A Light For My Love (13 page)

"Of course, Mr. Herrmann. I certainly
understand." Anxious to leave while her shaky composure was intact,
she lifted her face to give him a bland, concealing smile and
tugged at the hems of her gloves.

The watchmaker looked carefully at her
expression, and his voice dropped to a consoling murmur, empathy
lacing his words. "Ach, Fraulein, I am sorry. I know that fate is
not always so kind to us. She likes to plague us the way a cat
worries a little mouse. While I cannot purchase your beautiful
garnets, perhaps—" He hesitated here, poised on the edge of
delicacy, and though they were alone, he whispered. "Might a loan
be of any help?"

China felt here eyes widen before she dropped
them to the drawstrings on her bag. Her humiliation was complete.
She knew he hadn't intended it, but Mr. Herrmann's offer was salt
to her already lacerated pride. Terrified that she would begin
weeping, she was overwhelmed with a frantic, desperate need to get
away from his kind concern. She backed away, unable to look at him,
and ignored his question.

"I apologize for taking your time, Mr.
Herrmann. Please give my regards to your family, won't you?" She
rushed out of the shop and hurried down the sidewalk toward
home.

Troubled and despondent, she wouldn't have
noticed anything or anyone on the other side of the street. But
from the corner of her eye she caught sight of a bright blond head,
one that towered far above his companion's and everyone else's on
the sidewalk. She saw Jake standing outside the druggist's, deep in
earnest conversation with a woman who clutched his arm. He wore a
jacket and tie, as though dressed for an appointment. China slowed
her pace and moved a bit closer to the storefronts, her curiosity
roused.

The woman wore only a shawl over her shabby
dress to protect her against the winter afternoon.

Her hair, falling from its loose knot in
limp, mousy hanks, blew around her thin shoulders. Even from this
distance, China could see that despite her careworn, slatternly
appearance, she probably was no older than herself. She beamed up
at Jake with what China recognized as an inviting smile. He lowered
his head, apparently to listen to some murmured comment, then
reached into his pocket and produced a gold coin. He pressed it
into the woman's hand. She threw her arms around his neck and, to
China's horrified astonishment, kissed him full on the mouth.

China turned away and hurried down the
street. She didn't look back, and she didn't slow her steps until
she was on her own porch.

*~*~*

In the foyer of James 0. Hawthorn and
Company, Jake shifted in the hard oak chair where he'd already
spent the better part of ninety minutes. Glancing up at the wall
clock, he saw that it was getting dose to six, and gave vent to a
loud sigh. If not for the clock, he would have sworn he'd been
there three times as long. He had never been good at sitting
patiently. As a kid, the punishment he hated most of all was when
his father had made him go to mass. That usually happened after the
truant officer visited Pop or after Jake was caught for some prank.
Sitting here like this reminded him of those infrequent but
interminable Sunday mornings. Fidgeting on a hard pew at the back
of the church, he would listen impatiently for the benediction but
hear only the ring of the censer and Father Gibney's droning
Latin.

Jake leveled an unwavering gaze on the
determinedly oblivious clerk who sat at a desk, involved in some
clerkly task, behind a low gated fence of turned spindles. A brass
nameplate on the desk identified the skinny man as Dexter Morrison.
Behind Morrison was a door with frosted glass in the top panel,
upon which was painted the name "James Hawthorn." Jake had watched
men come and go from that office for the last hour and a half and
now, he knew, Hawthorn was alone.

Dexter Morrison's lofty attitude was somewhat
undermined by the faint but very detectable smell of fish that
pervaded the office. Well, canneries didn't smell like French
perfume. Jake couldn't see much of the clerk beyond the top of his
dark head and very prominent nose. The scratching of his pen grated
on Jake's ears and nerves. Finally he stood and walked to the
fence.

"Look—" Jake read the nameplate again,
"—Dexter, does Mr. Hawthorn know I'm waiting to talk with him?"

Morrison looked over his spectacles at Jake
with small, close-set eyes and a supercilious air. His large
nostrils flared disdainfully above a pair of rubbery lips that just
barely covered his considerable overbite. The man's weak chin must
have been tucked into his shirt collar, because Jake sure as hell
couldn't see it.

"I told you, sir, this is a busy cannery and
Mr. Hawthorn has been in several meetings this afternoon. And as I
also told you, without an appointment he probably will not see you.
You
chose to wait."

At the end of what had been a frustrating
day, Jake was in serious danger of losing his patience. He shifted
his weight to one hip, resisting the urge to pull at the throttling
tie around his neck. The occasions in his life when he'd had to
wear anything dressier than dungarees were few, and this time
wasn't any more fun than the others. But if he was going to call on
businessmen to secure cargo for the
Katherine Kirkland
, he
supposed he'd have to get used to stiff collars, boiled shirts,
neckties, and flimsy wool jackets. Of course, if he couldn't get in
to see anyone, it didn't matter what he wore.

Jake decided to try the persuasive approach.
He put both hands on the fence railing and leaned toward the desk.
"Come on, Dexter. The day is almost over, and I've been waiting a
long time. Go see if Mr. Hawthorn can give me a few minutes,
okay?"

Morrison pursed those rubber lips and put
down his pen, obviously discommoded. "I will try, but I can't make
any promises. Who did you say you are?" The man's Adam's apple
protruded so alarmingly, Jake thought it looked like bones.

Jake gave him his name again.

Morrison stood, went to Hawthorn's door, and
tapped quietly. A muffled voice invited him in, and the clerk
stepped into the office.

The door was left ajar, and at first Jake
could make nothing of the murmuring he heard. But slowly the door
began to swing open, as though on a draft.

“. . . remember him—nothing but a
trouble-making wharf rat as a boy, hanging around saloons, getting
into fights, womanizing. I doubt that he's any better now. Get rid
of him, Dexter. I don't have time for—"

Jake felt a flush surge up his neck and face,
and he gripped the fence rail so tightly that a joint in the wood
creaked in his hand. He turned on his heel and strode toward the
door, rage and injured pride boiling like lava in the pit of his
stomach. He stepped out into the waning daylight and thundered down
the wharf's wooden planking. A film of sweat broke out on his face
and body, making his shirt feel like a steam cabinet, closed at the
neck. With fierce impatience, he reached up, viciously jerked loose
his tie, and flung it into the river with all the strength in his
arm. It bobbed on the dark surface with the current and caught on a
piling. Fumbling to open his collar, he yanked on the button too
hard and it shot off the shirt like a bullet.

Goddamn that arrogant bastard and his
arrogant, toadying clerk! He'd like to see that bony-assed little
bootlick haul sheets in a hard blow off the Cape. Or climb a
hundred feet to the masthead and secure the skysail while the deck
was pitching under him like a fifty-dollar whore. He'd be shark
bait before he could blink his beady eyes. Well, at least he had
deprived Dexter Morrison the pleasure of throwing him out of the
fishy offices of James 0. Hawthorn and Company.

Jake continued down the long dock, his hands
in his pockets, trying to walk off his consuming fury. He had set
out this morning wearing this uncomfortable getup, ready to set
Astoria on its ear. After all, he wasn't that hooligan who had left
here in 1880. No, sir. That was all over. He owned a ship now.

But apparently Astoria wasn't ready to give
up its long-held memory of Jake Chastaine, the rake-hell, the
guttersnipe. He'd been trying to arrange meetings with businessmen
for days now, and none of them would see him. They were busy, or
not in, or just on their way out. Then, of course, there was James
Hawthorn, who may have expressed the true attitudes of all of
them.

Jake wandered along the waterfront,
sidestepping coils of rope and crates, dunnage and barrels, and
fishing nets spread to dry. The chill air smelled sharply of wood
smoke, fish, and river. A gray-striped cat with a salmon tail
damped in her teeth hurried past him and darted into a small hole
in one of the warehouse doors. He'd spent a lot of time down here
as a kid, eluding the efforts of many people to civilize him. A few
of them, like Aunt Gert and Father Gibney at St. Mary's, had been
well intentioned and saw him as a motherless stray, running wild on
the docks. Others, like some of his teachers, had merely been
offended by him and sought to bend him to their will or break him
in the trying.

Then there'd been Pop and his gloomy
admonitions to accept the life he had and settle down to it.
"Remember where you come from and find yourself some fisherman's
daughter or farmer's girl to put in your bed."

Despite his reputation, which was only
further inflated by that incident with Althea Lambert, Jake had
known few women in Astoria. And they'd mostly been girls who worked
above the Blue Mermaid and had taken him into their beds when
business was slow.

Oh, yeah, this town had had quite an opinion
of him. And now, even though he was a grown man of twenty-eight
with his own ship, Jake was still found to be lacking. He could
have all the money in the world, but he still wouldn't be good
enough.

He looked up and realized where his thoughts
and steps had taken him, as he stared at the row houses on Tenth
Street.

It was a working-class neighborhood that bred
large families, where children and dogs ran together in packs and
weary mothers never took off their aprons except to go to church on
Sundays. It was hardest on the women, life in this place.

That had been emphasized for him this morning
when he ran into Belinda McGowen outside the druggist's shop. She
was tired and aged beyond her years. Not very well herself, she'd
had to stay home from her job at the cannery to care for her sick
baby. Roddy McGowen, her husband and one of Jake's boyhood friends,
was on a ship somewhere between Astoria and the Orient. The crimps
had gotten him, she said, one night when he was on his way home.
The five dollars Jake gave her would buy medicine and groceries for
a week. She didn't want to take the money, but it was easy to get
lost in the small world on Tenth Street, and they both knew it.

It was a place where the sons of fishermen
became fishermen themselves and daughters went to work in the
canneries, packing their fathers' catches.

In this place where Jake grew up, men met
head-on the challenges of raging gales and an uncertain life, but
they couldn't reveal their hearts to tell their women they loved
them.

The sun was a smoky orange ball on the
western horizon as Jake walked past the shabby little dwellings. It
shimmered on the river and made the shadows long. He heard a woman
calling her children to dinner at the far end of the street and the
cry of a loon as it winged across the darkening sky toward the
marshes around Young's Bay.

Without deliberate effort, Jake was drawn to
a house at the end of the row. A deep sigh rose in his chest as he
stood before the place. It looked pretty much the same as he
remembered: the siding weathered to silver gray, drizzled with
rusty vertical stripes running from each nail. The windows, one on
either side of the door, were covered by cracked green shades
pulled nearly to the sills. They made Jake think of a face near
death, its eyes not quite closed.

He climbed the one step to the front stoop of
the shanty where he'd been born. An old rocker took up half of the
small porch, and for the space of a heartbeat he thought of a
rustle of skirts, a hint of honeysuckle, and wheat gold hair. His
mother had sometimes sat out here, even on cold, gray days, and
rocked in that chair, watching the river flow past with wistful
eyes. The memory was so faded, it was almost as insubstantial as
the mist. After all, he'd been just six years old the last time
he'd laid eyes on her.

He raised a closed fist to knock on the door
but then stopped, his hand an inch from the wood. A confusion of
feelings bumped around inside him. Despite old differences between
them, and wounds still not quite healed, he felt honor-bound to
visit his father. If what Pug had told him was true, Pop probably
could use a little help. But Jake didn't know if his father would
take anything from him. In fact, he wasn't really sure what kind of
reception he'd get.

He wanted to show his father that he'd proven
him wrong, that the son for whom he'd predicted mediocrity had
succeeded. But the events of the afternoon had left Jake a bit less
certain of that. He'd won his ship from a captain who wagered her
because she'd lost her luck. That wasn't much to brag about. The
men whose shipping business he wanted wouldn't give him the time of
day. And China, well—China . . . 

He took a swift, deep breath and knocked on
the door. Several moments passed and no one answered. He knocked
again. He was about to turn and leave when he detected a sound.
Leaning his head closer, he heard slow, unsteady footsteps on the
floor inside, followed by a fumbling at the doorknob. The door
opened, and Jake was confronted by a bent, aged man who stared back
at him. His hair was as silvery as the boards on the house, as was
the stubble of his day-old beard. His shoulders sagged and he
hunched forward. The deep lines in his face reminded Jake of
furrows the ocean sometimes left in the sand at low tide. A
medicinal smell drifted from inside the little house.