California Gold

by John Jakes

  Clive Henley sponsored Mack for the Riverside Golf and Polo Club. Initiation dues for a polo membership were $10. Henley taught Mack and Johnson rudiments of the ancient game, and was impressed by Johnson’s horsemanship and innate ability to hit the ball. Something to do with hitting a man with a bullet?

  Johnson told Mack that he was as taken with polo as he was with the orange groves; he was surprised that he liked what had struck him at first as a sissy sport. Clive Henley revealed that back east, on Long Island, certain teams were already paying experienced riders. “I have heard they also do it up north at the Burlingame club,” Henley added. Johnson pondered this for a couple of days, then demanded a small salary.

  “But my dear H.B.,” Henley said, “we only play games amongst ourselves. We have yet to challenge another club. Fact is, there aren’t many in California.”

  “Don’t matter—I’m a professional; I don’t ride a horse for free ’less I’m going somewheres. One dollar a month.”

  The club members agreed, took a collection of small change, and laughed about it. Soon it became a matter of some pride that Riverside’s team included a genuine Texas cowboy.

  Gradually Mack acquired six polo ponies, the minimum a rider needed for a six-chukker game. One of them, Fireball, was fifteen years old and couldn’t live up to his name. Another, Jubilee, was Mack’s pride. She was a small Spanish horse, fourteen and a half hands high, fast, strong, and smart. She cost $4,500 at the breeder’s in Pasadena, while the other ponies had gone for less than $500 each.

  The club agreed to provide Johnson with ponies, but he bought two of his own, Full-O’-Gin and a fleet, wicked-tempered little black horse he named Sam Houston.

  Mack joined the Southern California Fruit Exchange, a nonprofit cooperative that had sprung from earlier groups and had been organized to get around independent agents who charged gouging prices for packing and shipping oranges and lemons. The Exchange provided services at cost, and maintained offices in Los Angeles and Riverside. Because it shipped in volume, the SP and Santa Fe gave it favorable low rates. Growers such as Henley made no secret of their enthusiasm for the railroads. Rail shipment to the East had dramatically expanded the citrus market and enabled California growers to compete with Florida.

  Mack also attended meetings of the Riverside Horticultural Club, and donated several hundred dollars to the club’s research into the problem of orchard heating.

  Busy as he was, however, there was time for a relaxed social life, and he tried to interest Carla in it. Once a week they dined at the Anchorage Hotel, or at Frank Miller’s Glenwood Inn. At the Loring Opera House, Mack took a season box. They saw a traveling troupe perform The Gondoliers—Gilbert and Sullivan were idols in the British colony—and a production of Camille starring Helena Modjeska, the Polish expatriate who’d fallen in love with California and lived for a time at the artists’ colony at Anaheim. When James O’Neill came to town in his signature production of The Count of Monte Cristo, Mack arranged a postperformance reception at the house on Magnolia Avenue. O’Neill favored the guests with a ringing recitation of Poe’s “Raven.” Only Carla drank more than the actor.

  In March of every year, Riverside held a citrus fair in the pavilion at Main and Seventh streets. It was here, in 1896, that Carla told Mack she was pregnant.

  He remembered the moment exactly. They were standing in the broad aisle beside the booth where Clive Henley was exhibiting his fine Eureka and winter-maturing Lisbon lemons. Carla told Mack, then, wildly excited, hugged and kissed him in front of dozens of fair-goers.

  At the start of her third month she miscarried. “Oh, Mack, I’m sorry,” she said when the doctor first allowed him to see her. “I know it disappoints you.”

  “Doesn’t it disappoint you?”

  “Yes, I suppose.” She was wan, and her voice weak. It strengthened when she clutched his hand and said, “I hurt. I hurt terribly. I don’t like that.”

  Perhaps she wasn’t so sorry after all, Mack thought, and was instantly stricken with guilt for thinking it.

  The doctor insisted that Carla rest in bed for fifteen days. Hellman paid a visit to see how she was getting along, and that evening, after dinner, he said to Mack, “Listen, I got a question. Does Carla ever talk about me?”

  Mack was silent.

  “Come on, tell me. This ain’t no street peddler asking. I’m your father-in-law, family. Well?”

  “Yes, she does talk about you. She says she wishes you loved her. She says it goes back to her mother…” He stopped, frowning.

  “Go on, go on,” Hellman demanded.

  Mack didn’t have an easy time telling him. “She says you thought her mother was…immoral.”

  “You mean a whore. That’s what she said, isn’t it—whore?”

  Mack didn’t deny it. “She says you think she inherited a lot of her mother’s disposition. Look, I didn’t want to say this—”

  “Never mind,” Hellman snarled, and then his brows pulled together and his voice dropped so low that Mack could barely hear him. “I don’t discuss Carla’s mother. Far as I’m concerned, she don’t exist. You want to stay friends, never bring up the subject.”

  “You asked the question, for God’s sake.”

  “So I excuse you this time. This time only. I’m going to bed.” Hellman stood up and left the room.

  Mack sat a while, wondering about the old man’s strange reaction to discussing the mother Carla seldom talked about. Hellman was surely suppressing some bad feelings about the woman, and they carried over to his daughter—or so she thought. Perhaps it was a clue to Carla’s behavior. He didn’t fully understand it, but it prompted him to be as tender and attentive as possible during her recovery.

  But Carla didn’t respond. She seemed completely indifferent, and when she was on her feet again, she no longer bothered to conceal how she felt about Riverside.

  “The place is contemptible,” she said one night at dinner. She was at the far end of the enormous refectory table, her wineglass in hand as usual. “Contemptible, provincial, and dull as a church. Take away Clive’s accent and what is he? A farmer. The same goes for the rest of them.”

  “And me?” Mack growled.

  She shot him a look as she drank.

  Red-faced, he pushed his plate away. “Carla, you’ve made it clear a hundred times that you’d be happier somewhere else. But what the hell am I supposed to do, leave?”

  “Why, of course not, my dear,” she said with a sweet smile. “You have your business. But maybe one day I’ll leave.”

  “Christ, spare me the cheap threats,” he said, and walked out.

  The young geologist Haven Ogg did a superior job with Chance-Johnson Oil. The assets under his management now included 192 miles of pipeline; large storage tanks at Newhall, Santa Paula, and Ventura; a small refinery at Ventura; three tanker steamers; ninety railroad tank cars; and thirty-five six-mule tank wagons for local delivery. Chance-Johnson owned producing wells not only at San Solaro, but in the newer Summerland field southeast of Santa Barbara, in Whittier, and in Coalinga, Fresno County, in the shadow of the Diablo Range. Soon Ogg would personally lead an exploration crew into the low hills near the Kern River at the eastern edge of the San Joaquin.

  Mack read the company’s profit figures with amazement, and in mid-1896 he promoted Haven Ogg to general manager, giving him a munificent salary increase that allowed Ogg to marry and build a house in Newhall.

  Oil fever still consumed Los Angeles. The derricks of more than five hundred wells made the town dirty, noisy, and ugly, but those getting rich didn’t mind. One of these was Mrs. Emma Summers, who now drilled her own wells and had expanded into brokering crude oil, her piano pupils long since forgotten. People called her the Oil Queen.

  The petroleum market was growing. Smooth black asphalt paved many Los Angeles streets. Lyman Stewart had convinced the SP that oil was the fuel of choice, and its locomotive fleet was undergoing gradual conversion from coal and wood. As a result, Mack
was selling refined fuel oil to the railroad. He felt that he was dealing with the Devil, and compensated for it by purchasing more shares in the People’s Road.

  Oil was important to Mack, but citrus was his job. He spent hours with the orchardist’s Bible, The California Fruits and How to Grow Them, by Professor Wickson of the University of California at Berkeley. Mack annotated the book so heavily that some pages grew illegible and he had to buy a second copy.

  He educated himself about bud stock and refrigerator cars, climbed ladders along with his Chinese workmen to prune his windbreak trees, and learned to watch his trees for signs of cottony cushion scale, the terrible insect accidentally introduced from Australia in the late sixties. The egg sacs of the insect had once covered whole groves with a snowy mantle that yellowed leaves, shriveled fruit, and ultimately killed the stock. In the 1880s the scale had threatened to wipe out the industry. Then in ’89 a Department of Agriculture scientist sent to study the problem in Australia made a serendipitous discovery. A ladybird beetle, Vedalia cardinalis, devoured the scale insect. Imported beetles saved California citrus, though the scale was only held at bay, not eliminated.

  And then there was frost.

  Up on the hillsides, the so-called frost-proof belt, the oranges were supposed to be safe. Clive Henley and others warned Mack not to be caught short, however. If a subfreezing night arrived and heat was needed, there was no time to order equipment and fuel. Mack bought and warehoused hundreds of two-and-a-half-gallon sheet-metal heaters, storing barrels of Chance-Johnson crude oil to burn in them. It was an enormous, wasteful expense, but it couldn’t be avoided if a grower was realistic about the improbable but not impossible night of cold that could kill.

  One morning before it was light, Mack slipped from bed without waking Carla, put on old clothes, thrust a clasp knife and a wad of cash in his pocket, and left the house on Magnolia Avenue. He had an early breakfast meeting with several growers at a café; a drummer passing through town was going to demonstrate a new-design orchard heater.

  Outside the rented house, he paused to look at its mass of turrets and gables black against the first radiance of dawn. He’d never imagined he would live in such a handsome house, let alone the one he was building. He didn’t often stop to relish some of the rewards all of his work, and his money, were bringing him.

  In the cool, sweet air, he strode on down the avenue with his thoughts turning to the subject of his own life; of the amazing things that had happened to him since he met Doheny that night, and of all the numbers—sums—wealth—that followed as a consequence of his determination, and that accidental meeting.

  How much was he worth now? He spent some time turning pages of a ledger he kept in his head—one page for San Solaro (red ink), one page for Chance-Johnson, pages for real estate, citrus, stock and bond investments, and so on. He’d always been quick with figures so he had no trouble arriving at a total. At present he was worth five and a half million, give or take a few hundred thousand. But it kept growing, which raised another question. How much was enough? Money was the yardstick with which he measured his success. So how much was enough? The question had a bearing on the rest of life.

  He was pondering this when he realized he was within a block of the café, whose windows gleamed yellow in the dawn. Nearer, on his side of the street, the marvelous yeasty aroma of warm bread came from the open doorway of Frontière’s Bakery. A little girl with her head covered in a ragged shawl stood there, her face pressed to the window.

  She heard Mack’s boots on the walk, turned, scrutinized him warily, then smiled. He was taken aback, not solely because the girl was just seven or eight, and ragged as they come, but because she was striking. She had perfect Oriental features, but skin the color of dark chocolate. He had never seen a person with that kind of mixed parentage. It lent her an exotic and fragile beauty, which would probably be scoured away by years of poverty and toil.

  But this morning she was smiling, hugging herself, and inhaling the yeasty odors coming out Frontière’s open door.

  “It smells so good,” she said to Mack, who had stopped. “Like heaven must smell, don’t you think?”

  He nodded and pointed to some of the fresh loaves already heaped in the window. “I like Mr. Frontière’s rye bread best.”

  She studied the dark-brown loaves. “I’ve never had any of that. I’ve never had anything from this shop.”

  “Why not?”

  “I haven’t any father; he died. There’s only my mother and older brother working for the six of us.”

  Impulsively, Mack pulled the roll of cash from his pocket and peeled off the top bill. “Buy yourself some bread for breakfast,” he said, handing it to her.

  The girl smoothed the crinkled bill between two fingers. She was a little less sure of him all at once. “Why are you giving this to me?”

  “Because I get pleasure out of it.”

  “But I know how much it is. Ten dollars…”

  He smiled at her misreading of the $100 on the bill. “That’s all right, take it.” A thought came suddenly. “Money’s like bread. I can always make more.”

  Wonderment broke over her face then, and she rushed into the bake shop before he could change his mind.

  A buggy rattled into view and stopped at a hitch rail in front of the café on the other side. The grower emerging from it waved, and Mack cut across the street. He was satisfied that he’d answered the question that had occurred to him—maybe not in the happiest way, but certainly in the inevitable way. How much was enough? For a man like him, enough would never be enough…

  Mack and Carla moved from Magnolia Avenue to the hilltop early in November 1896. On Thanksgiving Day they invited three hundred people from Riverside and the outlying area to an enormous buffet feast.

  Japanese nurserymen who had no special feeling for the American holiday were planting palm trees and Italian pines along the winding drive as the guests arrived in their coaches and carnages. Mack thought the marriage of palms and pine trees a curious one, but the landscape architect assured him the effect was “completely Californian.”

  Villa Mediterranean was an enormous success from the first moment. The owners themselves were enormous successes. They were rich, and Mr. Chance was a popular and enthusiastic gentleman orchardist. Ladies enviously examined the silver plates embossed with the JMC cartouche; on the linen Mack had allowed a smaller cartouche with the initials CHC. Gentlemen with monocles pumped his hand and told him it was all jolly good.

  So it was, from the standpoint of the table. The guests sampled blue points and green-turtle soup, boiled California salmon and sliced wild turkey roasted with chestnuts. There was goose, quail, and venison, sweetbreads smothered with mushrooms, orange fritters, and croquettes of oyster. There was celery and lettuce from some of Mack’s own fields in the Central Valley. There were five varieties of potato, and giant bowls of starchy vegetables. There were French champagnes and California wines, Edam and Roquefort cheese, Malaga grapes, mince and pumpkin pie, charlotte russe, and of course English plum pudding with brandy sauce, as well as heaps of fresh oranges.

  Mack had had no time to cook lately, and he longed for that. He wished the sprawling, noisy house contained a few friends today, instead of all these acquaintances. Johnson mingled for a while, eating and saying little. Then he struck up a conversation with a buxom young widow. She left soon, smiling. Twenty minutes later Johnson followed.

  Mack and Carla circulated separately. She was flirtatious with several of the Englishmen, and it irked Mack, but he said nothing. He noticed she drank large quantities of champagne, and then equally large quantities of claret. At half past three in the afternoon she disappeared. He didn’t bother to look for her; he knew she was drunk in their bedroom suite. He hoped she was asleep.

  That night, after the guests had driven away down the hill and the only sounds in the mansion were those of the household staff clearing and cleaning, Mack found Carla in her silk wrapper, muzzy from her nap and
a fresh glass of claret in her hand.

  “Why did you do it, today of all days?”

  “Because I was bored. Those silly, vapid people bore me to death. Riverside bores me. This stinking huge house bores me.”

  “This new house? This bores you?”

  “Yes, yes, completely.”

  Over the raised glass, her deep-blue eyes defied him. She drank all the claret in gulps.

  So, with interwoven strands, the tapestry of the first year and a half of their marriage completed itself on the Riverside loom. Mack felt that he grasped and manipulated the individual threads but had no sense of a larger pattern. He continued to fill his hours with work, reading, physical sport. He saddled Jubilee and galloped up and down the polo field on Jefferson Street, practicing back and tail shots with his mallet and the cork ball. He hiked alone in his groves for hours. He shadow-boxed, remembering his friend Corbett, the heavyweight champion. He wondered what to do about Carla’s ennui, expressed in increasingly strong, blunt language. He tried not to recall that Swampy, who seldom visited, had predicted exactly this outcome.

  Matters came to a head on New Year’s Eve, 1896.

  35

  A NORTH WIND BLEW all day. Even at noon it breathed out cold air, shaking the lustrous leaves and ripening fruit of the groves on Arlington Heights.

  The temperature had been falling for twenty-four hours. In the hilltop grove, Mack worked alongside Chinese in coolie hats and heavy quilted coats. They all shivered as they hauled the sheet-metal burners from mule-drawn wagons parked in the lanes. Johnson was down in the flatland groves, supervising the same work.

  Teams of workers filled burners from a barrel of crude. Two seized each burner and ran with it, placing it according to a regular pattern, one between every two trees. In the cold shade, their eyes glistened white as they cast anxious looks upward. A few thin cirrus clouds trailed away east. Otherwise the sky was clear, blue-white, like new pond ice.