California Gold (72 page)

…
for the future, I cannot promise…I cannot guarantee that he…

Mack wondered if another dream had been layered over the memories of Steinmund and the hospital. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing: Abraham Ruef with a tentative, unsure look on his face. Reaching into his overcoat. Pulling out money. A stack of it. Almost an inch thick, bound with a rubber band. On top was a $100 bill.

“Here. Take this. Perhaps it will help cover the medical—”

Mack shouted like a gored animal, and his balled fist knocked the money from Ruef’s hand. The elastic broke and the packet sailed aloft, $100 bills whirling and sailing every which way. “You little bastard. You piece of scum. I’ll see you in hell.”

“Chance, Chance, I’m trying—”

“I’m going to ruin you, Ruef. You and your goddamned machine too.” Terrified, Ruef retreated, but Mack was faster. He caught his overcoat lapels and dragged him up to tiptoe, screaming at him. “My son won’t ever walk normally again. He’s lame. He’s in constant pain. For life.”

Ruef could only whisper. “Oh my God. My God, no, I didn’t know the full extent—”

Mack wanted to fling him off the esplanade, throw him under the white-topped waves and stand there till he drowned.

Trembling, he let go. “Get out of here before I kill you.”

Ruef opened his mouth in one last attempt to persuade, ameliorate—

Mack’s eyes convinced him he’d better not, and he bolted, flinging a scared look over his shoulder as he hurried down the flooded esplanade and disappeared in the dark pine trees. A few moments later a gasoline motor coughed, turned over, puttered, then gradually faded away.

Clouds of blowing mist streamed around Mack, the wind knifing his face. As breaking waves tossed wet money in the air with the spume, some fell on the esplanade and floated. Mack picked up seven $100 bills. He tore them up and threw the pieces in the Bay.

Johnson came back from a thousand-mile journey on the Amazon, through the rain forest.

“So you’re goin’ to get Ruef.”

“I am.”

“You blame him for Jim bein’ crippled.”

“Hell, yes. Who else?”

“Never mind—forget I asked.”

T
HE CITY GREW UP
quickly, but not completely. She had a foot in the old century, and another planted in the new.

Solid commercial buildings proliferated; the plush elegance of her great hotels
—
the Palace, the Fairmont, the St. Francis
—
rivaled anything in New York or Europe. The enthusiasm of her civic leaders was equally impressive. Mayor Phelan had drawn important men together into the Association for Improvement and Adornment of San Francisco, and the group engaged Daniel Hudson Burnham, a celebrated architect, to draw up a comprehensive plan for the modern San Francisco, much as Baron Haussmann had ripped apart the old Paris and created the new for Emperor Napoleon III.

Burnham was to finish his work and present it to the supervisors in 1905 or 1906. Meanwhile, the City remained caught between the present and the past. In her slums and poor neighborhoods, there was no brick or fine granite. There were wooden row houses as congested, flimsy, and dirt-ridden as the ones that burned in the fire of December 1849
—
and five more times in the years after that. Progress vied with poverty. On Market Street there were people on foot or driving farm wagons; there were carriages, plain and elegant, horsecars shuttling up and down, cable cars riding the mechanized slot in the center. There were a few autos that now and then left all the rest behind.

Everyone was enthusiastic and confident; that was the tenor of the decade in the City that carelessly bestrode one of nature’s most unpredictable and implacable forces: the cataclysmic power latent in the 650-mile San Andreas fault line.

E
VENTS LARGE AND SMALL
filled the hours and days of 1904, as they did every year. Mack took up a meerschaum he bought when he traveled to New York on business. While there, he discussed politics with Pierpont Morgan in Morgan’s great marble library on Fifth Avenue, and he sat for studies by John Singer Sargent, who had sailed over from London for a month to accept Mack’s commission.

Mack wore a black suit for the portrait. On the fingertips of his right hand, at waist height, he balanced an orange, as if he possessed and dwarfed the products of the earth. A dusky glint in the background suggested the dome of a stock ticker. Sargent would be many months completing the picture; when it was finished, Mack intended to hang it in the library at Sacramento Street.

He continued to tend all his enterprises dutifully, and none fulfilled him so much as The Palms at Indio. He remodeled the first dormitory and expanded the sanitarium on a cottage plan: fifty small private houses surrounding a large central building containing dining hall, sun room, offices, and a medical wing. He appointed Alex Muller executive director, with complete responsibility for the sanitarium, which now had a waiting list. This added a huge new work load to Alex’s already considerable duties. But he didn’t complain; if he worked the rest of his life without sleep or a day off, he still would not be working as hard as his employer.

For relaxation that year, Mack read Richard Harding Davis, and
The Call of the Wild
, a sensational literary hit written by Johnson’s Alaska friend Jack London. He gave a banquet for the writer, and the “Kipling of the Klondike” attended without his new wife. Whenever he was introduced to someone, he said, “Call me Wolf.” He frightened the guests with talk of the coming socialist revolution. After the first course he passed out, drunk.

In 1904 Mack’s hair turned white. It was a thick, distinguished mane, but strangers guessed James Macklin Chance to be fifty years old, not thirty-six.

During the year, Señora Olivar learned mechanical sewing on an electric Singer machine Mack bought for her. She loved it, calling it a miracle of the new century. Alex had a new machine as well, a Blickensdorfer typewriter, on which he learned to write at great speed with very few mistakes. He hired a young female assistant to operate the machine part-time. She, too, was called a typewriter.

Nellie continued her writing, started smoking Turkish cigarettes, and actively worked for the suffragist movement. One day she went to the Roundhouse restaurant on Market Street and sat down and asked for a menu. They threw her out, reminding her that, like many establishments, they served men only. She returned the next night, this time refusing to leave. The police arrested her, and she stayed in jail till morning. Then she wrote an article, the
Examiner
providing the headline:
PENNED UP WITH FELONS: HER NIGHT OF HORROR.

Hellburner Johnson spent the first five months of 1904 in Riverside, running the Calgold operation. Then he came back to San Francisco, joined a volunteer fire company, and spent hours at the Olympic Club with a guest card. “Till I took up polo I had no idea I was born to be a gent. I love that club. No women, dogs, or Democrats. Gives a man breathin’ room.”

Once back, he adopted Mack’s son almost every way but legally. “I got an affliction similar to yours,” he liked to remind Jim, tapping his cork foot. “It ain’t so bad. You’ll get along if you don’t dwell on it.”

Jim didn’t seem to dwell on it. In fact an odd reversal took place, with him and with his father. Jim now wanted to be outdoors as much as possible, and Mack now wanted him indoors, sheltered.

Johnson ignored Mack’s wishes, taking the boy hiking, sailing in the Bay, even climbing partway up Mount Diablo, though it was slow going because Jim’s left foot dragged at every step.

Little Jim’s new passion for the outdoors didn’t lessen his passion for learning. The weakness of his foot made him keener to strengthen his mind. After he learned to read at age five, he read endlessly, and he ciphered like some kind of swift and amazing machine.

Mack hired one tutor after another but none satisfied him. Then, early in 1904, in answer to an advertisement there came Professor Lorenzo Love of Piedmont, Ohio. A small, ordinary, forgettable man when he kept his mouth shut, the moment Love spoke he controlled every listener, his voice pealing like a church organ.

He said he was a graduate of Oberlin College. He had no papers to prove it, but you didn’t argue with that organ voice. He was full of enthusiasm for education, and full of maxims.

“The foundation of every state is the education of its youth, Mr. Chance. Enlighten the people, and tyranny of the mind and body will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.”

“Who said that?”

“I did, sir. Quoting Diogenes in the first place, and Thomas Jefferson in the second place.”

Professor Love had fled “the boredom of Columbus, Ohio, and a certain female there bent on pressing me into marital servitude.” He said a lifelong nasal condition had been cured the moment he set foot in California. He was a man obsessed with details.

“Mr. Oscar Wilde considers details vulgar, my boy. Not so. What separates those who fail in life from those who succeed? Attention to details. What is the bridge from the slough of commonality to the acme of accomplishment? Ask a rich man. Ask your father. Details, details, details. Tie your cravat again, please. It’s a mess.”

Lorenzo Love was a scold, and fussy. And Little Jim loved him.

In the summer of ’04, there could be found in Mack’s address ledger the names of 1,012 acquaintances in California. He added at least one name each week, the business address noted down in his careful hand, and the telephone if there was one. Sometimes he leafed through the book and gazed at all the names and realized he had but two male friends, Johnson and his father-in-law. Marquez, who might have been a friend in different circumstances, had disappeared in the Central Valley again.

Once a month Mack visited his ranches out there, giving him an excuse to look in on Hellman, who grew more feeble every day. The old man had moved into three rooms in a Sacramento boardinghouse.

Mack urged him to come to San Francisco. “You deserve better than this. You certainly can afford it. Let me hunt up a flat for you.”

“Maybe sometime,” Hellman said with a weary wave. “For now, I’m too tired.”

Mack took his father-in-law for a drive in his open Cadillac. On the journey from San Francisco to Sacramento, the auto had broken down twice, about average.

They chugged along back roads of the delta. Mexicans knee-deep in bright water worked the rice fields. At a crossroads, they came upon two people different from any Mack had seen before, scrawny brown men in loose shirts and turbans who bowed respectfully to the auto, then hurried on as if afraid of being stopped and questioned.

“What kind of men are those, Swampy?”

“Those little brown buggers? Hindoos.”

“In California?”

“Yah, I seen quite a few this year. They’re coming down from Canada. Looking for field work, I guess.”

“In Fresno, I ate dinner in a restaurant run by Armenians. The whole state’s filling up with foreigners.”

“You’re starting to sound old, Johnny. You’re starting to sound like Fairbanks or some other pure-bred snot-nosed native son.”

“God forbid,” Mack exclaimed. But he realized Hellman was right. It was something to guard against.

Late in the summer of ’04 Mack finally saw
The Great Train Robbery.
Edwin Porter’s little 740-foot moving picture had been released the preceding winter by Edison Films to instant acclaim. Mack paid his 5 cents and ducked inside Neville’s Nickelodeon one afternoon between meetings.

The picture exploded in his mind. He’d never experienced anything like it. The last scene showed Barnes, the outlaw leader, in giant close-up. He aimed his revolver and fired point blank at the audience. Mack jumped in his seat. Two ladies swooned.

He ignored his schedule and sat through it four more times. “It has a story, a genuine story,” he told Johnson that night. “If that idea catches on, the pictures could amount to something.”

He took Johnson to see it. “Not bad for a bunch of dressed-up easterners playactin’,” Johnson said afterward. “Jim might like it.”

“No—too scary.”

The trolley war started in 1904.

Mr. Patrick Calhoun, grandson of the famed South Carolina secessionist John C, owned United Railroads of San Francisco, and he decided it would be to his advantage to put all of his cars on overhead electric lines, doing away with the tangle of horse and cable systems on many streets. Calhoun promised improved service, while screaming opponents promised a new, incredibly ugly city choked with wires.

Calhoun wanted to electrify the Sutter Street system first. His men campaigned at City Hall, and it was no secret that he retained Abraham Ruef, Esq., for “municipal assistance and counsel.”

Adolph Spreckels invited Mack to the Pacific Union Club for luncheon. Adolph was upright, bull-necked, about fifty, the second son of the ruthless old Prussian Claus Spreckels, who had created a sugar kingdom in the West. Claus had gone out to Hawaii, they said, and won vast cane fields from the king in a poker game.

Adolph ran the family business in the City. He had three brothers. John, older, lived down in San Diego, managing his holdings from there. Rudolph and Claus Augustus, called Gus, had chosen to strike out on their own after a bitter fight with the old man over disposition of some plantation land in Hawaii.

At lunch, Adolph politely muffled a cough with his starchy napkin. “This trolley business—”

“Your brother Rudolph’s in the thick of it,” Mack said.

“You know Rudolph, I take it.”

“Yes. I’ve had dinner at his home a number of times. I was there when he first discussed a Sutter Street Improvement Club, to fight the overhead wires.”

“Ruef, that little sheeny”—Mack winced—“is telling everyone Rudolph is against Calhoun because the Sutter Street line passes his front door.”

“Every man has an ox to be gored, Adolph. It’s still a worthy fight. I gave the club a thousand dollars to help with it.”

Eyes darting, Adolph Spreckels leaned near, as if they were hatching a bomb plot. He drew a plain envelope from his coat. “I want to make a donation. Please take this cash and then write the draft in your name. My brother and I differ on so many things—he is an ardent, outspoken reformer, for example, while I prefer anonymity—I’m sure you understand.”