California Gold (60 page)

Mack laughed. “When he can sit up. You’ll spoil him, Swampy.”

“I got a right. I’m his grandpa.”

And a queer old bandit, Mack thought. Marquez wrote of the whirlwind of rising expectations among workingmen. What would Swampy do if that storm caught him? As a matter of fact, what would
he
do?

How will it be with kingdoms and with kings—

With those who shaped him to the thing he is—

When this dumb Terror shall rise to judge the world,

After the silence of the centuries?

By March 1899, the old depot office at San Solaro had been remodeled and expanded. Watercolor renderings and a plaster model of the new town, complete with blue water in the canal, offered prospects an attractive view of their future residence. Mack had written personal letters to all of the people who had closed on the earliest lots, describing the new water system and his plans for a real community and encouraging them to consider a home in San Solaro. He had three replies from couples near retirement who said they would enthusiastically consider it.

While the derricks pumped away, carpenters hammered up the framing for a row of four model cottages. They were done in Mission Revival, and were small neat homes of stucco with roofs of red tile and central patios to let in the sunshine and the fragrance of flowers. In his mind Mack defined the kind of future buyers he wanted in San Solaro: solid, settled middle-class folk eager to work or retire in Southern California. He didn’t want a town of country-club types, or part-time residents.

He spent most of his weekdays in San Solaro while Johnson stayed in Arlington Heights to supervise the groves. The Texan had discarded his crutch and no longer limped so noticeably. Once a day he practiced walking in front of a mirror, balancing for minutes at a time on his cork foot or simply standing and watching the reflection, making sure his shoulders were level. “Don’t want the field hands callin’ me a second-class man. Don’t want to give up my glorious polo career neither. Those fellas on the club, they start thinkin’ I’m a crip, they’re liable to vote me off. Ain’t fair, but that’s how people treat somebody with a hurt like this.”

Mack returned to Villa Mediterranean every Friday and spent long hours with his son, whom he took to calling Little Jim. Carla usually wasn’t home, and when she was, she showed no interest in the baby. Mack’s interest, on the other hand, was boundless. Each new development—a gurgle that a proud father could misconstrue as speech, a bump on the gum that might be a tooth—was a source of wonder. Angelina Olivar tended the child well, and she never spoke a word against his mother.

In April, construction began on a breakwater at San Pedro. After years of advances and reverses, C. P. Huntington at last gave up the harbor fight. Mack tried to imagine Huntington’s face—probably waxy and sullen with the rage of senility; he was almost eighty. Mack pictured Fairbanks too. It was shameful to be so vindictive, but he enjoyed it thoroughly.

A few days later the Sundown Sea Realty people began bringing prospects from Los Angeles. If Mack had a free hour, he showed them around the tract personally. He was with a couple from Michigan one Thursday afternoon, strolling by the canal.

“…so if you build a home here, you can be assured of a permanent water supply. San Solaro Irrigation, the company set up to be owned by the residents, just completed negotiations for all the land between here and Cat Canyon. The canyon runoff will be a primary source of our water. Wardlow Brothers is designing a two-thousand-foot tunnel to trap and channel the flow in the underground gravel beds. We’ll also have a diversion dam, and all the lines necessary to bring the water down here to a community reservoir. Pure, fresh water will be piped to every lot. It will fill this canal too, though the canal’s function is largely ornamental. The Wardlows are the best in the nation. They’re working this minute in those temporary offices you saw. As a general partner in San Solaro Irrigation, I’ll finance the system and you’ll vote ten shares of stock that accompany your building lot. Assuming, of course, that you decide to buy.”

“I’ve decided,” said the gentleman, a retired bank officer. “I like the layout. And I like your cut, Mr. Chance. Straightforward.”

Mack thought of Wyatt Paul’s hyperbole and smiled. “Well, I try to back up every promise.”

“I do have a few more questions about—” The gentleman stopped, noticing a man from the Wardlow office hurrying toward them.

The man drew Mack aside. “Mrs. Olivar just got through on the telephone. She asks that you come home right away.

Your son has a bad fever—a hundred and three or four. He’s had it since Monday night, and the doctor can’t bring it down.”

“What about Mrs. Chance? She’s there, isn’t she?”

The man replied with an embarrassed nod. “Yes, sir. But Mrs. Olivar said…uh…she said your wife refused to be bothered. She told Mrs. Olivar to call you.” Mack apologized to the retired couple and left immediately.

He also lost the sale.

Riding the local trains, it took him most of the afternoon and part of the evening to get back, arriving at the Riverside station at half past nine. One of the housemen met him with a pair of saddle horses, and they galloped up to the heights. Mack was grimy from traveling and exhausted too; the hours en route had left him free to worry.

He dashed directly upstairs to the large nursery. Doc Mellinger met him with encouraging news: The fever had broken about six o’clock, and Little Jim was sleeping comfortably.

Carla was downstairs in the living room. Mack recognized the slurred speech and slightly foggy gaze. How long had she been at the liquor?

“Carla, Jim’s your responsibility too. I can’t be here all the time.”

With an airy wave and an unsteady step, she started for the sideboard. “Then someone else will have to be. I went through the ordeal of having him. That was enough.”

He placed himself between his wife and the liquor decanters and jerked the glass from her hand. “Listen. For six months you’ve hardly looked at that boy. You let another woman suckle him—”

“Yes.” She shuddered. “The very idea’s repulsive.”

“—and you force Angelina to take care of him all day, every day, except when I can get home—”

She pushed his arm. “Get out of the way. I want a drink.”

“Keep your voice down. You don’t get another drink until I say so. I may never say so.”

“Goddamn it, you run everything else—you’re not going to run me.” She struck at him with her fists. He dodged away, tossed the empty glass in a chair, and grasped her wrists, holding her easily. She tried to stamp his foot.

“Carla, calm down and listen to me. I’m telling you again, you have a responsibility to the boy.”

“Why? I didn’t want him. I don’t love him.”

Mack let her go then. He stepped back and stared at her. “That’s the most obscene thing I’ve ever heard.”

“It’s the
truth.
” She beat her leg with her fist and started to cry. “I warned you I couldn’t handle marriage. Papa warned you. I was sick of it six months after the honeymoon. But I kept trying. I kept hoping it would be different with you. But it wasn’t. It isn’t.”

“I don’t give a damn—you have a duty to that child.”

“Duty? Go to hell. I’m not cut out for
duty.
I’m good for drinking, and for screwing, and for being shown off to your friends like a piece you bought at an auction gallery. But no duty, Mack. Fuck your duty. Fuck it. Fuck it.”

She ran past him to the liquor, and this time he let her.

He listened to the glassware clinking, and her crying, and tried to sort it all out. His emotions whipsawed back and forth between fury and compassion for her wretched state. How could he cope with this?

He had to start by calming her. Touching her shoulder, he said as gently as he could, “Let’s go for a walk. It’s a beautiful evening. We’ll talk. We can work this out—”

She reacted like a wild thing. Whirling around and ducking free of his hand, she threw the contents of the full glass into his face. The bourbon stung his eyes, fumed up his nose, and dripped from his lip.

“We can work out nothing, Mack. Nothing!”

He listened to the retreating footfalls, a frantic staccato. A door slammed; a bolt shot into its socket. He closed his eyes. Then he reached for the whiskey himself.

He woke with hot light striping his face.

He blinked several times while his brain slowly deciphered the meaning of the slanted sunshine. The light fell through the louvers of shutters left partly open in his office.

His mouth tasted like wool and dirt. He rolled over before he realized he was close to the edge of the leather couch, and he fell on the polished floor with a nasty jolt that woke him fully. The clock behind his desk showed ten-fifteen. Picking up the empty bottle from beneath the couch, he placed it on the desk near the guidebook.

His appearance in the crowded kitchen created a sudden hush.

“Angelina? Is Little Jim—”

“Fine, Señor Chance. The fever is gone. Imelda is with him while I eat breakfast.” Her brown hand hovered apologetically above a plate of corn cakes.

Mack watched the cooks bustling at the stove and chopping block. Rodolfo Armendariz, the elegant majordomo, sampled soup simmering on a hearth hook, avoiding the eyes of the master of Villa Mediterranean. Rodolfo’s silver goatee matched the silver chasing of his short velvet jacket.

“Is Mrs. Chance downstairs?” Mack asked him.

The majordomo looked at him nervously, then handed the ladle to a cook’s assistant.

“Rodolfo, what’s wrong?”

The elderly Mexican gripped the lapels of his jacket and replied gravely. “Señor, your wife departed in her carriage shortly after daybreak. She drove herself, by her own request.”

“To go where?”

“Señor, she did not tell us.”

“Was she sober?”

The majordomo avoided his eye again. One of the cooks rattled her implements, which was answer enough.
Drunk and crazy out of her head. Damn her. Damn her.

Wild-eyed, he ran up the staircase and flung open the doors of their bedroom suite. Empty drawers lay about, and the tall carved wardrobe stood open, everything removed. He walked toward it, feeling stupid and slow, as if someone had pounded him with heavy blows. He shut one door of the wardrobe, then the other. The mirrored front flashed an image of the unmade bed—and also of a folded note.

He snatched it off the pillow, knowing what it would say almost before he identified the sloppy hand:

Things are intolerable. I am leaving you.

At the end of the century, San Francisco was old enough to be recognized as a major city. Her population approached 350,000, and she ranked second only to New York as a trading port. She was old enough to replace her tumble-down buildings with splendid new architecture, even skyscrapers. Page Brown’s new Ferry Building, with its 235-foot clock tower, loomed over the Embarcadero, and the new City Hall would be magnificent if they ever finished it.

San Francisco was also fully old enough for a tradition of personal feuds. This grew in the dark soil of politics, watered by the blood of slain men in a climate that tolerated old-fashioned American violence.

In 1859, U.S. Senator David Broderick, a Democrat, and Judge David Terry, also a Democrat, but of the hotly conservative “Chivalry” wing, exchanged insults, and Judge Terry challenged Broderick to a duel. They met on the shore of Lake Merced. Broderick was unfamiliar with dueling pistols, and his hair trigger discharged too soon. Given this advantage, Terry took careful aim and drilled Broderick’s chest dead center.

New laws against dueling didn’t stop the feuds, however. In 1879, editor Charley de Young of the
Chronicle
criticized a political candidate in print, and the candidate promptly announced publicly that “Mother de Young once ran a whore house.” Charley de Young promptly shot him. The candidate lived, but his son entered the
Chronicle
offices one day in 1880 and shot Charley to death. Five years later, Mr. Adolph Spreckels, the sugar magnate, got so fed up with the paper’s personal attacks on him that he entered the editorial rooms and shot Charley de Young’s brother Mike, who was now in charge. A quick-witted bookkeeper in turn shot Mr. Spreckels. This time, both wounded men survived.

As
fin-de-siècle
San Francisco prepared to enter the new, presumably more enlightened century, one might assume such primitive frontier violence would end.

But no. It was by now a tradition, and there was much more to come.

O
N A FALL DAY
in that same year, 1899, Mack and Hellman met for a noon meal in Los Angeles. It was their third luncheon in as many weeks, Carla’s departure having created a new bond between them. They were rather like foreign legionnaires who’d endured a forced march barefoot across miles of hot sand and lived to reminisce about it.

They dined until half past two. Hellman complained of gas so they took a stroll to work it off. Carla’s father was in his middle-to-late sixties now; he was secretive about his age, though he insisted others celebrate his birthday. His hair no longer showed any trace of its original blond color and his paunch was huge and jiggly.

The old bandit wore a wrinkled suit of windowpane plaid, bilious yellow on brown. To adorn his summer shoes, white buckskin and brown leather, he’d donned yellow linen spats. The spats bore souvenirs of the street, his unbuttoned vest and shirt souvenirs of the meal. Mack, neat and proper in a summer wool, high collar, and four-in-hand, was always amused by Hellman’s peacock wardrobe.

Hellman fanned himself with his straw hat as they strolled down South Spring Street. The mild breeze brought them the chug of oil wells pumping away. Mack decided it was time to give Hellman the news.

“Carla filed for divorce. I had a letter yesterday. She hired a San Francisco lawyer, a former partner of Walter Fairbanks.”

“What grounds?”

“She’s charged me with adultery.”

Hellman blinked and almost stepped in a horse pie in the intersection. “With who?”