Pasadena (37 page)

Lolly knew what power she possessed over her brother, and that a tilted chin and a chest lifted in mid-sigh could get him to agree to anything. Because she was undernourished, her breasts were small, and she hid them under a corset that flattened them against her ribs, as if it were her intent to conceal her body’s every curve. If one of the maids were to accidentally see the dark rosy circles of her nipples, Lolly would fling herself atop her canopied bed as if she had been violated. She was a woman obsessed by preservation, not of her home or her land or her city or even her happiness, but of her childhood’s odorless, bloodless flesh. She saw this pursuit as her greatest virtue, and because she had achieved it with near success, she perceived herself as too innocent to be flawed.

Willis, on the other hand, was just mature enough to recognize a few of his shortcomings, and one of those was his weak skill, and limited interest, in ranching. And this was why he needed Bruder. At least that was how Rosa explained it to Linda. “Not that he doesn’t enjoy the life of an orange heir.” Landholdings vast and wired off, fence posts bent from golden bobcats rubbing their backs against them. Willis kept horses down at the ranch house, and even now, with pavement creeping closer to the Pasadena’s perimeter, each week he rode once or twice into his land, along the bottom spine of the dry arroyo, in the purple cleave of a foothill canyon, shading his horse beneath a live-oak older than California itself and vital with the delicate
seee, seee
of a waxwing. Yet despite the occasional pleasure of the rusty buckwheat catching in his cuff, if it were up to Willis he’d never clip another orange. His father had had hair as bright as a tangerine, and in his lifetime he’d picked and packed a hundred million oranges, he estimated with admirable exaggeration. When Willis was five, his father had given him his first bamboo ladder and a pair of picking gloves and a shiner pole, and from that day on, Willis perpetually hunted an excuse to avoid the harvest. Nothing
had really worked until the war rumbled along. After the eleven months in France he spent a semester at Princeton, admitted as a war hero. More than once he’d passed out in a pile of elm leaves on Nassau Street, his tongue pickled by the best bathtub gin in New Jersey. He hadn’t minded the cold descending autumn; he battled it in a coyote coat that dragged along the campus paths, and he told his prissy easterner friends about shooting lynx from his bedroom window and wrestling grizzlies. He promised a couple of sophomores to bag them green-eyed cougars over the Christmas break. These were boys raised in woolen-felt topcoats trimmed with burgundy velvet, sons of stockbrokers and the presidents of rubber-belt manufacturers, young men who felt connected to the wild by donning a penguin-skin top hat. Drunk in a secret paneled room deep within a Gothic, gargoyled hall, Willis would often ask the eastern boys how they could even be sure they were
alive
? They promised to take Willis to New York, to a hotel near the Bowery called the Baby Bijoux, where the bonnetless girls would prove they were all
much more
than alive. “But then there was a shipwreck that lost a quarter of the harvest,” Rosa explained. “No one knew why Willis had put his oranges on a boat. Lolly made him come home to oversee the property. I helped her write the telegram. ‘Ranch in trouble. Your return expected immediately.’ She paid Western Union with trembling hand.”

And then Rosa revealed something, coyly tossing it out as if she knew how it would ring against Linda’s heart: “That’s when he asked Bruder to come up to the ranch.”

“But why Bruder?”

“Because of what happened in France.”

“What happened in France?”

“You don’t know?” And then, with a careful face: “You
don’t
know, do you? So many secrets slip out of this house, I forget which ones the roof has held tight. It’s nothing.” And Rosa sent Linda down the hill with the box of groceries, the carton heavy and awkward and the sunlight in her eyes. Linda thought of the oranges on the beach and the pregnant girl in the mouth of the cave and she knew that Willis couldn’t be the man Rosa was describing, and just then Linda decided not to believe anything Rosa had said, nothing at all.

And when Willis caught up with Linda on the road he took the box from her and said, “I hope you know enough never to listen to her.” He
said that Rosa was a hardworking girl: “Too good to fire—no, I’d never do that. Her mother was like a mother to me. I’d never think of throwing her out. But trust me when I tell you that Rosa …” And Willis hesitated until his eyes had caught and secured Linda’s stare. “… is a girl made up of lies.”

Bruder was right
, and by the first of November rain arrived, the sky low and turning like the underside of the ocean, and a two-day downpour softened and loosened the hill road into a muddy chute. The irrigation ditches ran with dirty water, yellow foam quivering, and the kitchen roof leaked and the window by Linda’s bed swelled in its case. One morning while returning from the house with the groceries Linda slipped, the box of food sliding out of her hands and over the edge of the road, a pot roast (“For you!” Lolly had said) lost to the coyotes. Then Bruder met her on the road and opened an umbrella over her. The mud had splattered her skirt like bloodstains and her hair lay wet and flat round her face. He found her beautiful like this—strong, but quiet; and during the moments when Linda needed him most, Bruder could imagine a future that held them together in its palm. “You’ll need better boots,” he said. In the ranch house he gave her a box from the Pasadena Grocery & Department Store, and inside, beneath leaves of lettuce-colored tissue, were two red rubber boots lined with checked cloth. He knelt and dried her feet and then helped her put them on. He had seen them in the window and thought of Linda, and now, as he told her this, she felt a stir within. She tested the boots down the long narrow hall in the ranch house, her hands on her hips. He leaned in the doorframe and watched, happy that she liked the gift, and Linda said that she would wear them through the season, and because Bruder was guileless and had nothing to hide—or so he told himself—he cheerfully said, “I bought Rosa a pair, too.”

“Rosa?”

Bruder failed to see the hardening pique in Linda’s eye; he missed
the jealousy curling her fists. She said that she was busy and had to return to the kitchen. She said good-bye efficiently, and again Bruder didn’t correctly read her emotions, and he left Linda for the packinghouse content—as much as a young man like Bruder is ever content—that he had brought simple joy to two girls, and he pondered the similarities between Linda and Rosa and he came up with more than a few.

Why did Bruder misunderstand Linda so completely? It was a question she asked herself, flipping about in her bed, but one he never put upon his own conscience. If he had, he might have realized that over the years he had come to expect people to speak their minds. He had grown up with Mrs. Banning sucking her cheek and saying to him, “Sometimes you make me wonder if you’re all there.” And the children at the Valley Hunt Club, screaming through the window of the kitchen where Bruder sweated as he mashed the bananas for the angel-cream pies: “Freak! Freak! Bruder can’t speak!” And Rosa, a young woman with a wise soul, leaning into him softly: “I don’t know what I’d do if I didn’t have a friend like you.” She was the closest he had to a friend, and Rosa knew of his desire to marry Linda and build a small cabin on the far side of the orange grove, and when Rosa asked if Captain Poore would permit him to do that, Bruder said, “He doesn’t have a choice.” He couldn’t step back and see himself this way, but the truth was that in Linda’s presence his own heart became as inscrutable as hers. The truth was that Bruder could plainly see the bald motives, the good and the evil, of everyone in the world but Linda and himself. And Rosa had said, “That’s true love,” and Bruder had replied, “I wouldn’t know.”

But when the rain stopped two days later, Bruder was too busy to further ponder the delicate mysteries of the heart. He was a workingman and he had work to do, although what drove him was greater than the simple need of wage and food. The hands were arriving for the season—boys short and tall, all of them underfed and silky-whiskered and in patched cotton trousers. They were no more than a year or two out of the orphanages in Tecate and Mexicali or along the Rio Grande, floaters who traveled up and down California’s long fertile belly from orange ranches and lettuce farms to strawberry fields and white-grape vineyards, and they were still young enough to be grateful for work and
willing to sleep on any bunk or floor. They arrived at the Rancho Pasadena in the buckboard, fetched from the Raymond Street Station by Hearts and Slay. Each carried a tiny sack with his blanket and his poncho, his picking gloves and a second pair of socks and any mementos the nuns at the orphanage had given him in memory of his parents. They were sixteen or fifteen or fourteen years old, downy cheeks, trembling Adam’s apples, early hair on concave chests. A handful had worked at the Pasadena last season, but most were new, and Hearts and Slay spent two days explaining how to efficiently pick a tree clean while Bruder checked their sacks and bedrolls for guns and knives. One boy was carrying a bowie knife in his underpants, and when Bruder found it in a frisk he kept the knife for himself and drove the boy to the Pasadena’s gate and sent him off with a silver dollar.

This year’s hands were especially young, and Bruder worried about their inexperience. On the loggia, he complained to Willis and Lolly, interrupting their game of backgammon, that the ranch needed a better set of pickers. “Relax, Bruder old man,” said Willis. But Lolly echoed Bruder in a tiny chirp: “Willis? Maybe he’s right?”

During their first days at the ranch, Bruder lectured the hands by holding up a long bamboo pole and asking, “Any of you know what this is?” The boys shook their pimply chins. “It’s a shiner pole. After you’ve picked a tree clean, I check to make sure there aren’t any oranges left. If there are, they’ll shine like a light in the dark. If any tree has three or more shiners, I’ll send you back to finish it off yourself.” The boys were sitting on crates with their hair-sprouting knees out, and they looked at one another and each was thinking that the season would be all right if they stayed clear of Mr. Bruder. Each boy saw Bruder’s enormous hands—hands that were both thick and quick—and each boy could imagine the fingers tightened into blocklike fists or stroking a rifle barrel. And when they saw Captain Poore—starched collar, and hair bright as gold, and the medal thumping against his breast—each boy easily believed that Captain Poore would feed him more and pay him more if old Bruder wasn’t around to tell him not to. The boys were young and new to Pasadena, and because of this they could clearly see how things were at the Rancho Pasadena—or so they thought.

The days after the rain had stopped were cold and windy, and the small valley dried out the way parched land quickly gives back its first drink of water. In the morning the orange grove appeared freshly
painted, the fruit dewy and illumed like glass balls. A carpet of lime-green clover had pushed its way through the topsoil, and the rubber-aproned gardeners, commandeered by Nitobe-san, began rolling and reseeding the mansion’s lawn. Shortly after dawn one morning the ice wagon delivered the Yuen family. Rosa had said that the Yuens shuffled around the ranch in silk pajamas and conical hats, but this wasn’t true at all and Linda didn’t know why she’d said it. No, the Yuens arrived in work trousers and shirts patched with burlap from pistachio sacks, and they said they were ready to work: “Let’s begin today!” a young man cried, but Bruder slowed him down, saying that there was work to do before the picking could begin. Linda watched the Yuens unload their furniture from the ice wagon, bedrolls and a red-lacquer table and heavy bags of rice and a rocking chair, and they settled so quickly into the adobe house that Linda didn’t know how many had arrived until she knocked on the door and it turned out there were only four. A young man named Muir Yuen, peering through the crack of the barely open door, told Linda that they preferred to cook for themselves, and then an old, blue hand opened the door farther and a woman asked Linda in for tea. Mrs. Yuen laid out a tray, and cups painted with cranes, and a dented tin pot. She and Linda spoke about the upcoming harvest, and Mrs. Yuen, who was ninety-two, tapped the ring of jade around her wrist and declared it to be a good year for the orange. Her mouth was a soft line clamped upon the rim of her teacup, and she said, pronouncing Linda’s name as Valencia once had—
Leen-da
—“You must watch out for yourself, Linda.” And then, “Some things never change.”

In the mornings, Linda would return to the pantry and Rosa would greet her, and although Linda disliked Rosa she did her best not to show it. She said little as Rosa packed the crate, and though Linda assumed that Rosa didn’t like her either, nearly every day she sent Linda off with an extra treat in her box: a sack of walnuts, a bag of Cupid chips, a tin of butter crackers cut into the shapes of kings and queens. And often Lolly would send Linda back down the hill with a special package of meat wrapped in bloody paper: “For the men,” Lolly would say.

During the final days before the harvest, everyone was busy nailing the packing crates and the field boxes, sewing the flaps onto picking bags, mending bamboo ladders, and test-running the equipment in the packinghouse. The conveyor belts were tried out and repaired, the rind-brushers replaced, the hoses tightened and taped. A representative
of the California Fruit Growers Exchange, one Mr. Griffith, a lumpy man in serge suit and vest who looked as if he’d never picked an orange in his life, came to measure the scales. Willis was at the ranch house to meet Griffith, and relief entered his face as Griffith told him that all was fine with the packing scales. The man drove off in his pressed-steel Tipo 8, his great round head lolling behind the wheel, and later Rosa told Linda that every November, Bruder had to pay Griffith off: “And Captain Poore is too oblivious to know that’s how things are done.” And again, Linda didn’t believe her. This time she told Rosa so, and the girl’s face froze with surprise. She said, “Linda. I’m only watching out for you.”