California Gold

by John Jakes

  “Have another cup of tea, Mr. Chance,” said Mrs. Stanford. “And should I not say welcome home?”

  “We can put you up for the Bohemian Club, if you want,” Rhett Haverstick told him. “When it was founded thirty years ago, it was just what the name suggests, a hangout for journalists and painters. Now it’s the business and political crowd, the best and most powerful people. You might even make the summer encampment if things move speedily.”

  “Will they let me in?”

  “Of course we must discount our friend Fairbanks again—”

  “He belongs, does he?”

  “I’m afraid so. As for the rest of the membership—I should think they’d be enthusiastic. You know what’s being said about you around town.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “ ‘Chance is too rich to be ignored.’ ”

  Mack smiled.

  The decorators returned with an architect’s scheme to knock out the foyer ceiling and the ceiling on the floor above. “What we propose is a dramatic three-story entrance roofed in Tiffany’s finest multicolored glass.” Mack studied the plans a while. “How much?”

  “Less than three hundred thousand dollars.”

  Again he was silent for a bit, turning the pages of the ledgers stored in his head and studying their numbers. Then: “Go ahead.”

  The Bohemian Club admitted him, the only blackball Fairbanks’s, and that was not sufficient to keep him out. He received an invitation to the Midsummer High Jinks, the annual retreat, to be held this year at the club’s new campground in the Russian River redwoods.

  As business took him around the City, he met more of its leaders. A few refused to associate with him—those connected with Fairbanks Trust and the high echelons of the Southern Pacific, and those connected with the Examiner’s arch competitor, the Chronicle. Publisher Mike de Young ruled his empire from a new ten-story skyscraper on Market Street. Though he was a stalwart of Mack’s own Republican party, whenever the two met, he gave Mack a cool nod, no more; anyone known to be a friend of Hearst received the same treatment.

  One man who should have been his enemy treated him cordially: Henry Huntington, the son of C.P.’s older brother Solon. Nephew Henry, nicknamed Ed, had taken a job with the SP back in ’81. Now he managed the line’s San Francisco streetcar subsidiary. He was a blunt man, about fifty, and perhaps he and Mack respected one another because they detected common traits, chief among them implacable ambition.

  Weekends, Mack surrendered to his passion for the outdoors. He hiked down the wild Big Sur coast, and hunted quail, wolf, and wild goat in the Sierra foothills—but with nothing more lethal than one of Eastman’s black-box Kodak cameras.

  He devoured Clarence King’s Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada and took up the sport, climbing the wind-scoured volcanic heights of Shasta, and surveying the lush vineyards of Napa and Sonoma from the summit of Mount Saint Helena, named by the wife of a Russian governor-general. In Contra Costa County he climbed up through fields of wildflowers, then sycamore and pine, to the top of Mount Diablo. Nearly four thousand feet above the sea, he could see for almost a hundred miles in every direction sweeping vistas of the Pacific, the City, the North Coast, the Central Valley, and the far Sierras. On that peak on a summer afternoon, he was the king of California. The king of the world.

  Whatever else he did, he devoted an hour every evening to Little Jim. The boy was going on two, toddling and using new words and pulling down any object not nailed in place. Little Jim’s eyes had remained a deep blue—Carla’s eyes—and a great lot of golden hair capped his head. Unquestionably, he favored his mother, Señora Olivar agreed.

  Some weekends, Mack took his son walking in Golden Gate Park, or showed him the rocky coast at Bodega Bay from the deck of California Chance. The boy went on these excursions dutifully, but seemed uninterested.

  “I cannot tell you why,” Angelina Olivar said when Mack raised the question. “Perhaps, like his face, his disposition favors her.”

  God forbid, Mack thought with a shiver of dread.

  The Grove, the Bohemian Club’s newly acquired tract on the Russian River, hosted members for the first time that summer. An uncharacteristic shyness enveloped Mack as he carried his gear to his assigned cabin, where he met his camp-mates for the week of High Jinks: Hunter Vann, an important trial attorney; Oscar Himmel, a commission agent and warehouse owner; and Joe Snell, an official of the SP-controlled streetcar line. They greeted Mack with varying degrees of warmth; Himmel was too pompous and opinionated for real friendliness.

  Joe Snell said he’d come up with his friend and fellow member Ed Huntington, and Mack said hello to old Collis’s nephew at the first evening campfire. Like most of the others, Huntington wore boots and a lumberjack shirt. He shook Mack’s hand warmly. Across the huge sparking blaze Mack saw someone watching them. It was Fairbanks, surrounded by cronies deep into their bourbon; the lawyer nodded to him.

  Mack drank whiskey during the singing, as did everyone else. They locked arms and swayed to and fro under the gay Japanese lanterns, and generally acted like a lot of small boys suddenly relieved of daily cares.

  Not everyone could leave everyday affairs behind, however. Huntington spoke of his love of books, and then about streetcars.

  “I have a theory, Chance. Local transportation lines can do regionally what the Central and Southern Pacific did for this state. They can shape the future by shaping the way a city expands. Service must be fast, and clean—using overhead electric lines, perhaps. But I’m convinced the idea is sound. I’m going to test it out in Los Angeles one of these days.”

  Later, on a steep dirt trail back to his cabin, with the river purling nearby and insects harping in the dark, he met Fairbanks coming down, laughing with a friend. The trail wasn’t wide enough for them to pass and one or the other had to step off.

  Mack stopped under a paper lantern that cast feeble red light on the trail. Fairbanks stopped too.

  “Well, Chance, I suppose I owe you a welcome to the Bohemians.”

  “You don’t owe me a thing, Walter.”

  Fairbanks rubbed his mustache with his little finger. Sarcastically, he asked, “How’s your stock in the People’s Road?”

  “I liquidated it after the sellout.” It was a sore point. The San Francisco & San Joaquin had reached Bakersfield in ’98, then, in a surprise move, the directors had negotiated and merged the line into the Santa Fe. Mack and some other substantial stockholders attempted to block the sale, charging the directors with fraud, but they lost.

  “What a pity.”

  “We all lose some rounds, Walter. The harbor. The debt—”

  Fairbanks didn’t take the bait. “Neither of those detract from the company’s strong position.”

  “Maybe not. But one of these days, Walter, you won’t run California. One of these days the people will see to it. Good night.”

  Mack stepped forward so abruptly, Fairbanks was taken by surprise, and he stepped back. Then he realized what he’d done. The screwlike pain pierced his forehead.

  “Who is that?” his friend asked as Mack disappeared up the trail.

  “A son of a bitch I’ll get rid of when the time is right.”

  They fished and sang and lazed away the bright summer hours. They celebrated the Cremation of Care in the traditional outdoor play written and performed by the members. Happy and relaxed, they returned to the City at the end of a week to be met with stunning news. C. P. Huntington had left his Fifth Avenue mansion for a vacation at his camp on Raquette Lake in the Adirondacks. There, in August heat, one year short of eighty, the old man had died.

  The last of the Big Four was gone, RUTHLESS AS A CROCODILE, said the obituary in the Monarch of the Dailies. An era was over.

  This was never more evident than at the funeral. One of the mourners was E. H. Harriman, a broker who’d found his métier in railroad speculation. From his position as chairman of the Union Pacific executive committee, Harriman was acquiring lines all over
the country. “They say he’s already negotiating for Ed Huntington’s stock,” a friend told Mack. “It’s really the end.”

  “I don’t think so. The Octopus is still choking the life out of this state.”

  Over the racket of tools and cursing workmen, Mack interviewed the seventeenth applicant for the job of assistant.

  This young fellow struck him as just as unsatisfactory as the rest. He was small, no more than an inch or two over five feet, and had delicate hands and tiny feet. His hair was prematurely gray—he was perhaps twenty-eight or twenty-nine—and the thick lenses of his pince-nez only drew attention to his weak watery eyes. His skin was so white, it was doubtful that he ever saw sunshine. Two unnatural splotches of color crowned his cheeks.

  He shook Mack’s hand as if it were a pump handle. “How do you do, sir? My name is Alexander Muller. I am a Swiss. From the canton of Zurich. Traditionally, there is an umlaut over the u in Muller. I have dropped it. I want to be in all ways American.”

  Behind the young man’s smile Mack sensed a driven person. Alexander Muller cocked his head well forward, like a bird ever alert for a tasty worm.

  “You don’t know a thing about my business, Muller. That’s the trouble I’m having with every candidate. No one knows my business like I do.”

  “Perhaps you look for the wrong qualifications, sir.”

  “Beg your pardon?”

  “How can anyone know your affairs as well as you? In time—yes, perhaps. But it will require many years of industrious application. However, certain other qualities can recommend a candidate. A mathematical aptitude, for example. I clerked in a bank for three years. I am quick with numbers. I am industrious. I am dedicated to making my career in California.”

  “Why is that? You’re far from home.”

  “Far from the banks of the river Limmat I roamed as a child—yes. But you see, sir—I can’t lie if you are to employ me as a trustworthy person—I have been in a certain kind of hospital in the Alps for two years. When I was young, I was stricken with phthisis.”

  “With what?”

  “Pulmonary consumption, sir. It is in remission. It shall stay in remission, because I have come to the great hospital and sanitarium of the world, California.”

  “You believe that?”

  “Along with millions of other Europeans, I do, sir.”

  A consumptive for an assistant? Mack didn’t know if he liked that. But he liked this nervous, fragile, gray-haired man-boy quite a bit, he decided.

  “Tell me more about yourself. Do you have a family?”

  “No, sir. Parents deceased.”

  “A wife?”

  “No, sir.”

  “A girlfriend?”

  “No. My only mistress is my work.”

  “Well, that’s American, all right. You’d fit in well around here.”

  Mack hired him.

  In the summer Mack took up another old passion, cooking. With renovation of the foyer and ballroom on schedule, he decided to plan a gala party to celebrate the official start of the new century on New Year’s Eve. A banquet would precede the dancing, and he’d prepare at least one main dish. But he was dissatisfied with the wine, and he and Alex Muller drove up into the country with a satchel of cash. At the end of three days, Mack owned the Sonoma Creek Winery.

  Mack’s busy life was not without its physical side. He was still young, and no anchorite, so when needs and stresses exerted themselves, he found a ready solution at hand: a visit to one of the so-called French restaurants.

  The French restaurant was the City’s own peculiar institution. There were two or three dozen of them, scattered in the shabbier districts, the earliest having sprung up during the Gold Rush. No one could say exactly why they were called French; the cuisine didn’t qualify them for that description, being generally excellent but plain. Nor were the owners of French extraction. Perhaps the name had been given them because most Americans thought of the French as relatively relaxed regarding matters of sex, and sex was most definitely on the menu.

  The first floor of every French restaurant was just that: a dining room, and a perfectly respectable one, often patronized by the most conservative and conventional of businessmen. On the second floor, however, you could take supper in a private dining room, either alone or in the company of a discreet female companion who resided on the premises. None of the rooms was without a comfortable couch large enough for two. For even longer periods of refreshment, there were small suites called supper bedrooms on the third floor; you rented those for the entire night.

  Mack tried a couple of other French restaurants before he settled on a favorite, Maison Napoleon, tucked away on the north side of Mission, south of the Slot. During his second dinner there, he fell into conversation with the owner, who intrigued him because of her age—she was only in her early twenties—and her air of propriety. Her name was Margaret Emerson. He silently admired her enterprise and her obvious intelligence; no ordinary street trollop could have run a place so close to the edge of the law, yet so clearly successful. He and Margaret quickly became friends.

  Margaret Emerson was a slightly built young woman with large brown eyes, auburn hair, and a dappling of freckles on her nose and cheeks. Her jaw was rather too long, and so was her neck. When she was on duty, acting as hostess for the dining room, she maintained a serious air and wore dark dresses befitting someone much older. She enhanced the effect by piling her hair high on her head in a dignified arrangement and covering her freckles with powder.

  So long as she kept her mouth closed, Margaret resembled a maiden aunt, or the wife of a Presbyterian deacon. The moment she smiled, however, there was a marvelous transformation. She showed a mouthful of teeth, perfect white teeth. That smile and her brown eyes banished any illusion of age and severity, and she became an ageless pixie, full of charm. But she carefully hid this side of herself from her dining-room customers, perhaps believing a respectable demeanor downstairs was absolutely necessary because of what went on upstairs.

  Soon she and Mack were going on outings together. On sunny weekends, they rode wheels through Golden Gate Park, taking picnic baskets brought from the Maison’s kitchen. Once he took her for an overnight cruise on California Chance. He had dozens of fresh flowers placed in the largest of the guest staterooms, and made a show of presenting her with the door key just as Captain Norheim’s men were casting off. She gave him a swift look of comprehension. He wanted her company, but not in bed; that sort of companionship he could find on the Maison’s upper floors. If there was a flicker of regret on her face just then, Mack didn’t notice.

  The offshore cruise, which lasted until late Sunday, was a splendid success, with past histories shared, and a great deal of laughter. By the time they docked, they were more than friends; they were confidants.

  Mack had known Margaret for several months when it occurred to him that she would be an ideal guest and partner for New Year’s Eve. That same evening, he dropped in and tendered the invitation. Her brown eyes showed her eagerness, but she didn’t voice it. She said, “What if someone recognized me?”

  “I doubt they will. But suppose they do. You keep telling me politicians and businessmen come in all the time.”

  “By the back door, usually. They’d never admit it. You’re taking a risk.”

  “I need a hostess. I can’t think of a prettier or more charming one.”

  “Very well. I accept the invitation.”

  On New Year’s Eve, 1900, one hundred guests presented engraved cards in the three-story foyer roofed with Tiffany glass and lit from above by electric fixtures. An orchestra played in the ballroom while the ladies and gentlemen mingled for an hour in the public rooms. At half after nine everyone went into the immense dining hall.

  Margaret sat at Mack’s right, resplendent in a sapphire tiara he’d given her for Christmas. The great horseshoe table gleamed with white linen, glittered with silver cutlery, sparkled with fine crystal. He’d chosen low gaslight rather than the harshe
r glare of electrics. His boiled shirt shone like snow on a mountain when he rose to speak briefly before the meal.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to my house and this celebration of the new century. I was not born in this state, but I am now a Californian to the bone.” Some applause and murmurs greeted that; guests had been plied with unlimited amounts of Cresta Blanca champagne, the state’s finest, before the banquet.

  “Therefore, the dinner you’re about to enjoy is a California dinner. Every dish is native to this state. You will be given a printed menu in a moment. Meanwhile, I hope you’ll look with special favor on the stuffing and the glaze of the caille rôti—native quail from the San Joaquin. Cooking is a love of mine, and I prepared both the stuffing and the glaze. I confess I’ve never cooked for a hundred people before. That’s a mighty lot of time in the kitchen.”

  Laughter.

  “The wines, too, are Californian. Tonight we celebrate not only the New Year, and the twentieth century, but the state we love.”

  He lifted his brimming glass.

  “To California. And your very good health.”

  The gentlemen rose for the toast, a long elegant line of black lapels and white ties. I made it, he thought, heady with wonder and pride.

  Margaret took a symbolic sip of champagne and folded her white-gloved hands in her lap like the most proper of wives. By gaslight her eyes were enchanting, her face luminous as an affectionate child’s.

  Mack signaled to the column of waiters queued up in the passage to the kitchen.

  “Menus, please. Let the festivities begin.”

  To start, Les Huîtres de Tomales: Tomales Bay oysters on the half-shell, each enclosed in a linen napkin intricately folded, a mignonette sauce served alongside.