The Bride's House (28 page)

And so the next years passed. If they were not joyously happy ones, they at least were not unpleasant. Although Pearl found gray hairs and she developed wrinkles about her eyes and mouth, she seemed to others not to change at all. Charlie, on the other hand, began to look old. He was as white headed as cotton now, and his step was not so sure. He had lost some of his vigor, and when he went out at night to make the rounds of the saloons, he stumbled home or was carried there by friends. Pearl wondered how his investments fared. After the world war, Charlie began putting his money into factories and land development. Pearl suspected he had invested a great deal in the King Mine, a copper property, but she did not know the details, because she had distanced herself from her father’s business interests and did not pay them much attention. When Pearl asked Mr. Randal about an investment that struck her as odd, the bookkeeper patted her hand and said he was keeping an eye on things.

Mrs. Travers was growing old, too, of course, and Pearl took over management of the household. With her outside interests, the young woman no longer cared about cleaning and preparing meals, and so she employed a cook and a hired girl. Mrs. Travers fussed that the house was not as clean as it should be and the food was undercooked and never properly seasoned, although in fact, the Bride’s House was as spotless as ever and the food tasted better than that prepared by the former boardinghouse proprietor, who had a tendency to use too much salt and to keep things on the stove until they turned to mush.

*   *   *

After the one trip to Europe, Pearl forgot about travel, except for short visits to Denver or occasionally accompanying her father on business trips, although she went shopping or visited museums instead of attending meetings with Charlie. The two were never again as close as they had been, but over the years, both worked to repair the breach created by her engagement.

On one such trip to New York, Pearl returned to the hotel room to find her father agitated. “By damn,” he said, balling up a telegram and tossing it onto the floor. He went out in a rush to send a reply, and Pearl picked up the crumbled paper and read it: “
YOU RIGHT ON ORE ASSAY
.
ADVISE
.” No name was included, so Pearl didn’t know what mine the wire referred to. Nor could she judge how serious the problem was, because she no longer was involved in her father’s business transactions. But she knew from Charlie’s reaction that something had gone wrong, so she was not surprised that when he returned from the telegraph office, he announced they were going home.

Back in the Bride’s House, Charlie closeted himself in his study with a string of mining men who called on him day after day. He pored over the books late into the night with Mr. Randal, and when Pearl asked if the two wanted dinner at the desk, Charlie waved her off, saying they were too busy to eat. One afternoon, the bookkeeper stormed out of the study, slamming the front door of the house as he left. When Pearl, sitting on the porch with a book, wished him a good evening, he only frowned at her and did not reply.

“I shall see you tomorrow, then,” Pearl said.

“No you won’t!”

A few minutes later, Charlie stepped onto the porch and told Pearl that he had fired the bookkeeper. “He is incompetent,” was his only explanation.

Charlie did not ask Pearl to resume her former duties, but since her father didn’t hire anyone else, she appeared in the study the next morning and each morning after that to take dictation or rush to the depot with telegrams to post. At night, Charlie picked at his supper, then went off and got drunker than usual. He was more upset than Pearl had ever seen him, but he was closemouthed, and the letters she wrote did not explain the dilemma, so she could only guess at what had gone wrong. She felt sorry for her father but was not unduly concerned, because he had suffered downturns in the past, as did any investor with the slightest bit of daring. Although he was never a plunger, Charlie hadn’t believed in playing it safe, either. He’d told his daughter often enough that if a man didn’t lose from time to time, he was too cautious. Picking bonanzas, he’d said, meant picking borrascas, too.

But as the days went on, Pearl grew concerned that this latest loss was greater than usual, and she sought to have her father unburden himself. So one afternoon, she persuaded Charlie to join her in their old ritual of afternoon tea. She carried the silver tea service into the parlor and set it down on a table, then poured a cup for her father and handed him a slice of cake—Gold and Silver Cake, Charlie’s favorite, made from a recipe of Nealie’s. But Charlie only picked at the cake, and finally, Pearl asked, “Papa, I am worried. What is it that troubles you?”

She expected her father to take her hand and reassure her that everything was all right or perhaps tell her that the copper recovery method used in the King Mine was more costly than he’d thought. He might even say that a mine in which he held a stake had suffered a cave-in or that labor agitators were threatening to shut it down.

Instead, Charlie removed the spectacles that he had begun wearing and massaged the bridge of his nose. He set down his teacup, staring at the bits of tea leaf in the brew. “I had hoped to keep this from you, but you will find out in time,” he said. Then he looked directly at Pearl. “Daughter, I am ruined.”

“Ruined?” Pearl asked, stopping with her cup halfway to her lips. She slowly set it down, her hand shaking. “What do you mean, Papa? Surely not ruined.”

“Do I say things I don’t mean?” Charlie asked harshly. Then his voice softened. “Yes, Pearl, I am ruined. I have made a series of bad investments, and there is nothing to it but to admit it.”

“The King Mine?” Pearl asked.

“The ore has run out, and the management was incompetent. I sold my gold holdings to finance it. It has been good money after bad for years. Now all of it is gone.”

“The land you bought?”

“A swamp and a swindle.”

“The factories?”

“One made corsets. You know yourself what has happened to that market. The shoe factory in Europe—I had thought there would be a good market for shoes after the war, but it seems that nobody has the money to buy them. And the company that makes mining equipment was run by fools and profligates. It is closed. I have lost my touch.”

“What about your stocks, Papa?”

“I sold shares so that I could put the money into copper.”

“But why, Papa? You always diversified. You told me yourself that only a fool puts all of his eggs into one basket.”

“Then I am a fool.” Charlie slumped in his chair. “I did it because I wanted to be another Spencer Penrose,” he explained, naming the Colorado Springs millionaire who had backed the Utah Copper Company and its process for treating low-grade ore. “I’d thought the New Mexico prospect was another Bingham Canyon. But there wasn’t enough copper in the ore for even a low-grade treatment. I didn’t want to admit the mine was a bust, so I threw good money after bad. Just like I made it, I let it get away from me.”

Pearl stared at her father, confused. “I don’t understand why you wanted to be Mr. Penrose. You never cared about being as rich as Croesus, and you are hardly a spendthrift.”

Indeed, Charlie owned only one automobile and preferred horses to motorcars, and Pearl and Mrs. Travers had to coax him to purchase clothes. “When it comes to spending money on himself, your father is so tight, he squeaks,” Mrs. Travers once complained.

“I have my reasons. I hoped to leave something to you. I didn’t want you to be poor like your mother was.”

“But there is plenty of money for me.”

“Is there?” Charlie picked up his fork and cut a bit of cake, but he set the fork down with the uneaten confection. “Perhaps if I’d been more cautious, I might have saved something. But I gave Mr. Randal too much power to buy and sell stocks. I put trust in his judgment, the way I used to put it in yours. But he was not as knowledgeable as you. And he was flattered by stock promoters. Perhaps if you had been by my side instead of Mr. Randal, the outcome might have been different.”

“Did Mr. Randal profit?”

Charlie shook his head. “I don’t know. If he did, I can’t prove it, and I expect he was enriched only a little. He was arrogant and overestimated his ability. He wasted hundreds of thousands by selling my shares and speculating in others that are worthless. If we had even that money…” Charlie wrung his hands.

“What does it mean, ‘ruined,’ Papa? Are you a bankrupt?”

“No. It’s not quite that bad. We have enough to allow us to stay on in the house, but we must live simply. That means you must let the cook and hired girl go, and I’ll sell the horses. That will eliminate the need for a stable boy. There won’t be money for travel, and I must ask you to keep your own expenses to a minimum.”

“Mrs. Travers? Surely you won’t ask her to leave.”

“She’ll stay. She has always been with us.” Charlie looked so discouraged then that Pearl wanted to put her arms around her father and tell him that she did not mind. But they had never been a demonstrative pair, so she only patted his hand. “We will manage,” she said.

They sat quietly, Charlie opening his mouth to say something, then closing it again. In a minute, Pearl asked, “Is there a little left to be invested?”

“A little,” he said. “But I don’t dare risk it in speculation. If it’s lost, so are we. We’ll invest it safely so that you will have something to live on when I’m gone.” He leaned forward, his hands clasped between his knees. Pearl had never seen her father look so old or so beaten. “I could go back to work. I was considered a good man with the dynamite, you know. But that was long ago, and I do not believe anyone would hire me now.”

“You’ll do no such thing, Papa,” Pearl told him. She had grown up on stories of once-wealthy mining men who lost everything and were forced to return to the mines as day laborers, and she would not have her father subject himself to such humiliation. She vowed that if it came to it, she herself would find employment. After all, she was a good typist and took dictation reasonably well. Surely there was a demand for such a person. The idea even excited her a little, because she had missed being a part of the business world in those last years. But that decision would come later, and only if it were absolutely necessary, since she knew Charlie would oppose it. She would have to present the idea to her father in such a way that it didn’t shame him. Now, she could only console him and tell him that things surely were not as dark as he pictured. Pearl wondered then what their situation would have been if she’d been allowed to marry Frank Curry. But that was needless speculation. She had not married him; she had no idea where he was. He had never come back.

*   *   *

Although the months and years of the 1920s were ones of retrenchment, Pearl was not forced to seek employment, because the situation was not as perilous as it might have been. There was a little money left, and the woman—because it was now Pearl who managed the accounts—invested it prudently, saving out only a small amount for speculation, at which she was successful. Mrs. Travers resumed the cooking, and if she was at times forgetful and the chicken was burned and the biscuit-bread scorched, the other two did not complain. Pearl undertook the heavier work of housecleaning and discovered that she’d missed the pride she’d once felt in making the house sparkle, although if the truth be told, she hadn’t missed it
that
much.

Charlie, who had never been afraid of hard work, sold the auto and kept the old horse to pull the buggy, but he eliminated the stable boy and did the work himself. Mucking out a stall wasn’t that much different from mucking out a mine, he told Pearl, and the shovel loads were lighter. He let the groundskeeper go, and he and Pearl remade the garden so that the upkeep was simpler. Charlie hauled stones to construct the flower beds, while Pearl tended the plants. He cut the grass, Pearl weeded, and together, they planted apple trees where the tennis court once stood. Pearl figured the trees would pay for themselves when they produced, because she and Mrs. Travers would use the fruit for pies and fritters and sauce. They also planted a vegetable garden, although at Georgetown’s high altitude, they couldn’t grow much more than lettuce and root vegetables. Still, the labor reduced the food bill a little. Charlie made benches from timbers scavenged from deserted mines and placed them along the lilac hedge.

Working with her father in the garden was comfortable for Pearl. She would never forget that he had forced Frank Curry out of her life, but over the years, she had forgiven him. And she had come to understand him a little better. She understood that his love had been so consuming that he was jealous of any man who entered her life. Perhaps it had something to do with Nealie dying so young. Pearl thought that Charlie must have wanted his daughter close to protect her. Whether he had changed and would now allow his daughter to marry, Pearl did not know, but it didn’t matter, because no suitors called on her, had not for a long time.

The family let it be known that Charlie had retired, so no one was surprised to see the man working in his garden. Mining men were eccentric, and if Charlie wanted to toil in the earth or wander about town without a collar or even drive a buggy with a horse so old it couldn’t go faster than a walk, people simply said, “That’s Charlie Dumas.” At first, no one suspected that the Dumas fortune was gone, but later, when the Bride’s House went unpainted and the porch sagged, when the rugs and upholstery frayed, the plants in the solarium died and were not replaced, people understood that Charlie had fallen on hard times. But that was not news in Georgetown, where so many mines had been shut down and most people faced financial difficulties. Eventually, it became common knowledge that Pearl, not Charlie, invested the money that kept them going.