A Race to Splendor (16 page)

The male voice from beyond indicated that the intrusion was highly unwelcome.

“Who is it?”

“Mrs. Thayer’s son. Here at the request of her husband.”

Within seconds the door was opened by a man who looked disturbingly familiar. J.D. offered a curt nod as his official greeter held out a perfectly manicured right hand.

“Well, hello, J.D. It’s been quite awhile, hasn’t it?”

Dr. George Ellers, in his early fifties, was the picture of refinement. Clean-shaven, save for a fastidiously maintained blond mustache, his chiseled features were only just softening with age. He sported a tweed suit cut in the latest fashion and clasped a gold-headed cane in his left hand.

J.D. ignored his outstretched hand and turned toward the woman who reclined on a chaise lounge with a lap rug tucked about her small, fragile form. Blue-black hair hung loosely about shoulders covered by a lacy bed jacket that matched the beige upholstery. Her eyes and skin were amber—the legacy of Spanish blood—and her face was still smooth despite her fifty-three years.

Arrayed on a table beside the chaise was an impressive collection of pill bottles and jars filled with medical elixirs. The room’s curtains were pulled shut to block out the glare, and only a gas lamp, its globes painted with pink cabbage roses, illuminated the shadowy chamber.

Consuela Diaz-Reims Thayer nervously fingered the edge of the velvet lap rug while she regarded her son, her black eyelashes fluttering in apparent consternation.

“Oh thank God, James, you’re all right! Why didn’t anyone—” She gazed beseechingly at Dr. Ellers.

“I will leave you and your son to enjoy his visit,” Ellers said pleasantly. He eyed J.D.’s tattered appearance with distaste. “I have work to do in my study upstairs.”

“Oh, George,” Consuela pleaded, “I—I still feel rather unwell. Couldn’t you—”

“I’ll just be one flight up, Connie dear. That tincture I’ve prescribed will do its job in very short order. I’ll check back on you in a little while.”

“My mother has fallen ill?” J.D. asked of Ellers, knowing full well the nature of the medicines this physician dispensed so freely—and on whose orders.

“A continuing case of nerves, J.D.” The doctor’s expression suggested that the visitor was a prime cause of Mrs. Thayer’s infirmity. “Like so many others, your mother has had a difficult time since the earthquake. She was especially upset when no one sent word of your whereabouts.”

J.D. lifted a vial from her bedside table and studied the label. “Ellers, you prescribed this potion for my mother long before April eighteenth. And since when have you made your home here?”

“My infirmary and flat were destroyed in the fire. Your father was kind enough to accommodate me until I could get my practice reestablished, which is, of course, taking longer than expected.”

“And you have found living as a member of this household more comfortable than expected?” J.D. countered in a tone just shy of insulting.

“J.D., really! George has been nothing but a godsend since—since—”

Clearly, he thought, the prisoner had come to feel kindly toward her guard. J.D. ignored his mother and addressed the doctor.

“You’ve been meddling in my family’s affairs ever since my Grandfather Reims died under such unfortunate and
unusual
circumstances. That’s been nearly twenty years, Ellers. And now, here we all are, under the same roof. Amazing, really.”

J.D. heard his mother’s sharp intake of breath. The doctor strode toward the door and grasped the knob as if he were weighing his next action. Then he turned to address the interloper.

“Archibald Reims should be allowed to rest in peace and your mother and father spared from your brand of false and churlish accusations. Such behavior is, perhaps, excusable in a headstrong boy of fifteen, but your father and I find it rather tiresome in a man your age.”

“Weren’t you and Father fast friends even before my grandfather drowned in the bay?” J.D. countered. “Folks say you were such an inferior doctor back then, you’d do virtually anything to stay in Big Jim’s good graces—and it would appear you still would.”

Ellers returned J.D.’s stare but eventually looked away. “You haven’t changed much, have you, boy? Your mother tells me that, sadly, you have developed a strong penchant for gambling like your late grandfather.”

“George, please let’s not—” Consuela began.

“Young James, here, should not be allowed to upset you in this manner, my dear.” Ellers pursed his lips and addressed J.D. again. “I find it most disturbing you should be so like the unfortunate Mr. Reims. As your doctor, I must suggest that you watch yourself in that regard. It would break your mother’s heart if you came to the same, sorry end.”

“George, don’t!” Consuela pleaded, appearing close to tears.

“And
you
,” snapped J.D., “charlatan that you are, haven’t been my doctor in decades. And I wonder if my father knows how
often
you insinuate yourself these days into the family’s private quarters.”

“Not that he would care,” Consuela interjected with more petulance than bravado.

Without further comment, Ellers closed the door with just enough force to indicate that the son of his long-time patient had irritated him to no end.

“That was horribly rude,” Consuela declared sotto voce.

“Good, the pill-pushing quack.” J.D. spoke his last words directly at the door, hoping Ellers heard.

“We didn’t have a
word
from you after the fire. For the longest while, I feared you were dead.” Consuela took in his disreputable clothes and scuffed boots. “Are you all right? What of your hotel? Why have you come here after all this time?”

J.D. realized only too well that for years his mother had been as isolated in this soft, pink boudoir as if she’d been incarcerated in a garrison on Alcatraz Island. Little wonder she knew nothing of the fate of the Bay View Hotel. Ellers and her husband controlled whom she saw, what papers she read, what medicines were prescribed, and what withdrawals were made from her considerable bank accounts.

“My hotel burned to the ground,” said J.D., taking the seat that had been vacated by Dr. Ellers and reached for her hand.

“Oh, how terrible! I am so sorry, son,” replied his mother, ever his champion, and most likely unaware that he’d won the Bay View in a poker game.

“It’s good to see you again, Mother. You’re still beautiful as ever.”

“Oh nonsense,” she scoffed, but he could tell she was pleased. She tightened her grip on his hand like a drowning sailor. “I was so worried about you. Does your father know you’ve come upstairs to see me?” she asked anxiously.

“He sent me. I plan to rebuild the Bay View and came to get Father’s approval of the project so that the Committee of Fifty would vote me funds for it.”

“Are you also rebuilding that dreadful gambling club on Nob Hill? Don’t tell me he’d help you do
that
? All our friends were outraged a place like that was built in such a fine neighborhood.”

J.D. could clearly see his mother was allowed only negative news about her only child. He wasn’t shocked or surprised to see that she opposed the building of gambling establishments—wherever they might be. San Franciscans still joked about the way in which her grandfather, Eduardo Diaz, gambled away the sizeable acreage comprising Rancho Diaz in the Sacramento Delta—along with the hand of his daughter, Antonia, Consuela’s mother. Both the original Diaz Spanish land grant
and
J.D.’s maternal grandmother had been won in an impromptu shooting contest in Nevada City between the hot-tempered, hard-drinking Eduardo and the equally boisterous Archibald Reims when both men were silver miners. Such reckless gambling had sealed the fate of the Diaz clan in California. Antonia Diaz was wed to Archibald Reims and their “honeymoon baby” Consuela Diaz-Reims—now Connie Thayer—appeared nine months to the day of Archie Reim’s sharp-shooting triumph.

For a split second, J.D. allowed himself to consider the plight of Amelia and her mother, Victoria Hunter, helpless to halt the wagering of their assets by that other inebriate, Henry Bradshaw, which resulted in the loss of
their
family legacy.

Then, just as quickly, he pushed from his mind the stark truth that heiresses like the Bradshaw women—and his mother—had virtually no freedom to decide their own matrimonial or financial fate.

Recalling now the infamous story of Archie Reim’s dead-eyed destruction of five glass whiskey bottles perched atop a hitching post outside a saloon, J.D. could only remind himself that the win brought about the marriage of the youthful German immigrant and the lovely Antonia that, in turn, resulted in the birth of J.D.’s mother, Consuela.

I suppose I should be profoundly grateful for old Archie’s penchant for gambling and his skill with a pistol.

The noteworthy event in the previous century also marked the beginning of his grandfather’s string of good fortune in land speculation and mining in California and Nevada. Unfortunately, the lucky streak ended one foggy day aboard a San Francisco ferryboat, four decades later, when the elder Reims—said at the time to be morose over sudden financial reversals—mysteriously pitched overboard and drowned.

When tragedy struck, Archie and Antonia’s only child—Consuela Diaz-Reims Thayer—was still a beauty of thirty-four and by then the wife of James Thayer, a Harvard-trained lawyer and prominent San Francisco businessman. His son, J.D., saw Grandfather Reims die in the waters of San Francisco Bay. Merely a gangly youth in his teens, Archie Reims’s grieving grandson had been helpless then, to stop his father’s confiscation of his mother’s fortune or the subsequent campaign to portray her as a highly strung woman, emotionally unstable like her father. In an act of self-preservation, the underage J.D. eventually had joined Teddy Roosevelt’s brigade as the swiftest way to escape from home.

And now, in the prolonged aftermath of so many family dramas, he watched his mother nervously pluck at the coverlet covering her legs, wishing he could abandon his shield of wry indifference to assure her of his love and concern for her welfare.

But he dared not.

Truth was, he’d learned long ago that any action he took on her behalf often resulted in devious retaliation by his father. Big Jim had married Consuela for purely mercenary reasons when the senior Thayer’s own coffers were depleted at one juncture from foolhardy land speculations in San Francisco’s boom-and-bust economy.

J.D. had fought this triangulated battle for more than two decades. Now it was rendered even more deadly by Consuela’s increasing dependence on the tinctures dispensed so liberally by Dr. Ellers at Big Jim’s direction. The methods of controlling the fairer sex could be subtle, indeed.

“Son, please,” Consuela complained, interrupting his reverie. “I asked you a perfectly civil question. Are you rebuilding that awful gambling den or not?”

“Not. I’m reconstructing the hotel only, at this point. And in return, Father has promised not to set those City Hall rowdies on the rebuilding project or blackball me with the Committee of Fifty.”

“He wouldn’t do that!” his mother exclaimed. “Not to his own son!”

J.D. was touched by the expression of horror that flooded her still handsome features. For an instant, he saw a glimmer of the fiery temperament Consuela Diaz-Reims had once been known to exhibit against her husband’s wishes.

“Surely, Mother,” he replied gently, “you of all people should know by now that Big Jim Thayer will do whatever damn well suits him.”

“James! Your language!”

For a moment, in the midst of her distress, J.D. detected a trace of the Spanish accent his mother had worked so diligently to eradicate. When he was a small boy, she’d urged him privately to correct her every mispronunciation. It was part of her defensive campaign to gain acceptance from the lofty wives of her husband’s friends and acquaintances. These were mostly Protestant, east coast Americans whose hatred for people of color included olive-complexioned Spanish Catholics.

Even so, as time went on, she’d desired the good opinion of the nobs as much as she’d come to yearn for the potions Dr. Ellers so freely prescribed to calm her nerves. Exterminating her Spanish heritage had taken nearly thirty years to accomplish, but James Thayer Sr.’s, exotic, dark-haired wife was known now, to friends and relations alike, as simply “Connie Thayer.”

“Well, I must be off,” he announced abruptly and rose from his chair.

“But you’ve only just arrived,” she protested. “Stay for tea, won’t you?”

J.D.’s saw the look of panic and pleading she cast at him. He steeled himself from offering outright succor and support. He could only help her in the long run if he kept up the fiction of playing the wayward son.

Well, it’s not a complete fiction, is it, J.D.?

“It’s been good to see you, Mother.” He leaned down and kissed the top of her head. Then he took her hand and gave it a soft squeeze. “It’s hard to believe, but I’ve just been ordered by Father to pay you a visit at least once a month.”

“Truly? Oh, J.D., I’ve missed you
so
.”