California Gold (61 page)

“A woman in New York. It isn’t true.”

“Then you got to contest it.”

“No. She wants out of the marriage. And she’d be certain to win in court. My reputation’s pretty bad. Consorting with defrocked priests. Hiring Chinese. Opposing General Otis…” Otis had commanded volunteers in the Philippines in the recent war; he’d received a brigadier’s commission, and he let no one forget it.

Hellman shook his head. “That girl. She’s something. You should give yourself credit, Johnny. She stayed with you a long time. Longer than I expected, I can tell you now.”

Mack twirled his cane. Some of the shock and pain had burned itself from his system. He was sleeping soundly again, with only an occasional nightmare. “Have you heard from her? I haven’t, not directly, since she walked out.”

Hellman scratched his lumpy nose. “I had a letter last month. She’s in Europe. Carlsbad. Drinking champagne and bathing in the mineral springs. Be better if it was the other way around.” He sniffed. “I thought about cutting off her inheritance but that would just bring her back. Your son, Jim—he’ll grow up better without her—now don’t look at me like that. I told you plenty of times—I love Carla. But I know her inside and out—say, what’s this crazy joint?”

Mack turned to a familiar storefront. Gaudy posters covered most of the glass; dark paint opaqued the rest. He knew the place, number 311 South Spring. He stopped in whenever he could. He pointed with his cane.

THOS. TALLY’S

PHONOGRAPH AND VITAGRAPH PARLOR

AMAZING NEW
“
MUTOSCOPES
”

&

EDISON “
KINETOSCOPES
”

WHOLESOME—EDUCATIONAL—ENTIRELY SUITABLE FOR

FAMILIES!

Hellman scowled. “Are these here the moving pictures I read about?”

“That’s right. The Kinetoscope is a peep-show machine developed by Edison’s laboratory in New Jersey. The Mutoscope is a competitor. In the back, Tally’s got an Edison Vitascope. It projects the moving pictures on a large screen. Edison put his name on the projector, but I understand he doesn’t think much of the process.”

“Smart man. Don’t sound respectable to me.”

Mack opened the door and they peeked in. Peep-show machines lined both sides of a long aisle. There was one patron, a man in a cloth cap, crouched over the eyepiece of a Mutoscope. At the rear, a clerk on a stool lazily turned pages of a paper. The rear wall was divided between a curtained doorway and a partition of painted wood with seven peepholes sawed out. Chairs faced the three lower ones. A sign touted the
MAMMOTH PROJECTING VITASCOPE
.

“Don’t look respectable, neither,” Hellman said. “What kind of pictures do they show, the hootchy-kootch?”

The clerk recognized Mack and waved. “And other things. It’s all pretty tame stuff, really. Fifteen cents a peep for the machines on the aisle. The film inside is fifty feet long. A small motor runs it in a continuous loop between the projection bulb and a revolving shutter—”

“You’re really an expert on this stuff,” Hellman said, taking the tone he might have if Mack had announced he favored dynamiting the presidential mansion in Washington.

“It’s an exciting process. The back room’s even better than the peep shows. There, you sit in the dark in front of a big screen, and the effect is—well, staggering. People won’t go back there, though. Tally had to install those holes for looking through. Even with that, you can see how many customers he draws.”

“Sure, you wouldn’t catch decent people in there.”

“If you mean families, you’re right. I’ve never seen one.”

“But you been inside.”

“Often. Moving pictures are wonderful. Someone just needs to figure out how to use them right. Maybe to tell stories. Then they have to make them respectable.”

Mack opened the door a little wider. “Come on—you can watch my friend Corbett lose to Fitzsimmons. They’ve been showing that film for two years.”

“Go in there? No, sir. I got my principles.”

Mack laughed, shrugged, and called in, “Sorry, Ned, another day.” The clerk waved again without looking up.

Hellman stumped away quickly, as if escaping something pestilential. “How can you take up with such crazy newfangled ideas? They just upset the applecart.”

“Swampy, things never improve unless new ways upset the old ones.”

“Too much of that out here,” the old man exclaimed. “Too damn much. More than anyplace I ever seen.”

“That’s one of the good and rare things about California—new ideas flourish; there aren’t so many old restraints. People like that.” He thought of Fairbanks, cold as some marble bust in a museum. “I take it back. Not everyone likes it. But I do.”

“I keep saying it—you’re the craziest rich man I ever met.”

Mack held up on the corner. “I’ll tell you something really crazy. I just bought a house on Nob Hill—three and a half stories and forty rooms. It takes up half a block on Sacramento and Clay, right behind Jim Flood’s mansion. I bought it sight unseen.”

Not much astounded old Hellman, but that did. Eyes popping, he said, “You mean you’re finally going back?”

“It seemed a good time. I have the money, and there isn’t a lot to hold me in Riverside. Billy Biggerstaff is a competent manager.”

“What happened to your cowboy friend?”

“Sailed off to Alaska to see the territory and pan some gold.”

Mack raised his cane and rested it on his shoulder, gripping it so hard his knuckles whitened. He stared into his father-in-law’s pinkly sweating face.

“I’m going back and rub their noses in it, Swampy.”

On December 1, Captain Piers Norheim docked the steam yacht off Catalina Island. She had come around Cape Horn from Long Island, where she had been delivered to her owner, Oswald Henry Langford III, only last spring.

Shortly after, Langford’s wife had discovered her husband in a hotel tryst with his mistress, shot him, shot the music-hall girl, then shot herself. It was an enormous scandal, and it brought on the market Langford’s splendid steam yacht, built at a cost of $850,000, which came complete with a master and a crew of forty-three, all temporarily out of work. Captain Norheim was sixty years old and vastly experienced; he’d been at sea almost continuously since shipping out of his native Copenhagen at age fourteen.

After exhaustive checks by marine brokers and insurers hired long distance, Mack bought the yacht. She was the equal of the vessels sailed by Morgan, Drexel, Whitney, the Vanderbilts—if not their superior. She was 250 feet long, with a low, lean hull and a clipper bow. A stack jutted amidships between two vestigial masts. Her interior was a luxurious maze of deeply carpeted staircases, carved balusters, coffered ceilings. Paneling and moldings changed from room to room, surprising and pleasing the eye with lavish variations of oak, cherry, maple, chestnut, of Chippendale, Empire, and Louis XV. A marble fireplace welcomed guests to the dining saloon. A smaller one cheered those who used her library. Some 790 separate lamps drew their illumination from an electric plant below. Her annual payroll ran $50,000, her annual operating cost $175,000; her appetite for coal was enormous. What of it? He was worth $9-$10 million, and the carefully managed wealth kept compounding. However, as Pierpont Morgan liked to say, if you had to ask the cost of running a yacht, you couldn’t afford it.

Along the sleek bows, tasteful gilt letters proclaimed her name:
QUEEN OF HAMPTON
.

“Get rid of that,” Mack said at his first meeting with the spare, frost-eyed Dane who skippered her.

“I will, sir. But what’s the new name to be?”

“
California Chance.
I want owner’s flags run up, using this design.”

He tapped a drawing of the
JMC
cartouche.

“I want to see that above the door of every stateroom. I want to see it on the china and bed linens. I want to see it everywhere.”

On the last day of the year,
California Chance
bore through a sunlit sea at fifteen knots as the hilly coastline, winter-brown, slipped by to starboard. Sunlight streamed down on Mack, and the wind and the salt smell invigorated him.

He watched the coast with a meditative look in his hazel eyes. Somewhere inland ran a road he’d stumbled down years ago, ignominiously escaping to the south. The yacht’s clipper bow pointed north, and the sea crashed against it and broke in noisy celebration of his reversal of that old defeat. Spray landed on his face, and he tasted the brine triumphantly.

He stood with hands locked at the small of his back, behind Captain Norheim and the helmsman, under the quarter-deck awning. Signal pennants and the owner’s flag streamed from the otherwise useless masts. The four-thousand-horsepower steam power plant seemed to shiver the teak deck and run its throbbing power up into his braced legs, renewing his hope, driving out bad memories of an ill-conceived and ruined marriage.

He recalled the old litany—
Never be poor again; never be cold again—
and added a line:
Never be a nobody again.

He looked forward to establishing that fact in the communal consciousness of the City.

Mack had chosen his wardrobe carefully: white shoes, white flannel trousers, a navy blazer with the cartouche embroidered as a breast-pocket coat of arms. He wore a billed cap—again with the familiar emblem—and around his throat, a new style of scarf from England called an ascot. It, too, bore the initials. No one ever questioned the ceaseless replication of his identity on clothes and possessions and no one joked about it. Mack was a good-humored man generally, but some things were beyond the bounds of humor. Or discussion.

At his side, Angelina held James Ohio Chance in her strong arms to keep him from toddling into danger on the tilting deck. The little boy wore a child’s sailor suit, dark blue with white piping, that Mack had bought for him. He kept dragging off the cloth cap by yanking on its red pom-pom, and Angelina kept putting the cap back on. Finally she gave up, exclaiming, “Señor Chance, the wind is too strong. And he refuses to wear his hat.”

Mack tousled his son’s fair hair. “Never mind—the fresh air and sunshine are good for him. Besides, I want him with me when we sail into the Bay. How soon, Captain Norheim?”

The Dane with the marvelous chest-length white beard snapped open a brass telescope and raked it along the shore, where a few fishing boats bobbed in small inlets, and white cottages neat as cubed sugar perched on hillsides. Then he consulted a chart in the binnacle and spoke to the helmsman.

“I estimate the Bay in slightly over an hour.”

“Splendid,” Mack said with a hard shine in his sunlit eyes. The yacht lifted and fell and the motion of her passage stirred his pulses. He had no problem with nausea, not even in the worst swells. Norheim said he was a born yachtsman.

When it came to the child, however, Angelina was unimpressed by Mack’s wealth, importance, or occasional ferocity. “That is too long,” she announced. “I will take him below.”

“Mind the clock and watch a porthole, then. Bring him up when we enter the Bay. When he’s big, I want to tell him he was there when we came back.”

She left the deck.
California Chance
sped north through a sea strewn with the flashing gold of the morning light.

M
ACK FOUND GREAT CHANGES
in San Francisco. He found a new City landmark: the Ferry Building. Dominating the waterfront, its shining clock tower was a copy of an exquisite Moorish spire on the cathedral of Seville. He found City Hall finished at the corner of Larkin and McAllister, after twenty-nine years of construction and expenditures of $8 million. Boosters said the French-Corinthian building with its high dome was beautiful. Cynics said so many corners had been cut, it would fall down if hit by a strong sneeze. He found the town expanding relentlessly toward the ocean, reclaiming the sandy wastes of the Western Addition for new homes.

He found the section south of Market—South of the Slot; a literal slot in the street for cable cars—much more congested and run down than he remembered.

He found a new mayor, Jim Phelan, in office. The eccentric populist Sutro was dead two years now, most of his reform schemes unfulfilled. Phelan was that rare bird, a rich Democrat. A grandee with a Jesuit education, he boasted idealistic visions and a frank loathing of the SP and municipal graft.

He found a burgeoning literary and art community whose movable party shifted back and forth between the City and windswept cottages at Carmel; Nellie had rented one there and would return to it soon. This news came in a letter from Rome. With great glee she reported that another San Franciscan, her friend Frank Norris—“cruelly handsome—alas, he’s married”—was completing a railroad-bashing novel, a
roman à clef
based on the killings at Mussel Slough.

Mack found that youthful memories, good memories, of San Francisco almost balanced other memories: of Fairbanks; Bao Kee dead in the starlight; Huntington in his skullcap; Silver Tooth Coglan and that sour, damp room of pain and defeat. He found that, without realizing it, he had long ago given his heart to this shining pastel city on the Bay. When or where it happened, he couldn’t say. But knowing it now filled him with a sweet sentimental satisfaction that he dared reveal to no one.

Mack lived quietly during the first months of 1900, attending to his various enterprises, hiring a staff, advertising for an assistant in Hearst’s East and West Coast papers, buying more San Francisco real estate. He secured a local lawyer, Rhett Haverstick, Esq., a tall, regal man. An old-line City Democrat with family roots in South Carolina, Haverstick possessed the inbred good manners of Southerners, but none of their occasional arrogance.

Mack established substantial bank accounts at the Bank of California; he would have nothing to do with Fairbanks Trust. One of the bank officers proposed him for the Olympic Club and Haverstick seconded him. He was elected, though Haverstick told him Fairbanks later said he’d have tried to block the election, had not SP business kept him away from the City when the membership committee met.