Calico Palace (49 page)

—As always, thought Kendra, she’s glad to be rid of me. I am suitably disposed of. “And how is your daughter, Mrs. Taine?” —“She’s married, living in California. Oh yes, she likes it there.”

—I’ll write her after the baby is born. That will give me something to write about. I suppose we’ll each write about two letters a year, and neither of us will be sorry we’re so far apart. We have nothing in common. We never had, and we never will.

Kendra felt her baby move. She looked down at the place where the baby was growing, nearly ready now to be born.

“You are going to be loved,” she promised. “You are never going to know how it feels not to be wanted.”

After two drowning weeks the rain stopped. The weary people looked around. The hills showed long deep slashes cut by the rain, the lower part of town stood in a lake of mud like black molasses. In the mud they saw rags and shoes, bones and bottles and tin cans, potato peelings and eggshells and cabbage leaves and every sort of offal, all rotting together in the mess.

They had to live in it. Except where they could use the few plank sidewalks, there was nothing to do but wade in the mud. And it stank. Never had they been so glad of the wild winds of San Francisco.

They could only hope there would be no more rain until they had had time to make some sort of order out of the chaos around them. Or, said several hundred disgusted citizens, until they had left this miserable place forever.

The steamer
Panama
was in the bay, making ready to leave. The disgusted citizens rushed to the steamboat office and bought tickets home. The tickets at the office gave out, but word went around—You could get a ticket at the Calico Palace. You asked one of the bartenders. He would consider, and reply, “Why yes, I’ll try to get one for you.” After a moment’s pause he would add, “It
may
be expensive.”

Men who wanted to leave paid gladly, saying it was worth the price to get out of this filthy swamp. They crowded aboard the
Panama.
Two days after the rain ceased she left for the Isthmus, packed with passengers, half of whom had bought their tickets from Marny.

But over San Francisco the sky was bright again. The hills across the bay turned green, with great yellow splashes of wild mustard blooms. Again the people began to build. They laid plank sidewalks, they threw footbridges over the gulfs, they put up workshops and shelters of every kind.’ Chase and Fenway moved into their new building. Dwight Carson tore down their old store and set to work on their new warehouse. Workmen were not so scarce as they had been in the summer, for the mountains were covered with snow and men could no longer dig gold.

Kendra did not go into the mushy streets, but she got exercise by walking up and down her front porch. From here on the hill she could look down at the town and its boisterous energy. She could see men laughing, shouting, arguing, drinking from flasks they carried in their pockets, stumbling on the paths and swearing as they tried to stand up again. She could see the plaza and its peacocky resorts; on side streets she could see Chinese restaurants, where slippered men served good food at surprisingly low prices, and Chinese gambling houses where they played games unknown to Caucasians; and on other streets she could see saloons and cheap brothels and lunch counters where men ate standing up while they brushed away flies.

Swaggering up and down, often passing her own porch, were men just down from the mines. You could always tell a miner: bearded, long-haired, shirt of red or blue or plaid flannel, heavy breeches, gun in holster—maybe two guns in two holsters—boots caked with red mud. They kept the red mud sticking to their boots as long as they could. San Francisco mud was black. Only the mud of the placer country was red. Red mud on their boots proved they had been to the mines.

Nearly all these men from the mines were very young. In this same month of November, when the citizens voted on the State Constitution, hundreds of the swashbuckling heroes of the gold camps could not vote because they were not old enough.

But though they were nearly all young, not all the men from the mines were joyous. As she watched them go by, sometimes Kendra felt sympathy that was almost pain. The death rate among the miners was tragic. They had so much to get used to—the labor, the strange climate, the uncertain rewards of gold digging, the dreadful food and liquor, which was all they could get at many of the camps; the nerve-racking newness of everything. They had come into it suddenly. They lacked the background of slow toughening that Kendra and her friends had had that first year, when a gold camp was a safe and neighborly place.

No wonder so many of them could not stand it. They withered and died, or, in shocking numbers, they gave up and killed themselves. As the miners strutted around, much of their exuberance was real. But much of it was nothing but the bluster of scared kids who wished they had never left home.

And these were the men who had lived to get here. Now that the covered wagons were coming in, horrible stories were coming in with them. Stories of jaunty young fellows who had started out with their wagon covers painted “California or Bust,” thinking a lot of guns and bravado was all it took to get here, thinking one Yankee could lick six Indians with his right hand tied behind him, knowing nothing about the deserts and mountains ahead of them and too bumptious to ask. People said you could find your way from Missouri to California now, simply by following the graves.

But thousands of them did get here, and many of these prospered. How San Francisco was growing! From her porch Kendra could see the new buildings mushrooming out of the mud, and the vessels hurrying into the bay. When the
Panama
sailed she had left three hundred and seventeen vessels in the bay behind her. Still they came, they came from all over the world, bringing more people and more goods. Kendra could see the wharfs piled with merchandise, waiting to be drenched in the next rain.

On Thanksgiving Day the town was still wallowing in mud; but the sun shone, there were blooms on the wild bushes, and the people made holiday. Clergymen held services for thankful worshipers; the captain of a bark from Boston gave a dinner on board for a group of leading businessmen; the plaza preacher shouted to his hearers to repent, which apparently they did not, for the Calico Palace and its rivals were thronged all day. When Marny sent a bartender to the restaurant for her dinner he brought her turkey with sage dressing, fresh and hot as a holiday dinner ought to be. The men of the Calico Palace went out for their meals, but Marny did not. The restaurants were full of men, and the sight of her would have caused too much excitement. She carried the trays to her bedroom and ate her meals alone.

When she had finished dinner she piled the dishes on the tray to be sent back at once. She was not going to keep any broken pieces of food around to bring in the creeping things that spawned by millions in the damp.

For a minute or two she stood at a window, looking down. Her bedroom did not face the plaza—she had chosen a back room because here she had some protection from the noise—so she looked over the alley between this building and the restaurant, and the back doors of both. The dusk was closing in, but she could see by the light from the first floor windows. What a
dump,
thought Marny. Piles of boxes, bottles, garbage, and mud, mud, mud. Well, it didn’t matter. She was here because she wanted to be here, and she was doing what she wanted to do. And while she certainly did not live in such comfort as Loren provided for Kendra, she took care of herself rather well.

Marny slept on an iron cot. It was not handsome, but keeping clean in San Francisco was an endless and sometimes hopeless battle, and an iron cot was not attractive to bedbugs. Unlike most people, Marny slept between sheets. The sheets were never hemmed and never washed. She bought bolts of white muslin, tore off strips of the right length and put them on the cot. When she needed a change of sheets she rolled up the strips and threw them out of the window, and tore off new ones. Like the miners, she also threw away many of her garments. It was easier than washing them. It was also easier, and less expensive, than finding somebody to wash them for her.

She liked it here. She liked the bright raucous merriment of the Calico Palace, she liked the people she worked with. The Blackbeards and the Hawaiian girls were her friends, so were Chad and the other barmen. She liked Rosabel’s good-natured cleverness and the cool competence of Norman. Norman had few orthodox virtues—he was not kind or generous or unselfish—but he was consistent with himself. With Norman you knew exactly where you stood. Marny liked this.

And she liked all those beautiful gold coins she was collecting in her safe at Chase and Fenway’s. Marny had a high opinion of money. It gave her freedom to do as she pleased, and the triumph of proving herself. Marny shrugged as she thought of her brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and cousins. For all their prattle about good repute and good behavior, she knew that if she ever did go back to Philadelphia they would have more respect for a rich sinner than a poor one.

It was time she went back to her card table. As she turned from the window she caught sight of herself in the glass. Taking up the candle, she went nearer. She looked well. Her penny-red hair shone in the candlelight, and her cheeks—still somewhat freckled in spite of the San Francisco clouds—had a healthy glow. She wore a dark green dress, not very low at the neck but low enough to set off her nugget necklace. Men liked that nugget necklace. It was, as Marny herself had said, a trophy that belonged to California. Marny liked it too.

She blew out the candle, picked up her dinner tray, and went down to the second floor. Opening a door behind the bar of her parlor, she beckoned to the bartender who had brought her dinner.

“You can take it now, Wilfred,” she said as he came to the door.

“Right,” said Wilfred, “and I’ll stay for my own dinner. If I don’t get there soon all the turkeys will be gone and I’ll have to eat beef again.”

She gave him a smile of comradeship. “Fine, eat turkey while you can. Mine was good.”

Another bartender was approaching, this one from Chad’s bar in the public room. As Wilfred took her tray and went off, Marny spoke to the second man.

“Yes, Gordon?”

“Fellow downstairs,” said Gordon, “has a ticket on the
Unicorn.
Wants to cash it for gambling money.”

Marny puckered her lips, calculating. The steamer
Unicorn
was due to leave December first, day after tomorrow, and except for one or two quick showers, there had been no rain for two weeks. However, the ticket would still be good on the next steamer run. “Take it at twenty per cent discount,” she said.

He nodded and went out. Marny walked around to the front of the bar. A dozen drinkers greeted her and she threw them a kiss.

Pausing at the bar, she looked around. Everything was going well. Norman had gone out to dinner, and another Frenchman from New Orleans stood at the roulette table replacing him as croupier. Rosabel was playing the piano. Mr. Fenway, ungracefully straddling a chair, was listening as somberly as if he were hearing a dirge instead of a waltz. Near the piano was the faro table, where the players sat in their own blank-faced silence. Two young Mexicans were dealing monte, and a Yankee who spoke with a Harvard accent was substituting for Marny herself at twenty-one.

Marny could hear the clink of coins and glasses, and here and there the tinkle of a bell as some player summoned a bartender so he would not have to leave his game. In front of the bar a boy about sixteen years old was busy with a broom and dustpan, sweeping the carpet. The cleaning boys each paid half an ounce a day to be allowed to work here. As they swept up the cigar ash and dried mud and other odds and ends, they emptied the sweepings into bags. After work they sifted the sweepings.

Lucky gamblers, misty eyed drinkers, men who had had a good summer at the mines, were not too careful with their gold dust. When they took out their pokes to pay for drinks they rarely bothered about the grains that fell on the carpet. When a boy sifted the sweepings of an evening’s work he nearly always found enough gold to pay back his investment several times over. San Francisco was a dirty town, but never were carpets kept so clean as those of the gambling houses around the plaza.

Marny heard the main door open, and the steward saying “Good evening, sir,” to a man coming in. She glanced toward the door and gave a start as she recognized Loren.

The wind had spanked Loren’s cheeks bright pink, his cider-brown eyes were aglow, and as he took off his hat he smiled with the happy impulsiveness of a man who smiles without realizing that he is doing so. Loren had never been inside the Calico Palace before. As he came in he looked around him with curiosity, like a city boy on his first visit to a farm.

Marny hurried to meet him and caught his hand in both of hers. “Loren! Come in, I’m glad to see you. And I think,” she added in a lower voice as she drew Loren toward the bar, “by the look of you, you’ve brought good news.”

Loren nodded with his own engaging eagerness. His joy was like a light. “It’s a boy!” he told her.

“And Kendra?”

“She’s all right—would I be so glad if she wasn’t? She was sound asleep when I left. Mrs. Chase is with her, and will stay till I get back.”

“Oh Loren, I’m so happy for you!” Marny exclaimed. She spoke to the nearest bartender. “Pour Mr. Shields whatever he wants, he’s my guest. Shall it be champagne, Loren? Fine, I’ll have the same.” The bartender grinned and poured the champagne. As they lifted their glasses Marny said,

“And I suppose his name is Loren Shields, Junior?”

Loren chuckled. “I haven’t made sure yet, but I hope so.”

The other men at the bar were listening with a certain wistfulness. So few men in San Francisco had anything like a family, or if they had, they had left it two or three thousand miles away. They congratulated Loren. Every one of them wanted to buy him a drink. He declined, saying he’d better get home sober. He had just come here to tell the news.