Pasadena (5 page)

On the seat beside him was the advertisement from the
Star-News:

He had had to phone twice, eventually securing an appointment with George Nay’s wife. Mrs. Cherry Nay had given him directions in a friendly but distracted voice, as if she had just realized she had lost something, a diamond ring down the drain or something of the sort. Blackwood interpreted this as an encouraging sign that he was dealing with a birdbrain. But her directions had proved topographically precise, including that the asphalt would end at a black walnut, and that the
street would become a white dirt road, and that at the road’s end there’d be a gate covered in wild cucumber. “A dirt road? In Pasadena?” This had brought a ripple of hope to Blackwood, who wondered if much of the rancho remained undeveloped, a crude piece of arid scrubland. Over the telephone he had inquired about the price, but Mrs. Nay had said, “Now, Mr. Blackwood! You know as well as I that I’d never give that out over the phone.”

Over the years, Blackwood had heard surprisingly few stories about the ranch and its family, the Poores. As far as Blackwood knew they all were dead now, Captain Willis Poore the last to go, a heart attack last year while doing calisthenics on his terrace, or so Blackwood had read in the obits. The captain’s wife, a woman by the name of Lindy, who, according to the
Star-News
, wasn’t from Pasadena, had been dead for a number of years; his sister, Lolly, too, a girl who had once kept the largest rose garden in Southern California. The obit had gone on to say that the rancho “had seen its best days pass,” and Blackwood had made a note to keep his eye on the auction block. The rancho sprawled at the western edge of Pasadena, tucked between Linda Vista and Eagle Rock in a small valley that most people didn’t know how to find, including Blackwood. He thought, vaguely, that he had heard Stinky say that the family had something to do with the founding of Pasadena; but Stinky also added that the Poores weren’t a Cal Tech family, that was certain. “Goodness, now take a look at this,” Stinky had said on the telephone. “I’m looking at a 1925 Valley Hunt Club roster, and sure enough, here they are. Captain Willis and Miss Lolly Poore, Junior Members.”

The dirt road was in bad shape, toothed coyote brush and thickets of poisonous buckeye creeping into the car’s path. Blackwood drove carefully, worried about his paint job, making his way up the chaparral hill. The rains had left everything blindingly green, the deerweed in bloom with tiny butter-colored flowers and the sagebrush tipped with yellow blossoms. Vines of Pacific pea climbed the live-oaks, their ovate leaflets shimmering in the December wind. A row of bluish leaves sprouted from the road’s center hump, an early sign of a poppy trail. The car continued its climb, and the pitch of the road steepened. Soon the ceanothus and the lilac and the twisted-trunk madrone were nearly choking off the car’s path. The morning’s blue shadow pressed the side of the hill, a chill touching Blackwood’s neck, and he thought about turning around. But at last the car approached the tall black gate. As Mrs. Nay
had said, vines of wild cucumber twisted through the wrought iron; Blackwood got out and shoved the gate, and to his surprise it opened easily, as if a hand were pulling it from the other side. It was warm from the sun, and he dragged it across the road; dust rose in a line that seemed to mark the rancho’s boundary, a border to another world.

Back in his car, Blackwood continued up the hill, switchbacking through thickets of holly berry and pink-veined laurel sumac and minty eucalyptus. He was listening to the Saturday “True Stories” program on KHJ, and just as the actress on the radio whispered in a panic “I think there’s someone in the house!” reception was lost. Blackwood stretched to fiddle with the dial, and to his great disappointment the white plastic knob snapped off in his hand. The road turned sharply, but Blackwood, whose eye was on his dash, failed to turn with it, and the Imperial Victoria’s front wheels ran off the road and the car teetered over the edge. With no time to spare, Blackwood’s frightened foot found the brake; he was on the verge of a terrible plunge into the arroyo below.

Yet when put into reverse, the car performed for Blackwood. With sweaty palms he steered back onto the road. He mopped the moisture from his face and, reminding himself that caution was the developer’s guide, continued up the hill. Beyond the bend, the one he had almost missed, the road crested and the wildbrush fell away and before him was a wide, untended lawn surrounded by tight-budded camellias and yews and fan palms swaying high above. The grass needed reseeding, but immediately Blackwood began to tally the acreage. The great lawn alone must have added up to nine or ten.

The road skirted the lawn, and soon the dirt gave way to pavement, a strip of white concrete cracked and sprouting branchlets of ricegrass. Blackwood reached for his hat with the maroon band and the tiny golden feather, propping it on his head, and it was then that he saw the house. The Poore House, as Mrs. Nay had referred to it on the telephone, dwarfed the mansions on Orange Grove—“Millionaires’ Row,” they used to call it long before Blackwood moved to town. The house seemed to Blackwood even bigger than the Hotel Vista, but that wasn’t possible; in its heyday the Vista could sleep five hundred. Blackwood thought about how Pasadena’s richest citizens, tucked behind hedgerow and hairy-leafed arroyo willow and pillared gate, called their Mediterranean villas
casitas
, their slate-roofed palaces
cottages
, their
Greene & Greene redwood mansions
bungalows
. “It’s how they are,” Stinky had remarked, in his analytically detached way. “There’s no economic rationale for denying one’s wealth, the way some people do around here. But it wasn’t always like this. A generation ago it was just the opposite, everyone flaunting about. Things change, don’t they, Blackwood?”

Blackwood would have to present himself to Mrs. Nay as unimpressed, not letting on that he’d never seen an estate like the Pasadena; as if he were used to surveying private kingdoms. She had described the mansion as Beaux-Arts, but it was more than that: it was a twisted California mélange of Italian villa and Andalusian farmhouse and French château, three stories, plus attic, whitewashed with a red pantile roof supported by a cornice decorated with escutcheons bearing navel oranges and bobcat heads. A wide terrace ran along one side of the house, its chipped balustrade topped with marble urns potted with dying yucca—Blackwood guessed this was where Captain Poore had fallen dead. Creeping ficus jacketed the eastern half of the house, tangled with a dying passion-fruit vine.

Blackwood drove through the portico’s narrow columns and parked the car. He saw no one and heard only the chime of the yew leaves and the calling jays. In the distance, the Sierra Madres were limey yellow in the early sun, their peaks protected by snow, and it occurred to Blackwood that he had found a private world separated from the rest of Pasadena. It was not altogether impossible that they’d be asking too much for the Rancho Pasadena; right away he’d have to get the price out of Mrs. Nay.

“What are you talking about?” said Cherry Nay. “You haven’t even seen the place. Let’s not talk about prices until I’ve shown you around.” She was the forty-and-over ladies’ tennis champion at the Valley Hunt Club, and ten years of rushing the net—how Cherry Nay loved to volley and smash an overhead!—had worked her skin into a supple brown leather. In person there was nothing birdbrained about Cherry, and she sensed that her very presence had surprised Blackwood, as if the most apparent facts about her didn’t add up easily: her girl-size body and her sun-worn face and her old lady’s hair and her pleasure, and enviable skill, in assembling information and relaying it with authority. She had a habit of closing her sentences with the firm statement
And that’s just
the way it is
, and she said this now as she told Blackwood that since he had bothered to come out to the ranch, he might as well stick around for the tour. “Now let’s see this big old house!” She said this with the giddiness that had greeted Blackwood on the phone, and he was disappointed in himself for misjudging her; he wasn’t dealing with a rube at all.

They moved down the gallery that ran the length of the mansion. The house was empty except for a row of gilt-legged chairs draped in muslin and, at the base of the main staircase, a six-foot marble statue of Cupid blindfolding a half-robed woman whose bare stone breasts caused Blackwood to avert his eyes, a modesty Cherry noted as she explained, “The owner is selling everything as is.”

The house had been built in 1896, she said, for a land speculator and orangeman by the name of Willis Fishe Poore I. “Carved out of the old Rancho San Pasqual. It replaced an earlier but also grand mansion,” she said over her shoulder, moving quickly, assuming that Blackwood could take everything in at her rapid pace. What Cherry was careful to keep to herself was that Bruder had called from the village booth early this morning and asked if she knew anything about a man named Andrew Jackson Blackwood; he’d been poking around Condor’s Nest, Bruder had said, and Cherry, careful not to lie, had said that she’d never met Mr. Blackwood. “Is he a serious fellow?” Bruder had inquired. “There’s something about him that makes me think he might be the one.” Cherry had said she would try to find out. She hadn’t revealed that Blackwood would be inspecting the Pasadena in a few hours, and Cherry somehow understood that it would be best for her to mediate. She knew she had something to gain by keeping each man away from the other for as long as possible, allowing information to transmit through her.

“Willis Fishe Poore?” said Blackwood.

“The first.”

“The first?”

“Mr. Poore, as I’m sure you know, was one of Pasadena’s founders. He kicked off the Indiana Colony back in 1874. Not that George and I care about those things—whose homestead was here first and all that rigmarole of the past. But as I’m sure you know, there are those around town who take great pride in their antecedents.” When the house first rose on the hill the ranch totaled 2,500 acres, but that was long ago, said
Mrs. Nay. Now the Pasadena was a not-unimpressive 160: 60 acres for the estate and its gardens—“what’s left of them”—and 100 acres set aside for the orchards, half dead and the other half gone wild, producing oranges as black and filmy as coal. “The spreading decline hit during the Great Drought back in 1930, doing the grove in once and for all. It’s too bad, really. It was mostly navel, that was the crop. But there was grapefruit, tangerine, cherimoya, mandarin, apricot, blood orange, peach, walnut, sapota, and Kadota fig. It was quite a place, Mr. Blackwood.” Once there’d been a staff of six gardeners, Japanese men in green rubber boots who swept the lawn with bamboo rakes. In the house there’d been secretaries and chambermaids in lace pinafores and a seamstress and, later, a chauffeur who parked the cars in the converted stable. It took Willis Fishe Poore four years to build the house, and thirty mules to level the hilltop and dig the trout pond and clear the two acres for the thousand rosebushes. The house resembled the Château Beauregard, said Mrs. Nay. “Elmer Hunt—you’ve probably heard of his nephew Myron—transformed it into a … I suppose the best description is a California
castillo
.” There was a bowling alley in the basement and a billiard room where Mr. Poore used to gamble with his ranch hands and a loggia off the portico where delicate Arcadia orange trees, planted in porcelain saki barrels, blossomed so sweetly that Lolly Poore, Mr. Poore’s daughter, once collapsed from the onslaught of their perfume. There were twelve bedrooms, each with a view of the orange grove, and eight baths—“The first full-service in Pasadena, George always reminds me to point out”—plus a back wing big enough for a staff of twenty-four.

“But those days are over,” said Mrs. Nay. “Nobody lives like that anymore.” She doubted Blackwood intended to live like that. He could turn out to be the type of man who would raze everything, denuding the hill even before he had a plan of what to do with it. It was a shame, really, and although Cherry wasn’t a sentimental woman she held out a tiny hope that someone would come along and roll a carpet down the hall and replant the groves. Nothing wrong with keeping a little bit of history alive, Cherry liked to say.

On the landing between the first and second floors, they looked out the window toward the North Vista and its dolphin fountain, now dry and cracked, and a camellia garden reclaimed by a bramble of red-berried toyon. From this view, Cherry realized, the ranch appeared
rather forlorn, as if it were straining to expose its true sadness to its visitor.

“How long has the house been empty, Mrs. Nay?”

“A year or so. But it was on the decline for quite some time.”

“Like so many properties around town, Mrs. Nay. They say Pasadena isn’t what it used to be.”

“I suppose you’re right, Mr. Blackwood. When was the last time anyone built himself a mansion? Years ago, probably 1929 or 1930 at the latest. I can remember when they went up two a week.”

Blackwood sensed an opening, although he didn’t understand where it might lead him. He said, “You mustn’t forget the war, Mrs. Nay.”

“Of course, Mr. Blackwood. I don’t want you to think I’m not doing my part. We save our cooking fat in a tin can like everyone else, and the cook and I have learned more cottage-cheese recipes than I ever thought possible. I’m not complaining. Surely the war will end one day, but I have a strong feeling Pasadena will never be the same.”

“Nothing will be the same, Mrs. Nay.”

“That’s true, Mr. Blackwood.” And then, “And that’s just the way it is.” She paused before saying, “But that’s not why we’re here. There’s plenty more to see, Mr. Blackwood! Note the Diana statue. That comes with the house as well.”

She was having a hard time piecing Blackwood together; he was both rough and sophisticated, confident and self-conscious, adolescent and middle-aged. She knew he wasn’t from Pasadena, and she knew that his application for membership at the Valley Hunt Club had been rejected. The same was true for the Athenaeum over at Cal Tech, even his friend Stinky Sweeney hadn’t come out full-hearted on Blackwood’s behalf; and the Playhouse had voted not to elect him to its board. But Cherry’s sympathy for outsiders far surpassed her husband’s and that of most of the people she knew, and she wanted to take Blackwood’s hand and advise him to stop trying: some people will pass through the gates, and some never will.