Pasadena (31 page)

Had she known where Edmund was, Linda would have sent a telegram—
MAMA’S DEAD
—but he might as well have been dead too, gone and with no word, off with Carlotta. Accompanied by Father Pico’s trembling recitation of the rosary, Linda and Dieter buried Valencia beneath the tulip tree, in a field just beyond the shadow of the Vulture House. She held Dieter, frail in his epaulets, the winter sun blazing in a cloudless sky. “You’ll take care of me?” he asked; she said she would, and that first night she worked Valencia’s apron strings around her waist and shucked a pot of beans. She rolled the
tortillas
and fried the eggs while Dieter sat at the table, napkin tucked into his collar, his eyes fluttering with sleep. “Papa? Are you all right?” He snorted piggishly and woke up and sucked on the long white whiskers around his mouth. A sense of dread overcame Linda: not only was Valencia dead,
but now Linda would have to assume her mother’s life. She thought of how Valencia had changed after landing at Condor’s Nest; the girl brave enough to dance at Café Fatal and swim the Pacific had learned—and this Linda was beginning to understand—to yield. How disappointing it was to Linda; and rinsing the beans at the sink, the apron strings tight on her waist, Linda shuddered at the suddenly limited possibilities of her future.

After Valencia’s death, little changed at Condor’s Nest, little except that Valencia’s many duties—how had Linda not known there were so many?—were now Linda’s own. She cooked for Dieter—baking the
conchas
, boiling the onion kraut—and strung his yellow-stained wash and mended his trouser knees and sacked the onions until she thought she would never be able to scour the odor from her thumbs. She rinsed the dishes and repaired the curtains and stacked the furniture on the table when it was time to lye-mop the floor. She maintained the farm log: eleven hens, three roosters, two burros—Tristan and Isolde, Dieter called them. She hauled the onions to the market on the pier and sold her catch at the gutting house to a wholesaler named Spencer, whose thick, square face, the shape of a book, always made Linda think he was cheating her. At night she eased Dieter into bed, tucking the sheets around him, pulling his stocking cap over his ears, tamping the ash in his pipe, propping the pillows to help him sleep upright. Quickly she came to know better than she might ever have hoped Valencia’s life, the life gifted to her mother as recompense for a brief moment in Dieter’s barn; had it been a moment of pleasure? Linda would never know. It occurred to her, after living in Valencia’s apron for many months, that her mother would never have stayed at Condor’s Nest had she not become pregnant with Edmund. She’d been on her way to someplace else, to another life. Over the years, Linda had wondered how her mother had transformed from a girl smuggling herself in the ocean to a hausfrau, and now Linda understood: There’d been no choice. It was a hard, jagged thought to tuck into the soft folds of her mind, but there it sat, pointed and true. The only comfort came in Linda’s certainty that it wouldn’t happen to her—even after it already had.

During these long months, and then years, Linda tried to imagine how Bruder was spending his days. She guessed he worked in a field, on a farm or a ranch somewhere, and with an inexplicable certainty she knew he wasn’t far. Beyond Baden-Baden-by-the-Sea, surely, but not
far away, Linda would tell herself; sometimes she’d write it in the margin of a book: her daydream guess of where he might be. The books had belonged to Bruder, and the elegantly scrawled annotations she found here and there were as foreign to her as another language. In
La Vita Nuova
, she wrote:

On
Don Quixote’s
endpaper, she scribbled:

Did she feel abandoned? No, Linda wouldn’t allow herself to believe that someone had betrayed her. She was waiting. For what, she couldn’t say precisely. But she would wait, and as time passed she turned the notion around in her head so that it came to feel as if someone were waiting for
her
. She remained at Condor’s Nest so that she could be found; she grew another two inches and filled the bust of her mother’s apron and spoon-fed her father the delicate pink flesh of apricots and trembling cinnamon rice and his beloved sweet apple butter. Her someone would wait, and so would she. The sun crossed the farm and the full moon halved itself, then quartered, then started again, and Linda remained patient at her old father’s side.

And so it wasn’t a surprise when the postcard had arrived in the summer of 1924: a picture of a navel grove in blossom with snowy Mt. Baldy in the background, and the words in wedding-cake letters:
Pasadena, Crown of the Valley
. Bruder’s note seemed incomplete, referring to information she didn’t know:
Captain Poore can never get to me. He leaves me alone, which he knows he has to. We always need help around here. Don’t tell Dieter
. For a month she carried the postcard in her apron pocket to the gutting house, where she flayed her daily catch, earning twenty cents a pound. It was the first time in her life that the money she earned was hers, but with it had come little of the satisfaction she had anticipated. The coins sat shiny in a jelly jar above the sink, no one but
she and Dieter witnessing the sunset glinting off them. Only vaguely did she understand that Bruder had left because of Dieter, and she hid the postcard from her father, and soon the card chipped and creased in her pocket as she pressed herself against the rubber conveyor belt that transported the pale fillets from her place on the line. Then a letter arrived, Bruder’s longhand straight across the page. It divulged more than she would have expected from Bruder: he did not say it in so many words, but he missed her; he thought of her often; did she think of him? No, Bruder wrote none of these sentiments, but Linda interpreted his commentary—
The girls of Pasadena are either silly snobs or gossipy maids, but I have a friend
—as Bruder’s longing. A second letter arrived, and it included a request for Linda to join him at an orange grove called the Rancho Pasadena.

She knew she couldn’t go. She had Dieter to look after, and the farm, but it was not a week after she posted her reply
—I would come if I could, you know that, don’t you?
—that Edmund returned to Condor’s Nest. One evening he appeared in the kitchen yard, Carlotta’s fevered cheek on his shoulder and their son heavy on his hip. He had lost his eyeglasses, and he was squinting in a way that made him look old. Edmund said that his lungs were hungry for ocean air, and he and his son, a boy named Palomar, had the dull eggshell complexion of people who lived far from the sea. Carlotta, whom Linda remembered as all bust and mane and red-glass bead, had cut her hair down to a fine cap, and she clutched a handkerchief hard with dried sweat. Edmund ordered Linda to straighten up the Vulture House for his family, “Make us a home, won’t you?”

She obeyed, scrubbing the floorboards and polishing the windows, mending the rocking chair’s spindles and planting rust-colored chrysanthemums at the front door and hanging red chilies from the eave. Soon enough, Carlotta climbed definitively into Bruder’s old iron-spring bed, whence she gave feverish and increasingly demented commands—most of which involved Linda minding Palomar—and never again did she climb out, not even to wash or eat or to see her son on the beach writhing like an overturned tortoise.

Palomar was lumpy like a forty-pound sack of onions, with a barnyard smell. His head sat heavy on his sweaty neck, and his wiry black hair stood up, and his gray eyes moved slowly in slanted sockets. Linda
wondered whether the boy was right in the head, and if his eyes were as bad as his father’s. He’d sit for hours propped against the feed sacks staring at the flyingfish dying on the bed of ice, his glazy glare imprecise and unchanging. He rarely cried except when Linda transported him about the farm in the wheelbarrow. She loved the boy, but more from pity for her brother than anything else. And just as she was growing accustomed to Edmund’s return—the Stamps glued together almost as they once were—another envelope arrived from Pasadena. Again, Bruder told her not to mention the letter to anyone (Linda had snuck a letter into the post informing Bruder of Edmund’s return), but, Bruder insisted, with Edmund back home, wasn’t she now free to join him on the ranch? “The woman that deliberates is lost,” wrote Bruder, and he said there was a job for her at the ranch, and a narrow bedroom behind the kitchen, and he wrote, “Neither Dieter nor Edmund once hesitated when they left you.”

As Linda was preparing to leave for Pasadena, Carlotta, frail and gone mad with syphilis, suggested to Linda that she lop off her hair. “You’ll look more like a woman,” she said. “And less like a girl.” A deathbed beauty tip it would turn out to be, Carlotta boiling in the forehead and wheezing her final
Lieder
and clutching Palomar to her lesion-speckled breast. In the kitchen yard, Edmund cut Linda’s hair and it blew in clumps from the bluff, small black ghosts lifting above the ocean and flying off, lock after lock curled at the tip like a talon. Later, Linda would wonder whether Edmund—who had hobbled back to Condor’s Nest with a pocket crammed with debt—was in fact shedding his tears over Carlotta’s final song or over Linda’s hair, tufts of youth carried away, his face broken up with regret. The very fact of moonfaced Palomar explained everything to Linda, everything about Edmund and what he had done and where he had been. She understood that a mistake had transpired at the Cocoonery, maybe even in the greasewood shrub, and in the span of a minute or two, maybe less, his life had been determined for him. Edmund had never really loved Carlotta—he had been trapped by her, a young man handcuffed by obligation and offspring and a justice-of-the-peace marriage certificate. And on the train to Pasadena, Linda had sat rigid on the Pacific Electric seat, certain that the error of passion—a dark hole so many fell down—would never trap her. She had told her father and her brother that she
had taken a job on an orange ranch. When they asked why, her throat straightened upon her shoulders and she said, “To see what it’s like to be free.”

And now, on the platform at the Raymond Street Station, Linda was thinking that so far Pasadena looked just as it had in the postcard, the orange trees round and dense and green, the early fruit glowing like lanterns on the branch. Mt. Baldy rose to the east, its dome pale and brown and awaiting the first cap of snow. She smelled the lavender and the minty eucalyptus, and the sun in the afternoon’s corner cast a yellow-pink glow against the tracks. The station wasn’t crowded, but the street was busy with cars and clerks in shirtsleeves and black elastic armbands hurrying back from coffee breaks. A long-hooded Sunbeam, driven by a young woman with a shiny yellow bob and a sterling cigarette holder clamped in her hand, maneuvered recklessly between the Model T’s and the balloon-tired bicycles. The girl was busy lighting her Violet Milo cigarette and failed to notice until the very last instant the Pasadena Ice Company wagon directly in her path. The Sunbeam skidded and the wire wheels shrieked, causing the wagon’s brindled horse to buck and bray and stamp its feet. The girl screamed, and when she finally managed to stop the car she was so close to the horse that its cavernous nostrils were fogging up the car’s twin headlamps. “Get that beast off the street!” shouted the girl, and she honked and drove off.

The commotion transfixed Linda, and at first she didn’t hear the man’s voice saying, “You must be Linda Stamp.”

She turned, startled to see a stranger rather than Bruder, and asked, “Who are you?”

“Captain Willis Poore.” A buttery rose poked from the lapel of his suit, and dangling from his breast pocket was a military medal on a maroon satin ribbon. He was a young, beautifully handsome man, with a perfectly round head and full, round lips and eyes so blue and flat on his face it was as if they were painted on. He was the type of man newspaper photographers would snap pictures of simply because his face would please all subscribers, old and young, men and women alike.

“Where’s Bruder?”

“He got held up at the ranch. He asked me to come along and fetch
you instead. He assured me you wouldn’t mind. I hope you’re not disappointed.”

Linda shook her head in disbelief and clutched her bag and wondered if there was a mistake. She asked the man what could have kept Bruder from meeting her, and he said that one of the girls at the house was sick and that Bruder was looking after her. “She hasn’t been well lately, and Bruder’s taken to seeing to her.” Captain Poore’s medal reflected the station like a little mirror, and the draft of the departing train lifted the yellow-banded hat from his head and threw it into a ditch, and then Linda’s little featherless cap followed, landing next to his. She leapt into the ditch and he followed her, his hand beating hers to the hats. With his sleeve he wiped the dirt from her hat and replaced it atop her head, and it promptly blew off again.

“Welcome to Pasadena.” He leaned into her, and the medal swayed on his breast, and to her alarm, Linda felt an awkward inequality next to Captain Poore, like the day last year when Mary Pickford had driven down El Camino Real in a Roi-des-Belges, on her way to a film location at Cathedral Cove: her pretty, delicate head crossing the fields, a chalk-white hand waving, the farmers and the fishermen gulping noisily and checking to make sure their wives hadn’t seen the salty leer in their eyes, the envy and desire upon their lips. This event had shocked Linda, for she knew she’d never be able to stir such a response in others. No, Linda could raise a subtler but more profound longing, yet she was unaware of it, as unaware as a baby is of the shimmering pride she engenders. “It was nice of you to meet me, Captain Poore. But I’ll wait for Bruder.”

“You’re free to wait,” he said kindly, “but he isn’t coming any time soon. He sent me in his stead. The girl’s sick, a little stomach trouble, and if I know Bruder he’s folding a damp rag across her brow right about now. He’s a good man, your friend Bruder.” She must have looked shaken, because he added, “It’ll be all right. He did say he was looking forward to seeing you. He’s always said you’re quite a girl.”