Pasadena (44 page)

Some of this Linda learned from Willis himself, each morning as he walked her down the hill. But the rest came from Rosa. Linda had come to understand that the information Rosa passed along on the stairwell sometimes contradicted Willis’s version of events, and Linda had carefully decided that Willis had more reason to tell the truth than did his first-rank maid. There was the time Willis told Linda that he had rushed off to France to fight, “so eager I packed my own rucksack.” Rosa etched a more vivid but less credible scene of frightened tears running down Willis’s cheek and his boyish face pressed to Lolly’s breast. But if Willis had been so scared, how could he have won a medal for courage? Willis told Linda that the one thing he hated about his sister was how she often pretended to be ill: “She does it to get my attention, but I can tell the difference between the flu and folly.” Rosa, however, reported otherwise: “She’ll stay up all night, coughing into her pillow so he doesn’t hear.” But if this was true, how was Lolly capable of overseeing the mansion, managing every last floorboard waxing and window polishing and often taking the rag from a maid’s hand and saying, “I’ll just do it myself.” Willis told Linda that he had saved a man’s life on the banks of the Meuse; and Rosa said that someone had saved his.
There was no reason not to believe Willis, and one morning on the walk down the hill he said, “I hope Rosa hasn’t been telling you any tales. She’s an okay girl but tends to make things up. It’s her way of not talking about herself.” He added: “Or about her mother.”

Linda asked what Willis meant.

“She didn’t tell you? Her mother died a whore.” It was a cruel thing to say, said Linda, and he said, “Cruel but true.” He said that he was unlike a lot of other people in Pasadena, and he was only interested in telling the truth, even when it wasn’t so pretty. Then Willis startled Linda by saying, “In some ways my mother was pretty much the same as Rosa’s.”

“How can you say that!”

“I’m only telling the truth.”

What type of man would call his mother a whore? Despite the years, Linda’s memory of Valencia had never sweetened the truth, and she’d never forget the story of her mother’s arrival at Condor’s Nest, and of the morning deed in the barn—sunlight gilding the hay, Dieter grunting as he finished up. Once Valencia had admitted to Linda, “All women arrive at the same fate.” And Linda had cried, “But not me!”

“I loved my mother,” said Willis. “Don’t misunderstand me. I think of her every day.” A dreaminess descended upon his face, and now he looked more vulnerable than Linda had ever seen him. His eyes were damp and pretty and blue, and his cheek was like a ball of dough, and she thought that if she were to touch it, her finger would sink softly in. If he wasn’t a captain, if the medal wasn’t hanging from his lapel, if he didn’t own the sprawling ranch, he could have been any young man on the street, his eyes lifting to meet hers. It happened often, and she had grown to love it—to
want
it, even: a stranger’s eyes widening before her, taking her in, telling her at that tiny instant in his life that he would do anything for her.

“My mother wouldn’t want me to tell lies about her,” said Willis. “She was an honest woman. She was never one to care about what people said. I guess I’m more like her that way than Lolly is. She was from Maine, my mother, and she came west when she was fifteen.”

“Why?”

“Did you say why?” He began again: “She was fifteen. She lived in snowy Maine. Of course she was looking for something else. To become someone else.”

He said that his mother was a soprano and had come to Pasadena to sing at the old Moorish Grand Opera House that once stood on the corner of Raymond and Bellview. She was giving a series of bel canto recitals with Donizetti and Bellini on the program—the sleepwalker’s aria and Anna Bolena’s prison-cell lament—and one night in the audience she saw a handsome man with hair as orange as a tangerine. She later would say that even with the stage lights in her eyes she couldn’t miss his hair, like a fire in the second row, burning around a strong, square, durable face. And there was no doubt that Annabelle was beautiful herself that night. She was a honeycomb blonde, with a mouth like the bottom of an apple and two blue eyes big enough to take in the fifteen hundred faces staring up at her as she trilled up to the mountain range of high C’s, leapt from peak to peak, and then carefully scaled back down. Her nickname was “the Bluehill Baby”—a label she invented for herself after departing for good the whitewashed village where her mother and father rested in flinty graves.

“My father didn’t care much for music,” said Willis. “He always said it required too much sitting around.” Willis’s father, he said, was a strong, compact man who sneered at fanciness even as he surrounded himself with marble and gilt. From years of his riding about the rancho, his skin was as tough and rich as hide. Picking oranges had bulked up his forearms to the firm shape of two meaty drumsticks. He talked with one corner of his mouth cocked and made sucking noises as emphasis, and he almost hadn’t gone to the concert at the opera house that night. “Who is this Bluehill Baby anyway?” But word reached Willis Fishe Poore that a young woman of exceptional beauty was singing and that every night she caused the audience to stomp its feet and shout for more. As an encore to the Donizetti and the Bellini on her program Annabelle would sing two songs of a more folksy quality: “The Girl with the Crab-Red Hair” and “Sweet Casco Bay.” Between the bel canto and the Maine folksongs, Annabelle would change out of a leaf-colored dress sewn with Bohemian crystal and into a velveteen gown the color of blueberries that revealed a ballerina’s neck and small, beautiful shoulders. Across these shoulders lay a patchy brown stole of indeterminate fur, like a dead deer slumped across the rump of a mule. Annabelle Cone’s voice wasn’t especially big, and it wobbled like a truck as she drove up the peaks of the high C’s. Nor was her diction impressive; in fact, most of the time she couldn’t be understood, and
not just because the songs were in Italian. This was Donizetti and Bellini, and the audience was filled with Pasadenans, and women, and men too, in this town were known to study up on a libretto before going to the opera house. No, her vocal talent was limited, destined to earn her a living as long as she was healthy and young but—and Annabelle Cone knew this better than anyone else—the day her beauty began its inevitable retreat, her career would end.

What was all the fuss?, Willis Fishe wondered impatiently in the audience. But then in the interludes Annabelle would lift her hem and display ankles in pinky-brown stockings, and she would dance across the stage in a quick, proud trot, her calves as pretty as sweetmeats beneath the lights. As she finished each song she’d throw a prop—a country-white rose, a paper fan, a handful of peas—into the audience, which swayed en masse trying to catch them. And on that fateful night her leopard-lily corsage landed in Willis’s lap, the rusty stamens staining his fly. The man next to him received a dark, wet handkerchief that smelled like old roses fallen to the ground. Three rows back, a man caught an empty Eau-de-Moi perfume bottle shaped like a mermaid, with a pretty fake-gold cap.

But it was during the encore—as the Bluehill Baby belted out “She had crab-red hair, that made me long and stare!”—that Willis Fishe Poore knew he must meet the soprano. After the recital he went to leave his calling card with the opera house’s manager, a bald, happy gentleman who walked home every night with his cash in his boot. But to Willis Fishe’s surprise, the manager told him that Miss Cone was waiting for him backstage. Willis Fishe found her at her mirror, pinning her hair into a plump chignon. Years later, he would often describe the scene as virtually the reunion of a brother and sister: “It was as if we had known each other all our lives, separated at birth or something of the such.” Their eyes met thrice in the three-panel mirror, and never again did they look away. But in fact they didn’t speak that night. They kissed on the dusty backstage and Willis Fishe repinned the leopard lily to Annabelle’s bosom and stroked her cheek, which he always said was as cold as north-face snow.

After that, Annabelle and Willis Fishe began a short-lived correspondence, his letters delivered by wagon from the ranch, the driver instructed to wait for Miss Cone’s reply. “One long furious week of love written on the page,” said Willis Fishe’s son. After one week the marriage
proposal arrived, in Willis Fishe’s nearly illegible hand. Annabelle Cone accepted it at once and arrived at the Pasadena on a September morning in 1898 in her bridal gown, ivory lace hiding her face. The mayor of Pasadena was fetched, and in a little ceremony on the lawn, Willis Fishe Poore and Annabelle Cone were married, the maids, including Rosa’s mother, throwing rose petals and whispering behind their cupped hands. As the mayor read through his rigmarole, Willis Fishe realized that he had never heard his bride-to-be speak, and he anticipated the voice of the smallest, prettiest bird. But when she declared “I do,” he learned how wrong a man can be. Only then did he discover that her beautiful if somewhat strained soprano coexisted with a speaking voice not of liquid gold or fruitwood oil or the small trill of a songbird but as fierce, and as difficult on the ear, as a peacock’s scream.

But this last part Linda didn’t learn from Captain Poore. No, this aspect of the story came from Rosa, who had learned it from her mother. “It’s how mistakes are made,” said Rosa. “And lives ruined.” She described the lawn wedding as rushed and private—“Annabelle was so thin, she would show within the month”—and how several weeks later the police shut down the Grand Opera House after discovering that it was the front for a brothel. Linda said that she didn’t believe her, and Rosa said, “Fine, don’t.” But during the raid, it seemed, the police had discovered a secret chamber, occupied à deux, that the arrested house manager, in confession, called “Annabelle’s Attic.” And a second room, with walls padded in blue velveteen, identified as “Miss Cone’s Candy Cove.”

During her first days
in her new room, Linda learned more and more about life in the big house and in the little city endlessly expanding nearby. The more she discovered, the deeper her interest ran, and the further Bruder felt from her. Despite herself, everything about the Rancho Pasadena fascinated her, nothing more so than Captain Poore himself. Each morning he walked her down the hill—and often he’d walk her back up again at night—and once or twice he visited her in the ranch-house kitchen and leaned against the table while she dressed the chickens or chopped the onions; and the sweet, eye-burning odor would rise to her nostrils, carrying her back to Condor’s Nest. Willis would comment, “Even after growing up on an onion farm, they still make you cry,” and she’d dab her eyes with her sleeve. He asked about her mother, and she told him the stories; twice he asked how she had died, and the third time she described the landslide. This was on a cold December night when the kitchen’s warmth draped the windows with opaque moisture and the ranch on the other side of the glass was blurry. Linda realized that no one could see clearly into the kitchen, that anyone passing by would see only fuzzy shapes of movement. She talked of the steady ache and said she doubted it would go away. Willis said that his heart too had collapsed when he saw the dirigible deflate, the silver balloon sinking in the sky.

But on many nights Willis was busy with meetings and committees and hearings about various issues, including a proposed motor parkway connecting Pasadena to Los Angeles (he was in favor) and the Bakewell & Brown design for the new City Hall (he was in favor of a belfry, but others wanted a dome).

Lolly was equally busy in her own pursuits. The Monday Afternoon Club would meet in the Ladies’ Lounge of the Huntington Hotel to discuss literature and geography, and the Women’s Committee of the Valley Hunt Club gathered to put the finishing touches on the New Year’s ball and the flower-draped carriage for the Tournament of Roses. Lolly was as aware of her responsibilities to Pasadena’s civic advancements as her brother was, and the seriousness with which she pursued them gave her a tight-faced appearance, like the skin atop a cup of warmed-over milk. Despite her slightness, and her frequent but unspecified infirmities, Lolly was an energetically organized, determined, and carefully bunned woman who kept a tidy appointment book and, folded and tucked into her sleeve, a list of things to accomplish during each day: write the mayor about the dangers of the chariot races; discuss Christmas goose with Cook; beat the carpets; “swim 1 mile”—the 1 then crossed out and changed to a 2. Her efficiency—she could be a tall, slender blur in the hall—further contradicted Rosa’s description of a soft-fleshed invalid, gasping for breath and strength. It was true that there was a silliness to her repeated recitation of her iron deficiency and her struggle to stay afloat in the pool because she lacked “a normal person’s buoyancy of fat.” But she was not the
little girl frozen in time
Rosa had depicted; nor was Captain Poore a
selfish little boy
.

They were rich and they were spoiled and they were eccentric, but they were always kind to Linda.

On her own, Linda came to this conclusion—that Rosa depicted the Poores unfairly—just as she realized that the ranch and the city constituted a whole, full world, one that she believed more and more could make a small place for her. Each evening as she rested her cheek upon the spiny down pillow, the silk canopy stretching above her and the little clock ticking, she grew ever more accustomed to the room that had seemed so foreign that first night. And just as she had grown used to living in the house—referring to the pretty little room as “mine” without knowing she was doing so—Bruder asked when was she moving back to the ranch house.

“I can’t return
there
.”

“I understand. But you don’t want to get too used to it. It’ll be hard to leave when the season ends.”

“I’ll be ready to go when the time comes. It’s just a big old house.” And she put her arms around him and tilted her head in that way she
had discovered could affect him more than anything she could say. She didn’t know that she wasn’t speaking the truth—she didn’t know her heart well enough to be so calculating. No, she simply said things she knew she should, even if they were false. She implied that she would return to the ranch house if Willis would permit her, and against his best judgment Bruder believed her. He said, “I’ll talk to Willis.” “I’ve already tried,” Linda said quickly. “He won’t budge. Besides, what difference does it make after all? Nearly all my time is spent right here in the kitchen, where I’ve always been.” And then: “With you.” The raw, unpainted shelves, the floorboards so widely spaced that they perpetually trapped the dirt, and the stained oilcloth suddenly depressed her; was this really how she’d been meant to spend her days? But she continued, “Nothing’s really changed. I might as well be sleeping in the little room back there,” and she pointed to where they had shared their night; but now that Linda knew better, she realized the room was nothing more than a closet; in fact, Lolly’s closet, shown to Linda by Rosa, was more than twice as large.