Calico Palace

by Gwen Bristow

  “As the Good Book tells us, madam,” said Mr. Fenway, “‘a prudent wife is from the Lord.’”

  Kendra asked Rosabel about her housekeeping arrangements. Rosabel said she had the services of a married couple who lived in a cottage Mr. Fenway had built for them on a corner of this lot. The man cut wood and took care of the horses, while his wife did laundry and housework. This, said Rosabel, left her time for her music. She was taking lessons from a Frenchman who came in twice a week, and oh, she did enjoy it! She had played the piano since she was a little girl, but she had not realized till now how much there was that she did not know.

  Mr. Fenway listened proudly.

  They chatted about the new theater and the actors, about new fashions on display in the stores. Mr. Fenway said they must hear Rosabel play her new piano. Kendra observed that the French teacher was a good one. Rosabel had been taking lessons only three months, but already her playing showed marked improvement. Kendra told her so, and Rosabel smiled gratefully.

  It was time to go. They thanked Rosabel for a pleasant afternoon, and Mr. Fenway drove them back to the Calico Palace. Not until after they got there and Kendra had gone to her own room, did she realize that Rosabel had not asked them a single question about the Calico Palace. When she saw Marny, Kendra asked if she thought Rosabel ever felt homesick for what she had left behind.

  Marny’s forehead puckered as she considered this. “I don’t know,” she answered after a moment. “I wonder too. But I’ll tell you this, Kendra. If she asks us to tea again, I’m going to smile sweetly and decline.”

  “Oh Marny! Why?”

  “I haven’t been so bored since I left Philadelphia,” said Marny. She gave a sigh. “Sorry. I guess I’m just not the domestic type.”

  A few days after this, Dwight proudly told them they would no longer be disturbed by the noise of saws and hammers. The Calico Palace was finished. Here it stood, four stories high, the finest building on the plaza. And fireproof, said Dwight. This he promised.

  But though he assured them the building would not burn, he had not forgotten that there were many articles inside it that would—curtains, carpets, furniture. To be sure of an escape route if a dropped cigar set an indoor fire and smoke blocked the open stairwell, Dwight had built a narrow iron staircase at the back, leading from the fourth floor to an iron door at the bottom. The iron staircase was steep and narrow. “But it means,” said Dwight, “you can get out, and come back safe and sound the next day.”

  “Dwight,” Marny said seriously, “you’re good. You think of everything.”

  Dwight answered with pride. “I do try to.”

  There were now seven buildings in San Francisco that had been built under Dwight’s supervision. These were the Calico Palace, Hiram’s bank, Pocket’s library, and four other banks and office buildings. They all stood in the rich area near the waterfront. Not only did they have walls of brick and iron, but Dwight had added to each one a new feature to increase its chances of safety. Their roofs were flat, and on each roof Dwight had put a tank. This meant that each owner could flood his roof with water a foot deep, and thus protect it from windblown sparks and cinders. Dwight looked over his work with the air of a general who had prepared his forces so well that now he was eager for battle.

  Marny looked at the tank and up at the clouds. “Now if it will only rain!”

  She got her wish. Within a week after Dwight had told her the tank was ready, the clouds broke with a howling storm. Dwight’s carefully planned gutters led the rainwater into the tank. For ten days the rain fell, broken only by a few snatches of sunshine, while Norman gleefully rubbed his hands and Marny laughed with joy. By the time the weather cleared, the tank was full and Marny exclaimed, “We have water enough for a dozen fires!”

  “No we haven’t,” Dwight answered. But he added with a confident smile, “We have enough.”

  As Marny said to Kendra later, they were ready for the maybe. And not only was the Calico Palace strong, it was also comfortable. The living quarters on the fourth floor were as luxurious as those of the Union Hotel. The rooms were large, well lighted, and well furnished. Even Geraldine had a little room of her own, where she would be warm and dry when the weather made her balcony unpleasant. Lulu and Lolo kept the fourth floor in order, helped by the wife of one of the bartenders.

  “How gloriously different,” Marny exclaimed, “from the way I had to live last year! Shivering in the drafts, throwing the sheets out of the window when I needed fresh ones, and rats eating the soap and candles. How everything changes!”

  But though she said “everything,” she did not mean everything. Some details of her life had not changed. She lived in luxury, but she still wore her gun all day and kept it beside her all night. San Francisco was as dangerous as it had ever been.

  However, lawless though it was, the town was showing more of the ways of the towns on the Atlantic side. While women were still hugely outnumbered, by this time the group of wives from back East was large enough for them to introduce Eastern social customs. The same storm that had filled the roof-tank of the Calico Palace had also blown down the frame of the unfinished Presbyterian Church. The ladies from back East announced a bazaar to help raise money for rebuilding. After spending several weeks stitching on elegant trifles, shortly before Christmas they held the bazaar in the elegant Union Hotel.

  Hiram and Pocket and Dwight dutifully attended. Afterwards they came to the Calico Palace laden with fancy work. They sent one of the barboys to summon Marny and Kendra to a private card room, where they had spread their purchases on the table. “Take what you want,” Hiram said, “and give Lulu and Lolo the rest. We have tatting and tidies and tea aprons, reticules and penwipers and lamp mats—”

  “How do you know what these doodads are?” Dwight asked with wondering laughter.

  “I’m a minister’s son,” Hiram reminded him. “I know all about church bazaars. Help yourselves, girls.”

  The girls took some hemstitched handkerchiefs, and Kendra chose also a pincushion and Marny a hair-band of pale green ribbon trimmed with silk flowers. The men told them about the fair.

  “It was a great occasion,” said Hiram. “All the beauty and fashion were there. Mr. and Mrs. Eustis, Mr. and Mrs. Chase, Mr. and Mrs. Fenway—”

  “And Mr. Hiram Boyd,” Pocket said, “spending his money and winning more clients for his bank.”

  “And floundering and falling over my big feet among those dainty little ribbon-draped booths,” said Hiram. He stood up. “Now that I’ve done my social duty, I’m going to Marny’s bar.”

  “And I’d better get back to my card table,” said Marny. “After a church fair almost next door, I have a feeling that a lot of fellows will be heading this way, to loosen up and act natural.”

  She was right. The Calico Palace had a rush of late business. When she left her card table Marny was happy, but weary indeed. The next evening she said she was tired of cards and felt like going out. She and Dwight went to see the show at the Dramatic Museum.

  The audience here was not as select as that at the Jenny Lind, nor as dignified. When Dwight and Marny entered their box, she received noisy greetings from several patrons of her card table, who had evidently paused at the bar on their way in. She smiled back at them and so did Dwight. Dwight was proud to be seen escorting Marny, and to know he was the only man in town who had the privilege of doing so.

  Looking over the audience, Marny saw Captain Pollock, but he was not one of those who greeted her. He gave no sign of seeing her at all. For a moment Marny wondered if he still actively disliked her, but the show was beginning. She turned her attention to the stage.

  First there was music by the orchestra. After this, the program said, there would be a one-act farce, and then an interlude of songs by Miss Hortensia Vale. Marny had never heard of Miss Hortensia Vale, but Dwight said he had. She was newly arrived from the East, and he had been told she sang well. The program said Hortensia would give them songs to her own guitar
music, and more songs to a piano accompaniment by a gentleman from Peru.

  The farce was well played and Marny liked it. When the curtains parted again she saw Hortensia Vale, sitting on a beribboned ladder under an arch abloom with paper flowers. At one side of the stage was the piano. Evidently Hortensia was going to sing first to the music of her own guitar, for she held the guitar on her knee. She was not a beautiful girl, but she was a pleasing one, with fluffy brown hair and a merry smile. Her dress displayed her figure more lavishly than would have been thought proper at the Jenny Lind, but it was a good figure and this audience approved and applauded. Hortensia kissed her hand to them, and with easy grace she began to play her guitar.

  Though Marny had no ear for music she could sense that the audience was listening with pleasure. Hortensia began to sing, with a saucy mirth.

  “It’s hard to be a lady in a town like San Francisco,

  A girl just has to do the best she can—

  You have to be so brisk, oh! You take an awful risk, oh!

  For everywhere you look you see a man.”

  Marny laughed, and listened with growing interest. For while she was no judge of Hortensia’s voice she could certainly see that the girl had personality. Marny was wondering if Hortensia could play the piano. The song went on.

  “Oh, men are very plenty here beside the Golden Gate—

  Enough to please the most exacting shopper,

  And when every man you see wants to take you on his knee,

  It’s really hard to keep on being proper.”

  Her hearers were liking her more and more. Marny decided that she would tell Norman to come here tomorrow and find out if Hortensia could play the piano as well as sing. With her twinkling stage presence, as a piano player she would be worth a lot of gold dust at the Calico Palace.

  Hortensia sang.

  “If I’m out some rainy evening when the rats run helter-skelter,

  And the streets are waterfally and cascady,

  If some stranger from the placers wants to carry me to shelter,

  I don’t think I’ll even try to be a lady!”

  To great applause, she slipped down from the ladder. Dwight spoke to Marny.

  “She’s good, isn’t she?”

  Marny nodded with enthusiasm, and turned her eyes back to the stage. Hortensia was still bowing her thanks, laughing and enjoying it all. They wanted more, and she was glad to give it to them. Dwight added,

  “And not bad looking, either. We must come here again to hear—Ah, Marny!”

  Before his words were out Marny herself had given a cry of dismay. The firebells were ringing.

  The whole audience had started from their seats. All through the theater there were shouts of fright. Every man there feared the fire might be burning something that belonged to him. Or that looters, in the general alarm, were starting to work. They wanted to get out and see to their property. Where were the doors? Nobody seemed to remember. They were pushing, elbowing, everybody demanding that everybody else make room. In another second there might have been panic.

  But there was not. Dropping her guitar, Hortensia had almost leaped to the piano. She began to play.

  She was playing a march. She was pounding it out with all her strength, thump, thump, thump, and loud, loud, loud. It was so loud that they heard it above their own frightened voices. The Dramatic Museum was not a large theater, and Hortensia’s thumps resounded like sounds of command.

  Her hearers began to move in more regular fashion, following the rhythm without realizing that they were doing so. Their exit was not orderly, but at least nobody was being knocked down and trampled upon.

  In their box above the main floor Marny and Dwight saw it all with astonished admiration. Dwight’s hand gripped Marny’s elbow. He had turned toward the door that led out of the box, but had paused at the imperious sound of Hortensia’s music. Now he spoke, in a voice of respect.

  “I said she was good!”

  “She’s better than good,” said Marny. “She can think.”

  Now Marny was certain. She wanted Hortensia to take Rosabel’s place at the Calico Palace. If, she recalled with a start of terror, if the Calico Palace was still there tomorrow.

  On herself and Dwight, as on the rest of them, Hortensia’s playing had had just the effect Hortensia had wanted it to have. It had slowed them down for half a minute. Now Dwight was urging her out of the box and the exit beyond it. He was no longer interested in Hortensia. As the cold outside air struck their faces he was saying,

  “Hurry, Marny! Yonder it is—see the smoke? Over toward the waterfront. Looks like Sacramento Street. I’ve got some buildings in that area—come on, Marny!”

  He was almost making her run. She did not care. A weight had been lifted off her mind. The fire was not on the plaza. At the joy of this knowledge she was light-hearted enough to feel a twinge of amusement as she thought Dwight seemed less concerned about her safety, or even his own, than about the test now being given his buildings. As he rushed her on toward the fire she heard him exclaim,

  “It’s nowhere near the Calico Palace!”

  Almost out of breath, Marny managed to ask, “Should we flood the roof just to be sure?”

  “We don’t need to. The wind’s blowing the wrong way.”

  His voice had a sound of disappointment. Dwight had so much wanted to prove that the largest and most challenging of his buildings could withstand a fire. And now the wind was blowing the wrong way. Marny wanted to laugh, and at the same time she felt almost sorry for him.

  57

  TO THE JOY OF Marny and the secret disappointment of Dwight, the Calico Palace was not endangered that night. The firemen held the flames in two blocks near the waterfront.

  But when the fire was out Dwight was a happy man. For though the burnt area was small, in that area were two buildings that had been put up under his own direction. These were still standing. On both sides of each one, other buildings had gone down. But not Dwight’s. The outer walls had been blackened, and stained by the floods of water the firemen had pumped from the sea, but there had been no real harm. The fire had taken place on a Saturday night; on Monday morning both Dwight’s buildings were open for business.

  Several days after the fire one of the newspapers published an article about Dwight’s buildings. The writer urged other builders to study Dwight’s methods and profit by them. He praised the roof tanks, and even more he praised Dwight’s refusal to hurry.

  “Mr. Carson knows,” said the writer, “that a house is not meant to spring up overnight like a toadstool. Too many men in San Francisco seem not to know it.”

  Dwight bought fifty copies of the paper. Half of these he sent to his father and brothers and friends in New York. The rest he kept to gloat over.

  His office was besieged by men who wanted him to put up banks and stores and hotels. Dwight declined. He was at work on two buildings now, he said, buildings he had begun before the fire. He could not undertake anything more until these were finished. But Marny told Kendra she thought Dwight was refusing new contracts because he was planning to go back to New York.

  “He hasn’t said so,” Marny added, “but he spreads out the paper and taps his finger on the column about him. He says, ‘This will show them I can do it. I’ve done it.’”

  They were in the kitchen drinking chocolate. Marny stroked Geraldine, who lay curled up in her lap. She went on.

  “I think he’s not content to have somebody tell them he can do it. He wants to go home and do it.”

  “I can’t blame him,” said Kendra.

  “Neither can I,” said Marny. “What’s the fun of having scalps at your belt unless you can go back to the wigwam and show them?” She set her empty cup in the saucer. “Time I went down and took over from the Harvard man.”

  The Harvard man had a name, but in the Calico Palace few people ever used it. Marny now had three dealers who had come from the famous universities of New England. They all three were members of churc
hly families, and all three had been named for New England’s most famous clergyman. With three men named respectively Jonathan Edwards Bradford, Jonathan Edwards Braxton, and Jonathan Edwards Brand, nobody could keep them straight. So in Marny’s parlor the three dealers were called by the names of their universities, Harvard, Yale, and Brown.

  Marny and her learned assistants were good friends. They had a great deal in common.

  Marny went down to take over from the Harvard man. Left alone, Kendra wondered if Marny would be lonesome when Dwight left her. Probably she would miss him for a while, as she had missed Archwood, then she would take another swain, as she had taken Dwight. Marny seemed determined to stay on the surface of life. She was not going to let anything, and certainly not anybody, affect her deeply. She did not want any soul-shaking experience. So far she had managed very well.

  As only two city blocks had been wrecked, this fire had been far less costly than the earlier ones. At Marny’s bar men said the total loss had been only about a hundred thousand ounces. They said “only” with ironic laughter. Only a hundred thousand ounces. Elsewhere, people might call this a big fire. But not people in San Francisco.

  They laughed, but their laughter was harsh. This fire had been set on purpose. The men who started it had chosen a store that stood next to a warehouse, both filled with fine goods. They had been on the spot, waiting for plunder. As soon as they saw their fire successfully burning they had crept from dark corners, ready to carry off all they could steal. Some of these vultures had been caught and their loot recovered. But the men at the bar knew there were more of them, gathered in the saloons and flophouses around Clark’s Point, eager to try again.

  Marny’s patrons struck the bar with angry fists. Again and again she heard them voicing the old refrain. “Those firebugs have got to be stopped. I don’t believe in lynching, but…”

  They talked loud and long, but they did not lynch anybody. The fire had hurt the fortunes of only a few men, and the talkers at the bar found that other people’s troubles were not too hard to bear.