Pasadena (24 page)

“Do you want to dig?”

She took the shovel from Bruder and jumped into the hole. It was about three feet across, and the pile of mud and earth was rising, topped with stones scarred silver from the shovel. Then her shovel hit something with a
ping!
Linda shifted the dirt away and discovered an old bronze arrowhead, hammered and dull at the point. “Probably from the Luiseños,” she said, and Bruder turned the arrowhead in his palm. She had learned this bit of archeology from Miss Winterbourne, who had explained that the Luiseños were a matriarchal society. Something vague had stirred within Linda upon hearing this historical scrap, although if she’d been asked to report precisely what a matriarchal society might be she wouldn’t have been able to say.

She continued deepening the hole while Bruder sat on the pole. He whittled a stick with his deer-foot knife and then he practiced his aim, hurling the knife over and over into the pole’s long flank, stepping back
a few more paces each time. From twenty feet away he threw the knife and it missed the pole and whizzed by Linda’s hand into the side of the hole.

“Are you bored?” she said. “I wish there was a way both of us could dig together.”

“There isn’t.”

“What should we do?”

“We’ll have to keep switching off,” he said, and just then Paiver arrived in the buckboard and said, “These teams of two aren’t working. I need to break up the pairs. Bruder, you come with me.”

“I’m staying with Linda.”

“You’re on my crew and you’re coming with me.”

But Bruder refused and he leapt into the hole with Linda, and Paiver hopped heavily down from the wagon and the wind from his lungs fluttered his nostrils. Paiver fired Bruder and told him to get off his land. For emphasis, he coiled his hands into fists and turned up his mouth.

“You can’t fire him,” said Linda, inserting herself between Bruder and Paiver.

“I can’t?”

But Bruder whispered into her ear to forget about it,
We weren’t meant to work on this crew
, and she didn’t understand him when he accepted fate so easily. Didn’t he know how to fight? Didn’t he know that one’s destiny lay within one’s own palm? His breath was warm and touched her ear and he said, “So long.” He climbed out of the hole and walked off, and Linda remained four feet into the earth, her chest and head sticking out of the hole. Bruder turned once and said, “Are you coming, Linda?”

She began to move, but Paiver said, “Why don’t you stay? I need a good worker like you.” Linda said she wanted to go with Bruder, but Paiver said, “Linda, why? You’ll see him later. Listen, Margarita told me she had a little hat with an eagle feather you’ve been eyeing after. I’ll tell you what, put in a full day’s work and I’ll see what I can do about that cap. It’ll look pretty on you.” By now Bruder was too far away to hear their conversation, and Paiver went on, “Imagine wearing that hat when you go to see him tonight.” She watched Bruder as he crossed the scrubland, the milky-sapped chicory parting around his ankles. For a long time he remained a white sail on the sea of the open land, and
Linda rested her chin on the handle of the shovel. “Okay, Linda? You’ll stick around?” And she agreed and felt a heaviness in her chest, as if the mud had settled about her lungs, earth-packing her heart.

“Now dig that hole six feet deep!” cried Paiver and he left, the buckboard making its way up the line. Linda hummed to keep herself company, and she remembered the jazzy “Horse-Trot” and “The Heavenly Rest” and “The Figure-Eight” played by Fraulein Carlotta’s
banda
. Linda sang as her silver shovel arced against the sky, and the clouds blushed black, and the winter day pressed upon her. She was determined to finish the hole before the rains returned, and she continued digging until her thumbs popped with blisters and tears of blood ran down her wrists. But she kept fighting with the soil and opening the dark hole, and by three o’clock the early drops of rain fell.

She didn’t stop digging, but soon she was standing in a puddle and the walls of her ditch softened to mud, loosening with rocky ooze, and then a curtain of rain descended upon the field, so dense that the ocean disappeared behind it. At once, the weed-roots interlocking beneath the coastal range drank in the water, and almost magically wildflower buds swelled. The mud swallowed her boots and the hole began to erode, earthworms inched their way to higher ground, and Linda easily jumped from the hole just before it collapsed upon itself into a mound of black muck. She shivered on the sprawled telegraph pole and waited for the crew wagon to come fetch her. The rain fell in cold blankets, the clouds sagging so low that Linda thought if she had successfully erected her pole it would have reached into the mist. Lightning snapped flirtatiously over the Pacific, followed by the fraternal call of thunder, the girlish capering of electricity, and the mournful howl of thunder, again and again, one chasing the other, a cycle of tease and torment, and Linda held herself, not worried but alone. The wagon would come, her boots would dry at the coil-handled stove, a hand would extend to brush her wet hair from her face, from her throat and breasts. She felt an ache, remote and unfamiliar, and Linda sat with it as she thought of Bruder lying on his dry bed in the Vulture House, hands behind his head, shirt tight to his chest; she thought of rain catching in Edmund’s fine hair, wherever he was. Was Carlotta pulling his cap around his ears just now? Linda waited for the buckboard, but eventually Paiver’s car pulled up, its headlamp burning. He opened the door and said, “Get in,” and she slid onto the split-leather seat beside him, happy to be out of the
rain. She found herself in a small cabin warm with his breath, and they were alone and the rain fell so heavily that everything outside was a gray blur. Paiver cut the motor and the headlamp went out, and he leaned into Linda and said, “Now let’s see how badly you want that little hat,” and his greasy mouth was upon her and he was pawing at her wet clothes and he was saying, “Was it an eagle feather you wanted so bad?” and he was heavy, his chest barrel-dense, and his hands were both small and fat and the wiry hairs shocked her and his tuna-fish breath caused her to gag and Linda was sobbing but she wasn’t going to let this happen, she believed she knew how to fight any danger hurled her way, and she shoved Paiver back. He pushed her against the seat and she kicked this time, and at first her knee landed in a flank of fat and he merely gasped but it didn’t stop him, and she kicked harder, again and again, and now Paiver was cupping his palms over his stomach and his crotch and he was yelling at her as she opened the door and spilled into the mud and his words
You little whore!
cracked like thunder and Linda ran across the fields, home to Condor’s Nest.

In her cottage, she stripped out of her clothes and dried in a towel and told herself that she would never tell anyone what had happened. She trembled in front of the mirror, her flesh milk-blue and goose-pimpled, and she saw the recklessness in her mass of damp hair. Linda cautioned herself: it had been her fault, she believed, and evening came and the farm was dark and a tiny light burned in her window, and until dawn Bruder watched it, wondering if she would come to him. If she didn’t, he decided, tomorrow night he would go to her.

But the next morning the rain held its breath long enough for them to resume work on the staircase. Linda convinced her mother that the worst rains were over—“It could never be as bad as yesterday”—and she and Valencia climbed up the unfinished stairs, mallet and T-head bolts in hand. Valencia knelt and fingered the dirt and said, “It’s too soft today,” but Linda ignored her and said, “Then I’ll build it without you.” But Valencia surprised Linda when she said, “No, I’ll come too.” Linda couldn’t think of the last time her mother had done anything to surprise her; and Linda would be thinking of this as Bruder surprised her too, appearing with his toolbox and kneeling at her side. The three spent the morning malleting wagon-box nails into the wooden frame. While they worked, Linda sang and talked about the hole she had dug, skipping over the horrible sight of Paiver in his car. She thought to herself,
It was this very bluff my mother climbed all those years ago. And Linda continued at her task, her mother brushing the hair from her eyes, and she was happy to work through the day as long as Bruder and Valencia stayed with her, and for the first time since Edmund had left she felt the restless longing bury itself within her, a smothered emotion that by midday she had forgotten ever flickered within, and just as the long-sought peace settled upon her, Linda looked up the bluff and saw the dam break and the waterfall of mud.

The waste of youth, the waste of years
,

Departed in that dongeon’s thrall;

The gnawing grief, the hopeless tears
,

Forget them—O forget them all
.

EMILY BRONTË

Mrs. Cherry Nay apologized
, but her tennis match over at the Valley Hunt Club was starting soon. She stood and moved to close up the mansion. “Do you play, Mr. Blackwood?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Tennis?”

“Not enough.” But the truth was that Andrew Jackson Blackwood had never gripped a racket, had only thought over the years that he should take up the game for the sake of fitting in. Stinky Sweeney had rolled a north-south court behind his house over on Oak Knoll; others too. He didn’t admit it to himself, but Blackwood sometimes stared at the phone waiting for the right invitation to come across the line. He’d bought a pair of white tennis trousers, just in case.

“Perhaps one day I’ll see you across the net in a mixed doubles.”

“It would be my pleasure, Mrs. Nay.”

She chuckled in that knowing way of hers; again, she felt sorry for Blackwood—a successful man who was doomed to fail in matters of society. Maybe that was why she had felt the urge to tell the story of Linda and Bruder: to give Blackwood a bit of an edge in his negotiations—more than ever, she was possessed with a sense of justice. Or maybe it would teach Mr. Blackwood that Providence was a nasty thing to try to manipulate: follow your given path, and all the rest. Not that Cherry wholly believed in this sort of resignation, but sometimes she couldn’t ignore the evidence that each of them had been put there for a specific and appallingly limited purpose. “But enough of such thinking,” she said, and moved to return the chair to the library.

“Did you say something, Mrs. Nay?”

“Nothing, Mr. Blackwood.”

“Then let me help you with the chair.”

After the long morning on the terrace, the dim library welcomed them with its coolness. The tapestry on the wall, stitched in gray-blue silk, depicted a medieval prince beneath an orange tree. “That comes with the house as well?” Blackwood inquired for no particular reason.

“Mr. Bruder instructed me to sell everything ‘as is.’ ” Mrs. Nay shuddered. “It’s a term I don’t care much for. The truth of the matter is, nothing is as it is. Or what I mean is: nothing is as it seems.” She turned the bolt in the terrace door.

“Yes, it does imply that something is
wrong
, doesn’t it? ‘As is’ indeed,” he sniffed.

“I’m sorry we didn’t see much of the land.”

“Another time, perhaps.”

“If you’re still interested.” A blank look of concern had quieted her. “If I haven’t said too much.”

“Of course not, Mrs. Nay. I don’t want you to think about it again. I should know the history, shouldn’t I?” He said this without fully understanding what he had learned from Mrs. Nay; the girl named Linda Stamp—what did she have to do with the Rancho Pasadena? He had yet to piece it together, and Cherry Nay saw this in his buckled brow. It was clear he had no idea who she was. On the telephone, Bruder had said, “There’s something about Blackwood that I like. Something that I trust. See what he wants, Cherry.”

Mrs. Nay led him back to the gallery. Blackwood laid his hand across the Cupid’s cold marble foot and again turned his eyes from the stone breasts of the blindfolded maiden: so bare and round and white. “But tell me, Mrs. Nay. If you don’t mind. How do you know so much about all this?”

“About?”

“About Mr. Bruder and that girl? About Condor’s Nest?”

Cherry felt disappointed, as she imagined a mother might after failing to teach her son a cautionary tale; of course, Cherry wasn’t a mother—she and George had agreed that parenthood wasn’t for them: “Let’s stick to real estate,” George had said realistically. “To destinies where we can manifest our control.” They’d made a joke of it:
Manifest Destiny
—one of those private conjugal jokes that reside deep in the hearts of only two.

Cherry said, “I knew Linda.”

“You knew her?”

“Yes, of course. All my life. Don’t you see?” But Blackwood did not. “She became well-known in Pasadena. Many people still remember meeting her for the first time at the New Year’s ball. All wrapped up in a grizzly bear at the Valley Hunt Club.”

“A grizzly bear? At the Valley Hunt Club?” One thing Blackwood never told anyone was that he had once applied for membership; the rejection had come swiftly, in a letter printed on paper the color of urine; they had gotten his name wrong, “Dear Mr. Blackman …”