The Immigrants (6 page)

“Twelve dollars a week to start. That’s not the best, but it’s not the worst.” He got up, reached into his pocket, and took out a wad of bills, peeling off two fives and two singles. “Here’s a week’s pay in advance. Get your kid some food. But if you don’t show here tomorrow, I’ll peel your yellow skin off, and remember that.”

At thirty years of age, Mark Levy’s wife, Sarah, still had the appearance of an ingenuous girl of eighteen. She had flaxen hair

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which she wore tied in a tight bun at the back of her head and wide, pale blue eyes set far apart. She defied all the stereotypes of a Jewish woman; she was slender, small-breasted, and long-legged, and she gave the appearance of being perpetually startled. She had been born in the city of Kiev, in Russia, and brought to the East Side of New York City at the age of seven, and she still had a slight foreign accent, which her husband felt enhanced her slow, throaty speech. This, together with a certain vagueness in her manner, gave people the impression that she was a dull and phleg matic person, an impression that was far from the fact; and indeed her husband, who worshipped her, took a pe culiar comfort in the fact that her imagination and pas sion were so well concealed. She was a second cousin once removed or something of that sort—Mark was never entirely clear about their family relationship—and they had come together through an arrangement between his family and her family, done in the old Eu ropean manner, without their ever seeing each other before they were pledged—after which Sarah was shipped across the country, three thousand miles by rail and coach, a girl of seventeen tagged and addressed for all the world like a parcel. For two months before the wed ding, she had lived in his father’s house—which was four rooms behind the chandler shop on the Embarcadero—and during that time, Mark fell totally and ro mantically in love with her. For her part, she accepted him with the same easygoing tolerance with which she accepted all else that befell her.

Now, married almost thirteen years, with the older Levys dead and buried, she was contentedly mistress of the chandler shop, the four rooms behind it, a son, Ja cob, who was eleven years old, a daughter, Martha, who was five, and a husband who took her advice and asked her advice without ever truly understanding that either was the case. Even when she once casually sug gested that he use copper rivets to reinforce the pockets of the heavy cotton trousers he sold

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to the seamen and the fishermen, and thereby tripled his business, he was not certain that the idea was not originally his own.

Now, with the five-year-old Martha clinging to her skirt, she was engaged with her husband in their annual and fruitless attempt to take inventory in the shop, he calling out the items, she writing them down, when Daniel Lavette entered the store. They stopped what they were doing and stared at him.

“I want four new nets,” Lavette said, “and I want the Massachusetts stuff and not the garbage they make out here. So if you haven’t got them, order them for me.”

Still they stared at him.

“What the devil—”

“That suit doesn’t fit you, Danny,” Levy said.

“It fits.” He unbuttoned the tight jacket of the blue serge suit he wore and pulled in his stomach. “It fits. I haven’t had it on for a year or so. Maybe I filled out.”

“The sleeves are two inches short. The pants are short.”

“Let him be,” Sarah said. “He’s grown.”

“I haven’t grown. I’m twenty-one years old. You don’t grow at twenty-one.”

“When did you buy the suit, Danny?”

“Two years ago.”

“Well, you’ve grown. I don’t think I ever seen you in a suit before. What’s the occasion?”

“It doesn’t look right, does it?” he asked Sarah.

“It’s all right.”

“Sure, it’s fine. I’m only going to have lunch with Thomas Seldon at the Union Club—that’s all. God damn it to hell, I look like a monkey!”

“Take off the jacket,” Sarah said gently. “I’ll lengthen the sleeves. It won’t take more than a few min utes, and I’ll press out the creases.”

“Seldon? You mean
the
Thomas Seldon?”

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“That’s right.” He was staring at his cuffs.

“Oh, take it off, Danny,” she said.

He pulled off the jacket and handed it to her. Levy, riffling through the pages of a catalogue, said, “That Massachusetts netting is up twenty percent. It comes from Fall River. Seldon—come on.”

“Look, Mark,” Lavette said, bristling, “to me Seldon’s another guy—that’s all.”

“He only owns the second biggest bank in the city, that’s all.”

Sarah, small Martha still clinging to her skirt, had taken the jacket inside. Levy motioned for Lavette to follow. “Come on, I’ll feed you a beer.”

“I don’t want any beer on my breath. In one hour, I’m with the nabobs at the Union Club.”

They sat around the kitchen table. Sarah cut and stitched with speed and skill. Dan Lavette, grinning like a small boy at Levy’s disbelief, told how it had come about. He had walked into the Seldon National Bank, identified himself, and asked for a loan of thirty thou sand dollars. He didn’t get the loan, at least not yet, but he was introduced to Thomas Seldon himself and in vited to lunch at the Union Club to discuss it further.

“That’s
chutzpa
,” Levy said admiringly, “pure, un adulterated
chutzpa
.”

“What’s
chutzpa
?”

“Yiddish for gall, nerve, arrogance—whatever. Any way, what on earth do you want with thirty thousand dollars?”

“The
Oregon Queen’s
for sale.”

“So?”

“They’re asking a hundred and fifty thousand. I can get her for a hundred twenty thousand down and ten thousand more to put her in shape.”

“Danny, the
Oregon Queen’s
an iron ship. She’s a dead-lost experiment.”

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“Like hell she is. She’s rusty and she never had a fair shake, but her hull is good and her engines are good. There’s money in the lumber trade. This city eats wood like crazy, and there’s no end in sight. I can ship enough timber in one year to pay her off, and from there on it’s pure gravy.”

“Danny, you got three boats mortgaged to the hilt.”

“And I’m a fishmonger and my father was a fishmon ger.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“It stinks of fish and it stinks of the Embarcadero. We’re down here and the nabobs are up there on Nob Hill.”

“You’re an ambitious young man,” Sarah said. “Mark isn’t. Try on the jacket.”

“Why didn’t you go to Tony Cassala?” Mark asked him.

“Because Tony can’t say no to me, and if I asked him for his blood, he’d give it to me. I don’t want any hand outs. I’m not asking for charity. This is a risk, but it’s a risk that makes sense.” He pulled on the jacket. “How does it look?”

“It’s better. Take it off and I’ll press the sleeves.”

“Suppose the whole thing blows. Seldon can afford it. Tony can’t.”

“Don’t underestimate Tony,” Mark said. “Look, loosen your belt and drop the pants. It looks better that way. And for God’s sake, if you’re moving up to Nob Hill, get yourself a decent suit of clothes.”

At the door, leaving, Dan turned to them and said, “Funny thing happened today. I hired a bookkeeper.”

“It’s time.”

“He’s a Chink.”

“What?”

“You heard me. I hired a Chink. What do you think of that?”

“I think it’s all right,” Levy said.

After he had left, Sarah asked her husband, “Why does he try so hard to act tough and mean?”

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“Two reasons,” Mark replied. “First, because a part of him is tough and paean, because if you’re going to run fish and crab out of the wharf and not be run out of the place yourself, you got to be a little tough and a little mean, and secondly because he’s just a kid. I like him.”

That night, at dinner in his home, Thomas Seldon was not quite certain whether or not he liked Daniel Lavette. Of course, his value judgments were not in terms of liking or disliking; in his world, a man was sound or unsound, reliable or unreliable, solid or shaky; liking had nothing to do with it. “Interesting chap,” he said to his wife and daughter. “Big—too big for the clothes he wore—and young. Twenty-one.” He sat at one end of the great mahogany table in the Seldon dining room, his wife and daughter on his left and right respectively. Fully set, the table held sixteen; and even though there were only three of them at dinner, Seldon liked the feel of its size and substance. There was much substance, if little taste, all through the dining room, the half-paneled walls, the Victorian bastardization of Queen Anne fur niture, the heavy beams across the ceiling, not even shaken by the earthquake, a curious and uninspiring marriage of Spanish Colonial and Victorian, but never theless a solid place of substance.

Seldon had built the house for his bride, Mary, who was an Asquith from Boston before her marriage. Thomas Seldon, Senior, dead these twelve years past, had come to California in the late forties, not to mine gold but to care for the gold that others mined, and the present Thomas Seldon presided over the bank his fa ther founded. Now, at fifty-five, a solid, handsome, substantial man with iron gray hair and a firm chin, he found every prospect pleas-ing except that his wife, Mary, had seen fit to present him with one

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daughter and no sons. Mary had other virtues; she was calm, coldly beautiful, even at age fifty-two, and made few demands upon her husband, who found Madam Sigeury’s bordello on Beale Street a more comfortable outlet for his waning sexual energies than his wife’s bed. And if she had presented him with only a single child, a daughter, that daughter was nevertheless known and ac cepted as the most beautiful woman in San Francisco, providing you also accepted the fact that the choice in such matters was confined to the two hundred or so families that “mattered.”

But even in wider circles, Jean Seldon would have been considered to be unusually beautiful. It was bruited around town that Charles Dana Gibson, who had established the ideal of upperclass beauty in his drawings and paintings, had sketched her while in San Francisco, and had thereby come to his Gibson-woman stereotype, and while Jean herself knew this to be un true and indeed wondered whether Gibson had ever ac tually been in San Francisco, she did nothing to dispel the legend. She was a tall woman, five feet eight and a half inches in her stocking feet, well formed, with wide, straight shoulders and strong, long-fingered hands. Her face had the same chiseled quality as her mother’s—referred to on the society page as “classic”—her eyes were deep blue and her hair of a pale honey color which in certain light took on a golden sheen.

She had dutifully undergone twelve years of schooling of a sort at Miss Marion’s Classes, but she had little intellectual curiosity and, in common with most of her women friends, no desire to be college educated.

Nor was she very musically inclined. After ten years of piano lessons, she was capable of playing a Bee thoven sonata from the music, correctly if rather woodenly; but in all truth, music bored her. She played ten nis competently and rode competently, but did neither with devotion or passion. She wore clothes splendidly and loved shopping, and the trying on of the long, awk ward dresses of

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her time was something she delighted in. She was frequently photographed, and when the first upperclass charity fashion show was held in the city, the
Chronicle
noted that “the occasion was made mem orable by the costumes displayed by a bevy of local beauties, and in particular by the classic beauty and re gal manner of Miss Jean Seldon.” That was two years ago, when Jean was not yet nineteen.

Now, she was if anything even more handsome and certainly more dis content, a fact which puzzled and disturbed her parents. She took so little interest in most things that her interest in her father’s luncheon guest was rather unusual.

“You say his clothes didn’t fit him,” she said to her father, “and he didn’t even know which fork to use. That’s wonderful.”

“Why?”

“He sounds like one of Jack London’s heroes.”

“Who is Jack London?”

“Daddy!”

“I just can’t understand why you invited him here,” Mary Seldon said.

“You did? When?”

“Friday next. Mary,” he said to his wife, “this is a most unusual young man, believe me. He can’t be more than twenty-one or twenty-two, uncouth—yet not really. He walked into the bank as if he owned the place, demanded to see me, talked his way in, and coolly asked for a loan of thirty thousand dollars. And believe me, instead of throwing him out, I was taken with him.”

“And you’ll give him the loan?”

“Good heavens, no. He’s a crab fisher.”

“What!”

“You heard me, a crab fisher.”

“I still don’t understand why you asked him to din ner,” his wife said. “The way you describe him—well, who on earth could we ask with him?”

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“Why won’t you give him the loan?” Jean persisted, intrigued with the image her father evoked.

“Because he has no collateral. He owns three fishing boats that are heavily mortgaged, and he operates with a cash balance of about a thousand dollars, when he has it. Also, he’s young—too young for the crazy notion he has of buying a coastal steamer.”

“Then, as Mother says, why did you invite him here?”

“For the same reason I asked him to lunch with Al Summers and myself at the club. I suppose it’s his youth and vitality. They tell me his folks were killed in the earthquake—I think he’s half French and half Italian—but you don’t brush off a kid like that. He’ll amount to something some day, and when he does, I want him to come back to our bank.”

From a cousin who worked as a teller at the Seldon Bank, Anthony Cassala got the news that Lavette had come there for a loan. He told his wife, Maria, that it made him sick, sick to his heart, as he put it.