California Gold

by John Jakes

  “Carla?”

  “What is it?” she replied without turning around, still rubbing her cheeks, rubbing out age lines she imagined she saw there. Her motions were jerky, nervous.

  “Now that the game’s over, I’m going to schedule a trip to New York later this fall.”

  “How long will you be gone?”

  “I don’t know…a week or two. I need to look at some irrigation equipment, and there’s a firm of civil engineers I want to contact. Then I have to see about financing for those three ranches I’m buying up north.”

  She swung to face him. “California banks aren’t satisfactory any longer?”

  He couldn’t imagine that she cared. But he answered politely, not wanting another fight. “You know I’m into a lot of ventures. Starting and expanding them takes capital. I should have credit established with the New York banks.”

  She began to brush out her long yellow hair. “Suit yourself. Just don’t expect me to sit here idly and do nothing while you’re gone.”

  With more candor than he intended, Mack said, “I don’t expect anything from you anymore.”

  She threw the hairbrush down and they stared at each other without even minimal friendliness.

  Angrily he said, “Good night,” and rolled over on his belly to sleep.

  41

  SLUSH, SOOT, NOISE. THE elevated roaring. Horse-drawn vehicles jammed hub to hub up and down Broadway, Fifth, the cross-town streets. Here and there a gasoline carriage, a rare sight. A boy herding pigs along Forty-second Street—not so rare. Telephone poles and water troughs beyond counting, and everywhere ripe brown manure, its smell perfuming the wintry air.

  New York. After an hour there, Mack longed for the sunshine and uncluttered landscapes of California.

  At the firm of Wardlow Brothers, Civil Engineers, he met the principals, twins born in Savannah. Each had a pink pate and a fringe of white hair like a friar’s; they reminded Mack of Tenniel’s drawing of Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

  “Gentlemen,” Mack said, “I’ve just visited Professor LeConte, who retired from his chair at Berkeley last year.”

  “Joe LeConte is a superb geologist and natural scientist,” Clemons Wardlow said.

  “A Christian and an eminent Georgian,” said his brother Cole. “In younger days, we mustered with him against that devil Sherman.”

  “He recommended you two as the best hydraulic engineers in America. I want to hire you for an irrigation project. A new town.”

  “In California? We know nothing about California,” Cole Wardlow said.

  “A definite problem,” put in his brother.

  “I want you to come out there,” Mack said, “for as long as it takes to study and understand the ciénagas, the canyon run-off system—the entire situation. Then I want your best recommendation, and I want you to build it.”

  Dubious, Clemons said, “That would require a considerable investment of time.”

  “A problem,” Cole said.

  “It’s a system for a new town, you say? Challenging. Perhaps we could adjust our schedules. But Mr. Chance, have you considered the potential cost of our travel and consultation?”

  “Another problem,” Cole nodded. “Enormous.”

  Mack threw a banded packet of $100 bills on the desk. “No, that isn’t a problem. I want you gentlemen to come to San Solaro, and I’ll sit here till you say yes.”

  William Randolph Hearst roared into the office with his characteristic energy. “Mack! Nellie told me you were coming. She’s in a meeting—she’ll be here soon. What a sight you are. Hardly the penniless pilgrim who threw our girl into the Bay.”

  “True,” Mack said with a smile. He’d dressed carefully, wanting to make a good impression. His overcoat was an expensive Chesterfield with a velvet collar, his hat a black homburg with a ribbon edge to the brim.

  Hearst was in his thirties now, gangly and pop-eyed as ever. Seeing him brought good feelings of old times.

  “How are you, Willie?”

  “Never better. Welcome to the Journal. Morning, evening, and German-language editions.” He thumped papers neatly racked on a wall of Nellie’s office. The office, on the third floor, overlooked Printing House Square at Park Row and Spruce Street. Down in the square, snow flurried around the noble bronze head of Ben Franklin’s statue. It was three days after Christmas, 1897.

  Hearst sprawled in a chair. “We’re starting to run rings around Joe Pulitzer—can you imagine?”

  “I can—knowing the kind of stories you like, and some of the reporters you hire.”

  Hearst grinned. “Willie’s Yellow Fellows. I know it’s meant to be an insult, but I like it. I never forget the man I first imagined as my typical reader back home. The gripman on one of the cable cars. Not much schooling, perhaps, but a lot of innate intelligence and curiosity. That man is bored during most of his waking hours. He wants excitement—” Hearst plucked a paper from Nellie’s tidy desk, JOURNAL SOLVES GRISLY AX MURDER! He slapped the headline. “The gee-whiz feeling.”

  Footsteps in the hall quickened Mack’s pulse, and then Nellie was in the doorway. “There you are,” Hearst exclaimed. He went over and swept an affectionate arm around her. “Still one of my best, Mack.”

  Mack caught his breath. She looked trim and smart and very citified in a dark skirt and long-sleeved blouse the rich color of an acorn squash. But she’d lost her suntan; she was sallow, like most New Yorkers he’d seen. Into those pale cheeks color rushed now, and she gave him a swift, almost flustered look that was at odds with her sophisticated air. It isn’t all gone; she still feels something, he thought exultantly.

  She tossed sheets of copy on the desk and rushed to hug him.

  “I heard you were in the building. I’m sorry I was so long—I was tied up with Mr. Brisbane.”

  Mack smiled and shook his head to say it didn’t matter. His palms were warm, his mouth dry. Suddenly he wondered if he should have come. Seeing her again was painful.

  Nellie moved toward the window. “We were expecting you long before Christmas.”

  “I know I said that in my letters. I had to postpone the trip three times. Press of business.”

  “Chance—the California millionaire.” Hearst beamed. “You said you’d do it. You did.”

  At the window, Nellie watched the snow, as if reluctant to look at him too long. He felt a heartbreaking desire. Did it show?

  “How is everyone? How’s Bierce?”

  “Still in Washington, slashing away.” Hearst pulled another paper from the rack. A front-page cartoon caricatured old Huntington with dollar signs for eyes. He had his hands deep in the pockets of an oblivious Uncle Sam. “Just when we’ve got the old devil on the run—beaten on the debt issue—I’m going to lose the young woman whose copy helped turn the trick.”

  “You mean our Nell?”

  “Now wait, it isn’t definite—” she began.

  “Yes,” Hearst cut in. “Miss Ross may not realize that her departure is inevitable, not to say imminent, but I do. I’ve read her novel.”

  “A novel,” Mack exclaimed. “You always said you’d write one.”

  “And it’s damn good,” Hearst said. “Nellie, take the day off. Show our California tycoon what a big city looks like.”

  “Yes, sir, gladly.”

  And she turned to look at Mack again, ravishingly beautiful to him as she stood before the window, New York’s rooftops a winter quilt of black and white behind her. What a special woman she is, he thought. Her long-sleeved blouse with its full-flowing tie glowed like the California sun.

  But not half so brightly as her eyes.

  She showed him the sights, including one he especially wanted to see: Bartholdi’s immense Statue of Liberty in the harbor. They gazed at it walking arm in arm through light snow in Battery Park.

  They went next to Koster and Bial’s Music Hall at Thirty-fourth, in Herald Square. In the darkened auditorium they watched flickering projections on a twenty-foot screen. Surf rolled in and
crashed on the beach at Dover, England. An eccentric comedian danced and fell down. A woman with ringlets, sloe eyes, and gauze pantaloons swayed and twisted in a harem dance. Broadway stars May Irwin and John Rice indulged in a prolonged humorous kiss, his soup-strainer mustache tickling the lady’s face. Despite the humorous tone, the kiss footage had aroused preachers and incited demands for “police interference.”

  The climax of the Vitascope show was film of a locomotive rushing down a track straight at the audience. Many at the matinee screamed, and Mack unconsciously grabbed Nellie’s hand. Open-mouthed, he sat spellbound in darkness.

  Afterward they ate at one of Nellie’s favorite spots, the German Gardens, across Printing House Square and around the corner from City Hall. He told her about the New York bankers, about Wardlow Brothers and Professor LeConte at Berkeley. Nellie had studied with LeConte and admired him. “He was a charter member of John’s Sierra Club.”

  She in turn told him stories about the paper.

  Hearst had backed Bryan in the recent presidential campaign, and she’d trooped around the country with the candidate, one of the first women ever to report from the campaign trail. “You can’t imagine the places I slept. Silver-tongued oratory all day, bedbugs all night.”

  Mr. Hearst continued to believe in the power of articles about pseudoscience and sex, so she wrote many of those (DO SEAMONSTERS THREATEN OUR SHORES?; REPUBLICANS CAUGHT IN LOVE NEST). The Journal still boosted its circulation with stunts, though some were now on a much broader scale, with international ramifications:

  “Almost every day we print a dispatch about the Cuban rebellion: cruelty to prisoners in Spanish detention camps, priests beaten and burned alive, nuns raped and fed to the sharks in Havana harbor—I’m glad I’m not involved with our foreign news. Most of the stories are invented.”

  “Why?”

  “Mr. Hearst wants war. Joe Pulitzer just up the street at the World wants war. They’re trying to prove who wants it most.”

  “For principle, or circulation?”

  “Not funny,” she said, batting at his head. It was the spontaneity of old times. Her hand accidentally brushed his and she reacted with a start and a frown, then renewed concentration on her plate of schnitzel. Mack felt guilty about his own abrupt physical reaction, mercifully hidden by the red-and-white tablecloth.

  Guilty, but not surprised. God, he loved her.

  Nellie’s studio flat overlooked the East River and Roebling’s mammoth bridge to Brooklyn. It was not an untidy place; in fact the first impression was of spareness and space. Yet it had a bohemian quality, compounded by stacks of books and manuscripts, a guitar with colored ribbons hanging from the neck, the familiar pallets of fur, her silver samovar. Many mementos of California decorated the walls: bright Indian blankets, the photo of her relative in the round fur hat, a lithograph of the Bay that made him homesick.

  As the dark came down and lights twinkled along the East River, the snow fell harder outside the three large arched windows. Glad to be inside, Mack sat reading Nellie’s manuscript in front of an applewood fire. A Daughter of California dealt with the Anglo takeover of the state after the Gold Rush. It told the story of an affluent young woman, a Californio, who fell in love with a raffish American adventurer despite the warnings of her parents and friends. What the American really wanted was not the girl but the family’s rancho. After he married her and took it away by means of the property laws and her inferior position under them, he threw her over. Her suicide in the ocean ended the short novel, which was part history, part treatise on women’s rights. The prose was lean, like a news dispatch, though it was more emotional, bitter. He heard Bierce in it. The general style of the work was gritty and naturalistic. Because of the author’s omniscient viewpoint, the reader was never deceived about the romance, as the heroine was.

  The ring of Nellie’s telephone had interrupted at one point. After the operator made the connection she spoke softly. “No, Frank. No, my dear, not this evening, I have company. Yes, Friday. As we planned. Yes, I do. Yes. Good night.”

  She hung up the earpiece and without comment busied herself in the open kitchen attached to the loft. So she wasn’t lonely, nor living a spinster’s life, pining for him. Why had he been conceited enough to think she might be? He hated the unseen Frank.

  He squared up the pages after he finished the last chapter. “Nellie, I’m no critic, but I think Willie’s right. It’s powerful stuff.”

  “Thank you. I worship the work of Émile Zola: The Dram Shop; Germinal. Of course all you get in English are censored versions. But I hope I’ve paid him homage.”

  “I write a business letter—it creaks. You write without any sign of effort.”

  She laughed. “You can’t imagine the hours and the agony it takes to achieve that effect.” She carried plates to a small candle-lit table by the center window.

  “It’s going to be published, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, Appleton’s. In the spring.”

  “That’s grand. Congratulations.”

  She brought a green bottle to the table. “I’ve had this for weeks, anticipating your visit.”

  “Miraville Winery. Napa Chardonnay. What a treat.”

  He touched her hand at the same time as the label, standing close to her. A troubled look fleeted across her firelit face and she stepped away. The wind made the windows whine. He felt a chill off the glass, and another, different sort as they sat down.

  “You really haven’t told me much about yourself,” Nellie said when they began eating.

  “Not much to tell. I keep busy. I keep making money.”

  “Is your wife well?”

  “Yes, Carla’s all right.” He snatched his wineglass and drank. The snow fell faster; he could scarcely see the bridge now, and the heights of Brooklyn not at all.

  He watched the snow a while. “Last night, in that fine soft bed at the Astor House, the blizzard nightmare came back. When I walked outside this morning, there was the same snow. I know why I live in California.” She smiled. He sampled the cold vegetable she’d prepared with a touch of vinaigrette. “These avocados are fine.”

  “They’re from home. Like the oranges for dessert.” She pointed to a bowl on the kitchen counter.

  “Can you buy California navels here?”

  “Yes, at the grocers on the corner.”

  “Those oranges might well be mine, you know.”

  “There, you see? The railroad isn’t all bad. Please don’t tell Mr. Hearst I said that. Now I want to hear about this yacht you’re buying.”

  “I haven’t actually commissioned it. But I’m talking to designers, and I know what I want. Two hundred feet, minimum.”

  “Won’t that require a huge crew?”

  “I anticipate forty to fifty men. I can afford it. I told you I’d go back to San Francisco in style.”

  “And you’re ready.”

  “Soon.”

  “It just delights me that you’re doing so well. You must be very content.”

  “Content? I don’t know—” He picked up the wineglass again, deeply chilled by the invisible breath of winter radiating from the windowpanes. He rose and walked to the fireplace. The applewood burned sweetly, its light burnishing the bowl of oranges so they glowed like spheres of gold. “There’s always one more Klondike to explore, one more vein of gold to find. Sometimes I regret I’m too busy to chase off to Alaska and follow the new strike.”

  “But you are successful, and happy—?”

  He turned around and laughed ruefully.

  “Never ask that question of a married man.”

  “I didn’t mean to pry, or—”

  He startled her by striding to the table and setting his glass down firmly. He turned her in her chair, holding both her shoulders from above.

  “No, I’m not happy. I tried to make it work with Carla but it hasn’t.”

  “Mack, please…” She pried at his right hand, a curiously innocent, almost frightened expression on h
er face.

  “It would be different with you,” he went on. “That’s the real reason I came to New York. To say that.”

  Deftly, she slipped away from him. Standing by the window nearest his chair, she said, “Carla struck me as an intelligent woman. I expect she knows how you feel.”

  His tooled boots rapped the floor as he followed her. He set the chair out of the way and caught her shoulders from behind. “Forget about Carla.”

  He kissed the back of her neck above her collar. The dark hairs were downy-warm. His mouth moved to the left, the curve to her shoulder, his right hand sliding around to find her breast.

  She sagged and pressed back into him. “Oh dear God.” She clasped both hands on top of his.

  He released her long enough for her to turn, and she raised her arms around his neck and kissed him with her mouth opening a little, and her sweet tongue telling of memories of Yosemite, the falls’ roar all about them, and this same fire licking up within them—

  The moment broke when he started to pick her up in his arms.

  “No, Mack.” She was quiet but firm and pushed him away with a final, dogged “No.”

  “Why not? No one will know.”

  “We’ll know.”

  “Nellie, I love you.”

  “I love you. That doesn’t make any difference. An affair is never worth the turmoil and pain it causes. It hurts everyone, even those not directly involved.”

  Shocked, he realized she was admitting something. Anger found its way into his voice. “You’re an expert, are you?”

  She collected herself by the fire. “Yes, but never mind the circumstances; it’s in the past. It happened soon after I came here. I think I was trying to get over you. Anyway—if we did what we’d both like, eventually we’d all suffer. You, and me—and your wife.”

  “I doubt she’d be overly concerned.”

  “I’m sorry, Mack. The answer’s no.”

  She tucked her golden blouse into the waist of her skirt and smoothed it. He could almost see her walling up her emotions with the cement of reason and will. “We must go on with our lives as they are. I have the novel to look forward to—you have San Francisco to conquer—another page to turn in that guidebook. Do you still have it?”