California Gold (73 page)

Mack nodded, though he didn’t. Feuds such as the legendary one that wracked the Spreckels family mystified him. Never mind; the money was good, and would be put to a good purpose. On a couple of occasions Mack had talked with Adolph’s brother Rudy about the need for a serious reform movement in the City. That need seemed to grow more critical with every week that passed.

Every month or so Mack went down to call on Nellie at Carmel-by-the-Sea. She lived in a perfect little artist’s bungalow, isolated among the pines but with a view of the windy blue bay. Mack never stayed overnight, and usually they argued—about graft, about the trolleys, about the City’s water situation. To break the monopoly held by the Spring Valley Water Company, former Mayor Phelan had cast his eye on distant sources: Lake Tahoe, Shasta, the Sacramento River. Late in Phelan’s administration, his water consultants recommended establishing a claim on behalf of the City to the Hetch Hetchy Valley.

Phelan had done so. Under the federal Right of Way Act, the City proposed to build a dam in the valley. The interior secretary blocked the proposal, and it had been tied up in litigation ever since.

“And a good thing too,” Nellie said.

“Is that your opinion, or your friend Muir’s?”

“What’s the matter with you, Mack? If you dam that valley, you destroy it forever.”

“What about the City’s water supply? It’s completely inadequate. Meanwhile the population keeps on growing.”

“Not my fault. Put up barricades.”

“Oh, the great democrat is suddenly the great exclusionist.”

“No, I didn’t mean—”

“Nellie, San Francisco has a major problem. But you and all the folks in the nature societies want to ignore it.”

“Nature societies? Oh my God, that’s so snide.” She threw a book.

As a consequence of this kind of conversation, he had lately spent a lot of time with Margaret Emerson.

Mack forgave Nellie her short temper. Her San Francisco colleague Frank Norris had died suddenly and tragically two years before, of peritonitis, and with the permission of his widow she was attempting to write
The Wolf
, the last novel of his trilogy about wheat. She wasn’t having any luck, and that roughened her disposition.

“I reread parts of
The Octopus
again last night,” she told Mack. “Annixter seeing the wheat at dawn, the wonderful gangplow passage. In every sentence I hear the voice of a friend, but I can’t imitate it. I try and I fail. I’ve never failed so miserably at anything before.”

So Mack made an effort to excuse the quarrels, even to laugh about them. Underneath he was angry and bitterly frustrated because he couldn’t move the relationship one way or the other.

Much the same kind of frustration bred of love spoiled his relationship with his son.

He found contentment in small things. California names. He loved them and, in a corner of his memory, he amassed a collection.

Pigeon Point, Calexico, El Dorado.

Fallen Leaf, Drakes Bay, Hurdygurdy.

Chinese Camp, Malibu, Likely. Pismo, Chowchilla, Havilah, Dinkey Creek. Rough and Ready, Sevastopol, Berryessa, Hobo Hot Springs.

Avalon, Ahwahnee, Fandango, San Juan Capistrano. Angeis Camp, Coarsegold, You Bet. La Mirada, Yucaipa, Eureka, Glendora. Fiddletown, Modesto, Petaluma, Susanville.

Point Reyes, Death Valley, Malpaso Canyon, Mokelumne River, Mare Island, Signal Hill, Thousand Palms, Visitation, Hoopa, Tiburon, Portola, Calistoga, Ramona …

O California!

A year before, on the fifth floor of the Mills Building on Bush Street, Chance-Johnson Oil had opened an office. Mack’s competitors at Union Oil occupied space two flights up. One day in the fall of 1904, Mack met there for three hours with Haven Ogg and two other geologists. After showing them out, he welcomed Fremont Older.

They lit cigars and relaxed by a window looking up Nob Hill. It was a cool and golden afternoon, one of those rare City days without a sea breeze. When there was no wind, the soft-coal haze from thousands of chimneys wrapped the rooftops and settled all the way to the streets. The haze was like a gray sea, with huge signs advertising oculists and beer swimming in it like painted fish.

“I have some word about the water situation,” Older said. “The enlightened Mr. Ruef shares the view of the federal government. We must not dam Hetch Hetchy. At the same time, we must break the vile stranglehold of the Spring Valley Company.”

“How will we do that?”

With a cynical smirk, Older said, “We’ll bring in a competitor—Bay Cities.”

“Bill Tevis’s company.”

“The same.” Tevis, a San Franciscan, had inherited something like $20 million from his father, Lloyd, another of the state’s nineteenth-century land and cattle barons. “The company has water rights up on the south fork of the American and the north fork of the Cosumnes. My moles who burrow around City Hall tell me the Boss is definitely leaning toward a franchise for Bay Cities.”

“Is he a friend of Tevis?”

“No, but I understand someone in the Tevis organization has offered a little something to generate a friendship.”

“What’s a little something?”

“One million dollars.”

“My God,” Mack said. “It gets worse and worse.”

“Indeed it does. There’s hardly an honest man to be found at City Hall. They’re all so hungry for boodle, they’ll eat the paint off a house. We’ve got to unmask Ruef. Get him out, and his hirelings too.”

“How, Fremont? Ruef’s more popular than ever. So tell me how we do it.”

Smoking their cigars, they stared at one another in the waning light of a coal-haze afternoon.

Mack, Johnson, and Little Jim went down to Fisherman’s Wharf. It was a Saturday at twilight. Jim held tightly to his father’s hand as they walked out on the long plain pier.

The trim little Monterey boats had come in for the night, their red sails furled, but the fishermen, dark weathered men who chattered and yelled in Italian and Portuguese, still had much work left to do. They hoisted baskets of wriggling halibut and sea crabs to the wharf, spread and hung their weighted nets on its rail. One of the young fishermen with a gold ring in his left ear tousled Jim’s hair.

The three walked on out to the end. In the dusky bay, red and green running lights showed on small launches and an outbound Pacific steamer. Her great whistle bellowed and the boy watched her churning toward the sunset.

“Where’s she going, Pa—China?”

“Good possibility of that.”

“I’m going there one of these days.”

“Sure. But right now we’re going home. It’s cold. Look at that fog rolling in.” The bank lay just outside Golden Gate, the sun all at once swallowed by it.

“I want to stay a while.”

“No, it’s too chilly. I don’t want you catching cold.” Jim started to say something, but Mack patted his head. “Don’t argue.”

“Look,” Johnson said to the boy, “they’re bringin’ in more live crabs.”

That was enough to cue Jim to move away to see. Both men watched his tilting gait, heard the terrible slow scrape of his left foot. Johnson’s bright-orange bandanna snapped in the wind.

“Listen here. You’re treatin’ that boy like the very kind of hothouse lily you said you wouldn’t have.”

“You’re meddling again, Hugh.”

“Well, I figure I better. He’s your flesh and blood, but you don’t have but a few scraps of time to give him. When you do take him out, you treat him like some little girl’s china doll.”

Mack held his temper. “What I wanted for Jim before and what I want for him now are different things. He’s crippled.”

“He ain’t a freak. He’s a healthy, growing young ’un. Every time you coddle him, you make him remember what’s wrong with him, ’stead of what’s right. He don’t like that, and I don’t blame him.”

“He’ll have to put up with it. I have only one son and I mean to take care of him.”

“You ain’t doin’ it proper—”

“I don’t need your advice and I don’t want it.”

Johnson pulled his Texas hat lower over his bushy gray brows and stomped back up the wharf. “Guess we got to go home now, Jim,” he called. “Ain’t my idea.”

When Mack went to Jim’s room to say good-night, the boy was quiet, almost sullen. Mack insisted on a hug, and Jim complied with a hooking motion of his small arm, a light, fast hug, to let Mack know he didn’t like Mack’s discipline.

Nevermind. The boy was fragile. Look how easily he’d been injured at Richmond Field. Mack refused to risk it again. One of these days Jim would understand, and thank him.

As he went upstairs, a distant telephone rang. Alex Muller hurried to find him.

“Mr. Older is calling.”

“What is it, Fremont?” Mack said when he answered.

The voice came over the wire faint and scratchy. “It appears the
Bulletin
has printed one too many stories about Abe Ruef and his cronies. About an hour ago, our publisher was attacked on the street by unknown assailants.”

“Thieves?”

“They took nothing. They beat Crothers with lead pipes and ran away. It’s doubtful that he’ll live.”

In November 1904 Mack voted for Theodore Roosevelt and argued with Nellie over the merits of national and local candidates. She was particularly strong for Judge Alton Parker, a Democrat Mack disliked. He said with some heat that she would probably vote Democratic if the party ran a name from a tombstone. She said, “Oh, enough. I’ll be happy to discuss voting when you arrogant males condescend to permit me to do it.” Which immediately ended the conversation.

R. A. Crothers of the
Bulletin
surprised everyone and survived his savage beating. The incident heightened tensions between the Ruef machine and the few who dared to speak against it or ignore its authority. As the year closed and the new year began, the struggle focused in the issue of the French restaurants.

Back in the spring of ’04, Police Commissioner Hutton had launched a campaign against San Francisco’s own peculiar institution, announcing that French restaurants were open houses of assignation and a menace to public morals, and proposing the revocation of their liquor permits.

For several months the other three members of the police commission board refused to go along; Hutton’s brand of puritanism didn’t fit the style of an easy-going port city. But things changed toward the end of ’04. Members of the cooks and waiters’ union tried to organize one of the largest of the restaurants, Tortoni’s. Union business agents hired two men to eat supper there, then request introductions to the ladies working upstairs. Presented with depositions detailing what went on at Tortoni’s, the members of the police commission board now were forced to act, and they refused to renew Tortoni’s license. By early January 1905 the commission had refused to renew the license of a second French restaurant, Delmonico’s.

“I had a call about it at six o’clock this morning,” Margaret said to Mack. “From Pierre Priet of Marchand’s. He’s terrified we’ll all be run out of business. The others are just as scared—Tony Blanco at the Poodle Dog, Jean Loupy at the Pup, Max Adler at the Bay State. They want to organize a French restaurant keepers’ association. Each member will be assessed, and the association will hire a specialist to cure the illness.”

“A specialist? What are you talking about?” Mack said. They were dining under the fake Tiffany electric in her quarters next to Maison Napoleon.

“I’m quoting Pierre. He was practically gibbering. We’re all supposed to contribute enough to raise five thousand dollars immediately, and another five thousand for next year. To retain Dr. Ruef. That’s what Pierre called him—
Doctor
.”

“Good God. What did you say?”

“I told Pierre to go to hell, I’d pay no graft for a legitimate liquor license.”

“That’s a dangerous stance, Margaret.”

“I run a business patronized by some of the best men in San Francisco. City officials eat here. They go upstairs with a wink and smile. Do you think I’m going to be threatened by a bunch of hypocrites who suddenly decide I’m a fine source of boodle? The answer’s no. That’s what I said in my letter.”

Mack’s fork clattered on his plate.

“You wrote that in a letter? Let me see it.”

“I don’t have it. I mailed it to the
Bulletin
this morning.”

“I’ll call Fremont right awa—”

“Mack, sit down. I simply said City Hall was extorting money from businesspeople, and Ruef was behind it.”

“You don’t say that kind of thing in San Francisco, Margaret. Not publicly. These people are powerful, and they’re vindictive. Look what happened to my son. To Crothers—”

“I don’t care, and furthermore it’s too late. The letter’s gone. I stand by it.”

“I admire that. But you’re taking a hell of a risk.”

She patted his hand; her fingertips lingered. He was frowning, too worried to notice.

“You’re kind and sweet to concern yourself,” she said. “I think it’s needless. They may harass me, but that’s all. A woman is still safe in this town. Even a woman like me.”

A
CETYLENE HEADLAMPS DUG TUNNELS
of light in the evening fog as the Model A Ford putted around the corner onto Mission Street. The eight-horsepower car had a single seat under a folding top. Painted black, it resembled a motorized buggy. A second, identical Ford appeared. A man and woman crossing Mission to Maison Napoleon gawked at the autos, which were still not all that common.

The first Model A parked in front of Margaret Emerson’s flat. The second stopped behind it. There were two men in each vehicle, men of some size, trying hard to fit in the single seats and present themselves as gents by wearing derbies and velvet-collared coats.

The passenger in the first Model A was in charge. He was a hulk with a huge mustache waxed in points. Jumping out, he signaled to the men in the other auto, then trotted up the steps to Margaret’s door. He tested the handle, then signaled again. The two men from the second auto took up positions in front of the flat while the first man and his driver moved quickly to the entrance to the French restaurant.

The man in charge studied the foggy street. A horse-drawn cab passed with a clatter and glimmer of lamps. There was no other traffic.