by Howard Fast
Now, as so often, playing with the blond-haired, blue-eyed little boy who was his son, he wondered what the hell he, Daniel Lavette, son of a French fisherman and an Italian peasant girl, was doing in this improbable mansion on Russian Hill? Nothing in it gave him the feeling of being his, of belonging to him. The ship models and the sea paintings in the library–which Jean referred to as his room–were gifts from her parents, with the exception of a splendid Winslow Homer that the Levys had given him as a wedding present; the shelves were filled with books he had never read and had no intention of reading, and the furniture there, as in the rest of the house, had been selected by Jean and her mother. It was true that a Packard touring car that he kept in a garage on the Embarcadero was his own selection, but it was bright yellow, and Jean felt it was vulgar, and that if they had a car, it should have been a limousine of some dark and proper color. And Jean’s friends, the second generation of nabobs and the increasing mixture of artists, writers, and musicians who were moving to Russian Hill, were as alien to him as the furniture, rugs, and knickknacks that had poured into the new house in a steady stream since it was completed.
“You mustn’t excite him too much before his bedtime,” Miss Jones said. “Really, Mr. Lavette.”
“You don’t approve of excitement before bedtime.”
“Emphatically not.”
“Oh?” Dan grinned at her. “Try it sometime. It’s got its points.”
At dinner, Jean appeared more withdrawn than usual, and Dan decided to say nothing about what had happened at the bank. He had made up his mind that they would deny him the loan; and if, on an outside chance, they were willing to give him the money, he was no longer sure that he wanted it from the Seldon Bank. He felt that it had been a mistake to approach Seldon in the first place, and Mark agreed with him, telling him, after he had reported what had happened at the meeting, “You do Tony an injustice when you shy away from him. The Cassalas are bankers. Tony needs people like us. If the shipping venture is a mirage, we should drop it. But if it’s real, let’s go to Tony and talk to him. He deserves that.”
Both Dan and Jean sat in silence. More and more, they would eat in silence, and, still, when he looked at her he felt that he was entitled to no complaint, that the fact of her accepting him as her husband was all he could ask, and that the privilege of sitting opposite her and basking in the perfection of her beauty was enough in itself. Time would change things. She had accepted him wholly once; she would again.
Finally, he said, “It was a damn beautiful day, wasn’t it? I hope you went out for a while.”
“I wish you wouldn’t swear, Dan.”
“Yeah–I’m sorry.”
“I went to lunch at the Fairmont,” she said. “With Marcy Callan.”
And then she added, “We went to Borsin’s and picked out material for the drapes. I’m going to do this whole room over in pastels. I’m so tired of Oriental rugs and this ridiculous period furniture. It’s not Chippendale and it’s not Queen Anne; I really don’t know what it is or why I bought it. I think that if we are going to have antiques, we should have real antiques. We can certainly afford them.”
Dan nodded. He was still trying to place Marcy Callan.
“She’s marrying Whittier’s son, right? A kid by the name of John or something.”
“We’ll have to have a party for her. She’s one of my dearest friends.”
“Sure. Nothing I like better than having the Whittiers over here.”
“You’ll endure it.”
“Talking about parties and things,” Dan said, “Feng Wo–he’s my office manager, you remember–he’d like us to have dinner with his family.”
“You’re not serious?”
“He asked me today.”
“With Chinks?” she said incredulously.
“Chinese. Don’t call them Chinks, Jean.”
“Why not? You do. I heard you use that word a hundred times.”
“Not lately. Sure I used it. Everyone does. I don’t like it. It’s like calling Mark a sheeny.”
“I don’t think so, and I don’t think you’re ready to instruct me on the language.”
“Jeany,” he said gently, “let’s not fight. People think I’m some kind of crazy financial genius with what Mark and me built in four years–but there’s no way we could have done it without Feng Wo. He’s the one who keeps us out of bankruptcy and juggles the books and puts the brake on when I want to blow the whole thing. This is the first time he ever asked me to his home. What can I tell him?”
“Did you accept the invitation or did you tell him you would discuss it with me? It’s very simple to tell him that we have a full social schedule for the next two months. We have, as a matter of fact.”
“I accepted it.”
“Then you’ll go alone,” Jean said. “I’m very sorry, Dan, but I have no intentions of dining with a Chinese, as you put it.”
When Jack Harvey heard that Dan and Mark intended to sell his beloved Oregon Queen, which he had commanded since its first voyage under their flag and which was his darling, his home, his passion, he got drunk for the first time in more than three years. He did not simply get drunk; he was not a social drinker; he went on a mighty bender and disappeared for three days into the maw of the Tenderloin. It made no difference that Mark and Dan assured him that he would take over the first of the new ships. He refused to believe them, and he saw the one glorious period of his life going down the drain.
For three days, his daughter, Clair, now fifteen, searched for him. She had grown into a long-legged, oddly lovely young woman–with green eyes, a bronze skin, and a high-arched, imperious nose–very much her own person, independent, five feet, seven inches in height at fifteen, with a great mop of carrot-colored hair. Alone, she prowled through the Barbary Coast, poking into every dive she had ever heard her father mention–and then, in despair, turning to Dan and Mark. Mark joined her, and in the small hours of the fourth day, they found Jack Harvey in a whorehouse on Grant Avenue. Mark took him and his daughter to his home in Sausalito.
Mark put Harvey to bed, where he slept for the next twelve hours, while Sarah, who had always regarded Clair as that “poor, motherless child, living with that witless father of hers,” fed the poor, motherless child eggs and pancakes and oatmeal and cream. Jacob Levy, almost sixteen, and his ten-year-old sister, Martha, sat at the kitchen table, watching with fascination as the skinny, redheaded girl consumed everything placed in front of her with an appetite that was apparently insatiable and a stomach that incredibly held everything put into it. “Eat, darling,” Sarah said, placing a second plate of scrambled eggs in front of her. “Poor darling, to have to go through something like that. You’ll have more pancakes?”
“All right, please.”
“Good, good. Now eat, and after that, you’ll sleep.”
Jacob never took his eyes from her. He had seen her last some two years before, and now he was trying to comprehend the miracle that had turned a skinny, freckled kid into this tall, almost regal woman, with high, firm breasts and straight flaming hair that fell to her waist. Martha nudged him with her elbow and whispered, “Don’t stare at her. It’s not nice.”
Clair said to Sarah, “I’m not tired. It’s funny, I know I should be, but I’m not.” She turned to Jacob and said, “Don’t you ever say anything? You haven’t said a word.”
“No.”
“That’s a word. You mean you never say anything?”
“He’s shy,” Martha said. “He’s afraid of girls.”
“I am not,” Jacob said.
“You finished your breakfast,” Sarah said to Martha. “Outside. Go.”
Martha stuck her tongue out at her brother and then raced out of the kitchen. Mark came in and told Sarah that he was returning to San Francisco and that probably that afternoon he and Dan would drive down to San Mateo to see Anthony Cassala.
“He asked us to dinner,” he explained, “and we’ll talk about the loan. I’ll be too late for th
e ferry, so I’ll either stay there or at Dan’s if we drive back.”
“I’d love to see Tony’s place. What’s it like?”
“It’s in Hillsborough, so what would you expect? Stone and redwood. Funny, Tony always lived so simply–you know, Maria did the cooking and they always ate in the kitchen. This place has sixteen rooms. The bank took it over on a mortgage default, and it was such a bargain I suppose Tony couldn’t resist it. They brought over a girl from Italy to help with the housework, but Maria treats her like a daughter and still does most of the work herself. Maybe Stephan pushed him into it. The kid’s working at the bank this summer. He’s a smart kid with all kinds of ideas.” He drew her with him out of the kitchen and said softly, “Keep Harvey and his kid here. Tell him I said he has to stay until Dan and I come back, and don’t let him get at the whiskey and the wine.”
“And how do I do that?”
“You’ll figure it out. He’s always liked you. Make him understand that he’s not going to be beached.”
“You know, I’m getting scared, Mark. This big house scares me, and when I think of five oceangoing ships–how did we ever get into this?”
“Very simple. You hated living behind a store. Now don’t worry. I’ll be back tomorrow.”
Meanwhile, Clair finished her second plate of scrambled eggs and Jacob stared at the tablecloth.
“You got a saucy sister,” Clair said.
“Yeah, I guess.”
“You can look at me if you want to. I don’t mind.”
Their eyes met and they both grinned.
“Do they call you Jake?” she asked.
He nodded.
“You like it?”
“I like it better than Jacob. That’s a dumb name. It was my grandfather’s name.”
“I like Jake. It’s a great name. There was a logger up at Mendocino City whose name was Jake, and he was the biggest, strongest man I ever seen.”
“Bigger than Dan?”
“Way bigger than Dan. Six-foot, seven inches. I’d grab his fist and he’d lift me up with one hand. How about that?”
“Can you swim?”
“Of course I can swim!”
“Do you know what a catboat is?”
“Well what do you think?” she demanded indignantly. “I practically spent my life on ships and you ask me if I know what a catboat is?”
“I didn’t mean it that way.”
“Well, what did you mean?”
“I got one.”
“What?”
“A catboat.”
“No. You’re kidding.”
“Swear to God. My own. I bought it myself with money I made working at the warehouse after school. Forty bucks–but it’s a beauty. I scraped it, caulked it, and painted it.”
“How long?”
“Twenty-two feet.”
“Oh, grand! Grand! Twenty-two feet. That is absolutely the nuts.”
“You want to sail?”
“Where is it?”
“Down at the marina.”
“Oh, absolutely, absolutely!”
But once they were out on the bay in the catboat, her explosive energy succumbed to the past three days of sleeplessness. Unable to keep her eyes open, she curled up in the bottom of the boat. “Just to rest a little,” she explained. “I’m so tired, Jake.”
“Sure. I know. You had a rough time.”
A moment later, she was asleep, her long red hair cast over her shoulders like a burning shawl. There was just the slightest breeze, just enough to move the boat through the placid water with hardly a ripple. Jacob sat in the stern, his hand on the rudder, watching the sleeping girl, totally happy, totally content.
The breeze picked up, and Jake steered the catboat across Richardson Bay past Angel Island. Now he had a full, clear view of San Francisco and its hills, the swelling lumps of land with the streets mounting to the sky, the houses piled one on top of another, and all of it laced across with the last shreds of the morning fog, a lattice through which the morning sun sprinkled the city with gold. If he had seen the city a thousand times before, this was nevertheless and mysteriously the first time he had seen it truly–or was he seeing some magical wonderland that the presence of this strange redheaded girl had created? He stared at the city in silent awe, a flood of emotion rising in him, tears welling from his eyes. He didn’t quite know why he felt the way he did, but it was the best feeling he had ever experienced. He knew that. It was all magic, and all very right and as it should be. He knew that too.
*
With the help of Gina, the young girl they had brought over from Italy, Rosa and Maria cleared away the remains of a dinner of salad and soup and pasta and veal, stocking the table instead with bowls of fresh peaches and plums and grapes and pears and black Italian coffee for the men. Then the women vanished, excusing themselves with low murmurs of sound, leaving around the table Anthony Cassala, Stephan, and Dan Lavette and Mark Levy. Anthony pressed fruit upon his guests, poured coffee for them, and offered them cigars. Mark smoked a pipe. Dan accepted cigars when they were offered and was beginning to acquire a taste for them.
“Well, what do you think, Danny and Mark?” Cassala asked them, waving a hand at the baronial spaces of the dining room. “You like my house?”
“It’s great,” Mark said.
Dan puffed his cigar and grinned at Cassala.
“You laugh at me, huh, Danny? All right. In the morning I shave and I look at my face, and I say, Who are you? What for? You are plain Neapolitan bricklayer. I tell you something, Danny, you know where all this come from? I tell you, from the four thousand dollars you give me after the earthquake.”
“Never,” Dan said. “You’re dreaming.”
“Am I? You know what a bank is built on? Confidence. I bought confidence with that money. A few dollars here, a few dollars there–but people ate and drank and they remembered. I don’t have that money, my whole life is different.”
“Come on, Tony, what you did you did.”
“Maybe, maybe not. I got one regret–my saintly mother in heaven, she never had a day in her life without hunger, hunger from her children, hunger from my papa, hunger from cousins and brothers and sisters. Always hunger. Now I get fat. I got a paunch. What do you think of that?”
“On a banker it looks good,” Mark said.
“Papa,” Stephan said, “it’s almost ten o’clock. Let Danny and Mark talk.”
“Do I keep them from talking? Talk,” Cassala said. “Only one thing, Danny, I got to say. Your mother was a good Catholic. She sits with the Blessed Virgin now. When last you go to a mass? When you go to a confession? Don’t get angry, please, Danny–I talk to you like my son.”
“It’s all right, Tony. I know how you feel. I’m married to a Protestant. I can’t do something I don’t feel.”
“Papa,” Stephan begged him.
“All right. Talk.”
“Tony,” Mark said, “we have to talk kind of in circles, because the only way you will make sense of what we’re going to ask is if you see it our way.”
“You want money,” Cassala said. “Tell me what you need. We’ll find a way.”
“No, no,” Dan protested. “You got to understand what we’re after, Tony.”
“Let me start with the canal,” Mark said. “Last month, the first ship to come through the Panama Canal and dock at San Francisco tied up here. That changed the world, Tony, believe me. What it means in plain terms is that we have cut about eleven thousand shipping miles off the cargo exchange between here and the East Coast. That in itself changes the future of California, but let’s look at it in terms of this lunatic war they’re fighting in Europe. Say a ship sails out of the bay westward. Let’s just say it carries cargo for Japan, and it coals at Hawaii and Japan. Suppose it picks up cargo at Japan and sails to Australia, and then to South Africa. Then to the East Coast. With the canal, the profit from the East Coast back here–considering what is happening to the rates–pays for the whole voyage, and the rest
is gravy. Otherwise, the ship would have to go around the Horn and shave its profits for fuel. And there’s no cargo in Africa or Australia that they’re pleading for here. We need East Coast cargo and the British need it desperately in the Pacific, and before this war is over, San Francisco is going to be maybe one of the most important ports in the world.”
“So you want to buy a ship,” Cassala said, nodding. “That makes sense.”
“Wait a minute, Tony,” Dan said. “Maybe you’re thinking about the Oregon Queen. No. This is something else. We sold the Oregon Queen. As a matter of fact, we’re selling everything. We sold the garbage contracts and the garbage ships the other day, and next week we’re selling the pants business and the fishing boats. And maybe we’ll dump the chandling business too. Everything.”
“What!”
Dan glanced at Stephan, who was listening intently and saying nothing.
“That’s right,” Mark agreed. “All of it.”
“Why? You got a wonderful business and you sell it. Why?”
“Because,” Dan said slowly, “we’re going to buy a fleet of ships and we need every dollar we can lay hands on. Three six-thousand-ton ships and two five thousand tons. Steel ships. Beautiful ships. We need at least a million and a quarter in cash, and that’s why we’re here, Tony. We want a loan of a million dollars.”
Cassala stared at him; then he sighed deeply, closed his eyes, and leaned back. Stephan was nodding, smiling slightly. Mark and Dan waited. Maria came into the room with a platter of pastry. In her plain black dress that fell to her ankles, she reminded Dan more and more of his own mother. “You’re not eating the fruit,” she cried out in Italian. “Why? Fruit is good. Fruit cleanses the system. In America no one eats with joy, only to fill the belly. Look at those peaches. They are so ripe they plead with you. Eat fruit and eat pastry. I bring you cheese.”
