Calico Palace (46 page)

He had many chances. With so much riffraff pouring through the Golden Gate, crimes of all sorts were increasing. Honest folk wanted an adequate prison. The only one they had was a small building left over from the quiet days, so ramshackle that bad men had little trouble breaking out. Several leading citizens had advised that the town buy one of the deserted vessels, anchor it a safe distance from shore, and let convicts serve their sentences there. Mr. Chase asked Captain Pollock if he would sell the
Cynthia
for this.

Turn the
Cynthia
into a jail? Pollock was so outraged that Mr. Chase reported, “For a minute I thought he was going to knock me down.”

Dwight Carson offered to buy the
Cynthia
for a business building. Again, Pollock refused.

Mr. Fenway had another idea. The coastwise vessels did a thriving business bringing in food and lumber and firewood. It was not too hard to find sailors for these short voyages, if only because men wanted to earn a grubstake for the mines. Mr. Fenway said Pollock might go into the coastwise trade.

Pollock would not. He would take his ship home, or nowhere.

When Loren came back from Oregon he told Kendra he believed Pollock could at least make a start on his homeward voyage if he really wanted to. A few of the most determined captains were doing it. Nearly every week the
Alta
reported the sailing of some vessel bound for Mazatlan or Callao or some other port down the Pacific Coast. True, they were sailing with scanty crews, often including such men as the captains would never have accepted anywhere else. Loren did not suggest that Pollock try to double the Horn with a makeshift crew. But he did say that if Pollock would take what he could get, and put to sea, with any luck at all he could reach a port where he could find competent seamen.

At the advice that he insult the
Cynthia
with what he called “the sweepings of the waterfront,” Pollock was angrier than before.

Pollock would not, in fact, listen to anything Loren had to say. While he had been friendly toward Loren and Kendra during his first days in port, now that his sailors had left him he was friendly no longer. Loren was the enemy who had let Marny board the
Cynthia.
As for Kendra, it was bad enough that she should have married Loren; but when he learned of her friendship with Marny, it seemed to Pollock that she had betrayed his trust.

The
Cynthia
stayed where she was, among the lost ships. Day after day Pollock paced up and down the waterfront, watching her slowly rot on the water.

It was deliberate self-torture, and also it was a kind of triumph. If life would not give him what he wanted, life would get nothing from him. He, Captain Enos Pollock, would make no compromise. He was a man of iron will. He would do what he set out to do, or nothing.

To Kendra, it simply did not make sense. It made no sense to Marny, nor to Hiram and Pocket. During the summer Hiram and Pocket came to San Francisco several times. Each time they looked to see if the
Cynthia
was still there. She was.

“Pollock’s a fool,” Hiram said bluntly, as he and Pocket and Kendra talked it over in Kendra’s parlor. He ran his hand over his turbulent hair. “You know,” he went on, “a lot of this stuff called ‘strength of character’ is nothing but plain muleheadedness.”

Kendra agreed.

“And what’s he got against Marny?” asked Hiram.

Kendra made little pleats in the handkerchief lying on her knee. “On the way from Honolulu,” she said, “Marny and Captain Pollock had a quarrel. I know what they quarreled about because she told me. Maybe some day she’ll tell you.”

“And until then,” Pocket said, “I suppose it’s none of our business.”

“I suppose so,” said Kendra.

The men yielded good-naturedly. Kendra suspected that they would guess the truth, if they had not already done so. After a moment Pocket remarked,

“Poor captain. I’m sorry for him.”

“I was,” said Kendra. “I’m not any more. Hiram’s right. He’s a fool.”

“He is,” Pocket agreed gently. “That’s why I’m sorry for him.”

Other people wondered in vain why Pollock blamed Marny for his ship’s disaster. Pollock’s outburst in the store had been described with gusto by the men who had been there, but they could not explain it. Messrs. Chase and Fenway wondered too. When they—or anyone else—asked Pollock, he would answer only, “That woman is evil. She brought evil aboard my ship. And now my ship is dying.”

Messrs. Chase and Fenway, both practical men, did not know what he was talking about.

When men asked Marny why Pollock did not like her, she gave them the same answer she had given Foxy. “He thinks red-haired women bring bad luck.”

Some of them believed her. This answer was as sensible as any other.

However, both Kendra and Marny had much to think of besides Captain Pollock and the
Cynthia.

Kendra was concerned with her coming baby. She felt well, and Loren’s loving delight was like a cloak around her. She bought a crib, and cloth for little sheets and blankets, which she hemmed with slow awkward stitches while Serena made baby clothes with quick deft hands that Kendra envied. While Kendra envied Serena for her skill, Serena envied Kendra for her baby. Serena wanted another baby to replace the one who had died on the plains. Kendra promised, “When my baby outgrows these clothes I’ll give them to you.” But Serena protested, “Oh no! You’ll want to save these for the next one.”

Marny was concerned with the Calico Palace. Besides the furniture, she and Norman were choosing dealers, croupiers, musicians, bartenders. The artist Bruno Gregg was proving himself adept at painting women in all sorts of tempting attitudes. The building was nearly done, and Marny was aglow with joyful impatience. Several of her friends asked if she was going to change the name, now that the walls were brick instead of calico. Marny shook her head. Like most gamblers, Marny had a streak of superstition. She had been lucky in the Calico Palace and she was not going to tempt fate.

But though happily occupied, Kendra and Marny agreed vehemently that the city of gold was no easy place to live in.

Every day San Francisco was growing richer, dirtier, more stinky, and more packed with people. Except for a few who had made their way by land from Oregon or Mexico, so far all the Forty-niners had come by sea. But now the wagons that had left the States last spring were beginning to arrive. Some of the newcomers went directly to the mines, but not all of them had brought enough money to pay California prices for their picks and shovels and salt pork. They came to town to earn their grubstakes, and they could find no place to live. Angrily they wrote home that they had to sleep on the ground, stifling in the dust.

This was true, though seldom did people put up shelters with such speed as the people of San Francisco were doing it now. The hills were a wilderness of tents—big tents, little tents, sturdy tents, and tents quickly torn to pieces by the wind. Captain Pollock had brought a few readymade houses; now other captains were bringing them by scores. With half a dozen workmen, Dwight Carson could set up such a house in a day, and the residents—usually six or seven to a room—could move in the day after. They would not be comfortable, but at least they would have some protection from the dust. Now in the summer of 1849 the people of San Francisco were nearly smothering in the dust.

As long as they had had an occasional shower, the dust had been merely a nuisance. But since June they had had no more showers. They had only the dust.

The dust was dark and ugly. It was so deep that when you went outdoors you felt as if you were walking through a pile of feathers. Kendra reached down one day and stroked her hand through the dust. Against her fingers it had a velvety feeling, like fine flour.

Sometimes Kendra thought wistfully of the country back home, where they had rain all the year round. But it was no use to wish for rain. Here in the California summer they might get a spatter—though this was rare enough—but as for real rain, Mr. Fenway warned her sadly that they were not going to see any before November, maybe not before December, so she might as well stop wishing.

Every day was like the day before.

In the night the fog crept in from the sea. When she woke in the morning the fog lay on the town in a clammy wad. Sometimes it was so thick that she could not see the houses across the street; sometimes she could find the sun, a cold ball of light behind the fog. If Kendra had to go out she went now, before noon, and when she came in she and Serena closed the doors and windows and shut every drawer. Serena even wanted to cover the keyholes.

Early in the afternoon the wind began. The wind blew away the fog; and mercifully, said Serena, it blew away the smells. But the wind raised the dust in clouds higher than the chimneys. Every morning Kendra and Serena rubbed the furniture till it shone; by dark they could draw pictures on every chair and table in the house.

Last year during the rainless months the town had been dusty, but last year there had been less traffic and fewer people to stir the dust. And this year the people themselves were making it even worse than it had to be.

These men of San Francisco were the most impatient men on earth. They had come here to get rich and they were wasting no time about it. They said San Francisco had too many hills and too little flat ground. They said the water close to shore was too shallow. So, cut off the hilltops and throw them into the bay. Do it now. They would raise a few more tons of dust, but who cared?

They set big mule-drawn scoops to cut down the hills. Every day the scoops tore deeper into the hillsides, and every afternoon as the wind came sweeping around these hills, the dust rose. If you went outdoors the dust blew into your eyes and nose and throat, it choked you and sent tears streaming down your cheeks. It got into your hair like cobwebs. It got inside your clothes and crawled on your skin.

But already the men who cut down the hills had filled in the lagoon where an arm of the bay used to cut across Montgomery Street. Now they were filling the cove in front of town, pushing the waterfront out toward the deep water and making town lots where no lots existed before. Dwight Carson had bought several of these “water lots,” as they were called, and Marny said to Kendra, “He’s going to be
really
rich before long. Some smart girl is going to marry him and do nothing but spend money the rest of her life.”

In the white mornings, before the dust rose, Marny still found leisure to climb the hill and keep Kendra informed of doings around the plaza. All along Kearny Street and the cross-streets on both sides of the plaza, buildings were going up with breathtaking speed. Marny said they would be restaurants, hotels, gambling houses “—and,” said Marny, “
houses.
”

She told Kendra one of these new buildings, on Washington Street overlooking the plaza, was occupied by Norman and Rosabel’s friend Blossom.

“Blossom has several more flowers in her garden now,” said Marny. “Mostly from New Orleans. I’m told her business is fantastic.”

Kendra was not surprised. The harbormaster kept a careful count of the passengers who disembarked at San Francisco. His figures were published once a month in the
Alta,
and the ratio averaged one woman to thirty-seven men.

Marny liked to come up the hill. This was not only because she enjoyed Kendra’s friendship, but because—as she herself said frankly—it was a pleasure to spend an hour or two in such comfort. Kendra had everything gold dust would buy.

While firewood was scarce, charcoal from China was abundant, so Loren put braziers in all the rooms, to protect her from the chill of the fogs. He brought her books and sheet music from the bookshop recently opened in the City Hotel, and the newspapers brought by the steamers. Then in late summer Loren joined the other residents of Washington Street in providing the two greatest luxuries of the year. First, they hired workmen to lay a plank sidewalk that led up from Kearny Street to the top of the hill. Second, they bought a sprinkler wagon that watered the street every morning before the wind raised the dust.

Marny told Kendra that Blossom had made a liberal contribution toward both these civic improvements. “They go past her place,” said Marny. “Good for business. Expensive, but worth it.”

Kendra knew they had been expensive, though Loren would not tell her how much he had paid as his share. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m not spending anything I haven’t got. I don’t believe in debt.” He smiled down at her, adding fondly, “I can take care of my family.”

As always, he spoke the last word with pride. His hand on her shoulder, he bent and kissed the arrow of hair on her forehead.

All of a sudden, Kendra had a feeling of being
caught.
That kiss of Loren’s was saying, “You are my dearest treasure.” That hand on her shoulder said, “I will never let you go.”

When Loren had left her, for a long time she walked up and down the room, asking herself—Why do I feel like this? Haven’t I got everything I want? Everything I ought to want?

Yes, she thought, she had everything she
ought
to want. She had robust health. The doctor said he had never seen a woman have an easier pregnancy. Her child would be fine and strong, and she would have the joy of giving it the love nobody had given her when she was a child herself and had wanted it so much.

She had a home admired by every woman who came into it, and every man too. She had genuine friends. She had a husband who adored her, and who was one of the most highly respected men in town. So what else did she want?

—I ought to be ashamed of myself, Kendra thought sternly. I
am
ashamed of myself. Half the women in the world would envy me right now. And the other half? Oh,
stop
this! Mrs. Chase says every woman expecting a baby gets odd fancies now and then. The best way to manage them is to get busy and do something. There’s the wind. I’ll make sure Serena has closed all the windows.

Even with the plank sidewalk and the sprinkler wagon, they still shut up the house every afternoon because dust blew in from other streets not so well cared for. Serena had closed the windows, but one window in the parlor was slightly stiff and she had not quite brought the sash all the way down to the sill. Kendra could see light through the slit at the bottom. As she started to draw the sash down the rest of the way, a little tremor ran over her nerves. Why did that slit make her think of light seen through the bars of a cage?