Pasadena (50 page)

Later, when at last she was alone in her room, Linda found on her bed a letter from Edmund. He had written again with news from Condor’s Nest—
I’ve sold a few more acres to the highway men
—and reiterated his careful, fraternal inquiry: “Are you all right? Please write to tell me that everything is all right. That no one has hurt you.” She would have to send word but not tonight, she was too tired tonight, and as she leaned against the pillows, her feet still on the floor, she closed her eyes. And then there was a knock on her door, followed by a second rap, and Willis was saying, “Linda? Linda? Will you be coming down to dance tonight?”

He didn’t like
to talk about the war. One might think that Bruder had never seen battle, he said so little about being a soldier. Others might accuse him of forgetting his martial past: That scar in the forehead? Shrapnel that had affected his memory. But Bruder hadn’t forgotten anything. He thought of the beechwood forest every morning as he knocked about between sleep and the waking hour; and again when he retired to his room with Thucydides; and again, an hour later, when he gave up on the day and returned to sleep. And throughout the workday, too—especially when he saw him and the sunlight burned upon his medal, giving him an aureate, convincing—but false—appearance. They’d been soldiers together, and in a desperate hour they had cut a deal to keep a secret.
I’ll give you this, and you give me that
. Wasn’t that how progress came about? Progress of land and property, of possession and fortune, even progress of the heart? Someone has something that is more valuable to someone else. Bruder was a man of few words, but those words he uttered he meant and kept, and here he was on the eve of 1925, foreman at the Rancho Pasadena, a man of an indeterminate but youthful age, although already sore in white bone and blue bloody joint, living by the deals he had struck; and even now Bruder would never reveal the secrets he had promised to keep. To whom had he vowed a particular silence? First to Willis, then to Dieter, now to Rosa. Each for a different reason, each to a varying degree of selfishness, but hands had been shaken, and although Bruder had thought he was gaining by his agreements, he now saw as plainly as the snow-topped Sierra Madres before him that he was at risk of losing some things. Not property.
No, that would come. He was losing Linda. He blamed himself, and he blamed her.

And one day he would speak of it all.

At twelve noon on New Year’s Eve day, Captain Willis Poore rode into the orchards on his quarter horse, White Indian, and charged up and down the middles calling to the hands that they were off duty until the second of January. The hands left the empty field boxes in the groves and threw their ladders over their shoulders and returned to the packinghouse, where the girls were nailing shut the final crates. The boys talked about where they’d go that night to find a drink, and the girls made plans to sneak away from the watchful eyes of their grandmothers, or Mrs. Webb. Some of the hands and some of the packing girls would meet up in one of the brick alleys off Colorado Street, at a plain black door through which
marimba
music would thump. They’d pay their entry in coins, and inside they could dance and spend more money on foamy, milky
pulque
, and as the night wore on most of the boys would give up hope of saving any money for the morning and they’d buy tequila for themselves and the three or four girls they were eyeing, and by midnight their pockets would be empty—unless they were lucky and someone’s pretty hand wormed its way in for a New Year’s visit, but that would cost money that most of the boys didn’t have.

After Willis dismissed the crew, only Bruder continued working, picking clean the trees one after another, moving and resetting his ladder and keeping to his work as if he had no idea that the rest of the ranch had come to a halt. But he knew, and he wasn’t going to stop midday. He wouldn’t stop until the last orange was picked at the end of the season. From the branches he had an open view of the house, and he looked to it and wondered how Rosa was today. She had been ill but she hadn’t told him why, and he wondered if it was what he feared: but what he feared wasn’t as grave as the truth. Nonetheless, Rosa had seemed to Bruder to be on a collision course with Willis, and Bruder had done his best to steer her out of her employer’s path. But Bruder had known all along that she would ignore his counsel—just as Rosa had known that though Bruder was right, she still couldn’t heed his warning. Bruder
asked Linda what she knew, but Linda would only say “I’ve made a promise to Rosa not to tell.” Linda was known for many things, but keeping a secret wasn’t one of them. She said, “I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you what’s wrong.” She said, “I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you the importance of my keeping my word.”

Bruder sensed that Linda blamed him for something, and he moved to hold her. He knew that there was a misunderstanding, but he didn’t suspect its depth. If there was one thing he was certain of, it was that no one would ever mistake Bruder and his deeds for Willis and
his
.

But in fact Linda had done just that, and she told Bruder to leave the kitchen, that she wanted to be alone. All this time she had believed that he wanted to be only with her, with Linda, and she had known not to trust Rosa from the first day at the Pasadena. And though Linda had tried to stay vigilant, questioning Rosa’s every word, everything she did, after a while Rosa’s apparent sincerity had remained constant, and Linda’s skepticism had nearly fallen away. Until now. The hours waiting on Dr. Freeman’s daybed had taught Linda that if she wasn’t careful, her destiny would slip from her hands and she would be carried along by a cruel and manipulative fate, and she still believed that this was not how she had been meant to live; maybe others, but not she, and if she didn’t believe this, what else would she have?

And this was why, when Willis told Linda that Lolly was sick and he didn’t have a date for New Year’s Eve, Linda said, “Is that so?” Willis removed his hat and his bangs sprang up and there was a bright beauty to him, especially next to the row of dusty, half-picked trees. The day was fine, the sky bluer now that the cold had passed, and Willis was wearing the star sapphire ring that seemed to capture on his knuckle all the sun and the sky. It was a funny thing about Willis Poore and the way he carried himself. His slightness would come and go, and by now Linda could perceive the change: when news was bad around the Pasadena, his shoulders would sink and his neck would hang and he would take on the stature of an adolescent; but when Willis was in a good mood—after shooting a rabbit, say, or moving up the tennis ladder—his full size returned, and this was when Linda saw him differently, as she did now. “There’s a ball over at the Valley Hunt,” he said. “We’ll leave at eight.”

Later, up in the house, she told Rosa about Willis’s invitation.

“You’re not going, are you?”

“I don’t have a choice.”

“Oh, Linda. Don’t you understand?” Rosa began to cry into Linda’s sleeve. Her recovery had been a series of good days and bad; a drained lifelessness would send her to bed, followed by a day of vigor and fully circulating blood. Dr. Freeman had predicted this, and Linda interpreted Rosa’s tears as a symptom of what Dr. Freeman had described as “a heightened state of female emotionality.”

“Don’t you remember,” said Rosa, “what I just went through?”

Of course Linda remembered, and wasn’t that the point? There was comfort in a man like Willis Poore; she couldn’t be more secure than at his side. “But if you want me to stay with you,” Linda volunteered, hoping Rosa would say
No, no, go ahead
. For Linda didn’t want to miss this opportunity, this chance to peer further into life in Pasadena, and she’d be on Willis’s arm and she’d meet—she’d be introduced to, presented to!—the people she had read about on the society pages, in Chatty Cherry’s column, and wasn’t there a chance of Linda’s name appearing in the paper too? And in her imagination, Linda herself wrote the headline:
MYSTERIOUS BEAUTIFUL WOMAN VISITS PASADENA
.

But Rosa said nothing at all, exhaustion and pity causing her face to fall. She turned in her bed and began to pick at the wallpaper. Beneath the thin blanket she was a tiny mound; the blanket was old and dingy and frayed, and it wrapped Rosa like a shroud, and her breathing was slow, and Linda waited for Rosa to say something, and Linda waited for a long time, for what felt like a minute and then like forever. “Rosa? Rosa?” But Rosa had fallen asleep and Linda left her, a girl drowned by fatigue and scar.

Later that afternoon Linda was downtown, making her way up Raymond Street, alone. She had never been into the city by herself, and with each step she inhaled the conifer-minty air of Central Park and felt free in a way she had never before. She was thinking of no one—not Willis or Bruder or Edmund—no one but herself, and her mind was clear and her breath was loud in her ears. As she passed the Hotel Green, its veranda filled with people in wicker chairs, Linda became more and more aware of the isolation she had endured during her months at the Pasadena—the world reduced to the isolated fortress of the rancho. Rosa had said, “The city’s no different than the rancho. It’s a small, walled-off place too.” But again, Linda didn’t believe her—how
could this be true? Why, look at the city before Linda: men and women filling the sidewalks, children walking small white dogs, and other girls like Linda out alone, out for an errand or a stroll and dependent on no one at that particular moment. Free to go wherever they wanted! No one looking at them, no one expecting anything from them, no one but themselves aware of where they were, what they would do next, which shop they would enter, what would
happen to them
next! It would have overwhelmed her if Linda didn’t feel as if she’d been waiting for this her whole life, and roaming the heart of Pasadena nearly made her forget why she was there and what she was looking for.

At the intersection of Raymond and Colorado, a white-gloved policeman on a box was directing traffic. His lips were clamped around a silver whistle, and he blew and blew, and his hands pointed to cars and pedestrians. A small stone of worry caught in Linda’s throat as she thought that he was pointing at her and telling her to stop, as if she didn’t have a right to be there, to go wherever it was she was going. But the policeman wasn’t pointing at Linda; he saw her only for what she was, or what he and so many others thought she was: a pretty girl in a plain dress, a worker of some sort, her toil apparent in her red knuckles, in her long, firm arms.

Linda passed volunteers on ladders decorating streetlamps with garlands of evergreen and yellow and white rose. Ribbons of rosebuds trimmed store doorframes, and in the display window of Model’s Grocery was a fleshy standing rib roast, pale red roses wired to each bone. The people on the street had come alive with flowers as well, moss roses and blood hibiscus in coat lapels, poppies pinned to tightly knotted coifs, lilies yawning from a purse; one woman, lumpy in a brown knit dress, wore a pineapple in her hat. A girl with a narcissus corsage hurried past Linda, but the sweet, erotic scent of the tiny, papery flowers lingered, engulfing her in their perfume. The city was preparing for the Tournament of Roses, and the street felt like a garden in early spring.

She had come to town to buy a dress, and her pocket was full with her cook’s wages, and she imagined herself in something white and long and of a nearly blinding sheen. After her nap, Rosa had said that Willis would wear a white tie, “But what will you wear, Linda? You don’t have anything to wear.” Rosa suggested she pilfer a dress from Lolly’s closet: “She’ll never know.” But Linda didn’t want one of Lolly’s
dresses. Rosa offered Linda her confirmation gown, a dress with a ruffled, biblike front. But the small tear in the skirt and the almost imperceptible yellow stain at the throat made Linda a little sad. After all, Linda hoped for more. “I’d never fit in it,” she said, returning the dress to Rosa.

Linda had read the women’s page in the newspaper, and next to the recipes for creamed orange tart and “Alma Pudding” and the advice column written by a secret citizen known as “the Kewpie,” she found the advertisement for F. C. Nash offering gowns and dresses under the promise of “High Drama for New Year’s!” Silk shifts with crêpe de chine wrappers, tunic dresses with black feather collars, and, “for the daring woman of Pasadena,” a cream blouse and skirt beaded in the manner of—or so the advertisement claimed—the ceremonial wardrobe of a Tongva Indian princess. “Come in and ask about our reduced prices!” But a smaller, more refined advertisement had caught Linda’s eye:

DODSWORTH’S DRESSES
EUROPEAN STYLES ONLY
EXCLUSIVE DESIGNS
FOR THE VALLEY’S MOST DISCERNING LADIES

In Rosa’s washtub Linda had seen Lolly’s dresses with the Dodsworth’s label, and now Linda found herself in front of Dodsworth’s window. A mannequin was posed in a silvery silk dress fringed with sea-foam lace, and next to it on a little stand a sign read:
OUR LATEST FROM PARIS
. The glass reflected Linda, and in the angled afternoon light the effect was that of her face superimposed upon the mannequin’s head. A small black terrier with two rosebuds clipped to his collar lounged in the window on a needlepoint cushion, beside another sign that read:
BY APPOINTMENT ONLY
.

But Linda was determined. She tried the door and was surprised to find it bolted. She rang the bell and heard an ugly buzz from inside and waited at the glass door while people passed her on the street. She told herself not to feel self-conscious: no one knew whether or not she had an appointment, no one knew whether or not she belonged,
no one knew who she was!
And she wondered if there was a more liberating thought—more liberating than the freedom of thinking itself—than to know that she was a stranger to this entire city and could blend in and
become anyone she wanted. She felt as if people were looking at her, but they weren’t, no one paid any attention to Linda at all until a woman—surely this was Mrs. Dodsworth herself, Linda thought—appeared on the other side of the door and turned the bolt. “Yes?”