Calico Palace

by Gwen Bristow

  Kendra asked, “Who?” She was not surprised when Marny answered,

  “Me.”

  Kendra began to laugh. Marny set her cup on the table beside her and looked out at the sparkling day.

  “Kendra,” she said, “I’m a gambler. We may not get much rain this winter, but even with a little rain this town can be mighty disagreeable. I’m gambling on the chance that it’ll be disagreeable enough to put up the price of steamboat tickets.”

  Kendra remembered the mud flowing down the hill after a storm of only two days. “You’re a smart business-woman,” she said.

  Marny smiled. “Then you don’t think I’m wicked?”

  “No,” said Kendra.

  “Some people would,” Marny reminded her.

  “I’m not ‘some people,’” Kendra retorted. “I’m me. I know what I think, and I think it’s no more wrong to buy tickets and hold them for a rise than to buy city lots and hold them.”

  Marny took up her cup again and sipped the chocolate. “That’s what I like about you, Kendra. You do your own thinking and make up your own mind.”

  “That’s what I have a head for,” Kendra said laughing.

  But even as she laughed, she knew she was not going to tell Loren about Marny’s buying up those steamer tickets. Loren would not approve. It was only one more incident to remind her that her own spirit was closer to the Calico Palace than to this demure little cottage where she lived. She had let herself be caught between them. She had let herself turn into a halfway person, and she did not like it, and she did not know how to wrench herself free.

  44

  AT NOON ON THE first of November the steamer California puffed her way through the Golden Gate and turned toward the Isthmus. As usual on her southbound voyages half her berths were empty. The day was bright, and sunbeams danced around the vessels in the bay. That afternoon Marny went to Chase and Fenway’s and locked up her steamboat tickets in the little safe she kept there to hold her own private hoard of coins. Marny never paid for anything with coins unless it was something so rare and necessary that the seller could demand coins instead of gold dust. She put coins into her safe. You knew what coins were worth. You never could tell about gold dust, not in San Francisco.

  She went back to the Calico Palace along the plank sidewalk that the gamblers had built on Kearny Street. She dealt cards until shortly after midnight, then she climbed the stairs to her little room on the third floor and went to bed. Unlike the Bella Union and some other resorts around the plaza, the Calico Palace did not stay open till dawn. Marny and Norman had observed that most of the disorders in these places occurred in the early morning hours, when the serving men were tired and the drinking men drunk. They closed early, and kept the peace.

  By this time Marny was used to the plaza noise and slept through it fairly well. But the next morning a different sort of noise woke her up. She raised herself on her elbow, hearing the howl of wind, and vessels creaking as the waves rose and knocked them around. When she looked out she saw that the brightness of the past few weeks had gone. The clouds were thick, and as the day went on they grew thicker, until the Blackbeards had to light the chandeliers in the gambling rooms so the players could see the cards. In the late afternoon the storm broke.

  The rain poured all night. It poured all the next day, and the next and the next and the next. It poured every day for two weeks. Once in a while it would pause for an hour or so, long enough for people to look up at the sky and say hopefully, “Don’t you think it might clear now?” But they hardly had time to patch a leak before the rain started again.

  The mud rolled in torrents down the hills. Behind them the torrents left open gulfs that filled with water. In level places the ground soaked up all the water it could. When it could hold no more, great dark pools lay about, and stayed there. In places men laid planks across the pools to serve as bridges, but their work was wasted. After a few hours the planks went down into the mud, out of sight.

  The whole town tottered in a sea of mud. The best of the plank sidewalks had been laid on piles, and these could still be used if you wore thick boots and were very careful. But it was not easy, because the sidewalks were so narrow that when two persons met they could barely pass each other without stepping off into the slush.

  Except on these rare sidewalks men waded in mud to their knees, swearing tiredly as they slogged along. Sometimes they stumbled, and nearly choked in the mud before they could get up.

  In places the mud was six feet deep. Wagons stuck. The mules kicked and strained, bogging deeper as they fought to get out. Sometimes they went down and smothered to death. Their owners tried to drag the bodies away, but the stenches that rose over the mud suggested that some of the carcasses had gone out of sight and were still there. The wagons went down until the wheels could no longer be seen, and nobody tried to move them.

  Chase and Fenway advertised rubber coats and hats and boots, rubber tents for men to live in, rubber sheets to cover the beds they tried to sleep in or to tack on the leaky roofs they had to live under. But much as these were needed, few men could reach the store to buy them. Montgomery Street was a sea of mud, black and deep and dangerous, and cut with runnels of rain that made it deeper every hour.

  Mr. Fenway had an idea.

  “Let’s bury some of this trash from New York,” he said. “That’ll make the street solid enough to walk on.”

  He and Mr. Chase and their helpers set to work. Before long other businessmen up and down the liquid streets were following their example, dragging out bales and barrels of merchandise and sinking them into the mud so the customers could walk.

  They all had plenty of stuff that was good for nothing else. For months past, half the vessels that came into the bay had been bringing cargoes of expensive rubbish. Most shippers in the States knew nothing about San Francisco except that it was a town full of gold, and they had not bothered to find out anything else. They had sent out silver-mounted carriage harness for mules dragging wagons up the hills; ruffled white shirts and kid dancing slippers for men who needed overalls and knee-high boots for gold digging; mahogany beds and marble-topped dressing tables for a town where most men slept on shelves in flophouses, with bugs and rats and twenty or thirty other men all breathing the same air; baby beds and rocking chairs and parlor stoves for a town that had hardly a dozen family homes; and tons of bonnets and ribbons and silken fripperies for women who weren’t there. Messrs. Chase and Fenway and their friends, who had been supposed to sell these things on commission, now dragged them out and let them slide into the mud.

  Men who did not own stores came in, bought piles of this trumpery at low prices, and used it to fill their own streets. At the corner where Kearny Street met Washington, Norman and his gambling friends sank a double line of stoves. The stoves went down easily and made a firm pathway so men could cross from one plank sidewalk to the other.

  Swathed in rubber clothes, carrying lunches in rubber bags, Loren and Ralph and Mr. Chase went down the hill and back every day. Mr. Fenway, who had no family to go home to, slept in the store. Often in the evenings, dripping and determined in his boots and raincoat, he walked up to Kearny Street, crossed on the line of stoves, and made his way to the Calico Palace. Here he warmed himself with a few drinks and heard Rosabel play the piano.

  The Calico Palace was still doing a good business. It was a bright and cheerful spot. Many men besides Mr. Fenway preferred to kick their way through the mud than to stay in the wretched lodgings where most of them had to live.

  As for Marny, she too was damp and cold. Her bedroom was drafty, her clothes seemed never dry, and her meals—brought in from the restaurant next door—were soggy when they reached her. But she had the inner warmth of the gambler who has guessed right. During her breaks from the card table Marny sat in her dismal little room, sipping warmed over coffee and listening to the rain. Thump, thump, rub-a-dub, pour, rattle, rain, rain, rain. As she listened, she knew that every day of it was making her steamboat ticke
ts worth more than they had been worth the day before.

  She did not try to see Kendra while the rain came down. But Kendra thought of her often, and of the steamboat tickets, with amusement and admiration.

  Kendra herself was as comfortable as anybody could be in such abusive weather. Her house did not leak, and she had a good supply of firewood. Shortly before the storm Loren had bought the scraps from a building recently finished by Dwight Carson.

  During the deluge a steamer came in, bringing mail that had come on muleback across the Isthmus. Loren sent Ralph to the post office, a little wooden building high on the Clay Street hill, and Ralph came back with his rubber bag full of mail. Kendra had a letter from Eva, an answer to the letter Kendra herself had written last spring telling Eva of her second marriage.

  Kendra read the letter, lying on the sofa in her parlor while the fire crackled and the rain pelted the roof. Eva had written from Alex’s post of duty at Hampton Roads, Virginia. It was the same sort of tactful, dutiful letter she used to write when Kendra was at school. Eva was sorry the marriage to Ted had been a failure—“You gave so few details, I hardly know what to say, but I am sure you acted for the best”—and she hoped Kendra would find more happiness with Loren. “I remember him well from our days on the Cynthia. A young man of excellent character and gentlemanly bearing.” She added some details about life at Hampton Roads, which she was evidently enjoying.

  Kendra lowered the pages to the cushion beside her. She heard the rain. She looked down at Eva’s letter. Pleasant, almost impersonal. As if she were writing to a cousin she had not seen for years and did not expect to see for years more, if ever.

  —As always, thought Kendra, she’s glad to be rid of me. I am suitably disposed of. “And how is your daughter, Mrs. Taine?” —“She’s married, living in California. Oh yes, she likes it there.”

  —I’ll write her after the baby is born. That will give me something to write about. I suppose we’ll each write about two letters a year, and neither of us will be sorry we’re so far apart. We have nothing in common. We never had, and we never will.

  Kendra felt her baby move. She looked down at the place where the baby was growing, nearly ready now to be born.

  “You are going to be loved,” she promised. “You are never going to know how it feels not to be wanted.”

  After two drowning weeks the rain stopped. The weary people looked around. The hills showed long deep slashes cut by the rain, the lower part of town stood in a lake of mud like black molasses. In the mud they saw rags and shoes, bones and bottles and tin cans, potato peelings and eggshells and cabbage leaves and every sort of offal, all rotting together in the mess.

  They had to live in it. Except where they could use the few plank sidewalks, there was nothing to do but wade in the mud. And it stank. Never had they been so glad of the wild winds of San Francisco.

  They could only hope there would be no more rain until they had had time to make some sort of order out of the chaos around them. Or, said several hundred disgusted citizens, until they had left this miserable place forever.

  The steamer Panama was in the bay, making ready to leave. The disgusted citizens rushed to the steamboat office and bought tickets home. The tickets at the office gave out, but word went around—You could get a ticket at the Calico Palace. You asked one of the bartenders. He would consider, and reply, “Why yes, I’ll try to get one for you.” After a moment’s pause he would add, “It may be expensive.”

  Men who wanted to leave paid gladly, saying it was worth the price to get out of this filthy swamp. They crowded aboard the Panama. Two days after the rain ceased she left for the Isthmus, packed with passengers, half of whom had bought their tickets from Marny.

  But over San Francisco the sky was bright again. The hills across the bay turned green, with great yellow splashes of wild mustard blooms. Again the people began to build. They laid plank sidewalks, they threw footbridges over the gulfs, they put up workshops and shelters of every kind.’ Chase and Fenway moved into their new building. Dwight Carson tore down their old store and set to work on their new warehouse. Workmen were not so scarce as they had been in the summer, for the mountains were covered with snow and men could no longer dig gold.

  Kendra did not go into the mushy streets, but she got exercise by walking up and down her front porch. From here on the hill she could look down at the town and its boisterous energy. She could see men laughing, shouting, arguing, drinking from flasks they carried in their pockets, stumbling on the paths and swearing as they tried to stand up again. She could see the plaza and its peacocky resorts; on side streets she could see Chinese restaurants, where slippered men served good food at surprisingly low prices, and Chinese gambling houses where they played games unknown to Caucasians; and on other streets she could see saloons and cheap brothels and lunch counters where men ate standing up while they brushed away flies.

  Swaggering up and down, often passing her own porch, were men just down from the mines. You could always tell a miner: bearded, long-haired, shirt of red or blue or plaid flannel, heavy breeches, gun in holster—maybe two guns in two holsters—boots caked with red mud. They kept the red mud sticking to their boots as long as they could. San Francisco mud was black. Only the mud of the placer country was red. Red mud on their boots proved they had been to the mines.

  Nearly all these men from the mines were very young. In this same month of November, when the citizens voted on the State Constitution, hundreds of the swashbuckling heroes of the gold camps could not vote because they were not old enough.

  But though they were nearly all young, not all the men from the mines were joyous. As she watched them go by, sometimes Kendra felt sympathy that was almost pain. The death rate among the miners was tragic. They had so much to get used to—the labor, the strange climate, the uncertain rewards of gold digging, the dreadful food and liquor, which was all they could get at many of the camps; the nerve-racking newness of everything. They had come into it suddenly. They lacked the background of slow toughening that Kendra and her friends had had that first year, when a gold camp was a safe and neighborly place.

  No wonder so many of them could not stand it. They withered and died, or, in shocking numbers, they gave up and killed themselves. As the miners strutted around, much of their exuberance was real. But much of it was nothing but the bluster of scared kids who wished they had never left home.

  And these were the men who had lived to get here. Now that the covered wagons were coming in, horrible stories were coming in with them. Stories of jaunty young fellows who had started out with their wagon covers painted “California or Bust,” thinking a lot of guns and bravado was all it took to get here, thinking one Yankee could lick six Indians with his right hand tied behind him, knowing nothing about the deserts and mountains ahead of them and too bumptious to ask. People said you could find your way from Missouri to California now, simply by following the graves.

  But thousands of them did get here, and many of these prospered. How San Francisco was growing! From her porch Kendra could see the new buildings mushrooming out of the mud, and the vessels hurrying into the bay. When the Panama sailed she had left three hundred and seventeen vessels in the bay behind her. Still they came, they came from all over the world, bringing more people and more goods. Kendra could see the wharfs piled with merchandise, waiting to be drenched in the next rain.

  On Thanksgiving Day the town was still wallowing in mud; but the sun shone, there were blooms on the wild bushes, and the people made holiday. Clergymen held services for thankful worshipers; the captain of a bark from Boston gave a dinner on board for a group of leading businessmen; the plaza preacher shouted to his hearers to repent, which apparently they did not, for the Calico Palace and its rivals were thronged all day. When Marny sent a bartender to the restaurant for her dinner he brought her turkey with sage dressing, fresh and hot as a holiday dinner ought to be. The men of the Calico Palace went out for their meals, but Marny did not. The restaurant
s were full of men, and the sight of her would have caused too much excitement. She carried the trays to her bedroom and ate her meals alone.

  When she had finished dinner she piled the dishes on the tray to be sent back at once. She was not going to keep any broken pieces of food around to bring in the creeping things that spawned by millions in the damp.

  For a minute or two she stood at a window, looking down. Her bedroom did not face the plaza—she had chosen a back room because here she had some protection from the noise—so she looked over the alley between this building and the restaurant, and the back doors of both. The dusk was closing in, but she could see by the light from the first floor windows. What a dump, thought Marny. Piles of boxes, bottles, garbage, and mud, mud, mud. Well, it didn’t matter. She was here because she wanted to be here, and she was doing what she wanted to do. And while she certainly did not live in such comfort as Loren provided for Kendra, she took care of herself rather well.

  Marny slept on an iron cot. It was not handsome, but keeping clean in San Francisco was an endless and sometimes hopeless battle, and an iron cot was not attractive to bedbugs. Unlike most people, Marny slept between sheets. The sheets were never hemmed and never washed. She bought bolts of white muslin, tore off strips of the right length and put them on the cot. When she needed a change of sheets she rolled up the strips and threw them out of the window, and tore off new ones. Like the miners, she also threw away many of her garments. It was easier than washing them. It was also easier, and less expensive, than finding somebody to wash them for her.

  She liked it here. She liked the bright raucous merriment of the Calico Palace, she liked the people she worked with. The Blackbeards and the Hawaiian girls were her friends, so were Chad and the other barmen. She liked Rosabel’s good-natured cleverness and the cool competence of Norman. Norman had few orthodox virtues—he was not kind or generous or unselfish—but he was consistent with himself. With Norman you knew exactly where you stood. Marny liked this.