Daughter of Fortune (47 page)

Tao had bought beautiful furniture for Eliza's room, the only one in the house decorated with some luxury. Walking together through Chinatown, Eliza often admired traditional Chinese furniture. “It's very handsome, but heavy. The mistake is to use too much of it,” she said. He gave her a bed and armoire of dark, carved wood, and then she chose a table, chairs, and bamboo screen. She did not want a silk spread, like the ones used in China, but something more European: white embroidered linen with large pillowcases of the same fabric.

“Are you sure you want to spend that much, Tao?”

“You are thinking of the singsong girls . . . ?”

“Yes.”

“You yourself told me that there wasn't enough gold in California to buy them all. Don't worry, we have enough.”

Eliza repaid him in a thousand subtle ways: by respecting his silence and hours of study, by helping him in the consulting office, with her bravery in the work of rescuing the girls. To Tao Chi'en, nevertheless, her best gift was her irrepressible optimism, which forced him to fight back when shadows threatened to envelop him completely. “If you go around so sad, you won't have the strength to help anyone. Let's go take a walk, you need to smell the forest. Chinatown smells of soy sauce,” and she would take him by carriage to the outskirts of the city. They would spend the day in the open air, romping like children, and that night he would sleep like an angel and awake vigorous and happy.

Captain John Sommers anchored in the port of Valparaíso on March 15, 1853, exhausted by his voyage and the demands of his employer, whose most recent whim was to tow a whaling-ship-size slab of glacier from southern Chile. Her current idea was to make sorbets and ices to sell, since the price of fresh vegetables and fruit had declined sharply once agriculture had begun to prosper in California. Gold had attracted a quarter of a million immigrants in four years' time but the bonanza had passed. Even so, Paulina Rodríguez de Santa Cruz did not plan ever to leave San Francisco. In her fiery heart she had adopted that city of heroic immigrants where still there were no social classes. She had personally supervised the construction of their future home, a mansion at the top of Nob Hill with the best view of the bay, but she was expecting their fourth child and wanted it to be born in Valparaíso, where her mother and sisters could coddle her sinfully. Her father had suffered an opportune stroke, which left half his body paralyzed and his brain softened. Infirmity had not changed the character of Agustín del Valle but he feared death and, naturally, hell. Setting off for the other world with a string of mortal sins behind him was not a good idea, his relative, the bishop, had repeated ad nauseum. Of the womanizer and hellraiser he had been, nothing remained—not out of repentance but because his battered body was no longer capable of such deviltry. He heard mass every day in the chapel of his home and stoically bore the reading of the Gospel and the countless rosaries his wife recited. None of those things, however, made him any more benign toward his tenants and employees. He was still a despot to his family and the rest of the world, but part of his conversion was a sudden and inexplicable love for Paulina, the daughter who had left home. He forgot that he had repudiated her when she had run away from the convent to marry “that Jew boy” whose name he could never remember because the family wasn't of his class. He wrote Paulina calling her his favorite, the only child who had inherited his temperament and his vision for business, begging her to come home because her poor papa wanted to hug her before he died. Is that old tyrant really sick? a hopeful Paulina asked her sisters in a letter. He was not, actually, and no doubt would live on for years driving everyone crazy from his wheelchair. In any event, it was Captain Sommers' lot to be saddled on his most recent voyage with his employer, her screaming brats, her hopelessly seasick servants, a boatload of trunks, two cows for the children's milk, and the three lapdogs with a French courtesan's ribbons on their ears that had replaced the precious pooch drowned on Paulina's first voyage. To the captain, the trip seemed eternal, and he was terrified at the thought that soon he would have to take Paulina and her circus back to San Francisco. For the first time in his long life as a sailor he considered retiring, to spend the time he had left in this world on dry land. His brother, Jeremy, was waiting on the dock and drove him home, making excuses for Rose, who was suffering from a migraine.

“You know that she is always ill on Eliza's birthday. She has never been the same since the child's death,” he explained.

“I wanted to talk to you about that,” the captain replied.

Miss Rose had never known how much she loved Eliza until she was gone; the realization of her maternal love had come too late. She blamed herself for the years she had treated Eliza so casually, with an arbitrary and chaotic affection, the times she had completely forgotten her, too caught up in her own frivolities, and when she did remember would find that the child had been in the patio with the hens for a week. Eliza had been the nearest thing to a daughter she would ever have; for nearly sixteen years she had been her best friend, her companion in games, the only person in the world who touched her. Miss Rose ached with pure loneliness. She missed her baths with the child, when they splashed happily in water scented with mint and rosemary. She remembered Eliza's small, skillful hands washing her hair, rubbing her neck, polishing her fingernails with a piece of chamois, helping her dress her hair. At night she would lie awake, her ear cocked for the girl's footsteps as she brought her small glass of anisette. She would have given anything to feel Eliza's good-night kiss on her forehead. Miss Rose had stopped writing, and she had canceled the musical gatherings that had once been the hub of her social life. She had lost her flirtatious spirit and was resigned to growing old ungracefully: “At my age nothing is expected of a woman but to be dignified and smell good,” she would say. She had not created a new dress in years; she continued to wear her old ones and had failed to notice that they were out of style. The little sewing room stood abandoned, and even the collection of bonnets and hats languished in their hatboxes because Rose had opted to wear the black mantle of Chilean women when she went out. She spent her time rereading the classics and playing melancholy airs on the piano. As punishment, she deliberately and methodically sank into boredom. Eliza's absence became a good pretext for wearing mourning for the pain and privations of her forty years, especially her lost love. That was like a thorn under her fingernail, a constant, mute sorrow. She regretted having raised Eliza with a lie; she could not imagine why she had invented the story of the basket with the batiste sheets, the improbable mink coverlet and gold coins, when the truth would have been far more comforting. Eliza had a right to know that her adored uncle John was, in fact, her father, and that she and Jeremy were her aunt and uncle, that she belonged to the Sommers family and was not an orphan adopted out of charity. Miss Rose recalled with horror the time she had dragged Eliza down to the orphanage to frighten her. How old would she have been then? Eight or ten, a mere child. If only she could start over; she would be a very different mother. To begin with, she would have sympathized with Eliza when she fell in love instead of opposing her; if she had, her adoptive daughter would be alive, she sighed; it was her fault that Eliza had run away and died. Why hadn't she remembered her own experience, realized that the women of their family were always deranged by their first love? And saddest of all was not having anyone she could talk to about Eliza, because Mama Fresia was gone as well, and her brother Jeremy clenched his lips and stalked off to his room whenever she mentioned the girl. Miss Rose's grief infected everything around her; in the last four years the house had had the heavy air of a mausoleum, and the quality of their meals had deteriorated so badly that she was eating nothing but tea and English biscuits. She had not engaged a decent cook and, in fact, was not seriously looking. She was indifferent to how the house appeared; there were no flowers in the vases and half the plants in the garden were dying for lack of care. For four winters, the flowered summer cretonnes had hung in the parlor because no one had made the effort to change them at the end of the season.

Jeremy never reproached his sister; he ate whatever was put before him and said nothing when his shirts were badly ironed and his suits not brushed. He had read that single women are given to perilous indispositions. In England, a miraculous cure had been developed for hysteria, which was to cauterize certain points with a red-hot iron, but such advances had not yet reached Chile, where holy water was employed for those ills. It was, in any case, a delicate matter, one difficult to mention to Rose. It never occurred to him to comfort her, the habit of discretion and silence between them was very old. He tried to please her with gifts he bought from the contraband off the ships, but he knew nothing about women and came home with monstrosities that soon disappeared into the back of the armoires. He never suspected how many times his sister had crept near when he was smoking in his easy chair, on the verge of collapsing at his feet, resting her head on his knees, and weeping till she could weep no more, but at the last instant she would retrace her steps, fearful, because any word of affection between them would have come out as irony or unpardonable sentimentality. Stiff-backed, morose, Rose kept up appearances out of discipline, with the sensation that nothing but her corset held her together and if she removed it she would break apart. There was no hint of her former merriment and mischievousness, nor of her bold opinions, her rebellious behavior, her impertinent curiosity. She had become what she had most feared: a Victorian spinster. “It's The Change; women of her age become unstable,” the German pharmacist diagnosed, and prescribed valerian for her nerves and cod-liver oil for her pallor.

Captain John Sommers joined his brother and sister in the library to tell them the news.

“Do you remember Jacob Todd?”

“The cad who defrauded us with that yarn about missions in Tierra del Fuego?” asked Jeremy Sommers.

“The same.”

“He was enamored of Rose, if I recall correctly.” Jeremy smiled, gratified that at least they had been spared that prevaricator as a brother-in-law.

“He changed his name. Now he calls himself Jacob Freemont, and he's a newspaperman in San Francisco.”

“Egad! So it is true that in the United States any scoundrel may begin a new life?”

“Jacob Todd paid for his offense several times over. I think it is splendid that there is a country where a man can have a second chance.”

“And honor means nothing?”

“There are other things besides honor, Jeremy.”

“Is there anything else?”

“What do we care about Jacob Todd? I imagine you haven't b-b-brought us here to talk about him, John,” Rose stammered from behind her vanilla-perfumed handkerchief.

“I was with Jacob Todd, that is, Freemont, before I sailed. He told me that he saw Eliza in San Francisco.”

For the first time in her life, Miss Rose thought she was going to faint. She felt her heart pounding, her temples about to explode, as a wave of blood rushed to her face. She gasped, unable to articulate a word.

“You cannot believe a word the man says! Did you not tell us that a woman swore she had seen Eliza on a ship in 1849, and that she had not the slightest doubt she had died?” rebutted Jeremy Sommers, striding back and forth across the library.

“That's true, but she was a harlot, and she had the turquoise brooch I gave to Eliza. She may have stolen it and lied to protect herself. What reason would Jacob Freemont have to deceive me?”

“None, other than he is a four-flusher by nature.”

“That's enough, please,” Rose begged, making a colossal effort to get the words out. “The only thing that matters is that someone saw Eliza, that she isn't dead, that we can find her.”

“Do not raise your hopes, dear sister. You do not see that this is a pure fantasy? It would be a terrible blow for you if it is proven that this news is in error,” Jeremy warned.

John Sommers related the details of the meeting between Jacob Freemont and Eliza, including the information that the girl was dressed as a man and was so at ease in those clothes that the newspaperman had never doubted he was talking with a boy. He added that he and Freemont had gone together to the Chilean barrio to ask about her but they didn't know what name she was using, and no one could, or would, tell them where she was. He explained that Eliza had doubtlessly gone to California to join her lover, but something had gone wrong and they hadn't met, since the purpose of her visit to Jacob Freemont had been to inquire about an outlaw with a similar name.

“It must be Joaquín Andieta. The man is a thief. He decamped to escape the law,” Jeremy Sommers sputtered.

It had been impossible to hide the identity of Eliza's lover from him. Miss Rose had had to confess that she often went to see Joaquín Andieta's mother to ask for news, and that the unfortunate woman, poorer and sicker at each visit, was convinced her son was dead. There was no other explanation for his long silence, she maintained. She had received one letter from California dated February 1849, a week after he had arrived there, in which he told her of his plans to leave for the placers and repeated his promise to write her every two weeks. Then nothing more: he had disappeared without further word.

“Does it not seem strange that Jacob Todd would recognize Eliza out of context and dressed as a man?” asked Jeremy Sommers. “When he knew her, she was a child. How long ago was that? At least six or seven years. How could he imagine that Eliza was in California? This is absurd!”

“Three years ago I told him what had happened, and he promised to look for her. I described her in detail, Jeremy. Besides, Eliza's face never changed much. When she left here she still looked like a little girl. Jacob Freemont kept an eye out for a long time, until I told him that she might be dead. Now he has promised to renew his search; he was even thinking of hiring a detective. I expect to have more concrete news on my next voyage.”