Read Online Pasadena by David Ebershoff - Free Book Online Page A

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 gesturehe 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.
    Years later, Dieter would tell her about her infant gray eyes. “Gray as gull,” he’d say, in his accent that Sieglinde thought of as iron and rust. “And we couldn’t tell what color they would end up. One day they looked like they’d fire up and turn permanently blue, and the next day they seemed as if they’d turn as black and slick as a moray. Back and forth, blue and black, black and blue, your eyes changing like a witch’s, as if there were a fire smoldering in you. Blue, like the belly of one of your lobsters, black as that old tooth of mine that one of these days I’m going to ask you to yank out.” Eventually baby Sieglinde’s eyes simmered permanently black, and Dieter, who was well past fifty now and somehow at last suited for his small, wrinkled
Erdgeist
body, attached the plow to his burro Beatrice and cleared the land for the third cottage of Condor’s Nest.
    He built it for the children with his mallet, a one-roomer with diamond-paned windows and a tin-and-tar-paper roof and a porch where chilies and laundry dried in the sun. Sieglinde’s bed sat beneath the window that faced the ocean; Siegmund’s pitted-iron bedstead pushed beneath the window that surveyed the fields. Before she was six, Sieglinde had caught a puma pup in her claw-mouthed trap. She spread the cat-skin cozily between their beds, ignoring Siegmund’s complaints that it was like sleeping with a feline ghost. Electricity had yet to reach the farms surrounding the village. The lone kerosene lamp was nailed to the wall above his bed, its circle of light failing to reach Sieglinde’s pillow. At night Siegmund would stay up reading, the lamp reflecting off his spectacles, while Sieglinde would roll into her nightly heaving slumber. She didn’t understand where her brother’s readingappetite came from, but there it was—a longing that was foreign to her. Dieter made Siegmund read certain books:
A Guide to the Soils of the West; The Gentleman and His Ranch; The Benevolent and Proper Thinking of Today’s Young Farmer
. But whenever he could, Siegmund would open a volume of history or literature. “You’ll die with a book in your face,” Sieglinde would