California Gold

by John Jakes

  “Nevertheless, the unions simply can’t win against hired strikebreakers and the police. I feel a settlement is inevitable, and I’m urging it, though it won’t be favorable to our side.”

  So now it was our side. Mack’s wariness grew.

  “I like the situation as little as you do, Mr. Chance. But continuing the strike is foolhardy, as foolhardy as your confrontation with those thugs. What if there had been bloodshed? Bloodshed accomplishes nothing. We must take control of the machinery. Win the workingman’s fight with votes.”

  “Are you talking about your new party?”

  “That’s right. The Union Labor party. Do you know Eugene Schmitz?”

  “I’ve seen him conduct the orchestra at the Columbia Theatre.”

  “Another confidence, then. Schmitz will be our mayoral candidate.”

  Mack almost laughed. “He’s a violin player. What does he know about running a city?”

  Annoyed, Ruef said, “Everything: Because I’ll teach him. Gene’s an ideal candidate, German and Irish parents, Catholic, a family man. The musicians’ union is less threatening than many others. And he’ll look good on the platform—they don’t call him Handsome Gene for nothing. He’ll be the champion of the workingmen of San Francisco. He’ll represent them in our halls of power. Just as Senator Abe Ruef of California will someday represent them in Washington. It took me years to understand that if you want to do good, the power to do it must come first. Power is the lever of Archimedes. Power is everything.”

  The electric lights glittered in Ruef’s brown eyes, and he draped his arm over Mack’s chair with a false bonhomie.

  Dangerous man, Mack thought. “I hear what you’re saying,” he said out loud. “But I’m not sure why you wanted to meet.”

  “Because we share a common objective. We both want to build power for San Francisco’s most important constituency.”

  “So you really have abandoned the Republicans?”

  “I’ll use them if I can. But most of them are entrenched plutocrats. Gutless. You’re an exception. The Union Labor party is looking for exceptional men, men with the courage to support the candidacy of Gene Schmitz—with their ballots…and their checkbooks.”

  There it was. Mack leaned back. A waiter stormed by: “Goddamn it, coming through.”

  “I’m afraid I’m not your man. After your league lost the primary, you put your allegiance somewhere else. Overnight. I’m for supporting the workingman. I’m not interested in exploiting him.”

  The little pol’s toothy smile turned cold. “That’s a shortsighted view. Let me tell you what I foresee in San Francisco. I foresee a day when nothing moves on our docks—nothing happens in our government—without the sanction of the Union Labor party and its hand-picked mayor and supervisors. You may count on this, too. When we’re in power, we’ll assist our friends and remember those who disdained friendship.”

  I don’t like this man, Mack thought. He drew himself up in his chair. “In other words, money up front will guarantee favors?”

  Ruef flung down his napkin. “I don’t think I care for that. I could name certain other intelligent, progressive gentlemen who don’t take such a cynical view of friendship. They’ve donated to the party and, what’s more, they’ve retained me on a regular basis to represent them in the future at City Hall.”

  Mack stood up. “Ruef, I don’t pay extortion money. I especially don’t pay it in advance.”

  The little pol’s mustache quivered. His closely shaved cheeks were white as the china mugs. “That remark was a mistake, Mr. Chance.”

  “We’ll see. Excuse me.”

  “Surely. We’ll meet again.”

  His eyes promised it wouldn’t be cordial.

  With the intervention of Governor Gage, the strike ended, the terms of the settlement kept secret. The union drivers simply picked up and went back to work. Mack’s warehouse men didn’t want to talk about it, except to say the union shop was dead in San Francisco.

  Abe Ruef personally wrote a basic five-minute speech for Handsome Gene Schmitz. He rehearsed the candidate, and Schmitz gave the speech everywhere, bringing to it a natural flamboyance from his theater work. Soon the women in his audience were sighing and wringing their hands while their husbands stamped and whistled for everyone’s new idol.

  The dismal conclusion of the strike had an effect on the campaign, driving union men to work hard for a political victory. They were helped by the lackluster candidates of the regular parties. The Republicans offered a hack, the city auditor. The Democrats put up Joe Tobin, a young supervisor with money; his chances were diminished by the widespread unpopularity of Mayor Phelan. The Monarch of the Dailies was unimpressed with the whole lot.

  The major candidates have been carefully picked over by representatives of the Southern Pacific, the Market Street Railway, and the Spring Valley Water Company. Those chosen are sure to carry out orders with a fearless disregard of the public good.

  On the night of November 5, 1901, at Republican headquarters, Mack watched them chalk up the tally. Tobin—12,000. Wells—17,000. Schmitz—21,000. “Well,” he remarked, “the wolf’s in the fold.”

  49

  ON A DRIZZLY NIGHT that winter, Mack went to Margaret’s for dinner. While she cooked pork chops, and green beans spiced with ham chunks and brown sugar, he sliced golden bell peppers and artichokes brought from his own warehouse. She served a rich, almost syrupy merlot from someone else’s winery; he made a comment about that.

  Margaret had recently begun to fix dinner for them at least once a week when his schedule allowed. She lived in a flat next to the Maison Napoleon, but no connecting door breached the thick plaster wall between. It was as if she could shut out that part of her life by coming into these proper Victorian rooms furnished with the inevitable three-legged tables, potted greenery, old Rogers groups, and other assorted bric-a-brac.

  Knife in his right hand, Mack pushed green beans onto the fork in his left. It was the European way; Margaret had taught him. His cravat was loosened, his collar unbuttoned, his vest open, his sleeves rolled up. Under the imitation Tiffany-glass electric, they sat together in a relaxed, almost domestic intimacy. While he finished eating she darned a tiny tear in a yellowed lace tablecloth. She never ate much—to preserve her figure, she said.

  “I don’t know a lot about Abe Ruef,” Mack said after drinking some wine. “But I had a bad impression of him last fall, and it hasn’t improved. I’ve never seen anyone move in so fast. They’re paying court to him at the Pup until midnight or later, every night.” Ruef’s party had elected not only the mayor but three of its slate of eighteen supervisors. It was a strong start.

  “I know him slightly. He dines next door about once a month. Always orders in French. He’s proud of all the languages he speaks. He never goes upstairs. They say ambition leaves him no time for women.”

  “It’s a fairly common disease,” Mack said with a wry look. “Rhett Haverstick told me Ruef’s picking up clients right and left: Pacific Telephone and Telegraph, Pat Calhoun’s United Railroads. Rhett claims Ruef collects five hundred dollars a month from every one of them.”

  “What’s going to happen?”

  “While the voters let him get away with it, nothing. Schmitz is a lightweight, but he’s a superb actor, and Ruef has a certain brassy charm. People like both of them.”

  He pushed his plate away, stretched, and patted his stomach. He felt the beginnings of a potbelly. “You’re a fine cook.”

  “Anything for a friend.” She applied herself to her needlework but promptly pricked her finger. Then, avoiding his eye, she asked, “Will you be going next door tonight?”

  “No, I just want to relax. This is the best refuge in San Francisco. Better than my clubs. There, someone always wants something. Usually a donation.”

  He sighed, enjoying the rare contentment. A gold-plated clock on the parlor mantel chimed the quarter hour. He plucked a silver cigar case from his coat nearby.

  “You sa
id you were going south again—” she began.

  “In a few days. I could stand some sunshine.” He lit up and puffed. Outside, rain fell harder, making their little island of light all the more cozy. “That’s a lovely old tablecloth.”

  “Irish lace.” She raised it to show the pattern. “It was my mother’s only decent possession. I treasure it because it reminds me of her. It also reminds me that a person needn’t stay in one place swilling pigs forever.”

  “Growing up was hard for you, wasn’t it?”

  She turned her head on that lovely long neck. A swan’s neck, he called it in his thoughts. The face of a sad freckled child seemed to glimmer behind the face of the mature young woman. “The fine people of California, the ones who settled in the delta twenty years before my father, didn’t exactly welcome dirt farmers. ‘Pike’ was not a name you called a friend.”

  “So you ran away. How did you ever get this place?”

  “I worked for it.” Watching for a reaction, she added, “In someone else’s place. Resembling the rooms upstairs at the Maison. I’ll tell you this: Mission Street won’t be my last stop.”

  “What do you want from life, Margaret?”

  The rain fell, beating on bay windows hidden by heavy velvet drapes. Far away, a trolley clanged on Market Street. She pressed the tablecloth into her lap, her thimble shining like a nugget of silver. The line of her slim bosom trembled with a noticeable tension.

  “Something better. I want something much better than this.”

  Her eyes said the rest, and it made him uncomfortable. He put the burning cigar in a tray and stepped to her side, laying a paternal hand on her shoulder. She let out a breath, the tautness leaving her, and she averted her eyes to the precious tablecloth.

  “I’d better start home.”

  “Walking?”

  “I don’t mind the rain. The air will do me good.” He patted her. “I’ll see you as soon as I come back. Meantime, thanks for the good meal.”

  “I don’t have the budget for the kind of dinners you prepare. Or the talent.”

  He laughed and kissed her temple in a chaste way. Her high-piled auburn hair had a warm fresh smell. “You’re a wonderful cook. A wonderful friend.”

  Her right hand swept up and across to press his. Standing behind her, he saw her pained face in the back mirror of a heavy old sideboard.

  Quickly, she lightened the pressure of her hand. “Well, I’m grateful for that much, anyway.”

  After he went out, she locked the door, then leaned against it with the tablecloth held between her breasts. She closed her eyes and let the tears roll down.

  He lay awake in the small hours. It happened more and more lately. Columns of numbers streamed through his head, lists of things to be done.

  He kept a pad beside the great imperial bed with the JMC carved at the apex of the headboard. He was practiced at scribbling in the dark, though the notes were hell to read in the morning.

  It stormed violently about 2 A.M., thunder bumping over the Bay, and the high dark house seemed to breathe and shudder. Margaret’s face disturbed his rest. He knew what she wanted—what he could never give.

  The stairs creaked. He opened his door and saw the glowing circles of Alex Muller’s spectacles. The young man was going downstairs in his nightshirt, lamp held aloft. He coughed, a sound like shoes scuffing cement.

  The light disappeared. Far below, Alex kept coughing. Mack wrote on the pad, then flung his hands under his head and shut his eyes.

  No use. Too many worries, steady as the rain. Too many memories. Too much guilt…

  Tonight, that involving Margaret dominated the rest.

  As Mack strode into the sun-flooded office, Alex jumped up from his corner desk. “Ready, sir? So am I. All packed.”

  It was half past ten. Three tickers chattered and spewed tapes of the latest trades and postings from the stock exchanges—San Francisco, California, and Pacific. Mack had also installed a private telegraph wire and key, and a second telephone.

  “I want to say good-bye to Jim. Is he outside?”

  “No, sir, in the library.”

  “On a morning like this?”

  He ran down three flights and flung open the library doors. Little Jim sat in a red velvet chair, his feet dangling above the floor. Johnson knelt beside him, watching the boy play with some kind of toy.

  Mack stormed in. The dark room smelled of dust and leather bindings. “What the devil have you got there, Jim?”

  His son held it up so he could see. It was a Chinese abacus, brightly finished in lacquer. On the frame, tiny hand-painted dragons chased each other, spurting fire from their jaws and smoke from their nostrils.

  “Where did you get it?”

  Johnson stood, his knee joints popping. “Kim Luck in the kitchen dug it up. Alex says Jim’s a whizzer at ciphering. He’s picked this up real quick. Jim, show your pa. How ’bout five hundred and seven?”

  Little Jim studied the abacus a moment. Then his small hand pulled down a five-unit bead on the third wire from the right and clicked it against the dividing bar. He pulled down no beads on the second wire, a five-unit bead on the first wire, then pushed up two one-unit beads. Proudly he showed the abacus.

  “Suan-pan,” he said.

  “That’s the Chink name of the thing,” Johnson said.

  “Why are you fooling with that on a sunny day?” Mack grabbed it. “Go on outside and play.”

  “Don’t want to, Pa. I want to do numbers.” He reached for the abacus.

  Mack kept it away from him. “I said go outside. Get some air.”

  Jim’s small hands closed to fists. He jutted his jaw and held his breath, and turned red as he marched from the room. “Jim?” Mack called. “I’ll see you in a week or two—”

  In answer, a door slammed.

  Mack threw the abacus on a table, then whipped the drapes open. Sunshine poured in. “This place is cheerful as a tomb.”

  “You ain’t much better. You rag that boy too hard.”

  “I’m not going to raise a hothouse lily. I want him to enjoy the outdoors like everybody else in California.”

  “Maybe he don’t take to it. Maybe ridin’ and campin’ and all the stuff you like ain’t his style. He’s a quiet one, but he’s brainy. He can already pick out words in the newspaper.”

  “I want him outside, every day.”

  “Hell, he’s only three. He don’t have to climb Mount Shasta just yet—”

  “Don’t tell me how to raise my son.” Mack walked out.

  Johnson sighed. “And good-bye yourself,” he muttered. “Jesus.”

  Mack found Little Jim walking along the Sacramento Street side of the house, dragging a stick across the uprights of the wrought-iron fence, rat-tat-tat.

  “There you are. Give me a hug before I go.”

  The boy clutched the stick to his shirt.

  “Come on, Jim. I didn’t mean to yell. Fresh air’s good for you.”

  And Little Jim was pale. Very pale from too much time indoors. The California climate had been good for Mack, and he wanted the same benefits for his son.

  Stubbornly, he crouched down and held out his arms. Little Jim hesitated, snapped the stick in two, and edged sideways into Mack’s embrace.

  “I’ll miss you,” Mack said.

  “Sure, Pa. Good-bye.”

  Mack felt the boy’s stiffness. He was holding back, resenting him. Damn.

  Alex drove around the corner with the buggy. Leaving, Mack watched Little Jim standing there without a smile. Joyless as a little old man in the California sunshine.

  For the train trip, Alex carried a satchel of business papers and correspondence. Mack’s valise held a similar stack, and some books: The Octopus by Nellie’s friend Frank Norris, which he hadn’t read; his marked copy of The Conquest of Arid America by William Smythe; and one he plunged into immediately, heedless of Alex’s pleas that they work. Appleton’s had published Nellie’s new novel two weeks before. Range of Light
was essentially another romance, but a somber, bitter one. Mack stayed awake most of the night in his berth, mesmerized by it.

  The story involved a Yosemite hotel keeper seduced by greed and the blandishments of a San Francisco developer, who wanted to buy in and treble the size of the hotel. The hotelman, an older man, had previously brought a young wife to the valley. At first the natural beauty had diverted her from the loveless marriage. When Nellie introduced her, she was restless and discouraged.

  A young Basque illegally herding sheep in the valley became her summer lover. In one scene they met secretly at Yosemite Falls. They soon saw themselves as allies in a war against the innkeeper’s avarice and bourgeois mentality. Always, the Sierra range loomed as a presence, its light-flooded purity mocking their furtive love in the shadows on the valley floor.

  Finally they decided to risk a meeting in full daylight. They would climb up together to taste the sun—once. The husband learned of their plan, followed, and shot them both during their tryst on Cloud’s Rest, then accidentally fell to his death on the way down.

  It made no difference in the hotel scheme. The developer took over the property, remodeled, and turned the hotel into an enormous success, bringing raucous crowds who sang and shouted all night long in the new saloon bar. In the final pages, a drunken guest kicked the bar’s player piano. After the guests left, the piano kept playing “The Blue Danube” faster and faster, louder and louder. The piano started to shake itself to pieces, wires snapping and pinging, the music growing madder and uglier. It dinned from the open windows, drowned the voices of complaining guests, rolled down the valley. Nellie’s last images seemed omens. Frightened deer fled along the banks of the dark river and wild birds flew frantically across the face of the full moon while the music of civilization played on.

  He closed the book. Critics might never guess why the “female Zola” painted such a dark portrait of the lovers. He knew one possible answer.

  Or was he flattering himself?

  Not that it did any good. She was in Carmel—maybe with someone else—and he was here, in a stuffy berth, rattling through the California night, alone.