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

declare, yawning, pushing her hair into her sleeping cap. Siegmund wouldn’t respond, his body and his books huddled together. And Sieglinde—who even at age six had visions of the world beyond Condor’s Nest and Baden-Baden-by-the-Sea—would pull the quilt to her chin and shut her eyes.
    Her brother didn’t see well, and she’d always say he had damaged his eyes reading in the weak light. Though his wire spectacles were expensive, he was careless with them—or so it seemed to Sieglinde—the arms snapping or the lenses popping out in the ocean or Siegmund simply forgetting where he’d left them, even if they were propped atop his head. “You’ll go blind from reading,” she’d say, unaware of her maternal tone. His lips would move as he read, and sometimes a whole word would emerge from his throat, as if he were testing out its meaning and how it might apply to the Stumpfs of Condor’s Nest. Sieglinde could see that it was a struggle for him to comprehend the books—it would take him many months to finish one, sometimes even a year—and she wondered what made Siegmund try. “I want to learn for myself. I want to become an educated man,” Siegmund would say shyly, as if such an utterance would expose his soul too rawly. And maybe it did: for already people said things like
Sieglinde’s the bright one
or
I don’t know why he even bothers
or
What on earth can he learn from a little History?
Sieglinde too possessed a vague notion that Siegmund was fighting his destiny, a battle that inevitably he would lose. Even at a young age, she had enough sense of the way things worked in the world to understand that he was meant to be an onion farmer, nothing more and nothing less, and that any attempt to climb out of the hole of his fate would prove futile—and, perhaps, even dangerous.
    But Sieglinde also believed that certain people—like herself, like her father—could leave behind the world they came from. Certain people lived off the blood of free will.
    She was an early riser, up with the coydogs, their blood flooded with spaniel and shepherd and retriever and rufous-eared coyote; up withthe tide, up with the sun yawning above Siegmund’s shallot field, where it reflected against the white bulbs peering through the soil. In many ways young Sieglinde was like her mother: dark-haired, strong in arm, long in throat, possessing a general loathing of idleness and imposition. The one difference—and this Sieglinde realized only gradually—was the color of their flesh: she had inherited her father’s Teutonic paleness, while Siegmund’s skin was a muted version of their mother’s, like cinnamon atop a bun. When Sieglinde asked about it
—Why would we end up as if we’re from different litters?
—no one could answer, nor did they try. Instead, Valencia would read Sieglinde the Bible
—There was a man in the land of Uz
—and she’d sit in her mother’s lap both frightened and angry about the improbability of the stories: pillars of salt and a man in the belly of a whale. From the beach Sieglinde had seen the short-fin pilots and the migrating grays, and she knew that were one of them to swallow her she wouldn’t survive; the yellowish baleen would end it for her, and maybe the only memorial would be the bunting of whalebone strung above the door. Did her mother believe that all this was true? Valencia revealed nothing, only hinted at what she believed by wrapping her arms around her daughter. Because Sieglinde always felt a tiny chip of pity for her mother, she decided to believe the tales. Did Sieglinde have a choice? She didn’t think so: no, instead it was a matter of demonstrating to her mother the purity of her love. And so she believed what Valencia read, especially the story of Delilah and old Samson. That one was easy to understand, and Sieglinde thought of Siegmund. She realized, maybe for the first time, how simple it was for some people to transform themselves, to invent their lives.
    There were