Pasadena (62 page)

And now, parked at the orange combine, on her way home from the Monday Afternoon Club, blinded by a fever that Dr. Birchback once dismissed as “a feminine response to the heat,” Lindy Poore felt as if she too hardly knew who she was. Five years ago, when Willis had found her mother’s apron hanging limply from Lindy’s bed, he had inspected it, laughing, “Was this once yours?” And Lindy had struggled to answer, for she didn’t know: she no longer knew what was hers, which life was hers. The old smudged apron was both familiar and foreign, and it was stiff with dirt and smoke, and when Lindy told her new husband that it wasn’t hers, Willis ordered Rosa to throw it away—“Unless you want it for yourself.”

During her first orange season as Mrs. Willis Poore she had continued to rise at dawn and walk down the hill and drink coffee with the hands. Willis had hired a new cook, a girl from Salinas who spoke haltingly but with great deference to Captain Poore. Her name was Carnación, and the bud of her mouth would pinch whenever Lindy—whom Carnación would call only
Señora
—entered the ranch-house kitchen and peered into a pot. Lindy continued driving the truck to the Webb House to pick up the packing girls, and now that they understood the vast difference between themselves and the rancho’s mistress, none of them would sit up front with Lindy. Through the little window in the truck’s cab the girls’ gossip would reach Lindy’s ear, and she took comfort in knowing that they still talked about the same things, in knowing that each girl would close her weary eyes at the end of a long day in the packinghouse and dream what every orphaned girl had ever dreamed of. In the rearview mirror, Lindy would watch the girls study the mansions along Orange Grove Avenue. Lindy knew that their eyes were looking to the bedroom windows, and she also knew that if she were to warn the girls of what waited behind one of those Roman shades, they wouldn’t believe her. For all they had to do was look at Lindy as evidence of what was possible, even for them. “If you’re pretty enough …” Lindy heard one of them say.

The season of 1925–26 was the last rainy winter for several years, and it would also turn out to be the last Willis would permit Lindy to work. “Lindy, sweetheart, you can do anything. Why do you want to
spend the day in the orange grove? It doesn’t suit you.” For a while she defied him, returning to the grove each morning and sharing coffee with Hearts and Slay as the sun rose. She continued to oversee the packing, carefully monitoring the girls: when one became too hot upon her stool, Lindy would lead her to the fan standing in the corner and to the water spout. She’d bring Sieglinde with her, and the baby would sleep in an orange crate Hearts had lined with flannel. Sometimes, Willis would send Lolly to request that Lindy return to the house. Sometimes, Lolly would say, “He’s worried about you, Lindy.”

During the first year or two of his marriage, Willis had urged his sister to bring Lindy into Lolly’s social world. “Now that we’re sisters,” Lolly would say, telling Lindy what to wear and where to shop and that her women’s clubs, while limited in membership, would only expand Lindy’s mind. Lindy went along to the tea dances and the cotillions, her husband and her sister-in-law hooked to her elbows. They took her to all-night jazz parties on the Vista’s terrace or around the Midwick’s swimming pool. Willis took her to balls where she had to strangle her arms in elbow-length kid gloves and stand within her husband’s clasp, unless he excused himself “for some fresh air on my own.” There had been a period of time when Lindy wanted to fit in, and she learned from Lolly how to curl her hair with an iron and from Willis how to get tipsy from lemon-wedge fruit punch. Lolly took her to Dodsworth’s for evening dresses and to Nash’s for linen suits, but almost immediately upon opening the boxes on her bed Lindy would discover a familiar loneliness, one she had tried and failed to tuck away. Once, when Lindy and Lolly were strolling through Carmelita Gardens, Lindy spotted a man on a bench beneath a conifer. His back was to them, and his black hair spilled over the collar of his suit. A robin bobbed around on the bench beside him, inching its way closer. It’s Bruder, Lindy thought, and she stopped as the sun throbbed and the heat rose from the garden path and the small great instant Lindy had known would come finally arrived: Bruder had returned. “Do you know him?” said Lolly, and she looked to the man as well and then said, “Is it Bruder?” Both women, now sisters, approached the bench, the anticipation between them palpable, like heat radiating from sunburned flesh, and just as they reached the bench the man turned around and revealed himself to be no one they had ever seen before.

No, it couldn’t have been him, for Bruder was sitting on a wooden bench beneath a barred window, the breeze rank with salt and the stench of the mudflats. Her husband’s words remained with Lindy: “You put him away.”

It had been in the autumn of 1929, not long after the Crash that had kept Willis up late at night in his library, that the fever returned to Lindy. It arrived swiftly and vigorously, with sweat and chills and the sensation of a vise clamped to her head. As Lindy lay in bed, Sieglinde would tug on her sweaty hand—“What’s wrong, Mommy?” But Lindy didn’t know what was wrong, and neither did Dr. Birchback, who held his talc-soft finger atop her pulse and said, “Female trouble?” Then he saw himself out, careful not to investigate further—“I’m not that kind of doctor, Mrs. Poore.” There was no reason to think that the fever wouldn’t simply come and then go, as they do; there was no reason to believe that the open sore where her leg met her hip wouldn’t fold itself up and heal. Lindy didn’t really know what was happening, and so she wasn’t worried. She kept herself from Willis, who in any case heard Dr. Birchback’s report of a female malady and stayed away. No, it wasn’t until Rosa said “We should see Dr. Freeman” that reality, with all its infectious truth, presented itself to Lindy.

Just as it was doing right now.

And in the July heat wave of 1930, three years into a drought and several years before its end, at the western end of Suicide Bridge, a couple of miles from the Pasadena’s gate, Lindy Poore leaned her head against the Gold Bug’s steering wheel. Her headache thumped and the sunlight flashed through the combine’s canopy and the volumes of Gibbon sat upon the passenger seat and all of her past sat up in her mind, jumbled but there. History presented itself to her as a great dark light behind her eyelids and she looked into it, seeing nothing but sensing everything that had once touched her. The past was there, more firmly rooted than her present life, than this very day, more real than the breath leaving her lungs just now, and then someone was rapping a knuckle on the Gold Bug’s window and at first she thought it was the headache but then came the
Hello, hello?
, and for a moment—a tiny moment when her overturned heart uprighted itself—she thought that Bruder was at last free; after all these years, he had come for her, on the other side of the glass.

But the knuckle continued to rap and the blur cleared from her eyes and Lindy looked up and there was Cherry, saying, “Lindy? Are you all right?”

They hadn’t seen each other in years, not since Cherry reported on Bruder’s trial, and Lindy felt a sudden tenderness for her old friend, someone who had known her before her present life. Lindy told Cherry that she was merely tired, that she had had trouble sleeping in the heat, but Cherry interrupted her, saying, “Lindy, I’ve seen you driving around town. You haven’t looked yourself.”

“Myself? What do you mean, Cherry?” She paused. “Have you been following me, Cherry?”

But Cherry denied this, saying she was giving up reporting. “I was worried about you.”

Lindy asked why she would give up being a reporter when she had always loved it as much as anything.

“I’m getting married, Lindy.”

“Married?”

“To George Nay. Do you know him? He moved to Pasadena a few years back. The real-estate developer? He and Willis are working together on the parkway.”

Lindy had only heard Willis sniff at the man’s name.

“He told me he wouldn’t marry me unless I gave up reporting,” said Cherry. “He says it’s not a lady’s pursuit, writing stories about other people’s lives.”

“And you’re listening to him?”

“George is right. It’s a crummy business, living off others. I’m ready to give it up.”

Lindy said she didn’t understand—and maybe it was because she was feeling dizzy; everything around her was dimming.

“Just one more story, Lindy,” said Cherry. She lowered her voice. “One more that I hope will do some good. After that, I’m putting down my pen.” Lindy said that she had to get back to her daughter, and Cherry said, “I can tell something’s wrong with you, Lindy. You’ll let me know if I can help? You’ll call me, Lindy?”

Through the glass, Lindy promised that she would.

By August
, many people had left Pasadena for the cooler airs of Santa Barbara or Balboa or La Jolla cove, and those who remained in the city made up their cots and hammocks on their sleeping porches. Cherry’s inquiries had startled Lindy—it dismayed her that her old friend could sense her decline—and a week later, Lindy passed through the rancho’s gate and drove into town. The sun was hot and she was thirsty, and near the entrance to Suicide Bridge she pulled over at the orange combine. The juice stand was in the shape of a giant navel orange, with a dirty awning, and a radio was playing a song Lindy had heard a trio play at Connie Ringe’s the night before. Lindy had danced with Willis by the pool, beneath the pink paper lanterns strung between the oaks. The trio played
My girl with the blue, blue eyes
, and Willis was cold to her touch, but he held her tight and it felt as if he wouldn’t let go and then he said, “You haven’t seemed yourself lately.” She asked what he meant, but then Connie cut in, shooing Willis away, and Lindy swayed in Connie’s arms while across the yard Willis pushed himself in a swing in the sycamore. “Everything okay?” Connie said, lifting Lindy’s chin with a gloved finger. “I can see you’ve got the five-year blues.” No, Lindy said. It was more than that. “It’ll pass,” Connie assured her, fox-trotting Lindy around the pool while the man in the coat with the plum-silk lapels sang “Jazz Me, Baby.”

The girl behind the counter dropped an orange into a machine and it tumbled down a metal chute and was pushed against a triangular blade, the two halves carried along a conveyor belt to the juicer. The girl asked Lindy if she wanted to try the new orange sherbert: “Tastes like heaven in your mouth.” At a picnic table next to the stand, a boy was
spooning sherbert into his girl’s mouth and she was giggling and swinging her feet and saying, “That’s enough, Billy. Okay, stop.” But the young man, his broken nose reset crookedly, continued feeding the girl and she kept laughing, her mouth open and her tongue orange and creamy and the sherbert dripping down her throat. “You’re too much, Billy!” she was saying, and then: “No, Billy. I mean it this time, please stop. Billy! Stop, it’s too much, you’re making me sick—” And then a voice: “Ma’am, nothing but the orange soda?” A pause. “Ma’am?”

Lindy parked not far from the Webb House. As they always would, a new crop of girls had moved in, and the two frizzy-haired girls on the porch didn’t recognize Lindy Poore when she passed. A year or so ago Mrs. Webb had run into some sort of trouble, something about taking a cut from the girls’ wages. There’d been headlines and a picture in the papers of Mrs. Webb in a high-collared cape, and one girl charged her with the often-repeated accusation: “Twentieth-century slavery!” Mrs. Webb no longer ran the home; she was retired, they said, to a cabin outside Avalon, where she tended a herd of wool sheep.

Erwin’s had closed at the beginning of the summer. There’d been an
EVERYTHING MUST GO
sale one afternoon, but no one had turned up, and Mr. Erwin had stood at his door and asked people in from the sidewalk. Two days later, he turned over the sign in the door—
CLOSED—
and moved to Flagstaff, leaving a display of electric vibratory devices in the window, there to catch the dust and stares. Now the dark window offered Lindy a reflection of herself, thin in a belted dress, her hair recently cut short in a style the hairdresser had called “the Downturn-Do.” “It’s very
you
, Mrs. Poore. Very, very
you
.”

She rang the bell and waited in the hot alley, and then a figure appeared on the other side of the bubble glass, dark and slow. The locks turned and Miss Bishop waved Lindy up the stairs. “He’s running late,” the nurse said, fiddling with her key ring at the top of the steps. Lindy recalled how heavy Miss Bishop was the first time she had come to Dr. Freeman, but now Miss Bishop was a skeleton swimming in a suit of loose skin. The folds of flesh hung from her like laundry on the line and she looked exhausted, as if scooping up the hems of her skin had worn her out.

Lindy sat on the daybed and Miss Bishop watered the fern, saying, “You’re feeling all right?” The same, said Lindy, describing the feverish aches, the fatigue. “Poor you,” said Miss Bishop. “Let me check on the
doctor.” She disappeared behind the bubble-glass door and there was a muffled conversation and then the door opened and Dr. Freeman appeared, asking Lindy to come in. He left the examination room while Lindy undressed. She hung her dress on the coat-tree and sat on the padded table in her slip, the rubber warm against her thighs. Miss Bishop, standing in front of a black-bladed fan, bought on sale at Erwin’s closeout, commented on the heat. “I told the doctor to get two,” she said, her bangs fluttering. Miss Bishop said that the doctor had been inexplicably busy lately,
tsk
ing about his workload and the stress it put upon him. “He had to cancel his holiday next week,” Miss Bishop said, recounting her own vacation plans, a drive down the coast to San Diego, two nights in Tijuana, a third in Ensenada Beach. Miss Bishop had a friend named Molly Pier, and the two rented a bungalow together in Altadena, and they would drive to Mexico and back in Molly’s Dodge Delivery. Miss Bishop was going on about needing some sort of special insurance to cross the Mexican border when Dr. Freeman reentered the examining room.