Pasadena (30 page)

“The mood of a man in Willis’s position can change instantly, and he released his hand from my thigh and fell back and said, ‘You are right.’ He was silent with resignation for a while, and then he said, ‘Bruder? Will you tell them I died honorably?’

“ ‘But you did not,’ I said.

“ ‘But will you tell them that I did?’

“ ‘How can I?’

“Willis asked me to come closer, to bring my face within inches of his. I did so, and I could feel his breath upon me when he said, ‘Don’t tell them that I was trying to flee. Don’t tell them that I burned the depot. Tell them that we were shelled. That the enemy brought me down.’

“ ‘But it isn’t true.’

“ ‘We can make it true.’

“Was I shocked at his request? No, I wasn’t shocked. Desperation produces desperate acts. But I was surprised by my willingness to listen. What was it the poet once said? ‘I can endure my own desperation, but not another’s hope.’

“Willis looked into my eyes and said, ‘I have a proposal for you, Bruder. A proposal for a transaction.’

“I asked what he had in mind.

“ ‘A transfer of property.’

“Willis motioned for me to lean in even closer, so that now our noses almost touched. He said, ‘I’ll give you anything you want if you tell them I died an honorable man.’ I asked him what he meant, and he repeated, ‘Anything.’

“Although I was young, and in many ways still an unformed man, even then I knew precisely what I wanted. Yet until that moment I didn’t know how greedily I had desired it. I did not know what I was willing to do to acquire it.

“I held Willis’s face in my hands and said, ‘I want the Rancho Pasadena.’

“I expected Willis to protest, to say that that was the one thing he could not give me. Yet of course in many ways it was the only thing he had. He did not flinch. He only closed his eyes and opened them and said, ‘All right.’ From my pocket I produced a scrap of paper and a pencil. With significant effort Willis sat up, groaned, and began to write something down. While he worked on his note, I said, ‘How do you know I will keep my word?’

“ ‘I don’t,’ said Willis. ‘But with this paper you know I will keep mine.’ He handed me the note and I read it: ‘Upon my death, I, Willis Fishe Poore II, leave the Rancho Pasadena to Private Bruder of Company 17.’ The note was short and spontaneous but legally irreproachable. What shocked me most about that day in France was the note
itself. It looked as if a seven-year-old had written it. The letters were elementary and oversized and very much in the hand of a child. And I suppose that that was the case. But the note left me profoundly sad, and I genuinely felt compassion for the young man—a boy, really—dying before me. I did not take pleasure in the great treasure that would soon transfer to me. My life had changed with that note, and it actually felt—at first, at least—that Willis’s murderous disgrace was falling away. ‘The ranch is yours,’ he said. ‘Treat my sister kindly. You must make sure that Lolly does not suffer.’ I said that I would indeed look after Lolly. ‘And no matter what, you must not tell anyone how I died. Please always call me a hero, from this day on.’ I said that I would. And it was that simple. The deal was done! Willis’s disgrace had been erased, the truth of his impending death had been twisted into an unrecognizable form, and I had become one of Pasadena’s greatest landowners.

“Do you see what war can do? Everything can change with a single shot. In an afternoon, history, both personal and national, can turn itself around.

“But I did not have time to think of such things there in the forest. Willis was suffering greatly, and I knew that he wanted nothing more than another drop of water. ‘I’ll try again,’ I said. I ran through the trees, stopping only to tuck the note into my one dry boot. It was late afternoon by now and a shadow had fallen across the stream, as if someone enormous were standing over it. I knelt at the stream’s edge, but this time I closed my eyes for a minute. I cannot say whether or not I knew enough to pray then, but I stopped to think about the fateful day I had just survived; I relived it in my head and told myself to always remember it as it was, not as it might have been, or should have been. No, I would hold history correctly, artlessly. Then I pushed my head beneath the surface and filled my cheeks with water. Under the water, I thought I heard a clanging like cowbells, yet I was sure it was nothing but the stream running over the rocks. Willis was waiting, and I knew that I must return to him with the final drops of water he would ever drink. I pulled my head out of the stream and shook the water from my face. It was a great relief to the burn at my temple, but there wasn’t time to think about that; no, I had to get back to Willis Poore. But when I stood and turned around, there, not ten yards from me, was a little man with white hair and a white beard and a wide rack of tin cups and pans and canteens strapped to his back. He was wearing a little cap with earflaps,
and it was clear that he wasn’t a soldier but a salesman. What was he doing and who was he?, you ask. Oh, that’s simple to say. It was Dieter Stumpf, hawking his tin cups up and down the front, from trench to trench, and on that day in September 1918, Dieter reached up over his shoulder and plucked from his rack a tin cup with a curled lip and said, ‘Need a cup, soldier? Only five cents.’ He moved toward me, the cup extended, and when he was at my side he said, in a voice that could have sold me anything, ‘I’ve also got a first-aid kit for that burn of yours, soldier. It can be yours for a dime.’ ”

Bruder’s story stayed
with Andrew Jackson Blackwood as he drove home from the Rancho Pasadena on Christmas Day, and he returned to it many times during the following week. It began to explain things, at least sort of, and he felt as if he had succeeded at a difficult task in getting Bruder to unravel his past.

Blackwood alluded to this when he called Mrs. Nay the day after New Year’s, but she was furious with him for going to the property without her: “Your relationship with the client should be via me.” She scolded him for behaving unethically, prowling around the ranch like a thief, and Blackwood tried to explain that his interest had grown so intense that he couldn’t keep himself away. “Then meet me at the house this afternoon,” she ordered, “and I’ll show you the rest.”

In truth, Cherry Nay didn’t want Bruder to tell the story; even though it wasn’t about her, she felt it was hers to recount. Hadn’t she been the one who tried to sort out things in the end, for Bruder’s benefit? She saw it as her role—and her right.

“I told you already, Mrs. Nay,” said Blackwood. “I managed to see the orange grove. Mr. Bruder graciously showed me around.”

“Meet me anyway,” she insisted. “Come at three, and I’ll show you the rose garden and the empty swimming pool and …”

“And?”

“And I’ll tell you the rest of the story.” She paused; and then: “Don’t be late, Mr. Blackwood.” She returned the receiver to its cradle and hurried to the tennis courts, where, once her mind was clear of all this talk of the past, she would continue her winning streak, completing her climb up the ladder. She acknowledged that Blackwood was a curious
and inquisitive man, and she anticipated their conversation. He would ask her: “If Mr. Bruder had become the heir to the Rancho Pasadena, why did he go to Condor’s Nest in the first place? Why didn’t he just return to Pasadena and the land that would one day be his?”

And Cherry Nay would reply: “From the day he met Dieter Stumpf by the stream, everything Bruder has ever done has been for her.”

“For who?” Blackwood would say.

“For the girl we used to call Linda Stamp.”

Thou didst purchase by thy fall

Home for us and peace for all;

Yet, how darkly dawned that day—

Dreadful was the price to pay!

EMILY BRONTË

On an October afternoon
in 1924, Linda Stamp—now twenty-one and almost six feet tall—stepped off the Pacific Electric at the Raymond Street Station. Since the death of her mother, her coltishness had given way to a handsome solidity: her ankle descended sturdily to the platform, her sea-worn fingers held tight the handle of her kettle-pot bag, and her hair was cut pragmatically away from her face. On the platform Linda stood erect, her head large atop her throat, and anyone kneeling to tie his shoe or to jiggle the latch of his traveling trunk would look up and see her almost as a giantess before the brittle Sierra Madres, her profile in line with the pale dry mountain range. For more than four years she had lived alone with her father, assuming her mother’s farm and kitchen chores, and what Linda didn’t know about herself was the lust-inspiring nature her beauty had acquired. The mirror told her nothing of what she could stir in the hearts of others, and her life since the landslide had been so solitary that there was no one to tell her of it either. It was a beauty of contrasts: the pelt-dark hair against the pale cheek, the high, wide brow above the narrow but deep eyes, the unsettled soul of a girl now inhabiting a woman’s body. Her hair, which had once grown in ropes down her back, thick enough to lose pencils and fishing hooks in, had gone unshorn since Christmas 1919, and now that she’d cut it she couldn’t get used to the lightness of her head or the fact that she could no longer hide behind the curtain of her bangs.

On the train, Linda had worn an overcoat with a green felt collar and her hat with the white eagle feather, which she had purchased, at last, for the journey, and the coral pendant around her throat. In the car’s window she found her reflection agreeable, dressed smartly as she was
for what Margarita had called a fancy-pants town. But Margarita’s tales of Pasadena and its luxury hotels—the Vista above the arroyo, the Maryland with its long pergola, the Huntington with its distant ocean views—and its civic societies—the Twilight Club, the City Beautiful Committee, the 100 Percenters—sounded as if everything she knew had come from the society page. “You can learn a lot from the
American Weekly
,” declared Margarita. “You wait and see. Won’t be a soul up there who doesn’t read every last word. There’s a columnist named Chatty Cherry who keeps everyone abreast of the goings-on. Linda, you should look her up,” Margarita suggested, although Linda couldn’t imagine why.

But on the train, the scab-kneed boy next to Linda had left a thumbprint of guava jelly on the wrist of her coat; and when she opened the window, the eagle feather loosened and blew away. By the time she’d arrived in Los Angeles, dust and soot powdered her nose, and the coat hung limply on her arm. While waiting in Union Station for the four o’clock to Pasadena, Linda was asked for money by a burn-scarred man in an army uniform. When she said that she had very little, he yelled at her, his voice echoing. A heavily made up woman farther down the bench looked up from her compact and said, “Don’t make him mad, doll.” It was warm for October, summer’s final sticky grab, and during the long day on a woven-wool train seat and, now, this depot bench, she had heated up, a dewiness collecting on her throat, and she hoped he wouldn’t notice the weariness the trip had brought her.

The miles of track from Los Angeles to Pasadena cut through scrubland and arroyo, crossing a bridge spanning a dry riverbed and running alongside acres of orange grove. Through the open window came the scent of citrus bud and green waxen leaf and the singed odor of soil that had gone without rain for more than six months. A team of men—hoes and hooks in hand, burro idle in yoke and cart—was clearing the brown, brittle fennel weed from the lanes between the orange trees, readying the orchards. The harvest would begin soon, and the lanes would fill with men buttoned into shoulder picking sacks. Then the train tracks curved away from the orange grove, the trees retreating. Linda’s window sped past an abandoned grape orchard and a dairy and a sign promoting
THE WORLD FAMOUS SOUTH PASADENA OSTRICH FARM & HOTEL
. Another billboard advertised the
VALLEY CASH FEED
&
FUEL CO.: HAY!——WOOD!——COAL!——80
LB. SACKS OF SCIENTIFICALLY MIXED MASH!
Two or three houses with red-tile roofs appeared next to the fields, then more houses, Victorian in eave and turret, painted fescue-green and sunshine-yellow and scarlet. Soon paved streets ran neatly out of the fields, and the fields gave way to empty lots bordered by quartered sidewalks, and the empty lots gave way to more houses, now side by side, white stucco and iron grate and Tudor beam, wooden porch and cedar eave, and then the conductor called, “Pasadena! Next stop, Pasadena!”

She hadn’t seen Bruder in more than four years. The landslide had buried him in a foot of mud, the bulbs of his onion-white eyes peering through. Once free, he had dropped to his hands and knees and dug like a dog, mud shooting behind him. He said he knew exactly where she was, as if he’d caught her scent: “I knew I’d dig the hole and pull you out and you’d be there. I knew it more certainly than I’ve ever known anything.” When he did, Linda was crying and he wiped the silt from her lips and held her, her suit of mud cracking away. But only then did she ask: “Where’s Mama?” This time, however, Bruder’s hound skills failed. They didn’t find Valencia, curled into a delicate, hard ball, until the next day. He departed before they could bury her, the Vulture House door snapping behind him. Linda followed him across the field to the road, but when he reached the pavement he told her to turn around. She asked where he was going, and he said, “Home.” “I thought you didn’t have a home,” she said, and then he was gone, and atop her pillow Linda found the piece of coral.