The Gilded Age, a Time Travel

by Lisa Mason

  “Good morning, sir,” they murmur and recommence their conversation.

  “But, Evie, darling,” says the elegant lady, “the Young Women’s Christian Association puts up dozens of these Chinese girls every month. Every month! And still dozens more are defiled in Chinatown. Defiled, imprisoned. They are literally sold into slavery! In the United States of America!” Her melodious voice quavers. “Can you imagine our dear Jesus Christ tolerating this abomination?”

  “Well, they are heathens,” says the mousy girl.

  “All the more reason, Evie! In San Francisco! Young girls! Oh, our Christ would surely die all over again to see such a thing!”

  Uh oh, Daniel thinks, a Holy Roller.

  “And here we are, celebrating the one hundred nineteenth anniversary of our great nation founded on freedom,” the elegant lady says. “The shame!”

  Indeed it is the nation’s anniversary, why, it’s the Fourth of July. He’s lost track of the days during his trek west. The elegant lady glances at Daniel. Such eyes! With the depth of intelligence, the sheen of passion. Clearly, passion! Passion in a lady is a far different thing than the depraved opportunism of a whore. His heart assumes a more frantic pace.

  “That is why our dear Christ has sent for you, Dolly,” the mousy girl says. She darts a disapproving look at Daniel and sniffs loudly.

  “In point of fact, Miss Culbertson sent for me,” the elegant lady corrects her with refreshing logic. “When the directress of our mission at Nine Twenty Sacramento Street invites one, one goes. One goes gladly, to serve our Lord.”

  “But I am so worried for you, Dolly. San Francisco is such a dreadful dirty city. So low class. And we’ve got so many parties planned for the season.”

  “I shall stay at the mission only a little while, I promise. But perhaps we should not speak of such things in front of this gentleman.”

  “You may speak of anything you like, dear ladies,” Daniel says. “The sound of your sweet voices is all I crave.”

  “Dolly, he’s stinking,” the mousy girl whispers. “Perhaps we should find another table.”

  “Yes, it’s true, I’m stinking,” Daniel says. “I confess all before Our Savior, you need not whisper.” Now there’s a fine line for a couple of Holy Rollers. He congratulates himself and reaches for the mousy girl’s paw. She snatches her hand away. He pantomimes having seized her hand anyway and kisses the air in his palm. “I confess I’m drunk on your presence, dear ladies, drunk with wonder at this marvelous land. I have been away too long. And now I have returned, your true native son.” He slides off the chair and kneels before the elegant lady, taking her hand between his two, boldly clasping the whole package on her knees, and breathing deeply of her fragrance. She’s a hummer, all right.

  The mousy girl gasps at his impropriety, but the elegant lady smiles indulgently and neither reclaims her hand nor casts him off her knees. Smitten by him, too? Better and better!

  “And who might you be, sir?”

  “I might be the Devil but in fact I am Daniel J. Watkins of Saint Louis, London, and Paris. And you?”

  The mousy girl gasps, perhaps appreciating him after all. London and Paris? She widens her eyes and blushes, adding a modicum of charm to her sallow face. “Why, I’m Miss Evie Brownstone, Mr. Watkins, and this here is Miss Donaldina Cameron. We all call her Dolly.”

  Dolly! Yes, a Dolly! Very much a Dolly! Daniel eagerly leans forward, and her knees part a little.

  “Or Donald,” the elegant Miss Cameron says, frowning at her friend’s familiarity.

  “Donald?” Daniel shuffles back on his knees, lurches to his feet, regains the chair. Oh, no. She cannot be one of those peculiar women who cannot decide if they are female or male. He bows a little stiffly. “Miss Cameron.”

  “Dolly is one of the MacKenzie Camerons,” Miss Brownstone rattles on, uncertain how she has offended her friend. “Of Scotland, New Zealand, San Francisco, Oakland, and the San Gabriel Valley!” she says with another doubtful look at Miss Cameron.

  Daniel rouses himself. “Ah, then you know San Francisco, Miss Cameron? You know Oakland? Still the mud hut frontier, these towns, are they not?”

  Oakland glimmers behind the windows of the Overland train. After the golden-brown hills and rustic flatlands, he has not expected this—a shimmering lake, a stylish city. Three-story Queen Anne mansions line the littoral shore, with astounding gardens and sprawling lawns, carriage houses and small private parks set with classical sculptures wrought in marble. Daniel spies fine carriages driven by liveried coachmen trotting down well-worn lanes bordered by more of the astonishing succulents and palms, broad swooping oaks with reddish-green leaves unlike any foliage he’s seen back East.

  Miss Cameron coolly regards his surprise. “We call Oakland the Continental Side of the Bay, Mr. Watkins. Evie attended Snell’s Seminary here.”

  “Snells?” Daniel thinks of escargot in garlic butter.

  “The finishing school, of course.”

  “Of course.” The sliver of a headache pokes behind Daniel’s eyes.

  She gazes out the window, shifting into a pensive mood. “The good people live in Oakland, Mr. Watkins. People who love books and art and sculpture. Aesthetes, Mr. Watkins. Birders, scholars, astronomers, entomologists. Dr. Merritt lives here, and the Peraltas, and Joseph Knowland the publisher, and Judge Sam McKee. Mr. F. M. Smith, who discovered all that borax in Nevada. His ballroom accommodates hundreds and his gardens are legendary.”

  “I’ve heard of his gardens.”

  “And the houses in Oakland have telephones, Mr. Watkins. Do you know of the telephone?”

  He laughs indignantly. “Why, of course. In London and Paris—“

  “Oaklanders own more telephones than people in San Francisco,” Miss Cameron continues, growing animated. “They’ve got more electricity in their homes than anyone.”

  “Mother’s got a system of electrical buzzers to summon the servants,” Miss Brownstone says breathlessly. “Like Mrs. Winchester, the rifle heiress.”

  “And electrical lights,” Miss Cameron says. “Oaklanders employ Mr. Edison’s genius to good advantage, Mr. Watkins.”

  “I never said you didn’t.”

  “Mother’s got hot water for my bath,” Miss Brownstone yelps, getting into the spirit. “Pumped right into my rooms on the third floor!”

  “You say you’ve seen London and Paris, Mr. Watkins,” Miss Cameron says imperiously. “Well, the McPhail mansion was designed by California architects, and do you know what those clever fellows did? They installed a chute in the wall that opens up in the boudoir of the lady of the house upstairs and goes all the way down to the washerwomen’s tubs in the basement. No one has ever seen anything like it.” Miss Cameron’s flowers and ribbons quake with civic pride. “Have you ever seen such a thing in London or Paris, Mr. Watkins?” Before he can respond properly or crack a joke, she snaps, “No, I thought not, sir! We are scarcely mud huts in California. We are quite modern and striding forth into the future. And don’t you forget it!”

  The two ladies storm out of the dining car, leaving Daniel dazed.

  *

  The Overland pulls into the station at the Port of Oakland. Daniel collects his bags and his trunk, and disembarks. At midday, a languor has settled over the port. Sunlight filters through a high haze, a breeze whips in from the bay. Clang of ships’ bells, slap of waves, squeak of tightly drawn rope around wood. Ah, London, how he recalls those sounds, his night walks along the piers.

  By God, his head aches. He lights a ciggie, inhales deeply. His stomach rolls over. Another shot of puma piss would put him right. But the old cowboy has vanished as surely as his invisible companion.

  “Porter,” Daniel calls, extracting coins from his coat pocket. “Where’s the ferry bound for San Francisco?”

  “You’ll be wantin’ the Chrysapolis, sir, and a lovely steamer she is, too,” says the porter, a stringy old man in a cap and a rumpled uniform. He flashes an abundance of gold teeth
. A failed prospector? If the porter had been a youngster during the Gold Rush—and many Forty-niners were just kids—he could very well have scratched around in those golden-brown hills, panned the streams. Taking only a taste of fortune with him—a mouthful of gold teeth.

  “Take me there.” Daniel scowls, his headache deepening. He can see it—the stringy porter’s years of searching, the frustration, his ultimate failure. Perhaps the porter wasn’t so stringy then. Perhaps he’d been a robust young man like Daniel. That is what failure does—wrings you out, plucks at your bones, sucks you dry. A failed man is a loathsome thing. And Father? Why, the eminent Jonathan D. Watkins, he is a failure, too.

  “Sir, she don’t depart till half past three,” the porter says apologetically, unsure how he may have offended the young gentleman.

  “Half past three! What in heaven’s name am I to do till then?”

  “If you please, sir, the sights along the promenade is quite nice.” The porter points to where Miss Cameron and Miss Brownstone stroll arm-in-arm beside the rocks strewn along the steep grade of the beach.

  “I think not.” Holy Rollers, indeed.

  “Perhaps a gentleman like yourself would like to seek some refreshment?” The porter points in the opposite direction where sailors slouch about the docks and the murmur of distant merriment can be heard.

  Refreshment. Exactly. Daniel hands more coins to the porter. “You shall watch my bags while I seek refreshment. And you shall come and fetch me when the Chrysapolis is ready to depart. Understand me?”

  “Oh, yes, sir. Very good, sir. That way, sir.”

  Daniel stalks along the waterfront, loosening his tie and collar. Get a hold of yourself, sir. Why should he be so disquieted by a porter? There is no such thing as equality, his friends in London say. You Americans are deluded if you believe in such nonsense. There are those who are superior, those who are inferior, and that is that. Yet the porter—if he truly is a failed prospector in more than Daniel’s imagination—is no different than Father. No different at all. In the whole scheme of things, they are truly equal.

  Father fancied himself so clever. A friendship with a rich British lady during one of Mama’s many illnesses had enlightened him. Father realized that America’s rebellion could be turned to his advantage. This was the New World, replete with land and resources, cheap labor and huge ambitions. Funds were all the aspiring grubbers lacked. And funds, capital, gold could be secured from the old merchant families, royalty, continental capitalists hungry for higher returns, all eager to exploit the peasants and criminals and reprobates who were beating out a new life for themselves in this New World.

  Consider the beauty of it. You loan the wretches money against their homes, their land, their businesses. Let them think they’ve won their freedom, then reinstate their servitude not by force, king, or country, but by debt.

  This was part and parcel of Father’s insidious propaganda. If the strident communists and the clamoring workingmen infesting Europe are worrying you, then bring your gold to America where bold entrepreneurs are making a killing. Have you any notion, he would whisper in the ear of a French widow or a German dowager, how property values in San Francisco shot to the moon during the Gold Rush? Why, a little commercial front on Portsmouth Square with a bar slinging shots of rotgut and a rouge-et-noir game in the back was bought for six thousand dollars and sold but a few years later for one million. One million dollars, madame. El Dorado House, the first restaurant in the city serving hard-boiled eggs for five dollars apiece, leased its premises for twenty-five thousand dollars a month.

  This, when men and women rolling cigars or shining shoes or stitching gentlemen’s collars earned fifty cents a day.

  Oh, Father had them coming and going on both sides of the transaction. The dreaming settlers, the idealistic famers, the ambitious shopkeepers scraping out their survival in the cow towns, dead ends, tenderloins, and Chinatowns throughout the West. And the scheming capitalists, the jaded merchant dynasties, the indolent European royalty hungering for more profits, for greater cash flow.

  The eminent Jonathan D. Watkins became a mortgage broker and from 1888 to 1892 extended twelve million dollars, mostly in European capital, in loans on real estate throughout the West. He put Daniel on H.M.S. May Queen on New Year’s Day, bound for London and Paris. This was a time when Father favorably regarded his son’s good looks, quick charm, and easy manners. Hobnob, those were Father’s orders. Ingratiate yourself to those grieving French widows, diamond-studded German dowagers, plump Dutch bluebloods.

  Hobnob Daniel did. So what if he wound up in Paris, drinking absinthe with whores and poets at La Nouvelle-Athenes? He scratched up plenty of capital for Father’s schemes. Removed from Father’s stern ambit, he found he cared little for business, for money-grubbing. He kept his bohemian life to himself and dreamed of pictures on a strip of painted paper whirling in a Zoetrope.

  Then the panic struck America in ’93. Banks failed, and capital dried up in a financial drought the like of which no one had see in a decade. Businesses collapsed. Angry gangs of unemployed men roamed towns and cities with sticks and knives and guns. Needless to say, property values plummeted, especially in the West where the economy was still so fragile.

  By 1895, the eminent Jonathan D. Watkins found himself holding twelve million dollars of his own outstanding debt, debtors who could not or would not make payments, and property securing all that debt worth next to nothing.

  What could he do? Father declared bankruptcy and recalled his son from Europe. How well Daniel remembered the telegram. What excitement to receive a telegram, quite the rage. Brand-new telegraph wires looped all over the streets of Paris.

  DANIEL STOP WE’RE DONE STOP

  COME HOME AT ONCE STOP FATHER

  MOTHER NEEDS YOU STOP

  Daniel hadn’t understood the full import of the message till he reluctantly returned home, dragging a bag filled with scandalously decadent paintings and four bottles of Pernod Fils. We’re done? What in hell did that mean? That Father had decided upon a new strategy? A more lucrative way to become a millionaire besides lending the money of strangers to other strangers?

  No. Jonathan D. Watkins had become a failure, just as surely as the old cowboy or the porter with his gold teeth. Bankruptcy was, to Daniel, as evil as moral turpitude and as far-reaching as an extramarital indiscretion. Sins of the father? Oh, yes. Daniel was doomed.

  He kneads his brow. Refreshment. Indeed, sir, refreshment is just the thing he needs.

  He quickens his pace along the waterfront. Sailors stare at him, poke each other in the ribs, guffaw, or mutter half-heard obscenities. Daniel tips his bowler, keeping his spine ramrod straight. He’s got the accoutrements any gentlemen should possess when sojourning through the West—a Remington double-barreled derringer stuck in his waistband and a jumbo Congress knife with a two-inch blade. He’s strolled among dives and joints before. He can walk into any accursed place he cares to.

  The sound of merriment loudens.

  He spies a tiny crude building of unfinished wood with two plain windows and a strictly functional front door. A converted bunkhouse, perhaps, where oyster fishermen once slept. The odor of many a previous drunk teases his olfactory senses. Beneath the eaves, emblazoned in red letters across the weathered boards, he reads:

  HEINOLD’S

  FIRST AND LAST CHANCE SALOON

  Daniel steps into the smoky caucus. A potbellied stove glows red-hot in one corner. An assortment of rickety chairs and tables, none of a matching set, are jammed onto the sawdusted floor, together with retired packing barrels and tumbledown stools. Men sit on these or stand at the bar, weaving on their feet. Ropes and buoys are slung on the planked walls, and brass lanterns thick with the patina of heavy salt air.

  A wizened beerslinger stands behind the bar, sucking on a stogie. Deep lines crease his tanned forehead made high and wide by his receding hairline. Elephantine ears protrude from his head as if Nature had specially equipped him to bette
r hear each customer’s request over the din of those previously served.

  “Johnny, hey Johnny,” calls out one of the patrons. “Got a’ aspirin?”

  “Back yerself up to the stove an’ you’ll get yerself an ass burn,” the beerslinger says.

  “How much?” Daniel says.

  “A nickel for the beer, a deener for the whiskey,” says the beerslinger. “an’ nothin’ for the ass burn.”

  Beer is peasant’s fare, a heavy sour taste Daniel has never much cared for. But he finds this beer fruity and clean and thick with malt. The beer chases a shot of whiskey down his parched throat just fine and settles his stomach. The whiskey is smooth and mellow, and eases the ache in his head admirably.

  Daniel throws coins on the bar and looks for a place to sit. A vacant stool set before a barrel looks satisfactory except for the table crowded with rowdies seated directly beside it. Two men and a tawdry lady barge in the front door. Daniel seizes his opportunity. The stool it must be.

  “Say there, little brother, can you tell me what is a brick?” says a huge rowdy at the table. He sports an enormous mustache, a bush of a beard, and long, wild yellow hair beneath a Stetson hat. A cape of mangy fur that looks and stinks like bearskin is draped around the shoulders of his bright blue Prince Albert coat.

  “What is a brick?” Daniel says, playing along.

  “Why, there are gold bricks and silver bricks and bricks made without straw. There are bricks to be hurled at mad dogs. Ergo, bricks!” The rowdy slaps his suede chaps. One trouser leg is tucked into a fancy-stitched cowboy boot. The other leg isn’t. He toasts Daniel and triumphantly tosses a shot of whiskey down his throat, pleased at his own pronouncement.

  “Joaquin, you are living proof that American poets have yet to master the English language,” says his gaunt companion. The companion smiles dreamily, sipping his beer. He wears a sea captain’s cap over his mop of dark curls, though from his pale aristocratic face, pale elegant hands, and foppish bowtie, he is clearly no sailor. “Sir, may I introduce you to the great Californian poet, Joaquin Miller. And a very fine poet he would be too, if only he could make a lick of sense.”