California Gold (111 page)

Carla’s chauffeured auto arrived at twenty past two. She stumbled toward him along the esplanade.

“I can’t stay but a moment, my dear. I’m leaving in the morning.”

“Yes, I recall you made some reference to that. Another trip?”

“Not one I care to take. Walter’s sending me away. All the way to New York—Saratoga Springs, a health spa. Actually it’s a sanitarium for drunkards.”

“God, Carla.” He shook his head.

“Oh, perhaps it’ll do me good,” she said with an airy, empty laugh. “We’re not here to discuss my woes. We haven’t for years, have we?”

Thinking of her husband, he said impulsively, “Will you answer one question for me?”

“I’ll try, sweet.”

“What the hell has Walter wanted all these years? From me, I mean? Just my life? My complete total capitulation?”

“You mean you have no idea?”

“Would I ask if I did?”

“To be like you.”

“Like—”

“You. He’s wanted to be like you from that first day Papa refused you a drink and you stood up to him. You’re what Californians used to be…and Walter never was.”

She touched his face with an elegant glove. “Oh, Mack. So much trouble between us. So much terrible trouble…I hated you, a lot of times I wanted to hurt you, but I was never bored. Never with you; Papa was wrong about that. You’re the only man who never bored me for a single minute. I was afraid of you most of the time. I was afraid you’d see all of my bad side, and then start thinking about it…I was afraid, and frightened people are angry people. That’s why I drank so much around you. I knew you hated it. And then I walked out on you and the baby when I was drunk and crazy and…well, you know. Papa was absolutely right about one thing. You are the best man I ever loved. If you want to know the truth—the only one.”

Mack turned red.

Bright tracks of tears showed on her pouchy cheeks. “I want to tell you something in absolute confidence,” she went on. “Something you deserve to know. You mustn’t ask how I come by the information, just take me at my word when I say it’s true. Promise?”

“All right, yes.”

A long beat of silence.

“Our son is alive. Walter saw him in Pasadena and I saw him in Redlands this spring. He’s taken another name. He wanted no part of Walter. He said you were his father.”

Mack wondered if he’d been hurled back to the moment when the great quake rocked the earth. He felt so.

“Now I hope you believe I love you.”

Slowly, tenderly, Carla leaned forward and gave his cheek a wet, mussy kiss. She left lip rouge like a bloodstain.

Looking his face up and down, she caressed it once. Then, with the stiff, stately elegance sometimes achieved by the inebriated, she walked down the esplanade. A floating cloud covered her with shadow.

“T
HE LAME BOY? JIM DAVID?”

The manager of the Redlands Citrus Cooperative pointed into the sunshine.

“Should find him right out there somewheres.”

Mack turned his homburg around and around in his nervous, sweating hands.

“Jim David? Hello. Do you know who I am?”

His face said he did.

“I guess you also know that I’m not your father. But I’ve come here to say I want to be if you’ll have me.”

On the ladder, Jim David stared at the well-dressed white-haired man, so out of place in the sunny orange grove.

THE PAINTED SIGN ATOP the huge hangar announced its owner.

CALROSS AVIATION

LONG BEACH • LONG ISLAND CITY

LONDON • PARIS

The hangar doors were open, and a trim racing biplane stood on the sunlit tarmac, its colors gold and black.

Mack walked out of the hangar in a leather coat, helmet, goggles, and a too-flamboyant white scarf. He was portly now, his face heavily lined.

Nellie followed, along with Jim, limping as always, but tall and smart in his business suit. He was twenty-three years old this twenty-eighth day of September, and while he couldn’t whirl a girl on the dance floor, he was one of the most sought-after bachelors in Southern California.

Johnson emerged from the hangar pushing Jocker in a bright chrome wheelchair. Mack’s chauffeur had fetched the old man from a home for the elderly, where he was maintained in good style at Mack’s expense. Jocker was snowy-haired. His hands rested on the blue tartan coverlet wrapped around his legs; they were grotesquely misshapen. But his eyes were sharp and alert, and his smile was genuine. He understood the significance of the occasion.

Proudly, Mack indicated the Calross Special standing on the chocks. “There she is, Jim, with the new Swiss racing engine that’s going to help us whip the Curtiss R-One.”

Jim smiled but said nothing. He wasn’t sure Mack had finished speaking. People were obliged to listen attentively to J. M. Chance; he was that kind of man.

Nellie watched her husband with loving tolerance. Nearly as gray as Mack now, she wore a two-piece country suit of tweed, complemented by a white ascot and a black silk sailor—all bought in Paris on Mack’s last business trip.

Nellie hadn’t published a novel since
Huntworthy’s Millions.
She hadn’t abandoned writing—she did it regularly, three or four mornings a week—but had moved to nonfiction. She had nearly finished a work closely related to her early career, a candid memoir of her days on the
Examiner.
She called it
We Made the News.
It was doubtful that Mr. Hearst would care for it.

“We’re going to race her,” Mack said. “The Pulitzer Trophy this fall—hell, I may even put floats on her and send her to Europe for the Schneider Cup. She’s yours.”

“Sir? I believe I misunderstood—”

“No you didn’t. The Special is yours. Happy birthday, my boy.”

Mack hugged him. “Don’t look so startled. Why shouldn’t I give my son a plane if I want? You’re an excellent pilot, and you’re doing a first-class job managing the finances of Calross. And all the other companies.”

“Thank you, Pa. It’s a labor of love. You know that. Have you flown her?”

“Not this version. The privilege of the first flight belongs to the owner. You.”

With a teasing smile, Jim said, “I know it isn’t politic to disagree with the founder of the firm, but the first flight has to be yours. With my compliments.”

“No, no, I couldn’t—”

“Pa, I insist. If it wasn’t for you, the Special would be just another dream on a designer’s drawing board. Please—take her up.”

“Well,” Mack muttered, abashed and touched. “Well—all right. Thank you, son.” He started fitting on his leather flying gloves tucked into the belt of his coat. Jim and his stepmother exchanged amused glances.

“Ah, wait, I almost forgot,” Mack said abruptly. He reached into the pocket of his leather coat for something flat wrapped in butcher paper. “Small. But important. With my love.”

Jim unwrapped the butcher paper and then looked wonderingly at his father. “Your book.”

“That’s right. T. Fowler Haines. The original. I thought it was time I passed it on. That book taught me a lot, my boy. It taught me about the real treasure of California. It isn’t oil, or oranges, or real estate—or even the gold people are still panning for up in the Mother Lode country. It isn’t the sunshine or the Sierras that make this state so special. It’s hope. That’s the real gold of California, Jim—hope. Not a human being on God’s earth who doesn’t need hope.” He squeezed his son’s shoulder. “I want you to have the book. I wish I could get rid of that damn blizzard dream as easily.”

Jim flung his arms around his father. Jocker chortled.

A moment later, Nellie took Mack’s arm. “I’ll walk out to the plane with you.”

Surprised, he said, “Why, certainly, come along.” Jim stayed with Johnson and Jocker, thumbing the pages of
The Emigrant’s Guide to California & Its Gold Fields.

As they walked, Nellie said, “I don’t know whether this is the appropriate time …”

“Time for what? You sound positively ominous.”

“Time to tell you a secret I’ve harbored for years. Sometimes I’ve quite forgotten it. The book reminded me. I didn’t know you were going to give it to him.”

“What is this, Nell? What secret are you talking about? You’re too old to be pregnant.”

She laughed. “The book—T. Fowler Haines.”

“Yes? What about it?”

Glancing back at their son, she stepped near the plane. She kissed his cheek and by means of that, contrived to whisper, “It’s a fake.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Mack, don’t be angry. You’ve always respected the truth. This is the truth. T. Fowler Haines never traveled west of his birthplace on the Passaic River in New Jersey. Remember, years ago, I said I intended to look him up? I did. I discovered a whole literature of scholarship about Gold Rush guidebooks, chiefly centered on exposing the fakery of most of them. In ’49, publishers were no different than they are today. They seized on every trend. And the Gold Rush was the biggest event of its time. Eastern publishers rushed to hire any available hack, and Haines was one, a journalist for the penny papers. He died at thirty-six of a liver ailment, one year after he wrote his guide in a loft near Printing House Square. He was no worse than a lot of others.”

“Why didn’t you tell me before?”

“Many a time when we fought, I came close.”

“But you held back.”

“Some knives are just too sharp to be used.”

“Well.”

Mack rested a hand on the rim of the cockpit of the Calross Special and studied the sky with a vaguely wounded air. “Well,” he said again. “Haines may have been a fraud, but he was right about California. Dead right.” His mouth set. “I refuse to tell Jim.”

She touched him affectionately.

“That was my idea too.”

The mechanic ran out of the hangar and Mack lowered himself in the cockpit. A moment later the hornet snarl of the water-cooled aluminum-block Hisso engine deafened the observers. Mack showed a thumbs-up above the cockpit. The mechanic jerked the chocks. Then the Calross Special rushed down the sunlit runway.

Suddenly airborne, the racing plane rose through the splendor of the morning, mothlike against the panorama of the California mountains, the California sky.

Holding her black sailor hat, Nellie murmured, “I’ve seen that same look on his face as long as I’ve known him.”

“So’ve I,” Johnson said. “He’s goin’ prospectin’.”

“He’ll never stop,” Jim said. He put an arm around his stepmother’s waist and his other hand on Jocker’s shoulder, and they watched the Calross Special shrink to a dot above the blue Pacific. Flying due west.

The real Eldorado is still further on.

—
Peck’s 1837 New Guide to the West

It is hard to believe in this fair young land…because there has always been something about it that has incited hyperbole, that has made for exaggeration.…For there is a golden haze over the land—the dust of gold is in the air—and the atmosphere is magical and mirrors many tricks, deceptions, and wondrous visions.

Carey McWilliams

California: The Great Exception

California is quintessentially American. Yet it is also a universal symbol, exerting a universal appeal with its visions of sunshine and surf, palm trees and movie glamour, indolence and escape and renewal. California is the world’s paradigm of hope and opportunity.

Why this is so, and how it came about, are subjects I have long wanted to explore in a novel, together, with some of the flavorful and exciting history of the state as it changed from the old frontier to a modern society. On my shelves of California reference works I can immediately locate the first one I bought, a general history of the state by Warren Beck and David Williams. I bought it in a chain bookstore a couple of blocks from the Beverly-Wilshire Hotel, where I was staying on a book promotion tour. On the flyleaf I inked the year, 1979. I wanted to write about California before I finished
The Kent Family Chronicles
, or undertook
The North and South Trilogy.

A decade later,
California Gold
is the realization of that dream.

The late John Dickson Carr wrote a number of vivid and entertaining mystery novels with historical settings. At the end of each one, Carr always added a section to footnote certain events in the story or explain any small liberties taken with the factual record. These he called “Notes for the Curious.” I have borrowed his apt phrase for the same purpose. Before each note, I have given the section and chapter most appropriate.

1.5 and
ff.
My portrayal of the railroad, its methods and influence, is consistent with the attitude of a great majority of Californians at the time. They feared and loathed “the Octopus.” In the early decades of the twentieth century, this highly negative slant was almost universal among scholarly and popular historians. Today, however, the early, traditional view is considered one-sided and unfair, and is being challenged by scholars. The revisionist view is that the railroad empire created by the Big Four not only united the nation, but was a major force in the growth of California; in short, the SP was not the absolutely malign power it was perceived to be in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I am aware of at least one scholar who is working on a new, more balanced history of the SP, and there may be others.

1.5
Pope Leo XIII published the Encyclical
Rerum Novarum (On the Condition of Labor)
in May 1891, later than indicated in the story. This remarkable letter is “a comprehensive analysis of the world labor problem,” and a far-seeing humane plan to alleviate it.

11.13
and ff
. Bao Kee’s nickel ferry is based on John L. Davie’s larger, and later, effort to make a success of such a service. He had a thriving business for a short time, but ultimately the competitive muscle of the SP was just too strong, and Davie’s ferry line shut down.

III.16
Health claims in Wyatt’s literature are taken from promotional literature of the day. Truth in advertising did not exist.