The Immigrants (15 page)

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No
, Jean told herself,
this is not real, this is not hap pening to me,
this is insane and impossible
. Still, she did not move as Manya’s hand slid up her body and cupped around one breast, gently again, feeling, exploring, rais ing to life the hard point of her nipple.

She felt her nos trils close, her breath come pantingly through her open lips, her body beginning to bum in a way that she had never experienced before.

And then she heard the door downstairs open and close, the squeal of two-year-old Thomas’ anger, and the spell broke. She leaped to her feet, her whole body trembling, while Manya lay there, watching her and laughing lightly.

“Poor snow lady.”

“You must go. Now. Please.”

She went down the stairs swinging her veil and hat, humming to herself and throwing sidelong glances at Jean. “Such beautiful children!” she cried. “Oh, such beautiful children!” Miss Jones, the English nurse—or nanny, as Jean liked to think of her—frowned in disap proval and hustled the children to the stairs. Jean opened the door.

“When do we meet again, snow lady?” Manya asked.

“Never!” Jean exclaimed. “I have forgotten what happened! I have forgotten it completely! I trust you will too.”

“Perhaps. Who knows?” Manya said.

Dan Lavette was leaving his office, earlier on the same day, when Feng Wo stopped him. “Please, could I have a word with you, Mr. Lavette?”

“A quick word. I’m walking into a den of lions, so don’t say anything that will rattle me.”

“Only a moment. My wife, who has heard me speak of you for so

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long now, begs me to extend an invitation to you and Mrs. Lavette.

We humbly ask you to take dinner with us at our home on this Friday next. How ever, I must add that I will understand if there are cir cumstances that prevent your accepting.”

“Is your wife a good cook?”

“I would say so. Yes.”

“Then I’ll be there—with bells on. You count on that.”

“But Mrs. Lavette may have accepted another en gagement.”

“I don’t think so.”

But a few minutes later, walking toward the Seldon Bank Building, Dan realized that an invitation for Jean to come to a Chinese household for dinner was by no means a simple matter.

Well, there would be time to worry about that; meanwhile, it was more important that he be clear in his mind as to what he would say to Seldon and Seldon’s board of directors. He had made a few notes and rehearsed the facts and figures in his mind at least a dozen times, and his arguments ap peared, to him at least, to be reasonable and cogent. A few minutes later he reached Montgomery Street, walked past the modest front of the Bank of Sonoma, and entered the impressive eight-story Seldon Building. A hydraulic elevator brought him smoothly to the eighth floor and the board room. He was a few minutes early.

Five of them faced him around the big mahogany ta ble, Thomas Seldon, Alvin Sommers and Martin Clancy, both of them vice presidents, Rustin Jones, who was president of Sierra Insurance, and Grant Whittier of California Shipping. They were all of them men past fifty, solid, substantial men, with a net worth of many millions among them.

As Seldon introduced him to those he had not met, Dan realized that they were all watching him, studying him as if he were a particularly interesting form of life they had not encountered before.

Their faces were im passive and controlled; he remembered such

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faces from poker games, not on the wharf where the fishermen played poker loose and easy with each other but in the Tenderloin where the pros sat around the tables in their shirt-sleeves and vests with eyes as cold as hard steel. Well, he had not come here to be wined and dined and to be told what a brilliant young man he was.

He had come here to ask for a million dollars.

“You gentlemen know what the situation is,” he be gan, standing at one end of the table. “England, France, Germany, Belgium, the Austrian Empire, Italy, Rus sia—damn near every country in Europe is at war. It’s the worst, bloodiest war this world ever saw, and it’s only beginning. England is an island with the biggest empire in history, and most of that empire is at our back door, if you think of the Pacific Ocean as our back door. Now already Germany’s submarine fleet is nibbling away at British ships. They’re going to sink ev ery damn ship they sight, and the British colonies are going to live or die with what we ship over to them out of the West Coast. Now I know that the Panama Canal is going to change things, but chiefly in lower rates from the East Coast to here. As far as the Pacific passage is concerned, rates are going to go up and the sky’s the limit. Mark Levy, my partner, and I have been operat ing a fleet of ships for four years now, and I know what kind of money there is in shipping—just as I’m sure Mr. Whittier knows. I’m here to ask for a loan of a million dollars, to underwrite the purchase of five ships of five to six thousand tons each. I know where the ships are and I know they can be bought. They’re cargo carriers in first-rate condition. So I think that such a loan as I propose is reasonable and secure.”

“I think I know the ships you’re talking about,” Whittier said.

“Your figures are off. A million’s not enough.”

“We’re aware of that,” Dan agreed. “We intend to liquidate all our holdings, our ships, our fishing boats, and our factory. We have an equity of almost a mil lion.”

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“I know your holdings,” Sommers said. “You’re heavily mortgaged.”

“We have equity,” Dan argued. “I’m talking about a good market.

I should have said at least a half-million and possibly a million.”

“That’s quite a spread,” Clancy observed, smiling slightly.

“How old are you, Lavette?” Rustin Jones asked him.

“Oh, I don’t think that’s to the point,” Seldon put in.

“Twenty-six,” Dan replied, pushing it onto the com ing year. “If you’re looking for age, I can go out on the street and bring you a dozen men over fifty.”

“Take it easy, Dan,” Seldon said. “Tell me something about those ships.”

“They’re steel ships, turbine engines, twin screws, none of them more than three years old, four of them made in England, one in Holland, good condition.”

“You see the war only in terms of profit?” Whittier asked.

“I see the war for what it is—a bloody, stupid game they’re playing. We didn’t make it. It ain’t our war. But that’s no reason not to carry cargo and take a profit. If I don’t do it, a hundred others will.”

“May I read you something, Mr. Lavette,” Rustin Jones said, his voice a calm contrast to Dan’s heated assertions. This is from President Wilson’s message to the Senate. I quote, ‘The effect of the war upon the United States will depend upon what American citizens say and do. Every man who really loves America will act and speak in the true spirit of neutrality, which is the spirit of im-partiality and fairness and friendliness to all concerned.’ So speaks the President, Mr. Lavette, yet you propose a very considerable loan primarily for trade with the British Colonies.”

Dan shook his head and tried to contain his temper. “We’re a Pacific port. Do you want me to trade with Germany? Just tell me how, and I’ll be happy to oblige.”

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“Mr. Lavette,” Clancy said, “Mr. Jones made refer ence to your age. We have children still at school and not a great deal younger than you. Not too long ago, the newspapers carried an account of a shotgun attack you personally made upon what you claimed was some sort of fish pirate. You took upon yourself the responsibility of sinking a boat. Fortunately, the people on the boat survived, but it might have been a disaster. Now you ask us to entrust a million dollars to your judgment.”

“I’ve said my piece,” Dan told them, and, taking a sheaf of papers from his pocket, he threw it on the ta ble. “There are the facts and figures, gentlemen. As for fishing, I’m not asking for your instruction.

I’m here for a loan, and you can grant it or not, just as you please.”

With that, he pushed back his chair and stalked out of the room.

Seldon followed him.

“Dan!”

Dan paused in the outer office, the secretaries and bookkeepers watching curiously. Seldon walked with him into the corridor.

“You’re being unreasonable,” he said. “You can’t blow your stack that way.”

“I will not be treated like some hoodlum kid from the Tenderloin.”

“No one is treating you that way. We’re a bank. We have our ways. Now give this some time.”

“I’ve given it some time,” Dan said.

Jean was changing her clothes when Dan got home that evening.

He had time before dinner to play with his son, Thomas, and he rolled on the floor with him, swung him high in his arms, and growled at him, while Miss Wendy Jones looked on without approval. Miss Jones was a shapely, plump Welsh lady of thirty-five who rarely smiled and who never ceased to regard her present circumstances as those of one cast into a primi tive wilderness. She had lied about her antecedents, having worked in London at several homes as a house maid and not as a nursemaid, but she came to

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realize that such distinctions were not terribly important among the elite of San Francisco. Her present employer fasci nated and frightened her—this enormous, impulsive young man, who walked with a rolling gait and whose manners, to her way of thinking, left much to be de sired—an odd match for the beautiful young woman who was his wife. On the other hand, Dan, who still could not comprehend the role of servants, treated her with easy good nature and slapped her behind occasion ally, if only to enjoy the outraged reaction it elicited. His periods of sexual abstinence were increasing, and he toyed with the notion of seducing Miss Jones.

But the opportunities were few and he was still romantically and adolescently in love with Jean.

Now, as so often, playing with the blond-haired, blue-eyed little boy who was his son, he wondered what the hell he, Daniel Lavette, son of a French fisherman and an Italian peasant girl, was doing in this improbable mansion on Russian Hill? Nothing in it gave him the feeling of being his, of belonging to him. The ship mod els and the sea paintings in the library—which Jean re ferred to as his room—were gifts from her parents, with the exception of a splendid Winslow Homer that the Levys had given him as a wedding present; the shelves were filled with books he had never read and had no intention of reading, and the furniture there, as in the rest of the house, had been selected by Jean and her mother. It was true that a Packard touring car that he kept in a garage on the Embarcadero was his own selec tion, but it was bright yellow, and Jean felt it was vul gar, and that if they had a car, it should have been a limousine of some dark and proper color. And Jean’s friends, the second generation of nabobs and the in creasing mixture of artists, writers, and musicians who were moving to Russian Hill, were as alien to him as the furniture, rugs, and knicknacks that had poured into the new house in a steady stream since it was com pleted.

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“You mustn’t excite him too much before his bed time,” Miss Jones said. “Really, Mr. Lavette.”

“You don’t approve of excitement before bedtime.”

“Emphatically not.”

“Oh?” Dan grinned at her. “Try it sometime. It’s got its points.”

At dinner, Jean appeared more withdrawn than usual, and Dan decided to say nothing about what had happened at the bank. He had made up his mind that they would deny him the loan; and if, on an outside chance, they were willing to give him the money, he was no longer sure that he wanted it from the Seldon Bank. He felt that it had been a mistake to approach Seldon in the first place, and Mark agreed with him, telling him, after he had reported what had happened at the meet ing, “You do Tony an injustice when you shy away from him. The Cassalas are bankers. Tony needs people like us. If the shipping venture is a mirage, we should drop it. But if it’s real, let’s go to Tony and talk to him. He deserves that.”

Both Dan and Jean sat in silence. More and more, they would eat in silence, and, still, when he looked at her he felt that he was entitled to no complaint, that the fact of her accepting him as her husband was all he could ask, and that the privilege of sitting opposite her and basking in the perfection of her beauty was enough in itself. Time would change things. She had accepted him wholly once; she would again.

Finally, he said, “It was a damn beautiful day, wasn’t it? I hope you went out for a while.”

“I wish you wouldn’t swear, Dan.”

“Yeah—I’m sorry.”

“I went to lunch at the Fairmont,” she said. “With Marcy Callan.”

And then she added, “We went to Borsin’s and picked out material for the drapes. I’m going to do this whole room over in pastels. I’m so tired of Oriental rugs and this ridiculous period furniture. It’s not Chippen dale and it’s not Queen Anne; I really don’t know what it

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is or why I bought it. I think that if we are going to have antiques, we should have real antiques. We can certainly afford them.”

Dan nodded. He was still trying to place Marcy Cal lan.

“She’s marrying Whittier’s son, right? A kid by the name of John or something?”

“We’ll have to have a party for her. She’s one of my dearest friends.”

“Sure. Nothing I like better than having the Whittiers over here.”

“You’ll endure it.”

“Talking about parties and things,” Dan said, “Feng Wo—he’s my office manager you remember—he’d like us to have dinner with his family.”

“You’re not serious?”

“He asked me today.”

“With Chinks?” she said incredulously.

“Chinese. Don’t call them Chinks, Jean.”

“Why not? You do. I heard you use that word a hundred times.”

“Not lately. Sure I used it. Everyone does. I don’t like it. It’s like calling Mark a sheeny.”