by Chip Jacobs
Nick saw the beamed photo reflected in her eyes. “You really like it?”
“Nick, you’re on the cusp of, I don’t know—a floating movie palace.”
“Hardly. The pictures are stationary. But what do you think of Mrs. Julius Caesar? Wasn’t she something?”
Jules yanked him in by the collar. “Yes,” she said. “And so are you.”
Nick smooched her quickly, and then felt the top of his machine to ensure it wasn’t overheating. “Don’t blink,” he said. “It only lasts a minute before it fizzles. Guess I have kinks to iron out before I take it to D. W. Griffith. I was joshing about that last part.”
“Don’t josh. He’ll be groveling to you.”
Mrs. Julius Caesar, restored from death in floating pixels, actually lasted two minutes. Then, as predicted, the image wobbled and dissolved as Nick’s solar-powered projector lost power. He toggled a knob, withdrew the photo, and started repacking it into his gunnysack.
Leaving the deck, back on firm ground, Jules was still enthralled, though not blind to their surroundings. They weren’t alone. She pointed to the second floor of Mrs. Bang’s boardinghouse for the sickly, where a lamp was on in the background of a room. In front of the window were three small faces hopping up and down in excitement. They, too, must’ve enjoyed the ostrich in Nick’s floating movie palace.
“Looks as if you have your first fans,” Jules said. “Next time, you ought to beam a picture of you and the butterscotch wolf.”
Teddy Stumper
Nick squeezed Jules’s hand, fearing he’d lose her in the scrum of other guests who entered the property exactly when they did. To access this bash, everyone needed to survive the human bottleneck on the pathway. When they finally made it inside the host’s residence, Nick crossed himself in jest. “I think I cracked a rib,” he said.
“A rib? I have someone’s handprint on my spine,” Jules added. “Though I hear wine is a curative.”
Nick left, returning moments later with two goblets, and they dodged their way to the corner of the immense room to soak up the ambience. After two of the more uniquely garbed attendees brushed by, one in a raccoon hat, the other in a sort of fancy loincloth, they had their unofficial welcome to Charles Fletcher Lummis’s orbit.
If there was an alternative universe to Millionaire’s Row, this was it
They finished their wine, deciding to eat before socializing outside. The spread before them was fittingly exotic: arugula salad, cured meats, chicken paella, platters of maize and chorizo. In the center of a redwood table were artisanal cheeses stacked like an Aztec triangle, a tribute to Lummis’s multicultural tastes.
Jules’s head already was spinning knowing she’d be meeting Upton Sinclair tonight. She’d even boned up on their frizzy-haired host, who was outside just then greeting arrivals in a tan buckskin coat, which must’ve been sweltering on this warm June evening. Then again, the reigning master of oddball festivities could dress anyway he wished.
Every spring here, Lummis held an “Order of the Mad March Hares” for people born that month. Other times, he conducted “mock trials,” where newcomers to California were grilled about their knowledge of the state. But tonight’s wingding was his signature event: a “Noise.” There’d be loud voices, liberal personalities, and anything goes.
Nick, spooning his paella, admitted feeling out of his league. Jules told him he shouldn’t, and teased him that if a cow broke loose, he’d be their huckleberry.
They walked out into an enchanting backyard teeming with people. Chinese lanterns swung from sycamore branches. Beneath them, two flamenco guitarists played, some folks dancing barefoot to the music. The couple strode the grounds of the cliffside property situated in the Arroyo just south of Pasadena. Lummis’s place, the “El Alisal,” wasn’t as capacious as Ivy Wall, though it was still mighty impressive: a stonewalled castle boasting a tower and exhibition hall. It’d taken Lummis thirteen full years to build it.
After their yard promenade, they sat down at a candlelit table, where Jules refreshed Nick’s memory about the so-called “The Tramp.”
Lummis came west from Cincinnati in his mid-twenties to work as a reporter for the LA Times. He refused to arrive by train. To educate himself about America, he walked, leaving Ohio in a wide-brimmed hat and setting here four months later with a sombrero on his head and a stuffed-coyote necklace around his neck. Three years of tireless journalism later, he was fried, and wandered off to New Mexico to recuperate. Upon his return, his eclectic interests forged him into a Renaissance man somewhat like Charles Holder, only more skewed toward the marginalized. Lummis advocated for Indian rights and the American Southwest; he headed a library and edited the Land of Sunshine magazine.
“Makes sense,” Nick said, wishing he’d worn his adult knee pants. “His guests tilt to a certain artistic class. Now let’s dance.”
They kicked off their shoes and free-lanced moves when they weren’t laughing or reverting to the basic foxtrot. They admired the guitarist’s skill and rubbernecked Lummis’s friend’s—poets, ballerinas, writers, naturalists, socialists, and experimental painters—funky dancing. Jules, after twenty minutes of this, declared herself parched. Nick, light afoot, went into El Alisal to grab them more wine.
Once he returned, eager to tell Jules about his clever remark inside to the weirdo in the raccoon hat, Jules was under a lanterned tree talking to him.
“Upton,” Nick said. “I so thank you for greasing us this invite. It was kind of you to remember me.”
“My pleasure,” Upton said, shaking hands. “You enjoying your immersion into the stranger side?” A teetotaler, he was nursing a cup of un-spiked punch.
“More than I can express,” Nick said, glancing to check if Jules was batting her swimmable eyes at him.
“When I told Charles about you after our lunch, we agreed you were our type of Pasadenan.”
“And that is?”
“The interesting type, the no toffee-nose, trust-fund type.”
“The only toffee I like,” said Nick, in a play to impress Jules, “have wrappers. It’s humbling being surrounded by so many famous faces, nonetheless.”
He wasn’t exaggerating. Over Upton’s shoulder was Clarence Darrow, the famed lawyer who’d defended the anarchists indicted for bombing the LA Times over its anti-union stance. He was jabbering with a pair of young actors, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, who appeared wide-eyed in his midst.
“Your time is coming,” Upton said. “And I must say how heartened I am encountering a Chicagoan on safe turf. That city and I have had a tempestuous relationship since my book.”
“Speaking of Chicago,” Jules cut in, “would it be too cloying of me to inquire about the inspiration for a few scenes? Chalk it up to being a history major at Northwestern.”
Nick, who rarely got jealous, was experiencing gale-force insecurity. He needed to remove himself before he acted foolishly, and he had a ready-made excuse. A. C. Vroman was there by the edge of the property, so Nick excused himself from Jules’s literary swoon.
AC, to him, was the best of Pasadena: accomplished, altruistic. A studious man, he glowed when Nick said he used his photograph of Mrs. Julius Caesar for the solar projector. “You give the word,” AC said, “and I’ll be back with my camera for more action shots. A fella can only snap so many portraits of trees and streams.”
They gabbed until AC went to use the john. Nick stood alone then, listening to the party hullabaloo and whiffing the skunky smoke from three guests sharing a “wacky-tobacky” cigarette nearby. “You want a drag, mister?” one of them asked. “It’s a chest-full of euphoria.”
Nick, while tempted, declined. He circled Lummis’s land again, thinking it could use better lighting, and went to unlatch Upton from Jules. But she wasn’t talking to Mr. Decorated Author anymore. She was saying goodbye to Elizabeth Boynton Harbert, a graying feminist activi
st/writer whose works Jules held in high esteem.
When it was just the two of them, Jules’s face was incandescent, Nick’s zestless. “Are you all right?” she asked after he told her he didn’t care to dance. “You behaved a smidge upset when you left.”
“I needed to catch up with AC, that’s all. How was meeting your idol? Intoxicating?”
Jules never saw Nick territorial before. “He’s amiable in an inured manner,” she said. “And he’s taken with you. He called you a principled cookie.”
“Oh, hooray,” Nick said, kicking dirt.
“Don’t waste this night. Most people would lop off an arm to be around these names.”
“You’re right. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Shall we mingle or have more wine?”
“Both.”
Jules laced her arm through his. For the next hour, they drank and met other attendees. Watched a juggler. They couldn’t believe it either when larger-than-life Will Rogers blew past them.
They were tracking him when Lummis sashayed up, arms wide. The Tramp had a craggy face and an animated chi to go with shock-white, Brillo-pad-esque hair. “What’s a Noise without fresh faces?” he said. “Someday, son, I hope to have a lively discussion with you about the lamps our mutual friend informed me you’re developing. Not every town requires smokestacks for prestige.”
“Just name the time,” said Nick, deciding not to tell Lummis that Pasadena forbid grungy smokestacks.
“Now cavort,” said Los Angeles’s fifty-something man of letters. “We start howling soon.”
At eleven, Lummis scaled an outdoor bench, tapping a knife against his chalice to get partygoers’ attention. It took repeated clinking before the most garrulous in the bunch stopped yapping. Lummis spoke briefly about honoring California’s native tribes and questioning “the onslaught of the motorcar,” the latter a point Nick disagreed with. He plugged his museum, which was premiering next year, and thanked everyone for “being different.” Finally, he hoisted his goblet, saying, “To a Noise we’ll never forget. Friends, convene your inner-animal.”
“How-uuuuuu,” he caterwauled. “How-how-howwuuuuuuuu!”
The yowl was contagious, for everybody soon was woofing and howling in a cacophony of pitchy keening. Nick, trying to wick away the jealousy he denied having, joined in with a Royo-esque “Roh-Roy-Ro-uwhooooo.” Jules added a schnauzer-influenced “Yip-Yip-Yip-Yip.”
The frenzy grew, with the wilder guests boozing it up more, flinging artisanal cheeses, smoking herb, and slurring ribald jokes. When the flamenco guitarists paused for a break, a small pack encircled Will Rogers, begging him for an anecdote. The rubbery-faced actor didn’t require much cajoling: “Everything is funny,” he said in that squeaky voice, “as long as it’s happening to somebody else. To wit, one night in New York I finished a Ziegfeld Follies show with dried tar on my ass and lipstick on my neck.”
Nick quizzed Jules about what she wanted to do after Rogers removed his hat and bowed. She stretched, whispering over the din that she was ready to leave. Nick didn’t contest her. They made the rounds, saying goodbye to Upton and AC. They tried thanking Lummis for inviting them, but he, too, was storytelling—about an Albuquerque llama he swore could predict electrical storms.
On the Red Car home, Nick’s resurgent smile faded. This time, it wasn’t only residual insecurity. It was the creeping realization that’d struck him at El Alisal. To fall so completely for somebody like Jules was to cede them agency over your joy, your mood. Whether you regarded the common buttercup as evidence of divine flourish or ho-hum photosynthesis.
Jules, normally the opaque one, saw him brooding again, and tried vanquishing it by revealing something that she was plotting. Lowering her voice so no else on the trolley overheard her, she began telling Nick about her risky scheme in the name of equality. At the end of a future Pasadena Perfect Committee function or another event, she was planning to give an impassioned speech to Lilly’s wealthy girlfriends and acquaintances, beseeching them for their money and support advocating for women’s right to vote. The Prohibitionists who’d kept the town largely dry—one saloon, fiats against public drinking, no liquor stores—didn’t own the franchise on social justice.
Suffragette petitions and pickets, she’d note, aren’t free.
“That’s industrious, if it doesn’t get you pink-slipped from Ivy Wall,” Nick said, drooping in his seat. “I can imagine husbands protective of their businesses getting vexed, if you catch me.”
“Yes. I need to weigh that aspect more. What I cannot do is bypass the opportunity.”
“Is Lilly on board?”
“Absolutely. Behind all her baubles, she’s a progressive.”
“Genuinely?”
“She has daughters, daughters she knows occupy a man’s world that’d prefer them restricted to kitchens and bedrooms. She respects what our sisterhood in England is sacrificing for fair treatment.”
“Good,” he said. He rubbed his face: it’d felt prickled since he observed Upton schmoozing her. “Luck favors the bold.”
“Switching gears: something you abhor? Vegetable, mineral, people named Chester?”
He didn’t want to play but did. “Broccoli,” he said as if he were chewing it.
“I guess that counts. My turn. I abhor cod-liver oil. And freezing rain.”
She wasn’t going to stop. “All right,” Nick said. “I adore the crisp chill of a pillow after a grueling day. And stealing Fleet’s toilet paper from his water closet.”
“Shameless. I abhor men with snaggleteeth. Like a certain author’s.”
Nick’s eyes narrowed. “You’re just saying that because I turned covetous.”
“Time to switch,” she said, glossing over his admission. “What do I adore? How about humility?”
“Humility?” he asked. “What was the provenance of that?”
“Since you inquired,” Jules said, “I’ll answer. “ She withdrew from her purse a sheet of sepia paper. She unfolded the 1903 New York Times article next and read aloud. Nick’s chin hooked down after the first sentence.
On his recent, triumphant visit to Pasadena, California, to celebrate his negotiation of the Panama Canal, President Theodore Roosevelt was rendered speechless for one of the few occasions in his illustrious career. A high school student, awarded the occasion to pose a question to him after winning a science contest, pointed at a stuffed grizzly next to the podium, where Mr. Roosevelt had spoken to an exuberant audience.
“Mr. President, you once declared that ‘all hunters should be nature lovers’, and that the days of ‘wasteful, boastful slaughter are past.’ Yet, in the North Dakota badlands, you yourself shot dead an innocent mother bear and her cub. Logically, sir, if that’s loving nature, what constitutes despising God’s glorious creatures?”
The President, his lips convulsing beneath his auburn mustache and round spectacles, attempted, halted, and reattempted to articulate his evolving view on the subject while the restive crowd murmured. In the end, the man who led the Rough Riders up San Juan Hill and later confronted a railroad monopoly as a “trust buster” smiled self-consciously.
“As my children can attest,” Mr. Roosevelt told the crowd, “I’m rarely stumped for words, but this young man managed the feat. Bully for him. From hereon, let young Mr. Chance be known as America’s Teddy Stumper.”
It was a moniker that inspired humor and dialogue for a week, until Mr. Roosevelt had to dissuade other adolescents from attempting to pretzel him into silence.
“Dilly,” Nick said half-heartedly after Jules stopped reading the end of the story. “You found it. I’d spotted that it’d gotten lost in your research mountain.”
“It was already in a folder about newsworthy youths when I accepted the job. I spotted it first last week. It’s remarkable, even so.”
“Or just old news.”
“
That’s not what I meant. I doubt a single man at Mr. Lummis’s would’ve desisted from tooting his horn about that. It was a pro-Roosevelt crowd.”
“You got me. Cocky without the nostalgic conceit.”
Jules didn’t understand why he was behaving churlish. Two stops before theirs, he elaborated.
From childhood on, Nick said, he revered the man only slightly less than he did his own father. Roosevelt was Pasadena’s sort of he-man progressive, and the town celebrated his visit with a “flower fantasia you probably could have glimpsed from outer space.” Wreaths and palm branches were strung in abundance. An arch fashioned from lilies over Marengo Avenue was high enough for a locomotive to chug beneath it.
“And what did he do before I fired off my loaded question denigrating him as an animal murderer? He compared Pasadena’s natural beauty to ‘a garden of the lord,’ and said its plains remind him of a blooming rose. Over his head was guess what: a floral banner reading ‘Panama Canal.’”
“It sounds as if Queen Victoria would’ve received less accord.”
“She would’ve. At first, it was flattering garnering all that notoriety. At school. At Boy Scouts. At the Tournament. Eventually, it became shackles defining me. Almost nobody even bothered to inquire how I won the science fair.”
“How did you?” Jules asked.
“I made a miniature ballerina on a jewelry box twirl using a box of birthday candles.”
“I wish I could’ve seen that. Not that I would’ve understood it.”
“Neither did I,” Nick said. “After a week, the ambient heat melted the ceramic.”
They giggled for the first time since Will Rogers’ showboating.
At the Santa Fe depot, Nick turned in the direction of Jules’s place to walk her home. She wasn’t ready. “There’s more to the story, isn’t there?” she said.
“I’m that transparent, huh?”
Even once Roosevelt left office, after a term in which he’d championed the Square Deal and was awarded the Nobel Prize, Nick told her he still longed to apologize. It mattered nothing to him that Roosevelt’s 1912 presidential campaign as an independent in the “Bull-Moose Party” split the conservative vote, which enabled Woodrow Wilson to take the White House. He still felt rotten that he embarrassed somebody who handled his comment so magnanimously.
