Pasadena (43 page)

“Can this be right?” Linda asked as the door opened. “Isn’t his room down there?” Linda asked whether there mightn’t be a room she could share with one of the other maids. But Rosa rolled her eyes in the direction of Captain Poore’s door at the opposite end of the hall and repeated, “He wants you here.” The eight-paneled door gleamed from its daily polishing, and Linda instructed herself not to imagine the goings-on behind it, the sighs in the night. No, she would endlessly try to keep herself from pondering Willis in such a way. But when she did—when she pictured him asleep, his hair folded across his eye, a curled fist rubbing his nose—she hurried her imagination onward to something else, back to Bruder and the elusive, dark beauty he had presented her as he slept in her arms.

“Lolly’s room is that one over there.” The two young women looked toward a door with a gilt knob cast in the shape of a tightly puckered rose.

“This can’t be right,” Linda said again, but Rosa assured her it was.

The other maids slept either in the attic on the third floor, where in summer the rafters trapped the heat, or in the narrow rooms behind the kitchen, where the buttery air left their faces slick with grease. According to rumor passed around the ranch house, Rosa slept upon a locket of her mother’s blue-black hair, and her tiny room, which she permitted few people to enter, was kept just as it was the day her mother died—thin, white sheet stretched across the mattress, pillow flattened down to a small square pad, colored-pencil drawings of Rosa and her mother holding hands in the garden. The room was on the third floor, with a single dormer window that let in the dawn light, and from it she could see everyone arriving at the ranch. “Keep an eye on the comings and goings around here,” her mother used to tell her, and all her life Rosa had clung to this advice as if it were the only thing her mother had left behind. Her mother’s death had brought a heavy sadness to Rosa at a young age—sad eyes in a fragile face. She was delicately boned, but not in a girlish way; no, her comportment was more like that of a widow—she was a tiny-wristed woman who appeared frail but was in fact strong, hardened by the life she was required to live. Rosa never encouraged
the flirtations the ranch hands tossed her way—like an enemy’s grenade, she thought of their playful words—and she ignored the sucking noise they made through their teeth;
¡Rosa! ¡Mi Rosa!
She tried not to spend much time at the ranch house, where crusty-lipped whistles were offered as sincerely as valentines. If one of the boys hooted at her, she’d ignore him, but her detachment would spur the young men even more. Some of the hands would ask Linda or even Bruder for news of Rosa—what could they do to make her smile? One hand was caught sneaking up the hill to serenade her, his spit on his harmonica lit by the moonlight. Others spent a week’s wages on silly gifts like an abalone-shell music box, or a pink rose suspended in a wax globe. But Rosa was occupied by something else—and most assumed that it was grief. She ignored the boys. She dismissed the attentions of every man except one—or so Linda learned when she was unpacking her things in her new room, folding her few blouses and skirts into the cherry-wood dresser, its drawer deep and finely crafted. There was a rap on her door, and she was afraid she knew who it might be, but then Linda heard Esperanza asking if she could come in. The girl was carrying samples of her needlework and she pushed them into Linda’s hand. “Will you show him for me? This one I did especially for him.” It was a little felt sack with a flap, stitched with Captain Poore’s monogram. “It’s for his medal. A place to store it at night when he’s asleep.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

“You’ll try, won’t you? For me?”

And then Esperanza proved herself craftier than Linda had realized by saying, “Did I mention I saw Bruder and Rosa out together yesterday afternoon? I guess they were on a Sunday outing of some sort.” She released a single spurt of laughter.

“Bruder and Rosa? Yesterday?” Linda didn’t say it but she thought: Only hours before he came to me?

“They were at the orange combine. At the end of the day. It was almost evening. I saw them sharing a soda. They were listening to the graphophone.”

Had Bruder bought Rosa an orange soda, Linda wondered, and maybe a wedge of orange cake drizzled in icing thin as frost? Esperanza, whose thumb was spotted with needle-pricks, said they seemed to be having a good time. “I wondered where you were, Linda, I really did.”

“I was at the stove. I was at the sink.” And Linda too wondered what
she had missed and how it was that this assignation between Bruder and Rosa had preceded her first night of love. A chill found her and she shivered and it felt as if she were alone in the world, and later, when Willis timidly poked his head in her door, she welcomed him. “Everything’s all right?”

She thanked him for his kindness.

“Can I get you anything?”

She said he’d already done enough.

After unpacking and setting the coral pendant on the dressing table, Linda escaped down the back stairs and returned to the ranch house. She spent the day as she had spent her previous days, grinding
masa
and rolling
tortillas
and boiling beans with cubes of ham and lard and whole onions and carrot coins. She delivered lunch to the Naranjo boys and the other teams, and Esperanza helped her pass out to the packers
taquitos
rolled in wax paper. She found Slaymaker on his wagon in the grove and gave him an extra
tamale
, and she noted a sternness in his face that she guessed was exhaustion; Hearts was next to him and he didn’t say anything either, just tucked away a tentative grin. Slay silently accepted the
tamale
, dividing it for himself and Hearts, and they understood—even before Linda did—that something had changed. She asked them if they’d seen Bruder. Slay shook his head, the fold in his neck as soft as a bolster. “He was late picking up the girls this morning,” said Hearts. Then they turned to their
tamale
and their soda and Linda left them on the wagon, their long shadows merged into one on the ground.

After lunch, she was busy with a roast studded with bacon; the moist scent of chilies and brisket and pork fat overcame the kitchen. The fatty sludge at the bottom of the pan she’d collect and mix into bread dough. While the meat cooked, she made an orange flan for the boys. As she melted the sugar into caramel, she told herself that her days at the Pasadena would be no different than before, except that now she’d have to rise earlier to walk down the hill before everyone woke. The long day would pass in the kitchen, and she’d deliver the food to the hands and the packers, and she’d return to the mansion late at night, after the musicians had left the terrace and the candles in the paper lanterns had been extinguished. She was living in Captain Poore’s house but nothing had changed, she carefully reassured herself, and she would have believed this had the boys not been so silent and deferential when she
served them the roast later that night. They ate quickly and sucked their fingers and the steam shivered off the meat and no one said anything except
Is there more?

She brought them the orange flan, and Hearts asked, “What is it?” When she told them, their faces fell, and then Bruder arrived and said, “Don’t you know that the boys hate to eat what they’ve picked?”

But no one had ever told Linda. The boys left the table disappointed. When they were gone, Bruder asked about her new room.

She shrugged and told him it was nothing special.

“Nothing special? Have you gone spoiled already?”

“How’s Rosa?”

“Why do you ask?” She didn’t answer, and he said, “How many times do I have to tell you? Rosa’s my friend. One day
you’ll
wish you had a friend like me.”

“One day,” she said, and leaving Bruder in the yard she returned to the kitchen with trays of greasy dishes.

The dirt was dry and cold beneath his boots, and his breath puffed so densely that he could nearly hold it in his hands. The kitchen curtain was shoved aside on the rod, and he could see Linda moving about inside. Last night the window had been dark and its darkness had invited him in; the drawn curtain was the sign he had waited a long time for. He had hoped to find Linda just as he had. It had been a plan, but then the plan had unfurled wildly from his hands. Bruder didn’t know what had prompted Willis’s suspicion this morning, and he was angry that gossip was spuming from the ranch house, but he couldn’t guess from whom. It wouldn’t have been Hearts and Slay, and it wouldn’t have been Rosa—no, she wouldn’t do that, not after what she’d told Bruder late Sunday afternoon at the orange combine. They had sat atop a picnic table and for almost an hour she had talked, confessing that she had done something silly, something even Rosa was surprised she had done: she’d gone and fallen in love with Captain Poore, and what was she supposed to do? Bruder had listened but said nothing until she sobbed over her empty soda bottle. “Do you think he might love you?” he said. No, she didn’t think so, nor did Bruder, for that matter, and they’d sat for a long time as the afternoon slipped away and the reality of Rosa’s life sat up in all its apparent truth, and the picnic bench was rough with splinters, and carved with graffiti professing eternal teenage love. Bruder didn’t have to deliver any advice, for Rosa knew what she must do.
She was young but sheltered a knowing soul, and this had been her only lapse from sense; she could add things up better than most. “I know I should give up on him,” she said, resigned to the truth but slightly afraid that Bruder would find her childish for even confessing it. Bruder said, “He’ll use you.” Rosa nodded, knowing that he was right. The late-afternoon sky hung above them, the beautiful rosy light too delicate to last. Bruder promised he’d never tell anyone, not even Linda, and Rosa knew she could trust him, and it didn’t occur to him to break that promise, and many years later—after it was too late—he would regret that he had ever believed that a kept secret was an honorable thing.

By the time Linda returned to the mansion, it was past eleven. A firm weariness had entered her, and she made her way up the back stairs with her eyes nearly closed and gritty with sleep. The lights were off and the house was still and the handrail guided her, and she looked forward to the wide canopied bed and the perpetual tick of the little porcelain clock, and just then at the top of the stairs, out of the darkness, Willis said hello. “Do you have everything you need?”

She thanked him, and he said he’d told Rosa to get her whatever she wanted. “I’m sorry you were put in that position,” he said. “You’ll need to be more careful.”

“I’ve always taken care of myself.”

He turned to leave, hesitated, and said: “I’m at the other end of the hall. Just in case.”

Linda nodded, and they were two shadows saying good night, and neither could see the other’s face, and this was for the best.

On the canopied bed, the silence kept Linda awake. The window was locked, the heavy drape pulled. She was used to the ruckus of the natural world at night—the thrashing ocean, the osprey’s emphatic
kee-uk
, the kangaroo rat busy in the underbrush, her father’s rattling snore reaching every corner of Condor’s Nest. In her narrow bed in the ranch house she used to listen to the soft, toadlike trill of the nighthawk before its plunge into the groves to snare a pocket mouse, and the screams of coyotes in love. Once a cougar had descended from the foothills to pick through the trash, and as she lay in bed listening to his icy hiss she came to realize that something was wrong; if the cougar ate from the trash more than a couple of times, he’d forget how to hunt raccoon. It had happened before, Bruder had told her. The only solution
was buckshot between the shoulder blades; and there was another glassy-eyed trophy for Willis’s library, where grizzly and bobcat lay filleted on the herringbone floor.

But the mansion—“It’s really just a big house,” insisted Willis—was sealed off from the world. Linda resigned herself to the lifeless peace, to the motion strangled from the night except for the small gold clock held up by the porcelain man and the senatorial gong of the longcase in the gallery below. Nothing stirred in the house but the click of a door’s latch down the hall and a bare foot tentatively landing, and loitering, on the plush runner outside Linda’s door.

Some things are known
and others reveal themselves over time, and much later Linda would learn that Willis had wanted her to stay in the house from the beginning. It was Lolly who had asked, peeling a persimmon, “But heavens, why?”

Willis profoundly believed that his soul was more generous than his sister’s, but he didn’t fault her for this; he merely accepted it as fact. Whether or not it
was
fact was almost beside the point. Over the years, Captain Willis Poore had known a number of girls and he’d come to think of them in two ways—or so he explained it to Linda one day. “Girls from Pasadena, and girls from somewhere else. My world’s divided up like that.”

“Which do you prefer?”

“What do you think?”

She remarked that it was an imbalanced division, wasn’t it? How many young women were from Pasadena, anyway? “Even less than you’d guess.” He rattled off a list that could be counted on the fingers of two hands: Henrietta, whose family owned the oil fields out by the ocean, not that Henrietta ever visited the greasy wells herself; Margaret, whose family owned a handful of newspapers—not the
American Weekly
or the
Star-News
, she would quickly point out; Dottie Anne, whose family maintained the largest ranch in California, where she spent her holidays inspecting the lambs. Others too: a girl named Eleanor, daughter of a banking family with branches in Nob Hill and San Marino, freckled and tall, sporty on horseback, who years ago had asked Willis to escort her to the debutante ball but then changed her mind. And Maxine, who had a strange ambition to become a scientist, and who hung
around the Cal Tech campus and followed the chemists into their labs; she dropped by the Pasadena every now and then, once with a cow’s eye floating in a jar. And there was Lolly’s best friend, Connie Muffitt, who lived in a redwood Greene & Greene bungalow that featured, in its parlor window, a stained-glass poppy. Connie painted her own teacups with a calligraphy brush and was known around town as an
artiste
. She and Lolly organized an annual production at the Shakespeare Club, and over the years Willis had seen Connie play Ophelia, Goneril, Juliet, and Lady Macbeth, a range that he found impressive if not convincing. To each role she brought the same gold bob, tiny feet, and gentle lisp. At a Shakespeare Club party last spring there’d been an awkward moment of Connie’s hand moving to Willis’s lap, her hot sugar-rum voice in his ear: “I shall obey, my lord.” He told Linda this—not to disparage Connie, he said, but to inform Linda of what kind of man he was. Willis had become known for resisting all the girls who years before had written notes of sympathy on ecru cards when his parents had plunged to their deaths; there had been a line of them at the funeral, beneath black veils, prodded by pearl-braceleted mothers, each waiting her turn to offer condolence and a fine, teenage gloved hand.