“Need a hand with the ladder?” Willis called. He helped her set it into the next tree but then he said, “You look worn out. Maybe you should take a rest.” He tried to help her out of the sprayer’s straps but she resisted. She wanted to keep spraying and she climbed up into the branches. Down the lane, Slaymaker was up in a tree and he waved, and behind him it seemed as if the afternoon sun was continuing to rise, throbbing more and more with each hour, and it felt as if everything in the valley would catch fire and explode—the sky white, the sun white, the dirt drained of any color but the rainbow beads of petroleum water. And just then, in the span between a rising and falling breath, something did catch—sun through the prism of blowing petroleum mist, a spark shot from the sizzling telephone wire, two flinty rocks falling in the foothills—but no one would ever know exactly what, or where. White smoke rose in the mountains far above the ranch, at first as lazily as a lonely drift of ocean fog. Slaymaker wasn’t waving hello: he was pointing out the smoke far off in the distance. He pulled his mask from his face and called, not urgently but with respect, “Fire.”
It happened as Lindy knew it would: she leapt from the ladder and she was dizzy and Willis ripped the sprayer from her shoulders and took her hand and they ran to the ranch house. Hearts and Slaymaker were behind them, and they panted in the pepper tree’s shade while Willis telephoned the house, but no one answered and he was yelling, “Come on, where is she? Where’s that sister of mine?” He held the receiver to his ear and the sweat ran down his face and he hit the wall with the palm of his hand and at last he said, “Rosa, call the fire department! What? No, no, no. She’s here. Just call!” The fire was miles away but they didn’t know which way it was traveling, and they didn’t know if it had just taken hold or had been burning for hours and only now turned down a canyon to come into sight of the ranch. At first, only slow, lazy smoke rose from the mountainside and it was far enough away that it was more beautiful than menacing. But soon they could smell it, the bitter burning coming down through the foothills, and each of them inhaled the smoke and Slaymaker said, “Pine smoke.” A light flurry of ash drifted down.
When the first gold flames came into sight, no one was surprised. Hearts propped his ladder against the ranch house and they climbed up on the roof and passed a pair of binoculars around. They saw a platoon of flames standing erect in the mountains, idling as if deciding which direction to run. A hole in the pineland opened for the fire, and Willis and Lindy leaned against each other, and Hearts and Slaymaker leaned against each other, and the afternoon burned toward gloaming and the fire swayed, orange as the Pasadena navels. The smoke blew up the foothill chimneys, and the fire lay against the Sierra Madres like a huge fluttering blanket. Lindy thought she heard a distant roar, like the steady sound of traffic on Colorado Street: the flames sweeping away the sumac and the toyon and the lemonade berry. Hearts had turned on the radio in the ranch house and the announcer’s voice filled the yard and greeted them on the roof: “This just in: Fire in the foothills.” Almost at once the smoke changed from white to black, fueled by single-leaf pinyon and the blue-black berry cones of the western juniper. The afternoon was closing, but it was hotter than ever in the valley, and Lindy felt the ripple of fever behind her eyes. She touched her ears and found them hot as flame and she reached for Willis. Was the smoke drifting through the Linda Vista hills and across the Arroyo Seco, passing the Hotel Vista’s terrace? Was it sending word?
The wind shifted and the fire flapped like a sheet being shook out, and then it leapt both up the mountainside and down, and soon they heard the fire engines pass the service gate. Willis and Hearts and Slaymaker climbed down from the roof, and they were yelling and pointing while the fire picked its way in no discernible direction—now it was retreating west, now it was lurching east!—and Lindy, in the tin roof’s glare, felt herself erupt with fever as she waited for the valley to explode. She waited and she began to tremble and she was becoming cold and she clung to the brick chimney. Its mortar loosened beneath her grip, and the dusk swallowed the afternoon, just as the fire swallowed a swath of scrubland, climbing up into the mountains, and by night it was certain that the ranch would be spared even as the fire burned out of control. She thought she could hear the gray squirrels screaming and the black bears weeping and the bobcats hissing for help and the live-oaks falling as the fire burned into the forest, devouring the mountain, hungry for the entire range. By nightfall, firefighters from all over Los Angeles and in from Riverside were in the hills cutting firebreaks and hosing down cabins and trying to hold a line. As a precaution, Hearts and Slay had flooded the far end of the grove, and the trees sat in a foot of water and the mausoleum was covered with snowflakes of wandering ash, and late at night the fire was an orange strip on a far-off ridge, rancid and distant; but the smoke was reaching them, coming for them. Onlookers from all over drove into the rancho’s valley and up into the mountains to see the fire, to smell it, to stick out their tongues and taste the ash. They would park their cars at lookouts and drink from glove-compartment flasks and bet which way the flames would next dash; and some of them would make love for the first or the last time; and some of them would make love as if there were nothing special about tonight. And all the while the fever would continue to burn in Lindy, and eventually Rosa would drive her up the hill and escort her to bed, where she would shake through the night atop cold, damp sheets. She would lie awake alone, her arms crossed over her breasts, and patiently wait, her breath nearly stopped. She could withstand anything, she told herself as she lay her hand on the cold brass rail and lifted her foot to climb the stairs to bed, and just then, with Rosa’s hand at the small of her back, Lindy saw the note propped against the Cupid statue. At the landing, the far-off hills burning outside the window, she would read the note and learn—while Rosa gasped and Sieglinde cried upstairs in her room—that Lolly had taken Palomar and eloped with Bruder to Condor’s Nest.
6
One morning in September 1930, between the sixth and seventh fevers, Lindy drove down the coast, Sieglinde at her side. Over the years the road had expanded, the strip of bitumen widened just as they had widened Colorado Street last year, lopping off fifteen feet from the façades of buildings in order to make way for more automobiles. The road followed the ocean, slicing through the beach villages where pink-stucco motor hotels clustered like giant autumn weeds. The late seasoners hung their striped towels from balcony rails, and little bluff-top shops sold picture postcards and soda and ice cream and strips of fish fried in dough. At one of the stops Sieglinde ate a dish of sherbert, and Lindy thumbed through the rack of penny postcards and she stopped at one that showed the same image as in the picture taped to Dr. Freeman’s ceiling.
Back in the car, Sieglinde sat with her legs crossed and asked where they were going. “The beach,” Lindy said, and Sieglinde asked if they were going to the Jonathan Club, where they planted torches in the sand and organized sand-castle contests for the children. “Another beach,” said Lindy, and Sieglinde, whose face was as bright as a pane of glass, said, “Are we going to Condor’s Nest?” Yes, said Lindy, telling her daughter about the lobster pots and the blue shark; but Sieglinde was an impatient child and she turned in her seat to face the ocean, her finger idly tracing the horizon.
“We’re going to pick up your grandfather,” said Lindy.
“Who’s he?”
The day was hot, the sky empty of clouds, and Lindy told her daughter to pull down her hat and Lindy tightened her own head scarf, the knot hard at her throat. Each fever had been more and more difficult—the blue-lipped chills, the icy sweat flooding her bed, her wet hands flailing up and tearing the peach canopy. Rosa had fed her ice and wagged Lolly’s peacock fan. She would open the window and let the breeze run across Lindy’s body, thin in moist eyelet, until she would cry out for Rosa to shut it again, she was freezing; it went like that for several hours, Rosa tucking Lindy into blankets until she had sweated her way out of them, and then the cooling down until h
er hands turned blue. Lindy’s memory of the malarial hours was imprecise: a remote buried heat, like a fire in a coal mine, that was how she thought of it; she could recall the misery—her trembling, exhausted body told her of it—but she retained no knowledge of how she had borne it. She would remember talking with Rosa, but later, when the fever’s tide had ebbed, she wouldn’t know what she had said. Once, between the second and third fevers, Rosa said, “I still don’t know why you never told him.” Lindy looked at her puzzled: “Told him what?” And then: “Who?” Another time, when Rosa was easing Lindy into the bath, she said, “He loved you, Lindy.” Lindy was under the fever’s spell and required an hour’s soak in the scalding, steaming water. As she stepped out of the water and into the towel spread in Rosa’s arms, Lindy managed, “Who loved me?”
At night, when her head was clear and the moon was bright enough to read by, Lindy would worry that she had revealed too much to Rosa; as if the fever had scratched at the lock on her heart. Over the years, Lindy had learned that the house talked, almost on its own—the windows like eyes, the doorways like ears, the heating ducts like mouths. It traded secrets with its inhabitants as freely as a breeze crossing a threshold. Lindy no longer believed that Rosa would betray her; she regretted that she hadn’t trusted her long before. But the house itself was capable of betrayal—as if its walls could read her mind and relay everything to Willis. And Lindy had to concede that her own face, lit with memory and emotion, could betray her more than anyone else.
When Rosa spoke of Lindy to one of the new girls, she would warn the young maid to watch out for Mrs. Poore’s shifting moods, especially the onslaught of anger. “You can see it rising red in her throat. Be sure to leave the room right away. Tell her a faucet is running somewhere, a hot iron is waiting, anything. Just get out of there.” Rosa warned all the girls to avoid passing Lindy’s door on the afternoons when she stayed in bed. “Don’t even tiptoe by. Find another route.” When the girls, who sucked on gossip as if it were cherry-flavored candy, asked what was wrong with Mrs. Poore, Rosa would say, “Trouble of the heart.” The girls, feather dusters in their fists, would cluck and sigh, for they too had witnessed this common tragedy, over and over: their mothers, their sisters, each wrongly betrothed, each mending fissures in their souls. Yet no matter the evidence, each girl believed that such a cruel fate would spare her; for why should she—she with the blood-red lips or the black-velvet hair or the twenty-inch waist—err where so many women had erred before? The odds were against her but she would triumph—love would triumph, at least for me—and Lindy would know that each girl was thinking this as she brought Lindy her warm milk, the words unspoken but glued with teenage spittle to her lips. “I’ll either marry for love or not at all,” one of the younger girls told Rosa. Her name was Antonía, and she wore her hair in a long plait, and she had lost her job waxing the Huntington Hotel’s ballroom floor; the nightly affairs—debutante balls and midnight suppers and Donner Party–themed dinner dances for a thousand in gown and tuxedo—were now less frequent than a full platinum moon. “It won’t happen to me,” said Antonía, tilting her head. But Rosa pushed the girl into the laundry room and said, “That’s what she thought too.”
The dumbwaiter’s station was outside Lindy’s door and she could hear everything said in the house, soft-voiced news rising from the cool wine cellar up through the pot-clanging kitchen, into the echo-filled gallery, and traveling upstairs to Lindy’s ear. During her first year married to Willis, she would stamp her foot angrily whenever she heard Esperanza or anyone else talking about her: I never thought she would marry him. She can’t really love him, can she? If Rosa caught the girls gossiping she’d warn them, “Don’t discuss what you don’t know.” Lindy would thank Rosa for her loyalty; Lindy said that next time, she wanted Rosa to fire the girls. “I’m not going to allow a girl to tell lies about me in my own house.” But Rosa’s glassy face met Lindy’s with unflinching honesty: “They might be talking, but they aren’t telling lies.”
Lindy had learned not to mind, just as she was learning to withstand the pain of the fevers. She would anticipate her returning health as she wrapped herself in the towel after bathing out the last of the day’s fever: Rosa’s hands would be cold to her shoulders and Lindy would grip her fingers, as if to say, We’ve made it through another. Recovery can’t be far off! The light reflecting off the lime-green tiles would cast a leafy pallor across Lindy’s calm, naked body and she would say, “I’m free for another four days.” And last night, after the bath had concluded the sixth fever—a bout that had boiled her temperature to 104—Lindy had said, “Tomorrow. I’m going to drive down there.” And Rosa, tamping the water from Lindy’s breasts, had said, “Yes, I know.”
The salty wind ran through the open car and Sieglinde’s face remained turned away from her mother and Lindy drove on, squinting against the glare. She was halfway through the treatment: six more fevers to bear, and not once did Lindy doubt that she would make it. Eventually one of the fevers would surpass 106 and there would be hours when she’d slip into a short coma and would feel as if she were lying in a coffin of ice—all of this Lindy expected, and at the same time she knew she could withstand it, would withstand it. Lindy was prepared.
“Are we really going to that smelly old onion farm?” Sieglinde took an Automobile Club map out of the glove compartment and opened its paper wings and pretended to read it, studying the matrix of roads. Lindy warned her to put the map away, that the breeze would pluck it from her, but Sieglinde ignored her mother, and when Lindy warned her again, the wind lifted the map and off it flew, folds extended like a white gull in glide.
When they reached the dirt lane, Sieglinde asked, “Mommy, where are we?” and Lindy saw the sign:
CONDOR’S NEST
STAY OUT
The Vulture House appeared abandoned on the far side of the field, and there was a worn look to the dooryard and the cottages. The arroyo was dry, the dam’s stacked remains nearly imperceptible to the unknowing eye. Lindy got out of the car, and Sieglinde ran to the bluff’s edge, and Lindy became frightened as she watched her daughter dash to the lip and then stop as the sandy soil crumbled over the edge, sending a pair of snowy plovers into flight. “Whose farm is this?” Sieglinde asked, but Lindy didn’t answer. She went to her old cottage’s door, but it was locked. She peered inside and saw the iron bedstead and the matted puma-pelt rug, and memory’s flood washed away the years—but only for a moment. The other cottages were locked as well and there was no sign of life and Sieglinde asked, “Mommy, who are we looking for?”
Together they peered over the bluff to the skeleton of the half-built staircase. The sailor-carved table remained in the yard, and Lindy and Sieglinde sat on the bench. The sky stretched endlessly to the sea, no clouds between Condor’s Nest and San Clemente Island, a canopy of faded blue. The surf filled their ears and Sieglinde said, “Are we looking for that man?”
“And your Aunt Lolly.”
“What about Pal?”
“And Palomar.”
“And what about Grandpa?”
“And Dieter too.”
In the clarity that came with the most recent fever’s subsiding, Lindy had made a decision. When the treatment was over, she’d leave her husband. She wasn’t sad about it. No, in fact she was happy with the promise of her future. She had no plans. This trip to Condor’s Nest was to help her prepare. She didn’t know what she’d do or where she’d go, but one night she and Sieglinde would pass through the gate and she’d watch the rancho fall away in the rearview mirror. They’d pick up Dieter, propping him in the Gold Bug’s tiny seat, and they’d be off—and she would figure out the details between now and when the malarial treatment ended. She knew she was healing, and she knew that later in the fall she would act. She would leave. She’d take her jewelry and the cash she had collected in an envelope: three thousand dollars: “Just in case,” she’d say. She would leave everything behind. She’d even drop his name. She’d sign her letters
Linda Stamp.
Together Lindy and Sieglinde checked the barn and peered through the windows of the Vulture House and hopped into the arroyo to look around. “Maybe they’re on the beach,” said Sieglinde, and Lindy took her daughter’s hand and walked her back to the car. “Why don’t we go down to the beach, Mommy?”
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