California Gold (96 page)

“You ever gonna rebuild this mess?”

“The architects brought the plans right after the earthquake.” San Franciscans had a simple new calendar by which they kept track of the past. An event happened before the earthquake, or it happened after. Mack picked up the stone Johnson had moved and threw it on a larger pile, a puff of dust blowing away in the cold breeze. “I put them in the closet.”

“Maybe you should get ’em out. Place looks like a damn trash dump.”

“I’ve had any number of letters from neighbors expressing the same thought.”

Johnson brushed off a fallen slab of marble and sat. He started to roll a cigarette. “I’m glad you got Margaret that part with Broncho Billy. It ain’t only good for her—it’s good for you: Margaret said it shows you’re comin’ back to the real world. You been away in those dark pits too long. Can’t say’s I blame you, but you got too much to offer—you can’t hide down there the rest of your life.”

With a somber expression, Mack sat down too. For once he didn’t rebel at Johnson’s gratuitous advice. Maybe it was a certain tiredness, a resignation, after all the shocks of recent times.

Johnson scraped a match on his pants and lit his twisty hand-rolled cigarette. “I can understand why you was hit so hard. If I’d ever found the right woman, and had me a son, I’d love him as much as you loved your Jim.”

“Jim isn’t—”

The wind whispered over broken stones. Electric lights warmed the windows of rebuilt homes on Nob Hill. Faint scurryings told of rats running beneath the rubble.

“Isn’t what? Isn’t coming back?”

“I’ve accepted that as a possibility. No, more than that. You see, I’m absolutely convinced I saw Jim at the air meet, and that means…” Mack faltered, rubbing hard at a spot in the center of his forehead that pained him suddenly. “Hugh, it means he’s turned his back on me completely. He ran from me that day. He doesn’t want to be found, and probably wouldn’t come back if he were.”

Johnson saw his friend’s pain, and he too faltered: “Well— don’t give up. Maybe there’ll be some good luck after so much bad …”

Mack shook his head. “Look at the search that’s been conducted. Law officers, Pinkertons, thousands and thousands of flyers—and over forty false leads at last count. And nothing else. What’s more, come the twenty-eighth of September, Jim will be twelve years old. Grown up. Changed a lot since he ran off. Suppose he’s really going out of his way to hide? Suppose he works hard at leading a quiet, ordinary life? Suppose he’s taken a different name? That would blur the trail almost completely. Only his limp would be left as solid, conclusive identification, and maybe he’s even learned to walk a little straighter. You did.” He slapped his knees. “What difference does it make, all the theorizing? This is the sum of it. I’ll probably never see him again.”

Johnson was silent a while. Then he sighed. “Guess you’re right. It’s a real possibility, and mighty hard to bear. You can’t dwell on it, though. You got work to do in this world.”

Mack’s hazel eyes challenged him. “What work?”

“For one thing, the ’lections this fall. That lawyer Hiram Johnson—fine name—he looks like the one the reform crowd’s gonna run for governor.”

“Not exactly news.”

“No, but what I seen in today’s
Examiner
may be. The SP says it’s goin’ all out to stop these here Progressives from elect-in’ Johnson. The railroad’s puttin’ its whole damn machine to work, and today they announced the name of the man headin’ up the effort.” He pursed his lips and let smoke trickle from his nose. “Your pal Walter.”

“He’s in charge?”

“Yes, sir.” Johnson chuckled. “Thought that’d stir you some. It’s gonna be a mean, raw fight, you ask me. The state of California’s suffered with that blasted railroad near onto forty years, and a lot of folks are plain sick of it. The
Examiner
said the railroad’ll be fightin’ for its life. Everything on the line.”

Now the red light had leached from the sky. Mack walked out to the ruined gate pillars and stared off toward the bright windows of the hotel. Cold wind blew his hair and Johnson’s cowboy scarf about. Mack felt a curious stirring, as though he’d just awakened from heavy sleep.

“Maybe you’re right, Hugh. Maybe I should crawl out of the cellar and do what I can to nail Walter and those bastards he works for.”

“Thought you might see it like that.” Johnson stepped up beside Mack and rested an arm on his shoulder. “Nothin’ like good clean hate to stir a man’s blood.”

At Greenwich Street, Mack took a hot bath, put on his dressing gown, and turned on a light beside his favorite chair in the room he used for a library. At half past three in the morning, he finished reading Nellie’s novel for the second time.

Huntworthy’s Millions, or, an Honest Dollar
was a raucous, outrageous tale, cruelly unforgiving in its portrait of Clemons Parsifal Huntworthy, founder and chief thief of an unnamed railroad in an unnamed western state bordering the Pacific.

Nellie had divided her picaresque story in two. In the first section, in order to build his line, Huntworthy lied, stole, and swindled everyone from his trusting partner to President Lincoln. Established as a power in his state, he then bought himself a United States Senate seat. The night before leaving for Washington, he had another of his poisonous and profane arguments with his wife, Asphodel.

Asphodel Huntworthy was an illiterate shrew, a Mother Lode laundress who’d washed Huntworthy’s long underwear when he was too poor to pay a Chinese to do it. The quarrel was monumental, which Nellie suggested by using dashes for omitted obscenities, and it built over two and a half pages, with the last half-page little more than quote marks around dashes. At the end, severely tried, Huntworthy dropped dead of a heart spasm.

The second half of the novel dealt with vain and conceited Asphodel, her pretensions to social eminence in San Francisco, and her marriage to a slim, cultivated young decorator from New York City. Wallis Flummerfelt was twenty-eight years younger than Asphodel. At her invitation, he traveled west to refurbish her palatial residence. A Dartmouth man, he was charming and affectionate—until he got the ring on Asphodel’s finger. Then he showed himself to be fully as dishonest as her first husband, maneuvering behind her back, and ended up owning the railroad. She ended up as she began, arms in harsh hot water in a laundry tub in the failed mining town of Try Again, California.

Ed Huntington loathed the novel, and wrote Mack a boiling letter to say so. It was likewise hated by anyone with a fond memory of Uncle Mark Hopkins, whose widow had married her antique dealer.

Mack loved it, absolutely awed by Nellie’s savage wit. He badly wanted to see her and tell her.

He wanted to tell her how he really felt about his son, down underneath the show of hope he still maintained for others: Jim was alive somewhere, but almost surely lost to him now. He wanted to tell her he was taking a first step back into the world in spite of everything. And he wanted to tell her he loved her. That, of all his wants, was somehow the hardest to satisfy.

I
N A PRIVATE ROOM
at the Olympic Club, the four men dined one Thursday in April: Mack, Rudolph Spreckels, Fremont Older, and Dorian Stimson, who had traveled up from Los Angeles. Stimson nearly spilled his soup when Mack told him why he’d invited them.

“Mr. Chance—Mack—that’s wonderful news. I’m pleased beyond words that you’ll join us. We’re going to put forward a splendid slate of candidates with Hiram Johnson at the top. The Progressive platform is simple and unequivocal.
Kick the railroad out of politics
.”

Spreckels applauded. Mack said, “I certainly agree with a program like that. I’ll give you as much money as I can.”

“How about your personal involvement?” Older asked.

“That too.”

“Best news of all,” the editor declared. “We need you. We need every hand. The campaign will be rough. The railroad knows what we’re up to…”

“The railroad is desperate,” Dorian Stimson said.

The Southern Pacific boardroom was sequestered on the third floor of the temporary general offices at Market and Powell. There were plans for an entirely new and opulent headquarters building, but construction had not yet begun.

A life-sized portrait of Collis Huntington dominated the room. The old bandit’s painted eyes stared down at dusty sunbeams playing on the burnished wood paneling of the long table. Eighteen men sat around the table, eighteen proper, sober company men. All of them, including the executive at the head, concentrated on the man seated by himself at the other end: Walter Fairbanks.

The meeting’s chairman was William Herrin, the only attorney in the Southern Pacific with more authority than Fairbanks. Herrin was a bland sort, deceptively innocent. He didn’t smile, but neither was he unfriendly—merely direct and a bit formal.

“Walter, I speak for the entire board when I say that we respect you as a colleague and treasure you as a friend. You’ve directed and coordinated the state and local efforts of our political bureau almost since you joined the company. Your level of effort and accomplishment is high. But I’m afraid that does not and cannot carry weight in this situation. We are plunged into a desperate struggle for leadership in our state. The SP has been good for California—good for industry, good for agriculture, good for the common citizen in a thousand hamlets that might have moldered and vanished had we not favored them with our right-of-way. But there is a certain element—foreigners, Jews, jackleg journalists, rich men who are traitors to their class—a certain crazed element dedicated to ignoring the facts. Dedicated to pushing us out of the counsels of power and shutting the door. We are faced with a fight for our political survival. So, then, by extension, are you.”

Fairbanks’s gray-metal eyes blinked twice. He was not a man easily disturbed, but this disturbed him. Deep in his gut, he felt a sudden stab of pain.

“I understand, Bill.”

“Let’s hope so. The executive committee can’t and won’t excuse failure in this crisis. But we have enormous confidence in you.”

Enormous confidence. Unless I fail, in which case you’ll spit me and roast me alive. I know how this company works.

“You are challenged to attack and rout Hiram Johnson and the whole pack of lying Progressives. Johnson is an evil man. He represented the dregs of the trade unionists, the San Francisco teamsters, for eight years. He convicted Ruef. He’s a ruthless opportunist, and his backers are waiting at the door with a portfolio of socialistic legislation. You’re familiar with the man the Democrats are putting up, Theodore Bell of Napa. He says he’s a Woodrow Wilson Democrat and a reformer in his own right. We don’t like him, but we’ll back him in preference to Johnson. That, in essence, is our program. We want you to implement it as if your job and future depended on it. Which, in fact, Walter, they do.”

“Bill, are you saying—”

“Johnson and his crowd must lose in November.
Must.
Nothing else is acceptable.”

A
PROCESSION OF LIMOUSINES
rolled into the court entrance of the rebuilt Palace Hotel. Press hounds with cameras and flashlight powder photographed the notables arriving for the ball. It was September.

Mack drove in at half past eight. He didn’t want to attend but the cause was too worthy to be ignored. As he alighted from his hired chauffeured car, he scowled at the photographers. It didn’t stop them.

He was turned out in a formal evening suit of black worsted with silk braid down the sides of the trousers, his waistcoat and cravat a fine white pique. Pearl studs gleamed on his cuffs and starched shirt bosom, and his black patent-leather pumps and tall opera hat shone. He carried a cane and white kid gloves and wore a white silk scarf draped over his shoulders. With his white hair and round spectacles he cut a striking figure. He felt like a fool.

“Be here at eleven. I’ll be ready,” he said to me chauffeur, and the car rolled off.

Behind him a middle-aged man and his wife stepped out of their limousine. It was Mike de Young, the publisher of the
Chronicle.
He was a capable, feisty man of Dutch-Jewish extraction, a power in the City, though still not one of Mack’s intimates. These days the publisher treated Mack more cordially than he had in the past. Although Willie Hearst’s paper was still very much a part of the City, Willie himself was long gone, and that, plus a general mellowing perhaps brought on by age, seemed to have cooled de Young’s anger toward Hearst’s friends. He spoke to Mack in a way that recognized him as a member of the City’s small and exclusive club of the very wealthy.

“Good of you to come out for this benefit,” he said now. Wax on his handlebar mustache glistened under the lights.

“The De Young Art Museum deserves everyone’s support, Mike.”

He greeted de Young’s wife and the three of them started into the hotel. “I’m glad you feel that way, because we desperately need a new building,” de Young said. “That brick heap left over from the Midwinter Fair has outgrown the collection. Until we get a new museum, the operating budget for the old place must be raised every year. With all those needs, we’ll even accept donations from friends of Hearst.”

“None of that, Mike. I read your paper right along with the
Examiner.
I figure the old saying’s true: two sides to every story—”

De Young sent his wife along to the cloakroom. “What about the state election? Two sides to that?”

“No. There’s only one right side. The Progressive side.”

“On that we agree.” De Young squeezed his arm. “Glad you’re with us. Thanks for coming.”

The music of a Ballenberg orchestra, a jaunty rendition of “Shine On, Harvest Moon,” drifted from the ballroom. Mack crossed the foyer to the cloakroom and handed the attendant his opera hat, stick, and gloves. As he slipped the check in his pocket he noticed a couple coming down the staircase from the floor above.

Walter and Carla. She wore an ermine wrap over a peach satin gown with matching gloves and a lace décolletage. Tiny satin bows on the lace seemed too girlish for someone her age. White aigrettes bobbed in her hair, and Mack wondered how many water birds had died to decorate her for this affair.