The Immigrants

by Howard Fast

“Christ,” Levy whispered to him, “we miss one payroll and we’re out of business.”

  “But we make it, and we got the goddamndest business on this waterfront.”

  “In time, Danny,” Cassala said. “Go slow.”

  “Just don’t go away, Mr. Swenson. Let me talk to Mr. Cassala about this. Have some wine and cheese and ham.” He drew Mark and Cassala aside. “Tony–we can’t pass this up. Tony, we can’t.”

  “You never even see the ships, Danny.”

  “I know the ships. I seen them. I tell you, Tony, this crazy Swede is giving them away.”

  “What do you think, Mark?”

  “I think we can do it. I don’t know–garbage. I never thought of anything like garbage. But I think we can do it.”

  Goldberg was unenthusiastic; he disliked ships, felt uncomfortable about them. He insisted that there was a difference between a mortgage on a ship and a mortgage on a piece of real estate. Mark argued that if a ship were insured, there was no damn difference whatsoever. They argued about it, and then marched over to where Swenson was munching cheese and drinking wine and began to question him.

  Dan beckoned for Feng Wo. “Get out that Chinee harp of yours!” Feng Wo took his abacus out of the briefcase, and as Dan threw figures, interest rates, and percentage points at him–eighty-five cents times twelve hundred times three hundred and sixty-five–he shuffled the little black and white beads marvelously, jotting down the results on a pad.

  The others watched in awe. The children gathered around Feng Wo, and Maria poured wine and cut bread and cheese and meat and pleaded with them to eat. Swenson was taken with Maria. “You remind me of my Annie,” he said. “I like a strong woman.” Cassala and Goldberg went to the other side of the hatch to caucus and pore over the figures, and Maria, pressing a plate loaded with cheese and meat and red peppers on Dan, said to him, in her soft, southern Italian, “Just look at my Rosa, Danny–so sweet, so gentle, so willing. She will make a wonderful wife for a wonderful man.” “I’m sure she will. She’s a good girl,” Dan said, and then for the life of her, Maria could not think of another thing to say. It was the way Dan spoke, not even looking up from the figures he was studying.

  He asked Feng Wo, “What do you think, Feng? Are we crazy?”

  “I think it’s a remarkable opportunity.”

  “Could you handle it?”

  “I could handle it.”

  “All right. If Tony agrees and we’re in garbage as well as lumber and fish, your wages go up. Eighteen dollars a week, starting Monday.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Lavette,” Feng Wo said.

  Cassala called them. “Danny, Mark, come over here.” The tone of his voice spoke of decision. Mark and Dan walked over to join him and Goldberg. The two women stared at the little cluster of men. Jack Harvey, as fascinated by the abacus as the children were, was disappointed when Feng Wo put it back in his briefcase to turn and wait for his fate to be decided. Only Swenson, apparently indifferent, continued to eat and admire Maria.

  “Danny, Mark,” Cassala said, “we make the decision. You buy the garbage boats. Goldberg works out the mortgage, overriding on the whole thing, and we give you one hundred thousand dollars line of credit. You no pay interest, only on what you draw–six percent.”

  “The line of credit remains in force,” Goldberg added. “You understand, this is not a loan but a standing credit situation that can be canceled without penalty by ninety days’ notice on the part of either party. It is backed by an overriding mortgage on your entire operation, and we will require monthly statements of your cash position. We include the Levy property, the Lavette property, the fishing boats, this ship, and the two garbage ships–in other words, the total assets of the partnership. You pay interest only on what you draw from your line of credit. There’s no other bank in the city that would do this for less than eight percent, but Mr. Cassala’s the boss. I’ll draw up the papers next week.”

  There was a long moment of silence, then Mark said to Dan, “Well, Danny, we got a tiger by the tail, haven’t we?”

  “We sure as hell have,” Dan replied, grinning. “We sure as hell have. But, old buddy boy, we are going to let go of the tail and climb on its back and ride it straight up to the moon! Because this beautiful sonofabitch is ours–ours.”

  He couldn’t contain himself. He raced down the deck, halting to caress the rusty winches. He vaulted onto the roof of the deckhouse, standing there where he could survey his new iron empire–while the others watched him in amazement. Then he had to dash down into the hold and look at the engines again. Mark went after him and found him standing in the captain’s cabin, a wide, childish grin on his face.

  “It’s beautiful,” Dan said. “It’s just so goddamn beautiful I could cry.”

  A week later, calmly polite in the face of Mary Seldon’s cold stare, Dan picked up Jean and took her to dinner at the newly refurbished, reopened Palace Hotel. Wearing his dinner jacket, he helped Jean, in a simple white satin gown, out of the cab and escorted her into the Grand Court, conscious of and totally happy in the fact that every eye was on them. It was not his first visit to the Palace; he had come there the day before to prowl through the place and to admire its opulent Victorian grandeur, and so arrive with Jean as something less than an oaf. At least he could point to the Maxfield Parrish painting and remind her of their discussion of lateen-rigged boats, even though Jean informed him that Maude Adams had posed for it and he didn’t have the slightest notion of who Maude Adams was. He was becoming increasingly adroit at covering his areas of ignorance. He listened with pleasure to Jean’s story of how her mother had met Oscar Wilde at the preearthquake Palace, but did not feel any necessity to inquire who Oscar Wilde was. Instead, he stored the tale away for his own future telling, with a notation to ask Mark Levy about Oscar Wilde.

  At least he knew something about food. He had learned that at the Cassalas’ and at places like Trigger Joe’s on the Embarcadero, where a dollar bought you food no chef at the Palace could equal. Now he ordered mushroom soup, brook trout with butter sauce–which he barely tasted–broiled mushrooms on garlic bread, and a saddle of venison with a sauce of wild plums. The meal went on endlessly, dish after dish, yet they were without appetite and only nibbled and pecked at the food. A salpicon of fruits au rhum, quails in nests of purée of chestnuts, English walnuts and celery in mayonnaise, Roquefort cheese and lettuce, nut pudding, ice cream praline.

  “Don’t they stop?” he asked her.

  “You ordered the dinner, Danny.”

  He wondered whether she saw through him or not. It didn’t matter. He ordered a second bottle of wine and forgot the food, let the dishes come and go untouched. Her usually pale face was flushed now, and he was content to sit and look at her, and thus he was fulfilled and all his life was present before him. Not yet twenty-two, he was where he had dreamed of being, sitting in the restaurant at the Palace opposite the most beautiful–and without doubt in his mind–the most desirable woman in San Francisco, and still it was only the beginning. He told her about Swenson and the garbage ships and the line of credit they had obtained from the Bank of Sonoma.

  “Garbage ships, Danny?”

  “They’re ships–six hundred tons each, steam schooners. My God, Jean, I’m not tied to garbage, and sure as hell I’m not touching it with my hands. I keep the crews and fulfill the contract. Then the ships are mine. Then we got the iron ship, two wooden ships, and three fishing boats–six vessels. Mark and I figure to clear fifty thousand dollars the first year, and that’s only the beginning.”

  “Danny, what do you want?”

  “You know what I want. I want the biggest fleet of ships that sails out of this port. I want to be up there on Nob Hill with a house as big as your father’s, and I’m going to do it myself, with my own two hands. And I want you. Jesus God, I want you like I never wanted anything else in the world, and there’s no other girl in the world for me.”

  “I know that, Danny. But you’re so young.”


  “Young? What is young? When you were never a kid, how old are you? They can afford to be young up there on Nob Hill, I can’t. I shipped out on my father’s boat when I was nine years old. I watched him work and scrimp and I watched my mother work her fingers to the bone for them to buy that first boat. Do you know what poverty is–a disease, a stink.”

  Wide-eyed, fascinated, she listened to him. She desired him most when he was like that, filled with the passion of his wants, his hunger, his whole body alive with a sense of power. She had never known another man who gave her such a feeling of power, of the intensity of his will. He had no lust for money, and somehow she sensed this; it was power, and the ships were living symbols of power. She felt alive, drunk with his own strength, when she was with him, and she had never felt this way with anyone else.

  When they left the hotel, she begged him to take her out on the bay in one of the boats.

  “The fog’s in. Anyway, the boats stink of fish. Be patient. I got my eye on a little sloop. In six months we’ll own her.”

  “I want to go to the wharf,” she insisted.

  “All right–if that’s what you want.”

  They drove down to the wharf, where the boats lay like ghosts in the fog. Hand in hand, not speaking, they walked along the wharf to Dan’s shack. He hadn’t planned it that way; he had never touched her breasts, never kissed her with his lips parted; the virginity he endowed her with was as sacred as her beauty and her station in life; it defined the difference between Jean Seldon and the hustlers on the Barbary Coast. In his mind’s eye, he never undressed her; his fantasies were otherwise; and even now he was not sure that he wanted what would have to happen. Yet he couldn’t stop. He had reached the point where she became flesh and blood. He felt her grip on his arm tighten as he unlocked the door to his office. A word from her would have changed it, but she said nothing. He flicked on the lights. She led the way upstairs to the bedroom, and there they stood and watched each other.

  Still, he could make no move, and, as if she sensed this, she began to unhook her dress, let it fall around her legs, and then stepped out of it. The corset was a redundancy; she was slender and firm of flesh; she reached behind her slowly, deliberately, loosened the laces, and let the corset drop. Then she pulled the camisole over her head and stood naked in front of him, glowing pink and white, her small breasts perfectly formed, the hard nipples like tiny buds of pink roses, the triangle of pubic hair the same honey color as the piled hair on her head, which she now loosened and let fall to her waist.

  He pulled off his jacket, ripped his shirt open. He was struggling with his pants, his fingers shaking, and then he tore the pants open to the crotch. The violence of his action terrified her, and she crawled back on the bed, covering her breasts with her hands. He ripped his underwear as he had his trousers, and with the torn trousers still clinging to his legs, he flung himself upon her.

  “Danny, darling,” she whimpered. “Don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me. Don’t you understand? You’re the first one. I’m a virgin.”

  Momentarily, he came to his senses, propped up on his arms, staring at his erection as if it were a stranger to him. Her hands fell away from her breasts and she spread her legs. “Do it,” she cried, “do it, do it, fuck me, god damn you!” Then he drove inside of her and she screamed with pain, and he exploded, as if her cry had washed away all that separated her from the whores in the Tenderloin.

  He lay beside her then, cradling her in his arms, trying to stop her tears. “I’m bleeding so much,” she said. “Look at your bed.” “It’s all right.” “What happened to us, Danny?” “I don’t know. We made love.” “That’s what they call it?” “It was the first time.”

  He still wore his shoes. “Oh, take your shoes off–please,” she said.

  “I didn’t know.”

  “How do you feel about me?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean. Jesus Christ, get me a towel or something to wipe this blood off me.”

  He got up, stumbling over his torn trousers, then pulled them off, went into the bathroom, wet a towel in hot water, and returned and began awkwardly to wipe the blood from her crotch.

  “Oh, let me do that.”

  “I love you,” he said, as she wiped herself clean. “You know that.”

  “You damn near raped me.”

  “I didn’t rape you.”

  “What would you call it?”

  “I never even thought of you that way.”

  “What way?”

  He groped for some explanation. “Naked. Then when I saw you, something happened to me.”

  “Yes. It certainly did.”

  He leaned over and gently kissed her shoulder. “Does it hurt?”

  “What?”

  “What I did.”

  Suddenly, she began to laugh, half hysterically.

  “What is so funny?”

  “Tearing your pants to shreds.” The laughter stopped as suddenly as it began. She was staring at him as if she had never seen him before.

  “Will you still marry me?” he asked.

  “Suppose I’m caught?”

  “It doesn’t happen that easily.”

  “It can.”

  “I’ll never hurt you again, I swear,” he begged her.

  “I’ll marry you, Danny,” she said. “I don’t know what else to do.”

  PART TWO

  Russian Hill

  It was in August of 1914, soon after the birth of their second child, that Dan and Jean Lavette moved into their new house on Russian Hill. For the first three years of their married life, they had lived in a rented house on Sacramento Street, just a short distance from the Seldon mansion, which, along with James C. Flood’s gigantic million-and-a-half-dollar brownstone palace, had survived both the earthquake and the fire which followed. While the new Lavette house could have been fitted into a single wing of the Flood mansion, and while it could not compare to Thomas Seldon’s home, it nevertheless ran to a final cost of one hundred and ten thousand dollars. The first plans the architect had drawn for Dan added up to a cost of only seventy thousand dollars, but that called for a wooden front and Jean protested bitterly that she would not live in a house with a wooden front. White limestone was substituted; a solarium was added; and at Jean’s insistence, the two rooms in the servants’ quarters became three. With the library, the living room, the dining room, four bedrooms, and an entryway floored with marble, the price increased by forty thousand dollars.

  Jean was impressed by the fact that Dan never complained about the cost of anything. Whatever he felt about the making of money, he was indifferent to spending. She had been the recipient of a princely wedding gift on the part of her father, stock in the Seldon Bank to the value of one hundred thousand dollars and ten thousand dollars more in cash–princely considering Thomas and Mary Seldon’s bitterness at the match–but Dan would not touch the money. It was hers and it would be hers.

  His worship of the beautiful woman he had married had not dissipated, but it had changed enormously in quality. The two pregnancies had been difficult for Jean. The first resulted in the birth of a son, a healthy boy of nine pounds, whom they named Thomas Joseph Lavette for both grandparents. Dan would have preferred that the Joseph take preference, that being his father’s name, but he deferred to Jean, as he did with their second child, a girl, whom they agreed to name Barbara, since Jean disliked Dan’s mother’s name–Anna–and Dan protested naming the child after Jean’s mother. If Jean had insisted, he would have given in, but Jean did not insist. Two weeks after the birth of the second child, they moved into the new house on Russian Hill, and for the next eight weeks after that, Jean rejected Dan’s sexual advances with one excuse or another. She was polite, amiable for the most part, totally occupied with the new house and its furnishing and decoration, withdrawn, reasonably devoted to her children–for whom she had hired a live-in nursemaid–and apparently quite content to exist without sex. At the end of the eight-wee
k period, she finally submitted to Dan’s fervent attempt to make love to her. She accepted him without emotion and without response. When it was done, she accepted his almost servile plea for an explanation in much the same manner, without emotion and without response.

  Dan flung himself out of bed and stalked through the dark house, downstairs and into a library full of books he had never read. In four years, he had not looked at another woman. “God damn it!” he pleaded with himself. “What did I do? It’s like screwing a corpse.” He sat in the dark and then he dozed and awakened with the first flicker of daylight. It was just after five o’clock. The dawning was still early now in the middle of July. He was filled with hurt and anger and frustration–the hurt bursting out of him in an irresistible need to inflict it elsewhere. The middle of July meant that the crabbing season was almost over, and he sat there brooding over the fact that during the past three weeks five of his boats had been highjacked out of their catch, traps robbed; a new breed of young thug had grown up and was out on the bay. Christ, how he hated the whole thing, fishing and crabbing and fighting for the pennies with the commission men! He and Levy owned eleven fishing boats now, and he’d just as soon have the whole fleet at the bottom of the sea.

  He leaped to his feet suddenly, went to the closet where Jean had piled his fishing gear into a wicker basket, and put on boots and oilskins for the first time in two years. Where the devil had Jean put his old Colt .45? He found it in a desk drawer in the library, and his shotgun was in a closet in the same room. He checked the cylinder of the revolver. It was loaded. He loaded the shotgun, put the revolver in one pocket of his jacket and a handful of shotgun shells in the other. It was five-thirty in the morning when he left the house for the wharf.

  At the dock, Peter Lomas, his fleet captain, stared at the shotgun and made a crack about duck hunting.

  “Duck hunting, hell!” Dan said. “I’m going to get that son of a bitch who’s been stealing our crabs.”