Bruder, Linda. He’s made the journey back with me and he’s here to stay. Come out and say hello.”
But Linda couldn’t come out of the water, not just yet. First she’d have to resign herself to the fact that the interim years of war now belonged to memory—but whose memory? Then she’d have to think about the bag of lobsters and realize that she didn’t have enough for Bruder but would have to offer one to the stranger anyway, and she already knew that she would hand over the largest to the young man, saying something silly like “Doesn’t all that hair get in your eyes?” And then, before she could emerge from the ocean, she’d have to beg her father and her brother and the boy who’d go on to sleep in the bed across from Edmund’s to turn around and allow her to dress in privacy. Uponrealizing that she was naked, Dieter and Edmund skittered nervously up the bluff to Condor’s Nest, saying, “We’ll be back, we’ll be back!” But Bruder looked up alertly; his eyebrows lifted and he sealed his lips and he hesitated before he followed the others. The wind flapped the wings of his sleeves, and slowly he left Linda alone on the beach, a glance stolen over his shoulder. And when at last he was gone, Linda ran from the ocean and pulled her dress over her blue cold chest, and she dried as the weak sun set and the salt hardened upon her flesh and turned into bitter crystals in the night.
4
Bruder was about nineteen , or maybe twenty—no one knew his birthday for sure. His mother had deposited him as an infant at the Children’s Training Society in an orange crate lined with newsprint. Mrs. Trudi Banning, the long-faced Prussian widow who ran the orphanage, had given him his name. She’d been holding him up to the sun, turning him this way and that, finding the baby strangely large and of a warm, wooden color, when the mailman delivered a perfumed letter from her brother, Luther—a petal-skinned poet to whom Mrs. Banning’s heart was devoted. She was thinking of her brother and holding the new baby, and his name came to the orphanage’s mistress like a chill on the spine.
Over the years, gossip about the boy traveled on the breeze and Mrs. Banning told Bruder what she knew, and what she speculated to be true: “Your mother was a hotel whore. She was a chambermaid first at the Raymond, but then it burned down, and then at the Hotel Maryland, where she was caught
nakt
beneath the pergola. Who your father was, I’m sure even she couldn’t say. She was from Mazatlán, your mother, smuggled up the coast, and that is all I know, my lad, but it should be enough to tell you who you are. And what kind of man you are destined to be.” Until the war, Bruder had spent his entire life in Pasadena at the Training Society, and as soon as he was old enough to understand that Mrs. Banning didn’t want him to know how to read anything more complex than the stenciling on the side of a grove box, he walked to the library and found a copy of
Kidnapped
and began reading about boys in worse straits than himself. He was always big for his age, and black-haired puberty came early, and by the time he was twelveyears old and nearly six feet tall, he was easily spotted prowling the streets of Pasadena in a lonely lurch, to the library and back to the orphanage, books clutched in his paw. Rumors about him spread around town—
He’s a mutant! He’s the devil’s son! He only
pretends
to know how to read!
—but there wasn’t an invented story or whispered fallacy of which Bruder was unaware. He knew that people called him “El Brunito,” and that they said that the accident with the ice-delivery boy wasn’t an accident at all. He knew he frightened women on Colorado Street, young fragile-wristed ladies whose faces would blanch whiter than their tennis sweaters when his long shadow crossed theirs. He had been born in Pasadena, but there was a segment of society—the 100 Percenters, he knew they called themselves—that
But Linda couldn’t come out of the water, not just yet. First she’d have to resign herself to the fact that the interim years of war now belonged to memory—but whose memory? Then she’d have to think about the bag of lobsters and realize that she didn’t have enough for Bruder but would have to offer one to the stranger anyway, and she already knew that she would hand over the largest to the young man, saying something silly like “Doesn’t all that hair get in your eyes?” And then, before she could emerge from the ocean, she’d have to beg her father and her brother and the boy who’d go on to sleep in the bed across from Edmund’s to turn around and allow her to dress in privacy. Uponrealizing that she was naked, Dieter and Edmund skittered nervously up the bluff to Condor’s Nest, saying, “We’ll be back, we’ll be back!” But Bruder looked up alertly; his eyebrows lifted and he sealed his lips and he hesitated before he followed the others. The wind flapped the wings of his sleeves, and slowly he left Linda alone on the beach, a glance stolen over his shoulder. And when at last he was gone, Linda ran from the ocean and pulled her dress over her blue cold chest, and she dried as the weak sun set and the salt hardened upon her flesh and turned into bitter crystals in the night.
4
Bruder was about nineteen , or maybe twenty—no one knew his birthday for sure. His mother had deposited him as an infant at the Children’s Training Society in an orange crate lined with newsprint. Mrs. Trudi Banning, the long-faced Prussian widow who ran the orphanage, had given him his name. She’d been holding him up to the sun, turning him this way and that, finding the baby strangely large and of a warm, wooden color, when the mailman delivered a perfumed letter from her brother, Luther—a petal-skinned poet to whom Mrs. Banning’s heart was devoted. She was thinking of her brother and holding the new baby, and his name came to the orphanage’s mistress like a chill on the spine.
Over the years, gossip about the boy traveled on the breeze and Mrs. Banning told Bruder what she knew, and what she speculated to be true: “Your mother was a hotel whore. She was a chambermaid first at the Raymond, but then it burned down, and then at the Hotel Maryland, where she was caught
nakt
beneath the pergola. Who your father was, I’m sure even she couldn’t say. She was from Mazatlán, your mother, smuggled up the coast, and that is all I know, my lad, but it should be enough to tell you who you are. And what kind of man you are destined to be.” Until the war, Bruder had spent his entire life in Pasadena at the Training Society, and as soon as he was old enough to understand that Mrs. Banning didn’t want him to know how to read anything more complex than the stenciling on the side of a grove box, he walked to the library and found a copy of
Kidnapped
and began reading about boys in worse straits than himself. He was always big for his age, and black-haired puberty came early, and by the time he was twelveyears old and nearly six feet tall, he was easily spotted prowling the streets of Pasadena in a lonely lurch, to the library and back to the orphanage, books clutched in his paw. Rumors about him spread around town—
He’s a mutant! He’s the devil’s son! He only
pretends
to know how to read!
—but there wasn’t an invented story or whispered fallacy of which Bruder was unaware. He knew that people called him “El Brunito,” and that they said that the accident with the ice-delivery boy wasn’t an accident at all. He knew he frightened women on Colorado Street, young fragile-wristed ladies whose faces would blanch whiter than their tennis sweaters when his long shadow crossed theirs. He had been born in Pasadena, but there was a segment of society—the 100 Percenters, he knew they called themselves—that
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