Pasadena (42 page)

Often, as he returned from Titleyville, Bruder would catch up with Linda on her way back from the Webb House, and he would slow the truck and follow her, and by now it would be dark and the stars would sparkle like the ice-dust on the ice-house floor. She would be sitting erect on the wagon seat, pulling and snapping and tucking the reins with small, confident movements of her hands, like a seamstress who could perform expert work blindfolded. The
clop-clop
of the hooves would compete with the cough and gasp of the old truck, and she would turn her neck and the sliver of her smile would gleam. She hadn’t been in Pasadena long, but even so she was settling into a patterned day, and Bruder’s heart lurched, as he watched her steer the wagon out of the Arroyo Seco and up onto Park Avenue and into the Linda Vista hills, because her routine had yet to fully incorporate him.
From time to time he wished he had known her before he had gone to war, before he had become the man he was; then she would understand him better. It was an illogical desire—for didn’t he know Linda precisely
because
of the war?—but wasn’t that the case with most things a man wants? Why bother to yearn at all, if not for the unobtainable?

And yearn he did—steadily, like a low, blue flame—and Bruder knew that one day he would be a wealthy man and would share his fortune with Linda, and he decided then, on a crisp night as Linda’s wagon and his truck reached the rancho’s gate, that he would no longer allow her to push him away; he couldn’t wait anymore.

And during these evening trips home, Linda, guiding the wagon into the foothills, would be aware of Bruder’s eyes on her, and she knew he was thinking of her and she thought of many things but mostly of him: and it was as if the wagon crossed the city on its own, as if she were blind and merely being led along. The truck was loud but soothing, gently overwhelming the horse’s stomping and snorts and rubber-lipped bray, and it wouldn’t be long, she knew, before the horse would remain forever on the ranch, corralled by a sagging string of barbed wire, and the wagon would be broken up, its planks cut down for orange crates.

On each trip to the Webb House a different girl would sit up on the seat next to Linda, and each girl would eagerly tell her something about the ranch. “Bruder scares me,” said one. “I don’t think Captain Poore likes Bruder very much,” said another. The girls were still young enough to speak dreamily, holding their chins in their unjustly rough fists while the slow mare pulled them along. After a week of runs to the Webb House and back—Mrs. Webb waving from the pink-trimmed porch with her suspicion retreating a bit further each night—Linda realized that the girls perceived her as somehow different from themselves, as if her slot in the ranch’s order was far above their own. It was true, of course, and she pondered over how she had managed this fate, and it confirmed her suspicion that her life was hers to plan and achieve. Those who say they are pawns of a cruel, invisible will don’t know what they are talking about, Linda would think. Once, Esperanza asked, “Would you mind speaking to Captain Poore for me? About my taking on some of the sewing in the house? I’ll do it at night.” At first, Linda had stared at the girl, startled by the notion that she, Linda, had any more access to Willis than anyone else. How had Esperanza known
this before Linda realized it herself? At first, it was difficult for her to see that the more time she spent at the Pasadena, the more possibilities were opening before her. But that was the case, and Linda gradually came to believe that her improving future was a matter of her own doing.

Despite herself, she wondered what the mansion was like inside, and how it felt to stare out of the many-paned windows rather than in. Through a window she had once seen the double staircase that rose from the gallery, and Linda imagined herself upon the carpeted landing, her fingers on the hand-cast rail. She had seen dozens of Lolly’s lace-trimmed and silk-lined dresses lying flat and lifeless on the ironing board, Rosa’s strong arm pushing out the creases. But Linda was slow to recognize the tendrils of envy creeping about her heart; she failed to recognize the wingflap within her chest. Her longing was soaring but aimless, and would remain so until the day it found its nest.

One Sunday evening a few weeks before Christmas, Linda served the hands their supper and washed the teetering stack of dishes and cleaned the kitchen for the upcoming week. The weather was cold and the men were tired, and before she finished her work most everyone had gone to bed. The previous night, an isolated frost had settled on a few low-lying acres of the grove, and half a dozen hands had to divide the night into three shifts, stoking a few orchard-heaters in the spots where the cold air tended to get trapped. The paper reported that this night would be warmer, but Bruder wouldn’t let them take the risk: six men were to spend the night among an acre of trees, their breath fogging their faces. Nothing made the hands grouchier than a frost, and they’d stumble through the dark cursing the winter and Bruder and Captain Poore, who tonight had sent word down the hill that the mansion needed an extra cord of firewood right away. A couple of men delivered the wood and returned and said, “Those two were meant for each other.” Then the hands drew lots, and the losers wrapped themselves in blankets and headed into the grove, lighting the small platoon of heaters. They’d let them burn for an hour, then put them out and drag them twenty feet down the grove to the next quadrant of trees. It was a cold, tedious, sooty task, and no one wanted to do it, despite the extra two dollars Bruder paid each man, money that came from his own pocket, something no one knew.

The kitchen was at the far end of the ranch house, down the dark
hall, and the faint sound of doors latching traveled to Linda—first Hearts and Slay’s, then Bruder’s, the click and fall of the guillotine-shape bolts. The window over the sink displayed the ranch in the winter-dark, and the grove was like a night ocean, calm waves of trees, the flickering heaters the deck lights of a distant ship. She thought she saw Bruder hauling a heater, but that didn’t make sense, for hadn’t she heard his door close just a minute before? And she thought she heard a shout in the grove, but the coyotes were crying and the wind whistled down the hill and maybe she hadn’t heard his door latching after all. She heard yelling again, this time someone calling,
“¡Cuidado!”
The men would ruin their picking gloves carrying and lighting the heaters all night, and she felt bad that they’d have to pay for new pairs out of their wages, and she thought that perhaps in the morning she’d recommend to Bruder that he forgive the cost of the gloves. And if Bruder said no, she would appeal to Willis. She didn’t know that Bruder had already bought the men new gloves; there was so little she knew.

Linda finished her kitchen work after eleven and set four pots of water on the stove for her bath. In the corner of the kitchen was a coffin-shape zinc tub, its lip brittle and cold. Linda filled it with hot water and drizzled in some orange oil, the drops gold and glistening. The steam touched her throat, and she drew the curtain, sewn by her own needle, across the kitchen window. A small oval mirror revealed her face, and it struck her that there were times when she didn’t recognize herself anymore: she had become a woman different from the one she’d imagined. Years ago she had thought that one day she’d become the captain of a fishing boat; or maybe a clerk at Margarita’s counter; or perhaps she would grow old overseeing Condor’s Nest. Even six months ago, how could she have guessed that the ocean farm would fade so quickly away? She thought of Edmund, and she imagined him down the coast: stoking the fire and struggling with the fishing rods and bundling Palomar into his blankets and easing Dieter into bed. There’d been more letters, and she had failed to answer them yet again. They were in a pile beneath her pillow, and when she saw them she turned sharply, wishing they’d go away, and the longer they went unanswered the more she resented her brother for having written in the first place. She turned off the kitchen light and sat on the tub’s lip and unbuttoned her blouse and stepped out of her skirt and saw in the mirror the way the straps of her camisole fell across her shoulders and cupped her
breasts, and despite the crisp night she found herself warm within her body’s coves. The steam softened her skin and dampened her underclothes, and she looked forward to slipping into the water and sitting knee-to-chin until the water chilled. She hung her clothes on a hanger and began to peel a strap from her shoulder, and just as she was about to shimmy into nakedness, the doorknob shook and the door opened and in its frame was Bruder.

His mouth opened and he struggled to speak and a hot wave of embarrassment soaked him: “There was no light in the window,” he said. “I thought you’d gone to bed. I didn’t mean to …” He was so surprised that he didn’t move, and the kitchen was dark but for the moonlight that exposed her bare arms and legs, the long, pale stem of her throat, and the square of flesh beneath her shoulders and above her breasts, crisp and fresh and white. “I wouldn’t have come had I …” Bruder tried again, and again he couldn’t finish. His hand remained on the knob, and Linda remained in her camisole on the lip of the tub, and despite the cold night she became even warmer, the steam reaching up for her, turning her flesh sticky, and it felt as if Bruder was shooting his heat at her too, and he could see this—he sensed her face opening and ripening before him. She couldn’t move, and Bruder had succumbed to the same desire, and they stared at each other, their faces as clear as they’d ever been, and maybe for the first time each understood what the other wanted, and the night was black and the stars distant but bright, and Linda stared at him and said, “You were looking for me.”

Bruder inched toward her, and before either of them knew it he had crossed the kitchen and was taking her in his arms and they were kissing. A coyote howled, and she jumped, but his hand held her firmly to his chest. Beneath the camisole she was wearing nothing, and he could feel every shiver of her skin through the fake silk, and the tiny straps slipped from her shoulders, and the last thing she was wearing fell away and she was naked against his clothed body, and he held her and it felt as if his hands could touch her all at once and his fingers began to knead and stroke and search and find; and he sighed, “My Linda.”

She murmured “Yes? Yes?” and the time fell away as if a black cloth had been laid over the clock’s face. His buttons slipped through their holes, and his leafy scent met her nostrils, and in the dark he led her to her room and together they lay in the narrow bed. They were alone. Each was happy in the same simple way. Good fortune had found them,
but they’d both forgotten that this was rare and that they were the few among the many. It was too much to ponder on a night of pleasure, and there they were, Bruder and Linda—as they were meant to be—and for a few hours each pondered nothing but the other’s body.

The night moved to dawn, and Bruder never let go of Linda and she never released him, and then they slept for an hour. With their eyes sealed and their cheeks fused into one, they could not have seen the heaters flickering and extinguishing, the hands returning from the night shift; nor the stars fading; nor the moon turning out its lantern. Bruder and Linda did not see the first stain of dawn, or the early lights up at the mansion. And they failed to see the pair of eyes peering through the window beside the bed, eyes noting the scene, studying the rise and fall of the breathing, dreaming mound of flesh, eyes blinking indignantly and then dashing away.

It was daylight when they woke, and Linda said softly, “They’ll be wanting breakfast soon,” and Bruder kissed her again and again and he left. He returned to his room, and she brushed her hair in the kitchen mirror and drained the cold water from the tub. The spore of happiness that had lodged in their hearts remained. They were certain of the secret joy that had at last found them, and as the sun rose above the valley, burning back the dew, up the hill Captain Poore was hearing of indiscretions upon his land.

His reaction was swift and unbending. He ordered Rosa to help Linda pack her things. “She’ll be living in
my
house from now on. I should’ve known better than to have a woman in a ranch house.” And he sent Rosa with the news that from that day forward, Linda would sleep in a new bed.

But Rosa said
that because of the harvest there wasn’t a free bed in the servants’ quarters, and Captain Poore himself ordered Linda to stay in one of the guest rooms, upstairs, at the end of a hall. The room overlooked the terrace and the orange grove, a slender double door opening onto a balcony wide enough for two with a black rail that would retain the sun’s heat even after twilight. Linda’s first night there, she lay in bed staring up at the flesh-colored canopy, the pillows nearly swallowing her. She was thinking of the long day that had followed her night with Bruder—how those hours alone already felt like years ago. On the nightstand, a porcelain man in a cherry coat held a small gold clock in his tiny fingers; the clock’s hands seemed frozen, the night inert, and Linda waited impatiently for the slow lurch to dawn, when she’d return to the ranch house and to Bruder. Earlier in the day he had tried to stop her from moving into the house, but Willis wouldn’t relent and Lolly had turned up saying, “I’ll make her feel at home.”

“She’s not a child.”

“Please don’t worry about me,” Linda told Bruder. They weren’t alone, and she didn’t take his hand. And so in the end he sent Linda up the hill with a hard pleading look in his eye.

When she arrived at the mansion, she passed Willis in the pantry but refused to look at him.

“Don’t be angry,” he said. “I’m only thinking of you. You should watch out for yourself. You don’t want to end up like the other girls, do you? He’s not what he seems.”

“No one is.” She left Willis, following Rosa up the tunnel of the back stairs. The steps whined as they climbed, each step moaning
louder than the previous one, and Linda realized there’d be no sneaking out in the middle of the night. Upstairs, Rosa led Linda down to the dark end of a hall. “He wants you here.” Her lips were as red as jam with a new lipstick called La Petite Fille.