Pasadena (72 page)

“Mr. Blackwood?”

“Yes, Mrs. Nay?”

“Would you ever consider handing the property off to a charitable organization? Something like a school for girls?”

“I never thought of it,” he said. “It wouldn’t be a good return on my investment, would it?”

“I understand, Mr. Blackwood. It’s a lot to ask.”

Down in the grove, Sieglinde and Pal had disappeared, and for a while Blackwood and Cherry stood on the terrace, waiting for nothing in particular. They didn’t speak, and the wind brought nothing to them—no scent of citrus or trilling birdcall—nothing but the streaming rush of the traffic on the parkway behind the hill. More cars now than even a year ago, thought Blackwood and Cherry simultaneously.

When Sieglinde and Palomar reached the terrace they were flushed with heat, and Blackwood asked if he could get them some water. They refused, shading themselves beneath the tree, and they stood close to each other, and the resemblance was faint, except in their bottomless eyes. Blackwood wondered if in fact he now knew more of their history than they did; he wondered what it was they regretted. He wondered how they got through their days—what with the past of others yoked to their shoulders for them to bear.

Cherry hadn’t said why the girl had gone to live with Bruder after Captain Poore had died a few years back. Of course, the ranch had passed to Bruder at that point, but why hadn’t the girl gone someplace else? She was in an ivory dress that revealed a strong neck, and everything
about her spoke of Linda Stamp. In the mansion, Blackwood had found an old picture album, and he had studied the photos of Captain Poore. None of him had shown up in his daughter.

“He’ll be happy there,” said Sieglinde. “Buried with my mother.” Her face was dreamy with grief.

Palomar took her hand, and their expressions turned somber as they looked down to the mausoleum. The girl was beautiful, in a handsome way. Her hair was blowing about her face and she said nothing else, content in her silence. In the searing afternoon, Blackwood watched her for a long time, and when she moved to leave he came to realize why she looked nothing like Captain Poore. Just then Blackwood had taught himself one more fact about Linda’s story, and he thought of Bruder in his grave.

Huddled side by side, like a couple growing old together, Sieglinde and Palomar left the terrace, heading to Mrs. Nay’s car.

She moved to follow. “Good-bye, Mr. Blackwood.”

“Good-bye, Mrs. Nay.”

“You’ll enjoy your ranch, I’m sure.”

He said that he would.

“I’ll be curious to hear about your plans.”

“You’ll be the first to know.”

Something pushed up from within Cherry and she felt obligated to say: “There’s a need, Mr. Blackwood. It would be a grand gesture. Grander than most men are capable of making.”

“I’ll have to consider all my options.”

“The house could be used for classrooms. The ranch house could be a dormitory. Think of all the poor girls, Mr. Blackwood.”

“I’ll try,” he said. Several weeks ago, the private investigator had called with bad news: “There’s no Edith Knight in the whole state of Maine. And another thing, Mr. Blackwood. I found nothing to suggest there ever was.”

“They would name it after you,” said Mrs. Nay. “The Blackwood School for Girls.”

“I’m not looking to have a school named after me.”

“Then they’d let you come up with the name, Mr. Blackwood. The Orangeridge School for Girls? The Pasadena School for Girls?”

“Aren’t you getting ahead of yourself, Mrs. Nay?”

She apologized, and her sun-worn hand extended itself, its grip
tennis-strong, and Blackwood took it. In the August glare, Andrew Jackson Blackwood thanked Cherry Nay for all that she had done. She returned the gratitude and hurried to her car, certain that something had been saved.

For a moment, Blackwood lingered on the terrace. He listened for the birds, for the chiming leaves. But still there was nothing at all, the entire valley empty and alone and burned dry. The traffic hidden behind the hill was the only sense that life would continue, barreling on.

Blackwood entered the mansion, taking refuge in its shade. All was silent in the gallery, but then up through the vents came a ghostly call of some sort, a strange whimpering, almost like a girl crying. “Just the house settling,” Mrs. Nay had said. But this noise was spirited and small and alive. Blackwood asked if anyone was there, but no reply came. It continued, sounding like a child who is either happy or sad, only she can say. “Tell me if you can hear me,” Blackwood whispered into the empty house. His heart was pounding in his ears and the sound continued for another moment and then it died and there was nothing but his echoing breath.

Later, Blackwood would discover the source of the noise—an open window in an almost forgotten room at the end of the hall upstairs, a bed’s torn canopy flapping in the breeze—but in the meantime he dashed out the front door and climbed into the Imperial Victoria. He drove down the hill and through the gate, in the direction of Suicide Bridge, and in his rearview mirror a black cloud of exhaust rose from his tailpipe, and in its haze the Rancho Pasadena passed away.

Although this is a work of fiction, it takes place in a world that once existed (or could have existed) but no longer does (or no longer could). Several resources invaluably assisted my imagination in creating it. I started and concluded the novel in the Pasadena Public Library’s Centennial Room, where a collection of Pasadena history and arcana is housed behind wiregate doors. The research staff at the Huntington Library welcomed me with their vast knowledge of Southern California history. The upstairs stacks of the Carlsbad Public Library introduced me to the history of San Diego’s North County. Many books informed this novel, and among those I consulted most often are
Seekers of the Spring: A History of Carlsbad
, by Marje Howard-Jones;
Historic Pasadena: An Illustrated History
, by Ann Scheid Lund;
The Valley Hunt Club: One Hundred Years, 1888–1988
, by Ann Scheid;
A Natural History of California
, by Allan A. Schoenherr;
Underwater California
, by Wheeler J. North;
The National Audubon Society Field Guide to California
, by Peter Alden and Fred Heath;
The Huntington Botanical Gardens, 1905–1949
, by William Hertrich;
The Botanical Gardens at the Huntington
, by Walter Houk;
Fifty Years a Rancher
, by Charles G. Teague; Kevin Starr’s incomparable series,
Americans and the California Dream; Oranges
, by John McPhee; and
The First World War
, by John Keegan. I am indebted to the careful scholarship of each of these authors.

DAVID EBERSHOFF

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When I was a kid growing up in Southern California, I spent a lot of time stuck in traffic in the back of a Pontiac Estate Wagon. My memory (that selective hope chest of the mind) has it that I spent most of my childhood stuck in traffic, the wagon’s hot, gum-blue vinyl burning my thighs. In my lap was always a book, and I’d open it up to escape from the traffic and the car. But I was prone to motion sickness, and so to remove myself from the present scene—sisters fighting, dog panting, mother
tsk
ing—I’d have to stare out the window and imagine another world.

At the very northern end of San Diego County there’s a long stretch of coastland owned by the federal government. At one end, on a pretty beach loved by surfers, is a nuclear power plant. At the southern end is Camp Pendleton, where you can see bulky Marines climbing walls or crawling through the chaparral, feigning war. But in between the cooling towers and the Marine base is a landscape of dry arroyos, hillsides of toyon and lemonade berry, and sandy riverwashes where rattlers sunbathe at noon. The land slopes down to the high sandstone bluffs that overlook the Pacific. The beach below is wide, and from it in autumn you can watch the pilot whales breaching on their way to Baja.

Except for the scars of a few fire roads and the column of alienish, quadripedal utility poles, this huge tract of undeveloped land can show a student of history, or a budding novelist, what California once looked like. Interstate 5 runs through the landscape but somehow doesn’t spoil
it, and it remains one of the most untouched pieces of California coastline. At one point on the freeway there’s an INS check-station, where traffic is brought to a crawl and officers in beige uniforms and oval-brimmed hats peer into your car to see if you’re smuggling Mexican laborers. Because of that check-station, traffic jams could get so bad that our car would be idle long enough for me to read a page or two from the book in my lap before my mother took her foot off the brake and we lurched ahead.

When I first read
Wuthering Heights
, I was fifteen and therefore still trapped in the back of my mother’s station wagon. One day, as I gazed out the window at the dry chaparral and the bluffs rising from the ocean, it occurred to me that not so long before, Southern California was as wild and weather-savaged as Catherine and Heathcliff’s moors. I imagined a time when people arrived from Mexico by sailing up the coast or riding horses and hinnies across the border arroyos. I thought about the coastland before the real-estate developers, before the highway men, before the Marines and the nuclear power plant. I imagined Pasadena, my hometown, when it was all fruit groves and balconied hotels for the wintering tourists. I began to see California’s history in a simple but useful way: as the perpetual struggle between its natural and civilized selfs, between the breathtaking past and the phantasmagoric future. It is a state in perpetual and sweeping change, and so are the people who live there, even if they don’t know it at the time.

The history of California is based on transformation and reinvention. Southern California went from frontier to suburb in little more than a generation. In the blink of an eye, the scrubland gave way to sprawl, asphalt paved the arroyos, and the orange groves were felled for freeway. Who can ever forget Emily Brontë’s howling moors contrasting with the sealed, careful hush of Thrushcross Grange? How does Catherine end up with Hindley and not Heathcliff? How does a woman become who she is? How did California become what it is today?

All of this rose and swirled within me over the years, an eddy of emotion and idea and question, and then a few years ago the vision cleared. Characters cleared their throats and spoke their names: Linda Stamp; her brother, Edmund; her lover, Bruder; her eventual husband, Captain Willis Poore. I saw a young woman, a fishergirl, born in 1903 on the wild California coast between Los Angeles and San Diego. I saw
her years later, at the balcony of a large white house, surveying a dying orange grove on the outskirts of Pasadena. Who is she? How does she end up at the orange ranch in Pasadena? In my imagination, the long-gone orange groves took root again and the branches of chaparral pulled down the condos and a flashflood swept away the freeways. California’s beautiful past came to life, and I sat down and wrote a novel called
Pasadena
.