California Gold (48 page)

“There were fires in ’93, you know. Much rioting in anger. Now we have Mexican labor that takes care of itself. Goes home to Mexico in the off-season—you never have to worry.”

“I’m not worried about anything except my time, which you are wasting. Excuse me.”

Blas uncrossed his legs. His smile hadn’t disappeared, but now it had a fixed, hard quality. “This is foolish of you. I am an important man.”

“Get off my property,” Mack said.

To find the workers he needed, Mack went personally to Riverside’s small Chinatown. Blas had referred to the troubles of ’93, when white men had driven the Chinese out of many of the groves. The Chinese in Riverside were eager to come back—especially when they heard what Mack was offering to pay.

Johnson had agreed to act as temporary foreman. He and Mack learned the business together. To his surprise Johnson found that he liked citrus growing. It was hard, demanding work, but it kept him outside, and the Valencia and the Washington navel were the aristocrats of trees; orchardists were the aristocrats of the agricultural world. If this wasn’t so, why did so many tourists ride the Santa Fe to Riverside to view the groves?

After six months of marriage, Mack and Carla’s relationship began to change. Their lovemaking grew less frequent, and her ardor diminished. She smiled less often, becoming increasingly remote. When she did address him she was usually cross, complaining about his long absences from Magnolia Avenue.

On one such occasion, he flared. “You’re the one who praised ambition and encouraged me to work hard.”

Her smile had a faintly nasty air. “Do you always believe everything I say, Mack?” She kicked her skirt behind her and walked out of the room.

The word “bored” reentered her conversation. She showed no interest in running the household; her earlier attempts had been a pretense, he decided. The staff fended for itself, following his general orders.

To escape the rising tension, he worked even longer hours and she went off on shopping expeditions, with never an advance word or note of explanation. He was aware of the servants replenishing the liquor supply more often.

When they dined together she was listless, uncommunicative, sometimes openly sullen. He began to actively seek ways to occupy himself elsewhere. If there was a pause in the work in the groves, he filled the spare hours by closing himself in his office and going through stacks of newspapers and periodicals, both popular and technical, hunting for bits of information he might use. He was aware of the cycle that was perpetuating itself: He was busy, Carla grew bored and drank; the more difficult she became, the more he sought to absent himself. It was a disturbing trend, and one he felt he couldn’t discuss with anyone, not even Johnson. He harbored a melancholy and unreasonable hope that if he didn’t acknowledge what was happening, it would go away.

But he saw evidence of Carla’s malaise everywhere, even in situations that should have been pleasant. Clive Henley’s good offices gained the two of them immediate entree to the social life of the “British colony,” as Riverside was sometimes called. Accepting an invitation to join the Casa Blanca Tennis Club, Carla tried to learn the game but didn’t play well. The stoutness that made her attractive to men hampered her, and she soon gave up, preferring to sit in the canvas pavilion at court-side, gossiping and drinking the fine English tea served between matches. Mack tried not to recall her father’s repeated warnings. But given the sudden veer and drift of the marriage, he didn’t have much success.

Clive Henley sponsored Mack for the Riverside Golf and Polo Club. Initiation dues for a polo membership were $10. Henley taught Mack and Johnson rudiments of the ancient game, and was impressed by Johnson’s horsemanship and innate ability to hit the ball. Something to do with hitting a man with a bullet?

Johnson told Mack that he was as taken with polo as he was with the orange groves; he was surprised that he liked what had struck him at first as a sissy sport. Clive Henley revealed that back east, on Long Island, certain teams were already paying experienced riders. “I have heard they also do it up north at the Burlingame club,” Henley added. Johnson pondered this for a couple of days, then demanded a small salary.

“But my dear H.B.,” Henley said, “we only play games amongst ourselves. We have yet to challenge another club. Fact is, there aren’t many in California.”

“Don’t matter—I’m a professional; I don’t ride a horse for free ’less I’m going somewheres. One dollar a month.”

The club members agreed, took a collection of small change, and laughed about it. Soon it became a matter of some pride that Riverside’s team included a genuine Texas cowboy.

Gradually Mack acquired six polo ponies, the minimum a rider needed for a six-chukker game. One of them, Fireball, was fifteen years old and couldn’t live up to his name. Another, Jubilee, was Mack’s pride. She was a small Spanish horse, fourteen and a half hands high, fast, strong, and smart. She cost $4,500 at the breeder’s in Pasadena, while the other ponies had gone for less than $500 each.

The club agreed to provide Johnson with ponies, but he bought two of his own, Full-O’-Gin and a fleet, wicked-tempered little black horse he named Sam Houston.

Mack joined the Southern California Fruit Exchange, a nonprofit cooperative that had sprung from earlier groups and had been organized to get around independent agents who charged gouging prices for packing and shipping oranges and lemons. The Exchange provided services at cost, and maintained offices in Los Angeles and Riverside. Because it shipped in volume, the SP and Santa Fe gave it favorable low rates. Growers such as Henley made no secret of their enthusiasm for the railroads. Rail shipment to the East had dramatically expanded the citrus market and enabled California growers to compete with Florida.

Mack also attended meetings of the Riverside Horticultural Club, and donated several hundred dollars to the club’s research into the problem of orchard heating.

Busy as he was, however, there was time for a relaxed social life, and he tried to interest Carla in it. Once a week they dined at the Anchorage Hotel, or at Frank Miller’s Glenwood Inn. At the Loring Opera House, Mack took a season box. They saw a traveling troupe perform
The Gondoliers—
Gilbert and Sullivan were idols in the British colony—and a production of
Camille
starring Helena Modjeska, the Polish expatriate who’d fallen in love with California and lived for a time at the artists’ colony at Anaheim. When James O’Neill came to town in his signature production of
The Count of Monte Cristo
, Mack arranged a postperformance reception at the house on Magnolia Avenue. O’Neill favored the guests with a ringing recitation of Poe’s “Raven.” Only Carla drank more than the actor.

In March of every year, Riverside held a citrus fair in the pavilion at Main and Seventh streets. It was here, in 1896, that Carla told Mack she was pregnant.

He remembered the moment exactly. They were standing in the broad aisle beside the booth where Clive Henley was exhibiting his fine Eureka and winter-maturing Lisbon lemons. Carla told Mack, then, wildly excited, hugged and kissed him in front of dozens of fair-goers.

At the start of her third month she miscarried. “Oh, Mack, I’m sorry,” she said when the doctor first allowed him to see her. “I know it disappoints you.”

“Doesn’t it disappoint you?”

“Yes, I suppose.” She was wan, and her voice weak. It strengthened when she clutched his hand and said, “I hurt. I hurt terribly. I don’t like that.”

Perhaps she wasn’t so sorry after all, Mack thought, and was instantly stricken with guilt for thinking it.

The doctor insisted that Carla rest in bed for fifteen days. Hellman paid a visit to see how she was getting along, and that evening, after dinner, he said to Mack, “Listen, I got a question. Does Carla ever talk about me?”

Mack was silent.

“Come on, tell me. This ain’t no street peddler asking. I’m your father-in-law, family. Well?”

“Yes, she does talk about you. She says she wishes you loved her. She says it goes back to her mother…” He stopped, frowning.

“Go on, go on,” Hellman demanded.

Mack didn’t have an easy time telling him. “She says you thought her mother was…immoral.”

“You mean a whore. That’s what she said, isn’t it—whore?”

Mack didn’t deny it. “She says you think she inherited a lot of her mother’s disposition. Look, I didn’t want to say this—”

“Never mind,” Hellman snarled, and then his brows pulled together and his voice dropped so low that Mack could barely hear him. “I don’t discuss Carla’s mother. Far as I’m concerned, she don’t exist. You want to stay friends, never bring up the subject.”

“You asked the question, for God’s sake.”

“So I excuse you this time. This time only. I’m going to bed.” Hellman stood up and left the room.

Mack sat a while, wondering about the old man’s strange reaction to discussing the mother Carla seldom talked about. Hellman was surely suppressing some bad feelings about the woman, and they carried over to his daughter—or so she thought. Perhaps it was a clue to Carla’s behavior. He didn’t fully understand it, but it prompted him to be as tender and attentive as possible during her recovery.

But Carla didn’t respond. She seemed completely indifferent, and when she was on her feet again, she no longer bothered to conceal how she felt about Riverside.

“The place is contemptible,” she said one night at dinner. She was at the far end of the enormous refectory table, her wineglass in hand as usual. “Contemptible, provincial, and dull as a church. Take away Clive’s accent and what is he? A farmer. The same goes for the rest of them.”

“And me?” Mack growled.

She shot him a look as she drank.

Red-faced, he pushed his plate away. “Carla, you’ve made it clear a hundred times that you’d be happier somewhere else. But what the hell am I supposed to do, leave?”

“Why, of course not, my dear,” she said with a sweet smile. “You have your
business.
But maybe one day I’ll leave.”

“Christ, spare me the cheap threats,” he said, and walked out.

The young geologist Haven Ogg did a superior job with Chance-Johnson Oil. The assets under his management now included 192 miles of pipeline; large storage tanks at Newhall, Santa Paula, and Ventura; a small refinery at Ventura; three tanker steamers; ninety railroad tank cars; and thirty-five six-mule tank wagons for local delivery. Chance-Johnson owned producing wells not only at San Solaro, but in the newer Summerland field southeast of Santa Barbara, in Whittier, and in Coalinga, Fresno County, in the shadow of the Diablo Range. Soon Ogg would personally lead an exploration crew into the low hills near the Kern River at the eastern edge of the San Joaquin.

Mack read the company’s profit figures with amazement, and in mid-1896 he promoted Haven Ogg to general manager, giving him a munificent salary increase that allowed Ogg to marry and build a house in Newhall.

Oil fever still consumed Los Angeles. The derricks of more than five hundred wells made the town dirty, noisy, and ugly, but those getting rich didn’t mind. One of these was Mrs. Emma Summers, who now drilled her own wells and had expanded into brokering crude oil, her piano pupils long since forgotten. People called her the Oil Queen.

The petroleum market was growing. Smooth black asphalt paved many Los Angeles streets. Lyman Stewart had convinced the SP that oil was the fuel of choice, and its locomotive fleet was undergoing gradual conversion from coal and wood. As a result, Mack was selling refined fuel oil to the railroad. He felt that he was dealing with the Devil, and compensated for it by purchasing more shares in the People’s Road.

Oil was important to Mack, but citrus was his job. He spent hours with the orchardist’s Bible,
The California Fruits and How to Grow Them
, by Professor Wickson of the University of California at Berkeley. Mack annotated the book so heavily that some pages grew illegible and he had to buy a second copy.

He educated himself about bud stock and refrigerator cars, climbed ladders along with his Chinese workmen to prune his windbreak trees, and learned to watch his trees for signs of cottony cushion scale, the terrible insect accidentally introduced from Australia in the late sixties. The egg sacs of the insect had once covered whole groves with a snowy mantle that yellowed leaves, shriveled fruit, and ultimately killed the stock. In the 1880s the scale had threatened to wipe out the industry. Then in ’89 a Department of Agriculture scientist sent to study the problem in Australia made a serendipitous discovery. A ladybird beetle,
Vedalia cardinalis
, devoured the scale insect. Imported beetles saved California citrus, though the scale was only held at bay, not eliminated.

And then there was frost.

Up on the hillsides, the so-called frost-proof belt, the oranges were supposed to be safe. Clive Henley and others warned Mack not to be caught short, however. If a subfreezing night arrived and heat was needed, there was no time to order equipment and fuel. Mack bought and warehoused hundreds of two-and-a-half-gallon sheet-metal heaters, storing barrels of Chance-Johnson crude oil to burn in them. It was an enormous, wasteful expense, but it couldn’t be avoided if a grower was realistic about the improbable but not impossible night of cold that could kill.

One morning before it was light, Mack slipped from bed without waking Carla, put on old clothes, thrust a clasp knife and a wad of cash in his pocket, and left the house on Magnolia Avenue. He had an early breakfast meeting with several growers at a café; a drummer passing through town was going to demonstrate a new-design orchard heater.

Outside the rented house, he paused to look at its mass of turrets and gables black against the first radiance of dawn. He’d never imagined he would live in such a handsome house, let alone the one he was building. He didn’t often stop to relish some of the rewards all of his work, and his money, were bringing him.

In the cool, sweet air, he strode on down the avenue with his thoughts turning to the subject of his own life; of the amazing things that had happened to him since he met Doheny that night, and of all the numbers—sums—wealth—that followed as a consequence of his determination, and that accidental meeting.