Pasadena (26 page)

Mrs. Nay had said,
How about you, Mr. Blackwood? Always a bachelor?

That was when Blackwood had said it was time to go, leaving Mrs. Nay to her stories and her impending tennis match, returning to his sycamore-shaded house, where he lived alone with his advancing plans for the future and with the wall mirrors that reflected a man who was not who he claimed to be.

Stinky was unimpressed
with Blackwood, and his dissatisfaction came through the telephone line. It transferred to Blackwood himself, who sat in his echoey house—he had lived there for years, but there were so few personal items it looked as if he had moved in the month before—not entirely certain how he had left the Rancho Pasadena without visiting the orchards—
the most valuable part
, Stinky declared, to Blackwood’s annoyance (for he was well aware of that). “It’s just that Mrs. Nay kept me busy with some old story,” Blackwood tried to explain. “How much are they asking?” Stinky asked, and even more surprising, especially to Blackwood himself, was that he had left Mrs. Nay without obtaining the price. “All in all, it sounds like a wasted morning,” said Stinky, hanging up.

But Blackwood disagreed.

For the next few days, the stories about the fishergirl and the onion farm stayed with him. In his second-floor office on Colorado Street, running his pencil tip down the green-lined ledger, he couldn’t think of much besides what Mrs. Nay had told him. He couldn’t say why, but he felt certain that Mrs. Nay had chosen him, had found him more trustworthy than most, and he took pride in the knowledge, unconfirmed but true nonetheless, that she didn’t unfurl upon just any old one. Mrs. Nay had seen something in Blackwood, he was sure.

In fact, she had seen the hesitancy behind his still youthful, typically confident eyes, and the flushed cheeks wounded by rejection, and, not least important, the swollen wallet of a man ready to invest. Mrs. Nay knew that life would not move on, either hers or Bruder’s, until the Pasadena was sold and reincarnated. “The dead must be buried,” she
sometimes said. Anyone who works in real estate knows that properties house ghosts, and Cherry felt obliged to free Bruder of his past, to release him on his way. She was thinking of this as she drafted a letter to Blackwood on Nay & Nay stationery; and the next day, Blackwood was thinking of Linda and Bruder buried in the landslide when, shuffling through his mail in his office chair, he came across the soap-blue envelope from Nay & Nay.

In a fine penmanship, Mrs. Nay thanked Blackwood for visiting the Pasadena, saying that she was always
on the stand-by
should he have further questions. If his day had begun with doubt, all that fell away by the time he reached Mrs. Nay’s closing sentence:
Mr. Bruder remains anxious to sell
. Blackwood folded the letter into his breast pocket, thinking again and again of Mrs. Nay’s postscript:
You seem like the type of man who understands the responsibility of carrying this property out of the past
.

On Christmas morning, Blackwood realized that Stinky’s vaguely promised invitation for the Sweeney family crispy-skinned holiday goose would not come. Nor had any of the men Blackwood knew professionally asked him into their homes for hot grog and rounds of hearthside carols. Blackwood woke up without an engagement, and he tried not to let it overwhelm him with sadness or a windy sense of isolation; but he asked himself, as he did on occasion, what it would take for Pasadena’s triple-bolted doors to open to him; never could he have guessed that a community could seal itself so tightly. He wondered whether a grander life—residence in a mansion rather than in his modest (albeit satisfactory and well-built) bungalow—would make others realize that there was more to him than met the eye. Hadn’t one of the clerks at the bank let it slip to
anyone
just how many zeros yawned bold and black on his well-thumbed passbook? For the first time he thought about upgrading the Imperial Victoria—she was hardly new, after all—but that would be too much for Blackwood.

He lay about in bed, something he frowned on in others, and the birds shrieked in the cypress that pressed against his window. It was a sunny morning, not especially warm, and he supposed that the best part of having nowhere to go on Christmas was the freedom from the endless civic discussion that was circulating on how New Year’s wasn’t really New Year’s without the Tournament of Roses: “This damn old
war!” On the rear wall of Vroman’s Bookstore, someone had painted this: “No Milk or Meat, OK. But Bring Back the Parade on New Year’s Day!” No, he wouldn’t have to participate in the citywide
tsk!
of regret over how the Germans and the Japs had reached their sneaky hands all the way into Pasadena civic life! No one was expecting Andrew Jackson Blackwood, not anywhere. He didn’t think of it this way, but the truth was: Blackwood was on the mind of no one this morning, no one in the world.

But Linda Stamp was on his, and so was Mr. Bruder: how had he come into so much property—Condor’s Nest
and
the Rancho Pasadena? Bruder, who had started off with even less than Blackwood? Nothing impressed Blackwood more than a man who had made himself, and he was keen to learn how Bruder had gone about it. He was sorry they hadn’t gotten on better. Standing at his living-room window, Blackwood surveyed the arroyo, the sycamores green and glassy with dew. He thought of his parents, dead and buried beneath the Maine snowdrifts. Lungs sopping with influenza all those years ago, but Blackwood had managed on. When he thought of the past, his memory became imprecise. He had forgotten that he had been a thievish child, that in fact he had stolen first from his father: eggs pocketed from the hen’s nest, cream skimmed from the cold-handled pail, potatoes smuggled to market in his long yellow stocking cap. On an especially busy day, with deals ringing through the telephone and deeds transferring from one vault to another, if you were to ask Blackwood what had happened with the red-haired girl at the women’s college, he would say he didn’t remember. Everything about those days Blackwood did his best to forget, and he proved adept at his art.

And so on Christmas morning Blackwood went for a drive, the Imperial Victoria offering its own company. The radio played nothing but Christmas symphonies and holiday carolers and church services broadcast from cathedrals in New York City and Washington, D.C. On KNX, a clergyman by the name of Father Crean asked everyone to remember the boys, their feet ice blocks in their dicebox boots, and indeed Blackwood remembered the boys, he thought of them every day. One thing he had said to Mrs. Nay: “I’m cautious, but once I make up my mind, I move fast as a hawk.” He had swooped his arms in emphasis.

Under the weak Christmas sun, the car crossed Suicide Bridge. The
Rose Bowl sat idly, waiting for the football enthusiasts—of which Blackwood did not count himself a part—to return. His was the only car on the bridge, and the sky was a flat winter blue, and he saw no one in the arroyo beneath him. The city felt empty to Blackwood, and he enjoyed the sensation as if it were a sign of things to come: the world his for the taking. The morning was crisp, the air brittle with pine and cedar, and Blackwood drove on, listening to the Christmas sermon and then the on-the-hour news from the front, where the bombs continued to fall and the boys ate rations of foil-wrapped chocolate and navel oranges “shipped from the great state of
Cal-ee-for-nye-aye
!”

Blackwood found himself at the gate of the Rancho Pasadena. He nudged it, and it opened as easily as before. As he drove up the switchback road, once again the radio’s reception fell away. He hadn’t planned on returning to the property but here he was, driving by the great lawn—a total of eleven acres, Mrs. Nay had finally revealed—and carefully steering between the portico’s columns.

But Blackwood didn’t stop at the house as he had before. Today he continued along the drive, which returned to dirt as it descended the hill into the narrow valley of the abandoned orange grove, where stillborn fruit clung to the branch. At the foot of the hill, Blackwood parked at the camp of outbuildings and barns and sheds and the long ranch house shaded by a pepper tree. The buildings were not in an advanced state of disrepair but they looked sadly empty; dust frosted the windows and sweet clover sprouted at the foundations. Beneath the pepper was a worn wood table and a bench and a rusted steel drum overturned and spilling old coal and ash. The outbuildings and the ranch house sat in a corner of the orange grove, and the trees, with their knuckled orange-and-black fruit, appeared, through squinted eye, like those along Christmas Tree Lane, decorated and gaudy and a child’s delight—except not this year; no excessive lights anymore, by rule of law.

Blackwood justified his trespassing with the knowledge that he could not make any investment decisions without a full set of facts. On foot he followed a road into the grove and soon saw that nearly a third of the trees were dead and leafless, their trunks gnawed by fruit rats and their bony roots pushing through the soil like a corpse’s arm rising from the grave. The other trees grew bushy and unkempt, their skirts of leaves dragging in the soil. The irrigation ditches had eroded into shallow ruts and a few wood-slat crates lay on their sides, their
stenciling faded:
RANCHO PASADENA, THE SOUTHLAND’S BEST
. They looked a bit like lobster pots, and again Blackwood thought of the girl.

Except for the wind chiming in the waxy leaves and a woodpecker’s busy drilling, the morning was silent and Blackwood was alone. He walked between the trees down a narrow lane, and soon he saw only grove. It did not occur to Blackwood that he might become lost in the orchard; his sense of direction was too great for something like that. Besides, the grove, for all its display of former wealth, wasn’t all that vast. It was only a little more than a gentleman’s ranch, Blackwood sniffed, and when he stopped and held his ear aloft he heard more than the wind and the woodpecker: from beyond, in what direction he couldn’t be sure, Blackwood heard the cars careening down the Arroyo Parkway. Blackwood took comfort in the noise of progress, in the din of development. More than once he had regretted that he hadn’t known enough to get in on the parkway at the beginning. Someone had once said to him, “Nothing like the business of rolling out roads.” But, unusually for Blackwood, his ear had turned away from the tip.

He had been walking for several minutes when the grove ended at the foot of a hill. There before him was a white temple of some sort. Blackwood was as surprised to come upon it as he would have been to find at his feet a trunk of gold. It was of Greek design in its circular peristyle, a dome of milky marble supported by a double ring of columns. It made Blackwood think of the Jefferson Memorial, opened in Washington last year to celebration. In fact, this little orange-grove temple was nearly similar in design (he remembered the pictures in the
Star-News
), although smaller and, most certainly, in memoriam to an event or a person of much less significance than Mr. Jefferson—about this, Blackwood was sure. Maybe it was a temple to the mighty orange, or to the god of oranges—who was that? Blackwood made a note of looking it up in his Bulfinch; not that the Bulfinch was actually his, it had belonged to Edith; there’d been a couple of months when she’d loll in his arms and read him myths, like the story of Cupid and Psyche. Blackwood mounted the steps and inspected the cold white box beneath the dome. Only then did he realize that he had come across the family mausoleum Mrs. Nay had pointed out. At once he understood that he was inspecting an aboveground tomb housing the unburied dead.

The fact of it shocked Blackwood, and he withdrew his hand from the frigid marble, aghast, as if he’d been touching the corpses themselves.
The tomb was taller than he, perhaps as long as the Imperial Victoria, and inscribed with five sets of initials: WFP, ACP, LP, LB, WFP II, Cpt.

Blackwood scratched his head. It became clear that Mrs. Nay had not finished her story. He checked the other side for dates or other information but found only these words:

“What brings you to the Rancho Pasadena, Mr. Blackwood?”

The voice came from behind a column, and Blackwood turned to find Mr. Bruder. Blackwood felt the deep red of embarrassment sweeping his face. He removed his hat, and it fell from his fingers; he retrieved it from the mausoleum’s icing-white floor. “I hope you don’t think I’m trespassing, Mr. Bruder.”

“But you are.”

“No, not at all.” Blackwood’s hands were up in the air in protest. “I’ve been shown the property by Mrs. Nay. I’ve come back for a second look. We didn’t get to see the orange grove at the time.”

“Mrs. Nay told me. I’m glad you’ve returned.”

Bruder’s hair blew against the pillar, and he stood in angled sunlight. There was a phantasmagoric quality to him, and Blackwood rubbed his eyes. Maybe he hadn’t woken yet and was having a Christmas dream? But Bruder interrupted this reverie: “May I show you the groves myself?”

He took Blackwood by the elbow and escorted him down a lane of orange trees. Bruder’s boot came down on the withered fruit littering the soil, stomping hard, crushing the inedible oranges, and leaving a trail of squashed rinds.

“Did you have any questions in particular?”

“Quite a few.”

They returned to the yard outside the ranch house, and Bruder seemed to collapse onto the bench, dropping his face into his hands. For the first time, Blackwood noticed the meatless shoulders pressing sharply against Bruder’s shirt and the neck thin in the collar. Blackwood’s antennae sensed decay. Not only had the good times passed for
the Rancho Pasadena, they had passed for Bruder as well. Deals were made under such duress, Blackwood knew, and hadn’t Mrs. Nay hinted at Bruder’s exigency?

“So much for a warm Christmas,” said Blackwood, approaching the bench. “All this land is a lot to have on one’s mind, I’m sure.” Up close, Bruder’s weariness was obvious: the scrubby chin, the saucered cheek, the tendons in the throat, the blood-threaded eyes rimmed by yellow and the moon-blue on the lids; he clearly needed a shower and some rest. Blackwood moved closer and suggested that they sit on the Imperial Victoria’s quilted front seat, with the heater running. “Let me turn on the radio. How about a little
fa-la-la-la-la
?”