Pasadena (63 page)

“How’ve you been, Mrs. Poore?” She said again that she was the same: no better and no worse. “No new symptoms?” She described the headaches and the aches in her joints and the occasional pain in her eye. “Like a needle going through it. It’s hard to see at times. The left one.” Dr. Freeman looked into her eye with a penlight and made a note.

“You’ve been taking your bismuth and the salvarsan iodide?”

She said that she had, and she wondered if they had made her feel even worse. Flipping through her file, Dr. Freeman said, “I’ve given you both arsenics, haven’t I?” Lindy nodded yes: arsphenamine and neoarsphenamine administered intravenously, long afternoons on the rubber table with a needle in the crook of her arm and a distant cold sensation running through her. He had administered mercurial rubs, the cold paste massaged into her pores by Miss Bishop, who had worn a blacksmith’s apron. Dr. Freeman had put her through fever therapy, two hours baking in a lightbulb-lined coffin called the Electronic Cabinet of Kettering. Dr. Freeman had had an arrangement with Mr. Erwin to rent the cabinet, and when Erwin’s closed, Freeman had said he might give up on that particular hyperthermia treatment anyway: “In the end, I’m not sure how much good it does.” For almost a year Dr. Freeman had instructed Lindy to soak in near-scalding baths, a habit that Willis had found peculiar and wasteful. From time to time she
would fall asleep in the green-glazed tub, waking only when her nose slipped beneath the water.

“Any new lesions?” asked Dr. Freeman.

“Just the one on my thigh.” She opened her legs for the doctor and he bent to inspect the rubbery tumor. He pulled a ruler from his pocket and pushed it against Lindy’s flesh and said, “Miss Bishop, the gumma is one third of an inch in diameter.” Miss Bishop wrote this down, and Lindy leaned back on the examination table and looked to the ceiling as Dr. Freeman poked at the tender lump. She had learned that Dr. Freeman did this sort of work for no other reason than the money, wads and wads of it collecting in his pocket. Once, in an unusual moment of intimacy, Miss Bishop had said, “He’s glad he can help out all these girls, but he wouldn’t be here if it didn’t pay so well. He’s earning so much money now, he
can’t
walk away.” Lindy understood this; she wouldn’t be here either. Their lives wouldn’t have crossed; how far Dr. Freeman’s office, down the little alley, felt from the rancho’s gate. It was like traveling forward in time, Lindy sometimes felt when she sat on the velour daybed. She was warm, the moisture sticky beneath her breasts and in the pit of her arms, and then Dr. Freeman asked her to remove all her underclothes and he turned to his chart while she stepped out of the ivory silk; her clothes were in a pile on the floor and it made her think of Sieglinde, who liked to strip down to nothing at the pool. Dr. Freeman’s left hand lifted her right arm, and his free hand traced the flesh around her breast. He lifted her left arm and did the same, gently pushing her breasts one way and the other, inspecting the flesh in between. She found the examination neither humiliating nor exciting, only numbing, as if she had stepped out of herself as the doctor pushed her back onto the table, eyeing her, prodding, taking notes, checking her reflexes with a rubber-headed mallet.

After she dressed she returned to the velour daybed, and Dr. Freeman sat behind his desk and Miss Bishop perched on the windowsill, the Webb House’s shingled turret behind her. The fan’s blades whirred in the black cage and the limp fern fluttered in its gust.

“You’ve been coming to see me for almost a year,” Dr. Freeman began. “I’m afraid we’ve seen very little progress.” He explained his regret, as he had before, that she had not sought treatment when she was first exposed, when the first chancre had erupted on her loin. But Lindy hadn’t known, she said, as she said every time she visited Dr. Freeman.
“It looked like nothing more than a few spider bites.” He scolded her gently for not looking after herself, lumping her with “all the women who inexplicably fail to do so.” Miss Bishop’s gaunt face shook, as if she knew that in these matters the doctor lacked insight. The second lesion, eight or nine weeks after the first, had gone unnoticed in the spring of 1925. There had been a fever and a flu-like exhaustion as she watched Edmund’s coffin sink into the soil out by the tulip tree, no one there with Lindy except Dieter and Father Pico and Margarita and Cherry Moss, taking notes and eyeing Bruder, who stood fifty feet from the grave, awaiting the deputy sheriff’s arrival. Palomar had cried, grabbing at Lindy’s hair. And Willis had sent word that he was sending a car to retrieve her. No, she hadn’t tended to herself, Lindy admitted to Dr. Freeman. “There wasn’t any time.” And then, “I didn’t know.”

“You’re entering what we call the early tertiary stage,” said Dr. Freeman. “There’s now more of a chance the disease will advance from chronic to … well, to a more debilitating phase.” He said that at this point the spirochetes would concentrate in either her cardiovascular system or her nervous system. “Or both. Cardiovascular syphilis degenerates the aorta and other tissue around the heart; the heart itself too. Neurosyphilis can damage the brain, resulting in—” He stopped, as if wondering if he had already said too much. “I suppose the best way to describe it is personality change. A change of the self. You may be Lindy Poore, but you might act like someone else. Sometimes the patient doesn’t recognize herself.” He must have seen the bloodless fear in Lindy, because immediately he was stumbling: “But I’ve seen no signs of this in you, Mrs. Poore. Nothing suggests that your case has turned that particular corner. Everything about you suggests you know quite well who you are.”

The daybed was soft, and it nearly swallowed her. She inched herself to its edge and with great effort stood. Once again, the inconsolable doubleness of life hit her: Dr. Freeman’s news was at once shocking and expected. All those years ago the red chancre, no more dense or fierce than a boil, had both looked like nothing and alerted her to her future. There were times when Lindy could see the clarity of today and the vision of the rest of her life, like seeing at the same time ten feet in front of the car and the long white strip of the road ahead.

“Why hasn’t Willis become ill?”

“I’m sorry, what was that, Mrs. Poore?”

“My husband? Why isn’t he sick as well?”

“Your husband? Well, not having examined him, I can’t really say. You know for a fact it was he who gave this to you?”

The question shocked her: Who else, if not Willis? There was no one else. Lindy told Dr. Freeman she was sure.

“In that case, sometimes it’ll lie latent for years and years,” said Dr. Freeman. “There are many who never become sick. It’s another one of the disease’s great mysteries. Who it chooses, I suppose you could say. Who it singles out.” Dr. Freeman led Lindy back to the daybed, settling her against its humped headrest. “I trust you’ve discussed this with Captain Poore.”

She didn’t answer, thinking of the night she had gone to Willis, saying, “There’s something I need to tell you.” He had looked through her, somber with shock and certain of his innocence. He denied that he had known anything about this: “How do you know you didn’t get it before? From
him
?” She told him she knew exactly how the spore had first settled in her blood, but Willis demanded that she tell no one:
You haven’t told anyone, have you, Lindy? It could ruin us, Lindy. Ruin you!
But who was there to tell? “I don’t want to hear you mention it again,” Willis had said. “I want to pretend you never told me any of this. I’m going to pretend I’ve dreamed this and it’s a bad dream and now I’m waking up.” And he hurried to the sink, where he scrubbed his hands with a wire brush. Long ago, Lindy had learned that she’d married a coward. To expect more of him was to deny this simple, awful truth.

Dr. Freeman returned to the chair behind his desk and said, “Now, Mrs. Poore. If you’re willing, I want to try something new.” Miss Bishop looked up from Lindy’s chart as he said this, as if this was news to her as well. “Mayo is reporting success with malarial treatment. The reports are promising.” He continued, “It’s a form of fever therapy. You come in, and I’ll give you an intravenous inoculation of five to ten milliliters of malarial blood.” Dr. Freeman explained that she would become ill with chills and fevers and eventually go into a febrile convulsion. “It runs in cycles, a convulsion every two or three days. Optimally I’d want you to undergo ten or twelve convulsions, and then I’d abort the attacks by administering quinine.” He added, “You’d be sick on and off for a little more than a month.”

Lindy leaned into the daybed. She would continue to bear this
alone. Not out of shame but because she had no choice—the same way when, years ago, she hadn’t wanted anyone to know that she could bleed. She wasn’t yet thirty and refused to become an invalid. Yet more acutely, she refused to admit that there’d been a mistake; that perhaps
she
had made a mistake. After Sieglinde was born she had returned to the room with the canopy bed, and for a year or two Willis would knock on her door late at night when he wanted her. He was always polite, asking if she minded. And at first she didn’t mind, his fingers kneading away the loneliness, releasing the longing. But it had been a long time now since he’d kissed her, and Lindy hoped, the velour soft on her cheek, that he would never try again. From time to time she liked to close her eyes and imagine herself as a young girl in the grove, a fishergirl graduated to the orchard, with her life ahead of her, a future unfurled; but it was no longer true. What was it Lolly had said when they were in Dodsworth’s last week? “You’ve become just like the rest of us, Lindy. Most people can hardly believe you weren’t born in Pasadena.”

“Mrs. Poore?” Dr. Freeman was saying. “Mrs. Poore?”

Lindy shook herself back to this August day, to the office above the alley.

“I’d like to begin right away,” said Dr. Freeman. “Next week.” Miss Bishop flipped the appointment book and proposed a time. “Will that be all right, Mrs. Poore?”

“What?”

“Can you come back next week? You’ll have to make some arrangements in advance. You’ll be out of sorts for the month. Can you do that, Mrs. Poore?” The voices trailed away, and Lindy saw in the window’s reflection that she had misbuttoned her blouse. She fixed it, but the reflection was of someone else; was it really she? Another woman stared back, pocketbook hooked over wrist, hair cut and pinned in place, mouth grave and expressionless, and something came for Lindy, a large gentle hand, and led her through the office door and down the stairs and into the alley, where the sun reflected off the garbage canisters, and past Erwin’s empty window, and the exhaust from the traffic rose around her and Lindy found herself behind the wheel of the Gold Bug, the seat scalding, the dash burning her fingertips. In the heat wave that had spilled from July into August and would burn toward September a fever came on its own to Lindy; she was damp with sweat and her eyes
spilled over with tears and she turned the ignition and prepared to nudge the car forward, to drive blearily home, but then Lindy looked up and saw, across the hood, a man.

This time there was no doubt.

It was Bruder.

He was in a seersucker suit, and the five years had dusted the hair in his temples with early gray. He moved to her window as she hurried to roll it down and pushed his face into the car and said, “Lindy,” and she said,
Yes, yes
, and he said, “What have you done to yourself?”

“What do you mean?”

“What’s become of you, Lindy?” And the question remained in her head as she drove out of the city to the ranch, Bruder behind her in his Pierce-Arrow, his face alive in her rearview mirror.

He followed her
, through the hills and to the overgrown gate, and in the rearview mirror Lindy watched Bruder, and she thought of those evenings years before when they would return together to the ranch, she in the wagon and he in the truck behind her. But Bruder, his hair wired with gray and a deep frown carved around his mouth, now appeared as if more than five years had passed. His skin had darkened and coarsened, and his beard was dense and woolly, and he looked uncomfortable in his suit. He was visoring out the sun with his hand, but he couldn’t take his eyes off the Gold Bug’s rounded back and the sight of Lindy’s dark hair above the driver’s seat. She glided the car up through the curvy hills, and the sun seeped through the live-oaks, their trunks nearly encased in pavement. He knew that she was thinking that he looked older, but the same was true of her, although her beauty remained. A part of him had expected it to have faded by now—she’d pressed her face too close to the sun—and it would have been easier for him to return to Pasadena if she’d thickened in the middle and her posture had sagged under the life she’d chosen. She was thin, he noted—Cherry had alerted him to that—but the contrasting beauty was there: black, beautiful eyes darting fast in a somber face.

But Bruder had come to Pasadena not to pursue what he’d already lost, and he shook the longing from his mind, a shiver traveling down his spine.

Lindy’s hands were trembling on the wheel; it was like seeing a ghost. She had assumed that she wouldn’t meet him for another fifteen years—if ever. She had assumed that by the time he emerged from the gates of San Quentin and ferried across the bay to the railroad station
and then traveled south, she would be old and Bruder would be old too. She had assumed that all those cruel cold years would snuff the final flicker of desire, and that it would be safe to greet her former lover in her husband’s house, and the two would share a memory of twenty years before—there’s nothing as harmless as a tempered memory, thought Lindy. But she’d been wrong, for here Bruder was right now, holding his hand up to blot out the sun, and she wondered if he’d bought the seersucker suit to impress her. Had he escaped, had there been a riot, prisoners digging to freedom with coffee spoons? A secret swim across San Francisco Bay, his head in the water as black and slick as a harbor seal’s?

And in the Pierce-Arrow, Bruder knew that she was turning over the possibilities of how he’d come to arrive in Pasadena. He couldn’t see her face, but he knew; just as he knew that the reason for his freedom was the one reason she’d never suspect.