California Gold

by John Jakes

  In the bed, Carla stirred. He fought off a rush of dizziness. Her deep-blue eyes opened with a strange catlike solemnity. Her skin looked raw from all the kissing and embracing.

  He touched the shutter. “It’s morning.”

  “No—afternoon.”

  “What? Are you sure?”

  “I was up a while this morning. We’ve been here nearly a whole day. It’s five or six in the afternoon.”

  She sat up, folding her arms over her bosom. She was heavy as a classical nude in a painting: great golden thighs, a waist growing plump. The breasts would be heavy with matronly sag before many more years. She was the ideal woman, big and billowy like Lillian Russell. The whole world loved Lillian Russell…

  Carla rubbed her legs and shivered. “I’ve never had love like that. Never.” She was profoundly shaken.

  “I haven’t either.”

  He wandered through the room till he found a full champagne bottle, then tugged at the cork till it blew, pop, ricocheting off a ceiling beam. He offered the bottle.

  “No, I don’t want any more. All I want is you. The two of us together, always.” The dark-blue eyes seemed to grow huge, and draw him in. “Marry me, Mack.”

  He was silent. Stunned. Outside the shutters, the light was fading. There was no wind.

  “Mack, did you hear me?”

  He thought of Nellie. But she was gone. He swallowed, then thrust the bottle to his mouth and gulped.

  With a strange, vulnerable softness in her face, she said, “The least you can do is answer me.”

  “All right, Carla, yes. A man needs a wife. Any man would be proud to have a beautiful wife like you. I’ll build a fine new home for us down in Riverside…”

  Triumph flooded her face like a breaking dawn and her eyes danced. “I never thought I’d hear you say it. I never thought I’d get what I wanted most in the world. Come here, come here…”

  She opened her arms and wriggled her fingers. He swigged again, then put the bottle aside and walked to the bed. As his bare foot touched one of the newspapers, he glanced down and saw the masthead monarch of the dailies. A three-column headline snatched his eye.

  THE TEHAGHAPI TRAGEDY!

  Southern Pacific

  Negligence Claims

  New Victim!

  Exclusive Dispatches by Our Roving

  Correspondents

  Mr. BIERCE & Miss

  SWEET

  Forget her. She’s gone. He muttered an oath under his breath.

  “Mack? Sweetheart? What is it?”

  “Nothing.” He put his foot on the paper and twisted it. The paper tore. Kneeling on the edge of the bed, he braced both hands above Carla’s shoulders, leaned down, and kissed her.

  Her wet mouth pressed hard against his. “Once more, darling—can you? To seal the bargain?”

  Nellie, why isn’t it you? he thought. An invisible cliff loomed, and he was at the edge.

  “Mack? My darling husband? Please?” Her eyes were closed again and she made small whimpering sounds of anticipation. Tired as he was, his body responded. Seizing Carla’s billowy nakedness, he pulled her against him. As she raised her legs straight up for him to enter, he was gripped by a wild sensation of falling.

  On July 30, 1895, James Macklin Chance married Carla Marie Hellman in a civil ceremony in Los Angeles. Hugh Johnson stood up for his friend and partner. The Texan was polite to the bride, but oddly reserved.

  The state’s second-largest landowner gave the bride away. Afterward, at the reception in a hotel parlor, Hellman said, “One more word of advice, Johnny, and this time you better take it. Stay a hundred miles away from your wife when she’s drinking. She got started too young. My fault, I let her, I was too busy to notice what was happening. When she drinks too much, it makes her a crazy person.”

  “Well,” Mack said with a strange smile, “she isn’t alone in that.” He raised his champagne glass in a toast that puzzled his father-in-law.

  V

  GENTLEMEN OF RIVERSIDE

  1895-1899

  The orange was blessed with a rich and mystical heritage long before it came to California. Somewhere in the cradle of civilization, legend said, it flourished in a lush garden. Someone named it the golden apple of the Hesperides: the golden apple of the sun.

  Bedouin princes savored the orange, imperial Romans sucked its juice at their banquets, and medieval Spaniards planted and cultivated the trees. Columbus carried the fruit to the New World on his second voyage, and the conquistadors spread it and propagated it. By 1750, most of the Jesuit fathers in California grew oranges on Church lands.

  In this early period, the California orange was thick-skinned, generally sour, and full of seeds. Its enormous value would not be perceived until it had caught the eye of venturesome newcomers. The fruit itself had to change as well.

  In 1841, a former trapper from Kentucky, William Wolfskill, set out two acres of Mediterranean Sweet oranges on some land at Central Avenue and East Fifth Street, Los Angeles. Though his neighbors ridiculed his agricultural adventure, Wolfskill steadily expanded his grove to seventy acres, and by the 1870s the old trapper began to boast of profits of $1,000 an acre. That was enough to attract other farmers. New groves started to appear, and then new varieties, more suited to popular taste.

  But the true watershed was 1873. That year, cuttings from sweet seedless oranges from Brazil arrived in California via the U.S. Department of Agriculture. A Riverside couple, Luther and Eliza Tibbets, planted and nurtured the cuttings. Like so many Californians, the Tibbets had started out elsewhere, but they found their home, and their life’s reward, on the Pacific slope. Before long, everyone wanted “Washington navel” cuttings. Luther Tibbets could ask $5 for every bud and get it.

  In 1876, America’s centennial year, Valencia oranges came to the state from Spain. Valencias ripened in the summer, navels in winter, so citrus could become a year-round industry.

  All that was needed was a year-round market, and old Wolfskill helped create it. In 1877, he loaded an entire freight car with his oranges and dispatched it to St. Louis. The car was a month in transit, but when it arrived, midwesterners rolled back the doors and stood in awe before the bounty it contained: fruit as bright as sunshine, from trees ever green, in a land where snow never fell. Even after a month, the fruit was still edible and flavorsome.

  Older sour varieties were improved, and the groves multiplied. The Riverside-Redlands area proved the ideal location for navels, while Valencias grew best in parts of the new Orange County. But Southern California was equally hospitable to bright-yellow lemons from Sicily and Spain, which did especially well in sections of Santa Barbara, Ventura, and San Diego counties.

  In 1887, the first California oranges reached New York City, arriving in ventilated boxcars, and by 1889, refrigerated cars were being developed. The railroad, cursed by so many, quickly transformed a local industry into a national one. By 1890, there were more than a million orange trees in Southern California; five years later there were at least three or four million, and tourists were taking special excursion trains to Riverside, Redlands, and the other new citrus towns just to admire and photograph the groves.

  Gentlemen who never would have dreamed of owning pigs or potato fields found the cultivation of oranges an entirely suitable occupation. They established great tracts and great homes and a tradition summed up by the slogan “Oranges for health—California for wealth.”

  Thus, once again, the golden apples of the Hesperides grew in a magical garden in the West.

  34

  ON THE HILLTOP, THE gentleman orchardist built a mansion of twenty-six thousand square feet.

  The house crossed a Tuscan villa with a California mission, and was designed by the San Francisco firm of Arthur Page Brown in the fall of 1895. Brown was the high priest of Mission Revival, the neo-Franciscan style that looked to California’s roots for inspiration, having given the style its most perfect and popular realization in the California State Buildi
ng at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. When complete, the new Southern Pacific Ferry Terminal in San Francisco would be another. Charles Lummis, editor of Land of Sunshine, promoted the style vigorously. The SP was designing many of its local depots to resemble missions, and individual homeowners followed the trend, building their own personal shrines to California’s past. Mack joined them enthusiastically.

  The thirty-eight-room house would command a magnificent view of the heights, the town, Mount Rubidoux, the Santa Ana, and the flatland groves of lemon trees and hardier, more frost-resistant Valencia oranges. Mack and Carla’s bedroom was to measure forty by sixty, Mack’s office, with its various storage crannies and book spaces, twenty feet more in each dimension.

  The plan blended warm tan masonry with exposed beams, decorative tiling, and a red roof to create a structure with a distinct aura of lightness. Even on the rare gray day in winter, the house would appear sunlit, the architects promised. There would be lavish touches throughout. Mack insisted on solid masonry arches, not hollow ones of plaster and lath. For an additional $22,000 he proposed to bring electrification to the hilltop. The architects specified decorative tiles imported from Mexico and Italy, not imitations manufactured in Los Angeles. They protested his demand for an outside rear staircase; it would spoil the design and serve no purpose, they said. But Mack felt that among people of wealth and station, no home could be considered a mansion without an outside staircase. The staircase was added, with a lot of joking behind his back.

  An iron gate inspired by the one at San Solaro would welcome the visitor to a winding foothill drive, a full three quarters of a mile long. For the gate as well as the house Mack designed an oval cartouche framing the initials JMC. He conceived it as a way to show his pride in his accomplishments and could see nothing vain or foolish about this, though Hellburner Johnson dismissed it as just another cattle brand.

  “Sometimes you’re too blasted frank, H.B.”

  “You don’t like it, I can always mosey.”

  “You will anyway when you get ready.”

  “That’s true. Just stay away from me with your damn brand, hear?”

  In Charles Dudley Warner’s best-selling book on California, Mack read these words:

  It lies there, our Mediterranean region, on a blue ocean, protected by barriers of granite from the Northern influences…our Italy.

  Taken with the comparison, he decided to name his new house Villa Mediterranean. He didn’t consult Carla or anyone else, simply presented her and the world with the accomplished fact. He was by now determined that he would make only his own mistakes, no one else’s.

  The mansion was a huge, ambitious undertaking, and it went up slowly. Until it was ready, projected to be the autumn of ’96, Mack and Carla occupied a gingerbread castle they rented at the end of Magnolia Avenue—Riverside’s fashionable address. At this home on Magnolia Avenue, Mack drank a little California wine with evening meals. He had touched nothing stronger since the hour he proposed to Carla.

  It was a happy period, those early months following their honeymoon in Hawaii. Carla was ardent in bed, affectionate at other times, and laughed often. Except for an occasional and guilty memory of Nellie, Mack had no cause to regret his marriage.

  He had many interests that moved forward on parallel tracks. Dealing with all of them cost him enormous energy and hours of work, but he didn’t mind, and he assumed Carla didn’t either; she’d encouraged his ambition.

  Once again the guidebook occupied a special corner of his desk. He believed in its promises more strongly than ever, and felt that minute by minute, task by task, he was giving life to the dream that had brought him to California. Indeed, there were many more dreams than one to be realized, he discovered. As soon as one hope was fulfilled, one goal reached, another revealed itself. Coupled with Carla’s warmth and good cheer, this gave life a magnificent zest.

  Mack never lost sight of his intention to return to San Francisco. To this end, he kept track of the political situation there and throughout the state.

  In the City, some strong anti-railroad alliances had formed. Claus Spreckels, the sugar magnate, joined with Adolph Sutro, the populist who had been elected mayor in ’94 on an anti-SP ticket, and together they spearheaded organization of a new railroad, the San Francisco & San Joaquin. This was the so-called People’s Road, free of the control of Huntington and his henchmen. Construction began at Stockton in 1895. Mack bought $250,000 worth of shares.

  Down on the flatland, he picked up forty-five hundred acres of established Valencia orange trees. Since they ripened in summer, and the Washington navels in winter, the purchase put him in the citrus business year-round. He needed two work forces, one for the orchards, the other to brush, wash, sort, pack, and box the oranges in his packing sheds.

  In this connection, late in 1895, he received a visit in his office from a Mexican gentleman. On the desk lay an end panel from an orange crate, which bore a crude black stencil:

  WASHINGTON NAVELS

  CHANCE ORCHARDS

  RIVERSIDE, CAL.

  Mack didn’t find this too imaginative and was struggling for something better. Little sketches and scratched-out names covered a tablet lying under me stenciled wood.

  His caller was slender, deeply sunburned, and unctuous. He introduced himself as Alfonso Vicente Blas. “Es un gran honor conocerlo,” he said.

  “Igualmente,” Mack said. His Spanish was by this time serviceable.

  Blas sat down without invitation. He crossed his sharply creased trouser legs—he wore a white suit, some sort of statement about his importance—and informed Mack that he might call him ’Fonso.

  In reply, Mack said, “What can I do for you?”

  “I hear you are in need of men to work in your groves.”

  “Yes. I’ve hired a few, but I can use many more.”

  “I am your padrón,” Blas exclaimed with enormous good humor. “Comprador. Mr. Boss. You deal with me—I will get you all the men you need.”

  “I’m doing my own hiring, Señor Blas.”

  “No, no—’Fonso.” His smile was a little stiffer. “You deal with me. One contract—no trouble.”

  “Why should I expect trouble?”

  “You hire the wrong kind of men, it happens.”

  Mack had heard about these labor contractors. Crooked, most of them. They charged the growers too much, paid the labor too little, and pocketed the difference.

  “Do you mean to say someone makes it happen, Señor Blas?”

  “There were fires in ’93, you know. Much rioting in anger. Now we have Mexican labor that takes care of itself. Goes home to Mexico in the off-season—you never have to worry.”

  “I’m not worried about anything except my time, which you are wasting. Excuse me.”

  Blas uncrossed his legs. His smile hadn’t disappeared, but now it had a fixed, hard quality. “This is foolish of you. I am an important man.”

  “Get off my property,” Mack said.

  To find the workers he needed, Mack went personally to Riverside’s small Chinatown. Blas had referred to the troubles of ’93, when white men had driven the Chinese out of many of the groves. The Chinese in Riverside were eager to come back—especially when they heard what Mack was offering to pay.

  Johnson had agreed to act as temporary foreman. He and Mack learned the business together. To his surprise Johnson found that he liked citrus growing. It was hard, demanding work, but it kept him outside, and the Valencia and the Washington navel were the aristocrats of trees; orchardists were the aristocrats of the agricultural world. If this wasn’t so, why did so many tourists ride the Santa Fe to Riverside to view the groves?

  After six months of marriage, Mack and Carla’s relationship began to change. Their lovemaking grew less frequent, and her ardor diminished. She smiled less often, becoming increasingly remote. When she did address him she was usually cross, complaining about his long absences from Magnolia Avenue.

  On one such occa
sion, he flared. “You’re the one who praised ambition and encouraged me to work hard.”

  Her smile had a faintly nasty air. “Do you always believe everything I say, Mack?” She kicked her skirt behind her and walked out of the room.

  The word “bored” reentered her conversation. She showed no interest in running the household; her earlier attempts had been a pretense, he decided. The staff fended for itself, following his general orders.

  To escape the rising tension, he worked even longer hours and she went off on shopping expeditions, with never an advance word or note of explanation. He was aware of the servants replenishing the liquor supply more often.

  When they dined together she was listless, uncommunicative, sometimes openly sullen. He began to actively seek ways to occupy himself elsewhere. If there was a pause in the work in the groves, he filled the spare hours by closing himself in his office and going through stacks of newspapers and periodicals, both popular and technical, hunting for bits of information he might use. He was aware of the cycle that was perpetuating itself: He was busy, Carla grew bored and drank; the more difficult she became, the more he sought to absent himself. It was a disturbing trend, and one he felt he couldn’t discuss with anyone, not even Johnson. He harbored a melancholy and unreasonable hope that if he didn’t acknowledge what was happening, it would go away.

  But he saw evidence of Carla’s malaise everywhere, even in situations that should have been pleasant. Clive Henley’s good offices gained the two of them immediate entree to the social life of the “British colony,” as Riverside was sometimes called. Accepting an invitation to join the Casa Blanca Tennis Club, Carla tried to learn the game but didn’t play well. The stoutness that made her attractive to men hampered her, and she soon gave up, preferring to sit in the canvas pavilion at court-side, gossiping and drinking the fine English tea served between matches. Mack tried not to recall her father’s repeated warnings. But given the sudden veer and drift of the marriage, he didn’t have much success.