Pasadena (32 page)

“I don’t know what to do.”

“Come with me. I’ll drive you home.” Captain Poore took Linda by the elbow and led her to a yellow speedster with a rounded back, like a beetle’s. He secured her into the passenger seat and hoisted her bag into the trunk. When he turned the engine, the Kissel Gold Bug coughed
and Willis Poore whipped the car into the street, where the driver of the ice wagon was stroking his horse’s forelock, trying to calm the mare. “Bruder tells me you’ve never been to Pasadena.”

Linda shook her head. Everything around her was so foreign, she felt as if she’d landed in France.

“I’m sure he’ll give you a tour before the harvest. After that there won’t be much time. But if he gets too busy, I’ll show you around. You know how Bruder can be.” But Linda did not. “He gets so tied up in the grove. If you’d like, I’d be happy to show you Busch Gardens and drive you up to Mount Lowe and stop in at the ostrich farm.” And then, “Only if you want to, Miss Stamp.”

“That would be nice of you.”

“I want you to feel at home. We’re all a big family at the ranch.”

As he drove up the street, Captain Poore pointed out Central Park, where the Gentlemen’s Tourist Club, a group of retired Iowa feed-corn farmers, met to pitch horseshoes and lawn-bowl and suck on cob pipes, debating the local feuds reported in the newspaper. The car passed the Hotel Green, a Moroccan butter-stucco palace where dignitaries went for iced tea. “Did you ever see that picture of Teddy Roosevelt when he visited Pasadena?” Captain Poore asked. But other than Bruder’s postcards, Linda had seen nothing at all. The Hotel Green sat stoutly upon an entire city block, its two north turrets capped by parasol roofs. Sandstone and teak carved in lacy filigree decorated the balconies and the clover-shaped windows. The accordion awnings extended their shadows to protect the guests, all of whom must be rich, Linda presumed, endlessly wealthy in a way she had never thought of before. Lying atop Linda’s stomach, beneath her blouse, was a canvas purse of coins, heavy and bulky and fetus-size, and until this very moment at Captain Poore’s side she had deemed herself adequately enriched. But now the coin purse protruded in a ghastly tumorous way, and the pennies—for there were many more pennies in the purse than silver dollars—felt useless and encumbering.

The hotel sat at the head of the park, next to a circular fountain with benches around it where bank clerks and office assistants from the Pasadena Electric & Power Company rested after calling it quits for the day; here gossip about their bosses and the lady clerks and the gloved women who triggered the tinkling brass bell attached to the door traded as rapidly as the jay calls in the pines. Linda noted that the clerks and the
assistants, their vented jackets slightly wrinkled and ill-fitting across the back, rested in the shadow of the Hotel Green but not in the butlered shade of its veranda. Quickly, her mind was becoming adept at noting the rungs upon a ladder.

From nowhere Captain Poore said, “And, Miss Stamp. I want you to call me Willis. None of this ‘Captain’ business from you.” She said that she didn’t know if she could comfortably accept the informality, but he insisted: “That’s just the type of man I am.” He laughed boyishly, and his mouth seemed to hold more teeth than other men’s mouths, good, square teeth lined up in a gleaming smile. Every so often he would rub his medal, as if to remind himself of a former glory, and when she caught him doing this he blushed, as if he were a child caught admiring his own beauty in the mirror.

As Linda would soon learn, when prodded, which he often was, the captain would recount his wartime heroics neither humbly nor boastfully, simply with the weight of the facts themselves. He told often—because he was asked often—the tale of surviving the shelling of a motor depot along the Meuse. “They gave me this medal for saving a man’s life,” he would say, and to those whose eyes opened especially wide at the details of the great orange fireball that overtook the depot where he was stationed, Captain Willis Poore would unhook his acetate collar and reveal a pink burn-scar running narrowly but smoothly down his nape, much like a scrap of good leather sewn onto his flesh. The scar was not disfiguring; it merely provided tactile evidence—for it was smooth, and the natural inclination was to touch it, like a shrine—of bravery. To those who clutched their breast upon the conclusion of the tale of Captain Poore’s heroic military past he would simply say, “You would have done the same.”

“You must have been frightened,” said Linda when he told her the story.

“I was,” said Captain Poore. “But aren’t we all?”

Linda was sorry that Bruder hadn’t come for her as he’d promised, but Captain Poore was proving an impressive chauffeur. He must be a busy man, she thought, and she sat rigid with pride that her first impression of this strange city was coming from someone like him. He continued describing the heavy guns on the front and the mists of mustard gas, and if indeed he had a spell to cast, its dust was surely falling upon Linda’s brow. Yet she couldn’t know this about him, or even
about herself, not on that October afternoon in 1924. Not in the angled orange light, with the vines of dusk climbing the date palms and the knife-leaved bamboo; not in the promise of dusk on the manure-spread rose beds, petals weary in autumn, soil hard and crumbly and clumps of it deposited on the street by horses’ hoof; not as the firm, dry soil, collecting on the pavement like fossils from another epoch, shot from under the wheels of Captain Poore’s lemon-yellow car as he sped through the small gleaming city in the valley. Above them, along the ridge of the Sierra Madres, the lights of Mt. Lowe and the observatory twinkled.

Captain Poore turned at a busy intersection, and soon traffic was all around them—roadsters stuffed with young men in sporty sweaters; a long-bonnet Bugatti driven by a woman in a white fur coat; an open-air Vauxhall with two men and two women in riding helmets holding leather crops between their knees. The women were smoking gold-tipped cigarettes, and as the Vauxhall pulled next to the Kissel, one of the women, with a swirl of hair pasted to her forehead, tapped her cigarette, and the tiny ashes drifted toward Linda. She winked, and Captain Poore honked and leaned toward Linda and said, “Henrietta Cobb. Fifth-richest girl in town, but not for much longer. Her father’s still betting on the railroads. You know what they say? Once a robber baron …” The girl eyed Linda as she might a maid who had brought her the wrong doeskin gloves.

They passed a horse-pulled wagon, its planks barely held together by rusted bands, carting six Mexicans with their sleeves rolled past their elbows and grime in the folds in their throats; a turnip-shaped man in a striped suit drove the wagon, and the Mexicans didn’t look forward but behind. Linda met the eyes of one of them, who tipped his leather-trimmed hat. A red trolley rattled down the middle of the street, a girl in a blue uniform with a patent-leather sash selling tickets at the entryway, her hair in thick woodcut curls; Linda wondered how she managed to set her hair each morning for a long day on the trolley. A policeman stood on a round platform in an intersection, a whistle lodged in his mouth and his white gloves held up firmly: he waved traffic in this direction and that, and the sun caught his uniform’s brass buttons and the gleam in his dust-caked eyes.

“Is this Main Street?” she asked.

“Colorado Street. Isn’t it grand? A few years ago, they widened it for all the traffic, pushing the buildings back by almost fifteen feet.”

She’d never seen anything like it, although last year she had read in the
Bee
a two-part report on the bustle of San Diego: roads paved all the way to the Mexican border, ribbons of streets unwinding north and south, elevators tossing people twelve floors up. During the years Edmund was gone Dieter had read to her from Gibbon, slowly making his way through the dense history; now she imagined that this was what Rome must have looked like, the yellow afternoon light, the street dust in the throats, all the citizens plying the same thoroughfares, the jostle of exchange and trade. A sign at the train station had declared Pasadena the third-largest city in California, but the sign was already more than a few years out of date; no one seemed to know it, but as grand as Pasadena seemed to Linda, its most glorious days had already passed.

There was too much for Linda to look at: people pushing through the glass shop doors; a newspaper boy in front of the Electric & Power’s brownstone building selling the
Star-News;
stockingless women emerging from Model’s Grocery with packages wrapped in salmon-colored paper. Through the window of a printing press, Linda could see men in heavy aprons with ink-stained hands. A plume of yeasty smoke rose from a bakery’s chimney. A butchery speed wagon was parked in front of the Lincoln Cash Market, a boy in a cap loading deliveries of cross ribs and porterhouses. A man on a ladder painted a sign—
10¢ OFF EVERYTHING ON OUR SHELVES
—on the plate glass of Pasadena Hardware. Linda took in the careful stack of remedy bottles and tins in the window of the Owl Drug Company: Lydia E. Pinkham’s Liver Pills, Dr. Schenck’s Mandrake Pills, Foley’s Kidney & Bladder Remedy, Jad Salts, Sharpe & Dohme Lapactic Pills, Dr. Pierce’s Pleasant Pellets, and a pyramid display of Scott’s Syrup of Hypophosphites teetering upon a marble-top table. A sign painted on the side of a brick building said:
TURN AROUND! YOU HAVE MISSED THE UNEXCELLED ADVANTAGES OF BROADWAY BROTHERS
,
268–278 EAST COLORADO ST
.

“I’ve never seen so many stores.”

“A new one opens every day. It’s the richest town in California.” His hand fell to her wrist just as it had when he’d described the terrible silence before the German shells hit his depot. Captain Willis Poore’s nose was long but elegant, and at the crown of his head a cowlick of
thick flaxen hair stood erect like a stalk of late-season timothy. On his pinkie finger he wore a star sapphire ring that caught the light in the same way as his blue eyes, and Linda didn’t know if she’d ever known such a regally handsome man. The Kissel’s dashboard was nickel-plated and reflected the two of them, the fray in her overcoat exposing itself. Also in the dash’s shimmering reflection were the brick and cast-iron buildings of more merchants than she’d ever seen in one place and, above everything, the Sierra Madres, where astronomers from the old Throop University were setting up telescopes and, rumor had it, listening stations, antennae and earphones tuned in to the signal of celestial life.

They drove up a hill and into the sun, and then, as the city thinned, a wide arroyo opened before them. Live-oak and sycamore and black walnut sentried the hillsides and a road zigzagged to the basin, but instead Willis Poore turned onto a concrete bridge that stretched casually across the canyon. Bulb-lamp streetlights decorated the bridge, and over the low rail Linda could see up and down the arroyo: the wash sandy and dead, the dry clusters of alder and cottonwood and elderberry, their crisp, dying leaves chiming on the branch. As the car sped across the bridge, the air rushed around her, cool in the late-afternoon shadows of the western hills and fresh with the perfumes of laurel and lemonade sumac, of herb and sage and vanilla-scented scrub. To the north, a great horseshoe-shape stadium—“That’s the Rose Bowl; up it went just a couple of years ago”—sat in a flat of willow and toyon and coffeeberry. Linda closed her eyes to imagine the arroyo before the bowl, before the thousand men had come to dig and clear and pound and pour; before the six hundred mules hauled the dirt, sweating and stamping themselves to slow, parched death.

“What do they use it for?”

“The Tournament.” He paused, and then: “You
are
new to Pasadena, aren’t you? It’s a little festival we call the Tournament of Roses.”

The Kissel skidded on the bridge’s curve and Captain Poore jerked the wheel and Linda’s hand fell to his thigh, but just as quickly he regained control and she pulled back her hand and then they sped into the Linda Vista hills. “They call it Suicide Bridge,” he explained, chuckling mildly, baring his teeth, and his hair swayed and maybe for the first time in her life Linda didn’t know what to say. “You’ll like it here, Miss Stamp,” he said. “I’m sure you’ll get used to us.”

He turned down a white dirt road that ran through a eucalyptus alley. On the other side of the trees were outbuildings: a barn and a two-story shed and a stable with an open door. A couple of men were burning a pile of cuttings, but Linda couldn’t see their faces, only the orange flame and the pale smoke. An irrigation ditch ran parallel to the trees, its water slow and brown and inviting a gray squirrel to its edge. The road started to climb a chaparral hill, steep and choked with ceanothus and bitter cherry and old lilac and twisted-trunk madrone. Shadows pressed across the side of the hill, and a chill touched Linda’s neck. Already the cool, damp scent of night was approaching.

The road ended at a wrought-iron gate suspended between two stone pillars. One of the pillars bore a plaque reading
RANCHO PASADENA;
the other’s plaque read
NOT A SERVICE ENTRANCE
. The car pulled to the gate and Captain Poore idled the car, his hands on the wheel; after a few seconds he hopped out, saying, “I’ll just get the gate.”

One of Bruder’s letters had described the hundred acres of groves and the dense scrubland, the winter river and the summer wash, the white mansion on the hill, the family named Poore. He had described the gate: “Overgrown with wild cucumber when I arrived. A scraggly eucalyptus alley that hadn’t been properly cut back in a decade.” Another letter explained: “No one left in the family but a son named Willis and his little sister, Lolly. Spoiled rotten.”

The road cut up the hill, and at the crest the holly berry and the laurel sumac gave way to a ryegrass lawn and a long Blood of China camellia hedge. The driveway continued on, leading to a house so big and white that at first Linda thought it was one of the hotels Margarita had spoken of, the Huntington or perhaps the recently opened Vista. Willis drove the car toward it, waving to a Japanese gardener in green rubber boots, and it became clear that this was the Poore House, and that they had entered—as one crosses into a foreign land—the Rancho Pasadena. The mansion was three or four stories, Linda couldn’t be sure, the windows shaded with lace that Linda guessed required an army of maids to wash and iron. Several chimneys rose from the pantile roof, and Linda worried over who hauled the wood and stoked the fireplaces and scooped the ash. Were these duties to become hers? A wide balcony set off the second story, and Linda imagined that was where Willis and Lolly Poore resided, in rooms side by side, sleeping in the breeze of a cracked door. She imagined the cans of starch the household would run
through in a week, crisping the bedsheets and Willis’s detachable butterfly collars. The terrace on the house’s south side—its balustrade decorated with urns planted with kumquat—was as large as a lettuce field, an acre of tile; again, Linda imagined the mops and the sudsy bucket water and the ache in a bent spine. “Who cleans it?”