Pasadena (11 page)

“Come out of the water and give Papa a hug,” Dieter called.

But between Dieter and Edmund was a stranger, a tall young man in a white shirt that billowed to reveal a patch of black hair on his chest. He held his chin down, and his shoulders hunched against the spray, and his mane of black hair blew about. He followed Dieter to the water’s edge, and when he looked up, Linda, naked in the waves, the lobsters’ antennae tickling her thigh, saw his face: eel-dark eyes, a mouth split apart as if he were about to say something, as if he recognized her, his brow buckled with a worry Linda knew just then she’d forever wonder about.

“There’s someone I want you to meet,” Dieter said.

Behind the stranger hurried Edmund, his cap pushed far back on his head as if he’d been scratching it while figuring something out. He squinted and his face was blank and his glasses slipped down his nose and off his face, and Linda saw that his resemblance to Dieter had magnified. She knew that Edmund was sensing something shift beneath him. The four years of their small world, Edmund and Linda’s tiny circle of a world, had closed upon itself, a locked globe. Then Valencia appeared, and Charlotte Moss with her notepad.

“I want you to meet Bruder, Linda. He’s made the journey back with me and he’s here to stay. Come out and say hello.”

But Linda couldn’t come out of the water, not just yet. First she’d have to resign herself to the fact that the interim years of war now belonged to memory—but whose memory? Then she’d have to think about the bag of lobsters and realize that she didn’t have enough for Bruder but would have to offer one to the stranger anyway, and she already knew that she would hand over the largest to the young man, saying something silly like “Doesn’t all that hair get in your eyes?” And then, before she could emerge from the ocean, she’d have to beg her father and her brother and the boy who’d go on to sleep in the bed across from Edmund’s to turn around and allow her to dress in privacy. Upon
realizing that she was naked, Dieter and Edmund skittered nervously up the bluff to Condor’s Nest, saying, “We’ll be back, we’ll be back!” But Bruder looked up alertly; his eyebrows lifted and he sealed his lips and he hesitated before he followed the others. The wind flapped the wings of his sleeves, and slowly he left Linda alone on the beach, a glance stolen over his shoulder. And when at last he was gone, Linda ran from the ocean and pulled her dress over her blue cold chest, and she dried as the weak sun set and the salt hardened upon her flesh and turned into bitter crystals in the night.

Bruder was about nineteen
, or maybe twenty—no one knew his birthday for sure. His mother had deposited him as an infant at the Children’s Training Society in an orange crate lined with newsprint. Mrs. Trudi Banning, the long-faced Prussian widow who ran the orphanage, had given him his name. She’d been holding him up to the sun, turning him this way and that, finding the baby strangely large and of a warm, wooden color, when the mailman delivered a perfumed letter from her brother, Luther—a petal-skinned poet to whom Mrs. Banning’s heart was devoted. She was thinking of her brother and holding the new baby, and his name came to the orphanage’s mistress like a chill on the spine.

Over the years, gossip about the boy traveled on the breeze and Mrs. Banning told Bruder what she knew, and what she speculated to be true: “Your mother was a hotel whore. She was a chambermaid first at the Raymond, but then it burned down, and then at the Hotel Maryland, where she was caught
nakt
beneath the pergola. Who your father was, I’m sure even she couldn’t say. She was from Mazatlán, your mother, smuggled up the coast, and that is all I know, my lad, but it should be enough to tell you who you are. And what kind of man you are destined to be.” Until the war, Bruder had spent his entire life in Pasadena at the Training Society, and as soon as he was old enough to understand that Mrs. Banning didn’t want him to know how to read anything more complex than the stenciling on the side of a grove box, he walked to the library and found a copy of
Kidnapped
and began reading about boys in worse straits than himself. He was always big for his age, and black-haired puberty came early, and by the time he was twelve
years old and nearly six feet tall, he was easily spotted prowling the streets of Pasadena in a lonely lurch, to the library and back to the orphanage, books clutched in his paw. Rumors about him spread around town—
He’s a mutant! He’s the devil’s son! He only
pretends
to know how to read!
—but there wasn’t an invented story or whispered fallacy of which Bruder was unaware. He knew that people called him “El Brunito,” and that they said that the accident with the ice-delivery boy wasn’t an accident at all. He knew he frightened women on Colorado Street, young fragile-wristed ladies whose faces would blanch whiter than their tennis sweaters when his long shadow crossed theirs. He had been born in Pasadena, but there was a segment of society—the 100 Percenters, he knew they called themselves—that ruled the little city in the valley and considered him and everyone like him to be “from somewhere else.” Then, in 1918, Bruder went to war with the Motor Mechanics Co. 17, First Regiment, and he returned with a penny-size burn scar in his brow. He journeyed back to California with Dieter Stamp, the two of them having struck a deal. On the way, Dieter told stories of his youth and his family and his farm at Condor’s Nest, and Bruder, who early in life had learned that he could gain more by listening than by speaking, arrived in Baden-Baden-by-the-Sea in the spring of 1919 knowing everything about Dieter’s daughter, Linda Stamp.

She shrieked like a spoiled child, he thought, when her father informed her that he had gone to war and never changed his name. “I left Condor’s Nest and I thought: I am not David. It is not who I am. I tried calling myself David, but after a week I gave it up. I am Dieter.” Linda hollered over the betrayal: “It isn’t fair!” It was a cry Bruder would hear again and again during his first days at Condor’s Nest.

At the supper table one day shortly after Bruder arrived, Linda told her story of the blue shark, exaggerating her courage in the glare of its teeth. “There we were, just me and the shark.” Her account brought fear to her parents’ faces, and to Bruder’s, if not fear, certainly a quiet respect. Linda could see that he was asking himself, What sort of girl is she?—but in fact he was warning himself because he knew exactly what kind of girl she was.

The shark story left Edmund anxious. “I don’t think you should be out fishing by yourself anymore. It’s too dangerous for a girl.”

Linda turned, barely aware that he was referring to her. “Too dangerous?”

“You could’ve been killed.”

“But I can—”

“Edmund’s right,” Dieter broke in. “Maybe you should stay out of the ocean unless you’re with Bruder.” Over the years Dieter’s beard had grown lacy, a grid of white wire cut and bent like latticework. The years of war had folded twice again the creases in his throat, where his skin bunched up, and he fingered this loose flesh as he ate a shrimp ball.

“With him?” said Linda. “Does he even know how to swim?”

“With
Bruder
?” said Edmund.

“Of course he knows how to swim.”

“Does he know how to fish?”

Her father assured her that he did.

“Why would we send her out with him?” asked Edmund. But Dieter ignored his son.

“
Do
you know how to fish and swim?” Linda asked the young man.

“No, but you’ll teach me.” And he left the table and climbed down the bluff and stripped to his waist and rolled his trousers up to his knees. Linda followed and watched him from the beach. She doubted he would venture into the ocean without her. She assumed he would be a slow student, requiring months to learn, and something in her looked forward to the many days of him paddling tentatively at her side and heeding her instruction; days when Bruder’s face would float awkwardly in the water; days when he’d be nervous and careful to stay close to her.

But Bruder didn’t wait for Linda. He pushed himself into the waves. At once the tide pulled him under, and his fist rose in a way that she interpreted as a call of desperation. She couldn’t believe it: the boy had been at Condor’s Nest not two days and already he had drowned. She ran to the tide, tugging her dress over her head as she went, and in her underwear she swam out to where the waters had closed around him. There she paddled and panted, her underclothes heavy and pulling her down, and then something warm and firm took her by the ankle and climbed the ladder of her body and Bruder’s slick, otterlike head punched through the water. He was gasping, the sunlight flashing in his face. “You’ll give me my first lesson now?” He added, “Linda. It’s a pretty name.”

The next morning, he pulled her from bed and told her to watch from the bluff. “Don’t rescue me this time,” he said. On the beach, he
stripped to nothing and swam jerkily but steadily to the horizon and beyond, hundreds of yards past the colony of lobster buoys, his pale behind humping through the water like a dolphin head. He returned to shore as if powered by steam and shook the water from his wine-blue body and stepped back into his clothes. “Now I’ve learned,” he said when he returned to the bluff, where he found not only Linda but Edmund, who threw a swimsuit at him and said, “We wear clothes around here.” Bruder went to the cottage and reemerged in a worsted-wool tank suit that was so tight across his chest and around his groin that it was more obscene than if he had been standing before Linda with nothing on at all.

But even if Bruder could now swim, he still didn’t know how to fish. A few days later, Linda led him to the beach, hauling a pair of bamboo casting rods and a tackle box. The ocean was calm, and she baited a hook with a greenish-blue jacksmelt, hung a weight to her line, and waded into the surf. Bruder watched her from the shore. She maneuvered the tide and the rod with skill and experience, and Bruder realized that everything Dieter had promised about his daughter was proving to be true. And more.

“Just watch,” she cried, casting again. He possessed an unusual reserve of patience, she sensed, but this for some reason made her even more impatient. Soon, however, something yanked her rod, and its tip bent like the handle of a cane. Linda pulled, and the rod curved so sharply it looked as if it would snap. She planted her feet into the sand, bent her knees, and steeled herself against the waves crashing at her thighs. Linda reeled and snapped her rod back and forth, fighting the fish, and after five minutes she cranked her reel one last time and pulled up a brown-back barracuda. The fish, almost three feet long, thrashed in the surf, and Linda held it aloft and walked it over to Bruder, who backed away as she approached. On the shore, the barracuda flopped around and sank its fangs into the sand, and Linda didn’t think she’d ever seen a boy as frightened as Bruder was now. “You’ve got to kill the ’cudas straight off,” she said, pulling a club from her pile of gear and whacking the fish on its long pointed head; the fish flipped itself over and died. “Now it’s your turn.”

He hesitated, sitting on the rock next to Linda’s outrigger while she rebaited the hook. On the journey home from Europe, Dieter had told Bruder about his children, describing Edmund as impractical and soft-breasted
and Linda as a girl with the soul of a diamond ray. Having never seen a stingray, Bruder didn’t know what Dieter could mean, and he imagined a dark-haired girl who was both graceful and wing-fast and who lurked prettily until provoked. He was thinking of this when she startled him by sliding the rod into his hands. She worked her fingers around his wrists and demonstrated how to cup the pole’s handle and spin the reel. She asked him if he understood and prodded him into the water. “Go on, give it a try. What’s the worst that can happen?”

Bruder waded into four feet of water and stood for several minutes while the waves passed through him, his body rising up and falling with the tide. He had harvested alfalfa and picked a walnut tree clean and fixed a hundred truck engines, but this task with the delicately thin rod felt strange to him, and he worried that Linda hadn’t told him all he needed to know. “Plant your feet,” she called. He ground his feet into the sand, swung the rod back over his shoulder, and then cast, flipping his arms and wrists. Together, Linda and Bruder watched the fishing rod fly out of Bruder’s hands and up over the little waves, hurtling like a javelin fifty yards to sea. Bruder returned to shore, stripped down to his skimpy tank suit, and dove back into the water. He swam to the fishing rod and returned with it held aloft and crawled up out of the waves and slipped it into the hole of Linda’s cupped hands. “Show me again.”

Linda told him to watch more closely this time. Then she stepped into the waves, planted her feet, called “Here goes!” and cast her line. But as the hook flew back over her shoulder, the gut line an invisible arc, it caught on something and she heard a tiny moan and turned to find it snared within Bruder’s cheek. Who was more surprised by this, neither could say. Their eyes were wide and upon each other.

But over time, where both Linda and Bruder expected a scar to buckle and shine, instead a scab formed and fell away, and even the most careful eye couldn’t see that a snelled hook had once snared Bruder. Within a month there was no evidence of it except his word and hers, a story that would either tumble around the flatlands and collect into myth, or break up and crumble away.

It didn’t take long for Bruder to grow used to—and even to look forward to—listening to Linda, to her questions about where he came
from and how he had met her father, to her tireless inquiry into what he thought of her. Bruder would listen to Edmund too, as he warned him to stay away from his sister: “She’s not like other girls.” He listened to Dieter tell him not to mind Edmund—“He’s a funny boy”—and slowly Bruder realized that the only one who listened as closely as he did was Valencia, whose face would turn and lean in and betray nothing when the others spoke.

Bruder had never been like the other orphans at the Training Society, boys who would long for a family and would wet down their hair whenever the Sunday picnickers spread their blankets in the orphanage’s walnut grove. These boys were desperate for a mother and lonely for a father, and in their eyes Bruder had seen a pathetic fear he promised himself, even as a child, never to succumb to. When the other boys whimpered themselves to sleep in the dormitory, Bruder would stay up reading by the lamp. He had always taken solace in the books he stole from Mrs. Banning’s shelf, even greater solace in the comfort of his own quiet mind, and for many years he carried in his pocket a piece of advice he’d written out on one of Mrs. Banning’s alms cards:
Dumb’s a sly dog
. The same was true for a horse, Bruder often thought, and even though he was a motor mechanic he had befriended more horses than people in his short long years of life, and what was it the poet had said in the book Mrs. Banning had snatched from his sleepy teenage lap?: “My horses understand me tolerably well; I converse with them at least four hours every day.”