The Gilded Age, a Time Travel (7 page)

“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.