Pasadena (17 page)

On Jelly Beach, the tide had begun to move in and the waves were throwing hundreds of oranges onto the sand. Linda and Bruder saw the boy from before sitting on a rock taking inventory of what he had collected from the tide pools. His back was to them, and the disk of his straw hat hid him completely as he bent over his task. Bruder said, “Let’s not tell him about the girl. It’ll frighten him.” Bruder called to the boy, and Linda called out as well, and as they approached him he turned around and they were surprised to see that he wasn’t a boy at all. No, in fact the boy in the hat was Charlotte Moss.

On the rock she was examining a freshly broken piece of teakwood and a silver fork and a coil of rope and two or three oranges. “There’s been a wreck,” she said. She was busy writing in her notebook, a pencil behind each ear.

“Do you know the ship?”

“A freighter out of San Pedro. Carrying half a million oranges to Maine.” She seemed pleased with her acquisition of facts and pointed out the flotsam as if to prove her story. Then she said, “Everyone lost, it seems.”

“How do you know?”

“It came on the wire. The
Bee
sent me down here to see what’s washing in. Where’d you two get off to?” Charlotte asked.

“A long walk,” said Linda.

“Boy, I’d say. You passed by here more than an hour ago.” Charlotte’s chin, soft and soon to require plucking, twitched, and an idea struck her and she wrote it down.

“We went to Cathedral Cove,” said Bruder.

“Anything down there?”

“A few more oranges,” he said. “And a girl.”

Charlotte opened her mouth skeptically and said, “Then I must get to work. It might be my biggest story yet.” And she returned to the debris, holding it to the light. She screwed up one eye as she thought of the best phrase to describe the washed-up sterling filigreed hairbrush that must have belonged to the captain’s wife or the ship’s owner or a rich patroness seeking clandestine passage to another world. Only then did Charlotte say, “You mean an actual girl?”

Linda and Bruder said good-bye to Charlotte Moss, who moved in the direction of Cathedral Cove. She called, “Look for me in the paper tomorrow!” Their throats burning with salt, Linda and Bruder returned to Condor’s Nest. At the foot of the bluff, Bruder reached to kiss Linda, but she instinctively looked up the cliff and saw Edmund peering over. A cloud of uncertainty shadowed her face as Linda left Bruder and climbed the bluff. She ran to tell her brother about the wreck and the thousands of oranges and the silver-fleshed girl.

Over the years
, Bruder had learned that nearly everyone wanted to tell a story—forging the past and inventing the details along the way. The boys at the Training Society wove their family histories around the few scraps they knew: “My mother had green eyes and a beautiful mouth, and she fought off a hundred and one men before she accepted my father’s plea for her hand.” The soldiers in his company had told stories of the girls waiting for them at home: “She works as a telephone operator, and she’s so beautiful that men ring her up just to hear her voice—but she loves me, only me.” And on the long journey home from France, Dieter had described Valencia and Linda as “my little mermaids.”

And this was how Charlotte described the drowned girl in the
Bee
. “Her hair grew in long kelp-like strands, and she lay curled on the beach. She was a child-maid, whose life ended before she knew what had happened to her. She went down with the ship, and no one will ever know her name, nor her baby’s.”

“Charlotte made up most of her column,” said Bruder.

“In the end, what difference does it really make?” said Linda.

Her response touched him with regret, and one night he was studying her as she opened the case that held Dieter’s violin and wondered if she was like the rest: inventing the past to invent the future—ready, eager to tell a lie.

But Linda studied him as well, confused about why he never told his own stories. Since that day on the beach, Bruder had ignored her, working late in the fields and eating alone in the Vulture House. “Are
you afraid of Edmund?” she teased. “No,” he said. And this he withheld:
I’m afraid of you
.

She handed the violin, burnished red with ebony pegs, to Dieter. These were the nights she used to love, when Dieter clamped the violin between his chin and chest and the
Lieder
wept from his bow and Valencia told stories of Mexico, and Dieter told stories of Germany; of California when the scrubland stretched endlessly, untouched, untrampled.

When Dieter began to play one of Linda’s favorite songs, “Frühling,” she pulled Bruder up to dance with her. He refused, but Dieter prodded, saying, “Go on. She doesn’t belong to anyone else.”

Bruder held Linda, her breast against his. He kept an eye on Edmund, who was reading on the window bench, doing his best to ignore them, his pout reflected in the glass. Years ago, Bruder had peered through the Valley Hunt Club’s kitchen-door window into the white-tie balls, and he had seen men’s fingers intertwined with women’s, hands guiding hips, but he didn’t know how to dance and Linda sensed this, guiding him around the cottage. He was clumsy and self-conscious and wanted to please her, and she wanted him to trust her. “Follow me,” she whispered. And he did. Outside the window, the moon was full over the ocean and the waves crashed gently in the low silver tide.

Dieter continued playing the
Zeltmusik
and described how back in Schwarzwald at the end of harvest he and his brothers would use their mallets to pitch a canvas tent in the barley field. For three days they’d play their violins while a pair of singers, usually lovers, would perform
Lieder
and
Spiele
, and the village would dance through dusk and dawn, but the singers wouldn’t stop until Dieter was the last one standing in the tent. It was a contest—who could fiddle the longest—and Dieter always won. They used to call his mother
Der Waldvogel
, and his nickname had been “the Chickadee.” His brothers would ask him to play his violin in the tin shop to help the hours pass, and when the orders had flooded in from the American armies and the hammering in the tin shop lasted through the night, sometimes it was Dieter’s music that would keep the mallets tapping.

Bruder returned Linda to her chair, and he took Valencia’s hand and asked her to dance.

“Mama never dances,” said Edmund.

Bruder could see that the subject had touched Valencia, like a finger stroking the cheek, and it made him wonder about his own mother; he tried to hold back the longing, to fight down the curiosity. More than once he had told himself that it was a waste of time to wonder about the void of the past. But in spite of himself, Bruder couldn’t always resist.

“It was years ago,” said Valencia.

“What was?” asked Linda.

“The world I swam into, on that night long ago.”

“Why did you leave Mexico?” asked Bruder.

“It’s a long story.”

“Tell us,” he said.

“It’s late. Bed is calling.”

“Then start now,” said Bruder.

“And then you’ll tell us how you first met Papa,” Linda said to Bruder. “First Mama, and then you.”

He said nothing, he did not make a deal, but Linda misread his grimace as agreement, and perhaps Valencia did as well, or just maybe, weary from the endless months of sun, she thought that there was no longer any reason not to tell her daughter. Did Dieter know? Yes, although he had forgotten the details over the years. And what about Edmund? He had heard from his father that his mother was an orphan; that was as much as he cared to learn. This scrap of history Linda had already collected. When Dieter picked up his violin again, Valencia said, “It reminds me of the music in the hall in Mazatlán, just off the Plaza de la Luz, where on the first Saturday of each month, a three-member band opened their velvet-lined cases and played to a crowd of sailors and miners,
banditos
and mercenaries, at a
fiesta
that the regulars called Café Fatal.” There, years ago—
estaba una otra centuria, un otro mundo—
young Valencia, not much older than Linda was now, first learned to dance.

She had been tall for her age, with the legs of a crane; she wore her hair pulled from her face, and her skin was softened by a weekly smear of butter. She first attended Café Fatal with Pavis, who was two years older, already full in the blouse, the suede pouch she wore around her waist already filling with silver. Pavis wore a turquoise ring, a child’s ring that no longer fit, but she would grease her finger in a jar of lard to slide the ring past her knuckle. Valencia would watch this ritual, the finger sinking into the mass of pearly grease, as she ran the butter knife
over her arms and legs, over her throat and the thickening pad of her heel. Both girls were orphans, Pavis having never known her parents, Valencia having watched hers, when she was seven, drown in the flash flood that swept away the village of Villa Vasquez. Thirty-seven villagers disappeared, along with the village itself, which had been known for its hammered silverwork and necklaces set with coral. Valencia’s mother, in the few minutes before the flood, just as the village realized that it was about to drown, had taken Valencia to one of the adobe bell towers of the Cathedral of Magnificent Salvation and then returned to the
casita
to fetch Valencia’s crippled younger brother, Federico. It was from that height that Valencia witnessed the brown water pounce toward the village like an enormous beast, two boulders as its eyes, and swallow the houses and the silver factory and the chimneyed smelter and the stables and the market where Valencia’s mother bought corn oil and dried beef and jars of pickled sea bass imported from Mazatlán; Valencia watched the churning water inhale the wagons and the cottonwood trees and the shrubs of wild mustard and the thirty-seven villagers, each running frantically, squealing like a nest of mice scurrying at the meow of a cat, the entire village reduced, from the viewpoint of the bell tower, to fleeing squeaking rodents. But not Valencia’s mother and her father and young Federico: the three of them did not turn into mice at the moment of their death; no, instead they looked toward the wall of water and simply leaned against a ponderosa pine and crossed themselves and let the water crash over them. As she watched the flood swallow them, Valencia was terrified for her family, and for herself: for the cathedral, with its twin bell towers, was in the flood’s path as well, and only seconds after it consumed the ponderosa pine, the water rushed toward the cathedral’s iron-studded door, where Padre Cid shielded himself with a Bible. The church disappeared, and the water rose to the bell tower’s rail; and surely it would rise beyond the rail, Valencia assumed just then, waiting, crossing herself, and praying. But the water peaked, and Valencia, who never once shut her eyes, watched the flood’s froth, a stew of debris—porch chairs and latticed shutters and wagon wheels and iron ice tongs, and over there was a horse tossed about like a twig, and just up there was old Señora Viquario, fat as a cow, chained to her bull, Carlos, the two of them dead and bobbing like buoys—Valencia watched the flood’s churn slow and settle and retreat, so that by the following dawn, all glittered in the sun
and all was gone, nothing left but the twin bell towers and the lone, stripped trunk of the ponderosa pine.

That was why Valencia grew up in the orphanage, La Casa de la Naranja, where she and Pavis first became friends. The orphanage was run by five nuns whose habits swept the floorboards. Each morning the nuns sent the girls to the dairy to milk the sheep and churn the butter and skim the goat cream. The orphanage, although lonely, never became a house of misery. No one beat Valencia or rubbed her nose in her own excrement or forced her onto the straw mattress of the dairy hand, Señor Ferrero, who eyed the girls while fingering his shoebrush whiskers. No, not once did he move his hand from his face to one of the girls. At the same time, never once did the nuns hug Valencia with their stiff woolen sleeves or help her comb the snarl out of her hair. No, only Pavis helped her, using a silver comb spared by the flood: deposited at the foot of the bell tower along with a stick of pink coral with a silver-filigree cap and Padre Cid’s Bible, its pages damp and fleshy like a mushroom. Pavis would comb out Valencia’s plait, telling her that soon it would be time for them to leave the orphanage and take up positions as chambergirls at the Hotel San Poncho. There they would serve the guests, mostly sailors and miners and men trading silver for guns, gold for bullets, rocks of turquoise for candy-red sticks of dynamite. The chambergirls would offer coffee with milk, shark stewed in lime, and corn baked in its own husk. The men would say, “Here’s a piece of silver if you come and sit on my lap,” and Señor Costa, the hotel owner, would nod from behind the front desk, where he counted his money and locked up in a safe his guests’ pocket watches and wedding bands. And this sort of work led to the first and then frequent visits to Café Fatal, on the first Saturday of each month, where Pavis and Valencia would sit at a table in the corner drinking rum sent over by an admirer with gold teeth. He would ask one of them to dance, or both of them; and a moist hand would cuff Valencia’s wrist and pull her to the center of the hall and place itself at the small of her back, its sweat seeping through her blouse. The men smelled, she learned that first Saturday night: like the rind of a ham or the tail of a fish or the bed of a bull or the heap of apple cores beneath the hotel’s kitchen window. She nearly expected a swarm of flies to emerge from the collar of each man who paid her to dance, or to find flies caught in the sticky trap of his nostrils. Handprints on her blouse to wash away in the morning, grease
on her wrists, salty slobber behind her ear. Valencia pressed against a man softer in the breast than she, clammy breath fogging up her face, the jab of a revolver in a pocket. Pavis would dump out her suede pouch onto the bed they shared and count her coins and tell Valencia what she would buy with the week’s take: a hand mirror, a hat with a wide brim decorated with yellow feathers, a bigger purse. “Wasn’t it fun last night? All those men? All these coins?” Except Valencia never thought of it that way.