The Ruins of California

by Martha Sherrill

  I lifted the dresses out of their tissue wrapping, grimaced, then quickly shoved them back inside.

  “Maybe you’ll change your mind,” my mother said, a little cheerily. “They look big.”

  “Colors are nice,” said Abuelita. “Your father must have picked them out just for you.”

  “Or maybe somebody else did,” said my mother.

  I looked down at the box—the way he wrote “Inez Ruin” so precisely, and the round pink San Francisco postmark—and my vision began to blur. The check felt very thin in my hand, nothing but paper. Not like a present. And suddenly, as I stood there, my mother circling nervously and Abuelita with her grim consolatory expression, I felt very far away from him. He didn’t know me anymore. He didn’t understand. Otherwise why would he have sent something so wrong?

  “I guess I blew it,” he said later, when he called with birthday wishes. “Your mother says you really hated the dresses. Is that so? Cary thought you’d look great in them. Do they fit at least?”

  “No,” I said, “there’re way too big.”

  “Well, maybe there’s still time.”

  But school began, and the dresses hung in the back of my closet, forgotten and stiff above a pile of clodhoppers that I had started refusing to wear. With the neighbor boys at a Catholic school across town and involved in sports all afternoon—a cease-fire declared and my nursing efforts no longer needed—I was happy to start fourth grade with Miss Roth, a young waif with a short Twiggy hairdo who married around Halloween and announced that her name was now Mrs. Shockley.

  Quietly, from my desk in class, I contemplated my teacher’s sudden shift in status. I looked for outward signs of unhappiness and deterioration. I searched the surface of her sallow face for wrinkles and her eyes for tiredness and stress. Was she still pretty? In a blast of warm weather in early November, when Mrs. Shockley came to school wearing a sleeveless dress, I focused on her armpit stubble and felt it to be, among other things, the dire sign of neglect and fading youth. And I wondered when, having exhausted her supply of good cheer and energy, Mrs. Shockley might leave her husband forever.

  One sunny morning in November, my mother gave me a long bath and shampooed my hair. She put me on a stool in the kitchen and cut my bangs. A white dress with pink smocking—one that Abuelita had made for me—was pulled out of the closet, along with a pair of white tights and party shoes, and I was carefully dressed, put in the car, and driven out of Van Dale. The blue Mustang traveled along the ridge of the mountain into the foothills of Eagle Rock, where the houses were perched on stilts and hillsides overgrown with ice plant.

  Pasadena unfolded at first as a gulch, an arroyo seco, at the end of a long, elegantly arching bridge. My mother and I crossed the bridge, and soon enough Pasadena became a city—seedy and ramshackle in the bright light of day, lined with nightclubs and dingy shops. As we headed down Orange Grove Boulevard, the stores and seediness disappeared and the city became a place of enormous houses and wide streets lined with palms and lawns wet from sprinklers. The houses were bigger than anything in Van Dale. They were mansions, lumbering stucco palaces with dark overhangs and slanted roofs, set way back from the curb or mostly unseen behind tall black iron gates or walls of cement. On New Year’s Day, when the Rose Parade seemed to spontaneously arise, Orange Grove was congested and alive, but the rest of the year it had the hushed serenity of a cemetery. My mother drove farther into what seemed a green wilderness of wealth and gigantic pointy-finned Cadillacs, until we entered a neighborhood with even wider streets, bigger houses, taller palms. The air seemed lighter and cleaner. There was a sense of peace and invisible perfection. San Benito had the manicured beauty of a movie backdrop and the calm of heaven.

  The sunlight was strong and hot, but it was dark inside my Grandmother Ruin’s house, and cool. The air smelled like roasting turkey and onions and pumpkin and spices, and the large rooms contained small clusters of people who were holding cigarettes and glasses with liquids. I could hear murmuring and the tumbling of ice as the water glasses on the dining table were filled. Years later, when I thought back on the day, I wouldn’t remember greeting anybody. I remembered only the library and being lost in its darkness. Above the fireplace there was a portrait of a man who looked like my father, except he had wild hair and a long, gray beard. On other walls there were maps of Kentucky and Virginia, bookshelves with worn volumes of Shakespeare and Toynbee and Gibbon, nautical guides, travel journals, and two sets of encyclopedias. There was a mantel clock, chintz slipcovers on the love seat that felt slick and icy, and on top of a small desk in the corner, there was a black telephone and a silver cigarette box lined with thin, fragrant wood.

  A bowl of pale pink roses sat on a low table by the window, along with a selection of news and political magazines that my mother and Abuelita never had at their house in Van Dale, full of opinions they didn’t share. The National Review. U.S. News & World Report. Human Events. But I never wanted to talk about politics in San Benito, where the house was full of people who appeared to agree strongly about everything—the war, civil rights, and, most particularly, that communists and unshaven hippies and Negroes were taking over the country. Sometimes I looked at the portrait of the hairy man over the mantel, my great-great-grandfather, and wondered if he was a hippie. But I kept that to myself. I was just a girl on my own, in transit, a half Ruin, a traveler from the modest outpost of Van Dale.

  From the darkness of the library, I watched my mother in the foyer. She was buoyant, and her hair looked almost blue-black against her pale forehead. Her wool shift was tight in the bust—all her dresses were too tight lately—and there were half-moons of wetness under her arms. My Grandmother Ruin seemed very cool and relaxed in a blue knit skirt and cardigan, three strands of pearls, a lit cigarette. She was trying to convince my mother to stay at least for a drink.

  “Oh, come now, Consuela. You must say hello to Julia and Ann. I’ve no idea where Paul is. He drifted off, as usual. But please do stay. Please. You must. Oh, dear, you look so well. How is Adela? How are things? How are things?”

  My grandmother circled my mother with warmth and enthusiasm, the kind of unabashed acceptance that, I later learned, she reserved for servants and very rich friends. Did my mother want to stay for dinner that day? Maybe so. But, alone in the library, I remember wishing that she were gone already—and just imagining her vanishing from San Benito released me from the tension of our drive from Van Dale. I relaxed in the coolness and smell of camphor and spices, the tinkling of ice in glasses. I became part of the large spaces, the thick carpets, the low-light sconces, the shadows of the mysterious library where my dead grandfather, N.C., was rumored to have hidden money behind secret panels. In San Benito there were no great sweeps of feeling, no hysteria, no loud sounds, no intrusions or surprises. I was simply a granddaughter in a house with a butler who carried a silver tray and asked me if I wanted a Shirley Temple. I was in San Benito, a hamlet inside a hamlet, a place where I didn’t even need to think or have opinions or do anything for myself, because everybody had already done it for me.

  I stood at the window of the library and studied the patio and the weird light that a huge green awning cast on everything below it. Bougainvillea was draped over the awning and trees like garlands, like Mexican festival paper. There was a Spanish theme to most everything in the big Spanish house—wrought-iron tables, archways, terra-cotta tile floors—and a fountain spluttered into a clam shell on a mossy brick wall. My grandparents had raised three children there, my father and his two older sisters, indulged them with handmade clothes and music lessons and eggs Benedict brunches at the Vista del Arroyo Country Club, things my father came to reject and criticize. When he returned for holidays and illnesses, he wore a rumpled suit and black knit tie and agony on his face. For years I thought the agony was about Easter or Christmas or Thanksgiving—he hated all holidays—or maybe just about me.

  The patio had a brick floor with a crisscrossing pattern that was hard to sweep, acco
rding to Jose, my grandmother’s gardener and handyman who always prodded me to talk with him in Spanish. Green canvas chairs were set up in semicircles. There was a swinging sofa that was awkward to sit down on, teetering tables for drinks, and carved wooden boxes of more cigarettes. Beyond, a flat sweep of Kentucky bluegrass was kept dense and low for croquet. On the other side of a hedge and a massive California live oak, there was a rectangular-shaped swimming pool edged in Mexican tile, a pool house that smelled peppery with mold, and a brick barbecue that was never used.

  From the window I noticed movement on the small pathway that led to the pool. One of my four cousins from Newport Beach, I assumed. I pressed close to the screen door, hoping for a better look. A boy was coming down the gravel path, behind a wall of shrubs and trees. I saw the top of his head bouncing above a hedge. I caught bits of his torso, his shoulders, covered in a brown corduroy jacket. I saw his legs—and jeans. He was picking up gravel from the pathway and throwing it ahead of him. He was somebody new.

  I stepped outside. The air was warmer under the hot awning.

  He was tall and lean—long arms and long, spindly legs. His hair was limp and dark, but lighter on the ends, as if he’d spent the summer in the sun. When he turned his head to the side, I saw his pale face and the edge of his profile—a nose that was already prominent, a high forehead, full lips above a long chin. He moved with an energetic grace, a kind of strange happiness that wasn’t oblivious as much as expectant, as though every moment that bloomed before him were a surprise. He was radiant, so radiant, and I kept my eyes on him and then crossed the patio as loudly as I could.

  He didn’t seem to hear me. I stepped down to the pathway, scuffing my party shoes on the gravel. Then I kicked some gravel ahead.

  He turned. “Hello.”

  “Hello.”

  “I just climbed into the neighbor’s yard.”

  “You did?”

  His eyes were almost black.

  “I met an old woman,” he said. “She was wearing a bathrobe and shower cap. She was watering camellias. Do you know Vivi?”

  “Who?”

  “Vivi. Mrs. Swigg. She lives next door. She said that her husband died a few years ago watching the Watts riots on television—he had a heart attack—and now she’s alone. Have you met her?”

  He was staring at me so intensely that it was almost as if his words were just things coming out of his mouth—something to pass the time while he was staring. “She showed me her garden,” he said. “She gave two camellia trees to the Huntington Library last year, she said. Camellia japonica. Do you know the names of plants?”

  I said nothing.

  “I guess not. Do you know the names of trees?”

  I shook my head.

  “That’s a carrotwood,” he said, pointing to an old tree with deep glossy green leaves and a wide canopy. “That’s a live oak.” He pointed to the heavy tree by the pool.

  “I know about that one,” I said, looking at the old oak. “Grandmother told me.”

  “Who?”

  “Grandmother.”

  “You mean Marguerite?”

  I nodded.

  “Why don’t you call her Marguerite?” He smiled. “I do.”

  That was when I knew. The look on his face, his princely tone. When he stepped into the sharp sunlight, his eyes became golden like my father’s, and not black. But he had an accent—was he British or something? Was he twelve or thirteen? He was so darkly beautiful and confident. He knew plants. He’d climbed over the wall. And there was something about his hair…. It fell almost to his shoulders, far longer than the hair of any boys in Van Dale. How did he come to have hair like that? He was so unlike the other Ruin cousins, or the second cousins, or the blond, tennis-playing Orange County contingent who were always comparing yacht clubs and not looking me in the eyes.

  “But she’s my grandmother,” I said.

  “Don’t be so boring,” he said with a chuckle.

  “What?”

  “She’s my grandmother, too,” he said, shaking his head. “Don’t you know anything? You’re Inez. Aren’t you?”

  I nodded.

  “And your father is Paul Ruin.”

  It was the way he said it—the whole name, Paul Ruin—the weight of it bearing down on him, the shadows stretching out around it, that made me so glad, suddenly.

  “Whitman?”

  “I’ve been waiting all morning,” he said. “Didn’t they say anything?”

  He brushed his bangs away from his eyes and then grabbed my chubby hand to shake it. He bowed, sort of mock-formally. Then he leaned toward me to kiss my cheek, leaving behind a small smudge of wetness where, a minute later, I could still feel the cool air.

  Halfway between the house and the street, in the middle of the stone pathway, Marguerite was standing with my mother. The two women were gesturing at the trees and azaleas and perfectly tended grass with glides of hand. My mother looked fleshy and round, bursting with ripeness. Marguerite looked dry and prunish, her bony shoulders holding up her knit suit like a wire hanger. She was doing most of the talking. She seemed to be looking at her former daughter-in-law with both regard and wariness, or perhaps just regret. Where there had once been only affection, there was something else between them now—a distance, a kind of canyon over which all their goodwill could not cross. The fact that they were halfway to the street seemed odd to me, too, as though Marguerite were slowly, and unconsciously, urging my mother back to her car.

  Whitman and I were standing at the open door—looking out. “Is that your mother?” he whispered over my shoulder.

  “Yes,” I whispered back. “Where is yours?”

  “She won’t come anymore.”

  “Why not?”

  He shrugged.

  We heard a voice in the hallway behind us. It was Aunt Medora, the ancient second cousin from Kentucky, creeping toward us on her swollen feet that rose out of her wide pumps like bread dough. Whitman seemed stricken, eyes darting. Suddenly, as if we’d been able to read each other’s mind, we ran to the center-hall stairs as fast as we could. We went up, two steps at a time, passing the etchings of the Alhambra which ascended on the staircase wall. We passed the tolling grandfather clock on the landing, its chimes growing louder and louder as we approached. In my mind it had become a stand-in for the absent N.C. His clock face poised on us, its mouth tolling and tolling, as though saying, LOOK, LOOK, INEZ AND WHITMAN! They’re here! Coming up the stairs!

  On the second floor, we flew down a long corridor and into a bedroom, then closed the door behind us. The bedroom had once been Aunt Ann’s. It was decorated in floral chintz, matching curtains, spreads, chaise.

  “Think anybody saw us?” Whitman asked, out of breath.

  “No.”

  “I felt like hiding,” he said.

  “Me, too.”

  “Every time I’m here, I feel like that.”

  “You do?”

  He shrugged, looked around. “So does our dad, you know. He’s hiding out somewhere, or gone for a walk. Marguerite’s been looking for the last hour—before you came.”

  Whitman. I’d been hearing his name for so long. I’d seen his first-grade picture and another one, a year later, when his front teeth were missing. In my mind I’d sealed him there—no front teeth—and it hadn’t occurred to me that he’d be older than I. He’d lived in England and then Boston. His mother was an artist of some kind, designed gardens or painted gardens. Marguerite’s photo albums were pocked with missing pictures of her.

  “Where do you live? Boston?” I wanted to show that I knew something.

  “Not for long,” he said.

  “What?”

  “We’re moving.”

  “Where?”

  “Here.” He pointed to the ground.

  “San Benito?”

  “God, no.” He made a face—a grimace. “California somewhere. Not here. Are you kidding?” He shrugged again. “You’re Mexican, aren’t you?”

  Just l
ike that. I’ll never forget it.

  “My mother’s half,” I said, “and half Peruvian.” He stared at me. And I must have been staring back, a little hard.

  He shrugged. “It’s no big deal. You don’t have to look at me like that. I was just curious, that’s all. How long are you staying—overnight?”

  “How long are you staying?” I asked.

  “Until the end of the weekend.”

  “I’m just here for dinner.”

  “Your mom, too?”

  I shook my head.

  “Oh, that’s too bad. Marguerite was hoping she might stay. Have you ever seen his old room? Dad’s. It’s not really a bedroom anymore.”

  I followed him down a long hallway to a smaller, much sunnier wing of the second floor. We walked past a small, utilitarian bathroom and a tiny maid’s room. “That’s where Fitzy used to live,” Whitman said. “Have you heard about her yet?” I shook my head. “Dad fell in love with her. Miss FitzWilliam. Marguerite didn’t want to fire her, so Dad was moved into a bedroom farther away. But here,” he said, pushing open a door, “is the bedroom that used to be his.”

  We entered a large room that was decorated more like an upstairs library than a bedroom. The walls were lined with shelves of books. A small television with a V-shaped antenna sat in the corner. There was a twin bed covered in upholstery fabric and pushed against the wall like a sofa. Above the door there was a framed photograph of Albert Einstein.

  “I can’t believe Marguerite allows that to stay,” Whitman said, pointing to the photograph.

  Whitman’s things were tossed all over—clothes, sneakers, copies of Surfer magazine. An open duffel sat on the floor. He walked into a closet and pulled open a drawer in a built-in chest. He wanted to show me something he’d found. A few old swimming medals skidded around, their gold tone peeling off. There was a pocketwatch with a smashed glass, a tarnished silver thimble, and a box of assorted campaign buttons, about half of which said AU H20 64.