Calico Palace (48 page)

For three hours the rain came down. When Loren and Ralph came home the downpour had stopped, but the clouds were gathering again. Both men wore high rubber boots they had procured from the stock of Chase and Fenway. They said the mud on Montgomery Street was ankle deep, and the plaza was like a lake of black oatmeal.

Loren said tons of merchandise, stacked outdoors because nobody had dreamed of rain so early, had been drenched and ruined. Men of business were not only astonished, they were angry, as if Nature had played a mean trick on them. Rain in the first half of October just wasn’t right.

Right or not, the rain began again the next morning, and this time it poured all day. The mud was so thick that except on the rare plank sidewalks every step was an effort, and in some places the mud even buried the sidewalks. Men living in tents were miserable, and many of those living under roofs were not much better off, for the rain seeped in through the cracks.

The rain had blocked Kendra’s view of the bay, but when Loren came in he told her the steamer
California
had come in from the Isthmus this morning. She had brought American newspapers, and three hundred and thirty-nine passengers. “And most of them,” Loren said laughing, “took one look and wished they had stayed home.”

For days, people talked about the unseasonable rain. Mr. and Mrs. Chase, who had lived five years in San Francisco, said they had never seen anything like it. Mr. Fenway, who had lived here eight years and was one of the oldest Yankee inhabitants, said such early rain was unwholesome, and he sadly prophesied colds and consumption this winter. The native Californios said the Yankees had brought their own wretched climate with them.

At every bar around the plaza, men began announcing that they had choked in the dust and bogged in the mud and they were sick of it and they were going home.

The steamboat line was well organized now. A steamer left San Francisco every month, bound for the Isthmus, and when passengers reached the other side another steamer met them and took them to their home ports on the Atlantic Coast.

But up to now, while the steamers had always been packed with people on the voyages to California, they had gone back half empty. Now, however, for the first time, the steamboat office sold so many tickets for the homeward voyage that the crewmen said every berth on the
California
was taken and men would be sleeping on deck.

Then, all of a sudden, the sun began to shine.

The mud dried. The air turned balmy. The wind was merely a pleasant breeze, and because of the lingering dampness there was no more dust. In such delightful weather everybody wanted to go outdoors. Women went shopping, and men lined the streets to watch them pass. Boys roamed about selling walnuts from Chile, and strange delicious candies from Hong Kong, and an exciting new luxury, oranges from Honolulu.

There was another grand fancy ball at the Bella Union. Near the plaza a tent shot up, with a sign saying “Rowe’s Olympic Circus.” Mr. Rowe presented a circus he had brought out from the States, a real circus with clowns and acrobats and trained horses, and even two well-shaped female performers. The ladies disappointed their admirers by being married, the tightrope dancer to her partner and the bareback rider to Mr. Rowe himself, but they were live women, and men crowded the benches to look at them.

All over town, tents and shacks were coming down and threestory buildings rising to take their places. Chase and Fenway began putting up a new store next door to the old one. Loren said they were going to tear down the old store and replace it with a warehouse.

“I’ll miss it,” said Kendra, but even as she spoke she laughed at herself. In San Francisco it was absurd to waste your thoughts on anything from last year. It was all you could do to keep up with the here and now. The sun poured out of the blue sky, the whole town clinked with gold, and the men who had bought tickets home began to change their minds.

Sipping chocolate with Kendra, Marny said a few men were still planning to leave, but many more wished they had not been in such a hurry. They wanted to return their tickets to the steamboat line. This could be done, but it was a tedious process, so the hasty buyers were offering their tickets for sale around town.

“Is anybody buying them?” asked Kendra.

“Certainly,” said Marny. Her green eyes had a mischievous flash.

Kendra asked, “Who?” She was not surprised when Marny answered,

“Me.”

Kendra began to laugh. Marny set her cup on the table beside her and looked out at the sparkling day.

“Kendra,” she said, “I’m a gambler. We may not get much rain this winter, but even with a little rain this town can be mighty disagreeable. I’m gambling on the chance that it’ll be disagreeable enough to put up the price of steamboat tickets.”

Kendra remembered the mud flowing down the hill after a storm of only two days. “You’re a smart business-woman,” she said.

Marny smiled. “Then you don’t think I’m wicked?”

“No,” said Kendra.

“Some people would,” Marny reminded her.

“I’m not ‘some people,’” Kendra retorted. “I’m me. I know what I think, and I think it’s no more wrong to buy tickets and hold them for a rise than to buy city lots and hold them.”

Marny took up her cup again and sipped the chocolate. “That’s what I like about you, Kendra. You do your own thinking and make up your own mind.”

“That’s what I have a head for,” Kendra said laughing.

But even as she laughed, she knew she was not going to tell Loren about Marny’s buying up those steamer tickets. Loren would not approve. It was only one more incident to remind her that her own spirit was closer to the Calico Palace than to this demure little cottage where she lived. She had let herself be caught between them. She had let herself turn into a halfway person, and she did not like it, and she did not know how to wrench herself free.

A
T NOON ON THE
first of November the steamer
California
puffed her way through the Golden Gate and turned toward the Isthmus. As usual on her southbound voyages half her berths were empty. The day was bright, and sunbeams danced around the vessels in the bay. That afternoon Marny went to Chase and Fenway’s and locked up her steamboat tickets in the little safe she kept there to hold her own private hoard of coins. Marny never paid for anything with coins unless it was something so rare and necessary that the seller could demand coins instead of gold dust. She put coins into her safe. You knew what coins were worth. You never could tell about gold dust, not in San Francisco.

She went back to the Calico Palace along the plank sidewalk that the gamblers had built on Kearny Street. She dealt cards until shortly after midnight, then she climbed the stairs to her little room on the third floor and went to bed. Unlike the Bella Union and some other resorts around the plaza, the Calico Palace did not stay open till dawn. Marny and Norman had observed that most of the disorders in these places occurred in the early morning hours, when the serving men were tired and the drinking men drunk. They closed early, and kept the peace.

By this time Marny was used to the plaza noise and slept through it fairly well. But the next morning a different sort of noise woke her up. She raised herself on her elbow, hearing the howl of wind, and vessels creaking as the waves rose and knocked them around. When she looked out she saw that the brightness of the past few weeks had gone. The clouds were thick, and as the day went on they grew thicker, until the Blackbeards had to light the chandeliers in the gambling rooms so the players could see the cards. In the late afternoon the storm broke.

The rain poured all night. It poured all the next day, and the next and the next and the next. It poured every day for two weeks. Once in a while it would pause for an hour or so, long enough for people to look up at the sky and say hopefully, “Don’t you think it might clear now?” But they hardly had time to patch a leak before the rain started again.

The mud rolled in torrents down the hills. Behind them the torrents left open gulfs that filled with water. In level places the ground soaked up all the water it could. When it could hold no more, great dark pools lay about, and stayed there. In places men laid planks across the pools to serve as bridges, but their work was wasted. After a few hours the planks went down into the mud, out of sight.

The whole town tottered in a sea of mud. The best of the plank sidewalks had been laid on piles, and these could still be used if you wore thick boots and were very careful. But it was not easy, because the sidewalks were so narrow that when two persons met they could barely pass each other without stepping off into the slush.

Except on these rare sidewalks men waded in mud to their knees, swearing tiredly as they slogged along. Sometimes they stumbled, and nearly choked in the mud before they could get up.

In places the mud was six feet deep. Wagons stuck. The mules kicked and strained, bogging deeper as they fought to get out. Sometimes they went down and smothered to death. Their owners tried to drag the bodies away, but the stenches that rose over the mud suggested that some of the carcasses had gone out of sight and were still there. The wagons went down until the wheels could no longer be seen, and nobody tried to move them.

Chase and Fenway advertised rubber coats and hats and boots, rubber tents for men to live in, rubber sheets to cover the beds they tried to sleep in or to tack on the leaky roofs they had to live under. But much as these were needed, few men could reach the store to buy them. Montgomery Street was a sea of mud, black and deep and dangerous, and cut with runnels of rain that made it deeper every hour.

Mr. Fenway had an idea.

“Let’s bury some of this trash from New York,” he said. “That’ll make the street solid enough to walk on.”

He and Mr. Chase and their helpers set to work. Before long other businessmen up and down the liquid streets were following their example, dragging out bales and barrels of merchandise and sinking them into the mud so the customers could walk.

They all had plenty of stuff that was good for nothing else. For months past, half the vessels that came into the bay had been bringing cargoes of expensive rubbish. Most shippers in the States knew nothing about San Francisco except that it was a town full of gold, and they had not bothered to find out anything else. They had sent out silver-mounted carriage harness for mules dragging wagons up the hills; ruffled white shirts and kid dancing slippers for men who needed overalls and knee-high boots for gold digging; mahogany beds and marble-topped dressing tables for a town where most men slept on shelves in flophouses, with bugs and rats and twenty or thirty other men all breathing the same air; baby beds and rocking chairs and parlor stoves for a town that had hardly a dozen family homes; and tons of bonnets and ribbons and silken fripperies for women who weren’t there. Messrs. Chase and Fenway and their friends, who had been supposed to sell these things on commission, now dragged them out and let them slide into the mud.

Men who did not own stores came in, bought piles of this trumpery at low prices, and used it to fill their own streets. At the corner where Kearny Street met Washington, Norman and his gambling friends sank a double line of stoves. The stoves went down easily and made a firm pathway so men could cross from one plank sidewalk to the other.

Swathed in rubber clothes, carrying lunches in rubber bags, Loren and Ralph and Mr. Chase went down the hill and back every day. Mr. Fenway, who had no family to go home to, slept in the store. Often in the evenings, dripping and determined in his boots and raincoat, he walked up to Kearny Street, crossed on the line of stoves, and made his way to the Calico Palace. Here he warmed himself with a few drinks and heard Rosabel play the piano.

The Calico Palace was still doing a good business. It was a bright and cheerful spot. Many men besides Mr. Fenway preferred to kick their way through the mud than to stay in the wretched lodgings where most of them had to live.

As for Marny, she too was damp and cold. Her bedroom was drafty, her clothes seemed never dry, and her meals—brought in from the restaurant next door—were soggy when they reached her. But she had the inner warmth of the gambler who has guessed right. During her breaks from the card table Marny sat in her dismal little room, sipping warmed over coffee and listening to the rain. Thump, thump, rub-a-dub, pour, rattle, rain, rain, rain. As she listened, she knew that every day of it was making her steamboat tickets worth more than they had been worth the day before.

She did not try to see Kendra while the rain came down. But Kendra thought of her often, and of the steamboat tickets, with amusement and admiration.

Kendra herself was as comfortable as anybody could be in such abusive weather. Her house did not leak, and she had a good supply of firewood. Shortly before the storm Loren had bought the scraps from a building recently finished by Dwight Carson.

During the deluge a steamer came in, bringing mail that had come on muleback across the Isthmus. Loren sent Ralph to the post office, a little wooden building high on the Clay Street hill, and Ralph came back with his rubber bag full of mail. Kendra had a letter from Eva, an answer to the letter Kendra herself had written last spring telling Eva of her second marriage.

Kendra read the letter, lying on the sofa in her parlor while the fire crackled and the rain pelted the roof. Eva had written from Alex’s post of duty at Hampton Roads, Virginia. It was the same sort of tactful, dutiful letter she used to write when Kendra was at school. Eva was sorry the marriage to Ted had been a failure—“You gave so few details, I hardly know what to say, but I am sure you acted for the best”—and she hoped Kendra would find more happiness with Loren. “I remember him well from our days on the
Cynthia.
A young man of excellent character and gentlemanly bearing.” She added some details about life at Hampton Roads, which she was evidently enjoying.

Kendra lowered the pages to the cushion beside her. She heard the rain. She looked down at Eva’s letter. Pleasant, almost impersonal. As if she were writing to a cousin she had not seen for years and did not expect to see for years more, if ever.