Pasadena (25 page)

Now he thought to ask, “When was this?”

“New Year’s Eve, 1924. I remember it precisely. And so would she. But of course I wasn’t Mrs. George Nay then. I was an outsider too, looking in at Pasadena, reporting on its comings and goings. At times it was something of a dirty business, scooping around for news. But that’s just the way it is, I suppose. When I look back, what I remember most was how good those days were to this town and nobody even knew it, did they, Mr. Blackwood? At the time, everyone thought it would go on forever.”

Blackwood didn’t quite understand what she was referring to but responded, “No one could have predicted what would come next.”

Mrs. Nay concurred, fetching her key ring from a chair.

“Did she tell you all this?”

“Yes and no. You learn things over the years. Linda might say something, and now and then it would get passed around town.”

She was standing close to him, and beneath her loose leathery skin Blackwood could see the bones and frame of a girlishly small woman. “Captain Poore wasn’t always careful about who worked for him.”

“What do you mean?”

“People under the employ have been known to speak. It’s just the way of the world.”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“Stay right here,” said Mrs. Nay, and then, slim in her dull gray dress, she ran down the gallery and up the stairs, leaving Blackwood to contemplate the long hall and the naked statue and the cool cavernous air. It didn’t take much for him to imagine returning home nightly to this: for all this to be his. But Blackwood knew that manor life was not in his future; he lived modestly and through the rest of his days he always
would. Most everything he amassed he poured into amassing more. It had become habit. Blackwood bristled if someone accused him of greediness: “My good sir,” he’d say. “You have no idea from whence I come.” Once or twice, Stinky Sweeney had advised him to “slow down,” to “sit back and relax,” to “enjoy your good fortune, Blackwood, my friend.” It was common counsel from someone who’d been born with an agreeable life laid out before him. But that wasn’t Blackwood’s case. As a young groundsman in Maine, Blackwood had imagined himself as someone else, and he had become that man, obliterating his history along the way. Hadn’t he wrestled down his own destiny with brutally expert hands? He was thinking that his personal reinvention had been both simpler and more difficult than he might once have predicted when Mrs. Nay called, “Oh, Mr. Blackwood!”

“Mrs. Nay? Is that you?” Her voice was ghostly and distant, reaching his ear from nowhere he could identify.

“What are you doing, Mr. Blackwood?”

“Waiting for you. Where are you?”

Her mischievous laugh filled the hall, much in the way a voice on “True Stories” could fill the Imperial Victoria’s cab.

“Mrs. Nay? I can hear you, but I can’t see you.”

“Mr. Blackwood, this is what I mean. The heating ducts and the dumbwaiters in a house like this carry voices in an uncanny way. It’s almost as if the house were wired with radio.”

He wondered if she enjoyed the violent suspense of “True Stories” but instead said, “Every secret passed along, is that what you’re saying, Mrs. Nay?”

“Yes, exactly,” and again the naughty laugh, and he imagined Cherry Nay as a schoolgirl in a hair bow, passing a note to her best friend. “A maid hears something, and she tells a maid in another house. That is how things pass from back room to front. And sometimes from private conversation to newspaper story. There was a girl here named Rosa. She once peddled in gossip. But not maliciously, I should add.”

“Rosa, did you say?”

“But that’s another story. For another day, Mr. Blackwood.”

In the gray light, Blackwood was left to think about all this. He had never employed anyone at his house other than a carpenter, a burly man who had lingered one night in a confusing way. Again Blackwood was reminded that he was living at the edge of a world distant from the one
he had come from. He had no training other than how to lay a slate-stone path, and because he had traveled so far from his dirt-floored days, he sometimes had difficulty recalling the precise moment that had prompted him to pack up and pursue a new life. He’d grown adept at stating, “The cold drove me west.” Or, “A friend telegraphed with a tip.” When asked about his own history, Blackwood proved adroit in the vague. There was the fogbound reference to the defunct women’s college in Brooklin, Maine. Occasionally he would allude to his flinty New England blood. But he was certain that no one in Pasadena knew that he had fled Penobscot Bay in a railcar, scandal trailing him across New England, only dissipating like coal exhaust polluting the sky by the time he transferred in Albany. No, no one knew of such things, for Blackwood had a talent for shifting the snowbanks over the bones of the past; he didn’t think of it this way, but such was the truth. At the tiny women’s college, there’d been a girl from Isle au Haut, sixteen and hair as red as a boiled lobster. Her name was Edith, and she was so thin that Blackwood could see her heart thump in her ribcage, and this raw display of mortality, like a pink trout dying at the bottom of a dory, had stirred Blackwood deep within. She had come to him that final night. She had pressed her face against the glass panes in his door: “Mr. Blackmann, let me in. Mr. Blackmann? It’s me, Edith. I must talk to you! Please—” She was the only person in the world who called him Mr. Blackmann; the rest would snap
Andy
or
Blackmann
or
Boy!
Even after two months of intimacy she continued to give his name that respectful handling, and every time she said it,
Mister
, his chest would puff up a bit. She held hopes of becoming a singer—a coloratura soprano, she would say, lying in his arms; Donizetti was her favorite, the endless trills, “like cresting the Atlantic waves in a storm.” Her lungs would fill with air and she would sing for him, and her throat would flutter with the high C’s, and he would shut his eyes and think of a woodbird, flitting freely here and there. But that night when she came to his cedar-shingle cottage at the campus gate, where dirty-fingered groundsmen, one after the other, had lived for a hundred years, she wasn’t singing, she was sobbing as she tapped the window in his door. “Please let me in. There’s something I have to tell you.” He admitted her and was immediately alarmed by the red flushing in her throat and by her red-rimmed eyes. She fell into his arms, and he stroked her tentatively; for even before she spoke, he sensed that she needed something from him,
something he might not be able to provide. “At first I thought it might be nothing,” she said, kissing him. Her body, the body that once he thought he might love, was frail, and he feared that if it were to fall into the wrong hands it could snap in two. “Then I prayed for it to go away,” she was saying, her tears spilling over onto his cheek, and he wondered if she expected him to cry too? “But it’s just gotten bigger, Mr. Blackmann, and there’s nothing I can do about it, and I was afraid to tell you. I was afraid you’d be mad. I was afraid you’d—” But he calmed her with his palm atop her head and held her, and their breathing fell in unison, and her sobs steadied and she looked up, blinking away the tears: “You aren’t mad, are you?” He said he wasn’t. He wasn’t angry. No, in fact he was more frightened than she, for with her news he felt the sucking flush of fortune’s drain, drowning his piercing but unspecific hopes for another life. A vision came to him, as clear as a photograph: there he was, old and stooped and poor and dying in the groundsman’s cottage. Then Edith was fishing in her coat pocket and pulled out a sack bound with leather twine and opened it and dumped its contents onto the bed, onto the mattress where they had made love during the hours after her choir rehearsal, and said, “I’ve stolen it from my Papa. He’s out to sea. He won’t be back until tomorrow night. He keeps his money in an empty lobster pot with a trick bottom. Look, Mr. Blackmann! Three thousand dollars! Everything he’s ever made.” She ran her hands through the wadded bills and the stray coins and tossed some up into the air as if they were confetti. “What have you done?” he said. “We’ll run away,” she said, hugging him, pecking him with her pretty lips—puffy shell-pink lips that had first attracted Blackmann and that, one might say, would inevitably cause her downfall. She kissed him more and more, lips like two satin cushions upon his throat and face. “We have to hurry,” she was saying. “We should leave tonight!”

“What are you talking about?”

“We’ll go west. We’ll go to California. We’ll marry on the way. Out there, no one will ever know. We’ll arrive on the train as Mr. and Mrs. Andrew Blackmann. Way out there, no one will ever guess the truth!” She was playfully pounding her fists upon his breast and he took her wrists and cuffed them roughly and her face fell still as she became afraid. Would he not go to California with her after all?

“We’ll leave at dawn,” he said, and the smile returned to her face and she buried herself within his thin, strong arms. And Mr. Andy Blackmann,
groundsman, and Miss Edith Knight, daughter of a lobsterman, slipped beneath the covers of a bed wide enough for one, the money repoured into the sack and stored within his boot. They fell asleep while the winter wind blew old snow across the path and Edith dreamed of a land of sunshine and orange trees and her baby in a shaded carriage, and Blackmann closed his eyes and pretended to sleep. His mind turned not with notions of elopement but with plans of escape, and it was while he lay there, as the charred logs shifted in the fire, that the name “Blackwood” first came to him, and an hour before dawn, while Edith lay curled like a kitten, he slipped out the door with nothing but his coat and the sack of money and boarded the first train headed west, transferring in Albany and again in Chicago and then scarcely budging from his seat until he spotted the billboards twenty miles outside Pasadena advertising the hotels
JUST LIKE PARADISE
and the endless orange groves and the available
LAND
!
LAND
!
LAND
! By the time he stepped down to the platform at the Raymond Street Station, the young groundsman from the women’s college in Brooklin, Maine, Andy Blackmann, had reimagined himself as Andrew Jackson Blackwood, a real-estate man eager to invest in the right piece of land.

“Daydreaming, Mr. Blackwood?” Mrs. Nay reappeared on the landing with its view of the mountains.

“I’m afraid you caught me, Mrs. Nay.”

“You look as if something had just carried you back to the past.”

“Yes, something.”

“So there you have it, Mr. Blackwood. Chambermaid gossip and a little reporting helped fill in the stories over the years.”

“And that’s how you know all this?”

“Of course, some things Linda and Bruder told me themselves.”

“Mr. Bruder doesn’t seem like the type of man who would say anything about himself.”

“Oh, but he is. All you have to do is figure out what it is he’s bursting to say. All silent men are like that: Find the key, Mr. Blackwood. Find the key!” And then, with a face clearing itself as if it had been wiped clean with a rag, she added, “But I don’t want you to think that all I do is trade in dirty laundry. It’s only that this house has a history so very different from any other.”

Together they crossed the threshold and stood beneath the portico and looked at the Imperial Victoria, which somehow looked somewhat
less
between the pillars. “You’ll call me if your interest continues,” Mrs. Nay said. Blackwood sensed something skeptical in her voice.

“I
will
call, Mrs. Nay. Once I find another free day.” He would be careful to wait a week or so before ringing back. “The house is ready for delivery, I presume. There’s no one residing here at all? Not even a maid in an attic somewhere?”

“Not a soul but the jays in the coral tree.”

“Good luck with your match, Mrs. Nay.”

“Thank you. In eighteen matches against Becky Touchett, I have yet to lose a set. And I don’t intend for that to change today.”

“No reason it should, Mrs. Nay. No reason there’s anything different about today.”

“Good to know you, Mr. Blackwood.” A supple hand extended itself, bangle bracelet tinkling, diamonds dull in the shade. His hand met hers, and Blackwood’s callused roughness surprised her, and Cherry Nay took note. She would have to think carefully about what she would report back to Bruder: “Yes, I showed it to him. His interest is difficult to gauge. What’s that? Does he have the necessary funds? You might not think so, but he does. The funds and the will. What I mean is, Mr. Blackwood has much to gain from buying a property like the Pasadena. Yes, that’s right. He’s keen on moving up. Of course he’s wrong, but he thinks that moving into a mansion will help him along in this town.” She and Bruder would share an informed, but not cruel, laugh. But already she anticipated that Bruder would say he was inclined to do business with Blackwood. After all, did Bruder have a choice?

“Until next time, Mrs. Nay,” said Blackwood.

“That’s up to you. As they say, the ball is in your court, Mr. Blackwood.” On the hood of his car they found a white-faced kestrel crying
killy, killy
. Its black, hawkish eyes turned to them and its blue-gray wings opened. “Oh, look!” said Mrs. Nay, and the bird flapped and flew off in the direction of the orange grove.

In the front seat of the Imperial Victoria, Blackwood put his hands to his head and found his temples damp, as if from nerves, which wasn’t like him at all: as if the house had extinguished his usual sunniness. In his rearview mirror he saw Mrs. Nay fiddling with the flap of
her purse. He backed the car between the portico’s pillars and slowly made his way down the hill, and when he reached the bottom and passed through the gate, the radio found its reception and the announcer on the afternoon news reported further advancement in Germany and the young man reminded one and all to do their part. “The more we do, the sooner the boys’ll be home.” And, ever efficient, Blackwood noted that he would have to get to work if he was going to be ready to take advantage of their return.

But he had a hard time drafting a legitimate plan for the Rancho Pasadena’s future. Instead, he returned over and over to the story of Linda Stamp: the girl had made her way to Pasadena, but how? Blackwood realized that Mr. Bruder had something to do with it. From the way Mrs. Nay had told it, theirs was a doomed love; why they hadn’t seen this from the get-go, Blackwood couldn’t understand. Two ambitious hearts can never unite; if Blackwood knew anything, he knew this. He repeated in his head Mrs. Nay’s description: “She loved him but at first refused to hand over her heart,” Mrs. Nay had said. “Some are like that. Nothing frightens them more than surrendering. As if love were about being taken prisoner, or being smothered by a pillow.”