The Immigrants (31 page)

Lunch was homemade sausage meat, fried eggs, boiled potatoes, and fresh milk as thick as cream, and with it Mary Gallagher’s home-baked sour bread and home-churned butter. Jake and Clair ate until

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a sense of shameful gluttony put a stop to it; and then Gallagher poured glasses of a clear amber sweet wine of his own making. “A bit of dessert drinking,” he explained, “and a wee opportunity to flout their cursed Prohibition.”

The wine was delicious. “You make it?” Jake asked.

“We did,” Mary Gallagher said.

“And now the stinking government agents are all over us. I am at the end of my rope, kids, and I’ll not make it out of renting a room to a lad and a lass once a month.”

“Have you ever thought of selling the place?” Jake asked innocently.

“Oh? And who the hell would buy this turkey?”

“We dream of selling,” Mary Gallagher said. “My sister lives in Santa Barbara, and she begs us to come down there. They got a nice little dry-goods store and we could buy into it. We’re too old for this kind of thing.”

“What have you got here?” Jake asked. “I mean how much land?”

Gallagher regarded him shrewdly. “Ah—are you making conversation, boyo, or are you interested?”

“We’re interested,” Clair said, smiling. “That’s why we came back.”

“Well, both buildings are stone. You saw them last time. Oh, I admit they are run-down, and the plumbing ain’t what it should be.

Roof needs some work. But the buildings are sound. Counting the kitchen, there are nine rooms in this one—not that we use them, but you’re both young and healthy, and God willing, you’ll plant a few seeds. You’ve seen the other building. It ain’t a modern plant, but it’s good. Them fermentation vats and them aging barrels are all good German oak, worth their weight in gold if this country should ever get over this insanity. Now I couldn’t give them away. The presses are good. I got a thousand or so bottles—” He spread his hands hopelessly. “Never made fancy wine, just good white table wine. I’m a small man, Jake, that’s the truth of it. Well, it’s all there.

It ain’t worth a tink er’s damn today, but it’s there. The well is good,

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and it’s never gone dry. You can take out a thousand gallons, and it won’t go dry. As for the land, I got nine hundred acres, sixty acres in vines, and they’re choking with weeds. It’s a sorry thing to watch it all perish, believe me.”

“Can’t you market them for table grapes?” Clair asked.

“Hah! You seen the price of table grapes? They’re a glut on the market. I want to be honest with you. I can’t afford no labor, and I ain’t got the strength to pick them and crate them and market them even if it was possible. Oh, no, kids, they done us in proper. They put a knife in my heart, the lousy bastards, just as if the good Lord Himself didn’t lift His glass of wine. And what did they drink at the Last Supper—water? Like hell they did!”

“Oh, don’t carry on like that, Mike,” his wife said. “You’ll have yourself a stroke.”

“And good riddance. Now wait a minute, kids,” he said. “Your name’s Levy. You’re Jewish?”

Jake nodded.

“Ah. Well, it’s the damned Baptists and the damned Methodists that did this shameful thing to us. I never had no rancor in my heart against the Protestants, but it’s a shameful thing they have done, a shameful thing.”

“We’d like to walk over all the land,” Jake said, “and we’d like to look at the buildings again. Then we can talk about it.”

“Sure, so long as you realize I’m not trying to cheat you. I’ve told you the truth.”

As Gallagher led them over the great spread of the nine hundred acres, Jake and Clair’s excitement grew in leaps and bounds. High up on the hillside was a thick copse of live oak and mesquite. In one place, a dry, rocky bed cut a ravine.

“It runs like the devil himself when the rains come.”

“Have you never thought of damming it for irriga tion?” Jake asked.

“Sure, I’ve thought of it. Strength and money, lad, strength and

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money. You could put five hundred of these acres into vines with the proper irrigation. This is the finest wine country in the world, and some day the world is going to discover that—if we ever rid ourselves of this lousy Volstead thing.”

They poked through the old winery· “Oh, I love the smell,”

Clair said.

“I make a bit of squeezing for us, but you got to be careful. Look at these walls. A foot thick. It can be hot as hell outside, and just so cool and pleasant in here. Breaks my heart to look at it.”

They went back to the kitchen, where Gallagher poured glasses of a clear, white, dry wine.

“My God, this is good!” Jake exclaimed. “This is as good as anything I ever drank in France.”

“Better, boy, better. Truth is, I bought them vines out of a French dealer almost thirty years ago, but there’s no weather in France like this and no soil ei ther.”

“Is it a Chablis?” Clair asked.

“You cannot name it, because it’s all changed with growing here.

It’s California wine, and there is no other wine like it, and when it’s good it’s magnificent. You don’t taste the fruit and you don’t taste the sour; you taste an angelic brew. Ah, the hell with it! What am I talking about with what these bastards have done!”

“We’d like to buy,” Clair said.

“So if you’ll make a price,” Jake said, “we’ll talk about it.”

“All right. There are nine hundred acres. Even in this rotten world of Prohibition, the land’s worth twenty dol lars an acre, and that’s eighteen thousand dollars. With the two buildings, the barn, and the rest of it, I got to have fifty thousand dollars.”

Clair and Jake looked at each other in silence.

“How big is the mortgage?” Jake asked finally.

“Nine thousand.”

“Why didn’t you increase it if you needed money so badly?”

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“Because they won’t give me a nickel more, and that’s the truth like all else I told you.”

“I’ll be equally frank with you,” Jake said. “We want this place.

For days, we’ve talked about nothing else. My wife has about nine thousand dollars. That’s insur ance money that came to her after her father’s death. I have almost four thousand, my army pay and some sav ings. If we can get a mortgage for the rest—”

“Give it up, my lad. You’ll get no mortgage here or in San Francisco. The bastards have put a curse on us.”

“You wouldn’t take a mortgage yourself?” Clair asked.

“I like you both, kids, but I can’t play the fool. You can’t come into a place like this penniless. My trucks are tired, tired. If you want to raise cattle, you must buy the stock. I got a cow and a few chickens, that’s all. If you’re going to raise grapes for the market, you must crate them. That takes money.”

“If I give you a check for five hundred dollars,” Jake said, “will you hold the place for thirty days?”

“You been a soldier, eh?” said Gallagher. “You go through hell over there, but back here it makes for a kind of innocence. Who the hell is going to want this white elephant? You’re the first board-ers we had and the first buyers. Keep your money, and if you can get the price, come back. We’ll be here.”

Christopher Noel’s home on the island of Oahu in Hawaii was called by the people who inhabited it a bungalow, but its twenty-two rooms sprawled over half an acre of ground, and it was quite the most magnificent house May Ling had ever entered. The bamboo posts, the hardwood floors, the reed blinds gave her the feel ing that at long last she had touched a part of the Ori ent. She and Dan were housed in a two-bedroom suite with a connecting sitting room

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and a private porch that overlooked the beach. There, through the palm trees, she could see the magnificent breakers rolling in and listen to the endless thunder of the surf. There was a swing seat on the porch, and sitting there with Dan’s huge arm around her, she experienced a degree of hap piness and contentment that was almost terrifying. The first evening they were there, a wild, black storm swept out of the Pacific. Silent, entranced with the spectacle, they watched it approach and then huddled together on the swing seat as the skies opened and a torrent of rain fell. In a few minutes, it was over, and the setting sun burst through a ragged tracery of clouds.

“I think, Danny,” she said to him, “that as long as I live I will remember this as the most perfect moment.”

But there had been many perfect moments. For five days on the ship, they had been together morning, noon, and night. Their isola-tion had been complete; for the only person on the ship, aside from themselves, who spoke more than a few words of English was the Cap tain, Caleb Winton, a crusty New Englander whom they saw only at mealtime. Dan taught May Ling to play Jack-o-Diamonds, a favorite game on the wharf among the fishermen. They played for ten cents a point, and he carefully contrived to lose—with total transparency—so that at the end May Ling’s winnings amounted to over a hundred dollars. At other times, as they stretched out on deck chairs, she read to him—something he never had enough of.

When she was employed at the public library, she had conducted Saturday afternoon story readings for children, and she realized now that Dan listened to her with the same rapt and total intensity that the children had displayed. She read well, allowing herself to be swept up into the story, and he loved to watch her, to see her dark eyes flash as with emotion and passion.

Knowing that there would be no books aboard ship, she had put together a small package, very carefully and thoughtfully. She had selected
My Antonia
, Willa Gather’s story of an immigrant

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girl’s experience on the frontier,
Winesburg, Ohio
, by Sherwood Anderson—a book that caused hours of discussion with Dan—and Sinclair Lewis’
Main Street
, which had been a national bestseller for months and which was certainly the most talked about book of the year. Dan loved it, and demanded to know why other writers didn’t write the truth the same way. “It’s not the whole truth,” she countered, “and he writes rather awkwardly, I think.”

“What difference does that make? It’s what he says.” There was more discussion, but always in the end he bent to her point of view.

“You shouldn’t give in to me all the time,” she told him severely.

“You have a fine mind. Stick to your opinions.” But at the same time, she realized that she was for him all that his own life lacked; she completed him; she took away his sense of empti ness, of ignorance, of blundering like a bull through a world he never really looked at or understood while in pursuit of the simple twin goals of money and power.

She also selected and brought with her two books of poems,
The
Collected Poems of John Masefield
and
The Collected Poems of Algernon
Charles Swinburne
. Neither were to her own taste, but she felt that Dan would enjoy them. She was right about Masefield. He was enchanted by “Dauber” and by the “Salt Water Poems and Ballads,”

and when he heard “Sea Fever” for the first time, he exploded with excitement. “That’s it, that’s it! How can he say it, and I’d never be able to say it myself in a hundred years?” But Swinburne sim ply annoyed and provoked him. “That poor bastard!” he exclaimed.

“He needs a solid week in a cathouse with a couple of girls I knew in the Tenderloin, and maybe that would set him straight.” To which May Ling replied that it was certainly the most original criticism of Swinburne she had ever heard.

For those five days, May Ling accepted the dream and the illusion.

Dan was hers; it would never be other wise; and now in Hawaii, she was being treated with courtesy, attention, and respect—and no

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one appeared to be in the slightest way disturbed by the fact that she was Chinese. This had never happened before.

The first day after his arrival at the Noel estate, Dan had a long meeting with Christopher Noel, his cousin and business associate Ralph Noel, and the largest real-estate developer in the islands, Jerry Kamilee, who was part Hawaiian, part American, and part Portuguese. The Hawaiian part of Kamilee predominated; he was a huge man, taller and heavier even than Dan, brown-skinned, an odd contrast to the slender and somewhat delicate Noels. Dan already knew that nothing large or important in the islands happened without the consent or participation of the Noels. Now he learned that Kamilee was equally important to his project, and it was Kamilee who constantly brought the discussion back to the ships. Could he build the ships, and could he resist the lure of Atlantic passage? There’s where the money was. Californians went to Europe. How did he intend to bring them to Hawaii? If they were to put several mil lion dollars of their own money into a hotel and golf links to go with it, how would they fill the rooms? The Islands were just that, islands. Who in his circle of friends had ever been here? Even Dan’s own wife—as he had explained—refused to make the trip.

Dan argued and talked and persuaded, brought out his plans and projections, spelled out the wonders of the floating pleasure palaces he intended to create—and at the end felt that he had at least reached them, even if he was yet to convince them. Finally, Christopher Noel put an end to the discussion. “Enough for today, Dan. Tonight we’re having a luau in your honor. You’ll meet the people in the islands who count, and you’ll eat some good food and drink some good booze. Your idiotic Volstead Act has not taken here yet, and we intend to see to it that it never does. So rest up, swim, enjoy, and for heaven’s sake, don’t blunt your appetite. And by the way,”

he added, “you’ll bring your secretary—if you wish?”

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“I’d like to,” Dan replied, offhand. “She’s a good, hardwork-ing girl.”

“Fine. Let me mention that it’s a side of you I like, a Chinese secretary in San Francisco.”