Pasadena (67 page)

When they were gone Lindy said, “Lolly was just now confessing her affection for you.”

“For me?” His grin was curious, and Lindy wondered if it was at her own expense.

“There’s something you should know about her,” said Lindy. “It was Lolly.”

“What was?”

“She was the one who told Willis about that night.”

“You remember it, do you?”

“Don’t play with me.”

“How do you know?”

“Willis told me.”

“Why would she do that?”

“Because she loved you even then.”

“Lolly? In love with me?” He thought about this. “What use would I have for her?” He grinned mysteriously, and she saw that he was going to tell her nothing.

The years had been like a sentence for her too. Bruder wasn’t the only one who had stared out a window longing for freedom. The rancho had become her prison, its staircase creaking beneath her descending foot, always causing Willis’s voice to rise from the library, “Lindy? You aren’t going out, are you?” The rose bed had snared her, the front gate had trapped her, and now the illness strapped her to the bed. There was so much to tell Bruder, but his grim face told her that he would no longer listen; his eyes told her that he had learned all he needed to know about Lindy Poore.

After reading the article, she had called Cherry. “What did he tell you?” she asked.

“Everything he told me is in the story,” Cherry answered.

“What did he tell you about me?”

“Nothing, Lindy.”

“When you went to see him. Did he ask about me?”

“No, Lindy. Your fate was already clear to him.”

“How did he know?”

And Cherry, who was planning her City Hall marriage to George Nay, said, “Lindy. How is it that you don’t know?”

“You’ll let me know if I can help you?” Cherry had said. “Lindy, call when you need me.” The phone line clicking dead had stayed in Lindy’s ear for a long time; she could almost hear it now amid the calling jays.

Lindy and Bruder found themselves seated on the sycamore log. A spear of exhaustion entered Lindy and her fever rose. “Sieglinde, come sit beside me.” Lindy extended her hand, but her daughter instead threw her arms around Bruder and sat in his lap and pecked his cheek.

“She could only be your daughter.”

The afternoon had spoiled and Lindy shut her eyes, stopping the painful sun. The breeze ran through the oak scrub and she thought of that day years ago at the mineral spring, as she had awkwardly attempted to explain herself, and he had tried to confess what was in his heart. But her memory of that day was imprecise: she recollected it as if he had revealed secrets about himself, when in fact he had said almost nothing. She had come to convince herself that she was the only one he
had opened his heart to. For a moment she thought of them as lovers again, an afternoon in the sun, dust caking their eyelids, their throats dry, pulses panting. Time had passed and nothing had changed and she transported herself to one of Bruder’s first days at Condor’s Nest; with her eyes shut, she carried herself away from the trail above Devil’s Gate. She traveled home.

But then Bruder broke the spell. “Imagine it,” he said. “Lolly Poore and me.” If Lindy had opened her eyes she would have seen the predatory smile and the frozen, preylike fear in Sieglinde’s face. But she sealed her eyes against the hot reality of the day, and then Bruder laughed, and his laugh echoed in the canyon, a dark chuckle climbing up from somewhere deep and filling the brown, burned hills above Devil’s Gate.

A week later
, Lindy drove to Dr. Freeman’s, this time with Rosa. The sun-whitened dirt in the arroyo was blinding, and the KHJ radio news said that the afternoon’s temperature would reach 110. The hot wind rushed around them as they crossed the bridge and drove into town. There was more talk of the future speedway up the arroyo and an even wider bridge spanning its yawn. Lindy could imagine the pavement running endlessly, strips crisscrossing and eventually filling everything in, every last gopher hole stopped up with concrete; she shut her eyes and then opened them, and in the dark instant she had seen a narrow white road running from the Pasadena’s gate to Condor’s Nest. It was free of oil and rubber stain and it seemed as if someone had rolled it for her.

In Dr. Freeman’s office, Lindy and Rosa waited on the daybed. Over the years its velour had gone bald in spots, and the fern had grown into a large tattered shrub that filled the window and spilled across the file cabinet. The fern filtered the sun, casting a green light on the office and on Lindy’s hands and legs. It gave them a sickly color, Rosa’s face too, and while they waited for Dr. Freeman behind the bubble-glass door, Rosa took Lindy’s fingers in her own. Miss Bishop was with the doctor in the examining room and the two young women were alone, the heat touching them everywhere, the thin velour bristly, the fan blowing, its neck clicking. They didn’t need to say it but both were thinking about Rosa’s mother, and all the other women felled by the reeking, weeping tumors. “Somebody gave it to her,” Rosa said, “and she gave it to nobody, and she didn’t know what she had until she was sick and then she knew exactly what she had.” But then Rosa realized what she was doing
to Lindy and she said, “But she never took mercury. She had nothing but her rosary.”

And what did Lindy have?

“Due to your somewhat advanced stage,” said Dr. Freeman, “I’m going to give you the full ten milliliters.” She was lying on the rubber table, her blouse hanging limply on the coat-tree, and the rubber was almost gooey against her back. Lindy stared up. Since her last visit, someone—Miss Bishop, no doubt—had taped to the ceiling tiles a picture of a beach, gentle waves rolling in, children playing. It looked like Dana Point, but it could have been anywhere up or down the coast, fat-kneed children crouched in the wet sand and two mothers standing watchfully behind them, hands on hips.

“One good thing about the times we’re living in,” said Dr. Freeman.

“What’s that, Doctor?” said Miss Bishop.

“Plenty of donors willing to sell their blood. I had no trouble getting a pint that’s smear-positive for Plasmodium vivax.”

Miss Bishop nodded, agreeing that that
was
fortunate, and through the bubble glass, Lindy saw Rosa’s blurry black figure. “Can she come in?”

“Who, your maid?”

Miss Bishop opened the door, and Rosa came in and seated herself on a steel stool; the stool’s plate-shape seat looked like the only cool thing in the examination room and Lindy longed to press her cheek against it. Even without her blouse she was warm and sticky, the rubber mattress sucking at her. She thought of Willis, who’d be sweating it out down in the groves. He had spent the past week figuring out what to do about the spreading decline. The worms had taken no more than thirty trees, but there was no way to know where they would stop, burrowing deep until they found cold, moist soil and the teat of a root tip. They had tried spraying, Hearts and Slay and Willis misting the trees with zinc, borax, and manganese, which left the dying trees covered in a brittle gray film. The nematode lived in the soil, and flooding the rootstock with six parts water to one part chlorobenzene had done nothing either, the flammable runoff collecting in the ditches and sitting in the sun as combustible as gasoline.

Dr. Freeman nodded indifferently in Rosa’s direction, and Lindy could tell that he didn’t recognize her. But Miss Bishop did: she had said, “And how are you?” Miss Bishop once said that she never forgot
any of the girls who visited Dr. Freeman. While they lay on the examination table, humiliated by Dr. Freeman’s probe and prod, Miss Bishop would study each girl’s face, and she’d store the memory in a carefully indexed mental file. Sometimes Miss Bishop would scold Dr. Freeman by saying, “The girls might be coming to you with the same problem, but don’t forget, Doctor, if you asked each girl what happened, each time you’d hear a different story.” “You’re right, Miss Bishop,” Dr. Freeman would say. “But there isn’t time to ask, is there?”

On the wall was a diploma, Old Throop, class of 1914. Lindy imagined Dr. Freeman buttoning himself into his white coat for the first time, taking up his scalpel with intentions of bringing good to the world. Lindy was struck by the sadness of a man’s inexorable transformation—from the bright hope of youth to the dull, limited options that come from years of compromise. No one could imagine for himself a future that entailed the daily walk up the dark staircase, the turning of the lock in the bubble-glass door. Yet here was Dr. Freeman, Miss Bishop too; and here was Lindy as well, and her future and her present life had long ago parted ways. Sieglinde would be five in a few weeks; when Lindy was five she was trapping puma and casting her lancewood rod into the surf and chasing Siegmund up the arroyo. At once it felt as if it were both yesterday and a lifetime ago, and again the relentless doubleness of life stroked Lindy, soothing and frightening her in the same grasp.

Miss Bishop swabbed the crook of Lindy’s arm, and the alcohol was cool and the fan blew on it and Lindy began to relax. She looked again to the picture of the beach, and in it the ocean waves stretched to the horizon and far out she saw a little boat and she couldn’t be sure but it looked like an outrigger canoe, two people paddling to shore and cresting a wave. Miss Bishop saw Lindy looking at the picture and she said, “I bought it on my vacation.”

“Where is it?”

“A little run-down beach village. Baden-Baden-by-the-Sea. Do you know where it is? Down south of Capistrano and north of La Jolla cove. You ever go down to that part of the coast, Mrs. Poore?”

Dr. Freeman told Lindy to release her fist and to breathe deeply. He said that the inoculation wouldn’t take long. He flicked a syringe and prepared a vial of blood, and before she knew it he had inserted the needle into her arm and something warm seeped toward her shoulder just
beneath the skin. While he held the vial in place and the blood transferred to Lindy’s vein, he said that the first ague would set in at any point in the next three or four days. “It’s a quartan malaria. The chills will return every fourth day.” He said he hoped that Lindy would be able to hold out until the tenth or even twelfth bout. “You’ll feel hot and cold all at once, and an icy sweat will cover you, and it’ll be hard to think straight. But I don’t want you to worry because that’s normal, that’s what’s to be expected, Mrs. Poore. It’ll pass within a few hours and you’ll be tired, and the next day you’ll feel a little better.”

“Should I give her anything?” said Rosa.

“A cold rag and some water and, if she wants it, some ice chips, in case she’s gnashing.” Lindy thought of what she might say to Willis if he was to find her shaking and drenched in her bed; she’d only have to say that it was
a woman’s problem
to send him scurrying down the hall, his curiosity squelched. She would tell Rosa to keep Sieglinde away during the ague hours. “Tell her that Mommy’s gone to bed.” Lindy couldn’t quite envision it now, on the rubber pad, but she had a vague, misty sense that those words would echo in the house over and over during the next few months, up the dumbwaiter and down, transported by aluminum heating duct:
Mommy’s gone to bed
.

Dr. Freeman removed the needle, but this felt no more uncomfortable than a hand releasing her arm. “Rest for a bit, Mrs. Poore,” said Miss Bishop.

“Whenever you want,” said Dr. Freeman, “I’ll interrupt the treatment and administer the quinine. But I want you to try to hold out. The fever is burning the spirochetes out of your blood. The longer you let the agues run, the better chance we have.”

She was both hot and tired, the warm, fan-prodded air holding her against the rubber pad. Rosa took her hand and they waited together while Dr. Freeman moved to his office and continued his paperwork and Miss Bishop reset the instrument table. “Everything’s going to be okay,” said Rosa, and Lindy knew that Rosa was right. The Mayo Clinic was reporting a success rate greater than fifty percent, Dr. Freeman had said. “Almost seventy percent, depending on how you look at the numbers.”

“By success, do you mean cure?”

“It isn’t so simple, Mrs. Poore.”

But Lindy had no doubt that she would outmaneuver fate one more time. She was emboldened by the sense that good fortune waited ahead, and she felt her strength returning, running up her legs.

A few minutes later, Lindy stood at the window, buttoning her blouse. Outside, the tar-paper roof looked as if it were melting into a black skin of oil. The Webb House’s turret flashed the sunlight back into Lindy’s eyes, and she tucked the blouse into her skirt, and soon she and Rosa moved to leave. Miss Bishop was saying, “Don’t forget to call if it becomes too much.”

When she got home, Lindy felt in fact better than she had in several weeks, and the headache had subsided and the fever had disappeared. She thought that perhaps the treatment was working already. Sieglinde was out with Lolly and Pal at the swim tournament at the club. Lindy changed into her old work clothes and hiked down the hill, looking for Willis.

At the ranch house she found Hearts and Slaymaker strapping themselves into knapsack sprayers, the brass pumps burning in the sun. Hearts was in his work pants and his boots and nothing else, and the skin of his chest was glistening and the heat rose off it in iridescent waves. The yard smelled like petroleum, and the boys were greasy about the face, and they looked as if they might burst into flame right then, and when they saw her Hearts said, “About a thousand degrees today.” Then they helped each other into nickel-plated masks bound in chamois skin, Hearts adjusting the elastic band around Slay’s head and Slay doing the same for Hearts. There was only one pair of goggles, though, and each told the other to put it on and their voices were muffled like a holler into a tin can and finally Slaymaker insisted and helped Hearts adjust the goggles. His eyes were huge and worried-looking behind the smoky glass. He said something that Lindy couldn’t make out. Hearts put his hands atop his head, and the pits of his arms were white. He and Slaymaker walked slowly into the grove, the four-gallon tanks lurching on their backs, their boots coughing up dust.