Pasadena (22 page)

“No son of mine succumbs to the wayward heart,” Dieter said with a shiver, and in private he made a proposal to Bruder, an adjustment to their earlier deal. “You’ve been like a son,” said Dieter. “You’ve never betrayed me. One day, maybe soon, Condor’s Nest will be yours.” Dieter said he wanted to make sure that the farm never passed to Fraulein Carlotta or her offspring. “So I’m leaving it to you.” He paused. “Ah, Bruder. Didn’t I say in the forests of France that I would repay you?”

“We made another deal.”

“Yes, but this is a better one. The farm will be yours when I die.”

“Why not give it to Linda?”

“To my daughter?”

“If it’s Linda’s, then it will become her husband’s. Do you see how we can accomplish two things at once?”

“But what if I don’t approve of her husband?”

And Bruder understood. Dieter was trying to back out of the deal they had made in France, the deal that had first brought Bruder to Condor’s Nest and to Linda. If he didn’t take Dieter up on his new offer, perhaps in the end he’d wind up with nothing; and if things worked out as he hoped, Bruder would have both Linda and the farm. Bruder pondered the inevitable: for as he saw it, fate would always have its way—its hand large and strong-fingered and turning each of them here and there upon its great checkered playing board. He felt that if Condor’s Nest was to become his, it was meant to be. And what about Linda? Bruder had begun to feel that she too was meant to be his. That he no longer needed a father’s promise to gain a daughter’s affection. Of course, deep down Bruder was a paranoid man; hadn’t Captain Poore pointed this out behind the lines, forest-dappled sunlight across his face? But Bruder did not think of himself as paranoid; what man does? Yet he would saunter on instinct, strike out of self-preservation. And what Dieter was offering—“She’s a humble farm, but she will be yours; I have the papers right here”—was the type of preservation Bruder
understood best. What was it the newspaper once said?: “Back east a man is defined by his education and his clubs. Here in California it is by his parcel of land.” An unanswered letter to the editor had asked:
And where, my good sirs, is a man defined by his heart?

Dieter spoke to Bruder in the night. The moon was a bright, feminine frown behind a cloudy veil, and neither Dieter nor Bruder could see clearly the other’s face; but each was certain that the other was recalling their private scene in the forest—the night one man discovered the other in treasonous pursuit. “Let’s forget about this,” they had agreed under the shells of battle, in the summer of 1918.

Except nothing is forgotten, not in war, not at home; not when a man is owed.

“You’re my son now,” Dieter said after the papers were signed. “Do you know what this means?”

Bruder said he did, but he did not.

“It means you’ll grow old on the farm and watch over me and the land, and you’ll be picking onions until your back breaks, but at least you’ll have a place to call home, a stretch of land no one can take from you for anything.”

Bruder thanked Dieter, although he knew that this deal would mean more than that.

“And another thing,” said Dieter. “Part of this deal has to do with Linda.”

“Yes, I know.”

“You’re my son now. She’s my daughter. As a matter of speaking, you’re brother and sister. Siblings.”

“Siblings?”

“Everything you see will be yours, but you’ll have to forget all about Linda. Trust me, it’s for the best.” He paused, and then said something that revealed how Dieter truly felt: “She’s too much. And you’re not enough.”

“Even with the farm?”

“One or the other,” said Dieter, whose assets were few and who could not afford to give them away unless a debt was due. He set his weakening hand upon Bruder’s shoulder and tried to rock him playfully, but Bruder didn’t budge.

It wasn’t a gift, Bruder saw, but a proposal, and Bruder instinctively pushed its ring past his knuckle and wed himself to its terms. Like any
good speculator, in the end he was a cautious man. He was risk-averse, certain that destiny was set against him. And in the end, like every proprietor, he would crave more.

Bruder accepted Dieter’s offer. He would live with it, as best he could. And then one day she would come to him, and he would have both.

But Linda, almost seventeen, knew nothing of deals and terms and compromise; nothing of promises made in secret, especially those concerning her. The conflicted heart Bruder presented her she simply didn’t understand: the man who had held her outside the Cocoonery, his hand raking her hair, a week later declined to join her in the outrigger canoe. He ignored her plea to go fishing; he took no interest in the reslatting and the netting of her lobster pots. He said “No” when asked if he would stop by her cottage in the evening. At this point in her young life, Linda was capable of love, capable of giving and receiving pleasure, certain in her ability to grip the bloody handles of a throbbing heart. But she was incapable of accepting rejection. And the autumn turned to winter and the first rains fell, and Linda’s complaints to Valencia went unexplained, and how does a girl whose own heart has flip-flopped like a fish dying on a dock withstand another heart’s turning against her? Within a few weeks she had lost both Edmund and Bruder, and lying awake at night, listening to the ocean crashing violently, she came to regret that neither had ever been hers. And she asked herself, over and over: What have I done?

“In time,” Valencia would say, and it was all Linda had to go on: her mother’s knowing words, a soothing voice paved by the long years of life.

And when Linda told Charlotte that Bruder had gone cold, Charlotte said, “I’m afraid that’s just the way it is.” It was brittle solace. “There’s no resetting a man’s heart. What’s done is done is done forever.” But Linda thought that Charlotte didn’t know—why, Charlotte knew nothing but the daily breeze!—and Linda propped her chin upon her knees and picked at the scabs with her teeth and told herself that if anyone could defy destiny, it was she.

In January 1920
, Linda turned seventeen and a winter storm arrived gray-fisted and angry-faced, running off the Pacific. Dieter celebrated her birthday with his violin’s
Zeltmusik
, and Valencia told Linda that when she was a girl in Mazatlán she had hoped to become a shrimp fisherman. One day she and Pavis had entered the children’s
torneo de pesca
with nothing but a stolen rowboat and their eyelet skirts sewn as trawls, and they rowed back and forth off the peninsula where the lighthouse loomed, with the Sierra Madre behind it, and they hauled more pounds of shrimp than anyone else, boy or girl, but the fishermen refused to give two girls first prize, a tiny sterling shrimp with coral eyes. This was when Pavis first decided she had to lead her friend out of the city, and years later, at the little birthday celebration for Linda, Valencia said, “And now, Linda, here you are.” But this time Linda found no comfort in her mother’s tale, and she turned to the cold window, its glass streaked with salty rain.

The rains fell for five days, melting footpaths across the onion fields and eroding the route to the beach. The ocean’s rage was so fierce that one morning it hurled a barking grouper against the door of Linda’s cottage, its gills gasping with plea. Over the years, Linda had come to expect the January thunderheads: the flooding rains evicting the earthworms from their holes, their slimy trails iridescent on the threshold; the hailstones snapping the clothesline; the tide boiling and exploding against the bluff, tufts of sea-foam tossed against her sill. Linda believed she could manage in a January rain: she had launched her outrigger into a nine-foot surf on New Year’s Day; she had held back a shiver in the
schoolhouse, her stockings draped across the stove’s belly; more than once she had caught what Edmund used to call
the end of her
, her lungs as sodden as the soil.

But this year was different, she believed. “Have you ever seen rain fall for this many days?” she asked Dieter, who wrung the water out of his beard and told her that once he’d lived through a storm in Schwarzwald that raged for exactly twenty-one days in a flimsy house with rafters greasy from the pork smoke rising from the stove. When she asked Valencia, her mother only said,
“El diluvio.”
Had Bruder ever experienced rain like this? “I fought in France in an open trench,” he said through the screen door. “Now go on. I’m busy.” “You’re always too busy for me,” she complained. “Not always,” he said. “Only lately.” And then: “Linda, one day you’ll understand.” Through the wet screen he seemed to want her to linger on his stoop; and it was true: Bruder wanted to invite her in, although not quite as much as he wanted his future secured to the anchor of a plot of land. Was he too young a man to have such a cold heart? No, once the compromises begin, they never end. Even so, the heavy weeks of avoiding Linda had begun to pile upon his shoulders, and several times a day he wondered if he had entered into an arrangement he could not uphold. “I’ll speak to you later, Linda,” he said. And when she was gone: “Be patient, Linda.”

Linda would have taken her question about the rains to Edmund, student of almanacs, but after his argument with Dieter, Edmund set out to follow Fraulein Carlotta through foothill towns up and down California, waiting for her each night in the flimsy six-sided tent as she sang and revealed just enough flesh—breasts and belly swelling heavier by the day—to inspire showers of coins. She’d dance with the men who would pay to stroke her hips, and when she returned to the tent the money went into a headless kachina doll. “When are we moving back to that little farm of yours?” she kept asking, for Carlotta was in a hurry, and he would say, “As soon as they finish building our new house. It’ll be two stories, with a fireplace in every room,” he promised, nearly believing the fantasy himself. He married Carlotta before the cold hearth of Salinas’s justice of the peace—a marriage reported home on a postcard.

No, Edmund wasn’t around for the January rains. He had left before he could see his dam in the arroyo successfully catch the runoff. As
the rains continued and the water rose, Linda, sitting on her brother’s empty bed and stroking the mattress lumps, decided to name the yawning black pond “Siegmund’s Swamp.”

She might have asked Charlotte what she knew about rainfall records and the history of storms. But not a month after Edmund’s departure, Charlotte was gone too. Her father, a tall eel of a man, returned from his seal runs up north. After her story about the Cocoonery appeared in the
Bee
, nearly every fisherman within thirty miles wanted to tie Charlotte up and drop her to the bottom of the ocean, and Hammond Moss didn’t want to have a daughter loathed by men of the sea. “What good will it do you?” he said. And then: “Enough of this newspapering for you.” He was a man who spoke slowly, as if he had a limited pool of words to choose from, and he was more interested in getting along with the other sealers than in his daughter’s hopes and pursuits. His wife had died in childbirth, and that was the last time he had shed a tear. He liked that his daughter was a tough-hearted storyteller, but he didn’t like her planning a life that might somehow surpass his. Hammond Moss was an average shot, his rifle not always steady in his hand, and there were many men who harpooned more elephant seals, but nobody in the poop could tell a better yarn than he. He kept many a crew awake through calm, ice-starry nights, and what made Hammond Moss such a good storyteller—although he never knew this about himself—was that he didn’t worry whether or not he was telling the truth. “It all might as well be true,” he would say, and the men would shake their damp beards and agree. He had expected his daughter to marry another sealer so that he could retire to his blackie, Charlotte tending him while her husband was at sea. But upon returning from his latest run, Hammond could see clearly that Charlotte possessed—was possessed by!—ambitions that precluded him. Ritualistically, he dropped Charlotte’s notepads and pencils into the ocean and returned to his chair with the springs poking lumpily and said, “Now what’s for dinner?” And within a week, Charlotte was gone and it would be a long time before anyone heard from her again.

And so during that wet January, Linda found herself moping at Margarita’s counter. “Linda, forget about the rain. Why don’t you go over to the beauty cabinet and fix yourself up?” She scooted Linda to the far side of the shop, all the while
tsk
ing that Edmund would return,
Wait and see
. “Give this one a try.” Margarita passed Linda a sample tin of La
Doré’s Rubyline rouge, an eighteen-cent bottle of milk of cucumber for the throat, and a jar of orange-flower skin food for the buckling brow. “Nothing like a little beauty to help the days go by.” And Margarita, who every night applied a Parisian depilatory to her upper lip, sent Linda home with a contraption called the Princess Bust Developer Kit. It came with a jar of bust food, a white cream prepared, according to the label, from vegetable oils and charcoal by an eminent French chemist at the Seroco Chemical Laboratory in Chicago, Ill. “Before you go to bed, work the cream into your …” And Margarita had kneaded the loaves of her own breasts in demonstration. Later that night, in the quiet of her cottage, Linda followed these instructions. With the rain steady on the roof, Linda carefully unbuttoned her blouse and worked the lardy cream into the underside of her breasts, into the inner flesh where they met, into the coin of her penny-hard nipples. The label promised “a plump full rounded bosom,” but Linda wondered if she wouldn’t be able to grow that on her own. She couldn’t precisely say why she was doing this. She doubted the bust food’s claims even as she scooped more cream from the jar, following Margarita’s instructions to do so until her breasts were as slippery as a skinned hen.

The next step involved an instrument called the Developer, a plungerlike contraption made from nickel and aluminum, with a rubber cup at the end. “You’ll know what to do with it,” Margarita had said. The nickel rim was cold on Linda’s flesh, and she thought of the etching of the Norse goddesses hanging above Dieter’s bed: the breastplates, like helmets, worn by women with long double braids. Linda gently pushed the Developer’s handle and it squeezed her right breast. A heat rose in her chest; and then a remote ache surfaced between her legs. She pushed again and a sucking noise emerged as the Developer clamped her flesh, brushing her nipple and sparking something deep in her lonely chest. She had never felt this before: the longing intensifying as she pushed and pulled more and more. It was somehow connected to a tingle between her thighs—an unfamiliar yet distinguishable desire linking every point in her body. She shifted the developer to her left breast. The sense of swelling expanded. Perspiration collected around her mouth, on her nape, on her inner leg. She tasted her own heat on her lip, wondering if it was saltier than ever before, but could that be possible? Margarita had told Linda to repeat the pushing action on each breast twenty-five times, but no more. As she applied the final sucking
pressure, regret and dissatisfaction flooded Linda, and her life—which just months before had seemed full of promise—loomed dully. She fell back onto her bed and the Developer dropped to the floor and her breasts were greasy and slick and the air in the cottage was warm with effluvia. The rain was violent at the window and the ocean thrashed and Linda couldn’t fall asleep, and she expected to spend the rest of her life awake and waiting, a girl with nothing to look forward to.