Pasadena (35 page)

“But that’s not all we do around here,” said Slaymaker.

“Oh no,” said Hearts. “There’s a whole lot more.”

“We work every day but Christmas and New Year’s.”

“We never work New Year’s,” said Hearts. “Every year, Slay and I enter the chariot races. I think this year’s going to be our lucky year and we’ll take home the hundred bucks and the wreath of yellow roses.”

Linda asked Bruder if he had ever entered the chariot races, and he said that Willis wouldn’t lend him a horse.

“That’s not the reason,” said Slaymaker.

“It’s not the reason at all,” added Hearts. “It’s because Miss Lolly says it’s too dangerous and she won’t let her foreman risk his life.”

Bruder turned his shark knife in his palm, the heater’s flames catching the blade, and he hurled the knife across the table and over Hearts’s head into the trunk of the pepper tree. “Stop telling lies, boys,” he said softly, and he walked off into the dark grove. He didn’t want anyone revealing him to Linda; he would do it in his own careful way. The story of the ranch and his life there was his, and he would tell Linda over time. As intelligent as he was, Bruder didn’t realize that the stories inevitably would come from all mouths, not only his, and that any myth he hoped to create would be embellished and retold by more eager tongues.

By the time Slaymaker and Hearts went to bed, Linda had cleared
the table and washed the dishes and found the oats and the eggs and the coffee for breakfast. She returned to the yard, where Bruder sat with his feet on an orange crate. A low blue flame burned in the heater, and he was motionless, looking heavenward. She didn’t know if he saw her standing there in the doorframe, but without turning he said, “Ever see the Little Dog?” His finger led her eye to three stars. “It’s Orion’s other hound.”

“Where’d you learn that?”

He pulled a chair close and offered it to her. “The constellations? I guess I learned about them at our depot in the beechwood forest.”

“Were you with Papa?”

“Not until the very end. But I was with Willis, and he and I would lie on the ground on the late-summer nights and stare up at the black sky and we wouldn’t talk about much except the stars.”

“You were with Captain Poore?” Bruder said nothing, and Linda said, “It must have been lonely.”

“No more lonely than everything else.”

She didn’t believe him; or, rather, she wouldn’t allow herself to believe him. His letters had been a call to soothe an isolated heart. She had to believe this. What else did she have? “Captain Poore must’ve been a brave soldier.”

Bruder shrugged. “You should ask him yourself for the real story.”

“Why don’t
you
tell me?”

“When we got to France, he didn’t know much about fixing an ignition’s trembler coils, and he barely knew how to dig a hole. He could shoot all right, but his head was small and his helmet kept slipping off and he was too vain to report that the smallest regulation helmet was too big for him. The only good thing about him were the crates of oranges that would arrive from the patriotic committee of Pasadena’s Board of Trade. He loved to hand them out to the other boys, and they were so desperate for fruit that they’d shower Willis with cigarettes and spare socks and iron rations in exchange, anything for an extra orange. One boy swapped six oranges for Willis’s spot on a raid into a no-man’s-land to fetch a broken-down Mark IV tank. And poor Willis watched the boy blow up before his very eyes. In fact, the boy’s helmet blew all the way back to our trench, and it ended up fitting Willis better than anything else. He was upset about that, and though some people say his skin is thick, it’s really very thin. But he wore the helmet, and
over time he was given his chance to show his bravery. I’m sure he’ll tell you about it one day.”

“He already has,” said Linda.

Stars crowded the sky, the Milky Way a stain of light, and the full, cinereous moon exposed itself like the mouth of a lit passageway. A breeze rustled the pepper tree and prodded the orange leaves, and every now and then a scamper arose in the grove, dirt and leaves and dead stalks of clover kicked in chase. The mellow
coo-coo
of the burrowing owl crossed the small valley. Above them on the hill the white mansion gleamed, gold light pouring from its windows, and if Linda wasn’t mistaken, jazz was thin on the breeze: probably the aluminum whine of a disc graphophone.

“Most nights they have a quartet playing on the terrace,” Bruder said when he noticed her foot tapping. “Sometimes eight players, and dancing beneath paper lanterns. For no occasion at all. Simply to put an end to the day.” The mansion’s world was too unfamiliar for any sort of envy to rise in her throat just then. She knew nothing of the marble busts of Roman gods and British naval officers, of the blue-and-yellow Savonnerie carpets and the faded Beauvais wall tapestries, of the aviaries stocked with blue-crested Victorian pigeons and Brazilian parrots taught to say
Captain Willis Poore, Captain Willis Poore
, of the lawn-croquet set with the balls crafted of ivory, the wickets of bent sterling, the ebony mallets. In the mansion lived Willis and Lolly, but Linda knew nothing yet of the pencil-mustached French cook or the puttering Scot valet; of the morning-coated secretary, Mr. Coren, whom Willis would eventually fire because of Mr. Coren’s annoying insistence on punctuality and penmanship; of the chambermaids pinned in wool and lace, a tiny-ankled crew led by Rosa; of the Japanese gardeners pruning the acres of lawn with hand shears and tending the thousand rosebushes and the camellia trees: the two-hundred-stamened Snow, the anemone-shaped Splendor, the
C. japonica
‘Willis Fishe Poore.’

The music they heard drifting down the hill was in fact a burl-walnut piano rolled onto the terrace accompanied by a trumpet, a pair of bongos, a wet-reed clarinet, and a singer in sherry-colored velvet—a common entertainment for the Rancho Pasadena, where guests gathered two or three nights a week, the bare shoulders and throats of the women protected by fox wraps and pearls. Societies and clubs made up of friends of Captain Willis and Miss Lolly Poore, clusters of citizens
with birthright and acreage in common, often gathered on the terrace, with its view toward Los Angeles. They’d lean against the balustrade and tap their cigarette ashes down the kindling hill and pretend that the fizz in their grapefruit juice came from soda water and not from the crates of Oregon champagne hidden in the cellar behind a trick door. More than a couple of these clubs Willis’s father had chaired: the Valley Hunt Club, the Shakespeare Club, the Twilight Club, the 100 Percenters, this one made up exclusively of men descended directly from Pasadena’s one hundred original settlers. Willis knew that one day he too would keep a sharp eye over the membership lists. What was the motto the 100 Percenters toasted to? “City Beautiful, for one and for all.”

But on her first night at the Rancho Pasadena, Linda knew nothing yet of this world. Up on the hill the music stopped, and the night crackle and call of the ranchland grew louder, and Bruder said, “Sounds like they’re sending everyone home.”

“Do you ever join them?”

“He asks me up.”

“Do you go?”

“When I feel like it.”

“Why did you want me to come here?”

“We need a cook. The boys get hungry.” He paused. Should he say more? “Same for me.”

“You could’ve hired anyone.”

“You’re good enough in the kitchen.”

Again, Linda tried to stem her disappointment; but hadn’t his letters promised more? Why did he insist upon withholding? And why did she? On the train she had told herself to expect nothing: even before seeing it she had envisioned the narrow room on the other side of the stove wall; and a long line of famished pickers, empty plates and tin cups in their grubby hands; and the pots nearly big enough to curl up in where the Burbank potatoes, a hundred at a time, would boil. That’s all she had expected of the job on the ranch, and yet somehow a small polished stone of hope had sat atop her heart. What did she hope for? She couldn’t say, that first night; but the cool breeze and the creamy stars and the fruitwood perfume and Bruder’s face haloed by the rim of his hat left Linda anxious for a future other than the unremarkable one unfurling before her. What had Willis said before he left her in her room?
Hadn’t he said,
I want you to be happy here. You’ll tell me if there’s anything I can do to make you happy?
She had nodded and touched the coral pendant. The long day had made her think of her mother climbing the bluff from the ocean, surrendering her former self. Linda thought of the nights, after Edmund and then Bruder had left her alone with Dieter, when she had swum in the ocean: breaststroking out to sea as Condor’s Nest fell away, a mile out to ocean, maybe farther, Linda indistinguishable from any other fur-coated creature of the sea: an elephant-seal hunter would have spear-shot her from his prow. But the years had passed and Linda had taught herself to inter the longing, and on that first night in Pasadena she cleaned up the kitchen and dried the final plate—and Bruder closed the door to his room, eyeing her through the narrowing crack—and after the mansion fell dark and the ranch house quiet, Linda went to bed alone.

She woke before dawn
. The ranch was still and dark and the iron springs groaned as she pulled herself from bed. In the chest of drawers she found a yard of cheap Zion lace. Later, she would sew a curtain for her window and, if there was enough left over, a second, for the window at the kitchen sink. But at this hour the black of early morning poured through the paned glass, comforting her. The wind had died and the orange trees were large huddled masses, shouldering one another—kneeling beasts, they looked like before dawn—and there was a glimpse of the house on the hill. She had been tired and dreamed of nothing, and she woke with a clarity of mind that reminded her of the days—they now seemed so long ago—when she rose with the coydogs at Condor’s Nest and sank hook and worm into the gray-dawn waves. Edmund had asked her to write every night before going to sleep, and now she was already behind on her promise. The loneliness he had confessed had upset Linda, leaving her uncertain as to what he wanted from her. She didn’t know how to respond to his desperation; or to the awkward way he held Palomar on his knee; or to how, at the very end, he had ignored ailing Carlotta, who died in the Vulture House bed, her hair fanned around her as if she were floating in a brook. He had sobbed when Linda departed, the choke simmering in his throat. “Go, go,” he had said. “If you must.” He walked her to the road, struggling with her bag, leaving Palomar crying in the sun-killed yard.

From her window, Linda saw something stir among the trees, a moving silhouette, and as dawn began to streak the sky the sight of Bruder took shape: his arms spread and gripping the handles of a pushcart,
trundling it down a middle and stooping to clear the oranges dropped from the branch. She cracked the window and held her breath and heard his boots on the hard soil. There’d been talk at the table last night of when the first rain would come, before or after Thanksgiving; Slaymaker and Hearts had gone back and forth and then Bruder had said, “It’ll be early this year. No later than the first of November.” He had looked at Linda and thought, If you trust me, you’ll see that I am right.

Later in the morning, after the coffee and the oatmeal and a general inspection of the pantry and the oilcloth nailed to the kitchen counter, Linda set out up the hill. The sun was quickly wiping up the glossy dew, and the sycamore and oak offered speckled shade, but much of the road stretched blankly beneath the hard daylight. She came across a rattler exposing its white belly to the morning. Linda threw a rock and it landed squarely on the snake’s head, and with one quick flick of its baby-rattle tail the snake died. She couldn’t be certain how many rattlers she’d killed over the years, dozens and dozens, and with her pocketknife she neatly removed the rattle and wrapped it in a handkerchief. There’d been a time when she and Edmund would ceremoniously present each other with their bagged rattles, the tips withered and crisp, and each would sleep with them beneath the bed.

At the top of the hill, Linda came upon a wire fence with redwood posts covered in pink-and-white Cherokee roses. It separated the ranch’s scrubby hillside from a formal shade garden of Satsuki azalea and pineapple-fruit cycad and spotted-leaf calla. The road continued, the ruts smoothed and the rocks cleared, until it passed a tiered circular fountain with four spewing dolphins. Linda leaned over its rim to rinse the snake blood from her hands. The fountain sat at the head of a long lawn, walled on both sides by camellias and barrel-shaped holly bushes and a colonnade of towering fan palms. Italian stone figures—warriors in skirt and shield, cherubs at the foot of bare-breasted virgins—stood on pedestals along both sides of the greensward. The lawn led to the rose garden, a graded field of bushes flower-heavy in autumn, swollen blossoms of butter yellow and fish-gill pink and summer-sky white and night purple: forty beds separated by path, bordered by pergola, alive with the entire history of the rose. At the time she knew nothing about the flower, and how could Linda have guessed on that first morning at the Rancho Pasadena that she would come to learn the name of each species and cultivar, their bud size and bloom life: the yellow Sun Flair,
the pinkish-red Altissimo climbing the pergola’s latticework, the pink-and-white summer Damask, the hybrid teas grafted together in the humidity of the glasshouse under the gloved care of Nitobe-san. Linda wandered along the edge of the garden in the direction of where she guessed the kitchen door might be, but only in the shadow of the house itself did she realize that there wasn’t a kitchen door as she might think of one, that the stove’s smoke and flame most likely billowed and burned deep within, at the house’s pit.

Through a window, Linda saw a room that must have been Willis’s library. Perhaps he was in there at the partners’ desk or up on the stepladder with its ostrich-leather rail, but instead Linda saw the girl she’d seen in the upstairs window on a stool lifting the lid of a ceramic urn, feather duster poised. She was a few feet from Linda on the other side of the glass, and her hair was springing from her cap, and she was whistling
O Sweet-a-Lee, O Sweet-a-Lee
, and she was, Linda noted, quick with her work. A mirror above the mantel offered the girl a picture of herself, and she took the time to inspect the reflection, turning to see front and back and the way the apron fell across her lap. Linda thought about rapping the window and asking the way to the kitchen, but she feared she might startle the girl, who soon enough climbed off the stool and departed the library. Someone was calling,
Rosa! Rosa!