California Gold (62 page)

Mack’s turreted castle faced Sacramento Street and afforded splendid views of the Bay from the rear, the Clay Street side. He set masons to work building entrance pillars and casting a pair of cartouches in concrete, and hired a firm to furnish the house temporarily and plan a complete redecoration, starting with the ballroom. He decided to gut and remodel the entire top floor to create the largest, most lavish suite of private offices, conference and storage rooms the City had ever seen.

Gradually, the City’s better element became aware of his presence. He knew the society leaders would consider him a parvenu, and prepared to overcome that by a simple method: He would buy his way into their favor.

Mrs. Jane Stanford was gray now, but energetic as ever. Her other guest was Dr. David Starr Jordan, the president of Stanford University. Jordan was about fifty and over six feet tall, with the ruddy look of a confirmed outdoorsman. He had been one of the first Americans to climb the Matterhorn.

Jordan declined Jane Stanford’s offer of tea, slipping in a pointed little sermonette on the harmful effect of stimulants. Mack took tea, then presented the governor’s widow with a draft for $100,000.

“This is most generous,” Mrs. Stanford exclaimed with great emotion. “Most unexpected too.”

“I believe in education. California’s been good to me. And I’ve never forgotten that you and the governor gave me my first decent job.” With disarming charm, he added, “I also hope this takes a little of the sting from the memory of the nickel ferry.”

“How could it be otherwise, Mr. Chance? The university is my deepest concern—my only one, now that Leland’s gone”

Jordan smiled. “She tends to our welfare as devotedly as Phoebe Hearst tends to that of the university at Berkeley.” He examined the draft, obviously delighted. “Thanks to benefactors like you, the Stanford endowment continues to far exceed that of schools such as Columbia and Harvard. When I came here from the presidency of Indiana, members of the press predicted I’d have no operating funds, no faculty, and no students. They said I’d lecture all alone in empty marble halls for years—perhaps forever. We continue to give the lie to those nay-sayers. Thank you for helping us.”

“Have another cup of tea, Mr. Chance,” said Mrs. Stanford. “And should I not say welcome home?”

“We can put you up for the Bohemian Club, if you want,” Rhett Haverstick told him. “When it was founded thirty years ago, it was just what the name suggests, a hangout for journalists and painters. Now it’s the business and political crowd, the best and most powerful people. You might even make the summer encampment if things move speedily.”

“Will they let me in?”

“Of course we must discount our friend Fairbanks again—”

“He belongs, does he?”

“I’m afraid so. As for the rest of the membership—I should think they’d be enthusiastic. You know what’s being said about you around town.”

“No, I don’t.”

“ ‘Chance is too rich to be ignored.’ ”

Mack smiled.

The decorators returned with an architect’s scheme to knock out the foyer ceiling and the ceiling on the floor above. “What we propose is a dramatic three-story entrance roofed in Tiffany’s finest multicolored glass.” Mack studied the plans a while. “How much?”

“Less than three hundred thousand dollars.”

Again he was silent for a bit, turning the pages of the ledgers stored in his head and studying their numbers. Then: “Go ahead.”

The Bohemian Club admitted him, the only blackball Fairbanks’s, and that was not sufficient to keep him out. He received an invitation to the Midsummer High Jinks, the annual retreat, to be held this year at the club’s new campground in the Russian River redwoods.

As business took him around the City, he met more of its leaders. A few refused to associate with him—those connected with Fairbanks Trust and the high echelons of the Southern Pacific, and those connected with the
Examiner’s
arch competitor, the
Chronicle.
Publisher Mike de Young ruled his empire from a new ten-story skyscraper on Market Street. Though he was a stalwart of Mack’s own Republican party, whenever the two met, he gave Mack a cool nod, no more; anyone known to be a friend of Hearst received the same treatment.

One man who should have been his enemy treated him cordially: Henry Huntington, the son of C.P.’s older brother Solon. Nephew Henry, nicknamed Ed, had taken a job with the SP back in ’81. Now he managed the line’s San Francisco streetcar subsidiary. He was a blunt man, about fifty, and perhaps he and Mack respected one another because they detected common traits, chief among them implacable ambition.

Weekends, Mack surrendered to his passion for the outdoors. He hiked down the wild Big Sur coast, and hunted quail, wolf, and wild goat in the Sierra foothills—but with nothing more lethal than one of Eastman’s black-box Kodak cameras.

He devoured Clarence King’s
Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada
and took up the sport, climbing the wind-scoured volcanic heights of Shasta, and surveying the lush vineyards of Napa and Sonoma from the summit of Mount Saint Helena, named by the wife of a Russian governor-general. In Contra Costa County he climbed up through fields of wildflowers, then sycamore and pine, to the top of Mount Diablo. Nearly four thousand feet above the sea, he could see for almost a hundred miles in every direction sweeping vistas of the Pacific, the City, the North Coast, the Central Valley, and the far Sierras. On that peak on a summer afternoon, he was the king of California. The king of the world.

Whatever else he did, he devoted an hour every evening to Little Jim. The boy was going on two, toddling and using new words and pulling down any object not nailed in place. Little Jim’s eyes had remained a deep blue—Carla’s eyes—and a great lot of golden hair capped his head. Unquestionably, he favored his mother, Señora Olivar agreed.

Some weekends, Mack took his son walking in Golden Gate Park, or showed him the rocky coast at Bodega Bay from the deck of
California Chance.
The boy went on these excursions dutifully, but seemed uninterested.

“I cannot tell you why,” Angelina Olivar said when Mack raised the question. “Perhaps, like his face, his disposition favors her.”

God forbid
, Mack thought with a shiver of dread.

The Grove, the Bohemian Club’s newly acquired tract on the Russian River, hosted members for the first time that summer. An uncharacteristic shyness enveloped Mack as he carried his gear to his assigned cabin, where he met his camp-mates for the week of High Jinks: Hunter Vann, an important trial attorney; Oscar Himmel, a commission agent and warehouse owner; and Joe Snell, an official of the SP-controlled streetcar line. They greeted Mack with varying degrees of warmth; Himmel was too pompous and opinionated for real friendliness.

Joe Snell said he’d come up with his friend and fellow member Ed Huntington, and Mack said hello to old Collis’s nephew at the first evening campfire. Like most of the others, Huntington wore boots and a lumberjack shirt. He shook Mack’s hand warmly. Across the huge sparking blaze Mack saw someone watching them. It was Fairbanks, surrounded by cronies deep into their bourbon; the lawyer nodded to him.

Mack drank whiskey during the singing, as did everyone else. They locked arms and swayed to and fro under the gay Japanese lanterns, and generally acted like a lot of small boys suddenly relieved of daily cares.

Not everyone could leave everyday affairs behind, however. Huntington spoke of his love of books, and then about streetcars.

“I have a theory, Chance. Local transportation lines can do regionally what the Central and Southern Pacific did for this state. They can shape the future by shaping the way a city expands. Service must be fast, and clean—using overhead electric lines, perhaps. But I’m convinced the idea is sound. I’m going to test it out in Los Angeles one of these days.”

Later, on a steep dirt trail back to his cabin, with the river purling nearby and insects harping in the dark, he met Fairbanks coming down, laughing with a friend. The trail wasn’t wide enough for them to pass and one or the other had to step off.

Mack stopped under a paper lantern that cast feeble red light on the trail. Fairbanks stopped too.

“Well, Chance, I suppose I owe you a welcome to the Bohemians.”

“You don’t owe me a thing, Walter.”

Fairbanks rubbed his mustache with his little finger. Sarcastically, he asked, “How’s your stock in the People’s Road?”

“I liquidated it after the sellout.” It was a sore point. The San Francisco & San Joaquin had reached Bakersfield in ’98, then, in a surprise move, the directors had negotiated and merged the line into the Santa Fe. Mack and some other substantial stockholders attempted to block the sale, charging the directors with fraud, but they lost.

“What a pity.”

“We all lose some rounds, Walter. The harbor. The debt—”

Fairbanks didn’t take the bait. “Neither of those detract from the company’s strong position.”

“Maybe not. But one of these days, Walter, you won’t run California. One of these days the people will see to it. Good night.”

Mack stepped forward so abruptly, Fairbanks was taken by surprise, and he stepped back. Then he realized what he’d done. The screwlike pain pierced his forehead.

“Who is that?” his friend asked as Mack disappeared up the trail.

“A son of a bitch I’ll get rid of when the time is right.”

They fished and sang and lazed away the bright summer hours. They celebrated the Cremation of Care in the traditional outdoor play written and performed by the members. Happy and relaxed, they returned to the City at the end of a week to be met with stunning news. C. P. Huntington had left his Fifth Avenue mansion for a vacation at his camp on Raquette Lake in the Adirondacks. There, in August heat, one year short of eighty, the old man had died.

The last of the Big Four was gone,
RUTHLESS AS A CROCODILE
, said the obituary in the Monarch of the Dailies. An era was over.

This was never more evident than at the funeral. One of the mourners was E. H. Harriman, a broker who’d found his métier in railroad speculation. From his position as chairman of the Union Pacific executive committee, Harriman was acquiring lines all over the country. “They say he’s already negotiating for Ed Huntington’s stock,” a friend told Mack. “It’s really the end.”

“I don’t think so. The Octopus is still choking the life out of this state.”

Over the racket of tools and cursing workmen, Mack interviewed the seventeenth applicant for the job of assistant.

This young fellow struck him as just as unsatisfactory as the rest. He was small, no more than an inch or two over five feet, and had delicate hands and tiny feet. His hair was prematurely gray—he was perhaps twenty-eight or twenty-nine—and the thick lenses of his pince-nez only drew attention to his weak watery eyes. His skin was so white, it was doubtful that he ever saw sunshine. Two unnatural splotches of color crowned his cheeks.

He shook Mack’s hand as if it were a pump handle. “How do you do, sir? My name is Alexander Muller. I am a Swiss. From the canton of Zurich. Traditionally, there is an umlaut over the
u
in
Muller.
I have dropped it. I want to be in all ways American.”

Behind the young man’s smile Mack sensed a driven person. Alexander Muller cocked his head well forward, like a bird ever alert for a tasty worm.

“You don’t know a thing about my business, Muller. That’s the trouble I’m having with every candidate. No one knows my business like I do.”

“Perhaps you look for the wrong qualifications, sir.”

“Beg your pardon?”

“How can anyone know your affairs as well as you? In time—yes, perhaps. But it will require many years of industrious application. However, certain other qualities can recommend a candidate. A mathematical aptitude, for example. I clerked in a bank for three years. I am quick with numbers. I am industrious. I am dedicated to making my career in California.”

“Why is that? You’re far from home.”

“Far from the banks of the river Limmat I roamed as a child—yes. But you see, sir—I can’t lie if you are to employ me as a trustworthy person—I have been in a certain kind of hospital in the Alps for two years. When I was young, I was stricken with phthisis.”

“With what?”

“Pulmonary consumption, sir. It is in remission. It shall stay in remission, because I have come to the great hospital and sanitarium of the world, California.”

“You believe that?”

“Along with millions of other Europeans, I do, sir.”

A consumptive for an assistant? Mack didn’t know if he liked that. But he liked this nervous, fragile, gray-haired man-boy quite a bit, he decided.

“Tell me more about yourself. Do you have a family?”

“No, sir. Parents deceased.”

“A wife?”

“No, sir.”

“A girlfriend?”

“No. My only mistress is my work.”

“Well, that’s American, all right. You’d fit in well around here.”

Mack hired him.

In the summer Mack took up another old passion, cooking. With renovation of the foyer and ballroom on schedule, he decided to plan a gala party to celebrate the official start of the new century on New Year’s Eve. A banquet would precede the dancing, and he’d prepare at least one main dish. But he was dissatisfied with the wine, and he and Alex Muller drove up into the country with a satchel of cash. At the end of three days, Mack owned the Sonoma Creek Winery.

Mack’s busy life was not without its physical side. He was still young, and no anchorite, so when needs and stresses exerted themselves, he found a ready solution at hand: a visit to one of the so-called French restaurants.

The French restaurant was the City’s own peculiar institution. There were two or three dozen of them, scattered in the shabbier districts, the earliest having sprung up during the Gold Rush. No one could say exactly why they were called French; the cuisine didn’t qualify them for that description, being generally excellent but plain. Nor were the owners of French extraction. Perhaps the name had been given them because most Americans thought of the French as relatively relaxed regarding matters of sex, and sex was most definitely on the menu.