Pasadena (54 page)

She had come to Condor’s Nest to correct things, and she would no longer wait. In her nightdress and bare feet she went to him, the dress billowing as she crossed the field. The moon spun its silver upon her face, and she moved to Edmund as if she were being carried across the yard—a young woman just twenty-two, Linda Stamp, floating moth-like to the gold light in the barn door. As she approached him she knew what she would tell him, she knew. She would ask Edmund for his advice, she would tell him the truth about New Year’s Eve, and about how her heart had sent Bruder away, and now she wanted her brother’s help in bringing him back. The night was moist with sea mist. The quake in her stomach returned with an oceanic lurch, a cold, fish-thick wave swimming through her. Edmund, busy at his task, didn’t see her approach. A pink ribbon ran through the nightdress’s collar and sleeves. It was a gift sent over from Dodsworth’s; the necklace of pea-size pearls too. “You’ll need something other than that piece of coral,” Willis had said. A woman in an oyster-white gown approached Edmund, and when Linda stood over her brother he looked up, and the peace that she had witnessed in his face broke away in chips and shards, like a mallet smashing a vase’s round cheek.

She knelt beside him in the doorway of the barn. Their knees touched, and the moist air greased Edmund’s face. “It’s for Palomar,” he said, screwing the base of the spindle, turning the screwdriver with a thrust and then finishing with a swift smack of the mallet, a
crack!
in the night.

She said it softly: “I need your help.” He didn’t stop, wrists twisting, the single grooved screw tight between his lips, its tip beneath his tongue; was the iron taste seeping down his throat? Had Edmund heard her plea?

What she needed to say was simple, but now she feared she couldn’t bring it to words. Could the narrowness of a sentence hold the brimming
truth? But her life had come to this: one man wanted her, and she didn’t fully understand why; and another man didn’t want her, and she couldn’t understand why not.

“I’ve come into some trouble,” she began.

Edmund’s hands stopped. His chin turned cautiously toward her. His eyes screwed up as if someone were hurting him. His mouth was an open blank hole.

“Edmund,” she said. “I’m going to have …”

She tried again. “I’m, I’m …” She shook with humiliation and uncertainty, and then there was a lone, horrible sob. “I don’t know what to do.”

“What did he do to you?”

Edmund gripped the mallet, his knuckles glowing dark and amber, and like a bird taking off he propelled himself up and soared across the field, his arms outstretched, the barrel head of the mallet catching the moonlight. His feet and the wind carried him at full wingspan: gliding, running toward the bluff, like a turkey vulture scampering into flight, his head bobbing angrily.

Linda stood:
Edmund! Edmund!
She didn’t know where he was going, why he was running from her. He reached the cliff, and as quickly as a sparrow darting away, over it he ran.

Linda began to run too, calling his name. It came to her then, as Edmund’s scream rose from the beach: “You’ll never touch her again!”

As Edmund called out for Bruder, his voice echoing up from the sand, Linda understood. An image had entered Edmund’s head, one of her lying down in the orange grove, Bruder descending upon her. Was the image in her brother’s head similar to those that had visited her late at night, in a hot sleep, the sheets twisted between her legs?

Linda ran to the edge of the cliff: “No! Edmund!” And then: “Leave him alone!”

For Linda Stamp
—Lindy! Lindy!
—would not yet admit to herself that the decision had already been made for her; that she had made her own decision. How could it have happened without her knowing?

“It’s fate,” Willis had said. “You and me.”

A voice in the breeze, crawling up the cliff, struggled to reach her.

She stood at the edge, rocks skittering down the bluff: a calm tide, black ocean, whitecaps frothing, shooting and spraying and spilling in dollops, a glimmer on the wreckage of the staircase. She reached the
beach but didn’t see anyone. The sand was soft, footprints molded deep. Linda followed them down the shore, south around the bend and past Jelly Beach. Her feet ripped up the sand and she ran until it was hard to breathe and she kept running.

She heard them before she saw them: “I won’t let you take her from me!” Edmund cried, and there was a crack like wood splitting, a
snap!
like something out of memory, and then the sand gave way to a field of rocks and she arrived at Cathedral Cove and at once she saw them: Bruder’s raised arm was coming down swiftly, as if he were hurling something. Edmund was falling at Bruder’s feet. There was a strange sound, like a hoe slamming into mud. A small coin of metal winked atop Edmund’s head, and the ocean moaned. And then all was still. She saw them but she didn’t know what she had seen.

And time would pass, weeks and months, years, before Linda could know for sure what had happened.

She stopped at the edge of the cove. She heard Bruder crying in the darkness. He yelled at her not to come any closer. Linda was frightened and she obeyed and she stood on the beach and peered at the two figures, one standing and one lying down. Then something inside her told her to look away. She turned and looked north up the coast and thought of the beach’s long endless span, across inlets and coves and around harbors it ran, and her mind traveled up the coast with it. She thought of the orange groves and the white house on the hill and she thought of her future and she thought of her past. She made one last attempt to come to Bruder’s side, but she fell on the rocks, slippery with laver, and cut her palm, and her blood was bright on her blouse, and Bruder, a faceless silhouette in the night, hollered, “Linda, go back home! Stay away!” And then he said in a voice so soft that perhaps he hadn’t meant for it to reach her ear: “There’s nothing you can do now. You’ve come too late.”

All Heaven’s undreamt felicity

Could never blot the past from me
.

No; years may cloud and death may sever

But what is done is done for ever
.

EMILY BRONTË

By the late winter
of 1945, Andrew Jackson Blackwood had yet to make a move on what Mrs. Nay described as
the opportunity of a lifetime
.

“Something like this comes along but once,” she said one day when they ran into each other on Colorado Street. The sun was high and the rains were over. She added that as the months had passed, Mr. Bruder had grown more and more anxious to
unload
. “Imagine it, Mr. Blackwood. You: the master of the Pasadena. You’ll have come quite a ways, wouldn’t you say?”

It was one of the few instances in which her sales pitch became, to Blackwood’s ear, excessive. She discreetly inquired whether or not Blackwood had the funds, leaning in and whispering in a mildly insulting fashion. Blackwood politely assured her that he was more than capable of buying not only the Rancho Pasadena but also Condor’s Nest, should Mr. Bruder be interested in selling both.

“Both? In the same deal? It’s not a bad idea,” said Mrs. Nay.

“It was, after all, the onion farm that first caught my eye.” They were standing on the sidewalk in front of the former Dodsworth’s, shuttered so long ago.

Mrs. Nay said that she couldn’t promise anything but would float the idea. And then she was off to a meeting of some sort about the many abandoned buildings on Colorado Street—the Committee to Eradicate Our Eyesores, the group called itself. But she turned on her heel to tell Blackwood one more thing: “I just received a letter from George. He says the Reich is falling faster than even in the newspaper accounts. The first boys could be home by summer!” She waved a tissuey envelope
from a hotel in Washington. Her smile was full of the joy of prospective peace. Cherry longed to see her husband after these many months. Their relationship was unusually amiable: George and Cherry Nay—comrades, they thought of themselves. When she was young, she had built herself a somewhat shameful life—rushing from one sordid story to the next!—but back then her options had been limited. At the time, there wasn’t much else for Cherry but living off her words: she had been young and smart but not especially pretty, and in possession of no connections, and the world had offered little to a girl like Charlotte Moss. She’d done her best, although she admitted to herself, when the regret rose in her throat, that sometimes she had done less than that. But then she had helped out Bruder when he needed help the most, and at nearly the same time she had found George; in a matter of months, everything had changed for her. She understood her good fortune, her lot improving
just like that!
, and now, every time she wrote a letter to her husband—
My Dearest Friend …
—she reminded herself that in the end, fate had dealt her a fine hand.

“Good-bye, Mr. Blackwood.”

“Good-bye, Mrs. Nay.”

“We’ll be speaking soon, I am sure.”

The following morning began with an unpromising sunrise, diffuse and white, and a forecast of an early heat wave. But then a bald eagle alit on the telephone pole at Blackwood’s curb. Its hooked yellow bill was clasping something papery and green, and it looked to Blackwood like a dollar bill. He took this event as a sign of good fortune and he rushed for his folding telescope. But upon inspection the greenback turned out to be nothing but a leaf of mountain mahogany. Although hardly symbolic, this incident prompted Blackwood; and he coated himself in his customary cheerful self-confidence, and then and there, in his mint-green pajamas, he decided to pursue what he now thought would be his greatest accomplishment, that for which he would be remembered: to take control of the Rancho Pasadena. He would transform it into something useful and profitable, hauling it into the modern age. This would be the transaction that would forever rechart his destiny—once and for all moving him up the greasewood ladder that over the years had lodged so many splinters in his thumb. All would change for Blackwood; he would become a different man, and the world would have to accept him differently. The world that hadn’t acknowledged him would begin
to mail invitations to his red-flagged mailbox. He looked in the mirror and saw the flickering of someone else.

In early March, he arranged for Mrs. Nay to lead the men from the bank on a tour of the Pasadena. It was the time of year when the middles should have been stacked with field boxes and tracked from the picking trucks, but everything at the ranch was idle and, one could say, dying, if not already dead. While the bank men in their gray suits inspected the land and peered into the abandoned packinghouse and marveled at the California history that lay untouched at the western boundary of their progressive city, Blackwood sat in the Imperial Victoria, listening to the news that became more promising by the day.

Nineteen forty-five was turning out to be the year—for the good of the world and Andrew Jackson Blackwood. Matters would settle in his favor, he realized.

After the tour, he and the bankers returned to the conference room next to the bank’s vault. Blackwood made a formal presentation, unrolling a map of the ranch’s small valley, each square in the grid representing an acre. “What will you
do
with so much land?” one of them inquired phlegmatically. “Do?” “What are your plans, Blackwood?” Blackwood admitted that his plans were not yet firm. “The Pasadena is one of those properties that you buy when you can and figure out what to do with later. I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you that the opportunities are endless.” He added, “Wouldn’t you agree that it’s best for the city if this land falls into the hands of someone like me? Someone whose goals are in alignment with our mutual notion of progress?” The men around the white-oak table murmured inscrutably. Blackwood knew that plucking the civic strings often did the trick in Pasadena, and that the bank men (100 Percenters, they used to call themselves) were also directors of the Tournament of Roses and the First Presbyterian and, over on Euclid, All Saints. But they were cautious men in a cautious age. Way back in 1930, a couple of them had bet money that the Arroyo Parkway would run one direction, but the river of concrete had ended up flowing another route. The bank had also sunk money into the Hotel Vista, expecting its reign to last a hundred years. Blackwood hadn’t been around during those days, but they said it was once the spot—movie stars and gangsters and orange heiresses all around the swimming pool! And now look at the Vista: the most luxurious hotel in California converted to an army hospital, the bridle trails and the bungalows
and the carpets sold off for pennies on the dollar, the swimming pool as deep and empty as a socket without its eye. No, the Vista hadn’t turned out well for the bank, but this would be different, Blackwood assured the men, their cheeks gray and bloodless, and these were different times. Why, just today, March 1, 1945, the siege lines were forming around Cologne. “The war is almost over,” Blackwood stated in his meeting at the bank. “The boys will be coming home to California. Shouldn’t we ready the city for them, gentlemen? After all they’ve done for us? Don’t they at least deserve an apartment with a covered garage?”