Pasadena
Praise for
PASADENA
A Chicago Tribune Editor’s Choice of the Year
A Christian Science Monitor Noteworthy Book of 2002
“If ever, in recent history, there has been a book that uniquely captures the shaky, easily misinterpreted relationships between men and women, brothers and sisters, parents and children, this is it.… Pasadena is unquestionably a great novel that succeeds on every level. It is important not just on its own merits, but for how reading it can and will remind serious readers that, every once in a while, there’s a fabulous book waiting to be discovered.”
—Fort Worth Star-Telegram
“David Ebershoff takes us back to the days when Pasadena was a genuine article—and the bestseller was, too.”
—Baltimore Sun
“Pasadena is history as personal myth and, despite its sense of fatalism and loss, it has a clear-eyed benevolence about the enduring … American faith in progress.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“[Ebershoff] keeps the pages moving with suspense.”
—USA Today
“A novel filled with striking characters, elegant writing and a page-turning plot … Pasadena is a quintessentially American novel.”
—The Oregonian
“Packed as fully and fragrantly with detail and incident as one of the orange crates with which the story’s Poore family has built its fortune … a shimmering portrait of Southern California.”
—New York Daily News
“A sweeping romance … [Ebershoff] keeps the drama aboil.”
—People
“Conjuring a landscape of coastal flower farms, orange groves, and vast ranches … Ebershoff weaves extensive historical detail and period vernacular into a startling, intricate saga.”
—Vogue
“A big, passionate, engrossing story … Ebershoff gives [the characters] life and more—they flash and glow with a mythic sheen, ready for their close-ups.”
—New York magazine
“A warmly written and thoroughly engaging account of the Southern California community’s transformation from groveland into bustling boomtown.”
—The Tampa Tribune
“A meticulously researched narrative that combines elements of gothic fairy tale, nineteenth-century romance, and the rise and decline of an enchanted American city, Pasadena is a traditional family saga in the very best sense.”
—Carolyn See, author of The Handyman
“Pasadena is not merely a wondrous novel about California. It is a breathtakingly powerful novel about America. Here is an altogether mesmerizing story of a world forever transformed, as well as one of the most authentic and beautiful love stories I’ve ever read. Pure and simple, this book is a treasure.”
—Chris Bohjalian, author of Midwives and The Buffalo Soldier
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
2003 Random House Trade Paperback Edition
Copyright © 2002 by David Ebershoff
Map copyright © 2002 by David Cain
Reader’s guide copyright © 2003 by Random House, Inc.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This work was originally published in hardcover by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 2002.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ebershoff, David.
Pasadena : a novel / David Ebershoff.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-43453-1
1. Pasadena (Calif.)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3555.B4824 P37 2002
813′.54—dc21 2002020684
Random House website address: www.atrandom.com
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Map
Prologue: Runoff
Part One: Speculation
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Part Two: Spring
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Part Three: The Buried
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Part Four: Reap
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Part Five: Deed
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Part Six: Infest
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Epilogue: Upon the Breeze
Author’s Note
A Reader’s Guide
The Novel Born in a Traffic Jam
Questions for Discussion
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Other Books by This Author
About the Author
O God of heaven! the dream of horror,
The frightful dream is over now;
The sickened heart, the blasting sorrow,
The ghastly night, the ghastlier morrow
EMILY BRONTË
The dam broke and Linda looked up and saw the bluff collapse, a waterfall of mud.
She held her breath as the sludge burst from the swamp, as it funneled down the sandstone cliff, down the scaffold of steps, swallowing her. The mudflow slapped her face and plugged her ears, sealed her eyes, stopped her mouth, shoved cold between her thighs. She was a girl of seventeen, now dragged under by the grimy hand of a broken single-arch dam. The dirty water was in her throat, the air stolen from her lungs. A torrent of silt plucked her down to the cove, where her outrigger canoe rested against a rock padded with rubbery laver. Linda tumbled as if wrestled by a wave—no air or light, up turned down, the mud’s tide carrying her. It was rocky like the oozy water-bound macadam poured to pave the roads to and from Baden-Baden-by-the-Sea, the gravel and the dust-water devouring the old wagon trails and the weedy surrey routes and the former cow paths. The earthflow rolled Linda, stones attacked her, shredding her workdress, bruising her pale flesh. Linda Stamp, a fishergirl with eight lobster pots at the bottom of the Pacific, was transported in a coffin of mud.
The January rains had swollen Siegmund’s Swamp, home of the winter runoff and the red-eyed vinegar fly. The downpour had prodded the dam, while Linda toiled below, nailing the planks into the staircase. She was not alone: Bruder was a few steps above and her mother, Valencia, was next to her, handing her wagon-box nails and brushing the hair from her eyes. There’d been five days of rain, sometimes an inch an hour, flocks of clouds soaring off the Pacific, wings of thunder, a vulture-black sky. The rain had flooded the earthworm holes and the vole dens and uprooted a crooked digger pine.
/>
But this morning the rain had stopped; a slit of pink sunlight pierced the sky. “Maybe we should wait another day,” Valencia had warned, but Linda wouldn’t listen. They returned to erecting the staircase, one hundred steps up the bluff’s seventy feet, from cold-sand beach to the little onion farm: Valencia, her black hair streaked with silver, her tongue clucking ¡Jovencita!; Bruder, nineteen or twenty (“Orphan boy!” Linda would tease); and Linda. The three hammered step after step, crossbeams and hand-hewn two-by-fours, into the tarred-wood foundation. They worked steadily in the dry morning, anxious to complete the stairs, watching the sky swell and sag. “The worst is over,” Linda predicted. “The rain won’t return.” Her mother’s screwed-up eye disagreed. Bruder said nothing, the nails stored between his teeth, a T-head bolt behind each ear. Linda sang while they worked—O, she was born in the Ocean, and died in the Sea!—as Valencia and Bruder hauled the lumber with the log chain and hammered with the mallet. They worked as the ocean chewed the beach, foam spraying the steps, bull kelp spit from the mouth of the waves, hermit crabs skittering like crumbs across the table of sand. Up on the farm, Dieter shod the hinnies in the barn and sorted the white onions from sack to crate and napped on a hundred-pound bag of scratch feed.
Then the sky reopened and the rain fell again, pecking anew the farm and the sea, and the dam broke and Linda looked up and saw the downpour of mud: mudflow ferrying uprooted ice plant and mica-flecked stones and pale-yellow kangaroo rats and kitchen garbage and everything ever buried in the arroyo. Stewy mud, both liquid and solid at once, penetrated the dam and devoured her in less time than it took to say her name: Linda Stamp!
She said it and she was gone, the landslide pushing her down, yanking her under, pulling her in. Everything turned black, and the mass of moving earth trapped Linda. Valencia, reaching for Linda’s hand, was ripped away; and Bruder, too; each gone, each interred.
When the river of mire halted at the beach, Linda was lying in earth as dense as the fresh pavement on El Camino Real. She struggled to raise herself, but the muddy tomb held her. All at once, her past and her future had become sealed together in a dreamless, bottomless cave, everything as cold and quiet as the bottom of the ocean. Linda couldn’t see and she couldn’t move and she felt only fear. The mud settled like water stilling in a trough, and Linda heard the silence, as if there was nothing left, no one there. In the landslide Valencia and Bruder and Linda breathed mud and darkness, each aware of entering the grave alive.
Yet one, only one, gasped and fought and shuddered and died.
Will the day be bright or cloudy?
Sweetly has its dawn begun;
But the heaven may shake with thunder
Ere the setting of the sun.
EMILY BRONTË
1
On a December morning in 1944, Mr. Andrew Jackson Blackwood—a young-faced, self-made man who had been in California twelve or fourteen years, depending on whom you asked—was making his way down El Camino Real. He was driving his yellow Imperial Victoria on his way to a real-estate convention in San Diego. At present he was somewhere between Dana Point and Oceanside, but many miles back his Automobile Club map had flown out the window, the wings of its paper-folds extending and flapping away. The fluttery movement—and the car’s sudden swerve as he lunged for the accordioned map—made him think of a large, ancient bird lifting itself into extinction. This was a more morose thought than Blackwood was used to, and it didn’t stay with him, flitting away like the map itself. But Blackwood had a sense of direction, he liked to tell himself, and he continued on his way.
Yet by now he could no longer be certain that he was still traveling down El Camino Real; had he made a wrong turn somewhere back? The road cut through dormant pea fields and lettuce farms and a patch of shallots, passing an avocado orchard and a lemon grove protected by eucalyptus windbreak. It climbed a scrub-oak terrain burned gold in autumn where at hillcrest a rattler stretched belly-up in the sun. Thin, shabby utility poles stood across the fields like a line outside a poorhouse, and upon the drooping wires sat a family of garbage-fed gulls. Every now and then the road turned sharply and the hammered pewter of the Pacific would appear in the distance and Blackwood would inhale, tasting the salt on the breeze. He was listening to the kid announcer on the KCRO radio news, and lately word from Europe was better than expected, the Americans marching swiftly up the wine-cold valleys of the Moselle. Blackwood thought of the boys weighted down by carbine and canteen, and it occurred to him just then, as he descended a hill and the ocean lay before him, that the war would end sooner than most dared to hope. The soldiers would return en masse and many would request passage to Long Beach or Coronado and each would need a bungalow and a patch of ryegrass for himself and his honey-haired girl. The world after the war would be different. There would be an unprecedented demand. Someone would supply it. The idea came to Andrew Jackson Blackwood, complete and formed.
And this was what distinguished Blackwood from the rest, he liked to tell himself—whether when meditating upon the passage of another day while falling asleep in his mint-green pajamas, or at the closing of yet another deal around the bank’s white-oak table. Blackwood looked only forward, never back: the cuffs of history never locked about his wrists and throat.
In an open stretch of flatland close to the shore, he spotted a farm stand tended by a girl with dark, nostalgic eyes. A tulip tree shaded the stand, and Blackwood slowed the Imperial Victoria as he passed it. The girl looked sad, perhaps because of her skimpy display of onion and the day’s catch in a box of ice: three cigar-shaped flyingfish on their sides, their woven silver wings catching the sun. Behind the stand was a small farm, its turned onion field edging an arroyo dense with lemonade berry. The farm extended to the ocean, a perfectly underutilized tract of land, and Blackwood—whose first speculation in California real estate all those years ago had hauled him north across the border from poor to rich—swerved and turned down the dirt road.
He was a thin but strong man whose Broadway Brothers suits fit him well. In 1931 he had arrived in Pasadena unnoticed, an import from Maine who, with a small wad of money of questionable origin and a full, boyish smile, bought an abandoned whitewashed mansion on Orange Grove Avenue that had once belonged to a family whose money had been made and lost in ice. Blackwood converted it into a rooming house open to anyone who could push the nightly fee through the slot in the cashier’s cage. Because he was sympathetic to the outsider, from the beginning Blackwood accepted the money of any and all men—Negro, Mexican, Chinese, even a girl or two in dire straits—at a time when most other landlords turned away those with a hue in their flesh or a pickled breath. This and a general distrust of the police kept Blackwood’s rooming house full and brought him rapid success in the world of the down-and-outs. Eventually, other properties followed, dilapidated and distressed, picked up for pennies on the dollar. Early on, Blackwood became friendly with a professor of economics at Cal Tech, a man they called Stinky Sweeney, and together Blackwood and Sweeney pondered the many ways to expand their pies while most others watched theirs shrivel in the pan. And oh how Blackwood’s pie had grown since he’d come to California! Spanish-tiled mansions divided into by-the-week apartments; long-closed dress and millinery shops on Colorado Street reconfigured as pawn emporiums and pool halls and even a lounge where girls danced in their rationed silk underwear; and the plots of sandy land bought for almost nothing from desperate, tax-hounded people who sometimes paid Blackwood to take the property off their hands! He padded his real-estate holdings with a position in steel stocks, in oil shares, and in a piece of a rubber-belt company that held a patent. But Blackwood knew that there was no asset in California like the parched terra firma that could crumble in the hand.
The dirt road ended at three small cottages on a headland bluff. They overlooked the ocean, their foundations close to the eroding lip, where ropes of ice plant grew in rappel and belay. The cottages were on the verge of decrepitude, shredded tar paper and horizontal pl
ank warped white with salt, and the arroyo-stone chimneys leaned precariously against the scabbed corrugated roofs. The wind was throwing dirt and sand in the bantam-pecked yard, and from the barn Blackwood heard a horse sneezing and the groan of an udder-sore cow. Blackwood, so skilled at this sort of evaluation, noted that there wasn’t a telephone pole in sight. What was it he had first taught himself when he arrived in California all those years ago? The true developer sees value where others turn away.
Blackwood got out of his car and called hello in a friendly way. What Blackwood didn’t know about himself was that pink-cheeked friendliness came naturally to him, and that others sensed it and trusted it, perhaps even when they should not. He was handsome in a safe, pale-featured way—handsome enough for success to have come to him just a little more easily than to most; but he was unaware of this slight advantage. In fact, Blackwood was certain that he had started off with no advantages at all. He was equally unaware of his natural powdery scent, much like a baby’s, not unpleasant but unusual for a man of forty-four.
Oddly, however, on this December morning his typically cheerful “Hello! Anyone home?” emerged shrilly, as if he was nervous—like the call of a red-tail hawk. But Blackwood wasn’t the type of man who knew about birds and their calls. Since moving to California he had failed to grow curious about habitats and ranges and migration paths interrupted by the reach of man. Like most Pasadenans—and certainly he thought of himself as one, although others, many others, did not—he delighted when a bald eagle alit in the Arroyo Seco. Why, the Star-News had run a picture of such an event this very morning!—but this was the extent of Blackwood’s ornithological interest. Had it been greater, he might have noted earlier the sign along the dirt road that read:
CONDOR’S NEST