Pasadena (15 page)

“Along the front. You heard him say that.” She was preoccupied with unraveling the arms of a pongee shirt.

“Why do you think Papa brought him home?”

“Because Bruder doesn’t have anywhere else to go.”

“But if he’s old enough to fight in the war and carry a rifle, isn’t he old enough to go wherever he wants?”

“I don’t know, Linda.”

“Do you think he saved Papa’s life? Rescued him from the Germans, maybe?”

“So many questions, Linda.”

“Do you think Papa owes him something?”

Linda felt let down by her mother—let down that Valencia didn’t share her curiosity. Other things, too, failed to interest Valencia. Like what the men did in the evenings at the Twin Inn tavern, a room drenched in an unearthly yellow glow from the electricity in the crystal-dagger sconces. Why didn’t Valencia wonder what went on in there? Or wonder what lay down the coast in the village above the cove, La Jolla, or even farther, on Union Street in San Diego, where Linda had heard—but certainly hadn’t seen—that a horseless omnibus rattled up and down the street ready to take anyone anywhere for a nickel?

Valencia passed Linda one of Edmund’s shirts with the detachable collar. It smelled of him, of chipped redwood and onion; she could nearly feel his flesh beneath the worn cloth. “I know what you think,” said Valencia. “But you’re wrong, Linda.”

“Wrong?”

“I was like you too.” Linda didn’t understand.

“It was a different world when I arrived. Everywhere you looked, there was nothing but chaparral and oak scrub. The arroyo seemed bigger then, a gash flowing to the ocean. Agua Apestosa was wider, blacker too, before they built the bridge. Ay, Linda, if you think it stinks now, you should have turned your nose to it then. When the Santa Anas blew, we’d have to tie rags over our mouths.”

Linda scrubbed the shirt with the wire brush. She wondered what her mother was trying to tell her, and what any of this had to do with Papa and Bruder, and with her. But Valencia continued, describing the dirt road that once connected the village to the rest of the world; it was an overnight trip to Los Angeles, she reported. How did she know this? Because that first morning, after Valencia swam ashore and woke in Dieter’s barn, she tried to escape again. She’d never forget it, she told
Linda. Waking with the bantams, the fold of her elbow lined with sea salt, her sleepy cheek impressed by the straw. At once she knew that everything had gone wrong for her. Valencia had hoped to jump from the
Santa Susana
off the coast of Rancho San Pedro. When Linda asked where that was, Valencia explained that it was a place that officially traded in tallow and hide, and unofficially, according to rumor passed from the fern-planted windowsills of Mazatlán, traded in opium and girls with hair as black as Valencia’s. That was the way Valencia’s best friend, Pavis, a strong girl with an upturned nose and a braid coiled atop her head, had put it as Valencia was preparing to sign up for service on the
Santa Susana
. Such a prospect had frightened Valencia, but she also knew that just beyond San Pedro Harbor and the muddy salt flats of Wilmington lay a road, white-dirt and two-lane, that cut through the yarrow and the live-oaks and the dried-out river washes, across a flat stretch of land once grazed by fifty thousand head of cattle, through the citrus orchards, toward a pueblo, already a village, already a town, with whispery promise of metropolis, they called Pasadena. Even girls in the back streets of Mazatlán, girls who ran shoeless and taught themselves to read by sitting in the laps of old men in the bar of Hotel San Poncho, a glimpse of breast cracking like a smile, and studying day-old issues of
El Diario;
even these girls, even in 1895, had heard of Pasadena, of the resort town blossoming in the orange groves, where five-hundred-room hotels sprouted beside the arroyos, and chambermaids and seamstresses and silver-polishers and ballroom-floor waxers were in greater demand than water.

“Why did you want to go there?” Linda pushed another load around the barrel. She herself had never seen Pasadena, had never thought much of it, had assumed it was a valley of rich girls, their shadows extending across croquet lawns.

“We had heard that peacocks lived in the trees and that every man had his own orange grove.” That, and there wasn’t a hotel in Pasadena that didn’t need a thin girl with quick hands who could bow to guests on the loggia and tuck satin-trimmed sheets beneath a bed’s corner. Valencia had also heard that Spanish was still useful in Alta California, especially in the kitchens and butler’s pantries and back staircases of Pasadena. Valencia had also heard it described as a land of freedom and prospect. “Because it’s all new up there,” Pavis explained as Valencia boarded the
Santa Susana
. “A girl like you can go there and in no time
marry a railroad baron or an electricity tycoon or a gentleman with five hundred acres of orange grove!”

“But how will I meet such a man?” asked Valencia.

“You’ll find a way!” said Pavis. “Be sure to wear a pretty dress when you arrive! Be sure to brush the nest out of your hair!”

With this counsel Valencia had boarded the
Santa Susana
. After the ship laid anchor in San Pedro Harbor she would slip ashore and never be seen again—at least that’s what she told herself on the voyage out, belowdecks, in an old side chair upholstered in bald velvet, where she slept sitting up. Soon, however, she learned that the captain, Señor Carillo—wide-pored and broader in the middle than at the shoulders—never intended to allow Valencia to leave the ship again. In the first month, Valencia sailed to San Pedro and back to Mazatlán, all the while studying the endless turning, denting, jagging line of the coast. When she returned to the waters off Mazatlán, the captain wouldn’t allow her to visit shore; from the ship’s rail she could see the distant Sierra Madre and the city’s red pantiles and she’d wonder, Where is Pavis? Beneath a fern hanging from a window? On a lap at the San Poncho? On one of the other freighters floating lazily in the harbor?

“It was on that second voyage,” Valencia told Linda, “that I swam ashore to Condor’s Nest. I thought I was swimming to Los Angeles. Turns out I was wrong.”

Wrong indeed, thought Linda. Her mother handed her a bundle of laundry wrapped up in a shirt, the sleeves tied like a bow. When Linda opened it she discovered a pile of undershirts made from a ribbed cotton that wasn’t sold at Margarita’s. Edmund’s undershirts were long-sleeved and of a thin wool that pilled; more than once, Linda had held up one of them and peered at the sun through the tiny holes in the wool, his faint odor fresh and warm on her face. But these undershirts were Bruder’s, stiff with sweat. They were larger than Edmund’s, hanging to Linda’s knees, almost as big as the sail she used to pitch on her dory. “He’s tall, isn’t he?” she said.

Valencia murmured, busy with Dieter’s long johns, unbuttoning the flaps.

“He’s got a funny smell, doesn’t he?”

“Who’s that?”

Linda, under her breath: “Oh, never mind.”

She wondered about it, about what type of body would heat up and
boil over in the pit of the arm like this, releasing an odor so powerful that it would have to pass twice through the roller. She pulled the shirt over her head.

“What’re you doing?”

Linda didn’t answer.

“Take it off. There’s work to do.”

“Look, Mama! It’s as big as a dress!” She held out her arms and twirled around, the ocean and the bluff and the fields becoming a blur, blue and sand and brown and green. She shut her eyes, and the roar of the ocean increased and the scent of the undershirt flooded her nostrils. It brushed her shins, the buttons tickled at her throat, and Linda continued to spin. Valencia said, pausing from her task, “Ay, Linda. Don’t you remind me of me.” She snapped her tongue nostalgically.

And that was what Linda was thinking, too. She wondered how her mother, who had proceeded with her young life so bravely, who had been beautiful too … how such a girl—a girl who could leap into the sea!—had settled into life at Condor’s Nest, hoeing the garden and feeding the mules and grinding the wash through the roller. How had her mother become her mother? Yes, that was the question Linda asked herself. How does anyone become who she is? Yes, the stories of Valencia’s youth reminded Linda of herself, but then something had happened. Valencia had become someone else—had it occurred overnight?—and all of this, while she twirled in Bruder’s undershirt, made Linda ask herself: What will happen to me?

“Give me that shirt.” Valencia pulled the shirt over Linda’s head, and Bruder’s scent drifted away.

Linda wondered what had changed since Valencia first swam ashore. El Camino Real had widened since then, the shoeless burros and the horses making way for the macadam and the automobiles. Not long after Linda’s birth, Dieter sold his easternmost land to a man expanding the width of the road to two lanes. The transaction reduced Condor’s Nest to twenty acres, including the arroyo. “Those automobiles are changing the world around us,” Linda could recall Dieter saying excitedly when she was very young. But by the time she was seven or eight, he began to say sourly, “Those automobiles are ruining everything around here. Next thing they’ll do is pave up the lagoon.” And that turned out to be almost true, as a bridge was run across Agua Apestosa so that the cars could save two miles rather than have to skirt its edge.
Linda learned that she liked the notion of progress more than her father did, and it puzzled her, her father’s grumpy acceptance of the future—the way his forehead would wrinkle and his nose would seemingly extend into a hook and his spiderweb beard would flap in a sunset breeze. He was becoming an old man, Linda could see.

Of course, Dieter resented the roads and the automobiles because, as he put it, everyone got rich on them but him. “That man made me hand over my land,” he’d say as he stood in his fields and watched the traffic hurry by.

“Why’d they make Papa sell his land?” Linda asked her mother as they continued with the wash.

“Nobody made your Papa do anything. He sold it to the first man to come along. If he’d waited another month, he would have gotten twice as much. Another year, four times.”

The clothesline was a triangle of rope staked to three cottonwood poles, protected from the wind by a screen of fan-palm fronds. The mayweed was in bloom, clusters of it around the poles, and Linda, soon bored, stopped pinning the clothes. She plucked the flowers, which looked like daisies but were, according to Edmund, poisonous—which had seemed unlikely to Linda, but since Edmund insisted it was true, she believed him. She linked the mayweed into a wreath and crowned herself, the flowers’ tiny weight as imperceptible as a tick on the scalp.

She returned to Bruder’s undershirts. They were heavy with water and now smelled of lye and the barrel’s hooped oak. The stains were gone, his smell was gone. She held a shirt up against the sun. All she could smell was the ocean and the light burning the shirt dry. She took two pins from her lard tin and clamped each shoulder to the line.

“You don’t have to do that.”

“Who else is going to do it?”

“I’ll do it myself,” said Bruder.

“That’ll be the day.”

“I didn’t ask you to do this.”

He was leaning against one of the poles, his dungarees wet up to the knees, and staring at her in that way of his, with his chin hard with whisker, the corner of his mouth up as if he were about to make a rude sucking noise. What did he want? He sometimes wished Linda would cough up the question. If she were to ask, he would tell her. What no one knew about Bruder was that he was a cautious man, careful not to
step into unfamiliar danger. He had learned as a boy in Pasadena to know his enemy; it had saved his life at the Children’s Training Society, and in the beechwood forest in France—his enemy had never been who he seemed.

“Why are you wearing daisies on your head?”

Linda touched her hair and felt the wreath. She must’ve looked silly, like a girl who thought she was a princess. “Oh, this …? Why, these aren’t daisies. You don’t know very much, do you? This is mayweed. And you better be careful, because it’s poisonous. You better be careful if you can’t tell the difference.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“No, it isn’t
what
?”

“Mayweed isn’t poisonous.” And then, “No more poisonous than you or me.”

She was about to curl her fist and say, Oh yes it is! But she stopped herself. Yes, Bruder would ask her where she had learned something like that, and she would have to tell him it was Edmund; and Bruder would laugh, his mouth open so wide that she could see into the black cave of his throat.

From behind his back he produced an orange, and he began tossing it in the air and catching it. “Come with me.” Bruder moved to her. He threw her the orange. Imprinted on its rind was a faint blue stamp:

PASA

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I want to show you something.”

“What?”

“Just come.” His shadow fell across the laundry basket. Linda felt a rise in her pulse as he stole the orange from her palm.

“I’ve got laundry. What about Mama?”

“We’ll be back.”

“Where are we going?” His hand took hers, and it seemed as if her hand belonged to someone else: a free little hand caught in Bruder’s hot paw.

He ran to the edge of the bluff and Linda followed, the basket of laundry turning over behind her. She wondered if anyone could see them, if Valencia, whose eyes were puffy and bruised with fatigue,
was standing in the kitchen and looking out to the ocean, witnessing them sprint away.

He had seen something on the beach that frightened him and he wanted to show Linda, to see if it frightened her as well. They would share their apprehension, and Bruder predicted that Linda would reach for him and then he would hold her and his arms would fall around her and he would have her and they would rock as the tide ran over their feet.

They ran quickly down the path, Bruder’s feet kicking dirt and rock, his hands, extended for balance, grabbing vines of ice plant, the fleshy triangular leaves snapping. Linda followed, losing her balance and grabbing for the purple flowers. She didn’t stop, she slipped and ran farther, one pace behind Bruder. When he turned and called “Are you all right?” she hollered, “I know this path better than you.” The truth was, she’d never run down it so fast, and there was a part of her, a dark pulsing part, that feared she would lose her balance and tumble forward into Bruder and pull them both off the face of the cliff to the rocky beach below. This didn’t scare her, only sent her heart racing faster, so that she became overwhelmed by her own heat, her forehead releasing a sheet of sweat across her face. Her blood was flowing so fast through her body that it felt as if something in her was changing just then, as if what she felt for Bruder was somehow replacing an earlier emotion. Bruder’s arms stretched parallel to the earth, as steady as the line of the horizon, and he transfixed Linda: the smooth bump of bone that grew at the base of his neck, the tendril of hair creeping down toward his spine, the chapped elbows, pink and white like valentines, the rear pocket in his dungarees stuffed with an old kerchief that Linda had seen him use to pull back his hair in a warrior manner. She was wet with her own perspiration and dizzy, and then she lost balance, the soil crumbling beneath her. Linda fell forward against Bruder, and he fell as well, downward, their bodies pressed, but they were only a few feet from the beach and they landed, chest to chest, in the sand.