Pasadena (71 page)

She cried out and held Bruder tightly while she hopped on one foot, pulling up her other. Through the green water she and Bruder watched the inky blood seep. She had stepped on an old double hook, one tip sunk into her toe, the other tip as bright as a fish gill under the water. The blood flowed in dark clouds. The initial sharp pain was gone, and looking at the snared foot through the water it was as if it belonged to someone else. Bruder passed his rod to Lindy—“Hold this”—and he knelt in the water, his head swallowed by the surface, and with a doctor’s concentration he carefully pulled the hook from her flesh. He stood back up and gulped for air and his hair was flat and glassy on his skull and the water had washed the sullenness from his face: it was as if the saltwater had etched away the years. “It’ll scar,” he said.

He took back the fishing rod and began reeling the line in and he said, his eyes cast upon the horizon, “I wanted you to love me, Lindy.” San Clemente Island was visible in the distance and it looked like the hump of a sea monster, and how could Lindy know then that the sky over Condor’s Nest would thicken with filth, and that in a few years the island would slip behind a scrim of haze, to be spotted from shore only on the clearest, bluest days. She couldn’t know this, nor could Bruder, but as the heart perceives the future before the eye, Lindy realized her world was gone. “I wanted to earn your love,” he said. “I already had you but I wanted to earn you. And you wouldn’t let me.”

And then, flicking the rod, he said, “That’s all there is.”

She said he was wrong. He didn’t know her heart, no one knew her heart! He slowly raised his hand and moved it to her and she expected his fingers to stroke her chin, to touch her thin, fever-hollowed cheek. But instead he yanked the gold chain from her throat and pulled the coral pendant off her, his tug so hard she thought her neck might snap, but it didn’t, only the gold chain, like a fishing line breaking under the weight of a bluefin.

You’re wrong!
she was about to cry again, but before the words left
her she asked herself—and would ask herself through the next six fevers, and the months of remission, and the illness’s final visit next spring—Who? Who was wrong?

“I’ll be back for my father,” she said.

“And I’ll be here.”

Lindy returned slowly through the water to shore, her clothes hanging heavily from her. She pulled Sieglinde from the mouth of the cave. “Time to go,” she said. “Don’t argue.” What a girl cannot know about her mother, thought Lindy. What no one can know.

They returned up the beach and up the arroyo, up the highway and up the coast, up the white dirt road and the chaparral hill. Lindy returned home, to her room and the canopied bed, where she would sleep through the nights and days alone, planning her exit from the world that was never hers, and outside her window the nematode would creep through the orange grove and spread the spreading decline, and the six-cylinder plans for the parkway would hurtle forward—six lanes! eight lanes! ten lanes! And many weeks later a night would come when the moon would fail to rise and Rosa would be snoring and Willis would be wheezing with orange-bourbon breath and Sieglinde would be sucking the flesh from her thumb, and everything in the house would be as quiet as the dead, except for the canopy flapping in the breeze, its silk torn by Lindy one night in a feverish bout, but all else would be still, all else would be gone, and Lindy would stand at her open window and look out across the small valley and strain to see the black ocean—almost always hidden now behind the sulfuric haze—and she would blink and blink again and all but the shimmering phantasm of memory would fall away. She’d go to bed and pull the white sheet taut to her chin, and as she drifted into a cave of dreamless, bottomless sleep, Lindy Poore would be certain of her recovery.

One day in August 1945
, Mr. Andrew Jackson Blackwood was walking through his orange groves when he arrived at the mausoleum. He had owned the Rancho Pasadena for a month, and although he had visited the lonely property several times he had yet to explore the orchard’s outer reaches. It was a dry, desertlike day, the sun burning through a wad of permanent haze. The grove sagged with abandonment and the dirt was as hard as concrete. The mausoleum appeared before him, white and agleam, just as it had the time he discovered Mr. Bruder there on Christmas Day. How long ago that felt now—war yet raging in frozen-mud Europe and the Japs still defending the bayonet-sharp tallgrass of the Pacific atolls. And now it was all over and Blackwood, like every American, had learned how to say “peace” in half a dozen languages.
It’s a new world!
, the news reports had been claiming for a week.

The sun had left the marble hot to the hand. It was midday, and the mausoleum provided little shade except directly under its dome, and there Blackwood found himself, master of a great tract of western land, leaning against a family crypt. A sense of loss touched Blackwood, and at once, in one swamping wave, he recalled everything Mrs. Nay and Bruder had told him.

He traced his finger across the Swinburne quote and walked around the high, sealed box to study the newest name, added only days after Blackwood took possession. Mrs. Nay’s telephone call had come as a great shock. “He’s dead, Mr. Blackwood,” she had said. “Taken in his sleep.” Of course it was how Lolly had died years before, her little heart giving up. As distressing as the news of Mr. Bruder’s death was Mrs.
Nay’s own grief, the sob traveling across the line. Blackwood had heard the regret in her voice, and he understood.

He returned up the hill to the terrace, to the shade of the coral tree. He leaned against the balustrade and surveyed all that was now his. On his first visit to the Rancho Pasadena as its new owner, the sense of pride he had expected did not come. And on each visit thereafter, the view of the valley had stirred him even less. In the past week, Blackwood had asked several visitors to the rancho: a man who built peach-stucco houses by the dozen, a highway man whose complexion was as rough as asphalt, and a man in an unventilated wool suit who was scouting property for a new power plant. Yet after each meeting Blackwood had felt nothing certain about the future, except the need to wash his hands.

In August the hills were husk-brown and dead, the grasses and the scrub too brittle to sway. The newspaper predicted a deadly fire season, and yet he noted that the newspaper predicted that every August. Might as well report that the sun is hot, thought Blackwood.

He did not live at the ranch, nor would he. There’s no point in trying to live a life that isn’t yours, he had come to understand. Blackwood was a dealer, not a baron, and although once he’d had the desire to live like a rich man, not anymore. That inclination had departed Blackwood, crawling away from its cave. His small but comfortable house would be more than Blackwood would need for the rest of his days.

And it was at this moment of summer contemplation that Cherry Nay came across Blackwood slumped over the parapet.

“Am I interrupting, Mr. Blackwood?”

“Not in the least.” He wasn’t expecting her but her visit didn’t surprise him either, and he greeted her warmly.

“You haven’t checked your mailbox, Mr. Blackwood.” She handed him the envelopes and the flyers.

“My mailbox? I suppose I’m still not used to this place being mine. I don’t even know where the mailbox is.”

“Down by the gate, draped in wild cucumber,” said Mrs. Nay. And then: “Guess what the mail brought me today, Mr. Blackwood. My George is on his way home. Released from service.”

“You must be very happy, Mrs. Nay.”

She said that she was. She was looking forward to resuming their dawn-lit tennis matches, and their evening gin on the patio shaded by
the avocado tree, and the quotidian regularity of peace and prosperity. George had written that he was eager to return to business. “The boys are coming home,” the letter said. “We’ll be busy for many years, my dear Cherry.”

Blackwood shuffled through the mail and found that it was mostly notices from the utility companies and something from the Growers Exchange addressed to Mr. Bruder. Seeing Bruder’s name typed out like that reminded Blackwood of the cruelty of death: the mail continuing even when you cannot.

Blackwood came across a small envelope with a return address in San Marino, from someone named Mrs. Connie Ringe. The envelope was made out by hand, and at first Blackwood thought it must have been misdelivered, but he looked again and saw that it was indeed addressed to him. In the letter, Mrs. Ringe apologized for writing even though they had never met. She was writing on behalf of a group called the Committee for Reforming the Poor. At once he realized that it was a solicitation letter, and he nearly stopped reading. He figured now that word was out that he owned the Rancho Pasadena, many people would conclude that he was a rich man, there to donate to their cause. But then the name grew familiar to Blackwood.

“Connie Ringe? Wasn’t she a friend of Mrs. Poore’s?”

“Who, Connie? Yes, in the end they were friends. Why do you ask?”

Blackwood continued reading. Connie Ringe and some other women had raised money to open a school for underprivileged girls. “It’s something we’ve been working on for nearly fifteen years,” wrote Mrs. Ringe. She said that over the years the group had held drives and sought out bequests. They were now in a position to buy a modest property. There were plans to hire a small faculty and open a high school.

“I’m sure your plans for the Rancho Pasadena involve much profit-producing development, but if you would be kind enough to agree to meet with me, Mr. Blackwood,” concluded Connie Ringe.

“They’re hoping to open a girls’ school,” said Blackwood.

“Yes, they’ve been at it for years and years. I understand that someone recently died and left them a sum of money.”

“An admirable mission,” said Blackwood.

Cherry agreed, and together they looked out to the valley. The afternoon was still and the birds were quiet and Blackwood looked behind
him to the mansion and imagined the cry of girls running in the gallery between classes. He imagined the sight of a row of shiny heads bent over an exam in the library. A school for girls? At the orange ranch?

“I hope you don’t mind,” said Cherry. “But I brought Sieglinde and Pal with me.”

“What? The children? Where are they?”

“I left them at the service road. They wanted to visit his grave.”

“Is that why you came?”

“They didn’t feel comfortable coming on their own. They didn’t want to trespass, Mr. Blackwood. I hope you don’t mind.”

He said he didn’t, and sometime later, when he looked again, he saw the two figures walking about the mausoleum. They were far away and the distance smudged their faces, but he could make out which one was Pal and which one was the girl. She was standing beneath the dome, examining the crypt. The young man waited for her on the steps.

“How are they doing?” asked Blackwood.

“It’s hard to lose the only world you know.” Bruder had left them Condor’s Nest, and Cherry said that they had torn down the Vulture House and tidied things up in a way that hadn’t been done in a generation. “They’ve set out to rebuild the stairs to the beach. The boy is giving up on onions. He’s starting a flower farm.”

“A flower farm?” said Blackwood.

“Gladiolus, poppies, narcissus.”

“Is the soil right?”

“Anything will grow there. Any old thing.”

Blackwood thought about this for a long time, motionless with contemplation. If Cherry had learned anything about Blackwood during the past many months, it was that he was a nostalgic man. The past stroked at him, like a cat’s tail winding around his ankle. She made use of this vulnerability now by asking him, “Have you made any plans, Mr. Blackwood?”

“None yet, Mrs. Nay.” Later in the afternoon, Stinky Sweeney was dropping by. Stinky had an idea for an instant village for all the commuters who worked in the office buildings in Los Angeles. “Roll out a branch of the parkway down the bottom of the valley, and I guarantee it, Blackwood, you’ll be richer than even
you
thought possible.”

What Cherry had never revealed to Blackwood, or to anyone else,
was that in all of George’s letters during the war he had pressed her to negotiate with Bruder to take control of the ranch for themselves. George wanted to develop the land, and often he inquired on the Pasadena’s status and she had been vague, careful never to lie outright to her husband. But sometime ago, Cherry had realized that George’s work—her work, too—wasn’t always for the best. She had developed a hope—in this instance, at least—to guide the ranch into the hands of a man who might preserve it. Early on, she had sensed that Blackwood would be her best chance. In his face she had seen a conscience bubbling with remorse; and it reminded Cherry of herself. All those years ago, Lindy Poore had said, just before she died, “Cherry, you’ll look after things for me?”