by Tom Murphy
Sophie had built her house on the corner of Broadway and Montgomery Street, just four blocks from the wharves. Lily stepped carefully across the dust and filth of Montgomery and paused on the planked sidewalk on the other side.
She looked up at the notorious house that had been her hospital, her refuge, her sanatorium of recovery for nearly a month now.
The El Dorado Hotel was four stories tall, solidly built of gray stone, with six rows of arched windows on every floor, and every window framed in some other, lighter-colored stone. It could have been a bank, or a fine shop, or almost anything. Instead, as well she knew, it was the fanciest sporting house in town.
And if anyone sees you coming out its door, there goes your reputation, Lily Malone. What reputation? Lily had heard many voices, whispering many things inside her bewildered brain, ever since Sophie had revealed what the business of the El Dorado truly was. Well, whatever tempting whispers the voices put in her ear, and however confusing it all was, she’d soon be free and clear of the wicked El Dorado. I will never, never forget Sophie’s kindness, Lily told herself over and over again, as though it were a prayer, but surely even she can see I must be gone, and soon, with Kate to think of. Lily could feel the thick, reassuring square of Jack Wallingford’s letter of introduction where it lay in the soft pouch of her reticule. Mr. Charles Linton, Esquire. Manager, The Wallingford Emporium, 117 Market Street, San Francisco, California. Lily felt as though her whole future was sealed inside that envelope. Soon she’d know all about it, for Market Street was just ten blocks west, and 117 a block or two down toward the Embarcadero.
Lily had walked one block, deep in thought, her head alive with hopes and plans, before she realized what a sensation she was causing, just by the simple fact of being a woman, alone, on the narrow boardwalk.
“Can you believe it?”
The man’s voice was not loud, yet Lily could hear it across the street. She looked back, startled, and saw six well-dressed men, all in a tight little group, pointing at her and frankly staring. They saw me come out of Sophie’s, and they think I’m a whore. But they hadn’t seen her come out of Sophie’s, and their looks were respectful, if staring can be respectful. There were no lewd remarks, no catcalls, no provocation was offered. Confused and embarrassed, Lily looked down, and quickly walked toward Market Street.
And everywhere she went, the stares followed.
Sophie had suggested the carriage, but Lily had decided against that well-meant offer. Sophie’s carriage, she was sure, would be easily recognized, for San Francisco was more a small town than a city, gold or no gold. And Lily would be damned if she arrived for a clerk’s job at Wallingford’s in the equipage of the fanciest bawdyhouse in town.
When she found the courage to look up and around her, Lily realized that a woman on these streets was probably perfectly safe, for surely she was a rarity worthy of continuing astonishment on the part of every man in the town. Soon her embarrassment disappeared, and she found herself able to smile at the fundamental silliness of it all. Nothing was going to pull her spirits down on this great day! For here, in truth, was the beginning of her new life, and a fine life it would surely be. She walked on down Montgomery Street and practiced ignoring the naked stares of virtually every man she passed.
I am the only woman on this street, and if trouble came, who would come to my rescue?
Only four more blocks to Market Street. Market, Lily knew, was the main commercial thoroughfare of the new city. Paved with boards it was, and proud of it. Think, Lily, how you took Fifth Avenue for granted, and the fine marble mansion of the Wallingfords, where here they are grateful for a few old boards as frosting on the mud!
Montgomery Street was a crazed mixture of buildings and people and animals. The buildings were sometimes shabby and primitive, knocked together of canvas and boards, and sometimes they were very grand. There was marble to be seen, and gilt-bronze, and gas lamps twinkling inside the bars and banks. Death lived in San Francisco along with gold and sin and hope: Lily shuddered as she passed “GRAY’S COFFIN WAREHOUSE” and recalled how very close she had come to being one of Mr. Gray’s customers, just a few weeks ago. The photography craze had made its way west, and here was a fine four-story brick house sporting a large painted sign announcing “VANCE’S DAGUERREAN ROOMS.” There were assaying offices and three banks and any number of small merchants. The time was late morning, but the sidewalk was bustling, and everyone on it but Lily was male. Just before the corner of Market Street Lily saw another woman. She was small and plump and her skin was the color of a walnut, her eyes flat and pointed, almost Chinese she looked, but not exactly: An Indian, Lily thought—I’m seeing my first Indian. The other woman passed, expressionless, dressed in greasy layers of skirts and shawls that showed faint traces of the bright colors that must once have adorned them. The woman smelled like a dirty kitchen. Lily wrinkled her nose as the Indian woman passed, and thought how lucky she had been, to be at least this far above such filth, however tenuous her hold on cleanliness and respectability.
Well, Mr. Charles Linton would certainly help with that.
Market Street ran straight down from the hills, cutting the young city nearly in two, struggling like the town itself under the weight of its aspirations.
Carriages and wagons and mounted horses thundered on the echoing pavement of dirty boards.
The width of the street diminished the size of the buildings that lined it, although they were taller, for sure, and more grandly decorated than any that Lily had seen thus far. Left, she must turn, and toward the water. At the bottom of Market, as at the end of nearly every street she had crossed, Lily could see the dark fingers of masts pointing to the sky. There was no escaping the water here, nor the ships that made their own highways on the great trackless seas. For herself, Lily would just as soon forget the ocean, and the Eurydice, and all that had happened on the long voyage. The sea had taken enough from her: her strength, it had taken, and Fergy’s life, and very nearly her own. And Kate’s life too, worst of all. Well, here was the three-hundred block. She must find number 117.
Lily was learning to ignore the stares now. They came so thick and so often that a girl could either ignore them or fall dead beneath the weight of them. When she had imagined San Francisco, back in New York, or on the long voyage around the Horn, Lily had never dreamed of a city without women. Yet this was just what seemed to be the case here. She looked up at the raw, sandy, scrubby hills. Here and there were little cottages that must be homes. Now and then she could see a washline flapping in the morning breeze. Surely there must be some decent women somewhere!
Lily noticed, too, that there were almost no children to be seen.
She recalled New York, and the ferret-faced street gangs, and the fine young children walking with their nurses along Fifth Avenue, dressed like little princes, they were, the girls sometimes even wearing furs, tiny versions of their mothers’ seal and beaver and mink. In San Francisco, it seemed, children were hidden away, or Mexican-looking. What a strange town this was, half-exciting, half-bewildering!
Lily walked briskly, lifting her skirts when she crossed the unpaved side streets, passing the two-hundred block now, hurrying to meet her future. And there! There, halfway down the next block, she could see it. A grand four-story building in new red brick, with a fine big sign on it, gilt letters against black, gilt-framed, beckoning: THE WALLINGFORD EMPORIUM. Strange, and yet not so strange, was the shudder that went through Lily then. She felt part of it all, even though she had no real right to feel that way. And hadn’t Jack Wallingford come panting for her love, and hadn’t she held him close in the dark and wanton nights? And hadn’t she carried Jack’s bastard through hell and high water both, and almost to the gates of death itself, and back, and didn’t she deserve something for all that?
Wallingford’s must be having a fine sale, to draw such a crowd outside. Sure, and maybe I’ll pick up some things for the baby.
As Lily got closer to the big store, she real
ized that something was wrong. This was not a happy, bustling, sale-going crowd. Maybe someone’s dead. She thought of Jack’s father, then, and all Jack stood to inherit should the old man have gone to his reward. With a slow buildup of dread that seemed to numb her very toes, Lily made her way through the muttering crowd. The men instinctively made a path for her. Now she could see the front door.
Suddenly Lily felt faint. A wave of heat rushed to her head. She seemed to feel the ground shake. Lily blinked, trembled, and looked again, not believing what her eyes plainly told her was fact.
The door to the Wallingford Emporium was chained and padlocked. The notice in the window was an auction notice. The Emporium was closed until further notice, and all of its contents were to be sold up for taxes, by order of the marshal of San Francisco!
Lily stood like one paralyzed, unable to move or think. How long she stood thus, she could never remember. It seemed like days. There was an undercurrent of anger and concern in the crowd. Some of their grumblings penetrated through the icy walls of shock and panic that were forming around Lily’s ruined expectations.
“They say,” said one tall man who carried an official-looking leather document case, “that it’s the start of a real panic back in New York, that half a dozen businesses are going under.”
“But Wallingford’s? They were solid as anything!”
“Overextended in the stock market, that’s what I heard, put the big New York store up as collateral, and they grabbed it away from him just like that.”
“Is it true the old man killed himself?”
“That’s what I heard tell.”
“Never! Old buzzard like that?”
“I heard tell.”
“Sixty dozen pair of French gloves of mine, they’ve got, and never paid for, and where the hell are they?”
“Where’s Linton?”
“Is it true the old man killed himself?”
“Sold all her jools, that’s what he did.”
“The very house they lived in, that too?”
“Hear tell.”
Lily turned and moved through the crowd without quite knowing how or why she did it. It isn’t true, it’s the fever come again, I got up too soon, it is another one of those bad dreams!
But the chain and the padlock were true, and the sign in the window was real, and if the mutterings and questions of the crowd weren’t real they must have some nugget of truth to them—great stores just don’t close for nothing. She felt the square of the envelope in her reticule. It felt sharp as daggers, deadly, mocking, cold. How could anyone rich as the Wallingfords lose their money? Lily had heard, but only vaguely, of panics and great risings and fallings of the stock market. She had only the most hazy idea of what the stock market might be. For years she had supposed it to be a place where cattle were traded.
As usual in a crisis, Lily thought of the immediate problems first. Get through the minutes, Lily, and the hours will take care of themselves. The Wallingford Emporium was closed tight, and where, then, was Charles Linton?
There was something else in Lily’s purse besides the letter to Linton. There was Jack Wallingford’s draft for five hundred dollars on the Merchant’s Bank of New York, which had a branch here in San Francisco, and on Market Street, too.
Lily had to ask directions, and gladly did so. It gave her something real to do.
The Merchant’s Bank of San Francisco was a grandiose white limestone fortress of a building on the corner of Market and Front streets, just a block away from the ruin of Wallingford’s. A uniformed attendant ushered Lily into a small but elegantly furnished office.
“Mr. Harrison, this is Mrs. Malone.” The attendant bowed and withdrew. Mr. Harrison was a thin gray man who looked as though the last time he’d smiled might have been back around the War of 1812. He had rimless spectacles through which he regarded Lily with the dry clinical interest of a bird inspecting a not very promising worm. Lily felt uneasy, as though she were somehow trespassing. He spoke.
“Yes, yes, Mrs. Malone, it’s always a pleasure to meet a new customer. May I be of some service?”
His voice had no pleasure in it. Lily had to think about her hand to stop it from trembling as she fumbled with the clasp of her reticule.
“I have a draft on your New York branch,” she said quietly, “and I hoped you might cash it for me.”
“Of course, of course. If you’d just let me have a look at it.”
She found the draft and handed it to Mr. Harrison.
He held it up, at some distance from the rimless glasses and the nearly colorless eyes behind them, held it out with two long skinny fingers as though it might in some way contaminate him.
Silence filled the little room until Lily felt it must choke her.
Finally Harrison made a small noise. He cleared his throat. It was like dry leaves rustling in the wind.
“You are a friend of the Wallingford family?”
“I know them.”
“Then you will be distressed to hear that a rather serious misfortune has befallen them.”
“And what is that, sir?”
“They have, Mrs. Malone, lost all their money.”
In the brief moment before the full impact of this hit her, Lily found herself thinking of Jack Wallingford, of how helpless he’d be without money. For herself, who never had more than a few dollars in all her life, the loss of a great fortune was unreal, impersonal—but for the baby. But for Jack, Lily feared, it would be the breaking of him, and while Lily knew very well that she had never loved the boy, she remembered his kindnesses and was sad.
The banker cleared his throat, a signal.
Why, God, why are my worst fears always coming true?
Lily looked at him, and at the draft, which was now resting on Mr. Harrison’s desk like a dead thing. She said nothing. Once more silence crept up on them.
Then he spoke. “When this draft was written, in…”
“In late March or early April, I believe.”
“Of course, of course. March. Well, in March it was good as gold—heh-heh—and gold is very good indeed. It is a shame, Mrs. Malone, that you waited so long to cash it.”
“I was sailing around the Horn. It seemed a risk to carry that much cash.”
“Yes, yes, well, everything is a risk, isn’t it? In any event, it will be impossible for us to honor this paper now, as things stand.”
Lily took a breath and gathered what strength was left in her. “How do they stand, Mr. Harrison?” Lily heard the words forming in her throat, and could not believe she was truly saying them. Bold as brass, she must sound, an old hand at trying to cash in false drafts on New York banks. But it isn’t—wasn’t—a false draft, dammit!
“A merchant of old Wallingford’s magnitude rarely goes under for long. But at the moment, all of the Wallingford funds—such as are left of them, that is—are frozen, Mrs. Malone. Frozen assets, we call them. Pending the bankruptcy, don’t you know? Don’t, don’t by any means throw the thing away. Given a bit of time, a recovery period, it may be worth its full value someday. But for the moment, impossible. There is the beginning of quite a bad panic back East, Mrs. Malone, as possibly you hadn’t heard.”
“No,” she said flatly, “I hadn’t heard that.”
“Yes, yes, quite a panic. Many businesses going under. Some quite big ones. Wallingford’s won’t be the last, mark my words.”
“Very sad it must be for them, rich as they were.” And sadder, far, for me, for Kate. Lily choked on her words, for she felt like a hypocrite saying them to this cold little man.
“Sad, sad. Exactly, very sad indeed. Well!” Harrison stood up then, rubbing his thin, lifeless hands together as though he expected to strike sparks from them. “I am sorry, very sorry, to be the bearer of such sad news, Mrs. Malone. Do hold onto this”—he handed her the draft, and she folded it carefully and returned it to her reticule—“and do let me know, yes, let me know if there is any possible way I can be of service to you.”
/> “Thank you. There is one thing.”
“Yes? Yes?”
“Do you by any chance know where I might find Mr. Charles Linton? The manager of Wallingford’s?”
He looked at her quizzically, suspecting God-knew-what. “The fact is, I do, I do. Look for him at number 328 California Street. He’ll be there still, by all accounts.”
“Thank you, sir, you have been most kind.”
“Think nothing of it, Mrs. Malone, nothing of it.”
Harrison smiled his death’s-head smile and grandly opened his office door. Lily walked out of the bank with her chin held high, looking for all who cared to see—and there were many who did care—as though her world had not just come crashing down all around her in sharp and hurtful pieces. She knew where California Street was: she’d crossed it on the way from Sophie’s this very morning. Not an hour ago, and all the world changed in that small time! Lily walked up Market Street and used every ounce of the strength that was left in her just to keep from crying, or breaking into a mad run and throwing herself into the harbor. There was less than a hundred dollars of Jack’s money now.
And how far would that go, with prices what they were in San Francisco? How far would that go, when a cabbage alone could cost two dollars, and meat twice as dear, and who knew what for rent, for a nurse, for firewood? And how long could she presume on Sophie’s good nature?
Lily thought of Harrison and of all the men like him, and how smug they were, how far removed from panics, from fear, from the gutter, the very grave!
And who would Mr. Charles Linton be, and what might he have to offer?
You must try, Lily. You must not give up; he may have something, he may be a good enough friend of the Wallingfords to honor their note, to get some kind of work for you, anything, anything!
She walked up Market Street to Montgomery and turned right. The stares still followed her, but all Lily could see now was a future that had been filled with promise an hour ago, and was now filled with terror, with fear for herself, and for the baby, for life itself. For what could she do, here in this strange wild place, this city without women?
