Pasadena
Page 57
Blackwood entered the mansion, taking refuge in its shade. All was silent in the gallery, but then up through the vents came a ghostly call of some sort, a strange whimpering, almost like a girl crying. “Just the house settling,” Mrs. Nay had said. But this noise was spirited and small and alive. Blackwood asked if anyone was there, but no reply came. It continued, sounding like a child who is either happy or sad, only she can say. “Tell me if you can hear me,” Blackwood whispered into the empty house. His heart was pounding in his ears and the sound continued for another moment and then it died and there was nothing but his echoing breath.
Later, Blackwood would discover the source of the noise—an open window in an almost forgotten room at the end of the hall upstairs, a bed’s torn canopy flapping in the breeze—but in the meantime he dashed out the front door and climbed into the Imperial Victoria. He drove down the hill and through the gate, in the direction of Suicide Bridge, and in his rearview mirror a black cloud of exhaust rose from his tailpipe, and in its haze the Rancho Pasadena passed away.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Although this is a work of fiction, it takes place in a world that once existed (or could have existed) but no longer does (or no longer could). Several resources invaluably assisted my imagination in creating it. I started and concluded the novel in the Pasadena Public Library’s Centennial Room, where a collection of Pasadena history and arcana is housed behind wiregate doors. The research staff at the Huntington Library welcomed me with their vast knowledge of Southern California history. The upstairs stacks of the Carlsbad Public Library introduced me to the history of San Diego’s North County. Many books informed this novel, and among those I consulted most often are Seekers of the Spring: A History of Carlsbad, by Marje Howard-Jones; Historic Pasadena: An Illustrated History, by Ann Scheid Lund; The Valley Hunt Club: One Hundred Years, 1888–1988, by Ann Scheid; A Natural History of California, by Allan A. Schoenherr; Underwater California, by Wheeler J. North; The National Audubon Society Field Guide to California, by Peter Alden and Fred Heath; The Huntington Botanical Gardens, 1905–1949, by William Hertrich; The Botanical Gardens at the Huntington, by Walter Houk; Fifty Years a Rancher, by Charles G. Teague; Kevin Starr’s incomparable series, Americans and the California Dream; Oranges, by John McPhee; and The First World War, by John Keegan. I am indebted to the careful scholarship of each of these authors.
DAVID EBERSHOFF
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THE NOVEL BORN IN A TRAFFIC JAM
DAVID EBERSHOFF
When I was a kid growing up in Southern California, I spent a lot of time stuck in traffic in the back of a Pontiac Estate Wagon. My memory (that selective hope chest of the mind) has it that I spent most of my childhood stuck in traffic, the wagon’s hot, gum-blue vinyl burning my thighs. In my lap was always a book, and I’d open it up to escape from the traffic and the car. But I was prone to motion sickness, and so to remove myself from the present scene—sisters fighting, dog panting, mother tsking—I’d have to stare out the window and imagine another world.
At the very northern end of San Diego County there’s a long stretch of coastland owned by the federal government. At one end, on a pretty beach loved by surfers, is a nuclear power plant. At the southern end is Camp Pendleton, where you can see bulky Marines climbing walls or crawling through the chaparral, feigning war. But in between the cooling towers and the Marine base is a landscape of dry arroyos, hillsides of toyon and lemonade berry, and sandy riverwashes where rattlers sunbathe at noon. The land slopes down to the high sandstone bluffs that overlook the Pacific. The beach below is wide, and from it in autumn you can watch the pilot whales breaching on their way to Baja.
Except for the scars of a few fire roads and the column of alienish, quadripedal utility poles, this huge tract of undeveloped land can show a student of history, or a budding novelist, what California once looked like. Interstate 5 runs through the landscape but somehow doesn’t spoil it, and it remains one of the most untouched pieces of California coastline. At one point on the freeway there’s an INS check-station, where traffic is brought to a crawl and officers in beige uniforms and oval-brimmed hats peer into your car to see if you’re smuggling Mexican laborers. Because of that check-station, traffic jams could get so bad that our car would be idle long enough for me to read a page or two from the book in my lap before my mother took her foot off the brake and we lurched ahead.
When I first read Wuthering Heights, I was fifteen and therefore still trapped in the back of my mother’s station wagon. One day, as I gazed out the window at the dry chaparral and the bluffs rising from the ocean, it occurred to me that not so long before, Southern California was as wild and weather-savaged as Catherine and Heathcliff’s moors. I imagined a time when people arrived from Mexico by sailing up the coast or riding horses and hinnies across the border arroyos. I thought about the coastland before the real-estate developers, before the highway men, before the Marines and the nuclear power plant. I imagined Pasadena, my hometown, when it was all fruit groves and balconied hotels for the wintering tourists. I began to see California’s history in a simple but useful way: as the perpetual struggle between its natural and civilized selfs, between the breathtaking past and the phantasmagoric future. It is a state in perpetual and sweeping change, and so are the people who live there, even if they don’t know it at the time.
The history of California is based on transformation and reinvention. Southern California went from frontier to suburb in little more than a generation. In the blink of an eye, the scrubland gave way to sprawl, asphalt paved the arroyos, and the orange groves were felled for freeway. Who can ever forget Emily Brontë’s howling moors contrasting with the sealed, careful hush of Thrushcross Grange? How does Catherine end up with Hindley and not Heathcliff? How does a woman become who she is? How did California become what it is today?
All of this rose and swirled within me over the years, an eddy of emotion and idea and question, and then a few years ago the vision cleared. Characters cleared their throats and spoke their names: Linda Stamp; her brother, Edmund; her lover, Bruder; her eventual husband, Captain Willis Poore. I saw a young woman, a fishergirl, born in 1903 on the wild California coast between Los Angeles and San Diego. I saw her years later, at the balcony of a large white house, surveying a dying orange grove on the outskirts of Pasadena. Who is she? How does she end up at the orange ranch in Pasadena? In my imagination, the long-gone orange groves took root again and the branches of chaparral pulled down the condos and a flashflood swept away the freeways. California’s beautiful past came to life, and I sat down and wrote a novel called Pasadena.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. The novel has two narratives, that of Cherry and Blackwood and the larger story of Linda and Bruder. What effect does this have on how the story is told? How does the author use this narrative strategy to reveal information about his characters and their fates?
2. Many critics have suggested that place—California—is as much a character in Pasadena as the people in the story. Do you agree with this? In one interview David Ebershoff commented, “I wanted my characters’ internal landscapes to echo or contradict the external landscapes of California.” How does the changing landscape of Southern California reflect the characters and their lives?
3. Linda is a character in perpetual transformation: she is born Sieglinde, has her name changed to Linda, and takes on the name Lindy after she marries. Why is she always seeking change? How does this affect her ability to know herself? Who else in the novel reinvents himself or herself? Why do you think so many characters in Pasadena have abandoned their pasts? Is this common to the American experience? To that of California?
4. Why do you think Linda and Bruder have difficulty loving each other? What is it about their characters and the circumstances of their relationship that thwarts their affection? Bruder is described as resigned to fate, Linda as
convinced of her own free will. How does this affect the outcome of their romance, and their lives?
5. Consider the relationship between Linda and Valencia. How are they different, how similar? Do you think that Linda’s relationship with her mother is more important to her than her relationship with her father? Why (or why not)? What do you think in Valencia’s childhood in Mexico impresses Linda the most? What about in Dieter’s experience in Germany and as an immigrant?
6. Linda and Charlotte Moss begin life in similar circumstances. Why do you think their lives diverge so drastically? Who do you think compromises the most? Why?
7. What do you make of the world of Pasadena and the Poores? Are you surprised that it attracts Linda? What do you think spellbinds her the most? Why do you think she makes the choices she does?
8. In his World War I adventures in France, Bruder spares a man’s life. Are his actions heroic or selfish? Why do you think he insists on keeping his secrets? Whom do you think he is keeping them from?
9. Throughout the novel the author uses epigraphs from the poetry of Emily Brontë. Why do you think the author quotes Brontë? The Wall Street Journal described the novel as “East of Eden meets Wuthering Heights.” What other novels do you find echoed in Pasadena?
10. By the end of the novel many characters are living with the choices they made long ago. What do you think the novel says about regret and redemption? About knowing and accepting the consequences of one’s life? How are the fates of Blackwood and Cherry different than those of Bruder and Linda? How are their fates knotted together? What does Pasadena say about fate?
IN MEMORY OF MY GRANDPARENTS
Rebecca Jane Erikson Rutherford 1912–1992
Robert Bruce Rutherford 1914–1996
John Henry Ebershoff 1908–1999
Maxine Malsbary Ebershoff 1909–1999
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book owes much to the generosity of many. My agent, Elaine Koster, encouraged me when it was an early idea, and again when it was a long manuscript. At Random House, Sunshine Lucas, Liz Fogarty, Tom Perry, Carol Schneider, Gaby Bordwin, Amy Edelman, Stacy Rockwood, Casey Hampton, Libby McGuire, and Ivan Held are among my many colleagues who applied their great publishing skills to my work. My copy editor, Benjamin Dreyer, brought his beautiful expertise to these pages. Evan Stone, Maria Massey, and Daniel Burke read the final drafts with thoughtful precision. Ann Godoff edited this book with patient, knowing care. For that, and much else, I am grateful to her.
ALSO BY DAVID EBERSHOFF
The Danish Girl: A Novel
The Rose City: Stories
David Ebershoff is the author of The Danish Girl, a New York Times Notable Book and the winner of the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Lambda Literary Award. His collection of stories, The Rose City, was named one of the best books of 2001 by the Los Angeles Times. His books have been published in more than a dozen countries to critical acclaim. Since 1998, he has been the publishing director of the Modern Library. He has taught at New York University and Princeton, where he is now a visiting lecturer. Originally from Pasadena, he is a graduate of Brown University and the University of Chicago, and he currently lives in New York City. He can be reached at www.ebershoff.com.