The Immigrants (7 page)

“To say to me, you, you who are like a father to me—I don’t want your help. How can he do that to me?”

“Ask him.”

“Not that he gets the loan. That cold Irish bastard would take his heart’s blood first.”

“The Seldons aren’t Irish, Tony.”

“The same thing. Who are his people, the Seldons?”

The next day, unable to contain himself, Cassala drove his gig down to the Embarcadero. Dan Lavette’s boats were unloading, and Dan himself was raging at a commission merchant.

“Rotten fish! So help me God, you say that word again, and I’ll spread you over this dock! Who the hell do you think you are, coming up here from San Mateo to tell me my fish are rotten!

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Where’s your ice? You cheap bastards skimp on the ice and then tell us we sell rotten fish! Look at my fish—they’re half alive. I sell my catch when we dock, not the next day. Ah, get to hell out of here. I don’t need your business.”

He caught sight of Cassala then, turned on his heel, and stalked over to the gig.

“Danny, Danny, you got a short temper,” Cassala said. “That’s no way to do business. You make ene mies.”

“Screw the bastard! I don’t want his business.”

“You don’t want mine either, do you, Danny?”

“What are you talking about?”

“The loan you go to Seldon for.”

“So you heard about that. From that loudmouth Angelo who works at Seldon’s bank.”

“That’s right. And what for you go to Seldon? Who lend you the money for the fishing boats?”

“You did, Tony, and I’m into you up to my neck. I got this crazy scheme to buy a coastal lumber ship. Sup pose I come to you, and you got to say no—and even if you were dumb enough to go along with me, I wouldn’t take it. Tony, believe me.”

“I believe you, Danny. But come to me, yes?”

“We’ll see.”

Dan strode over to the dock, where his men were un loading the catch of crabs into bushel baskets. He picked up one of the baskets of crabs and then walked back and stowed it in the boot of the gig.

“Danny, you are a crazy man,” Cassala said. “Who can eat a bushel of crab?”

“Your wife, your kids, your relatives—I never seen less than ten at your table.”

“Then you come to dinner, Danny.”

“Tomorrow. But no business talk. Just forget about that whole Seldon thing.”

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Cassala drove off and Lavette walked down the wharf to his shack.

Upstairs and downstairs, the place was spotless. Feng Wo had taken over, not only as bookkeeper but as houseboy and cook. The smell of fresh coffee permeated the place, and as Dan entered, Feng Wo leaped up from his place at the desk.

“Lunch in ten minutes, Mr. Lavette. As soon as you change and clean up.”

“Listen, Feng—you don’t have to cook my lunch. That’s not in the deal.”

“Please, I enjoy it. You eat hash and beans out of cans, Mr.

Lavette, and you’ll ruin your digestion. My word, you bring in hundreds of tons of fresh fish, and you never eat a piece of fish yourself.”

“I hate fish.”

“I’ll cook you a Chinese omelet. It won’t take but a few minutes. Yes?”

“Suit yourself.”

The omelet was delicious. Dan ate quickly and hun grily, getting rid of the food rather than savoring it, and then, as he left the place, he told Feng Wo that he would be back in an hour or so.

He walked down the Embarcadero to Market Street, and there he entered the first men’s tailoring establishment he came to.

“I need a suit,” he told the tailor. “A good suit—a suit with some class and some distinction. Do you know what I’m talking about?

Forget what I look like now. I’m a boatman, and these are my working clothes. I want a suit for Nob Hill, quiet—no fancy checks or stripes, just quiet class. And I want it to fit me.”

“My name is Pincus,” the tailor said.

“Lavette. Now do you get my drift, Mr. Pincus?”

“I think so, Mr. Lavette. I’ll show you the cloth and you can pick out the material and the style.”

“Wait a minute. I need it in three days.”

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“Three days? Impossible.”

“Nothing is impossible.”

“Three days—it’s got to cost.”

“How much?”

“At least a hundred dollars. Depends on the material you select.”

“I paid six dollars for the last suit I bought.”

“Ready-made.” Pincus shrugged.

“All right—three days. Let’s get to it.”

At the age of seventeen, when his father and mother died, Dan Lavette abandoned all thought of school. During the two years that followed, he came to know the fishermen on the wharf, not as a kid who rode his father’s boat as crew but as one of them. He was the youngest of the lot. They liked him; they helped him; they got him drunk for the first time and they took him to his first whorehouse, and they accepted him as one of them, and when they tried to bully him, he fought them with a ferocity that won him his place as a man in a rough, crude man’s world; yet he never became a fisher man as such. He won his place but maintained himself as an outsider. The fishermen were Italian and Portuguese and Mexican and Yankee, and some of them owned their own boats and others worked on shares, but they all had in common the fact that they were fish ermen and they grew old as fishermen, their hands brown and horny, their brown faces as lined and tough as old leather.

He was nineteen when he came to the decision that the difference between Nob Hill and the Embarcadero was the difference between those who owned the boats and those who worked the boats. He decided that life was a plan and a schedule, just as a day’s crabbing was a plan and a schedule. He rented the shack on the waterfront, fixed it up, and moved out of the Cassala house,

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quieting the woeful fears of Maria Cassala that life with the bums and whores on the coast would de stroy him. He had no intention of being destroyed. A few months after he moved in, he bought the shack that he had made his home and his office for a thousand dollars in cash against a mortgage. He learned to keep a set of books. He borrowed from Anthony Cassala’s bank, mortgaging his boat to buy a second boat, and then mortgaging that to buy a third. He stopped drink ing after a dozen drunken sprees, not because he was afraid that he couldn’t handle the liquor and not for any moral reasons, but because drunk in a whorehouse, he had been rolled for two hundred and forty-five dollars in cash that he had in his pocket, and then decided that profit and loss did not match. The Barbary Coast, he decided, was a sucker’s game, a stupid delusion for kids in the bodies of adults; there were no paths from there to Nob Hill, and at nineteen he had had his fill of wasted, middle-aged whores and maudlin drunks and cheap con men, and fishermen who worked their back sides to the bone six days a week and then blew it all for one night on the Coast. He knew what he wanted; he wanted Nob Hill.

And this night, he was on the Hill, dressed in a gray sharkskin suit that fitted his massive bulk, wearing new black shoes, black socks, a white shirt, and a tie of mid night blue. He saw and observed and learned, and as he walked through the gateposts and up to the front door of the Seldon house, he examined and assessed the place, a Victorian mansion of redwood and gray stone. He was impressed yet not unaware of the gaudiness and ugliness of the place; and he felt that if he had put the same kind of money into the building of a Nob Hill cas tle, he would have done it differently. How he would have done it, he didn’t know; but the very fact that he sensed an aspect of vulgarity gave him assurance.

The butler who opened the door raised a brow. “Your coat, sir?”

He was hatless and coatless, indiffer ent to the weather. He made a

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note of his error. As he glanced around the foyer, at the big staircase leading up to the second floor, the double doors on either side, the view through the glass doors at the back of the foyer to the potted plant wilderness of a conservatory, the dark bronze sculptures in the foyer, the marble floor and banister, the huge, almost awesome crystal chandelier hanging overhead, the two enormous ugly Gothic chairs on either side the staircase, he felt impressed yet not deflated, more as if he were in a store and taking stock. He neither approved nor disapproved; he simply filed an impression for a time when his judgment would al low him to assess it.

The butler, a portly, middle-aged man in livery, opened one of the double doors on the right. Since he had not asked for a name— somewhat surprisingly, for Dan had visions of his reading a formal announce ment—Dan concluded that he had been expected and described. He stood for a moment awkwardly, looking at a brightly lit living room, a grand piano, a harp, two enormous couches, overstuffed chairs, a huge Persian rug and five people: Seldon, who came forward to meet him, two older women, a man in his fifties, and a young woman who Dan, with only a glimpse of her face, felt was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen.

Seldon shook his hand. “Delighted, Lavette. Glad to see you.

Welcome to my home.” He then made the in troductions: “This is my wife, Mrs. Seldon—Daniel Lavette.” A tall, handsome woman; not friendly, simply courteous with a touch of the dubious as she extended a limp hand. “And Mrs. Whittier.” No hand at all this time, just a nod from a stout, tightly corseted woman, whose white satin gown was sewn over with hundreds of small pearls. “And this is Mr. Whittier. Mr. Daniel Lavette.” A small man with a waxed mustache; he, like Seldon, wore a dinner jacket and a black tie, a fact of which Dan was now painfully aware. He examined Dan with interest and curiosity and shook hands heartily.

On Dan’s part, he was unable to tear his eyes away from Jean

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Seldon, who sat in one corner of one of the great couches, her blue gown intensifying the pale blue of her eyes, watching him, just the faintest flicker of a smile on her lips. “My daughter, Miss Jean Seldon. And this is Daniel Lavette.”

He tried to think of something to say, something he had read, something he had heard—pleased, delighted, overwhelmed, he felt a sick, empty pit in his stomach—or simply
how do you do
; yet no words would come, and he said nothing. Then she gave him her hand, a large, shapely, long-fingered hand yet lost in his own. He held it a moment and then let go.

“I’ve heard so much about you, Mr. Lavette,” she said. “You made quite an impression on my father. I can see why.”

He took it as a compliment and mumbled a thank you. The smile turned to light laughter. Was she laugh ing at him? The butler appeared at his elbow and asked what he would like to drink. He would have refused a drink, but the other men were drinking, and after a mo ment’s hesitation, he said that he would have a whiskey and soda. Jean Seldon watched him intently. He was conscious of her scrutiny. “Why don’t you sit down and tell me about yourself, Mr. Lavette?” she asked. Her manner of speech, her ease, so different from the easy intimacy of the dance-hall girls or the stiff shyness of the girls he met at Cassala’s house, was marvelous and new and intriguing. But now Seldon had taken his arm.

“Dan—you don’t mind if I call you Dan; I’m old enough to be your father—Whittier here’s the president of California Shipping.

He’s too fat and rich. He needs some young competition.”

Jean Seldon smiled at him and watched. The smile relinquished him for the moment, but it also established her proprietary interest for the evening. It said,
You’re released for the moment, but only for the
moment
; and he nodded slightly, the thought flashing through his head that this was what he had been looking for and dreaming of, this and nothing else.

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“I hear you’re planning to buy the
Oregon Queen
, young man.”

“Yes, I am.”

“She’s been nothing but trouble and bad luck since Swenson had her built. Oh, I’m not against iron lumber ships. I’ve ordered three to be built for my own flag, but it takes time and research and planning.

Swenson jumped into his, and it’s been nothing but trouble and disaster. That’s why he docked it, and that’s why he’s trying to sell it.”

“I’ve seen the ship,” Dan said. He addressed Whittier, but he was talking to her. She smiled and listened.

“What do you know about iron ships?”

“Not much. I know the
Queen
is two hundred and forty feet long, and I know her twin screws are out of sync, and I think I know what has to be done with them. She’s eighteen hundred gross tons, and she’ll carry a million and a half board feet of lumber.

She blew a boiler and her engine room’s a mess, but her engine’s good. I’ll put new boilers on the main deck, abaft the engines, two boilers instead of one, and they’ll never blow again.”

“Boilers on the main deck?” Whittier exclaimed. Jean Seldon was smiling now, her father listening in tently. “She’ll be top-heavy.

You’ll lose her the first time out.”

“No, sir. My arithmetic’s nothing to write home about, but I’ve done the calculations, and she will not be top-heavy. Also, when I take out her boiler, I’ll have cargo space for another hundred and fifty thousand board feet.”

“I’ll tell you this, Mr. Lavette,” Whittier snapped. “You’ll not have me for a passenger.”

Unable to keep from grinning, Dan told him he was not thinking of passengers yet. “That’s in the future, sir. I’m thinking that an iron ship can take a deadweight cargo, cement, salt, sugar, sand, so I’m not bound hand and foot by the lumber season or the lumber barons. And I’m not tied to the Redwood Coast. I can take cargo from as high up as Oregon.”

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“You seem damn sure of yourself for a man your age.”

“I’m as old as I can be at my age,” Dan said. “I don’t know very much, but I know the water.”

The butler entered to announce that dinner was being served, and Mrs. Seldon interrupted to say that the very least they could do would be to save their business dis cussions until after they had dined. Watching, wary of error, Dan waited. Seldon took his wife’s arm, and Whittier his wife’s. Dan waited. Jean rose. “You will take me into dinner, Mr. Lavette?”