by Howard Fast
At the door, leaving, Dan turned to them and said, “Funny thing happened today. I hired a bookkeeper.”
“It’s time.”
“He’s a Chink.”
“What?”
“You heard me. I hired a Chink. What do you think of that?”
“I think it’s all right,” Levy said.
After he had left, Sarah asked her husband, “Why does he try so hard to act tough and mean?”
“Two reasons,” Mark replied. “First, because a part of him is tough and mean, because if you’re going to run fish and crab out of the wharf and not be run out of the place yourself, you got to be a little tough and a little mean, and secondly because he’s just a kid. I like him.”
That night, at dinner in his home, Thomas Seldon was not quite certain whether or not he liked Daniel Lavette. Of course, his value judgments were not in terms of liking or disliking; in his world, a man was sound or unsound, reliable or unreliable, solid or shaky; liking had nothing to do with it. “Interesting chap,” he said to his wife and daughter. “Big–too big for the clothes he wore–and young. Twenty-one.” He sat at one end of the great mahogany table in the Seldon dining room, his wife and daughter on his left and right respectively. Fully set, the table held sixteen; and even though there were only three of them at dinner, Seldon liked the feel of its size and substance. There was much substance if little taste all through the dining room, the half-paneled walls, the Victorian bastardization of Queen Anne furniture, the heavy beams across the ceiling, not even shaken by the earthquake, a curious and uninspiring marriage of Spanish Colonial and Victorian, but nevertheless a solid place of substance.
Seldon had built the house for his bride, Mary, who was an Asquith from Boston before her marriage. Thomas Seldon, Senior, dead these twelve years past, had come to California in the late forties, not to mine gold but to care for the gold that others mined, and the present Thomas Seldon presided over the bank his father founded. Now, at fifty-five, a solid, handsome, substantial man with iron gray hair and a firm chin, he found every prospect pleasing except that his wife, Mary, had seen fit to present him with one daughter and no sons. Mary had other virtues; she was calm, coldly beautiful, even at age fifty-two, and made few demands upon her husband, who found Madam Sigeury’s bordello on Beale Street a more comfortable outlet for his waning sexual energies than his wife’s bed. And if she had presented him with only a single child, a daughter, that daughter was nevertheless known and accepted as the most beautiful woman in San Francisco, providing you also accepted the fact that the choice in such matters was confined to the two hundred or so families that “mattered.”
But even in wider circles, Jean Seldon would have been considered to be unusually beautiful. It was bruited around town that Charles Dana Gibson, who had established the ideal of upper-class beauty in his drawings and paintings, had sketched her while in San Francisco, and had thereby come to his Gibson-woman stereotype, and while Jean herself knew this to be untrue and indeed wondered whether Gibson had ever actually been in San Francisco, she did nothing to dispel the legend. She was a tall woman, five feet eight and a half inches in her stocking feet, well formed, with wide, straight shoulders and strong, long-fingered hands. Her face had the same chiseled quality as her mother’s–referred to on the society page as “classic”–her eyes were deep blue and her hair of a pale honey color which in certain light took on a golden sheen. She had dutifully undergone twelve years of schooling of a sort at Miss Marion’s Classes, but she had little intellectual curiosity and in common with most of her women friends no desire to be college educated.
Nor was she very musically inclined. After ten years of piano lessons, she was capable of playing a Beethoven sonata from the music, correctly if rather woodenly; but in all truth, music bored her. She played tennis competently and rode competently, but did neither with devotion or passion. She wore clothes splendidly and loved shopping, and the trying on of the long, awkward dresses of her time was something she delighted in. She was frequently photographed, and when the first upper-class charity fashion show was held in the city, the Chronicle noted that “the occasion was made memorable by the costumes displayed by a bevy of local beauties, and in particular by the classic beauty and regal manner of Miss Jean Seldon.” That was two years ago, when Jean was not yet nineteen. Now, she was if anything even more handsome and certainly more discontent, a fact which puzzled and disturbed her parents. She took so little interest in most things that her interest in her father’s luncheon guest was rather unusual.
“You say his clothes didn’t fit him,” she said to her father, “and he didn’t even know which fork to use. That’s wonderful.”
“Why?”
“He sounds like one of Jack London’s heroes.”
“Who is Jack London?”
“Daddy!”
“I just can’t understand why you invited him here,” Mary Seldon said.
“You did? When?”
“Friday next. Mary,” he said to his wife, “this is a most unusual young man, believe me. He can’t be more than twenty-one or twenty-two, uncouth–yet not really. He walked into the bank as if he owned the place, demanded to see me, talked his way in, and coolly asked for a loan of thirty thousand dollars. And believe me, instead of throwing him out, I was taken with him.”
“And you’ll give him the loan?”
“Good heavens, no. He’s a crab fisher.”
“What!”
“You heard me, a crab fisher.”
“I still don’t understand why you asked him to dinner,” his wife said. “The way you describe him–well, who on earth could we ask with him?”
“Why won’t you give him the loan?” Jean persisted, intrigued with the image her father evoked.
“Because he has no collateral. He owns three fishing boats that are heavily mortgaged, and he operates with a cash balance of about a thousand dollars, when he has it. Also, he’s young–too young for the crazy notion he has of buying a coastal steamer.”
“Then, as mother says, why did you invite him here?”
“For the same reason I asked him to lunch with Al Sommers and myself at the club. I suppose it’s his youth and vitality. They tell me his folks were killed in the earthquake–I think he’s half French and half Italian, but you don’t brush off a kid like that. He’ll amount to something some day, and when he does, I want him to come back to our bank.”
From a cousin who worked as a teller at the Seldon Bank, Anthony Cassala got the news that Lavette had come there for a loan. He told his wife, Maria, that it made him sick, sick to his heart, as he put it. “To say to me, you, you who are like a father to me–I don’t want your help. How can he do that to me?”
“Ask him.”
“Not that he gets the loan. That cold Irish bastard would take his heart’s blood first.”
“The Seldons aren’t Irish, Tony.”
“The same thing. Who are his people, the Seldons?”
The next day, unable to contain himself, Cassala drove his gig down to the Embarcadero. Dan Lavette’s boats were unloading, and Dan himself was raging at a commission merchant.
“Rotten fish! So help me God, you say that word again, and I’ll spread you over this dock! Who the hell do you think you are, coming up here from San Mateo to tell me my fish are rotten! Where’s your ice? You cheap bastards skimp on the ice and then tell us we sell rotten fish! Look at my fish–they’re half alive. I sell my catch when we dock, not the next day. Ah, get to hell out of here. I don’t need your business.”
He caught sight of Cassala then, turned on his heel, and stalked over to the gig.
“Danny, Danny, you got a short temper,” Cassala said. “That’s no way to do business. You make enemies.”
“Screw the bastard! I don’t want his business.”
“You don’t want mine either, do you, Danny?”
“What are you talking about?”
“The loan you go to Seldon for.”
“So
you heard about that. From that loudmouth Angelo who works at Seldon’s bank.”
“That’s right. And what for you go to Seldon? Who lend you the money for the fishing boats?”
“You did, Tony, and I’m into you up to my neck. I got this crazy scheme to buy a coastal lumber ship. Suppose I come to you, and you got to say no–and even if you were dumb enough to go along with me, I wouldn’t take it. Tony, believe me.”
“I believe you, Danny. But come to me, yes?”
“We’ll see.”
Dan strode over to the dock, where his men were unloading the catch of crabs into bushel baskets. He picked up one of the baskets of crabs and then walked back and stowed it in the boot of the gig.
“Danny, you are a crazy man,” Cassala said. “Who can eat a bushel of crab?”
“Your wife, your kids, your relatives–I never seen less than ten at your table.”
“Then you come to dinner, Danny.”
“Tomorrow. But no business talk. Just forget about that whole Seldon thing.”
Cassala drove off and Lavette walked down the wharf to his shack. Upstairs and downstairs, the place was spotless. Feng Wo had taken over, not only as bookkeeper but as houseboy and cook. The smell of fresh coffee permeated the place, and as Dan entered, Feng Wo leaped up from his place at the desk.
“Lunch in ten minutes, Mr. Lavette. As soon as you change and clean up.”
“Listen, Feng–you don’t have to cook my lunch. That’s not in the deal.”
“Please, I enjoy it. You eat hash and beans out of cans, Mr. Lavette, and you’ll ruin your digestion. My word, you bring in hundreds of tons of fresh fish, and you never eat a piece of fish yourself.”
“I hate fish.”
“I’ll cook you a Chinese omelet. It won’t take but a few minutes. Yes?”
“Suit yourself.”
The omelet was delicious. Dan ate quickly and hungrily, getting rid of the food rather than savoring it, and then, as he left the place, he told Feng Wo that he would be back in an hour or so. He walked down the Embarcadero to Market Street, and there he entered the first men’s tailoring establishment he came to.
“I need a suit,” he told the tailor. “A good suit–a suit with some class and some distinction. Do you know what I’m talking about? Forget what I look like now. I’m a boatman, and these are my working clothes. I want a suit for Nob Hill, quiet–no fancy checks or stripes, just quiet class. And I want it to fit me.”
“My name is Pincus,” the tailor said.
“Lavette. Now do you get my drift, Mr. Pincus?”
“I think so, Mr. Lavette. I’ll show you the cloth and you can pick out the material and the style.”
“Wait a minute. I need it in three days.”
“Three days? Impossible.”
“Nothing is impossible.”
“Three days–it’s got to cost.”
“How much?”
“At least a hundred dollars. Depends on the material you select.”
“I paid six dollars for the last suit I bought.”
“Ready-made.” Pincus shrugged.
“All right–three days. Let’s get to it.”
At the age of seventeen, when his father and mother died, Dan Lavette abandoned all thought of school. During the two years that followed, he came to know the fishermen on the wharf, not as a kid who rode his father’s boat as crew but as one of them. He was the youngest of the lot. They liked him; they helped him; they got him drunk for the first time and they took him to his first whorehouse, and they accepted him as one of them, and when they tried to bully him, he fought them with a ferocity that won him his place as a man in a rough, crude man’s world; yet he never became a fisherman as such. He won his place but maintained himself as an outsider. The fishermen were Italian and Portuguese and Mexican and Yankee, and some of them owned their own boats and others worked on shares, but they all had in common the fact that they were fishermen and they grew old as fishermen, their hands brown and horny, their brown faces as lined and tough as old leather.
He was nineteen when he came to the decision that the difference between Nob Hill and the Embarcadero was the difference between those who owned the boats and those who worked the boats. He decided that life was a plan and a schedule, just as a day’s crabbing was a plan and a schedule. He rented the shack on the waterfront, fixed it up, and moved out of the Cassala house, quieting the woeful fears of Maria Cassala that life with the bums and whores on the Coast would destroy him. He had no intention of being destroyed. A few months after he moved in, he bought the shack that he had made his home and his office for a thousand dollars in cash against a mortgage. He learned to keep a set of books. He borrowed from Anthony Cassala’s bank, mortgaging his boat to buy a second boat, and then mortgaging that to buy a third. He stopped drinking after a dozen drunken sprees, not because he was afraid that he couldn’t handle the liquor and not for any moral reasons, but because drunk in a whorehouse, he had been rolled for two hundred and forty-five dollars in cash that he had in his pocket, and then decided that profit and loss did not match. The Barbary Coast, he decided, was a sucker’s game, a stupid delusion for kids in the bodies of adults; there were no paths from there to Nob Hill, and at nineteen he had had his fill of wasted, middle-aged whores and maudlin drunks and cheap con men, and fishermen who worked their backsides to the bone six days a week and then blew it all for one night on the Coast. He knew what he wanted; he wanted Nob Hill.
And this night, he was on the Hill, dressed in a gray sharkskin suit that fitted his massive bulk, wearing new black shoes, black socks, a white shirt, and a tie of midnight blue. He saw and observed and learned, and as he walked through the gateposts and up to the front door of the Seldon house, he examined and assessed the place, a Victorian mansion of red wood and gray stone. He was impressed yet not unaware of the gaudiness and ugliness of the place; and he felt that if he had put the same kind of money into the building of a Nob Hill castle, he would have done it differently. How he would have done it, he didn’t know; but the very fact that he sensed an aspect of vulgarity gave him assurance.
The butler who opened the door raised a brow. “Your coat, sir?” He was hatless and coatless, indifferent to the weather. He made a note of his error, as he glanced around the foyer, the big staircase leading up to the second floor, the double doors on either side, the view through the glass doors at the back of the foyer to the potted plant wilderness of a conservatory, the dark bronze sculptures in the foyer, the marble floor and banister, the huge, almost awesome crystal chandelier hanging overhead, the two enormous ugly Gothic chairs on either side the staircase, he felt impressed yet not deflated; more as if he were in a store and taking stock. He neither approved nor disapproved; he simply filed an impression for a time when his judgment would allow him to assess it
The butler, a portly, middle-aged man in livery, opened one of the double doors on the right. Since he had not asked for a name–somewhat surprisingly, for Dan had visions of his reading a formal announcement–Dan concluded that he had been expected and described. He stood for a moment awkwardly, looking at a brightly lit living room, a grand piano, a harp, two enormous couches, overstuffed chairs, a huge Persian rug and five people: Seldon, who came forward to meet him, two older women, a man in his fifties, and a young woman who Dan, with only a glimpse of her face, felt was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen.
Seldon shook his hand. “Delighted, Lavette. Glad to see you. Welcome to my home.” He then made the introductions: “This is my wife, Mrs. Seldon.–Daniel Lavette.” A tall, handsome woman; not friendly, simply courteous with a touch of the dubious as she extended a limp hand. “And Mrs. Whittier.” No hand at all this time, just a nod from a stout, tightly corseted woman, whose white satin gown was sewn over with hundreds of small pearls. “And this is Mr. Whittier. Mr. Daniel Lavette.” A small man with a waxed mustache; he, like Seldon, wore a dinner jacket and a black tie, a fact of which Dan was now painfully aware. He examined Dan wit
h interest and curiosity and shook hands heartily.
On Dan’s part, he was unable to tear his eyes away from Jean Seldon, who sat in one corner of one of the great couches, her blue gown intensifying the pale blue of her eyes, watching him, just the faintest flicker of a smile on her lips. “My daughter, Miss Jean Seldon. And this is Daniel Lavette.”
He tried to think of something to say, something he had read, something he had heard–pleased, delighted, overwhelmed, he felt a sick, empty pit in his stomach–or simply how do you do; yet no words would come, and he said nothing. Then she gave him her hand, a large, shapely, long-fingered hand yet lost in his own. He held it a moment and then let go.
“I’ve heard so much about you, Mr. Lavette,” she said. “You made quite an impression on my father. I can see why.”
He took it as a compliment and mumbled a thank you. The smile turned to light laughter. Was she laughing at him? The butler appeared at his elbow and asked what he would like to drink. He would have refused a drink, but the other men were drinking, and after a moment’s hesitation, he said that he would have a whiskey and soda. Jean Seldon watched him intently. He was conscious of her scrutiny. “Why don’t you sit down and tell me about yourself, Mr. Lavette?” she asked. Her manner of speech, her ease, so different from the easy intimacy of the dance-hall girls or the stiff shyness of the girls he met at Cassala’s house, was marvelous and new and intriguing. But now Seldon had taken his arm.
“Dan–you don’t mind if I call you Dan, I’m old enough to be your father–Whittier here’s the President of California Shipping. He’s too fat and rich. He needs some young competition.”
Jean Seldon smiled at him and watched. The smile relinquished him for the moment, but it also established her proprietary interest for the evening. It said, you’re released for the moment, but only for the moment; and he nodded slightly, the thought flashing through his head that this was what he had been looking for and dreaming of, this and nothing else.
“I hear you’re planning to buy the Oregon Queen, young man.”
