by Chip Jacobs
To Nick, if there was anything paradoxical about the Mercereau Company’s ultramodern approach, it was his realization that assembling something of this magnitude was to buzz-cut a small forest’s worth of timber. Indeed, of all the stations at base camp, the sawmill area might’ve been the most decisive. It was there that lumber essential in creating the falsework used to shape the bridge’s elaborate parts was prepared with fussy precision. No wood, no concrete bridge. Fortunately, Pasadena’s bountiful mountains served as a lumber supply store.
Engineers schooled in geometry and trigonometry burned through pencils, slide rules, measuring tapes, and antacids in this process. They needed to ensure these wooden casts were sawed, milled, and bent just so. It didn’t matter whether the falsework was for the soaring arches Pasadenans gushed over, or spandrel columns reminiscent of glass-less cathedral windows. Failure to get it precisely right, to translate the architect’s granular specifications into three-dimensional reality, threw everything into a tizzy. Bungling meant do-overs where heads rolled.
Once the falsework was ready to be bolted together, horses became the freight elevators delivering the shaped boards to the bridge rats up on scaffolding. The horses trod the opposite direction of the structure, pulling ropes levering the wood to the proper elevation. In a decade, Nick expected, hydraulic cranes would replace them.
Given a chair and a Buford’s Special, he could’ve watched this regimentation for hours. Cawston’s enterprise was well organized; Mercereau’s was fantastic choreography. Even the open-hearth furnace, which cooked the long, ribbed strips of rebar sunk into the wet concrete to fortify it, never roared a second longer than necessary to scrimp on fuel.
But Nick couldn’t gawk. And he already tried too hard once to ingratiate himself with the crew. When he could locate no other place to sit for lunch one day, he took his place at the end of Chester’s table, saying, mildly as possible: “Afternoon, fellas. All right to join you? Mess tent’s chockablock today.”
“Sure. Take a load off,” said an amiable lumber cutter with sawdust in his scalp; at five feet seven inches, the giant crosscut saw he used appeared to operate him. “Say, that’s some heaping of grub you have. You cross the Mojave?”
Keep it short. “Sometimes it feels like it after my tromping about.”
Chester nodded curtly at Nick, and Nick nodded back. When he wasn’t slopping chipped beef into his mouth, he kept it shut this time. Sage decision, for the bridge rats were gossiping again in hushed tones. This time the subject avoided the supernatural. The topic du jour was jobsite gaffes.
“Only a politician who’d never seen a grommet in his life would impose such a hasty deadline,” said Chester, working a toothpick in his gums before he rolled a post-meal cigarette.
“Don’t rile yourself up—Stonebreaker claims they’re bringing in reinforcements,” said carpenter Porter Hodge, a prissy-looking fellow in a remarkably unstained flannel shirt. “Old man Mercereau, RIP, must be clapping. I recall him spitting bullets when we fell behind getting those first footings sunk.”
“Well, some things are worth getting riled up about,” Chester replied, still picking his teeth. “Before he signed on here, our design architect, Mr. Waddell, had the emperor of Japan and Grand Duchess of Russia draping medals around his neck. That’s what I read, anyway. Other cities fell on bended knee for his services. So what happens in Pasadena?”
“I’ll play along,” Hodge said. “What?”
“The pooh-bahs award him the job, argue with him over a measly five thousand dollars, and the city repays him by changing his blueprints. How’s that for respect?”
Fleet, Nick knew, would’ve been backslapping Chester if he heard this. Repeating the fix was in. Needling him about one of the rare articles critical of the bridge, the one where county politicians expressed reservations about coughing up a hundred grand for the job because of rumors about “wire-pulling” in Pasadena’s construction bidding.
Nick himself wasn’t so delusional to believe the project was immunized from normal greed and ego. In his homer mind, it was a matter of relativity: Pasadena was downright antiseptic compared with New York’s Tammany Hall, or Los Angeles City Hall. Ask Messrs. Van Nuys and Lankershim about how the powers-that-be there hoodwinked them out of their San Fernando Valley land holdings for the Owens Valley Aqueduct poised to deliver water from the Sierras.
“Our new friend must be asking himself again what he got himself tangled up into,” said Darby, who sat far from Chester in case the hothead exploded again.
“Aw, he’s being polite, as his mama taught him,” Chester added. “That’s all.”
The men continued bellyaching about labor shortages and miscues securing patented building materials; they nattered on about how the nighttime freezes were affecting the falsework lumber and ill will among some property owners whose acreage the city condemned.
Nick kept shoveling chipped beef into his mouth, saying nothing. Walking away after lunch, he was glad he proffered nothing about how A. J. Pearson’s engine-testing shop was the probable source of Chester and Darby’s superstitions, or that he didn’t counter the other grievances. Stubborn people tend to only listen to evidence that reinforces their slanted views.
—
A few Mondays later Nick rose at four o’clock, a ball of anxious energy. The night before, he decided that was the smart hour to set his alarm clock. Royo must’ve been eavesdropping on his brainwaves, as he sometimes did unasked, for the dog awoke him with a sloppy lick to the eyelids at three fifty-nine on the dot.
Nick’s movements were swift in this pressure-cooker moment. He splashed cold water on his face, pounded a bowl of cornflakes, and fed Royo scraps. He was out the door in sixteen minutes with cowlick hair and sleep dust in his eyes; out the door in a dark Pasadena before newspapers announcing the discovery of “cracked petroleum” and the possibility of Irish home rule hit the streets.
At Orange Grove Boulevard, Nick glanced up at a moon hanging low in the sky like a hazy silver dollar. He smiled at it, and lit out toward the banks. He didn’t need to run, other than being amped up about re-inspecting his lamps again before Marcus rendered judgment. That he was here last night at ten doing the same obsessive thing was of no consequence.
Once he checked every one of his twelve lights again, he scaled the bank, passing the splattered concrete mixer onto the deck. Could he ever use caffeine: his pocket watch read five. He swayed on his heels, thinking, for some reason, of his father.
“Fancy meeting you here, Chance,” Marcus said, slapping a meat hook on Nick’s shoulder from behind five minutes later. Nick practically leapt out of his skin, feet from the edge of the bridge. “Sheesh. Don’t have a heart attack. You didn’t hear a big galoot like me coming?”
“No, sir,” Nick answered, trying to de-shock his system.
“Guess not.” Marcus stood with a steaming cup of Joe, which Nick wanted to steal, and a battered clipboard. The saggy bags under his eyes were matchbox-size. “Let’s get this done. I got new bridge rats starting today that I need to interrogate. Can’t lie: I enjoy it.”
“Yeah,” Nick said. “I get that.”
“Careful, wisecracker.”
Marcus placed his mug down on one of the two-by-four railings, which served as temporary safety buffers along the open sides of the deck. He withdrew a stubby pencil from behind a hairy ear and walked to the south side of the roughly two-thirds-done bridge. Nick stayed where he was, his stomach in knots. First morning light was slashing the horizon pinkish-orange.
Next, Marcus strode to the opposite side, the one that looked out on the Sierra Madre range, to assess the six solar lamps there. “You passed,” he declared matter-of-factly after a minute. “I’ll make this quick. I’m okaying you to add another dozen around the existing ones. They could use some beefing up. Maintain the same configurations.”
“In obtuse triangles?”
“Yeah, what you said. Make sure the light’s aimed at where the motorcars will be entering.”
“You got it. It’s heady to realize this will be their debut.”
Marcus picked up his mug and drank the rest of the coffee. “Look. I’m not a sentimental man,” he said, wiping his mouth with the sleeve of his wool jacket. “To be honest, I was looking forward to firing you—you being foisted on us and all with zero experience. I can’t reasonably do that, can I though, when your little metal petunias continue working. I still expect you to revise the site plan and estimate a completion date.”
“That I can do.”
“No lollygagging, either. We’re busting our humps to complete this job.”
“I’ll get right on it.”
When Nick spun to leave, Marcus once more clamped his fleshy hand on his shoulder. “We’re not quite done, eager beaver. You may still be leading VIP tours. Reassure me that I can trust you.”
And they say sadists have no fun. “Fire away.”
“Altitude of the highest arch? Quick.”
Nick’s brain fought through fatigue. “Um, two hundred twenty-three feet.”
“Why’s she curved?”
“Unevenly distributed bedrock on the west, narrow on the east. Good footings need unshakeable ground.”
“Not bad. The daily pour?”
“I know that. Up to one hundred twenty cubic yards per day, with an eight-man team.”
“Concrete mix?”
“Four parts gravel to two parts sand and one part cement.”
“Last one. How many road apples do our best horses crap in an average day?”
Before Nick could answer it was a trick question, Marcus rolled over him. “Why doesn’t anyone think us roughnecks have a sense of humor?
“I have no idea,” Nick said, biting his lip.
—
After work that triumphant day, Nick didn’t drag his exhausted body straight home. He scaled the path toward Ivy Wall to ask Lilly for a favor. They hadn’t spoken since he played tour guide to her inscrutable Girl Friday. Lilly greeted him warmly, even so.
His question involved Royo, canine tornado. The dog’s cabin fever, his hatred of being left alone in Nick’s bungalow for hours on end, six days a week, was at a breaking point. While Nick was away, the stray chewed and then chewed some more. The carnage so far included Nick’s hiking boots, two sets of schematics, a college photo album, and enough divots in the hardwood floor to start a new trend in the Arts and Crafts movement. Royo also figured out how to bypass Nick’s pantry door to pilfer human food. Whether he was doing that because of a rapacious hunger or as insurrection, it didn’t matter. This couldn’t go on.
Was there any possibility, Nick asked from Lilly’s parlor, if he could board Royo in the fenced-in pen, where her dog stayed, while he was at work nearby? The backyard space, which overlooked upper Busch Gardens, was roomy enough for twenty Royos. “He’ll be good,” Nick said. “I think he takes out his loneliness on my possessions, one gnarled object at a time.”
Lilly didn’t twist any knives as Marcus did when you needed something. “Delightful notion,” she said. “Maty, my butter streusel, could benefit from the company. My staff can only attend to her so much.”
She opened the doors, and they drifted out onto the square, grassy enclosure. Jules didn’t seem to be around, and Lilly, thankfully, didn’t broach her. A steel-gray schnauzer trotted over to say hello and beg a treat from Lilly’s pocket. A giant opal on the baroness’s hand winked sunlight as she threw the rag-mop a carrot. Maty crunched it and immediately returned to her spot in front of a custom doghouse mimicking Snow White’s steep-roofed cottage. There, the dog a quarter of Royo’s size resumed her compulsive behavior, alternating between licking her paws and nibbling lawn.
The schnauzer, Nick gathered, must spend all day there. Because of her lapping tongue, the grass was pocked with yellow encrustations where even new turf wouldn’t sprout. Royo would need time adjusting to such a pampered, lazy pen-mate that didn’t even bother terrorizing squirrels or barking at milkmen.
After Lilly accepted Nick’s repeated thanks, she said she had “something I’ve been meaning to get you. Hold your donkey while I retrieve it from inside.” Minutes later, he departed with a gold-embossed envelope.
In the weeks that followed, Royo settled into his fresh air, doggy-care with a new cohabitant still more preoccupied by her own tongue than playing. For him, the real benefit of being outdoors was freedom. Within days, he learned how to escape by squeezing through loose fence posts, using his liberty to romp about and explore Pasadena beyond luxurious Orange Grove Boulevard.
Doris and the Writer
The well-heeled guests striding into the main banquet room at the Hotel Green were astounded at the lengths party organizers went to recreate a hoedown in this historic chamber. Everywhere they looked were scarecrows and mason jars, banjos and hay bales, country punch and substantial farm animals.
“Wunderbar to see you,” event chairwoman Lilly Busch said seeing a new face enter. She employed another go-to greeting for certain male acquaintances: “My, my. You look as handsome in overalls as you do in a tuxedo.”
It was wise to butter up the attendees. She wanted their money.
Nick and his stag date, Fleet, watched her press the flesh with her donors from the back wall next to the pocket library. They were sipping complimentary Budweiser, preparing to hobnob with the upper-crusters, many of them awkwardly attired in cowboy hats, cowpoke skirts, and rawhide for Lilly’s costume-gala fundraiser.
Between the pair and the pasty faces were twenty or so blue-and-red-checkerboard-covered tables on the parquet floor. Off to the side was a grub table heaped with fried chicken and other countrified fare.
“Knock Pasadena all you want,” Nick said, “but you think you’d get this quality of people watching in Whittier?”
“No. Probably not,” Fleet said. “Let’s drink to that.”
They clinked bottles.
“And you promise to be a good boy, correct? No talking out of school.”
“Yes, mother,” said Fleet. “No speaking of Gilly’s beer pipe, your green parrots, or the Spring Street man who guessed your name.”
“Anything else?”
“Fine. I won’t mention the Benjamin Harrison incident. Don’t I have First Amendment rights?”
“I’m suspending them tonight.”
Nick, as Fleet knew, didn’t wanted to be here, despite this venue being a ten-minute walk from his bungalow. And it wasn’t only his distaste of artificial socializing. It was missing a double-barreled opportunity elsewhere.
Two weeks earlier, a former girlfriend who worked at the “Solar Observatory” on Mount Wilson, invited him for a sneak peek at the huge, steel-and-concrete dome under construction there. Once the French manufacturer milling the giant lens stopped botching the job, George Ellery Hale’s telescopes could well revolutionize astronomy. They’d pack the optical firepower to peer tens of thousands of light years into the universe’s past; maybe unlock the spectral mysteries of the sun. A former Austrian-patent already yearned to book time there.
Still, Albert Einstein wasn’t in Pasadena like Nick, a layman with a fervor for science and a shot at romance on Mount Wilson. But all that evaporated with Lilly’s invitation for him to “enliven the atmosphere” here with his vitality. He couldn’t refuse.
What Nick could do was eyeball the head-spinning list of local millionaires or their kin on the event program. In alphabetical order, there were Armour Cochran (pig iron, coke); John S. Craven (Liggett-Myers tobacco); Henry C. Durand (groceries); Arthur H. Fleming (lumber); Eva Scott Feynes (publishing); David B. Gamble (soap); Anna Bissell McCay (vacuum cleaners); Lamon Vandenburg Harkness (Standard Oil); Henry Huntington (railroads, et al); Lewis J. Merritt (iron ore); Mrs. George Pullman (trains), and, Nick an
d Royo’s favorite after the Busches, William J. Wrigley (chewing gum). They all either resided in Pasadena or “wintered” here.
“We better hope the ceiling doesn’t cave in,” Nick said. “The US economy would sink.”
“True. You’d need,” Fleet said, swigging on his Bud, “a morgue just to house all the zeroes in their bank accounts.”
They entertained themselves observing this assemblage of wealth and privilege tipping Stetson’s or showing off western boots fresh out of the box. A third of the attendees weren’t in any hokey outfits they judged beneath them. They wore what they frequently did on Saturday evenings on the Pasadena party circuit: black ties and ball gowns.
“Is that,” Fleet said, “who I think it is approaching us?”
“I can’t read your mind,” said Nick, whose dog frequently read his, “but yeah, if you’re talking about Pasadena’s White House connection.”
Hobbling past them to the ladies’ room was the sunken-cheeked, hair-bonneted Lucretia Garfield, widow of former President James A. Garfield, who was fatally wounded by a maniacal drifter in July 1881 entering a Washington, DC train station. Twenty years later, another assassination roiled America after an anarchist murdered William McKinley in Buffalo, New York—bloodshed that installed then-Vice President Teddy Roosevelt in the White House, which paved the way for Nick’s intersection with him. By then, Lucretia had relocated west to a sunny, five-bedroom, South Pasadena Craftsmen designed by the Greene Brothers. Wags called Mrs. Garfield the area’s “lady in continual mourning,” for no dignitary passing through town would dare leave without paying respect.
A minute later, it was Nick’s turn to point. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t that your dowager over there? I didn’t know she was that rich to warrant an invitation. I sure hope Hattie isn’t aware of your arrangement with her.”
