Pasadena Page 4

  Over the years, Blackwood had heard surprisingly few stories about the ranch and its family, the Poores. As far as Blackwood knew they all were dead now, Captain Willis Poore the last to go, a heart attack last year while doing calisthenics on his terrace, or so Blackwood had read in the obits. The captain’s wife, a woman by the name of Lindy, who, according to the Star-News, wasn’t from Pasadena, had been dead for a number of years; his sister, Lolly, too, a girl who had once kept the largest rose garden in Southern California. The obit had gone on to say that the rancho “had seen its best days pass,” and Blackwood had made a note to keep his eye on the auction block. The rancho sprawled at the western edge of Pasadena, tucked between Linda Vista and Eagle Rock in a small valley that most people didn’t know how to find, including Blackwood. He thought, vaguely, that he had heard Stinky say that the family had something to do with the founding of Pasadena; but Stinky also added that the Poores weren’t a Cal Tech family, that was certain. “Goodness, now take a look at this,” Stinky had said on the telephone. “I’m looking at a 1925 Valley Hunt Club roster, and sure enough, here they are. Captain Willis and Miss Lolly Poore, Junior Members.”

  The dirt road was in bad shape, toothed coyote brush and thickets of poisonous buckeye creeping into the car’s path. Blackwood drove carefully, worried about his paint job, making his way up the chaparral hill. The rains had left everything blindingly green, the deerweed in bloom with tiny butter-colored flowers and the sagebrush tipped with yellow blossoms. Vines of Pacific pea climbed the live-oaks, their ovate leaflets shimmering in the December wind. A row of bluish leaves sprouted from the road’s center hump, an early sign of a poppy trail. The car continued its climb, and the pitch of the road steepened. Soon the ceanothus and the lilac and the twisted-trunk madrone were nearly choking off the car’s path. The morning’s blue shadow pressed the side of the hill, a chill touching Blackwood’s neck, and he thought about turning around. But at last the car approached the tall black gate. As Mrs. Nay had said, vines of wild cucumber twisted through the wrought iron; Blackwood got out and shoved the gate, and to his surprise it opened easily, as if a hand were pulling it from the other side. It was warm from the sun, and he dragged it across the road; dust rose in a line that seemed to mark the rancho’s boundary, a border to another world.

  Back in his car, Blackwood continued up the hill, switchbacking through thickets of holly berry and pink-veined laurel sumac and minty eucalyptus. He was listening to the Saturday “True Stories” program on KHJ, and just as the actress on the radio whispered in a panic “I think there’s someone in the house!” reception was lost. Blackwood stretched to fiddle with the dial, and to his great disappointment the white plastic knob snapped off in his hand. The road turned sharply, but Blackwood, whose eye was on his dash, failed to turn with it, and the Imperial Victoria’s front wheels ran off the road and the car teetered over the edge. With no time to spare, Blackwood’s frightened foot found the brake; he was on the verge of a terrible plunge into the arroyo below.

  Yet when put into reverse, the car performed for Blackwood. With sweaty palms he steered back onto the road. He mopped the moisture from his face and, reminding himself that caution was the developer’s guide, continued up the hill. Beyond the bend, the one he had almost missed, the road crested and the wildbrush fell away and before him was a wide, untended lawn surrounded by tight-budded camellias and yews and fan palms swaying high above. The grass needed reseeding, but immediately Blackwood began to tally the acreage. The great lawn alone must have added up to nine or ten.

  The road skirted the lawn, and soon the dirt gave way to pavement, a strip of white concrete cracked and sprouting branchlets of ricegrass. Blackwood reached for his hat with the maroon band and the tiny golden feather, propping it on his head, and it was then that he saw the house. The Poore House, as Mrs. Nay had referred to it on the telephone, dwarfed the mansions on Orange Grove—“Millionaires’ Row,” they used to call it long before Blackwood moved to town. The house seemed to Blackwood even bigger than the Hotel Vista, but that wasn’t possible; in its heyday the Vista could sleep five hundred. Blackwood thought about how Pasadena’s richest citizens, tucked behind hedgerow and hairy-leafed arroyo willow and pillared gate, called their Mediterranean villas casitas, their slate-roofed palaces cottages, their Greene & Greene redwood mansions bungalows. “It’s how they are,” Stinky had remarked, in his analytically detached way. “There’s no economic rationale for denying one’s wealth, the way some people do around here. But it wasn’t always like this. A generation ago it was just the opposite, everyone flaunting about. Things change, don’t they, Blackwood?”

  Blackwood would have to present himself to Mrs. Nay as unimpressed, not letting on that he’d never seen an estate like the Pasadena; as if he were used to surveying private kingdoms. She had described the mansion as Beaux-Arts, but it was more than that: it was a twisted California mélange of Italian villa and Andalusian farmhouse and French château, three stories, plus attic, whitewashed with a red pantile roof supported by a cornice decorated with escutcheons bearing navel oranges and bobcat heads. A wide terrace ran along one side of the house, its chipped balustrade topped with marble urns potted with dying yucca—Blackwood guessed this was where Captain Poore had fallen dead. Creeping ficus jacketed the eastern half of the house, tangled with a dying passion-fruit vine.

  Blackwood drove through the portico’s narrow columns and parked the car. He saw no one and heard only the chime of the yew leaves and the calling jays. In the distance, the Sierra Madres were limey yellow in the early sun, their peaks protected by snow, and it occurred to Blackwood that he had found a private world separated from the rest of Pasadena. It was not altogether impossible that they’d be asking too much for the Rancho Pasadena; right away he’d have to get the price out of Mrs. Nay.

  “What are you talking about?” said Cherry Nay. “You haven’t even seen the place. Let’s not talk about prices until I’ve shown you around.” She was the forty-and-over ladies’ tennis champion at the Valley Hunt Club, and ten years of rushing the net—how Cherry Nay loved to volley and smash an overhead!—had worked her skin into a supple brown leather. In person there was nothing birdbrained about Cherry, and she sensed that her very presence had surprised Blackwood, as if the most apparent facts about her didn’t add up easily: her girl-size body and her sun-worn face and her old lady’s hair and her pleasure, and enviable skill, in assembling information and relaying it with authority. She had a habit of closing her sentences with the firm statement And that’s just the way it is, and she said this now as she told Blackwood that since he had bothered to come out to the ranch, he might as well stick around for the tour. “Now let’s see this big old house!” She said this with the giddiness that had greeted Blackwood on the phone, and he was disappointed in himself for misjudging her; he wasn’t dealing with a rube at all.

  They moved down the gallery that ran the length of the mansion. The house was empty except for a row of gilt-legged chairs draped in muslin and, at the base of the main staircase, a six-foot marble statue of Cupid blindfolding a half-robed woman whose bare stone breasts caused Blackwood to avert his eyes, a modesty Cherry noted as she explained, “The owner is selling everything as is.”

  The house had been built in 1896, she said, for a land speculator and orangeman by the name of Willis Fishe Poore I. “Carved out of the old Rancho San Pasqual. It replaced an earlier but also grand mansion,” she said over her shoulder, moving quickly, assuming that Blackwood could take everything in at her rapid pace. What Cherry was careful to keep to herself was that Bruder had called from the village booth early this morning and asked if she knew anything about a man named Andrew Jackson Blackwood; he’d been poking around Condor’s Nest, Bruder had said, and Cherry, careful not to lie, had said that she’d never met Mr. Blackwood. “Is he a serious fellow?” Bruder had inquired. “There’s something about him that makes me think he might be the one.” Cherry had said she would try to find out. She hadn�
��t revealed that Blackwood would be inspecting the Pasadena in a few hours, and Cherry somehow understood that it would be best for her to mediate. She knew she had something to gain by keeping each man away from the other for as long as possible, allowing information to transmit through her.

  “Willis Fishe Poore?” said Blackwood.

  “The first.”

  “The first?”

  “Mr. Poore, as I’m sure you know, was one of Pasadena’s founders. He kicked off the Indiana Colony back in 1874. Not that George and I care about those things—whose homestead was here first and all that rigmarole of the past. But as I’m sure you know, there are those around town who take great pride in their antecedents.” When the house first rose on the hill the ranch totaled 2,500 acres, but that was long ago, said Mrs. Nay. Now the Pasadena was a not-unimpressive 160: 60 acres for the estate and its gardens—“what’s left of them”—and 100 acres set aside for the orchards, half dead and the other half gone wild, producing oranges as black and filmy as coal. “The spreading decline hit during the Great Drought back in 1930, doing the grove in once and for all. It’s too bad, really. It was mostly navel, that was the crop. But there was grapefruit, tangerine, cherimoya, mandarin, apricot, blood orange, peach, walnut, sapota, and Kadota fig. It was quite a place, Mr. Blackwood.” Once there’d been a staff of six gardeners, Japanese men in green rubber boots who swept the lawn with bamboo rakes. In the house there’d been secretaries and chambermaids in lace pinafores and a seamstress and, later, a chauffeur who parked the cars in the converted stable. It took Willis Fishe Poore four years to build the house, and thirty mules to level the hilltop and dig the trout pond and clear the two acres for the thousand rosebushes. The house resembled the Château Beauregard, said Mrs. Nay. “Elmer Hunt—you’ve probably heard of his nephew Myron—transformed it into a … I suppose the best description is a California castillo.” There was a bowling alley in the basement and a billiard room where Mr. Poore used to gamble with his ranch hands and a loggia off the portico where delicate Arcadia orange trees, planted in porcelain saki barrels, blossomed so sweetly that Lolly Poore, Mr. Poore’s daughter, once collapsed from the onslaught of their perfume. There were twelve bedrooms, each with a view of the orange grove, and eight baths—“The first full-service in Pasadena, George always reminds me to point out”—plus a back wing big enough for a staff of twenty-four.

  “But those days are over,” said Mrs. Nay. “Nobody lives like that anymore.” She doubted Blackwood intended to live like that. He could turn out to be the type of man who would raze everything, denuding the hill even before he had a plan of what to do with it. It was a shame, really, and although Cherry wasn’t a sentimental woman she held out a tiny hope that someone would come along and roll a carpet down the hall and replant the groves. Nothing wrong with keeping a little bit of history alive, Cherry liked to say.

  On the landing between the first and second floors, they looked out the window toward the North Vista and its dolphin fountain, now dry and cracked, and a camellia garden reclaimed by a bramble of red-berried toyon. From this view, Cherry realized, the ranch appeared rather forlorn, as if it were straining to expose its true sadness to its visitor.

  “How long has the house been empty, Mrs. Nay?”

  “A year or so. But it was on the decline for quite some time.”

  “Like so many properties around town, Mrs. Nay. They say Pasadena isn’t what it used to be.”

  “I suppose you’re right, Mr. Blackwood. When was the last time anyone built himself a mansion? Years ago, probably 1929 or 1930 at the latest. I can remember when they went up two a week.”

  Blackwood sensed an opening, although he didn’t understand where it might lead him. He said, “You mustn’t forget the war, Mrs. Nay.”

  “Of course, Mr. Blackwood. I don’t want you to think I’m not doing my part. We save our cooking fat in a tin can like everyone else, and the cook and I have learned more cottage-cheese recipes than I ever thought possible. I’m not complaining. Surely the war will end one day, but I have a strong feeling Pasadena will never be the same.”

  “Nothing will be the same, Mrs. Nay.”

  “That’s true, Mr. Blackwood.” And then, “And that’s just the way it is.” She paused before saying, “But that’s not why we’re here. There’s plenty more to see, Mr. Blackwood! Note the Diana statue. That comes with the house as well.”

  She was having a hard time piecing Blackwood together; he was both rough and sophisticated, confident and self-conscious, adolescent and middle-aged. She knew he wasn’t from Pasadena, and she knew that his application for membership at the Valley Hunt Club had been rejected. The same was true for the Athenaeum over at Cal Tech, even his friend Stinky Sweeney hadn’t come out full-hearted on Blackwood’s behalf; and the Playhouse had voted not to elect him to its board. But Cherry’s sympathy for outsiders far surpassed her husband’s and that of most of the people she knew, and she wanted to take Blackwood’s hand and advise him to stop trying: some people will pass through the gates, and some never will.

  On the terrace, she pointed out the orange grove and the ranch house and the outbuildings. “It comes with all sorts of picking and packing equipment. If you’re interested, if you’re serious, Mr. Blackwood, I will supply you with an inventory.”

  He felt obliged to say, “I am serious, Mrs. Nay.”

  Her finger traced the property line: “From that hill with the fire scar in its side to that one shaped like a camel’s hump, including that little arroyo over there.”

  “What’s that noise?” asked Blackwood.

  “What noise?”

  “That whirring noise?”

  The two stood on the terrace, its red Welsh tiles casting a glow about their feet.

  “That’s the parkway, Mr. Blackwood.”

  “Is it that nearby?”

  “Yes, it’s just beyond that first hill over there. Captain Poore, who was Mr. Poore’s son, sold some of his land to the men who dreamed of paving the Arroyo Seco with a six-lane road.” She failed to mention that one of those men was her husband.

  “I suppose you can hear it night and day?”

  “I’m afraid so. They say a thousand cars use it every hour.” She and Blackwood exchanged a look that they both understood to mean that the parkway’s proximity would knock something off the price; she held private the thought that the parkway had made her and George very rich. “Except for the automobiles, we really could be stepping back in time, couldn’t we, Mr. Blackwood.”

  He thought her a handsome woman, small and mulish, like the few lady professors scuttling around Cal Tech. He thought to ask, “How about you, Mrs. Nay? Were you born in Pasadena as well?”

  She said that she was from Baden-Baden-by-the-Sea, and that George was from Bakersfield. “We’re both upstarts in Pasadena, but we’ve done all right for ourselves. We’ve been over on Hillcrest for the past ten years and we’ve seen the changes, Mr. Blackwood. And we know the next ten will bring even more.” She was of two minds about what she did in real estate—ushering in progress and stamping out the past—and sometimes it was as simple and innocent as shepherding a bungalow with a swing on its porch from one generation to the next, but other times, especially with George’s deals, it meant deciding that the past should come down altogether: choosing one hundred tiny new houses over a citrus grove.

  Blackwood noted that in the past several years the changes had been especially rapid: the Hotel Vista converted into an army hospital, the candied-fruit shops on Colorado Street boarded up, and a dozen Orange Grove mansions abandoned in the night and turned into rooming houses, or pulled down by rat and ivy. A nearly imperceptible brown veil hung over the rancho’s valley, blurring the landscape like one of the plein-air paintings that hung in the ballroom of the Valley Hunt Club—or so Blackwood had heard.

  “And what’s that over there, Mrs. Nay?”

  “What?”

  “That white structure at the far edge of the grove? Is it a folly?”<
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  “Not at all. That’s the mausoleum. They’re all buried there, the whole family.”

  “Who?”

  “The Poores. Most recently Captain Poore. He followed his wife and sister by more than ten years.” And then the memory washed over Cherry and she said, although she didn’t intend to, “She was an unusual woman.”

  “Who?”

  “His wife.”

  Continuing her tour, Mrs. Nay explained that the library’s mahogany paneling had come from a manor outside Windsor, pried from the walls of a cash-poor earl and crated to California by the Duveen Brothers. The roller shades were drawn and the seams in the herringbone parquet collected dust, and the room was gray and vacant, except for the six thousand books on the shelves. “The present owner chose not to take them. He says he doesn’t like to read another man’s books. He’s not from Pasadena, Mr. Blackwood. Or, I suppose he is, but not like anyone else.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “He was an orphan. Raised at the Children’s Training Society, out by the old City Farm. It closed a while back now. You probably don’t know it. There’s no reason you would.”

  “I’m afraid not.” Blackwood pulled a volume of Gibbon from the shelf and found a bookplate that read, This book belongs to the library of Lindy Poore, 1930. The pages were heavily underlined and annotated. On the inside of a schoolroom edition of The Three Musketeers he found a signature, written over and over, Sieglinde Stumpf.

  “Sieglinde Stumpf?”

  “What’s that, Mr. Blackwood?”

  “Who’s Sieglinde Stumpf?” He pointed to the signature.

  “She was the mistress here.”

  “Here?”

  Mrs. Nay nodded, and her hand fell to his wrist. Sometimes Cherry would say to George that she hadn’t thought about Linda Stamp and Bruder in years: “It feels like someone else had known them, not me …” But in truth, a day didn’t pass when she didn’t turn over the details, the stones of the story tumbling and polishing in her mind. “Tell me, Mr. Blackwood. Is it the house or the land that interests you?”