by Chip Jacobs
Fleet quickly hid behind Nick so the small-mouthed woman in a sunflower dress didn’t notice him. “No, Hattie doesn’t know,” he said. “You try attending medical school with poor parents minus any helping hand; my side jobs only pay so much. I wouldn’t have come if I thought I’d run into her.”
“Well, don’t even consider bailing now. Tug your cowboy hat down over your face.”
Though twenty years Fleet’s senior, the dowager, who lost her industrialist husband long ago, was actually a beguiling woman who just craved virile, younger men.
They’d just sat down at a table across the room from her when Lilly motioned Nick to come to the side of the stage up front. She was in a taupe Texas ranch dress accented with pearls the size of bonbons. Nick, by contrast, wore a black jacket-bolo tie costume over a white dress shirt; Fleet compared him to a louche, riverboat gambler.
“Stay right here,” Lilly told Nick after a brief hug. “There’s someone who wants to say hello. I’ll go retrieve her.”
Nick didn’t dare let his mind wander. While he waited, he surveyed the inside of what locals nicknamed “The Castle.” The Hotel Green was the size of a battle ship. It was a full block long, designed in a hybrid, Moorish-Colonial style, and painted in sand tones with red trim. Its hallmark turret fronted a plaza you could imagine Norman Rockwell painting. Unlike the La Pintoresca and The Raymond, its steel and concrete construction ensured it’d never burn down. Its glamorous spaces once served as the headquarters of the Valley Hunt Club and the Tournament of Roses.
Still, you wouldn’t know that now from the job Lilly’s decorators did transforming the banquet room from hoity-toity to barn shindig. Hay bales lined the walls; milking buckets offered guests wrapped candy apples and Lilly’s hideous Berlin marzipan. The denim pockets on the scarecrows propped up in the corners were where everyone was instructed to deposit their charity checks and cash.
Some of the party accoutrements were alive, as an unexpected moooo by a Jersey heifer demonstrated. It and other barnyard animals were trucked in from San Gabriel Valley farms because what’s a hoedown without critters? The bigger ones—two bovine, three sheep, one Shetland pony—were tethered by restraints. Hens, pigs, a sedated raven, and others loitered in an adjacent area, cordoned off by troughs.
Nick was sizing them up when Lilly returned. “Nick, “ she said, “you must remember your high school history teacher. She recalled you when I mentioned your name at a committee function. She said you were at the top of your class.”
Under the crook of Lilly’s arm was a stooped over old woman with veiny arms and a twitchy neck not unlike a geriatric pigeon. She was half blind and even deafer.
“Miss Figgleberry, marvelous to see you,” Nick said, pecking her on her powdered cheek.
“Nick, is that you?” she said in a quaking voice. “Lillian informed me about your current occupation. How invigorating it must be arranging lights across our glorious new bridge.”
“I’m developing lamps, Mrs. Figgleberry,” Nick said loudly. “Solar-powered lamps.”
“Cramps?” she said. “I don’t have cramps at my age anymore, sweetie.”
An hour later, guests were in their chairs, finishing their entrees. Lilly spoke from a small riser through a bank of cigar smoke and social chatter, much of it about the dreaded imposition of America’s first income tax. Lilly said it was everybody’s responsibility to support needy children, as well as Civil War veterans who either visited or relocated to California. Subsidizing their admissions to Busch Gardens and assisting local charities was a modest start.
“In closing, dear friends, I ask you to give until your wallets cry in pain. Not to lecture such a distinguished crowd, but the Bible makes a point about rich men and eyes of needles. I say that, too, as a dreadful seamstress.”
Uk-uk-uh-haw. Uk-uk. Evidently, the leased hen appreciated her punch line.
“Pardon the interruption,” Lilly said, vamping. “She must be nervous, we’re serving her cousin.”
Nick hated acknowledging it, but he was enjoying himself. The guests at his table were friendlier than their initial scowls, except for the snob in a raw hide jacket displeased that Nick momentarily placed his elbow on the table.
Next were further solicitations by others for donations, and a reminder about the ongoing efforts by the Pasadena Perfect Committee. When a paper-clip scion quoted another of Adolphus’s tributes about the city—that it was “a veritable paradise (with) no equal in the world regarding healthful climate, scenery, vegetation, flowers”—Nick saw Lilly gulp at the front table. Few must realize how sick Adolphus was.
The night was roughly two-thirds over as waiters prepared the coffee and a wire basket emerged for a raffle. A couple of banjo players set up for a square dance. This wasn’t a group that stayed late.
The same heifer that mooed before—a seven-hundred-pound, cinnamon-colored Jersey cow—was done, however, being a compliant party decoration anymore. She snorted again in a call of the wild that made the crowd shudder. The animal didn’t immediately repeat it, so most of the attendees went back to their cherry cobbler and check writing.
Almost no one heard what one of the livestock handler’s said to the other seven minutes later. “John, Doris is loose! She’s snapped her ropes. Trap her.”
Too late for that, however, after the cow hurdled the hay bale supposedly sequestering her, stomped her heels, and released a moo that could’ve awoken a mummy. Now there was no barrier between her and some of America’s richest people, many of whom were never so close to a beast like this before. Eyes bulged. Hearts raced. Bodies studded with diamond jewelry shook.
Nick, while slightly beer-brained, popped up to assess the situation. From his time around ostriches, he knew how easily some larger creatures became unhinged. He looked up front: nothing but magnates in country regalia. He looked to the side: just waiters in black. He gazed to the rear last, and there, by the kitchen door, stood one of Lilly’s party organizers.
Apparently, Jules Cumbersmith’s experience with cows in big-city Chicago was limited because otherwise, she wouldn’t have been wearing a silky, claret-hued dress. Where she saw one shade, that heifer interpreted red, a red demanding it trample her.
Doris mooed another war cry that vibrated the cobbler plates. Then it was on: she bent her head and charged directly at Jules, who froze against the wall. The cow’s hooves slipped after her first tentative steps on the polished parquet floor. Once she regained her footing, Doris was only third yards from Jules, and closing fast.
“Lady,” a beanpole-thin handler yelled. “It’s the dress. The color!”
“Now you tell me,” Jules shouted back. She tried shoving open the kitchen doors to get away, but they opened out. Her only resort: kicking off her heels and scurrying toward the raffle table.
Fleet jumped up next to Nick. “You’re a doctor, sorta,” Nick said to him. “Got any tranquilizers?”
“Sure,” he jibed. “They’re in my pocket with my blow darts.”
It was confusing knowing what to do as Doris chased Jules from the boundary area into the space between the tables and the stage. After this continued for a minute, what seemed like a slapstick turn of events was taking on the air of disaster. In panic, some of Lilly’s guests bailed out the exit door onto Green Street. The two frailest attendees, Gilda Figgleberry and Lucretia Garfield, were escorted there. A dozen millionaires, meanwhile, helped their wives onto the checkerboard tables, which was comedy on its own.
Which wasn’t to suggest that Jules was fully deserted. One of the animal handlers, dreading that she was fodder for a grievous head-butt, threw a lasso as the rogue bovine hoofed by; having rarely practiced, he roped a chair. A gent in a Stetson hat, who was either a Wrigley or a Gamble, threw his winter coat over Doris’s neck. The cow shook it off in three strides.
Jules, after running and cutting, finally leapt onto the low plat
form where Lilly and others spoke to cower behind the black curtains. Lunatic over her red dress, the athletic heifer jumped onto the stage, too. Jules bounded out, racing down the center aisle. “Can someone do something about this she-devil?” she said, shaggy-breathed. “I’m tuckering out.”
Unsure if the animal might charge them, fifteen or so guests too scared to risk running to the exit packed themselves into the railed orchestra stand, where the banjo players were intending to play. This left no room for Jules, though someone there shouted advice: “Play dead.”
The other farm animals began editorializing with a nerve-rattling chorus of clucking, hawing, whinnying, and baying. Never had such an ado transpired in a hall where the pampered and chauffeured schmoozed during the hotel’s thirty-year existence; not even the Benjamin-Harrison-dinner kerfuffle.
Nick pirouetted, trying to freelance a solution. Doris, evidently, wasn’t going to be thwarted with a table or somebody’s coat. His eyes focused on the food table, where he and Fleet twice loaded up on fried chicken, gravy ’n’ biscuits, green beans, and potato salad.
Now, he let a remedy flow to him and, sure enough, a light bulb clicked on.
He relayed it to Fleet, who nodded his head without further commentary and rushed off to prepare. Nick then sprinted toward the buffet table, ripping off his jacket, bolo tie, and white shirt on the way. Distracting striptease? Better.
Nick dunked his dress shirt into the punchbowl of the vodka-spiked “Wild Cherry Country Punch.” He didn’t want Jules’s blood on Doris’s dark heels. Bare-chested, he ran back and climbed onto a vacant table in the middle of the banquet room. From it, he managed a two-fingered whistle, which RG had previously tried teaching him; most of the time it’d produced more spittle on his pinkies than a shrill blast from his lips.
Jules, with fear in her eyes, turned to him as he hollered his plan. “Fine,” she said between pants. “Anything.”
Nick pinkie-whistled again, and this time the heifer locked its furious eyes on him. “Doris, what do you think about this color?” he shrieked, holding up his red-punch-soaked shirt by its collar as if he were a matador. “Come and get it, kitty.”
He hopped down from the table just as Jules, gown hem in hands, sprinted by him in her bare feet. The snorting cow, which had fallen behind after skidding on a napkin, abruptly forgot about the woman in the claret dress she wanted to pancake. Nick’s red shirt was now her bull’s-eye, so to speak.
Nick ran toward the rear of the hall with amused horror etched in his face. In his sightline was the Hotel Green’s pocket library, which held a small, prized collection of works from esteemed California writers. Now it’d become something else, what with Fleet opening its mahogany door and hiding behind it.
“Get ready,” Nick shouted as he raced square at it with Doris in pursuit. Right before he was about to smash into the library’s doorframe, he lobbed his soggy, punch-red shirt in there and hopped to the side. The cow, unable to slow her hooves on the parquet floor, skidded into the little room, crashing into the back bookshelf. Fleet slammed the door shut, and Nick brought over a chair to prop under the knob.
Nick, with no shirt and sticky hands, and cowboy-hat-less Fleet hugged. The remaining guests, down to a quarter of Lilly’s original audience, clapped and cheered for them in a chorus of “Bravo,” “here, here!” and “quick thinking, lads.”
By the time Nick saw Jules again, she was rushing into the ladies’ room in tears.
Twenty minutes later, Fleet exited with his impressed dowager, who said his “bravery warranted a special cuddling.” “Before I go,” Fleet muttered to Nick, “what is it with you and animals nowadays? You’re going to get yourself killed, and that’d be a shame. For me.”
Lilly by then was speaking with the banquet room’s frazzled event manager, who saw no levity in this as Lilly did. She reassured him they’d reimburse the hotel for any damages caused by Doris’s antics and Nick and Fleet’s impromptu incarceration of her. “It could’ve been worse,” Lilly said. “What if she’d gotten into your kitchen?”
This she said while waiters and busboys were already sweeping up. Besides food, straw, and party favors in their dustpans were other telltale items, among them a monocle, a woman’s dentures, and a liniment vial. Blessedly, Lilly had barred any press tonight, or this would’ve exploded into a national punch line.
The previous uproar now was as quiet as the idle scarecrows, into whose pockets the Busches’s friends stuffed seventeen thousand dollars. Only stragglers like Nick and hotel staff remained when Jules emerged from the bathroom, mascara smeared and formerly bobbed hair a bird’s nest. She grabbed her discarded heels and trudged his direction.
“That was something,” Nick said to her in a borrowed waiter’s shirt. “Are you all right? You’ll be avoiding milk for a while, I imagine.”
Jules, the anti-damsel, smiled at him and pulled him to the side to converse. For a moment, Nick thought she might reward his heroics with a smooch. Lilly stood in the center of the trashed room reviewing the bill, though she occasionally glanced over at them.
“Avoid basking in this,” Jules said, holding her plastic smile. “You managed a good deed in an unpredictable circumstance, and I thank you. But don’t flatter yourself too much. I had an alternative rescue plan.”
“What? Take the dumbwaiter?”
“Do you ever stop joking when the subject isn’t Pasadena?”
“Okeydoke,” Nick said, resentful of her tone.
Still smiling, she said, “Goodnight.” And that was all.
When he arrived home at midnight, Royo offered him no victorious welcome, either. No, he was reclined backward on Nick’s bed, again, with Nick’s tennis racket in his teeth. Half the strings were ripped out.
“Oh, wunderbar,” Nick said.
—
Nick and Fleet, with parents out of state, celebrated Christmas together by exchanging small gifts and inside jokes. They attended Pasadena’s event-heavy New Year’s Day, including the Rose Parade and ostrich races, whose outcomes Nick always predicted correctly. On the maiden night of 1913, they sipped cheap champagne. When Nick strummed “Auld Lang Syne” on guitar, Royo pirouetted on hind legs.
Three weeks later, on a hump day in late January, Nick sat alone on a Red Car inbound from Los Angeles. Between his boots rested a jingling bucket of metal parts for his solar lamps. In his hand was a business card pumping confidence into his chest.
Rex Gleason, an Edison Electric Company special assistant, handed him his card after Nick led him and two others on a rain-shortened tour of the bridge. Reginald Plant, who didn’t have school that day, was also on the outing. The first of his many questions: “who’d bother taking this boring road after someone invents flying motorcars?”
Percy Fixx, a beady-eyed, broad-shouldered icehouse proprietor, was the Pasadena VIP of the bunch. The forty-something businessman served on the executive committee of the Board of Trade, among other organizations, and was known around town as a financial whiz and lady-killer. He didn’t articulate much today, sponging up Nick’s narration with a grin on his face. But there was something reptilian about how he looked at you, as if he was trying to determine if you picked up on his extra row of teeth. Nick mistrusted him from the second he shook his frigid hand.
After the tour concluded in the misty shadows under an arch, which Nick joked that Edgar Allan Poe should exploit as a backdrop in a future horror tale, Gleason told him he’d like a quick word. “We’ve been following you since you were at the ostrich farm, Mr. Chance,” Gleason said. “What you achieved there and here, from what we understand, is nothing short of remarkable. If your schedule permits, we’d be honored if you’d meet with some of our technical people to expound on the science behind your lamps. We live to harness energy wherever it exists.”
Gleason, a chunky man with an orange-hair comb-over that oscillated in the breeze, cited Ediso
n’s hydroelectric plant in Riverside; he mentioned the steam power it furnished to some Pasadena streetlights “before,” he added, “your city decided, somewhat rashly, to charter its own electric utility.”
Nick was gracious and noncommittal, telling Gleason he’d contemplate the offer that he had no intention of pursuing as he considered Edison Electric a predatory octopus. Even so, the solicitation was a pride booster. Proof that the octopus was scared of what he was refining; that his lamps could be his legacy. Who knows? Later this century, kids on field trips might trek to the banks of the Colorado Street Bridge to eyeball where the sun-power revolution began.
That’s why he was still fingering Gleason’s card while trying to balance his pail of bolts, wires, eyelets, and filaments on the trolley floor. He bought the components this morning at Tilly’s Hardware Emporium store on Virgil Avenue with a purchase order he wrote out, too impatient to wait for the harried requisition clerk to do it.
Now those parts clinked hypnotically to the rattle of the steel wheels like a dreamer’s song. This was a fruitful time for inventors like him to be asking the proverbial “why not?” Technological breakthroughs launched in the Gilded Age of excess were booming in the Progressive Era. Since 1900 the “firsts” were ubiquitous: the alkaline battery, the Brownie camera, the electric typewriter, the jukebox, color photography, an “all-purpose zipper.”
A gentle, two-finger tap on his shoulder from a passenger behind him wrenched Nick out of his reverie. “Pardon me, sir,” said the male voice. “Would you be able to recommend an establishment selling a hearty sandwich?” Nick turned his head ninety degrees, seeing the side of a man in a tweed cap. “Everybody I ask,” the passenger continued, “directs me to one of your city’s delis, which isn’t suitable. My constitution can no longer abide the aroma of pickles, not after consuming their juice for a week.”
Before Nick told the unknown gentlemen he was in luck, he said, “Mister, you drank pickle juice? On purpose?”