Pasadena (61 page)

“We must do something,” Sarah Woolly implored. “These girls have no training other than housekeeping and cooking, so what are we to do with them? They’re steps away from desperate lives.”

“We should educate them,” said Connie Ringe. In the time that Lindy had lived in Pasadena, brass-haired Connie Muffitt had married and divorced a man named G. W. Ringe, a Hollywood producer who shortly after their marriage found himself ensnared in a tax-and-bribery scandal. The incident of her brief marriage—the twelve-hundred-guest wedding, the oak-shaded
finca
in San Marino where no one could hear her midnight screams, the teary drive home to her parents on Bellefontaine—had chiseled away Connie’s hardness, leaving her with supple cheeks and hands gloved in empathy. They had become friends, Lindy and Connie, each with one foot in and one foot out of the lives others expected for them; together they had hunted lynx in the foothills until hunting became illegal and they played doubles at the Valley Hunt, climbing the ladder as fast as ivy. They made sure that the boys at the Children’s Training Society and the girls at the Webb House each received a winter sweater and a pamphlet on birth control, respectively. Connie showed Lindy a side of Pasadena that Willis knew nothing of: the poetry circles and the scientific lectures at Cal Tech and the Pasadena Arts & Crafts Society, where men and women in smocks and berets painted dreamy oils of the sycamores. “We should organize a school,” proposed Connie to the Afternooners. “Some place where these girls can learn less domestic and more modern work.”

“Yes, a school for girls,” said Lindy. “A place that can prepare them for the future.”

“Afternooners,” said Sarah, “let’s each of us talk to our husbands about starting a fund.”

“A fund for a school for girls,” someone said.

“If we don’t do it, who will?” asked Lindy.

No one thinks about the girls’ futures, the women agreed.

But the Afternooners were unsure what precisely they could teach the unemployed maids and cooks and seamstresses and nannies and house girls and washerwomen. “What will the future demand that these girls can supply?” The question hung in the Ladies’ Lounge and
buzzed around the Monday Afternoon Club’s ears: What indeed? And Lindy thought too, but not about the abstract future. For what
could
be done? Wouldn’t fate go on and have its way? She recalled, rubbing her temple, how certain she had been that a girl’s life was her own to steer, that no single misfortune could thwart a young girl’s plans. And yet at some point the truth had flashed her, both obscenely and indisputably. At night, tucking Sieglinde into bed, Lindy tried to tell her daughter that things would be different for her. “No one will tell you what to do,” Lindy assured her. “But, Mommy. You’re always telling me what to do.” The girl was too young to comprehend, but her eyes sparked as if the notion was registering. It was all Lindy could hope for.

Over the years, Sieglinde and Palomar had become best friends, and Lindy would come across them—Palomar’s melon-round face molding slowly into an image of Edmund—tying flies on the edge of the trout pond, which Willis had stopped restocking in 1929. Lindy had cared for Palomar after Edmund’s death, and when she married Willis, the boy came as her only dowry. Willis had mistakenly thought that with Edmund’s passing, Condor’s Nest would become Lindy’s; but, no, she had had to explain: the farm is Bruder’s. “But he’s been thrown away.” “And from prison he’s ordered that no one step foot on his land,” she said. Even Dieter had been moved into a room behind Margarita’s; Lindy mailed a check each month to pay for his board and care. When all this was revealed to Willis, Lindy could see her husband registering the news:
I’ve married a strange girl
, his eyes told her. No, Lindy brought nothing to the marriage but herself and Palomar, and the forming lump in her stomach, which kicked and beat through the nights and days.

Lindy’s love for her nephew was rivaled only by Lolly’s possessive affection. Lolly, who was held permanently under youth’s glass bell, had fallen for the boy the way a little girl falls for a yellow-maned pony, or a china-head doll. Side by side, Lindy and Lolly raised the children while Willis, unwilling to hire a new foreman, oversaw the groves and shaved his landholdings as bid after bid came along: small tracts—four, seven, thirteen acres—to housebuilders and macadam mavens and the automobile companies buying up right-of-ways. Over the years he would entertain any offer: “What do I need with all this land?” Soon enough he stopped mentioning his business transactions altogether: if he sold a parcel, she would learn of it only on the
Star-News’s
“Notices and Holdings” page.

But in the idle summer of 1930—with the number of unemployed citizens doubling each month, with the chambermaids and the private secretaries released from the mansions by the truckload, with the undershirted construction crews standing around in the heat, their cement mixers still—there was little on Captain Poore’s mind but the deal that would, as he put it, seal the Pasadena’s—and Pasadena’s—fate. Captain Poore and a developer named George Nay led the men proposing a motorcar turnpike running from Pasadena to Los Angeles, a bending river of concrete its proponents hoped would pave the floor of the arroyo and the sandy riverbed. It had become a great distraction to Willis, a pursuit that kept him irritable and away from the ranch, in planning meetings in the Valley Hunt Club’s paneled library, in the tiled, resounding corridors of City Hall, its courtyard fountain tinkling; and it kept him away from Lindy and her fevers, her red eyes, her tender nodes. Captain Poore and the other 100 Percenters were busy hatching plans for the parkway, as they referred to it, emphasizing the
park
. Their enthusiasm was based on their intention to keep Pasadena at the helm of civic advancement; that, and to sell their spare scrubland at the highest possible price. The men were much like Willis himself: former mayor Hiram Wadsworth, whose white billy-goat beard children liked to stroke; Wallace Burdette, an Ohio industrialist who erected a castlelike mansion in Linda Vista modeled after Byron’s Château de Chillon; Charles Sutton, a fair, wispy man with an El Segundo oil reserve that gushed a thousand barrels a day; Milford A. Puddington, grandson of a robber baron, whose open disdain for railroads (“A car’ll beat ’em every time!”) had brought a seizure upon his ninety-nine-year-old grandmother’s tiny, rich heart.

In August 1930, the parkway was nothing more than a dream, although in the developers’ minds a vivid one. Not everyone supported the idea of a six-lane concrete river flooding down the Arroyo Seco. More than a few “naturists”—as Willis called them—predicted traffic of more than five hundred cars per hour, a vision into the future Willis scoffed at as both “hysterical and factually unfounded.” “These are people who have yet to rip down their stables,” Willis would say. “People who dream backward to the days of wagons and mules.” Willis Poore was not such a man, he was fond of saying; like his father he looked only forward, and sometimes at the breakfast table he would emphasize this by thumping his breast, or by talking with a mouthful of raspberry
jam, which would prompt little Sieglinde to giggle. On a regular basis he would make a speech of some sort to Lindy, as if he were testing his resolve in front of an audience, and she would say, if she was listening, “Once you’ve destroyed something it can never return.”

Their first argument was over the baby’s name: When the nurse handed Lindy the greasy, shrieking infant, she realized at once that she wanted to name her Sieglinde. “What kind of a name is that?” said Willis. “Sounds like an immigrant.” That was exactly what kind of name it was, Lindy protested, and a dread settled upon the new mother’s breast. In her bedroom she cried that no one would tell her what to name her daughter, and her screams rose above the baby’s, and the sweat running down her sides mixed with the blood on the sheets. This behavior erased the happy, new-father grin upon Willis’s face, and she knew that she had frightened him, as if he had for the first time peered down the tunnel of her soul, carbide lamp in hand.

Over the years, Willis had come to realize that it was less effort to keep things from his wife than it was to argue with her. He hadn’t told her that earlier in the summer of 1930 he had sold to the Pasadena Parkway Corporation two hundred acres, a corner of the rancho that was wild and untouched and where Lindy had taught Sieglinde to ride a colt and shoot an old Winchester Model 1873, a gun with a barroom nude etched into the silver plate. No, Willis failed to mention the transaction, and only by reading the
Star-News
had Lindy discovered it. When she asked about it, he said that he had sold the land not to destroy the Pasadena but to preserve it. “We want the parkway running by our front gate, don’t we? It’s going to be like the railroads,” he predicted. “You don’t want to be left out of its path.” But Lindy doubted he was right; from the flock of roadsters and Hispano-Suizas rushing down Colorado Street,
beep-beeping
by the trolley cars, she had a clear sense of what was to come. When she ventured to tell her husband, he would hush her: “Why should
you
be worrying about such things?”

During the past year—especially during the summer, when a feverish malaise overtook the city, and Lindy and Willis suffered through the hot nights on the sleeping porch—she had thought about leaving Pasadena, even if only for a short time. The longing for someplace else was both imprecise and permanently lodged. She didn’t know what she hoped to
find beyond the gate, beyond the Sierra Madres’ long morning shadow; there were days when more than anything she wanted to see the ocean and feel the salt dry stiffly on her skin. Occasionally she would bundle Sieglinde into the car and they’d drive to Santa Monica. On the beach in front of the Jonathan Club, Lindy would sit in a canvas chair and watch her daughter erecting a dam of sand. There were rules, unstated but firm nonetheless, against mothers joining their children in the tide. The younger women—the seventeen- and nineteen-year-olds with the narrow white hips—bathed in their rubber and worsted-wool suits, rubbing coconut oil into one another’s long limbs, but never the mothers and the wives. Up the beach and far off from the Jonathan Club’s roped-off sand, Lindy could see the Mexican families bodysurfing, mothers younger than she walking naked infants into the waves. The fathers would dig pits in the sand and burn driftwood, and they’d be opening baskets of
conchas
and
tamales
for sunset picnics while Lindy and Sieglinde made their way across the beach to the parking lot. Those young mothers and their shiny-bottomed children, and their husbands and brothers with mustaches drooping around their mouths—Lindy knew that they would stay to witness the sun slip beyond the horizon, when the clouds in the sky singed orange. But Willis didn’t like Lindy driving at night; he’d say he didn’t like the idea of Sieglinde eating anywhere “public”; he didn’t approve of his wife returning to him with a fine layer of salt across her warm and red face. She used to argue with him, but not anymore. She used to scream from the bottom of the stairs, her hand upon Cupid’s foot. Willis would hurry down the steps and kiss her forehead and say, “No, no. I would never dream of telling you what to do.”

But in fact he did.

Yet other than the day trips to Santa Monica and the afternoons beneath the Valley Hunt’s latticed tennis pavilion or along the hiking trails in the foothills, Lindy had nowhere to go. Willis, whose self-worth extended as far as his gate, didn’t like to leave his ranch: “Who’s going to look after things? Rosa? Hearts and Slay?”

Sieglinde had been born only a few days after Lindy gave her testimony in Bruder’s trial. The baby arrived in the world with the bloody cord tight around her throat and her face blue and bruised. When Dr. Birchback cut the baby free, a frightening shriek emerged, one so high-pitched and glassy that nurses from two wards down peered into the
Labor Room to inspect what variety of devil had arrived. They held their fingers to their lips as they looked at the large blue baby girl, and thought,
The poor mother … what she must’ve gone through
. Within two weeks, though, Lindy returned to working on the ranch, helping Hearts and Slay prepare the bunkhouse for the soon-to-arrive hands and scrubbing the plank floors in the Yuens’ adobe. But soon word came that Bruder would be sentenced, and Lindy drove down the coast to hear Judge Dinklemann read aloud Bruder’s future. She insisted on taking the baby with her, and Sieglinde, who typically screamed herself hoarse every day, slept in a mysterious silence throughout the sentencing. Not once did Bruder turn around in his chair, and Lindy didn’t know if he had seen her. She hoped that her daughter would wake up and scream and cause everyone in the courtroom to turn. He would see her; he would see that she had come. But Sieglinde slept as if she’d been drugged; nothing would nudge her from her dreams, not even when Lindy pinched the baby’s leg, twisting her skin.

The bailiff led Bruder out of the courtroom, and just as he was leaving he said to Judge Dinklemann and Mr. Ivory, “I’ll be back for it.” Then he was gone, and the judge and the prosecutor looked equally perplexed by Bruder’s final statement, and soon they were folding papers into files and their day was done.

The next day, a package arrived for Lindy. It was from Bruder, and he’d sent it just before being taken to San Quentin. She carried it to her room and told Rosa to leave her alone, and on her bed—where she had gone to sleep during her pregnancy and where she would sleep most but not quite all of her nights alone—she tore through the brown paper to find Valencia’s old apron, its strings dingy and frayed. She shook it out, expecting a note to tumble from the heap, but there was nothing, and when she held the apron to her nose, again nothing—nothing lingered, nothing remained.

It had been Bruder’s last message to her, and now, almost five years later, no word had carried up from Condor’s Nest or down from San Quentin. Dieter had been moved to an oceanside house for the aged and the infirm, and when Lindy would drive down the coast to visit him she would enter her father’s room and he would have no idea who she was. He would be wearing his military jacket with the epaulets and babbling in German, and Sieglinde would be frightened of her grandfather,
and soon they’d leave, a crate of oranges the only thing to tell Dieter that he’d had a visitor.