The Immigrants (45 page)

Sam Goldberg was a sentimental man. After all these years, he still kept a photograph of the
Oregon Queen
hanging in his office. His father, then aged fif teen, had come to California in ’52

to dig for gold. He never found gold and settled for a fruit stand in Sacramento, and somehow set aside enough money to send his son to law school. Goldberg had deep loyalties. He was ferociously loyal to and proud of San Francisco, which he never tired of defin-ing as the one and only great city in the United States wherein Jews and Italians and Irish played commanding roles from the very be ginning. He also hotly defended it as the only truly civi lized city on the face of the earth, and he specified Cali fornia as the only place on earth fit for human beings to live.

He had the same loyalty to and love for Dan Lavette and Mark Levy—his oldest continuing clients and now his biggest and most important clients. His partner, Adam Benchly, was four years older than Sam, who was now sixty-two. Benchly, whose father had jumped ship in San Francisco in 1850, had run for mayor once, but was defeated, and had served as district attorney some twenty years before. Unlike Goldberg, he was coldly cynical and sourly suspicious. They made an ex cellent combination. They had worked out in detail the public offering of stock for Levy & Lavette, and now, a pleasant afternoon in April of 1928, they were both of them, Goldberg and Benchly, sitting in Goldberg’s of fice with Dan and Mark.

“The trouble is,” Benchly began, “that you two young fellows have been running this operation like a grocery store. No board of directors, no vice presidents, just Dan here running off like some besotted steer, with Mark trying to hang on to him. Well, God

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damn it, this is no grocery store. You two got yourselves one hell of a big and sprawling operation.”

“We’ve got managers,” Dan said defensively. “We’ve got Anderson in New York and Burroughs at the store, and we’ve got Sidney Cohen in Hawaii.”

“You don’t know what you got,” Benchly snorted. “When you had that Chinaman running things, you could make some sense out of it. Now—good Lord, Sam and I have been trying to make sense out of your books for two months now. Well, we got them in some kind of order. Do you realize that you’ve got an opera tion with maybe twenty million dollars of capital worth and you don’t make a nickel?”

“What about our balance sheets? What about our statements?”

Mark demanded. “We showed half a mil lion clear profit last year.”

“Where is it?”

“In the business. Do you know what this airline is costing us?

And we bought that building on Eleventh Avenue in New York.

We had a floor of offices that cost us more than the taxes, and we have seven floors rented.”

“What Adam is saying,” Goldberg put in, “is that you’ve been very lucky. When you two kids decided to buy the
Oregon Queen
, Adam and I set up a corpora tion for you, and we issued a hundred shares of capital stock, fifty in your name and fifty in Dan’s. That stock is still lying in our office safe. Since then, you been flying, and lady luck rode with you. But the bitter truth is that you don’t own the business. The Seldon Bank is into you for sixteen million.”

“We’re into them.” Dan grinned.

“No, sir,” said Benchly. “They are into you. That’s something you have to understand.”

“Now wait a minute,” Mark said. “We’re issuing a million shares of stock—which represents twenty mil lion dollars. That takes us off the hook, doesn’t it?”

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“Yes and no. Like I said, you’re not running a gro cery store. Sam and I have drawn up a new charter for the corporation. You’re in the big time, and you’ve got to play it like the big time. You have to put together a board of directors. You have a responsibility to your stockholders as management, and you’ve got to exercise it like grown men, not like a couple of kids gone hog wild.”

“Adam, that’s not fair,” Mark protested.

“It’s fair enough.”

“It’s not that we don’t respect you,” Sam Goldberg said. “Our job is to protect you. Right now, if Seldon called his loans, you’d probably be able to cover. Tony Cassala would protect you, and between him and Giannini and maybe with Crocker and Wells Fargo in the picture you’d get out from under. That’s because we’re sailing on milk and honey these days. But suppose the situation changes? All right, we got Cohen, Brady, and Wilkinson to take the underwrit-ing and they’re very confident. At this time next week, you’ll have ten mil lion dollars, less the underwriter’s commission, and you’ll be a publicly owned corporation. But if you insist on retaining fifty-one percent of the stock, you will still be in hock to the bank.”

“We can carry six million easily,” Mark said.

“Not six million. Mark, your idea of paying off ten million of the loan is impossible. We’re in an inflationary situation, with prices skyrocketing. There’s going to be a longshore strike as sure as hell.

You’re going to have trouble with your crews. You can’t go on operat ing without money, and you can’t keep going to Seldon.

Now I hear that Dan is ordering six new planes from the Douglas Company. Where does the money come from?”

“When the time comes—”

“No, sir,” said Benchly. “Either you listen to Sam and me, or we’re out of this.”

“Come on, come on,” Goldberg said. “No ultima tums. Boys, please—we’ve got to play it differently. You’re paying Seldon

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a million and a quarter a year. We want you to put away three million in government paper to cover that, and above all, the debt stays. You don’t go into Seldon or any other bank—not until you can show a realistic profit. Otherwise, you’re playing roulette.”

“That’s all right with me,” Dan agreed. “God Al mighty, we can use that money.”

Mark began to protest, and Dan said, “Mark, we can’t stay still.

This whole country is snowballing. It’s a new era, a new time, a whole damn new civilization.”

“Then we don’t retire any of the loan?” Mark asked.

“Sam and I think three million might go to that. Let the rest of it lay.”

“I bought a stock ticker,” Dan said. “Can you imag ine—never bought a share of stock in my life, and now I got a brand-new classy ticker, all my own.”

Jean had left for England again, this time to attend an auction at Sotheby’s. She had conceived a sudden pas sion for water colors, and Sotheby’s was selling a wide range, from David Cox to John Marin. Thomas was at school in the East, and Barbara was totally devoted to horses. The year before, Dan had made his daughter a gift of a five-year membership in the Menlo Circle Club, a very exclusive riding club in Menlo Park, just outside of Atherton and about thirty miles down the Peninsula, and ever since then she had pleaded with Jean to give her consent to the purchase of a country house at Menlo Park. But Jean was not only averse to a second home; she also expressed the opinion that Menlo Park had become the haven of the newly rich. There had been a time when Jean rode, if infrequently; of late she had taken a dislike to horses and the company they kept—as she put it. Still too young to drive, Barbara

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had become a part of a clique of the boys and girls, be tween sixteen and twenty—she was the youngest one of the group—who raced down to Menlo Park at every opportunity that presented itself.

School had been reduced to a chore that kept her from the stables.

She was a poor student—not because she lacked intelligence, but out of resentment for any thing that kept her from riding. She was a tall, long-limbed girl, five-foot-eight already, very much like her mother in appearance and very much of a stranger to Dan. Not only was he unaware of who she was, but with Jean away, he had no notion of the rules by which she should live. The two of them shared the house with Wendy Jones and the servants. Miss Jones ran the place, planned the meals, and took care of the house hold accounts with money Dan gave her. With the stock offering that turned Levy and Lavette into a publicly held corporation, Dan’s trips to Hawaii, New York, and Detroit became more frequent, and when he was in San Francisco, he would frequently eat dinner downtown and then return to the offices. He saw his daughter only intermittently and salved his conscience with gifts. He took a day off to attend a horse auction in Sonoma County, where he purchased a splendid chestnut mare, which he immediately shipped to Menlo Park. Barbara encountered it the following day at the clubhouse sta bles but curiously enough did not mention it to Dan or even thank him for it until the two of them met in the house one day a week later.

He had to prod, finally asking her whether she liked the horse.

“Oh, yes. It’s a beauty.”

“Did you name her?”

“Her name is Sandy,” Barbara said. “Didn’t you know? You bought her.”

“Funny, I never asked her name of anyone. If I did, I forgot.

I’m sorry.”

“That’s all right.”

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In his mind’s eye, he saw her throwing her arms around him, kissing him, and thanking him effusively; but the reality was a tall, slender, distant person, prop erly polite. When had they last kissed or embraced? He could not remember. He said, suddenly, “How about the two of us going out to dinner?”

“Wendy has dinner here.”

“The hell with Wendy. She can eat alone.”

“I have a party later.”

“All right, I’ll drop you off at your party.”

She agreed without enthusiasm, and when they were in his car, he asked her whether she liked Italian food—aware of how strange the question was, but no stranger than the fact that she spoke not a single word of Italian and probably had never thought of herself as Italian.

“If you wish, sure.”

“There’s a little place on Jones Street where I eat. It’s not very posh, but the pasta is as good as any in the city and better than most—”

“Pasta?”

“Spaghetti, linguini, tortellini.” He wondered whether she had asked the question deliberately. Could she con ceivably not know what the word meant?

Gino welcomed him with delight, wringing his hand. “Danny, two month I don’t see you. Too long.”

“I been away, here and there. This is my daughter, Barbara.”

“So beautiful,” Gino exclaimed. “So tall, so beautiful. I welcome you here. Come, here is your papa’s favorite table.”

She was stiff and cold, looking around the little res taurant with its checked gingham tablecloths with dis taste. Already, Dan realized that it had been a mistake to bring her here. Why had he ever imagined that she would like the place?

Gino led them to the table, pulled out the chair for Barbara with as sweeping and courtly a gesture as he could manage. Oblivious to

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her reaction, he was beam ing with delight. “What do you think, Danny,” he said, “Al Smith, he gonna make it?”

“I raised a hundred and sixty thousand dollars of San Francisco money that says so.”

“What’s he like?”

“He’s a smart boy from the streets. I like him. Tell you something, Gino, when he comes out to San Fran cisco, I’m going to bring him here. That’s a promise.”

When Gino left, Barbara said, “Why do you let him call you Danny?”

“Because he’s an old friend.”

“Does Mother know you’re backing Al Smith?”

“I suppose so. Why?”

“Because she despises him. So does Grandpa.”

“Well, that’s their right, isn’t it? I don’t think we should talk politics. There are too many other things to talk about, and I don’t think you know enough about this election anyway.”

“You don’t think I know much about anything, do you?”

“Now why do you say that?”

“Well, why did you bring me here? You think I don’t know about this place? Well, I do. This is where you go with your Chinese mistress.”

“What! What in hell are you talking about?”

“Just what I said.”

“How do you know that?” he whispered.

“Mother told me.”

He closed his eyes and fought to control himself. Then he said, very slowly, “I don’t intend to discuss that with you. We will eat our dinner here, because Gino is an old friend and he would be deeply hurt if we left. There are some things you don’t understand.”

“I’m sure there are,” she said tightly.

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“There are no virgins,” Timothy Kelly said to Spizer. “I know.

I been there. The whole notion is a con invented by some crazed white Protestant-god-merchant. This is me speaking, Marty. I must have humped three hundred broads in my time, and I tell you there is no such thing.”

“You been there? Baby, I been there. It was as bloody as the Battle of Verdun. This tomato is twenty-three years old, and she’s a virgin. Jesus God, I don’t want to go through that again. I had to feed her a pint of rotgut in ginger ale—you and your stinking smart ideas. Then when it’s over she throws up all over me, blood and vomit and the tears, all mixed up. That’s be yond the call of duty. I shoulda given her a shot in the head. No, sir. Not Marty—the last of the good guys.”

“You’re all heart,” Kelly said.

“You’re goddamn right. Then she says to me, with the tears, ‘I don’t know if I can marry you, Marty, I don’t know if I’m in love with you—’”

“That is not a bad idea, Marty.”

“You bite your tongue, you little sonofabitch. It just happens that I am married, which is the only protection a guy has in this world.

And if you weren’t such a mis erable little motherfucker, you’d be in the front line in stead of me. I don’t like that little bitch.”

“Don’t blow this, Marty. It’s the one chance we got to get out from under that lousing acting school.”

“There are easier ways to earn a buck.”

“You didn’t walk out on her?”

“You’re talking to a gentleman. I cleaned her up. We took showers.

That’s one hell of an apartment her old man pays for. I turned on all the Spizer charm. I con vinced her that she’s going to be a star. Look, just let me play it my own way—give it another few days.”