Pasadena (53 page)

By the time they left
the Valley Hunt Club, dawn was arriving behind the mountains. Willis and Linda emerged beneath the
porte cochère
and found a crisp frost on the clubhouse lawn. It was so late that the valets had gone home, and Willis left Linda to fetch the car. While he was gone, a man in a bowler hat appeared from behind a hedge. “Enjoy yourself tonight?” he asked.

Linda said that she had, pulling the coat tight around her, buttoning herself in.

“What made it so special?” asked someone behind the man. Linda couldn’t see who it was, but she was so tired that she spoke without hearing herself: “The music and the dancing. And those hundreds and hundreds of furs.”

“Is that your bear coat?” It was a woman’s voice, and the man bent to pull a camera from a bag at his feet and Linda saw that the woman behind him was small with silvery curls, and young but somehow already hard in the face. The face was familiar, and the woman smiled knowingly, as if she were aware of something that had yet to click in Linda’s mind.

Then Linda knew. “Charlotte? Is it you?”

“Sure it’s me.” And Cherry Moss handed Linda her card:
REPORTER—SOCIETY AND NEWS
. “But, golly! Take a look at my old friend Sieglinde Stumpf. Wally”—and she elbowed the man—“be sure to get a shot of her. I knew her way back when.”

Wally clicked his camera and an enormous tin-colored flash erupted on the lawn and Linda’s hand flew to her eyes. She was blinded for a second or two, disoriented, and she found herself reaching at the empty air before her. “Charlotte?”

“Cherry’s right here. Did Wally get you in the peeps?”

Linda’s eyes cleared, and she found Cherry standing at her side with her notebook, biting her lip in that way of hers. She stood with her feet planted firmly, as if she were boring in for a long day, and a great dreamy confusion overcame Linda and she wondered if it was the drink, or something else. She was both cold and hot, and the grizzly was nearly suffocating her.

“Do you mind telling me who you came with tonight?” asked Cherry.

“Captain Poore.” As she said this, the car pulled beneath the portico and Willis ran to Linda, yelling at her to get in at once. When she didn’t move, his arm moved around her and she leaned into him, and the magnesium flash startled her again. Then Willis yanked Linda into the car. They drove off in the direction of the bridge. Linda looked over her shoulder and saw Cherry, her head down, busily writing in her notebook, and when Willis said under his sour breath, “Goddammit, Lindy, never talk to the gossips,” Linda understood.

Cherry’s curls bobbed against her throat, and her pencil scratched her notebook as the car sped up the boulevard, and when Cherry lifted her head, the distance was too great, and her face, to Linda, was a blank oval. And so much had happened in the night that Linda thought maybe, just maybe, it was a ghost or a memory or a premonition, anything but the cold truth of the grinding daily news.

But the daily news arrived the next afternoon, printed in gray ink that smudged Linda’s thumbs as she held up the
American Weekly
.

The accompanying photograph, blurry and dark, caught Linda and Willis in a moment of exhausted happiness, his arm around her shoulder and her head tilted toward him. It revealed, even in the dull newsprint,
her glowing eyes, and anyone shaking the
American Weekly
out of his newspaper—for the
American Weekly
was distributed in the grimy folds of a thousand of America’s finest and filthiest papers, including the
Star-News
—would recognize the dewiness of Eros on the lips and throat of Linda Stamp.

Certainly Bruder recognized it when he folded back the newspaper, and the ranch hands craned their necks to see the picture at the table beneath the pepper tree; they hooted and whistled at Linda’s silhouette moving in the ranch-house window, preparing their breakfast, and Muir Yuen and the other men joked about Linda not working in the kitchen for much longer. Bruder sat at the head of the table with the newspaper spread in front of him, his forehead propped in his hands. He didn’t want to believe it, but the evidence was before him. He had always hated Charlotte, or Cherry, or whatever she was calling herself, but now, even as he despised her, he was grateful for her having captured the truth. It was the same truth Linda herself had been presenting Bruder, but somehow he hadn’t been able to see it in her averted eyes. Only the newsprint clarified what he should have known for a long time, and Bruder was silent and enraged. The hands must have known that he had been betrayed, everyone must have known, and Bruder sat with his humiliation, too stunned to nurse it.

“Don’t believe everything you read,” said Linda.

“And the picture?” said Bruder.

“It’s nothing. It might give someone the wrong idea.” She laughed falsely, and her voice, high and sweet, didn’t sound like her, and she didn’t know how to explain what had happened even to herself. Her future had arrived, but she didn’t know where it was.

By nightfall, Willis had relieved her of her kitchen duties, driving her up the hill once and for all, and by the next night—although she wouldn’t know it for four or five years—a speck of flesh in her loin had reddened with chancre, and Bruder had quit the ranch, running off beneath the shattered moon.

Several weeks later
, Willis bought Linda a return ticket at the Raymond Street Station and left her on the platform with his command to
think about it, Lindy. What else can you do? I don’t understand why you can’t say yes right now
.

Burdened by headache and fatigue, she rode the train down the coast, her coat with the jelly-stained cuff wadded in her lap. Her fingertips pressed against the swollen nodes in her throat and wiped at her simmering brow, and she felt as if she were someone else returning to Condor’s Nest, an offshoot of her former self. She had lost weight, and her face was thin in the window’s reflection; beneath her skirt, upon her upper thigh, a mild rash blossomed red, like a colony of ant bites, but Linda thought little of it. There was the morning nausea too and her sluggish blood flow and Linda was not herself—that much she knew. She had even said to Willis, “I’m not feeling myself,” and said it to Rosa; and when she wrote Edmund, announcing her return to Condor’s Nest, she had also said: “Haven’t felt myself lately.” And then: “But nothing’s wrong.”

Linda pressed her face to the glass as the train raced along the coast. The dimpled ocean was calm and the tide was out, and she saw fishermen wading and buoys bobbing and, on the horizon, two people in an outrigger canoe. The window was cracked and the damp, salty air fell like a veil across her face, and she smelled the beach and the heaps of drying, flyblown kelp, and the train passed a cove where a group of boys and girls were prodding with sticks a beached pilot whale, and throwing rocks at its huge, rubbery head.

She was going home because she didn’t know what she should do.
She would talk to Bruder. She would ask Edmund for his help. No one knew her better than he, she told herself, and his letters—all but one unanswered—were piled in her bag, bound by twine, smudged and ripped, the ink of one smeared by an overturned flute of champagne. After New Year’s he had written that Bruder had returned to Condor’s Nest. “He’s kicked me out of my cottage. I’m living with the boy in the Vulture House. He acts like he owns the farm, and then he told me that he does.”

When Linda reached Baden-Baden-by-the-Sea she walked down the paved lane toward Condor’s Nest, bag in hand, the silver dress, resewn by Esperanza, folded in tissue within. She expected that Edmund and Dieter would run out to greet her, and Bruder behind them. They would hug her beside the field, and their oniony scent would flood her nostrils, and their dirty, working hands would hold her, smudging her blouse, and they would say, “You’re home at last! Welcome home!”

But no one came to meet her, and she found herself standing next to a sign that someone had erected:

CONDOR’S NEST
STAY OUT

Linda called out for her father and her brother and then Bruder, but her voice was swallowed by the grumbling ocean. She yelled again, but there was a wind running up the bluff and she could barely hear herself and Linda felt alone. Something small and sharp and laden with regret sat beneath her breast.

She found Edmund in the Vulture House, struggling to get Palomar out of a pair of muddy overalls. Edmund looked too burdened with work to be happy to see her. The boy was babbling and fighting with his father, and his bare hips were white and aglow against the blue blanket on the bed. He was kicking, and Edmund was yelling at him to stop, and the boy kicked his father in the chest, and Edmund slapped his son.

“Can I help?” she said.

“I didn’t believe you when you said you were coming home.” His face was soft and tremulous. “I don’t believe you’re here right now.”

Little Palomar ran to Linda, the overalls plunging around his knees and his flesh mottled from the cold. He wrapped his arms around her
shins, nearly toppling her, and she knelt and guided him out of his overalls and into a clean pair of pants.

Then Dieter appeared, and he struggled to recognize Linda. “Back from the war?” he said. “Back from France?” His face was snow-blue and his eyes were vacant and his right hand was a lame, flaky claw. He was old, and his brain had emptied before his body. “One day he woke up and he was gone,” said Edmund, snapping his fingers to demonstrate the swiftness of a fleeting second, of a life. “Didn’t you read my letters?”

But Edmund appeared hollow too; the household chores that once had been Linda’s had drained him. With both Dieter and Palomar to look after, Edmund’s days were long: he rose before dawn and went to bed late, feeding his father and his son and washing their clothes and their bodies and changing their bedding and stewing the white cabbage Dieter liked to slurp on and baking the corn
tortillas
Palomar sucked on for hours and lye-mopping the floors after one of them, or both, had made a mess. The endless quotidian work had left Edmund with the feeling that he had buried himself and was being forced to lead another’s life.

“I’ve come to see you,” said Linda.

“Why now? After all these months?”

“I’ve come to talk to you. To tell you what’s happened—” But Linda was interrupted by something moving outside the window, in the field. She looked, and it was Bruder trundling a pushcart. Because of her fever, she almost wondered if he was a ghost: he looked just as he had when he first arrived at Condor’s Nest. She sat upon her brother’s bed and their thighs touched and he plucked her hand from her lap and stroked it with cold fingers. There was a cruel honesty: at once she realized that their lives had diverged, but at the same time their childhood felt only an hour away. She said his name. And he said hers.

Siegmund
.

Sieglinde
.

What Linda didn’t know was that as Bruder worked the onion field in the twilight he could see them on the sagging mattress, like two old people clutching each other against the sucking brutality of life. In one of Bruder’s pockets was the picture from the
American Weekly
and Cherry’s article; in his other pocket was the deer-foot knife. He had left
Pasadena with nothing but it and the newspaper and a hard vow of revenge.

There’s a question that some people ask: When does a man become the man that he is? For Bruder, he would always think of New Year’s, 1925. He had believed in her, and then that day he stopped believing, and although he would always love her, he would never forgive her. Despite himself he wished her dead, but that glance into the future stung his eyes with tears, and the onions in his cart reeked and rolled around like lopped heads, and Bruder went down to the beach to roam the black night.

He no longer wanted anything from her—except the coral pendant, which one day he would take back. He imagined his fist snapping the necklace from her throat, yanking the pendant free, and at precisely the same moment, Linda imagined this too, sitting up in her bed and touching her throat as if a hand had been squeezing her windpipe. At first she didn’t know where she was, and then she recognized the crashing surf and realized it was the middle of the night. At first she thought that she was a little girl, and that Dieter and Valencia were asleep in the cottage next door, but then Linda remembered everything. Spread around her were the gifts from Willis: a detachable polar-bear collar, mother-of-pearl opera glasses, the silver dress hanging from the window sash and fluttering in the breeze. She got out of bed and examined the rash on her thigh. It was hard and red and the pits of her arms were tender with swollen glands, and she didn’t understand what was happening, not at first. Rosa had said, “It happened to me too. It comes in the first month or two.” Then: “How’s your stomach? And your sleep? And the queasy feeling buried deep within? Are you tired before dinner, and in the morning?” Linda answered yes to all of Rosa’s queries. “Then you’ll be visiting Dr. Freeman soon,” Rosa had said.

Something outside Linda’s window moved. When she pulled back the curtain, she saw Edmund at work in the barn with mallet and hewing ax. Leaning against the door were tiny wooden rods of white pine, and Linda couldn’t guess what he was doing. Edmund screwed the rods into a rail-board, and slowly she figured out that he was building a small bed for Palomar. The barn light cast a gold electric halo onto him, and Linda saw the smooth peace in his face as he two-fisted the mallet, his lips clamped around a pair of screws. Edmund knelt at his task, securing
a rod with his screwdriver and then rubbing at it with his sander. It was as if Edmund were in a trance, protected from the reality that had descended upon all of them. Linda could see this in his concentration, his eyes open but blank behind his spectacles, in the way his hair fell round his brow. He screwed another rod into the molded rail, and Linda could sense that he was prepared to help her—there had been a detour in their lives, but all would be right soon.