Pasadena (69 page)

One morning in September 1930
, between the sixth and seventh fevers, Lindy drove down the coast, Sieglinde at her side. Over the years the road had expanded, the strip of bitumen widened just as they had widened Colorado Street last year, lopping off fifteen feet from the façades of buildings in order to make way for more automobiles. The road followed the ocean, slicing through the beach villages where pink-stucco motor hotels clustered like giant autumn weeds. The late seasoners hung their striped towels from balcony rails, and little bluff-top shops sold picture postcards and soda and ice cream and strips of fish fried in dough. At one of the stops Sieglinde ate a dish of sherbert, and Lindy thumbed through the rack of penny postcards and she stopped at one that showed the same image as in the picture taped to Dr. Freeman’s ceiling.

Back in the car, Sieglinde sat with her legs crossed and asked where they were going. “The beach,” Lindy said, and Sieglinde asked if they were going to the Jonathan Club, where they planted torches in the sand and organized sand-castle contests for the children. “Another beach,” said Lindy, and Sieglinde, whose face was as bright as a pane of glass, said, “Are we going to Condor’s Nest?” Yes, said Lindy, telling her daughter about the lobster pots and the blue shark; but Sieglinde was an impatient child and she turned in her seat to face the ocean, her finger idly tracing the horizon.

“We’re going to pick up your grandfather,” said Lindy.

“Who’s he?”

The day was hot, the sky empty of clouds, and Lindy told her daughter to pull down her hat and Lindy tightened her own head scarf,
the knot hard at her throat. Each fever had been more and more difficult—the blue-lipped chills, the icy sweat flooding her bed, her wet hands flailing up and tearing the peach canopy. Rosa had fed her ice and wagged Lolly’s peacock fan. She would open the window and let the breeze run across Lindy’s body, thin in moist eyelet, until she would cry out for Rosa to shut it again,
she was freezing;
it went like that for several hours, Rosa tucking Lindy into blankets until she had sweated her way out of them, and then the cooling down until her hands turned blue. Lindy’s memory of the malarial hours was imprecise: a remote buried heat, like a fire in a coal mine, that was how she thought of it; she could recall the misery—her trembling, exhausted body told her of it—but she retained no knowledge of how she had borne it. She would remember talking with Rosa, but later, when the fever’s tide had ebbed, she wouldn’t know what she had said. Once, between the second and third fevers, Rosa said, “I still don’t know why you never told him.” Lindy looked at her puzzled: “Told him what?” And then:
“Who?”
Another time, when Rosa was easing Lindy into the bath, she said, “He loved you, Lindy.” Lindy was under the fever’s spell and required an hour’s soak in the scalding, steaming water. As she stepped out of the water and into the towel spread in Rosa’s arms, Lindy managed, “Who loved me?”

At night, when her head was clear and the moon was bright enough to read by, Lindy would worry that she had revealed too much to Rosa; as if the fever had scratched at the lock on her heart. Over the years, Lindy had learned that the house talked, almost on its own—the windows like eyes, the doorways like ears, the heating ducts like mouths. It traded secrets with its inhabitants as freely as a breeze crossing a threshold. Lindy no longer believed that Rosa would betray her; she regretted that she hadn’t trusted her long before. But the house itself was capable of betrayal—as if its walls could read her mind and relay everything to Willis. And Lindy had to concede that her own face, lit with memory and emotion, could betray her more than anyone else.

When Rosa spoke of Lindy to one of the new girls, she would warn the young maid to watch out for Mrs. Poore’s shifting moods, especially the onslaught of anger. “You can see it rising red in her throat. Be sure to leave the room right away. Tell her a faucet is running somewhere, a hot iron is waiting, anything. Just get out of there.” Rosa warned all the girls to avoid passing Lindy’s door on the afternoons
when she stayed in bed. “Don’t even tiptoe by. Find another route.” When the girls, who sucked on gossip as if it were cherry-flavored candy, asked what was wrong with Mrs. Poore, Rosa would say, “Trouble of the heart.” The girls, feather dusters in their fists, would cluck and sigh, for they too had witnessed this common tragedy, over and over: their mothers, their sisters, each wrongly betrothed, each mending fissures in their souls. Yet no matter the evidence, each girl believed that such a cruel fate would spare her; for why should she—she with the blood-red lips or the black-velvet hair or the twenty-inch waist—err where so many women had erred before? The odds were against her but she would triumph—
love would triumph, at least for me
—and Lindy would know that each girl was thinking this as she brought Lindy her warm milk, the words unspoken but glued with teenage spittle to her lips. “I’ll either marry for love or not at all,” one of the younger girls told Rosa. Her name was Antonía, and she wore her hair in a long plait, and she had lost her job waxing the Huntington Hotel’s ballroom floor; the nightly affairs—debutante balls and midnight suppers and Donner Party–themed dinner dances for a thousand in gown and tuxedo—were now less frequent than a full platinum moon. “It won’t happen to me,” said Antonía, tilting her head. But Rosa pushed the girl into the laundry room and said, “That’s what she thought too.”

The dumbwaiter’s station was outside Lindy’s door and she could hear everything said in the house, soft-voiced news rising from the cool wine cellar up through the pot-clanging kitchen, into the echo-filled gallery, and traveling upstairs to Lindy’s ear. During her first year married to Willis, she would stamp her foot angrily whenever she heard Esperanza or anyone else talking about her:
I never thought she would marry him. She can’t really love him, can she?
If Rosa caught the girls gossiping she’d warn them, “Don’t discuss what you don’t know.” Lindy would thank Rosa for her loyalty; Lindy said that next time, she wanted Rosa to fire the girls. “I’m not going to allow a girl to tell lies about me in my own house.” But Rosa’s glassy face met Lindy’s with unflinching honesty: “They might be talking, but they aren’t telling lies.”

Lindy had learned not to mind, just as she was learning to withstand the pain of the fevers. She would anticipate her returning health as she wrapped herself in the towel after bathing out the last of the day’s fever: Rosa’s hands would be cold to her shoulders and Lindy would grip her fingers, as if to say,
We’ve made it through another. Recovery can’t be far off!
The light reflecting off the lime-green tiles would cast a leafy pallor across Lindy’s calm, naked body and she would say, “I’m free for another four days.” And last night, after the bath had concluded the sixth fever—a bout that had boiled her temperature to 104—Lindy had said, “Tomorrow. I’m going to drive down there.” And Rosa, tamping the water from Lindy’s breasts, had said, “Yes, I know.”

The salty wind ran through the open car and Sieglinde’s face remained turned away from her mother and Lindy drove on, squinting against the glare. She was halfway through the treatment: six more fevers to bear, and not once did Lindy doubt that she would make it. Eventually one of the fevers would surpass 106 and there would be hours when she’d slip into a short coma and would feel as if she were lying in a coffin of ice—all of this Lindy expected, and at the same time she knew she could withstand it,
would
withstand it. Lindy was prepared.

“Are we really going to that smelly old onion farm?” Sieglinde took an Automobile Club map out of the glove compartment and opened its paper wings and pretended to read it, studying the matrix of roads. Lindy warned her to put the map away, that the breeze would pluck it from her, but Sieglinde ignored her mother, and when Lindy warned her again, the wind lifted the map and off it flew, folds extended like a white gull in glide.

When they reached the dirt lane, Sieglinde asked, “Mommy, where are we?” and Lindy saw the sign:

CONDOR’S NEST
STAY OUT

The Vulture House appeared abandoned on the far side of the field, and there was a worn look to the dooryard and the cottages. The arroyo was dry, the dam’s stacked remains nearly imperceptible to the unknowing eye. Lindy got out of the car, and Sieglinde ran to the bluff’s edge, and Lindy became frightened as she watched her daughter dash to the lip and then stop as the sandy soil crumbled over the edge, sending a pair of snowy plovers into flight. “Whose farm is this?” Sieglinde asked, but Lindy didn’t answer. She went to her old cottage’s door, but it was locked. She peered inside and saw the iron bedstead and the matted puma-pelt rug, and memory’s flood washed away the years—but
only for a moment. The other cottages were locked as well and there was no sign of life and Sieglinde asked, “Mommy, who are we looking for?”

Together they peered over the bluff to the skeleton of the half-built staircase. The sailor-carved table remained in the yard, and Lindy and Sieglinde sat on the bench. The sky stretched endlessly to the sea, no clouds between Condor’s Nest and San Clemente Island, a canopy of faded blue. The surf filled their ears and Sieglinde said, “Are we looking for that man?”

“And your Aunt Lolly.”

“What about Pal?”

“And Palomar.”

“And what about Grandpa?”

“And Dieter too.”

In the clarity that came with the most recent fever’s subsiding, Lindy had made a decision. When the treatment was over, she’d leave her husband. She wasn’t sad about it. No, in fact she was happy with the promise of her future. She had no plans. This trip to Condor’s Nest was to help her prepare. She didn’t know what she’d do or where she’d go, but one night she and Sieglinde would pass through the gate and she’d watch the rancho fall away in the rearview mirror. They’d pick up Dieter, propping him in the Gold Bug’s tiny seat, and they’d be off—and she would figure out the details between now and when the malarial treatment ended. She knew she was healing, and she knew that later in the fall she would act. She would leave. She’d take her jewelry and the cash she had collected in an envelope: three thousand dollars: “Just in case,” she’d say. She would leave everything behind. She’d even drop his name. She’d sign her letters
Linda Stamp
.

Together Lindy and Sieglinde checked the barn and peered through the windows of the Vulture House and hopped into the arroyo to look around. “Maybe they’re on the beach,” said Sieglinde, and Lindy took her daughter’s hand and walked her back to the car. “Why don’t we go down to the beach, Mommy?”

But Lindy wanted to look around in town. Maybe she could find a place for them to live?

They drove back down the dirt lane, past the sign and then the tulip tree, and Lindy drove into the village, not knowing what she’d find on Los Kiotes Street. What would she do if she found Bruder and Lolly
sharing a pan-fried turkey supper on the Twin Inn’s veranda? Would she stop to say hello?

After it had become clear that the fire would spare the ranch, Willis had returned to the house and read Lolly’s note. He had cursed his sister, and his contorted face, frozen in the instant when one realizes that all hope is lost, reminded Lindy of Edmund. Willis went to Lolly’s room and tore the mattress from the bed and shredded the lavender-silk bolsters and ordered Rosa to remove Lolly’s clothes from the closet and her hair ribbons from the rosewood stand carved especially to hold them. He dumped open her mother-of-pearl jewelry box and found its velvet-lined compartments empty. “Get rid of all her things,” he ordered Rosa, who packed the taffeta dresses and the porcelain-faced dolls and the poetry diaries into tissue-lined crates. In the morning the crates were hauled to the attic, and Lindy did her best to hide the
American Weekly’s
headline from Willis:

ORANGE HEIRESS ABANDONS FAMILY FOR LOVE

The story was written by the man who had taken over Cherry’s column, and he’d gotten it wrong. The story was about love, but he had arranged the facts incorrectly. Did it matter? Was there a reason to do anything other than shred the article from the newspaper and tuck it in with the tissue in one of the packing crates? There for another generation to find. Rosa and Lindy used Dieter’s mallet to close the lids, its worn head sinking each nail through the yellow pinewood with a single blow.

The drought had devastated Baden-Baden-by-the-Sea. The mineral spring had gone dry, and the tourists had stopped coming, and the real-estate speculators had fled. Half of the Twin Inn had been boarded up, and a peeling
VACANCY
sign swung on the door, and when Lindy and Sieglinde stepped into the hotel’s entryway, a man in a visor greeted them. “Need a room?”

“I was looking to see if someone was in the dining room.”

“The dining room’s closed. Had to shut it up last winter.” Lindy touched the flocked wallpaper, and Sieglinde pulled on her hem, saying, “Let’s go, Mommy.”

They drove up Los Kiotes Street, but no one was on the sidewalk
and Margarita’s old porch had been walled up since the beginning of the summer.

An old sign shredded by the wind announced a sale on everything in the store, bolts of dimity, Princess beauty products, eagle-feather hats—
EVERYTHING MUST GO!

Lindy and Sieglinde drove past the mineral spring, but the platform around the weeping rock was abandoned and the stands that sold the bottled water were shut and the baths had closed. A faded sign flapped in the breeze:
DRINK A CUP OF PURE APFELSINE WATER AND
CHANGE YOUR LIFE!

Lindy drove on, with no idea where else to look, following the road along the rim of Agua Apestosa. The lagoon was low with turgid water and the receding waterline had left bright salt powdering the mudflats. It reflected the sun, and Sieglinde hung her head over the car door and pointed. They reached the far edge of the lagoon, and Lindy thought that perhaps she would show her daughter the schoolhouse and the bushes around the outhouse that Miss Winterbourne used to make her cut back with a scythe; Sieglinde wouldn’t believe that her own mother had lived like this, Lindy knew. But when she rounded the eucalyptus grove, she found that the schoolhouse was gone. In its place was a mission-style filling station, half built and then abandoned before the first delivery of gasoline. The eucalyptus grove cast a net of shadow over the station, and the pair of bulb-headed pumps looked like two small, ghostly children whose faces had been wiped blank. This was a strange thought, one that released a chill upon Lindy, and she feared that perhaps the seventh fever was coming early; her fingertips found her forehead damp and her ears burning. But she wasn’t shaking, and she assured herself that she was fine. She had three more days until the seventh fever; Dr. Freeman had promised that four days would separate them, there would always be a gap of four days. “It’s as predictable as the calendar itself,” he had said, and she had believed him.