Pasadena (60 page)

“You may do what you like with the property. I don’t care what happens to the house or the land, as long as you destroy everything as it was.”

The regret tasted like rust on Blackwood’s tongue.

“Everything but the mausoleum.”

“The mausoleum?” said Blackwood.

“Where she rests. It’s where I’ll lie down at last, too.” Bruder
brought the pendant to his mouth, sucking on it as gently as a nursing infant.

Once again, Bruder seemed swamped by his dreams. “How do I know you’ll preserve the mausoleum?” he said.

“You have my word.”

“Yes, a man’s word. It’s all I can have. It’s all I’ve ever had.”

Eventually Blackwood thought it was time to leave; he was unsure whether or not the Pasadena had passed to him in the course of the conversation. In fact, it had, but Blackwood did not know this yet, and he remained uneasy. What would happen to Blackwood if after these long months he came up empty-handed? If the men from the bank came in and scooped up the ranch from his grasping fingers? It’d be quite a blow, he thought; but when in a few days he found the Pasadena’s deed folded in the Imperial Victoria’s glove compartment, he wouldn’t be quite certain how he had accomplished the task. What was it Mrs. Nay had said to him last week?
You seem like a man unfamiliar with himself, Mr. Blackwood
.

Blackwood cleared his throat. “I have a final question for you, Mr. Bruder.”

Bruder didn’t stir.

“I’ve been wondering this for a long time now.”

“Sieglinde,” said Bruder, “please leave us alone.” The girl leaned against the waxed slickers on the hook and folded her arms across her breasts and said she wouldn’t leave. “So much like her mother,” said Bruder. “Go ahead, Mr. Blackwood. I’ll do my best to answer.”

“It’s a bit personal, if you don’t mind.”

“Mind? Why should I mind now?”

“What happened to Linda?”

“It’s rather straightforward, Mr. Blackwood. She became Mrs. Willis Poore. They called her Lindy.”

“Why did you let her marry him?”

“It wasn’t my intention.”

“Then why did you ask her up to the ranch in the first place?”

“To be with me.”

“You misjudged her, Mr. Bruder.”

This touched Bruder in a way Blackwood hadn’t intended. “I’m not sure why I thought she’d be more patient. Had she waited, one day we would have lived on the ranch together.”

“Yes, but what happened to her?”

“Sieglinde, please go.”

“No,” said the girl, and she brought a chair to the oval rug and sat by the fire. Palomar returned to the cottage smelling of fish, and his pant legs were wet, and he lay on the rug like a dog drying himself, his head upon his cousin’s feet. Of course, Blackwood had never met Linda and Edmund, but even so he could see the resemblance in the girl and boy.

“Do you really want to know?” Bruder asked. Blackwood said that he did. “Then I’ll tell you. What happened to her is what happens to anyone who betrays her own heart.” And then: “But it was worse than that.”

“Worse?” said Blackwood.

“First she betrayed mine.”

“How do you mean, Mr. Bruder?”

“Can’t you tell by now?”

“It makes me wonder. How did Captain Poore learn about the two of you? About the night she was taking her bath? It seems to me that your fortune, and hers too, turned that night.”

“That’s very perceptive of you.”

Blackwood thanked Bruder for the compliment. He went ahead and made a guess: “Did Linda tell Captain Poore herself?”

“Linda tell Captain Poore about our one night of love? Even she wasn’t capable of gross betrayal like that. She scratched in a subtler, deadlier way.”

“Was it Rosa?”

“Rosa? Oh no. Rosa was all good. She never did anything to hurt anyone. Of course, that didn’t stop Captain Poore from hurting her.”

“Then how, Mr. Bruder? How did Captain Poore know to move Linda up to his house? How did he know to take her away from you?”

Bruder leaned forward in his chair. His breath was strained and his eyes were vacant and his hand trembled, and he was the closest Blackwood had come to seeing death. “Yes, how?” He paused. “I can tell that Mrs. Nay hasn’t told you everything. Go back to Pasadena, Mr. Blackwood, and ask Mrs. Nay to finish. Ask her to tell you about Lolly Poore.”

Soon Blackwood was shaking Bruder’s hand, unaware that he’d never shake it again, and the sunlight outside the cottage blinded Blackwood, and when his pupils adjusted he looked over his shoulder and waved good-bye.

It is not pride, it is not shame
,

That makes her leave the gorgeous hall;

And though neglect her heart might tame

She mourns not for her sudden fall
.

EMILY BRONTË

On an afternoon
in July 1930, during the third year of the long drought, Lindy Poore was driving Willis’s Gold Bug west on Suicide Bridge. The sun was in her eyes and one of her headaches was attacking her as densely as a blow to the temple, and that, combined with the sun, made it nearly impossible for her to see. But there was no room on the bridge to pull over and so she slowed, her foot heavy on the brake. The car behind honked viciously and Lindy signaled for the man to pass, but the oncoming traffic prohibited him. Again he pressed on his horn and she could see that he was yelling, a bush of wiry gold hair about his mouth. He continued to honk, and when the traffic cleared he overtook her on the narrow bridge, craning to leer and shout at the
lady driver!
Then the man was gone and Lindy inched along the bridge, and up rose the brittle scent of the arroyo, desiccated since the drought began in 1928. A pale dust drifted from the dead riverbed, and the Rose Bowl sat dull and cracked and alone, radiating its own heat like an enormous cauldron. The newspaper had said the temperature would top off at 109, and it felt as if the sun were igniting Lindy as she lurched the car toward the bridge’s western end, where she would pull into the orange combine and rest in its shade.

She was on her way home from a meeting of the Monday Afternoon Club, held in the Ladies’ Lounge of the Huntington Hotel. The club, made up of twelve women, met on the last Monday of the month to discuss literature and geography and anything else proposed for its agenda, such as the new but distressing problem of unemployed chambermaids loitering at night outside the Raymond Street Station. On
this particular Monday afternoon, the ladies—including Mrs. Ellie Sickman, Mrs. Sarah Woolly, Mrs. E. B. Rocke, and Mrs. Connie Ringe—had discussed—and
tackled
, as Connie Ringe declared—Gibbon’s Rome. In the days before the meeting there had been a flurry of midnight reading in a dozen upstairs suites across Pasadena, on shady Oak Knoll, on wide-avenued Hillcrest, on olive-lined Lombardy, in the skunk-and-coyote Linda Vista hills: a lone window bright with gold light, a fine-boned, determined hand turning page after page while the neighborhood slept and the wind bent the stalks of cypress, while the husband snored and emitted his sour nighttime effluvia and the children sighed and picked the paint from the bedposts and the governess moaned in her dreams. But the members of the Monday Afternoon Club were achievers, women capable of nearly anything they set their minds to; such was their motto, and inscribed on the inside of their white-gold membership bracelets were the words of Abigail Adams: “We have too many high sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them.” In due time each member had finished studying Gibbon and was prepared to discuss the subtleties of a civilization’s decline.

But two weeks before the meeting, Lindy hadn’t been able to locate Gibbon in Willis’s library. Most of the books were his father’s, and over the years she had learned that few left the shelves for any reason other than to be caressed by Rosa’s feather duster. At Vroman’s Bookstore, Lindy asked one of the clerks, Mr. Raines, for an edition. He brought her the books, the three volumes held to his chest by shirtsleeved arms. Mr. Raines, a young man from Stanford, was responsible for the history section, and while Lindy inspected the three volumes he leaned against the oak shelves, one meaty, half-exposed arm crooked above his head. Behind him was a glass case displaying Adam Vroman’s collection of sun-pale Hopi kachinas and folded Navajo blankets and dozens of carved Japanese netsuke purse-beads. Hanging above the bookshelves were photos of Hopi Indians: a chief silhouetted on a ridge and a braided woman peering into a basket of squash and a penny-colored child in a mesa village. Mr. Raines said that though he himself was a specialist in the history of the West, he had learned at Stanford to look to the ancients for certain truths. He adjusted the items in the cabinet while Lindy inspected the books.

“Is there anyone more useful than Gibbon in these trying days?” said Mr. Raines, seeing Lindy to the car. He suggested that she visit him when she had finished her reading, to share her thoughts. They could have a book chat in the Spanish Library Room, he proposed, glancing in the direction of the courtyard. His eyes returned to her, and there was something behind them, a warmth Lindy no longer could take comfort in. The young man was offering friendship, but Lindy couldn’t accept it. She hesitated before she made any promises, and Mr. Raines, who was twenty-two or twenty-three, stepped backward on the sun-swamped street: “I hope I haven’t said anything disagreeable, Mrs. Poore. I wasn’t suggesting—”

She assured the man that he had not.

Two weeks later, the Monday Afternoon Club met in the Ladies’ Lounge, with its upholstered window seats and the passion-fruit relief scrolling around the room. They picked at radishes and spiced peaches and cooled themselves in front of electric fans, discussing both Gibbon and the recent downturn in civic fortunes. Ellie Sickman chaired the Committee for Reforming the Poor, and she told the other Afternooners that her task had become so much more difficult this year. “Ladies, 1930 is not 1929. We are living in a different age,” she said knowingly, her husband’s ice fortune collapsing even as she spoke. The Sickmans would go on to lose their “gals,” as Ellie called her three crow-haired maids. Then the Sickman house on Orange Grove would close, its fescue lawn that cost a thousand dollars a year to irrigate burning to straw; and the Sickmans would sneak off in the night, bags and baby tucked underarm. But of the future, what did Ellie Sickman know during the July heat wave of 1930? What did any of them know, in the Ladies’ Lounge? They had gathered to discuss the past. One of them, Sarah Woolly—whose long, boxy mouth and heavy-lidded eyes possessed a bovine quality that grew even more prominent when she discussed her mother’s dairy fortune—said that the Afternooners held a unique responsibility to summon history when others were too busy worrying
about the day-to-day. “Ladies, we are privileged in that regard,” said Sarah, who was the club’s chair for 1930 and therefore stowed in her purse the cherry-wood gavel that kept meetings in order and on agenda. The Woolly dairy empire would survive heartily into the future, for with the decline in beef sales came the rise in the consumption of cottage cheese, a trend that would continue for fifteen years, conferring upon Sarah’s daughter the unspoken but oft-thought moniker “Pasadena’s Cottage Cheese Princess.”

Yet Lindy’s vision into the future—whether her own or that of the city that had become her home—was imprecise. When she tried to look forward, one of her headaches would descend and its blow would prod her to look back: the years with Willis had passed somehow both urgently and in one long rolling gait, and the baby would turn five in September. “I’m not a baby anymore!” Sieglinde would scream, her fists pounding Lindy’s thigh or the wall next to her bed as she flipped and flopped and refused to go to sleep. Sieglinde was a dark-featured girl, eyes like two chips of coal and a black tendril of hair growing down her neck. People would say, “She doesn’t look a thing like Captain Poore. She’s all you, Lindy!” Lindy would correct them, “You’re wrong. She looks like her Uncle Edmund too.” The girl loved to roam the open chaparral, slingshot in hand, and hike into the foothills above Devil’s Gate, hurling arrow-edged rocks at the squirrels. She learned to swim at twelve months, tadpoling across the pool into Lindy’s arms, and how to ride at the age of two, in Willis’s lap on White Indian. But as much as little Sieglinde loved to run barefoot through the groves and ride in the truck with Hearts and Slaymaker, the girl loved even more the boxes sent from Dodsworth’s and the bunny-fur hoods ordered at the furrier in the Vista’s lobby. She was only half her child, Lindy knew, and with this came both love and disappointment; and when her headache throbbed, and her joints ached feverishly, Lindy’s regret would pool in her chest even more.

Sarah Woolly continued to steer the conversation away from Gibbon and toward what might be done for the less fortunate of Pasadena. The girls released from service in the half-empty hotels and the shuttered mansions were “becoming a blight,” said Ellie Sickman. They gathered at night in search of what the Monday Afternoon Club called “romantic work.” “I would just
die
if I ever saw one of my gals out there, waiting in the night,” said Ellie, although, when this event transpired a year later,
Ellie Sickman did not in fact die; she merely wondered how much a girl could earn between dusk and dawn. Ellie Sickman would go on to say, “I suppose for many gals there’s no other way.”