Pasadena (66 page)

“I stood and waited for your brother and I didn’t know why he was so angry, why his mission had gone from secret to overt, but he ran toward me and it was no more frightening than watching an old dog lumber to your heel. I waited for him. It was too dark to see his face but he was yelling things about me and you—and only you, Lindy, know if he was right or wrong.

“Edmund was running with the mallet and there was only a second to realize what he was about to do before he was doing it. I saw his eyeglasses fly off his face but this didn’t slow him, he continued his charge, just as a bull will run into a blade. The next thing I knew your brother had leapt atop a boulder and was jumping toward me, the mallet raised. Only then did it occur to me that he was trying to kill me, but this seemed laughable enough and then, together, both Edmund and I realized that he had made two grave errors. The first was small, and not necessarily fatal. The boulder he was propelling himself from was covered with rubbery Pacific laver, and he lost his footing, causing him to leap with much less arc than I imagine he had planned. The other error was more ghastly, however. You see, only when his foot was leaving the slippery rock did he see the nearly invisible stack of lobster pots between him and me, and by then his body was hurtling and he did not land on me but on them. The crack was like an iceberg breaking free from its translucent blue shelf.

“The lobster pots, which I’d just been admiring for their construction, broke beneath him, and Edmund was thrown several feet toward the mouth of the cave. And even more surprising, both to Edmund and to me, was that the mallet had sprung from his grip and was flying up and up, twenty, then thirty, feet into the air, stopping and suspending itself in the night for a brief long moment. Up there it winked, its violence as distant as a star’s. Then it began to fall, head over grip, boomeranging down, faster and faster, and as it passed me I tried to snag it but I couldn’t although I want to emphasize that I tried, hence the fingerprint. But before anything else could happen, its head sank into the temple of your brother.”

“Why didn’t you tell the court this?”

“I did. But they’d already listened to you. Don’t you remember the picture Mr. Ivory showed you? The driftwood?”

Linda said she remembered everything about it.

“It was your pots broken to a thousand pieces by your brother.”

“I told Mr. Ivory I didn’t know what it was. How could I know that, Bruder?”

“Don’t you remember Mr. Ivory insisting it was driftwood brought in by the tide
after
Edmund was killed? Do you remember that, Lindy? Do you?”

She said she did.

“Cherry proved he was wrong.”

“How did she know?”

“She came to visit me and she asked. She’s a good reporter. Half-truths never stopped her. She went to the police archives and found the film shot by the officer sent out from Oceanside. Remember him? His freckled nose twitching at the sight of the night flies landing on the fatal wound? Shielding himself with his camera. Taking pictures up and down the beach and asking only you, never me, ‘Now, what happened here?’ You do remember him, don’t you, Lindy? Cherry sent the film out to be blown up. When the pictures came back they showed the body, which proved nothing new, and the mallet, also useless, and the ocean—beautiful, but not helpful. But one picture was of a pile of split-up wood. ‘Why are you showing me that old picture of driftwood?’ said the prosecutor when Cherry took it to his office. She didn’t have to say anything. In her head already she was writing her article:
Dear Reader: Do you remember the story of death on the beach from five years ago?…

“Then Cherry produced a tidal report from the spring of 1925. It turns out that when Edmund was killed, the tide was going out, not coming in. That wood didn’t wash up after he died. It was already there. Right in Edmund’s path. And when they studied the enlarged picture again, both Cherry and Mr. Ivory saw the eyeglasses in the pile, and the driftwood now looked like nothing but broken-up lobster pots.”

Lindy and Bruder remained on the mausoleum steps for a long time, and the wind descended the foothills and shook the dying trees. Their scent of citrus was sharp but faint, overwhelmed by the husklike odor of parched ranchland. Leaves whirled about the pillars, blown at the base of the tomb.

“I understand you haven’t been well,” said Bruder.

Was this why he’d come? To inquire about her health? Had he driven from far away, his foot on the pedal heavy with concern for her?

“Who told you?”

“Cherry. All she said was, something’s wrong.”

Lindy rested her grateful cheek upon his shoulder. “Is it why you’re here?” She was prepared to describe the fevers and the lesions and the shameful pain in her loins.

“I came to look in after the ranch,” he said. “I heard it was dwindling by the day.”

His cruelty mixed with kindness startled her, and she failed to see the pattern of his heart. She was as blind to it as Edmund, forever losing his spectacles, had been to the world. She pulled away from Bruder and moved to stand, but her body didn’t follow, her joints sore and the headache’s tide coming in. She meant to rise and walk away but she remained on the steps at his side. A space no more than a foot separated them but the air felt as flinty as a stone wall. “I thought you came to see me,” she said.

Why, oh why can’t we understand that the heart both loves and repels at once? Lindy and Bruder were sitting close, but they might as well have been separated by the ocean. Bruder steeled himself against feeling anything, a skill he was on his way to perfecting. And Lindy felt the blade of old love. The August sun burned against the Yule marble and silhouetted the leafless branches in the dying trees. Then a rustle rose in the grove, footsteps in the soil, and someone approached the mausoleum.

“Lindy?” Willis called.

His face flushed and his chest was heaving. “Lindy,” he said. “Please come to the house at once. Sieglinde was looking for you. So was I.”

Lindy rose and moved to her husband, and when she looked over her shoulder Bruder was gone.

Later, next to Willis on the stairs, Lindy said: “Why do you always have to behave like that?” Her husband said nothing as he inspected her, as if he hoped to find a slip of paper pinned to her dress that would explain her. She watched him, eyes dull and flecked with gold, and she saw a man at a loss; but she was at a loss too.

“I thought you were happy,” he said.

“I’d be happier if you treated Mr. Bruder as you’d treat any other guest of mine.”

His face fell, a tremor in the chin. “You don’t see yourself the way I do, Lindy. Even a mirror can’t show you your burning cheek. You don’t know it’s there, but I see it. And he saw it too.”

“What did he see?” Willis attempted to rest his hand on her, but she shrugged him off. “You don’t know him,” she said.

“But I do, Lindy. It’s you who doesn’t know him.” And then: “Please don’t see him again.”

“I can’t say whether or not he’ll come to visit.” She said this not knowing that Bruder wouldn’t return to the Pasadena for years and years—and then, in fact, only to close it down and sell it off. Despite their conversation, Lindy thought he still might return for her.

“If you love me, you won’t see him again.”

“If he shows up at the door, I can hardly turn him away.”

“You can.”

“But I won’t.”

“No, I know you won’t.”

From the nursery, Sieglinde called for Lindy. She was crying, thirsty from the heat, and Lindy thought of her daughter’s fists rubbing her eyes, her hair in moist curls around her ears. “Mommy!”

“The baby,” said Lindy. Dusk was approaching, the yellow light framing the stalks of cypress outside the window. Willis opened it, and they heard the trickle of the dolphin fountain and the clang of copper pans in the kitchen. Sieglinde cried again, and Lindy looked up the stairs, telling her husband that she must go. There were others who needed her: that’s what her face relayed to her husband. She didn’t mean it, but long ago her heart had been quartered and divided among a few. Once, she had assumed that her love could continue to blossom from her heart’s bloody bulb, one red-faced flower after another, pressing upon the world a weeping bouquet of love; love as endless as spring feels on an April night, when white flowers shawled the orange trees; enough for everyone. But that was long ago.

“Mommy!”

“I wish she wouldn’t scream like that.”

“Mommy, I’m thirsty.”

And then from the room across the hall came Pal’s bristly voice: “Lolly! Lolly, come tell her to shut up!” The children began to scream at each other from their bedrooms.

Lindy moved up the stairs. She felt her husband falling away as she climbed the steps, the chandelier’s treelike shadow cast across his face. She mounted the steps slowly, her knees wobbly, the flare in her hip, the red weltish chancre dense with pain, a pain that prescribed her future, and as she reached the top Lolly pushed by Lindy, a blur of skirt and tightly wound hair, and she was calling, “I’m coming! Pal, I’ll be right there!”

But Bruder didn’t return
to see Lindy: no letter in the mail, the telephone in the cabin beneath the stairs silent, the bell at the gate dead and rusted over. She asked Rosa if she’d heard anything. “Only that he’s taken a bungalow at the Vista.” Cherry said she’d spotted Bruder around Pasadena, at the Midwick tennis courts, in the window of the bakery, seeing a matinee at Clune’s. “And he’s not always alone.”

“Who’s he with?”

“Now, Lindy, I thought I told you I’ve given up reporting gossip. That was another me. Another Cherry.”

One afternoon, Lindy and Lolly drove the children out past Devil’s Gate, where the water sat low and black in the reservoir. At the trailhead the children ran ahead, their little feet scaring lizards into holes. Lolly, equipped with silk parasol and goatskin canteen, marched up the path. The children were out of sight, but Lindy could hear Sieglinde’s peevish squeals and Pal’s gentle laugh. Lolly seemed to be energetically sulking over something, and at first Lindy was curious about her sister-in-law’s vigor: the parasol beating the evergreen out of the path.

They paused and passed the goatskin. Lindy asked if something was wrong.

“That day, when Bruder came by,” said Lolly. “You didn’t ask him up to the house. You kept him to yourself.”

“Willis didn’t want him in the house.”

Lolly was contemplating this answer and her face told Lindy that she didn’t find it adequate. They continued walking, and the heat was all around them. The scrub was dry and brittle and scratched at their
clothes and their bare forearms. Were a spark to fall, the entire mountainside would sway with waves of orange flame.

The women stopped again, and Lolly called after Pal to come for water. He called that he didn’t want any, and then his crackling footsteps told them that he was continuing up the path. “Will you invite Mr. Bruder to the house?” Lindy saw it then: a glimpse of betrayal in Lolly’s eye. “You’re trying to keep him from me.”

“Away from you?” Despite the years, Lolly was still a child-woman stunted in a household that gave her no reason to grow up. Up the path, the children’s voices had fallen away and Lindy called after them, and there was a moment of silence when the only response was the jays in the pines and the squirrels scampering in the underbrush, and then Sieglinde answered, “Mommy, we’re right here!”

“Did you love him, Lindy?”

Within Lindy something broke; she had dammed herself for too long and now there was a surge. She scolded Lolly for being childish. “What do you know about love?”

“I know what love is.”

“Mommy?” cried Sieglinde. “Mommy, where are you?”

“Right here.”

“Mommy, come now. Mommy, I’m scared. There’s someone here.” Then the girl screamed, a shriek crossing the canyon, followed by a cry from Pal.

Lindy and Lolly ran up the path. The voices were coming from behind a thicket of sumac and the children were screaming and Lindy thought,
What’s happening?
A cold panic entered her, and when Lindy and Lolly reached the children, she found them shaking in the long shadow of Bruder.

He was standing over them, his hand spread atop each of their heads. His suit was dull with dust; a grass stain shone bright on his knee. He said, “Out for a hike, I see.”

“What are you doing here?” said Lindy.

The children ran from him, Sieglinde hugging Lindy’s leg and Pal taking Lolly’s hand. The girl’s nose was quivering, as if she were both scared and excited at once. Pal was motionless next to Lolly. He reminded Lindy of Edmund: his sorrowful, nearly adult face attached to a little boy’s body, the drooping eyes and the early wrinkled brow and the downturned mouth.

Lindy expected Lolly to berate Bruder for scaring the children but she said nothing, only lifted her chin and smiled.

“We were just talking about you,” said Lolly.

“I doubt I could be of much interest in any conversation of yours.”

A door flew open in Lindy. It felt as if her emotions were stampeding out to this spot in the chaparral, trampling the path and the felled sycamore where Bruder’s foot rested, his ankle exposed to the sun. She feared that he and Lolly and even the children could read everything in her eyes: the jaundicing jealousy, the tearful regret. She wanted to cry out and tell Bruder—but what would she say? How could she begin now? For many years, words had sat tasteless on her tongue. Again she wondered why he did not know how she felt; wasn’t it as obvious as smoke rising from a far fire? But perhaps he did know; perhaps he knew and he no longer cared. She realized that what she had feared most was true: He has seen my heart and rejected it.… The door to her soul banged shut on its hinges.

“Mommy, I wasn’t scared,” said Sieglinde. She twirled in her sunflower dress and performed a curtsy.

Pal’s eyes were wide and he twisted Lolly’s skirt in his fingers, and in his hesitation Lindy could sense that the boy was recognizing something about Bruder.

“Pal wants to leave,” said Lolly. “Good-bye, Mr. Bruder.” She took the boy’s hand and together they ran down the path and the afternoon was silent again.