Pasadena (36 page)

Around the corner Linda found the terrace, and she was on the steps before she realized that there were people there. She stopped, her hand on the rail, and wondered if she should turn around, but she didn’t. Willis was sitting at a table littered with the remains of breakfast, and standing next to him was a young woman, her spine alert and erect, holding several pages before her. His tie matched the soft peach color of the woman’s petal-sleeved dress, and the two looked alike. The loose sleeves and the petunia-cut hem of the woman’s dress emphasized her boniness and her zinc-pale flesh—her face was so white that Linda wondered if she ever got out onto the land. A rope of pearls hung heavily to her waist, and it looked as if her head might spring back were she to remove the necklace.

It was clear to Linda that this was Lolly Poore, and she was reciting something. Neither she nor Willis saw Linda: he nursed his coffee and scanned the
Star-News
, and Lolly shuffled the papers and said, “Willis, tell me what you think of this one. Maybe it’s good enough.”

“What’s it called?”

“ ‘Pasadena, the Bride.’ ”

“Who wrote it?”

“Mrs. Elizabeth Grinnel. She also wrote that not-so-bad sonnet ‘Our Feathered Friends,’ the one you said you liked somewhat.” Lolly arranged herself against the balustrade and the backdrop of the valley. “Willis, are you listening?”

He murmured that he was.

Again: “ ‘Pasadena, the Bride.’ ”

“Please stop. It’s awful.”

“I suppose it is, isn’t it? But what am I going to do?”

“Stop reading me bad poetry.”

Lolly sank into her chair and riffled the pages, her face distressed by everything she read. “What about this one: it’s called ‘Pasadena, Atlantis Ye Shan’t Be.’ ”

“You read that one yesterday.”

“It was terrible, wasn’t it?”

“Excruciating.”

“Why do only bad poets enter poetry contests?” She folded her arms and sighed.

“Why did my sister agree to be the judge?” The newspaper hid his face and Lolly turned in her chair, leaning over the back, and it was then that she saw Linda. “Who’s that?”

Willis folded back the newspaper and smiled and called Linda over. “Lolly, dear. That’s Linda Stamp. She’s the new cook down at the ranch house.”

Lolly didn’t stir.

“Lolly, remember I told you about her? She’s a friend of Bruder’s.”

Linda apologized for disturbing them. She explained that she was looking for the kitchen, and an unfamiliar deference took over, one that felt as uncomfortable as an outgrown dress. It quieted Linda, and again the vastness of the Rancho Pasadena came into focus: the balustrade running the length of the terrace, and the valley beyond, and the far
hills, gold in October. Did the Poores own all of it? The terrace had the feeling of a broad stage with a secret world hidden behind it in the house. Clipped, round pillars of brush cherry grew tall in planters, and a giant coral tree cast a webbed shadow over the breakfast table. The terrace faced south down the hill, and she saw that the orange grove covered only a portion of the valley; beyond it ran the wash of an arroyo, a trickle of white rock and sand frozen in arid gleam. The Pacific Electric’s tracks glinted in a long arc parallel to the dry river. The rest of the land was open scrub, live-oaks canopied on a field of yellow grass and the beige blur of sycamores knotted in the foothills. One or two houses dotted the far hills, plank-cottage stations for the former cattlers and the secret vintners who tended five acres of grape hidden by a ring of walnut trees. To the west were more hills, their morning faces bright with needly chamise and the blue-blossomed deerweed. The tracks ran through a pass in the western hills, and beyond them Linda saw the flicker of city, the cast iron and brick and stucco of Los Angeles that she had seen from the train’s window. From this distance it was no more distinct than a phantasm, shimmering and shapeless and alive, teeming with unknowable life; that was how she had felt upon pulling into Union Station, frightened not by the dangers shadowing a concrete alley or by the red mustache of a confidence man but by the palpable prospect of losing herself to the sprawl. A great relief had come to Linda as the Pacific Electric left Los Angeles and the canyons of the San Gabriel Valley opened before her. Pasadena was a city, but it remained planted amid the wilderness, and the view from the hilltop now reassured her—the river dead in autumn, the neat lanes of the grove, the great, green mass of the coral tree growing at the terrace’s corner. And then in the west, beyond the wink of Los Angeles, something flashed and burned, a flat sheet of blue-gray, and she said, “Is that the ocean? Can you really see it from here?”

“On the clearest day you can see Catalina,” said Willis, whose tonicked hair reflected the dull red of the tiles. He said that he hoped she’d slept all right. Lolly coughed delicately and said, “The ranch house isn’t so bad.” She was a year or so older than Linda, and maintained a clear ceramic face of youth; her cheek was decorated sparingly with brush and rouge, with a barely perceptible amount of powder on the hood of her eye; Linda noted it, the powder glittery in the sun, but she didn’t feel plain in comparison. No, Linda merely wondered what it was like to sit
at a dressing table with a view of the valley and apply the makeup with the careful help of a chambermaid and then descend the stairs to meet Willis on the terrace. Linda wasn’t envious but she wondered, as any girl might wonder, and she asked Lolly about the poetry contest and this perked up Lolly as she exclaimed fiercely, “The first-prize winner will be printed on the front page of the
Star-News
on New Year’s Day. And in the Tournament’s brochure. We’ve had hundreds of entries. All I can hope is that our Browning will turn up.”

Then Rosa arrived, and Linda got the sense that Rosa already knew who she was. Rosa collected the plates and never took her eyes off Linda, who worried that she had said something wrong, or was in fact in the wrong place. It occurred to her that the terrace might be offlimits to her, and never before had Linda felt so out of place. She was angry that Bruder hadn’t escorted her up the hill that first morning, and she planned to tell him that he should have shown her the way to the kitchen, and the longer Linda stood there the more lost she felt, and then Willis said, “You’re looking for the kitchen? Let me show you the way.”

In the pantry, Rosa asked Linda what she needed from the larder. Then she said, her voice low, “Be careful around them.”

“Around Willis and Lolly?”

“Keep your eyes open.”

The pantry was narrow, with glass-door cabinets holding groceries and copper-bottomed pots. Every morning, Rosa inventoried the stores with a checklist and a red pencil and then called Chaffee’s with an order: for, say, a case of PictSweet peas, or a half dozen cans of M.J.B. coffee, or the bricks of Sea Rose codfish that Willis liked to eat at midnight, after the musicians went home. Rosa was a beautiful girl with beautiful eyes and a body hard from mansion chores and breaststroking naked in the swimming pool when the others slept. Her lips were full and poutish and gave her a pretty, dimwitted look—which was altogether inaccurate. She was eighteen and in charge of a troop of five maids, and she knew, without rage or brooding, that had she received a proper education she would have gone on to become a famous lady mathematician. She held numbers in her head easily and perpetually and multiplied instantly, as if there were a button and she knew where
to push it, and she could order the groceries and tally the prices without the assistance of an abacus or scratch pad. She helped Bruder predict the orange yields, and she helped determine the number of pickers the ranch would need for the season, and the number of field crates. Lolly relied on Rosa’s numerical skills for calculating the tonnage of manure required for her rose garden, and Willis relied on it when re-estimating the value of his land.

Rosa’s mother had been one of the late Mrs. Poore’s maids, and one day as a four-year-old, Rosa fell down the dumbwaiter and lay unconscious in the shaft for a long summer’s day. Everyone at the Rancho Pasadena, including young Willis, believed that the girl would be damaged in the head, but when the concussion and the goose-egg bump subsided, Rosa continued on her way to superior intelligence. But her mother needed her help around the mansion, and after several, but not enough, years at the Titleyville School, Rosa began working for her mother six days a week. She polished and hemmed and swabbed and dusted and swept until a fever overtook her mother and a colony of weepy lesions ringed her torso, and then Rosa’s mother up and died, mop in hand.

“I’ve been here my whole life,” Rosa told Linda in the pantry. “I know them better than they know themselves.”

“Then what’s she like?”

“Who, Lolly? She isn’t very kind.”

The two young women fell quiet, and they looked at each other, and what either knew of the other she had learned from Bruder. Then Linda asked: “What about Captain Poore?”

“I can’t stand him. It’s a long story. One day, you’ll see.” And then, “No, I take that back. I hope you never see.” Rosa was loading a box with food for the ranch house: a sack of H.O. oats, a pound of Purity Oleoa, a box of Not-a-Seed raisins, three pounds of boiling beef. “I was going to give you a couple of cans of tomato juice, but they drank them all last night.”

“Did they have a party?”

“Another silly Poverty Party.”

Linda asked what that was, and Rosa pursed her mouth, as if she was wondering whether it was worth explaining. “For a good laugh, they ask their friends to show up dressed like paupers,” said Rosa. “The men arrive in filthy suits like bums, and the women turn up as if they’re
working the street. It’s their idea of fun.” Rosa folded back the newspaper and showed Linda the morning’s society page:

“Captain Poore can’t sit still,” said Rosa. “Like a little boy who can’t stay put in his chair. He has people over almost every night, and they play pool and shoot their pistols at the stars. Sometimes Willis stays up all night.”

As she said this, a deep smear of red appeared in Rosa’s cheek, and Linda instantly realized—the way you realize the sky is clear or the flower is pink—that she shouldn’t trust Rosa. She was the reason Bruder hadn’t met Linda at the station. Rosa lay her hand upon Linda’s arm, and her fingers were rough-tipped and a little sticky, and Linda could see in Rosa’s blown-glass face that she resented her arrival at the ranch—nothing Rosa said could be believed, Linda warned herself. And just as Rosa handed Linda the box of groceries, Lolly appeared in the pantry.

She ran her finger up and down the doorframe, as if to say, Don’t mind me. “I’ve called the butcher and ordered a box of porterhouses,” she said. “His wagon will deliver them in the afternoon to the ranch house. Mr. Hearts likes his with onions, and Mr. Slaymaker likes his gray as a goose, and Mr. Bruder likes his rare with blood. Willis scolded me for not ordering one for you, Linda, so I called back and ordered you the biggest one of all.”

Then Lolly left, and Linda felt even more certain that everything Rosa had said was a little less than true.

Lolly was a poetess. Twice the Tournament of Roses had printed her sonnets in its annual. Two poems, each of two stanzas, “Mt. Lowe the Lovely” and “Roses in Arcady,” and Lolly took as much pride in her work appearing within the Tournament’s brochure as she did when the early rosebuds, as tight as the skin on a grape, took shape in the trembling March wind. Once
The Century
awarded her second prize in an ode contest, an event that occasioned the
Star-News
to headline an article
LOCAL POETESS PUTS PASADENA ON THE LITERARY MAP
. When meeting someone for the first time, Lolly had a habit of declaring herself frail, patting her temples and alluding to a childhood infirmity. But other than a fashionable boniness and a pile of curls susceptible to the Santa Anas, there was nothing feeble in Lolly—except her odd insistence that she was still a child. “Part of her doesn’t want to grow up,” said Rosa. Lolly had yet to retire her collection of hair bows, more than a hundred stored and displayed in a special closet with a wooden rack Bruder had crafted. A few years back, she had contemplated college and even bought herself a floor-length beaver; but then she learned that the pretty Northampton snowdrifts could top ten feet and remain in place until early May and that at least once each winter a girl would disappear in them, frozen and lost until the thaw. “I wouldn’t survive,” Lolly had said, throwing out the college pamphlets but keeping the beaver, wrapping it in layers of scarlet tissue paper during the summer and wearing it on the winter nights that promised frost.

Lolly was ten months younger than Willis, and when they were little some people confused them for twins, especially when he wore his hair long. “Even now he anxiously corrects anyone who thinks they’re a pair,” said Rosa. He shared his sister’s smallness, but in his case it was beautiful, and nearly a year in a captain’s uniform had roughed up his complexion to a respectable maturity. “One of his greatest daily concerns
is keeping his hair in place,” said Rosa, explaining that the Eau De Quinine hair tonic wasn’t always successful against his resilient crop of bangs. He knew that his floppy hair, like puppy ears, added to his image of youth, and so he never left the ranch without his comb and a tin of pomade. He owned a pocket mirror framed handsomely in teakwood, and although he didn’t carry it with him all the time, he carried it more often than not. This was another habit he shared with his sister, and a second reason others considered them of the same litter.