Pasadena (49 page)

Willis introduced Connie Muffitt. By now he was standing, leaving Linda in the shadows, and she felt like a child looking up at them. She
stood and shook the woman’s hand and saw that they were nearly the same height, she and Linda, and that Connie was more beautiful than anyone else around the pool. “Stamp, is it? Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?”

“She’s not from Pasadena,” said Willis.

“In Pasadena for the season? Staying at the Vista?”

Connie didn’t even pretend to wait for Linda’s response, and said to Willis that she hoped to see him New Year’s Eve. “Where will you be?”

“I haven’t decided yet. It depends—”

“Don’t forget to bring Lolly.” Then Connie was gone. It struck Linda, the pool throwing the sunlight into her eyes, that she hadn’t come to Pasadena for this. She thought of Bruder, alone in the groves shoveling the charred wood out of the ditches; he’d be so damp with sweat that his pant legs would stick to his thighs, to the mass of hair spreading there. His palms white with blisters and his throat hoarse after the yelling last night, and then speaking to no one today, not a soul. It was his fault, she told herself; she was here with Willis because of him. But it wasn’t too late, and the season would stretch on until spring, and she would cook for Bruder until the last orange was picked, and she imagined climbing aboard the Pacific Electric with him, waving good-bye to Captain Poore and his sister through the window. To tell the truth, Linda couldn’t imagine a future other than that one; Willis was like a game, like the Treasure Hunt itself. And she told herself that she would go to Bruder and say that she had forgiven him, and she didn’t consider that he might be incapable of forgiving her. And Linda surprised even herself when she leapt up from the table and said she had to go, she’d walk downtown, it wasn’t far, but she had to go
now
. Willis caught up with her in the lobby, the furrier’s box stuffed under his arm, and took her by the wrist, his fingers uncomfortably tight, and he steered her behind a folding screen painted with a pagoda scene, shushing her and whispering, “No, no, I’ll drive you. But don’t be upset, I didn’t bring you here to upset you.” She shook her head, saying that she wasn’t upset by any of this. She said she’d promised to meet Rosa, and now look at the time! Willis handed her a handkerchief, but Linda wasn’t crying or sniffling; her breath was as slow as a somnambulist’s; she felt her face harden and she stood erect and she felt cold. She returned the handkerchief, and Willis struggled to return it to his pocket while holding the furrier’s box. He snapped at a bellboy to help
him, and the boy in the little square hat lay his manicured hands around the shiny white box and fell in step behind Willis and Linda, who said, “Thank you for bringing me here. Now I see.” With its own will her hand made its way to his elbow as she descended the hotel’s front steps, just as the coco-buttered hands of all the other women on the steps slid around the elbows of men; Linda Stamp was one of a dozen young women entering or leaving the Hotel Vista, hems high upon shins, silk headbands tight across brows, hands squeezed roughly in the paws of a man. As she stepped into the
porte cochère
, the petroleum fumes greeted her, and Linda thanked Captain Poore for lunch.

She was almost two hours late, but Rosa was still waiting on a bench in the park, staring at the fountain and the old men throwing horseshoes. Her glassy face looked as if it would shatter to the touch and her eyes were threaded with blood. “I don’t know if he’ll still see me,” she said.

“Who?” Linda apologized as she recognized the gravity of the afternoon that lay before them.

They walked down Raymond Street, squinting against the glare. With each step, Linda came to sense Rosa’s fear. The skin around her eyes flinched. Linda didn’t know where they were going, and Rosa, whom before today Linda had chosen never to believe, now seemed like a different person: young as a schoolgirl, vulnerable with honesty, marooned atop the great cresting wave of fate. But Rosa wasn’t a different person. No, in fact, Linda was merely seeing more of Rosa than she had before. She took Rosa’s hand. “Everything will be all right.”

“I’m not so sure, Linda.”

Not far from the Webb House they crossed California Street, and before Linda knew it they were in front of the P. F. Erwin Electrical Distributorship. Mr. Erwin himself was in the window, rotating his display, plugging in an electric juicer and arranging a pyramid of oranges, and he was too preoccupied to see the two girls hesitate in front of his building. Linda finally realized where they were and whom they were visiting, and she rubbed the cold from Rosa’s fingers and they stood silently in the December sun, the City Beautiful Committee’s Christmas wreaths swaying in a breeze on the lampposts. Traffic passed, but the world felt no larger than the square of sidewalk where they rested, the cars and the exhaust pipes receding into another, distant world. Rosa’s
fingers were sticky and soft like ice-plant leaves, and Linda led her into the side alley and to the door with the bubble-glass window etched with a simple sign:

RING BELL FOR SERVICE

They waited at the door for so long that Linda rang again, and she began to fear that Rosa had missed her appointment because of her. They’d have to return another day, and Linda imagined Rosa’s horror at having to wait. Again Linda whimpered an apology: “He said we weren’t going to be—”

But just then a shadow appeared on the other side of the glass, and a walrus-size nurse opened the door and quickly waved the girls inside. “The doctor was about to leave.” The nurse heaved her tremulous legs up the stairs, her uniformed backside as large and white as an icebox. She pulled herself along by the rail and called over her shoulder, “Come on, girls.” The stairwell was dark, walled with unfinished redwood panels, and the steps creaked and Linda couldn’t see beyond the woman, her body filled the stairwell so completely. The nurse panted and said, “You coming?” At the top of the stairs she fiddled with a ring of keys at another bubble-glass door, working three locks and then scooting Linda and Rosa into Dr. Freeman’s office.

“Which one of you is it?”

Rosa took a small step forward, as if offering herself. The office was crowded with a desk and a Bar-Lock typewriter on a stand and a daybed upholstered in russet figured velour. A glass-doored cabinet held trays of pliers and scalpels and rubber-tipped pincers and wads of cotton and glass jars of clear liquids that made Linda think they might explode if dropped. On the top shelf was a sharp foot-long instrument like an ice pick, its steel handle cross-hatched for grip, and lying across it a loop-shaped steel knife.

“You’re lucky the doctor didn’t go home. I told him to wait another fifteen minutes. But usually the ones who keep him waiting never show up at all.”

Linda and Rosa sat on the daybed while the nurse squeezed around the furniture, moving so indelicately that Linda was sure she would knock something from the desk or slam into the cabinet or topple the fern stand. The nurse was humming and then looked up and said,
“Don’t be frightened. That’ll only make it worse. He’s a good doctor. You’ve come to the best.”

Linda continued to hold Rosa’s hand, and they both jumped when the door opened and the doctor appeared. He was a young, darkly whiskered man, bespectacled and narrow-chested, and he shook the girls’ hands and then sat behind his desk. “You met Miss Bishop?” He nodded in the direction of the nurse, who had propped herself on a spinning stool, her body spilling over the seat, its mass rolling the casters.

The doctor looked at Linda and said, “I presume you’re Rosa.”

“No, I am.”

The doctor’s eyes remained on Linda and he said, “I’m sorry. For some reason I thought it was you.” Then he shifted his attention to Rosa. “I have some questions. Then we’ll begin.”

The nurse nodded her plush, plucked chin, and one of the coils in the daybed groaned, and Linda whispered, “If you want to go, I’ll take you home.”

“How old are you?” Dr. Freeman began.

“Twenty.”

“Where were you born?”

“In Pasadena.”

“Any family?”

“My mother’s dead.”

“Are you married?”

“No.”

“Why are you here today?”

“I have a … I’m in … Doctor, I thought you knew.” Her hand curled into a ball and rubbed her temples. The tendrils of her hair were moist around her ears, and her eyelids were dewy and her cheek was damp.

“How long has it been, Rosa?”

Rosa hesitated, and Linda wished she could answer the questions for her, help her some way at all. But Linda knew nothing more than the doctor and Miss Bishop did. She found herself leaning toward Rosa and wondering how long it
had
been, and then she asked herself the inevitable question: And with whom? How long ago, and with whom? But Linda knew the answer to at least one of those questions, and she was too worried about Rosa right now to unlock her own anger and
hurt. That would come later, but Linda had promised to see Rosa through this appointment, and she had almost broken that promise, and now she would keep it, just as Bruder had kept his.

The doctor removed his eyeglasses and looked to Miss Bishop and then stood and leaned over the desk. “Rosa, dear. It’s important that you answer all my questions.” He grinned in a way that he must have thought friendly but that Linda found coldhearted, as if what Rosa might say next were the most
fascinating
news he would hear all afternoon.

“A couple of months.” And then: “I can’t really say.”

Miss Bishop began removing instruments from the cabinet: the cotton balls, a scalpel, the looped knife. She passed through the doorway behind Dr. Freeman’s desk, and Linda could see the rubber-padded examination table that waited in the back room. Miss Bishop wheeled an enormous lamp on casters to the table’s side, positioning it to spray Rosa with bitter pearly light.

“Have you had any related illnesses?” Rosa stared blankly, clutching Linda, and Dr. Freeman continued, “No? Nothing? Gonorrhea? Chancroid? Syphilis?”

Rosa let out a little gasp.

“Rosa?”

“No. Just this.”

“I’ll give you some arsenic, just to be sure.”

Next to the cabinet was a window, its shade drawn, but the sunlight pressed around it, framing the dingy sheet of canvas. It reminded Linda of the bright day outside and the Vista’s terrace where she had visored the sun out of her eyes with her hand. Had that been only an hour ago? Everything felt so far away, and she turned to Rosa, whose cheek raged pale.

“Why don’t you go see Miss Bishop now,” said Dr. Freeman. Rosa stood, and Linda got up too, and Rosa hugged Linda awkwardly, her breasts soft and her quick breath warm on Linda’s throat and her body a slender column of bones.

Rosa entered the next room and Miss Bishop closed the door, and through the bubble glass Linda could see Rosa’s silhouette as she removed her coat and then unhooked the buttons of her dress. Dr. Freeman remained at his desk, gazing into space, his glasses secure in his hands. Linda could see that he was a handsome man who suffered from
a daily beard so bristly and black that by afternoon he looked forlorn. On his desk was his wedding picture, angled so that Linda could just make it out, Dr. Freeman in his Navy uniform and his bride pinned with a corsage. “She’ll be fine,” he said.

“How long will it take?”

“Not long at all. But she’ll need to rest a couple of hours. If you like, you can leave and come back for her around five.” Linda said that she would wait. “She’ll be uncomfortable, but that’s normal. I don’t want you to worry. Is she your sister?”

“A friend.”

The doctor put on the white coat hanging from the wall and entered the next room and the door closed. Linda sat on the daybed and felt a weariness overtake her, the sleepless night catching up. The dim office settled her pulse and her eyelids grew heavy and she wasn’t sure how much time passed before she heard the terrible shriek and the sob. “Nurse!” Dr. Freeman called, his voice urgent but without panic, and again a scream rose from the other side of the door and Linda moved toward the panel of bubble glass and heard his calm, firm voice, “Miss Bishop, hold her down. Keep her down.” Rosa was crying, and Linda tried to see through the glass but she made out nothing more distinct than two dark shapes moving around, and it was like seeing two patrolling sharks through fifteen feet of water. She turned the doorknob but it was locked, and the sounds on the other side quieted, the silence broken by sniffling and a heave. She remained at the door, but for several minutes there were no sounds from the other side except for what reminded Linda of the familiar clink and splash of dishes being washed in a sink. Linda went to the window and pulled back the shade and saw that the office looked across the alley and a tar-paper roof over to the Webb House. The white Victorian house gleamed in the late afternoon sun, the slanted light a pinky orange on its clapboard. The house’s scallop-trimmed turret shimmered, and two of the packing girls, enjoying their day off, sat in the turret’s window seat, the western sun lighting their faces. Their idle poses suggested to Linda that they were chatting about anything but the orange grove. On the porch, Mrs. Webb stood in an iron-gray skirt with her hands on her hips, and she looked around as if she knew,
she just knew
, that some girl somewhere was getting into some sort of dilemma that only Mrs. Emily Webb could resolve.
What would they do without me?
, Linda imagined Mrs.
Webb thinking. In her chest, Linda felt a breaching sensation, her allegiance turning on its side.

From the examination room a lone sob traveled to Linda’s ear, and she returned to the daybed and several minutes passed before Dr. Freeman appeared. “She’s resting, but she’ll be fine,” he said. Dr. Freeman sat at his desk and folded his hands and Linda tried to stay alert, but once again sleep overtook her and gradually she slumped against the bed’s round, padded head and she slept while Rosa slept behind the bubble glass. At a quarter to six, Dr. Freeman called the Black & White cab service, and a kid in a billed cap too large for his head drove them in a taxi with a black roof and a black body and whitewall tires to the rancho’s service gate.