Fortune is a Woman (4 page)

He downed another brandy thinking of the women in his life, the endless train of mistresses and one-night stands, his two worthless wives, and Francie. God, he could remember like it was yesterday; his father telling him, when he was still only a kid, that his sister was crazy and that she did not deserve to have the Harrison name. It was at their mother's funeral when he realized that he was the important one. He was the son and heir. She was a mere girl and she just didn't count.

CHAPTER 3

Francie couldn't sleep. She heard the cars and voices as Harry's guests left and quiet settled over the city. Her mind cast back where it didn't want to go.

Her first memory was of the week her brother was born. The year was 1891. She was three years old and she climbed from her bed in the third floor nursery and tiptoed down the stairs to the landing to see what all the noise was about. The grand hall, with its dark oak paneling, its stained-glass dome and Italian marble pillars, was lit as bright as day. Menservants wearing the burgundy Harrison livery were hurrying back and forth to the dining room carrying platters of food under the supervision of Maitland, the English butler.

Clinging to the banisters, she watched with fascination a world she had never seen before. Snatches of conversation and laughter came from the dining room and she could hear her father's booming voice barking an order at Maitland. The butler emerged into the hall, his face impassive as he repeated the order to one of the servants and she shrank back into a corner as the man hurried past her up the stairs.

A few minutes later he returned carrying a tightly wrapped bundle. It was her new baby brother, who she knew slept in a crib by her mother's bed, and whom she had only been allowed to see once for a few minutes when her father was out. "Because he's afraid of the germs, dear," her mother had said. The servant disappeared toward the kitchen with the baby, and Francie's hand flew to her mouth in horror. Were they going to put him in the oven and cook him for supper?

She clung terrified to the banisters and a few minutes later Maitland strode across the hall bearing an enormous silver platter covered with a large silver dome.

Fear lent wings to Francie's feet as she sped down the richly carpeted stairs, tripping over the brass stair-rods and almost landing on her nose on the black-and-white checkered floor. The marble felt cold under her bare feet as she ran to the dining room and through the half-open doors.

The long table was aglitter with candlelight, silver, and crystal. Wine glowed ruby red in decanters and fragrant blue cigar smoke wreathed the air. Her father, Harmon Harrison, was seated at the head. He was tall, bearded, and heavily built. He exuded the power and confidence of his wealth and position. His eyes were fixed on Maitland carrying the platter toward him. He tapped on his glass and the twenty-three men around the table fell obediently silent.

"Gentlemen," Harmon boomed, "I have invited you here tonight not just for your company, and not only to discuss how we can bring San Francisco into the glory she deserves by strengthening her links to the East Coast. No, sirs! You have partaken of the best the house of Harrison has to offer, but now there is something else I have to show you. Something special." Pushing back his chair, he rose to his feet, and with a flourish removed the silver dome. "Gentlemen," he said proudly, "may I introduce my son and heir—Harmon Lloyd Harrison, Junior."

The tiny baby, naked but for a cotton diaper, lay sleeping on a bed of green ferns oblivious to the laughter and applause. Grabbing the silver platter Harmon Harrison held it aloft. "A toast, gentlemen, to my son," he called, and the baby's health was solemnly drunk in the finest vintage port wine.

Francie stood unnoticed by the door as the silver platter with its tiny human burden was passed from hand to hand around the table. The baby was as still and silent as her rag doll. A scream forced itself from her throat as she launched herself suddenly at her father.

"Stop them, Papa, stop them," she screamed, throwing her arms tightly around his legs. "Don't let them eat him!"

"Francesca!" The depth of anger in her father's voice froze her screams into instant silence. With a gesture he indicated she should be removed and a servant pulled her clinging arms from his immaculate gray pinstriped trousers.

"I shall deal with you in the morning," he said quietly in a tone that changed her blood to ice as they bore her away. It was then that Francie first realized her father did not love her.

***

Hate
was too strong a word to describe Harmon Harrison's attitude toward his daughter; for him she simply did not exist. His son was what he had desired above anything else and all his energy, all his ambition, all his life force went into grooming him to take over his position as head of the Harrison Mercantile and Savings Bank, as well as the myriad other Harrison business enterprises that fueled his lavish lifestyle and his ever-growing fortune.

Harmon had always claimed that his father came from old Yankee stock, from Philadelphia, and that his mother's ancestors had come over on the
Mayflower.
Nothing could have been further from the truth. His father, Lloyd Harrison, was a Yankee all right, but he was an itinerant trader whose life had been devoted to making a fast buck when and wherever he could, legal or otherwise, and to pleasuring any attractive woman who fell for his rough, dark good looks and practiced line of patter.

Lloyd had arrived in San Francisco, a town of tents and shanties, with twenty thousand dollars in his pocket earned selling guns and ammunition to settlers in the middle west. He was quick to take his talents out to the gold-fields, where he bartered, dealt, and traded in everything from canvas tents to picks and shovels, candles, tea, liquor, barroom fittings, Bibles, and brass beds for bordellos. Sometimes he was paid in cash, sometimes in still-worthless gold stock, and it was the stock that ultimately made him a rich man. With his fickle, fly-by-night nature, Lloyd never hung on to his stock; when it rose from worthless to lucky strike and hit a thousand dollars a share, he sold, and then he bought up real estate in San Francisco, cheap sandy lots that within a year were selling for small fortunes. Though he never put his shoulder to the pick and shovel in the gold mines everything Lloyd touched turned to pure eighteen-karat nuggets sitting snugly in a vault in the California Bank.

Within two years he was a millionaire, within five a multimillionaire, but he still preferred the rough-and-tumble atmosphere of the shantytowns near the gold mines to the urban pleasures of a growing San Francisco.

One day he had found himself with a shipment of fancy gowns and feathered hats direct from Paris. There was a shortage of women in San Francisco, so he took them to the only place where there were both women and money. The bordellos of the boom silver mining town, Virginia City.

He sold half a dozen fashionable dresses and some delicious silk underwear to Bessie Maloney, the buxom, dark-haired proprietress of Maloney's Cat House, consummating the transaction a little more personally later that night. Bessie was a nice woman, she ran a fair establishment, and he'd made a good profit on his shipment; it was nothing more than that to either of them. Except a couple of months later when he found himself back in Virginia City and Bessie told him she was pregnant.

She was thirty-four years old, she had never had a child, and she intended to have this one. Lloyd shrugged, passed a couple of thousand dollars across the bar and promised casually to "see her all right." Then he thought nothing more of it.

When he returned to Virginia City a year later he was told Bessie had died in childbirth and the baby—a boy— was being looked after by the whores. He stared at the infant sleeping in a Moses basket on top of the mahogany bar while blue cigar smoke and even bluer language floated around him.

Picking up the basket, he walked to the door. "This is my boy," he said firmly. "My son. He's coming home with me."

But first he had to build that home. He chose his lot carefully on top of the almost empty California hill and built the first of its grand mansions. Later it would be called "Nob Hill," because the men who lived there were like the nabobs of the east, the most powerful in San Francisco and rich beyond the dreams of avarice. He spent over a million dollars creating a palace for his son and he made sure that everything was the best. While it was being built, he took a suite at the lavish Oriental Hotel, where he left his son in the care of three nursemaids and returned to his old stamping grounds at the silvermines.

When the house was finally finished it occupied a full city block. It had more than sixty rooms including a drawing room with painted wall paneling brought from a French château, a ballroom with mirrors copied from those at Versailles, and floors and bathrooms of marble imported from Italy. There were three hundred silver wall sconces and forty crystal chandeliers from Venice, as well as forests of oak paneling and a great staircase from a Jacobean mansion in England. The tall windows were hung with satin and velvet drapes imported from Lyons in France, and the floors covered with magnificent rugs from Persia. The stables in back of the house rivaled it in luxury, with polished rosewood stalls embellished with silver, mosaic tiled floors, Brussels rugs, and elaborate chandeliers. The mansion was the talk of San Francisco, as was Lloyd's flamboyant lifestyle.

His son, Harmon, was brought up by nursemaids and governesses and by the age of seven already ruled the household like a tyrant; his word was law. "You tell 'em, son," his father would chuckle, watching young Harmon giving orders to the maids. "You show 'em who's the man of the house."

When he was ten Lloyd sent him back east to a smart prep school to teach him how to behave in men's company. "You've been around namby-pamby women too long," he told him. Harmon was of average intelligence, tall, fair, and good-looking, and he had a great deal of money to throw about. He quickly acquired a coterie of hangers-on and he enjoyed his school years and the new masculine company. At eighteen he went to Princeton, returning home at age twenty-one with a diploma and a sense of his own importance. He had become an overnight aristocrat.

It was a dreadful shock, therefore, when one night Lloyd, slightly the worse for drink, told him the truth about his mother, Bessie Maloney of Maloney's Cat House. Devastated, Harmon nursed the secret in his heart and his hatred for his "mother" grew into a burning hatred for all women.

For a handsome young man, Harmon sowed few wild oats. He preferred masculine company and sporting events and considered women a secondary breed, put there for a man's entertainment—and not worth the money he had to spend on them.

Lloyd died when Harmon was twenty-two and he found himself the sole inheritor of an estate calculated in excess of eighty-five million dollars. He buried his father with tremendous pomp, hosting a reception afterward at the Harrison mansion attended by every one of San Francisco's notables, most of whom had made their money the same way his father had. With that done he set about reshaping the family image by covering up Lloyd's wild reputation and the facts of his own birth, and throwing himself wholeheartedly into running the business. He did both very well and in ten years he had become a pillar of San Francisco society and had tripled his assets. He was discreet about his personal life and sexual predilections and his public life was a model of propriety.

By this time he was thirty-two years old and still a bachelor, but he wanted a son and heir to carry on the Harrison name and tradition, and so he began to look around for a suitable wife.

He met Dolores de Soto at a dance at a neighboring Nob Hill mansion. As he whirled her around in a waltz, his hand tightly clamped on her tiny waist, her white skirts flowing, he was thinking less of her dark, sapphire-eyed beauty than her pedigree, because the de Sotos were decendants of Spanish aristocrats and they also were known for breeding sons. And he, the son of an itinerant Yankee trader and a whore, wanted to be socially well-connected as much as he wanted a son and heir. He knew the de Soto family had once been rich, owning many thousands of acres from the Spanish land grants, but generations of bad business deals had reduced their assets to a small ranch in the Sonoma Valley. They might not have money—but their breeding could be traced back to Queen Isabella of Spain.

He requested a meeting with Dolores's father; an agreement was reached and a marriage contract signed. The de Sotos left the ranch and planned to move back to Mexico, and within a matter of weeks the girl found herself walking down the aisle of St. Mary's Cathedral in front of a crowd of three hundred hand-picked guests as Harmon Harrison's bride. At that moment her father became a rich man again and Dolores became her husband's chattel, to be used whenever he desired, to be a vessel to breed his sons, and to be present on those public occasions when a wife's presence was required.

Dolores knew why he had married her and she breathed a sigh of relief when she knew she was pregnant. Harmon sent the best doctor in San Francisco to examine her; he watched over her health like a hawk, but she became weak and thin, her eyes were huge pools of blue in her pale face and her black hair lost its luster. Deciding that San Francisco's hills and fog were dangerous for a pregnant woman, he sent her up north to her family's old ranch in the Sonoma Valley, where he left her in the care of a nurse. He stocked the ranch with special Jersey cows to provide her with fresh milk and cream; he ordered San Francisco's best butcher to prepare prime cuts of meat, had them packed in ice and dispatched them daily to the ranch; and he hired a special cook to supervise his wife's diet and prepare her meals.

Dolores was still only nineteen and she felt like a prize calf being reared for the kill. She was a well-brought-up girl, soft-spoken and timid, and she was afraid of her husband's coldness and terrified of his anger. Everything she did was to please him; the way she wore her smooth black hair, wound into an elegant chignon; the way she dressed, quietly but expensively as befitted a rich man's wife; the way she behaved, smiling by his side in public or supervising his dinner table. But whenever they were alone she kept to her rooms and out of his sight. Because that's the way he wanted things. And she knew for a fact that he cared for his dogs, the Great Danes, King and Prince, more than he did for her.