Pasadena (39 page)

In the morning
, Willis turned up at the ranch house, honking the Gold Bug’s horn. It was Sunday, and everyone was asleep but Linda. “We’re on our way to church,” Willis called from the car. He pointed up the hill, saying that Lolly was waiting. Linda looked up to the house, where the terrace was partly hidden by drippy Montezuma cypress and cork oak and conifer. She couldn’t see Lolly, but Linda knew that she was there, leaning against the parapet, waiting, watching. “Lace up your hiking boots and let’s go to the mountains,” Willis proposed. “I’ll fetch you after church.” And before she could ask if Bruder was coming too, Willis was gone.

While she waited for them to return from the First Presbyterian, Linda wondered who else would join them on the hike. Maybe Willis would invite Muir Yuen, whom Willis liked to ask up to the house to impress him with his collection of porcelain snuffboxes and blue-and-white ceramic elephants. She assumed that Lolly would come too, her face shaded by a broad-rimmed hat with an ostrich plume, pigskin gloves tight on her wrists. Lolly loved archery, and Linda expected her to arrive with a quiver slung across her back; her small face and her gold curls would make her look like a hungry cherub floating on the path. When at last Bruder woke up, Linda told him about the outing.

But Bruder had no intention of hiking with Willis, and he told Linda—the words coming more harshly than he intended—that he didn’t care what she did, he had things to do on the ranch. “The harvest begins in the morning, the first packers will arrive at dawn, and I can’t go.” He expected that she would stay with him; the sunlight would
needle through the pepper tree and the day would be warm and they would work together—this was his hope.

“But I want to go,” she said. Surely he would yield and join them, and she imagined his hand reaching for hers as she mounted a granite boulder cold from oak-branch shade.

Neither imagined that each would refuse the other, and then at exactly this moment Willis drove into the yard and Rosa appeared on a path leading down from the house. Willis honked and called, “Hop in!” And Rosa shielded her eyes from the sun and said, “Bruder, will you be around later?”

Linda and Bruder said nothing, and they wouldn’t look at each other, and as she slid into the car, he went to Rosa and asked her how she was feeling. The car knocked a cloud of dust and exhaust into the yard, and through it Bruder was a retreating silhouette to Linda’s eye. It had happened in a flash, a mistake too late to correct, and before Linda and Bruder knew it, they were separated. She would blame him and he would blame her, and each had expected the other to yield.

Captain Poore drove her out past the Rose Bowl and beyond Devil’s Gate and into the foothills, where the dirt road narrowed to a lane barely wide enough for the car to pass. The thorny hands of the chaparral pressed against the hood, snapping and scratching dryly. Mexican elderberry and toyon and holly-leaf cherry and sugar sumac grew all in a parched tangle until a thicket eventually chocked the road, and the Kissel’s engine sputtered and stopped.

For a long time they followed a path through the oak scrub, Linda behind Willis. His neck above his collar was pink, and soon his scar was slick with sweat, and he plucked a handkerchief to swab it dry. He asked if she was warm and she said she was fine and Willis said, “Yes, Bruder tells me a little heat never stopped you.”

“Is that what he said?”

In fact, over the years Bruder had told Willis almost everything he knew about Linda; and the more Bruder revealed, the greater Willis’s interest had surged. In his estimation, Bruder was a heartless man. They had known each other under the direst of circumstances, and Willis, he liked to say, had seen Bruder when it counted most—when a man’s true soul is put to the test. “I thought Bruder was incapable of
feeling for another human being,” he now said to Linda, “and then I realized he had a peculiar, fraternal fondness for you.”

Willis was carrying a six-shooter, its pearl handle carved with an ox-head design, and every now and then he’d pull it from his pocket and twirl it on his finger. She had heard that he was a good shot, and when he saw her looking at the revolver he held it up and said, “Just in case.” Then he stopped and straightened his arm and fired down the path. Surely he was showing off, she thought, and if he imagined a bullet would scare her he was wrong; but then they reached the headless squirrel twenty yards down the path, dead with an acorn in its tiny black claws. Willis held it up by the tail and said, “I used to chase grizzlies out of the grove.”

Despite the early rain, everything in the foothills remained in need of water: the brush rabbits scampering and sucking on sumac leaves; the gray-bellied towhee fluttering out of the live-oaks in a desperate search for seed; the tree tobacco, thick with the limp ghosts of its yellow trumpet flowers; swaying, crackling garlands of climbing penstemon; tiny creamy aster fragile as lace coral; fairy tarweed, yellow-white and beaten down by the sun; the small terminal leaves of the drought-defying mimulus; a thistle, its red-purple color drained away; wild oats pinning Linda’s skirt with barbs; the cockle’s egg-shape seedpod falling before bloom; a twelve-foot yucca blossom toppled across the trail. The littered autumn hillside waited for visitor, rain or fire, and no one dared to bet which would come first to sweep it clean.

Willis lifted a string of barbed wire for Linda to climb beneath. “Left over from the Rancho San Pasqual. The sheep used to graze up this high.” They were at a lookout, and below was the sloped table of the San Gabriel Valley, the busy cluster of Pasadena laid out on grids of white concrete, and the outlying farms and ranches and groves, and the long gleam of the railroad tracks. “Imagine this. Not even fifty years ago, all of this was a single rancho. A big old Victorian house, a couple of lean-tos for the hands, some barns, hundreds of miles of barbed wire, and thirty thousand head of cattle. That’s what was here. Nothing but scrub and cow dung and fifty thousand sheep. Fifty years ago, two people owned a hundred thousand acres, maybe more. They owned so much that no one was really sure
what
they owned; the parchment surveys only described the property line as running from the sycamore with the heart-shape hole to the dead spring and everything in between.
And no one bothered to even wonder what they owned until they started selling it off.”

She could imagine it, not needing to close her eyes to see the past with its endless vista of scrubland and dry riverwash and the mesas and the dust clouds driven heavenward by stampeding hooves. She had seen the growth in Baden-Baden-by-the-Sea, but it was nothing like this: there the village measured progress by the pier’s extending length and El Camino Real’s widening macadam and the electricity poles rising on the horizon—but not much else. The number of farms and families had changed little, a few more one year and a few less the next; and except for the increasingly heavy wave of spring-seeking tourists, their cars leaving pools of motor oil in the dirt, the village had remained an outpost between Los Angeles and San Diego. But Pasadena, even Linda could see, teemed with growth, its soil practically sprouting houses and roads: a population doubling in ten years, doubling again in twenty; how long could the valley hold it back?

“Fifty years ago there were maybe fifty people out there,” said Willis. “Now there are fifty thousand spread around.”

“Where did they come from?”

“The same place they all come from. Someplace else.”

She wished that Bruder were there to share the view, and she said so.

“Bruder? I asked him along. He didn’t want to come.”

“You asked him?”

“You know how he gets. He waved me off. Told me to make sure you had a good time.”

The familiar disappointment returned to Linda, and Willis must have noted it because he said, “I’m sorry you’re not enjoying yourself.”

But she assured him that she was.

His medal sent a blinding reflection of sunlight into her eyes, and for a short moment she couldn’t see him: she only knew instinctively that a man unlike any man she’d ever known was at her side.

During her weeks at the ranch, Linda had learned from Hearts and Slay and from Rosa something of the Poore family. They said that Willis Senior had arrived on the Rancho San Pasqual in 1873 and convinced the owners to sell him four thousand acres. Where he got the money for it Slay and Hearts couldn’t figure out, but he turned around and sold fifteen acres to a hundred soybean farmers from the Illinois-Indiana border, and in a single afternoon he had founded the Indiana Colony of
California. “They say it was quite a sight on that January morning in 1874,” Slay had said. “Wagons and buggies of every kind coming up the arroyo, and each laying claim to fifteen acres. Each colonist waving a piece of paper scrawled in Willis’s illegible hand. He was famous for terrible writing. It was so bad, some said he didn’t know how to write.”

“You never know about a man’s past,” added Hearts. “Those settlers rode into town, and from what I’ve heard it was unlike anything seen in the San Gabriel Valley since God created it and the mission first rose. Nothing but dust and men and women and babies in baskets and skinny horses and stupid mules eating flies. Wagons loaded with rockers and trunks and cooking pots stacked eight feet high, and weary, patient faces beneath sunbonnets looking for a man named Willis Fishe Poore.”

“And there he was,” said Slay. “Handing out a hundred deeds and declaring the establishment of a new colony and then walking away with his twenty-five hundred acres and plans for an orange grove and a mansion on the hill.”

“Hey, Slay, do you think he was a crooked man?” Hearts had asked.

“No more crooked than the next.”

Now, on the path, Willis told Linda they had another mile before reaching Paradise Canyon. Then, in a gesture that resembled a hummingbird landing at a fat-faced rose and flying off, Willis took Linda’s hand for a tiny, fluttering moment and then released it, leaving it suspended between them, fingered with his oils. She looked at her hand as if it belonged to someone else, and Willis cracked the small spell by saying, “I hope you’ll like Pasadena. A lot of good people here. Not everyone’s like the folks you read about on the society page.”

“I mostly read about you.”

“Then I hope you know enough never to believe what you read.” Each morning when Linda arrived at the pantry for the groceries, Rosa would fill her in on what had taken place at the house the day before. “Yesterday was Lolly’s Orchid Club. Rummy all afternoon.” Or, “The University Club ladies were here to discuss their upcoming pageant, something called ‘The Mexicana.’ ” And once: “Willis and his friends were over last night shooting in the trout pond. Didn’t you hear their guns?” Linda wouldn’t ever have believed Rosa if she didn’t also open the
Star-News
to the page that reported on these events and the city’s other social activities: the Friday Morning Club putting on Shaw’s
“How He Lied to Her Husband”; the Sunshine Society’s bridge tourneys; the Masque Ball at the Hotel Maryland; the Bierlich Trio’s concert at the Hotel Raymond; horseback trips up Mt. Wilson; lessons in portraiture by Miss Mabel Watson, 249 E. Colorado; dancing instruction in the Huntington’s ballroom; fashion shows sponsored by Fuhrman’s French Millinery. And all over the page, Linda would find Willis and Lolly Poore’s names: as a mixed doubles team on the Valley Hunt’s ladder; as members of the College Club’s book discussion group, led by Leslie Hood of Vroman’s Bookstore; as runners-up in an archery tournament sponsored by the City Beautiful Committee. At least once a week there’d be a picture, and Rosa would say, “Doesn’t he look awful, with that little sneer of his?” But Linda would hold the newspaper and study the smile of Willis Poore, posing in his bathing tank suit, winner of the swimming and diving championship at the Water Carnival. The suit would reveal his small but muscular arms and the water sparkled in his hair and the trunks were cut high on his stocky, powerful thighs. She had leaned on the pantry counter, bringing the newspaper close to her face, and Rosa would say, “Doesn’t it make it worse that he’s so beautiful?” Once Linda ripped a photo from the paper and took it back to her room, folding it into her pocket next to Edmund’s unanswered letters.

The day was hot on the trail, and Willis’s shirt was now soaked with sweat. As if something obscene were exposed in front of her, she tried not to look at his narrow pink flanks, yet there was nowhere else to look except at the quilted muscles of his back.

“I suppose you know all about Bruder,” said Willis. “I suppose he’s told you everything himself.”

Linda asked what Willis meant.

“He’s not from Pasadena, not like Lolly and me.”

“Nobody’s like Lolly and you.”

“That’s not what I mean.” And then: “He was a strange child.”

“Weren’t we all?”

“Did he ever tell you about the boy he killed?”

Something gripped at Linda and she said, “Not in so many words. But what can you expect? He was at war.”

“I was at war, too, but that’s not what I’m talking about.” Willis said that as a child he was told about the little dark-haired boy at the Children’s Training Society. “The widow who ran the place didn’t know
how to keep him under control,” he said. And she’d run to the Presbyterian minister to confess her exasperation at the six-year-old who refused to speak and who spit at strangers like a camel. “The newspaper used to write little stories about the boy they called ‘El Brunito,’ and the minister said that the only way to calm him down was to get him into the fields from dawn to dusk. He said that this ‘El Brunito’ was like an animal, that if you didn’t work him he’d go crazy on you—a little black stallion, snorting, growing an inch a day. They decided that working him was better than sending him to school. Everyone in town knew about him—had read about him, at least—but because he was so young they didn’t put his picture in the paper or print his real name, and Mrs. Banning was too good to him to allow that. And so when I was growing up there was a fear around town that any half-Mexican boy encountered on the street was El Brunito, and if some sort of mischief had occurred, like a rose bed sprinkled with lime, everyone would blame him.”