeman moved to his office and continued his paperwork and Miss Bishop reset the instrument table. “Everything’s going to be okay,” said Rosa, and Lindy knew that Rosa was right. The Mayo Clinic was reporting a success rate greater than fifty percent, Dr. Freeman had said. “Almost seventy percent, depending on how you look at the numbers.”

  “By success, do you mean cure?”

  “It isn’t so simple, Mrs. Poore.”

  But Lindy had no doubt that she would outmaneuver fate one more time. She was emboldened by the sense that good fortune waited ahead, and she felt her strength returning, running up her legs.

  A few minutes later, Lindy stood at the window, buttoning her blouse. Outside, the tar-paper roof looked as if it were melting into a black skin of oil. The Webb House’s turret flashed the sunlight back into Lindy’s eyes, and she tucked the blouse into her skirt, and soon she and Rosa moved to leave. Miss Bishop was saying, “Don’t forget to call if it becomes too much.”

  When she got home, Lindy felt in fact better than she had in several weeks, and the headache had subsided and the fever had disappeared. She thought that perhaps the treatment was working already. Sieglinde was out with Lolly and Pal at the swim tournament at the club. Lindy changed into her old work clothes and hiked down the hill, looking for Willis.

  At the ranch house she found Hearts and Slaymaker strapping themselves into knapsack sprayers, the brass pumps burning in the sun. Hearts was in his work pants and his boots and nothing else, and the skin of his chest was glistening and the heat rose off it in iridescent waves. The yard smelled like petroleum, and the boys were greasy about the face, and they looked as if they might burst into flame right then, and when they saw her Hearts said, “About a thousand degrees today.” Then they helped each other into nickel-plated masks bound in chamois skin, Hearts adjusting the elastic band around Slay’s head and Slay doing the same for Hearts. There was only one pair of goggles, though, and each told the other to put it on and their voices were muffled like a holler into a tin can and finally Slaymaker insisted and helped Hearts adjust the goggles. His eyes were huge and worried-looking behind the smoky glass. He said something that Lindy couldn’t make out. Hearts put his hands atop his head, and the pits of his arms were white. He and Slaymaker walked slowly into the grove, the four-gallon tanks lurching on their backs, their boots coughing up dust.

  They were off to spray the trees around the mausoleum with a fine mist of petroleum, and to douse the roots. In the past they’d sprayed the grove with fuel to fight off fungus and mites, and as no one had any better ideas of how to stop the spreading decline, Willis decided they had nothing to lose. Hearts and Slay hated the spraying more than any other job on the ranch. For a week they’d smell of bitumen, the vapors off their flesh so strong that Clune’s wouldn’t sell them tickets to the matinee. Following them down a middle, Lindy thought it was like being stuck behind two old belching Tin Lizzies, the petroleum fumes trailing them. She ran ahead and asked where Willis was, and Slaymaker mumbled through his metal mask, “He’s out here spraying too.”

  When they reached the mausoleum, she found Willis slick with fuel sitting on the steps, his sprayer at his feet. He looked worn and small, his eyes dull in his greasy face and his clothes damp-dark with sweat and fuel. The far end of the grove smelled like the Richfield filling station, where the serviceman in the jumpsuit with the eagle stitched to his breast stacked the quart cans of Richlube in pyramids eight feet high.

  “I’ve come to help,” said Lindy.

  She expected Willis to turn her away, and she was prepared to fight to stay and work with them, but he simply ran his hand through his hair and said, “All right. Take my sprayer.” And he heaved it up and worked the leather straps over her shoulders, tightening the buckles and adjusting the mask over Lindy’s mouth. And then he saw the cotton taped to the crook of her arm. “What happened to you?” She said that a bee had stung her, but the mask garbled her words and no one heard her lie. No matter, for Willis was already busy explaining how to use the nozzle, showing her the stopcock, maneuvering the rubber hose. His demonstration released a cloud of petroleum mist that immediately cooled the air around them, but then it changed, the vapor heating in the sun, thickening to something both invisible and deadly. Even behind the mask her nose and throat burned, and it made Lindy think of the lion’s-mane jellies on Jelly Beach, invisible, almost a product of the imagination, until a long yellow tentacle snared a girl’s thigh, burning the flesh off in strips.

  The sprayer tank was half full but it pulled on Lindy, and she shifted her hips, trying to find a spot of balance on her back; she leaned forward heavily, fearing that if she were to stand up straight, she might teeter over. “I’ll help you up the ladder,” said Willis, and they walked to a tree at the mausoleum’s rim and he set the ladder inside the branches. She climbed until her nozzle reached high and then she waved at Willis to stand back. He walked down a middle into a place where the trees were full-canopied and green, and she watched him scurry away to the ranch house for shade and water. From the ladder the grove stretched before her, nestling the bottom of the valley and rolling up into the foothills. She saw from here how the mausoleum echoed in its design the house on the hill, both white and rising from the surrounding chaparral. Willis had installed a special telephone line between the house and the ranch house, its thick gray wire strung down the hill along stripped ponderosas, and the wire looked as if it were crackling in the heat. Several yards away, Hearts and Slaymaker were up in the trees too, gingerly working their nozzles through the branches, spraying and turning their heads, spraying and turning away.

  Lindy adjusted the sprayer on her back, aimed the nozzle, and flipped the stopcock. She released a mist of petroleum and the sunlight caught it, illumining each particle as if it were a shattered diamond blown aloft. The small cloud descended and veiled a section of the tree, its leaves turning greasy. The petroleum fumes reached her through the mask and she coughed and held on to a slick branch while a dizziness arose in her, fluttering her eyes, seeping the blood from her head. But the spinning stopped, and she sprayed again and again, dousing the tree down to the trunk and then misting the roots through the hard dirt, each spray causing a lightness in her head. By the time her first tree was complete, her tank was empty and her clothes were wet.

  She returned to the fuel shed, the mask hanging around her neck. She called after Willis but couldn’t find him. She began refueling her tank, the petroleum running hot through the rubber tube, and she smelled nothing but the burning fumes, as if they had sprayed the entire ranch. There was nothing in the air but fuel, petroleum lining the breeze, a river of fuel mist for the grove jays, a spring of fuel air for her thirsty throat. Her eyes were watering and she touched her cheek and found it hot with grease, and when she closed her eyes she felt her mind boiling. The tank overflowed with fuel, a rivulet running across her feet, saucing her boots and ankles, and Lindy shut the valve.

  Her first attempt to reload the sprayer onto her back ended in her falling over. The second time, she crouched into the straps and slowly pulled herself up. The galvanized tank loaded with fuel was heavier than a rucksack of bricks, and she was so bent over she could nearly touch her toes. She fleetingly thought about leaving the spraying to Hearts and Slay, but she didn’t want to walk away from the work. She made her way back to the mausoleum, each step heavy and clumsy and painful. By now her forehead burned, the coat of grease intensifying the heat of the sun, her skin turning pink and then red. It felt as if there wasn’t a clean breath to be had in t
he valley, as if all the air would be hazy and toxic until the winter rains swept in to scrub the atmosphere.

  And she realized, as she set the ladder in the next tree, that Bruder wouldn’t return to the Pasadena for her. He would leave Pasadena and live at Condor’s Nest and she might never see him again. Lindy flipped the stopcock and the petroleum sprayed out and she hung to the top of the ladder, panting. What was it he had said? “You’ve chosen, Linda.” He didn’t understand, she reassured herself; something might look like a choice but was in fact inevitable. She knew, even then, that the first fever would come before morning. Soon she would be trembling in a cold bed of sweat. It didn’t frighten her; she knew what to expect. Her mind would grow dark, her vision would close down, her teeth would chatter, a clamminess would dress her, her hair would lay damp against her throat. She would wait out the ague, teetering at the brink of delirium, and Rosa would ice her forehead. She would call to Willis through the door that everything was all right, go back to bed. Rosa would tell Lolly that Lindy wanted to be alone. Sieglinde’s will was harder than the others’, Lindy knew; she might cry at the door, kicking it, flinging herself against it until her Mommy let her in. Sieglinde would blame Lindy for turning a bolt upon her, but Lindy would burn through the icy fever saying nothing, biting back the groans, and then as dawn rose over the oily valley, the fever would recede, the yellow-pink restored to Lindy’s cheek. She had steeled herself to last the dozen bouts, and only then to request the quinine. She wanted to return to Dr. Freeman and say, I have done as you said. Am I healed? She believed that she would recover. She believed that her future would be long. Now, she believed it more than anything.

  Up in the orange tree, Lindy asked herself if she might die, and she said No. She considered it and dismissed it and she was certain; and Lindy Poore would never ask herself again. It was what kept her from being afraid: her ability to ignore the embers of evidence. She aimed the nozzle and sprayed her way down the second tree, resetting the ladder four or five times. By the time she was in the third tree, Willis had returned with a cart loaded with barrels. He called Hearts out of his tree to help him. When Hearts removed his sprayer there were red ribbons of welts across his shoulders. He didn’t bother to examine them, just gave Willis a hand unloading a barrel and dumping it at the base of a tree. The barrels were filled with water and a curdy layer of petroleum, and Willis used a broom handle to stir it up before dumping it into the soil. “If this doesn’t get that goddamn worm, nothing will.” He and Hearts continued turning the barrels over, and Willis was cursing the fucking nematodes, the goddamn evil worms from fucking hell! He was coiled and stooped and red, and Lindy watched him from the treetop. In their five years of marriage he had taken on a leathery quality about the neck, and his hair had gone wiry. He was thicker in the middle, not yet soft but on his way, and when the City Beautiful Committee meetings didn’t keep him busy outside the ranch, draw poker and Santa Anita did. Sometimes, when he was exasperated with Lindy, he would say, “For Christ’s sake, don’t you love me anymore?” In spots he had roughened, just as she had hardened in patches, and both were aware of the sparking friction between them, both smelled the early smoke. He was good with Sieglinde, when he was interested. Sometimes, not always, Lindy looked at Willis and thought that soon he’d be gone—not dead but far off—and no longer would she be Mrs. Poore; she didn’t cling to this, nor articulate it specifically, but it remained a possibility, like the inevitable chance of good fortune walking up your path.