Pasadena Page 5

  “Both, Mrs. Nay.”

  “Do you have any intention of preserving things as they are?”

  “No plans yet, Mrs. Nay. But anything is possible. I’m most interested in what’s best for the property. And for Pasadena.”

  “I was hoping you’d say that,” she confessed. “We shouldn’t rip up every last thing, should we? On most days, I find the past a useful thing to keep in mind. I had a gentleman in here who had an idea to turn the mansion into a halfway house. Another fellow wanted to build an apartment complex where the roses are. You can’t imagine what he had planned for the orange grove. Still, the present owner has little reason to seek preservation. If it were up to him, he’d tear down the whole thing. He says the only thing the mansion could be used for is a home for old ladies.”

  “A home for old ladies?”

  “That’s what he says, and I know he’s probably right. But I’m sure you can see this is a one-of-a-kind. In the end I am a realistic woman, Mr. Blackwood, and my only hope is that the future owner thinks carefully before he raises his ax.”

  “There aren’t many people who can take on a mansion and one hundred and sixty acres just for themselves these days, are there, Mrs. Nay? Few people set themselves up as barons anymore.”

  “That’s what the present owner says.” In the dim library, her eye gleamed and she made a little swing with her arm, as if she were on the tennis court.

  “Did you mention who the present owner is? Is he Captain Poore’s heir?”

  “I didn’t mention the name, Mr. Blackwood. He has asked me not to say.”

  “I understand.”

  “But he is an unusual man.” She said this to test Blackwood, to fillip the crystal of his interest to hear how it rang.

  “Is that so?”

  “I’ve known him for years and years.” She added, “He once worked the orange ranch here.”

  “And now he owns it all?”

  “It’s a long story, Mr. Blackwood. Mr. Bruder’s history is complex.” She knew that the revelation of Bruder’s name would startle Blackwood. Cherry wanted to grade his resourcefulness, to see if he was the type of man who could stitch together a story with the little scraps she had meted out.

  “Mr. Bruder?” said Blackwood, pressing his lips together so as not to give anything away. He peeled back the window shade: the small valley lay before him, the hills fighting off the fiery reach of the new houses, the roof tiles as orange as flame and the fresh roads the color of smoke. What was the likelihood that it was the same man? On the other hand, what was the likelihood that there were two? “Do you have any idea why Mr. Bruder is selling?” asked Blackwood.

  “As I said, it’s a long story.”

  “I have time.”

  “I really shouldn’t say. After all, I’m representing the seller.”

  “It would help me in my decision. And my decision might be for the good of things in Pasadena.” Cherry didn’t say anything, and Blackwood tried again. “Who is this girl named Sieglinde?”

  “Which Sieglinde? There are two.” Cherry checked her watch. She didn’t know why she felt the need to tell the story, but it pressed at her from beneath her skin, an angry fist punching out. Like Blackwood, she sensed that an era was coming to an end, and perhaps she wanted to set things straight before the world moved on. And unlike Bruder, Cherry had never made a promise to keep a secret; and oh! how from the day she first heard Bruder’s name she had known he would change their lives. Now they were allies of a sort, she and Bruder, hooked together to a past that was receding quickly. She had recounted the story to George early in their marriage, and he had said, his lips gentle upon her forehead, “Cherry, I’m glad you’ve given up newspapering. It makes you ponder such horrible truths.”

  “Should we pull a couple of chairs onto the terrace?” she said to Blackwood. “Beneath the coral tree?”

  “After you, Mrs. Nay.”

  The transition from the library to the white sun erupted a flash in Blackwood’s eyes. For a second he couldn’t see, and then his pupils readjusted and Mrs. Nay was waving her hand, “Over here, over here.”

  On the breeze was a lingering scent of citrus. The past blossomed on its sturdy stalk. The memory carried Cherry upon its sweeping flood and she said, but not to Blackwood, “Where to begin, where to begin?” She hesitated, and then, with her eyes sealed, said, “Where did the trouble first begin?”

  A mute remembrancer of crime,

  Long lost, concealed, forgot for years,

  It comes at last to cancel time,

  And waken unavailing tears.

  EMILY BRONTË

  1

  Down the coast, along the old El Camino Real, in a flatland between the ocean and a rancid salt lagoon, not quite midway between the bougainvillea-buttressed missions of San Juan Capistrano and San Luis Rey, was the village of Baden-Baden-by-the-Sea. At the turn of the century it was a handful of acre farms and fishing shacks—“blackies,” they were called—and a straight strip of gray-sand beach. At one end of town, on the bank of Agua Apestosa, the long-dead virgin Donna Marròn had built a schoolhouse, where generations of student eyes had reddened in the swamp-ripe afternoon breeze. At the other end, on Los Kiotes Street, was Margarita Sprengkraft’s P.O. and general store, where the twine of gossip wrapped up every purchase. A hundred yards from Margarita’s porch stretched the village pier, which groaned under the pressure of high tide and the weight of fishermen leaning perpetually against its rail. Up on the bluff above the village was the Fleisher gutting house, a lean- to warehouse that swayed in the wind and dumped buckets of fish blood into the sea and employed fishergirls from the farms, young women whose fingers stank and whose clothes at day’s end sparkled with the sequins of scales. Each March, after the last winter storm, the farmers came to town to rebuild the pier, but the gutting house never fell to the January storms; the fishergirls were always busy, day after day, year after year, knifing open the pale pink shells of quivering rock scallops, or slitting open mackerels and turning their delicate flesh inside out.

  And in the village center sat a large round boulder of red chert. At sunset, the fiery rays playing on its dimpled surface made it look like a ten-ton navel orange. It was surrounded by a bunting-draped viewing platform that resembled something out of a small midway or carnival. The villagers called this rock Apfelsine, and perpetually trickling down its stone-rind face was the mineral water that gave the town its name. Since the 1870s the Apfelsine mineral spring had drawn settlers to this part of the coastland, and it had drawn real-estate speculators too, men who erected hotels for the tourists who journeyed here to buy tin cups of Apfelsine water for twenty-five cents apiece. The waters were of such a rich mineral complexity that the village promoters guaranteed that their imbibement would deliver not only rejuvenation but transformation: “Drink a cup of pure Apfelsine water and be the man you were meant to be! Become the girl you’ve always dreamed of!” The tourists arrived with hopes of changing their lives and their fates, and they drank at the spring and departed certain of their altered, and improved, destinies: ugly girls went away hopeful of husbands, slow boys left hopeful of fortunes, hard-luck men and women wet their lips with spring water and returned home believing they would rise beyond their lot. Every few years, when the real-estate speculators became swamped by debt, the hotel at the spring’s side would burn in a mysterious midnight fire, guests in white sleeping dresses running from the smoke. But within a month a grander hotel would always replace it, its veranda wider, its mineral baths deeper, its views of San Clemente Island forty-nine miles offshore expanded.

  And the villagers of Baden-Baden-by-the-Sea would laugh at the visitors and the speculators and sell them sips of water and souvenir tin cups and lobster dinners. But they would never turn to the Apfelsine for their own thirst. For everyone on this particular stretch of coastland knew better than to challenge his fate.

  Almost everyone, that is.

  Inland, tucked among the gold-grass hills, was an
abandoned silkworm farm called the Cocoonery, which Herr Beck had refashioned as a flower house and depot. Where millions of silkworms had once devoured themselves cannibalistically, now Ensenada girls pruned bird-of-paradise and long-stemmed lilies, packing the stalks in wet newspaper for train delivery. All around the village, nitrogen laced the soil, and when the year saw thirty inches of rain the farmers made skimpy but reliable livings rotating their crops among sweet onion and alfalfa, red-leaf lettuce and white corn, leeks and chives and a little cotton. During the wet years, a few farmers dabbled in gladiolus and the hundred-petal ranunculus. Once, a German farmer named Dieter Stumpf tested fate by planting thirty rosebushes on his ocean farm. But the salt in the wind pickled the buds and everyone told him to leave the rose briars to Pasadena, where they had better luck with their blooms.

  But when drought blanched the year, the mineral spring ran dry and the tourists stopped coming and the speculators turned brittle, and no one could make a living at all.

  A regular morning fog shrouded the bluffs and the fields of Baden-Baden-by-the-Sea, the heavy dew bending the brittle bush and the monkey flowers. On some winter days the fog never lifted, and the villagers—Spaniards and Mexicans and Germans twisted together into a wild Californian vine—padded through their work in damp ponchos while the greedy lips of the few remaining longhorn cattle worked the succulence from the cholla and the live-forevers pushing up from the crags. Yet for much of the year the fog would ascend early to reveal the hills and the scrub, the farms and the sea—an unknown paradise emerald in January and February and March, gold and gilded the rest of the year—through which the Santa Fe passed but didn’t stop. The village had once been a marine outpost on the Rancho Marròn, a parcel of cattle land that stretched a half-day’s ride between the Pacific and the first wandlike creosote bushes of the desert. But that was long ago, when the rancho’s allegiance ran to the Spanish king—for whom the highway, still running north and south, was named. But the world of missions and padres, Mexican governors and suede-legged rancheros, fields littered with the sun-bleached debris of steer—horned skulls and carrion and carcasses skinned for hide and tallow—had disappeared by the time Dieter Stumpf beat the odds of side-wheel oceanic voyage and arrived in California in 1866.

  The Stumpfs—faithful family of Schwarzwald—owned, through land grant, the sea cliff known as Condor’s Nest, two score acres two miles outside Baden-Baden-by-the-Sea. The sandstone-and-blueschist bluff rose seventy feet above the Pacific, crowned by a trapezoid of field and an arroyo where a lonely puma prowled. The property had come as compensation for the tin cups Dieter and his brothers had produced for the Union Army in the Stumpfs’ tiny hammer-tapping shop. The shop sat deep in the misty Black Forest on the outskirts of Baden-Baden, where waters heavy with minerals had long before earned a reputation for therapy, both hygienic and Providential. For more than two years, young Dieter had worked late at night tapping his small-headed mallet against the circular sheets of tin, tap-tap-tapping cup after cup into shape, curling over the lip with pliers. He produced his cups for the Yankees and the Confederates and didn’t care who won; all he cared about was staying busy and receiving an eventual, if currently unspecified, reward. Dieter was smaller than most boys, with a head almost pointy at the crown, and his face and hands were pruned like an old man’s. Nothing made him happier than working alone, tapping and bending tin, out of teasing’s range. When the Civil War—which from Schwarzwald seemed more like an opera raging on a prince’s distant stage than anything with actual bloodspill—came to a halt, the federal government of the United States offered Dieter and his brothers a piece of land to pay for the tens of thousands of tin cups. But Dieter’s older brothers weren’t interested in land on the other side of the world. In exchange for his share in the Stumpf tinnery, they gave Dieter all rights to the land grant, and happily sent their odd little brother on his way. Yet to Dieter the reward was so great that his immediate hope was for another war. Some might say that Dieter had been duplicitous in supplying both sides, but Dieter himself realized more than others that he had been wise. For he believed that a boy could pave his own path, and that was what he had done, with a mallet and thousands of dull, circular sheets of tin.

  The official papers were slow to reach the thatched shop deep in the fir wood, but when they did, and after the pale-faced sister at the moss-walled nunnery downstream translated them, Dieter learned that his offer for compensation was for one of three pieces of genuine American land: a wooded parcel described as prettily situated at the tip of Illinois; a cottonwood plain at the foot of a mountain range he’d never heard of, “the Stonies,” as Sister Anke translated it; or a plot of California soil, up on a bluff, that stretched from an ocean-thrashed precipice inland to a hill rolling with soil the color of caramel. This oceanside land lay situated in a newly formed settlement called Baden-Baden-by-the-Sea, named for its own mineral-heavy spring in which the old and the infirm and the barren and the lovelorn and the Christ-scared washed their feet and hands. One of young Dieter’s repeating nightmares was about meeting a girl—dark-eyed, hair wild round her face—in the dawn but not knowing how to speak, how to shout “Wait! It’s you!” In the nightmare, language failed him, and so he chose the piece of land, forty acres, where it seemed most likely people would shout and sing in his German tongue.

  He arrived in California in September 1866 on a side-wheel steamer called the Elephant Seal. Upon taking deed to his land, Dieter, only fourteen but telling the world he was twenty, mistakenly believed he’d better get busy with his mallet or else he and his hinny, Caroline, would find themselves freezing beneath the cruel veil of the first snow-fall. That was how little he knew about where he had landed. The first cottage rose from the pounding of Dieter’s mallet in twelve days. This was the same tool that had hammered a war’s worth of tin cups, and somehow Dieter knew that this mallet would determine more than a few things in his life. At the eastern edge of his new land—which the Baden-Badeners had dismissed as too windblown to be worth anything—tilted a eucalyptus grove, their trunks pink and buckling like the skin on elbows. The grove had been planted by Donna Marròn, who had possessed ill-conceived dreams of a rancho lumberyard. Those trees, gone wild over the years, provided Dieter with his first plank. The cottage’s floors were green and weepy from the freshly cut wood, and the chimney leaned with stream stones. A coal stove, potbellied, coil-handled, disassembled and shipped to California in a crate on the Elephant Seal, sat portly on a large flat beach rock. In the alcove, beneath a shuttered window, Dieter first unrolled his horsehair blanket and slept, so tired that he dreamed of no one at all. This sensation would carry him through the years: nightly dreamless exhaustion from the hours in the field, clearing and tilling and planting and harvesting and separating and packing—all that work and only getting by. The hinny and the nitrogen-rich soil and the months of relentless sun brought Dieter no riches at all, only a steady hard life of rising with the bantams and retiring with the silvery moon peeking through the gaps in the tar paper. Each October, before anyone could guess whether the winter would be wet or dry, Dieter would twist himself with worry, wondering if this would be the year he’d be unable to feed his hinny and his hens and himself. His agrarian skills earned him enough of a reputation for the gimpy horsemen who hung around Margarita Sprengkraft’s front porch to tip their hats and call him by the friendly nickname Cebollero, “Onion-seller,” which he translated in his head as “Herr Zwiebel.” The other villagers, some German but many more of Spanish and Mexican blood, trusted him enough to grant him the right to work the scale at the gutting house or borrow a double-barrel to shoot a bold coyote or kneel at their pews in the adobe cathedral where the waxy hands of Padre Vallejo caressed their chins as he offered the chalice. They asked Dieter to play his fiddle at the harvest dances and join the crew in burning the sumac creeping alongside El Camino Real, and not once did anyone claim he had succumbed to what was called “Californio fever,” something Dieter eventually understood
as old-fashioned laziness. The villagers of Baden-Baden-by-the-Sea accepted Dieter in every way but one: they refused to let him marry one of their own. And when he asked why, Margarita, at her counter, arranging bolts of calico, told him how Baden-Baden-by-the-Sea perceived him. “You’re a funny little man. You’re smaller than most ten-year-old boys. Your face is wrinkled and fat like a baby’s. You make us think of a tiny creature stepping out of an enchanted forest. We’ve read about you in fairy tales. You own the worst piece of farmland around, right there at the ocean’s edge. You weren’t meant to marry.” Did she say the word Erdgeist? Dieter wasn’t sure, but afterward he would recount it as if she had: Who would let his daughter marry a gnome? a stranger? he who is not one of us?

  Many years later, after Dieter married the girl from Mazatlán with the heart-shaped face, he built a second cottage. By then he was familiar with every pebble in the arroyo and every golden chinquapin and cinnamon tree cresting the hillocks and the intertidal marshes abutting Condor’s Nest. Out by the eucalyptus stand, a great blue oak grew in yellow grass. Lore claimed that a Spanish settler had married an Arcadian princess beneath the oak’s canopy, but Dieter was Teutonically suspicious of any myth that didn’t involve Norns and Valkyrior. Regretting nothing, he axed the blue oak to a stump; and just as easily as the myth had billowed over the years, so it disappeared with the felled tree. But Dieter wasn’t one to consider preservation, nor was anyone else those days in Baden-Baden-by-the-Sea. His handsaw, won in a poker game on the deck of the Elephant Seal, drove wide kerfs into the logs, splitting them into planks later smoothed with a file. The second cottage was no bigger than the first. There were three windows facing the Pacific, which for years Dieter had done his best to ignore. But the new cottage was more refined, with a bookshelf and plastered walls and a mantel carved with blue whales. Dieter strung his old horsehair blanket along a wire, securing privacy for the bedroom, and hung, in a gesture he believed would be inviting to a female presence, a string of washed-up baleen over the door. This cottage, lullabyed with the night ocean, warm from the chimney, cocooned old Dieter and his young bride in their conjugal bed, where they would retire stunned by fate and fatigue. Dieter would smell of the chives and the leeks and the white globes of onions, and Valencia would be perfumed by the owl limpets and the hairy hermit crabs she’d learned to collect during an ebbing tide. The shrouded bed, a mattress stuffed with mule hair, served as the nativity pallet for Siegmund, in 1897, a runt of a baby, bright and dark as a ruby grapefruit, eyes squinty and struggling, and then, six years later, on New Year’s Day, Sieglinde, a mass of black hair marking her from the beginning.