California Gold (49 page)

How much was he worth now? He spent some time turning pages of a ledger he kept in his head—one page for San Solaro (red ink), one page for Chance-Johnson, pages for real estate, citrus, stock and bond investments, and so on. He’d always been quick with figures so he had no trouble arriving at a total. At present he was worth five and a half million, give or take a few hundred thousand. But it kept growing, which raised another question. How much was enough? Money was the yardstick with which he measured his success. So how much
was
enough? The question had a bearing on the rest of life.

He was pondering this when he realized he was within a block of the café, whose windows gleamed yellow in the dawn. Nearer, on his side of the street, the marvelous yeasty aroma of warm bread came from the open doorway of Frontière’s Bakery. A little girl with her head covered in a ragged shawl stood there, her face pressed to the window.

She heard Mack’s boots on the walk, turned, scrutinized him warily, then smiled. He was taken aback, not solely because the girl was just seven or eight, and ragged as they come, but because she was striking. She had perfect Oriental features, but skin the color of dark chocolate. He had never seen a person with that kind of mixed parentage. It lent her an exotic and fragile beauty, which would probably be scoured away by years of poverty and toil.

But this morning she was smiling, hugging herself, and inhaling the yeasty odors coming out Frontière’s open door.

“It smells so good,” she said to Mack, who had stopped. “Like heaven must smell, don’t you think?”

He nodded and pointed to some of the fresh loaves already heaped in the window. “I like Mr. Frontière’s rye bread best.”

She studied the dark-brown loaves. “I’ve never had any of that. I’ve never had anything from this shop.”

“Why not?”

“I haven’t any father; he died. There’s only my mother and older brother working for the six of us.”

Impulsively, Mack pulled the roll of cash from his pocket and peeled off the top bill. “Buy yourself some bread for breakfast,” he said, handing it to her.

The girl smoothed the crinkled bill between two fingers. She was a little less sure of him all at once. “Why are you giving this to me?”

“Because I get pleasure out of it.”

“But I know how much it is. Ten dollars…”

He smiled at her misreading of the $100 on the bill. “That’s all right, take it.” A thought came suddenly. “Money’s like bread. I can always make more.”

Wonderment broke over her face then, and she rushed into the bake shop before he could change his mind.

A buggy rattled into view and stopped at a hitch rail in front of the café on the other side. The grower emerging from it waved, and Mack cut across the street. He was satisfied that he’d answered the question that had occurred to him—maybe not in the happiest way, but certainly in the inevitable way. How much was enough? For a man like him, enough would never be enough…

Mack and Carla moved from Magnolia Avenue to the hilltop early in November 1896. On Thanksgiving Day they invited three hundred people from Riverside and the outlying area to an enormous buffet feast.

Japanese nurserymen who had no special feeling for the American holiday were planting palm trees and Italian pines along the winding drive as the guests arrived in their coaches and carnages. Mack thought the marriage of palms and pine trees a curious one, but the landscape architect assured him the effect was “completely Californian.”

Villa Mediterranean was an enormous success from the first moment. The owners themselves were enormous successes. They were rich, and Mr. Chance was a popular and enthusiastic gentleman orchardist. Ladies enviously examined the silver plates embossed with the
JMC
cartouche; on the linen Mack had allowed a smaller cartouche with the initials
CHC.
Gentlemen with monocles pumped his hand and told him it was all jolly good.

So it was, from the standpoint of the table. The guests sampled blue points and green-turtle soup, boiled California salmon and sliced wild turkey roasted with chestnuts. There was goose, quail, and venison, sweetbreads smothered with mushrooms, orange fritters, and croquettes of oyster. There was celery and lettuce from some of Mack’s own fields in the Central Valley. There were five varieties of potato, and giant bowls of starchy vegetables. There were French champagnes and California wines, Edam and Roquefort cheese, Malaga grapes, mince and pumpkin pie, charlotte russe, and of course English plum pudding with brandy sauce, as well as heaps of fresh oranges.

Mack had had no time to cook lately, and he longed for that. He wished the sprawling, noisy house contained a few friends today, instead of all these acquaintances. Johnson mingled for a while, eating and saying little. Then he struck up a conversation with a buxom young widow. She left soon, smiling. Twenty minutes later Johnson followed.

Mack and Carla circulated separately. She was flirtatious with several of the Englishmen, and it irked Mack, but he said nothing. He noticed she drank large quantities of champagne, and then equally large quantities of claret. At half past three in the afternoon she disappeared. He didn’t bother to look for her; he knew she was drunk in their bedroom suite. He hoped she was asleep.

That night, after the guests had driven away down the hill and the only sounds in the mansion were those of the household staff clearing and cleaning, Mack found Carla in her silk wrapper, muzzy from her nap and a fresh glass of claret in her hand.

“Why did you do it, today of all days?”

“Because I was bored. Those silly, vapid people bore me to death. Riverside bores me. This stinking huge house bores me.”

“This new house? This bores you?”

“Yes, yes, completely.”

Over the raised glass, her deep-blue eyes defied him. She drank all the claret in gulps.

So, with interwoven strands, the tapestry of the first year and a half of their marriage completed itself on the Riverside loom. Mack felt that he grasped and manipulated the individual threads but had no sense of a larger pattern. He continued to fill his hours with work, reading, physical sport. He saddled Jubilee and galloped up and down the polo field on Jefferson Street, practicing back and tail shots with his mallet and the cork ball. He hiked alone in his groves for hours. He shadow-boxed, remembering his friend Corbett, the heavyweight champion. He wondered what to do about Carla’s ennui, expressed in increasingly strong, blunt language. He tried not to recall that Swampy, who seldom visited, had predicted exactly this outcome.

Matters came to a head on New Year’s Eve, 1896.

A
NORTH WIND BLEW
all day. Even at noon it breathed out cold air, shaking the lustrous leaves and ripening fruit of the groves on Arlington Heights.

The temperature had been falling for twenty-four hours. In the hilltop grove, Mack worked alongside Chinese in coolie hats and heavy quilted coats. They all shivered as they hauled the sheet-metal burners from mule-drawn wagons parked in the lanes. Johnson was down in the flatland groves, supervising the same work.

Teams of workers filled burners from a barrel of crude. Two seized each burner and ran with it, placing it according to a regular pattern, one between every two trees. In the cold shade, their eyes glistened white as they cast anxious looks upward. A few thin cirrus clouds trailed away east. Otherwise the sky was clear, blue-white, like new pond ice.

Mack tried to forget his obligation for that evening, but it nagged him as he stalked up and down the lanes, helping wherever he was needed. Where he saw a weak point, he told the men to set out additional wire baskets filled with soft coal or kindling. Freeze damage meant more than the loss of the season’s crop. If severe enough, the freeze would destroy the stock. Trees worth hundreds of thousands of dollars could be lost, requiring a wait of five, six, or seven years until new stock bore for the first time.

Throughout the afternoon he drove himself, and the workers too. By five o’clock all the burners and baskets were lit. Mack dragged himself into the saddle of his Morgan and walked the horse up the winding road to Villa Mediterranean.

Winter’s pale light was slanting from the west. Long sharp shadows lay on the heights. He overtook two wagons laboring uphill, stacked high with oil barrels. Would the fuel last? How low would the temperature fall?

Mack had made his decision about the evening, and he was braced for trouble.

He changed clothes in the wardrobe adjoining his office. At his desk, he tried to study the December cost and production reports. It was impossible; he couldn’t concentrate.

He heard the wind gusting over the roof tiles and raised his head and stared at the dark ceiling beams. Although Mack was not yet thirty, horizontal streaks of gray showed in the hair over his ears. Tonight his eyes had a sunken, fatigued look.

He heard her coming, her pumps rapping the floor in the hallway. It was hardwood, not the soft fir of the homes of poorer people.

She swept in without knocking. He had to admit she was breathtaking. Why not? She’d spent the afternoon bathing and dressing. Her princess gown was black satin and favored her golden complexion, with decorative ribbons of gold velvet falling from either side of the bodice all the way to the hem. Black aigrettes adorned her hair and black suede gloves reached above her elbows to puffed sleeves of black lace net over satin. She carried a painted and tasseled fan in her left hand, and on the fourth finger of her right hand, outside her glove, she wore a $15,000 emerald, rectangular and scissors-cut, in a gold mounting—his wedding gift.

“Mack, is it necessary for me to remind you that it’s New Year’s Eve? Supper starts at seven. We must leave in half an hour. Maria laid out your evening suit.”

“I wish she hadn’t gone to the trouble.”

Carla kicked her voluminous skirt behind her and the garments under her dress rustled in a way he found very feminine and seductive. “What do you mean by that remark?” she asked.

“I mean I can’t go. I have to stay in the groves. We’re going to have a bad freeze. Those oranges are my livelihood.”

“Ridiculous. You can buy ten more orange groves tomorrow.”

“It’s the livelihood of the men too. I need to be there, not abandon them.”

“This is the best country-club dance of the year. Clive told me so. Everyone will be there—”

“The only people who’ll be there are a few who have no investment in citrus. And the chefs, the waiters, and the orchestra. You won’t have many partners.”

“I’ll find a
man
to dance with—don’t worry.” It implied that he, perhaps, was not a man.

Frowning, he crossed in front of her. He caught her heavy orange-blossom scent and then, underneath, whiskey. He switched on the two elaborate ceiling fixtures with trumpet-flower glass shading the electric lamps and, above them, gas mantles, necessary because the power company often shut down without warning.

“Are you going to ignore me completely, Mack?”

Remaining angrily silent, he unlatched the shutters on the windows overlooking Riverside. The sky was a cold dark blue. Lights winked below, lovely jeweled patterns. How strange that millions could be lost on such a pretty night.

Wind pushed at the windows, setting up a humming vibration. The windows were the finest antique glass obtainable, full of visible waves. Each had a decorative border of leaded red glass rectangles. That was yet another sign of wealth; red glass was made with ground gold.

“Mack, I’m waiting. I insist you take me to the club.”

“No. I’m staying.”

“My feelings aren’t important to you?”

“Of course, but—”

“If I’d known when I married you that you’d act like this—”

“You knew exactly what I was. If you wanted some other kind of man, why did you want to marry me?”

A sweet smile. “You screwed me into it, darling.”

“My God.” He fell into his favorite leather chair and tossed a scarred boot onto the ottoman. “You’re a beautiful woman, Carla. But sometimes you’re a foul-minded drunk too.”

“Oh, aren’t we righteous.” She kicked her skirt again, stalking him. “Aren’t we good…”

A blood vessel stood out in his left temple and he closed his hand on the chair arm. “I’d still like to know—why did you marry me?”

She leaned forward, spat the words. “It was something to do.”

He glared. “I believe you.”

“Why did you decide to marry me? Because you couldn’t get a tumble from that little newspaper slut?” He jumped up. “Oh, I saw how you looked at her. I’ve no illusions. And you have none about me. A foul-minded drunk—isn’t that what you said?”

“Carla, I’m sorry…” He tried to appease her with outstretched hands. He felt helpless; she was mercurial and unreasonable when she drank. “…I’m sorry I lost my temper. Please go ahead to the dance.”

“How generous.”

“Ah Sing will drive you and bring you home.”

“I don’t want a damn ignorant Chink for my escort; I want my husband.”

The blood vessel rose up thick as a rope. Outside he heard a horse on the winding road. “I’ll watch for the coach coming back. We’ll open a bottle of champagne.” He walked toward her. “Please have a good time if you can. I’ll make it up to you some way.”

He started to kiss her cheek but she pulled back, withholding herself. The whiskey odor engulfed him. She gave him another of those sweet, vicious smiles.

“Good night, darling,” she said.

“See you next year, then.”

“Who knows? Let’s hope so.”

She kicked her skirt back a third time and sailed out, her dancing pumps rat-tatting on the hardwood.

Then that faded beneath other, heavier footsteps. Johnson’s boots. He walked in with uncharacteristic long strides that spoke of agitation. He wore dirty jeans, a leather vest, his usual long bandanna. This one, ironically, was bright orange.

“All your burners going?” Mack asked.

“Yep, every one we got. There ain’t enough by half to take care of the Valencias.”

“What’s the temperature?”

“ ’Round thirty. Falling.”

Mack snatched his broad-brimmed brown hat from the desk and Johnson trailed him down the faintly lit hall. “Something wrong here, Mack? Carla was dressed up prettier’n a queen, but she looked like she could spit bullets.”