The Immigrants Page 7

  “What on earth is a lateen sail. You see, I know nothing, absolutely nothing.”

  “It’s a triangular sail. It hangs forward on a low mast and a rake angle. You know that artist who paints those purple and blue pictures of ladies on swings with a lot of old Greek columns around them–”

  “You mean Maxfield Parrish. What a wonderful description.”

  “That’s right. Well, he has that kind of boat in his pictures.”

  “Of course. I remember. They’re wonderful.”

  “They’re gone now, all of them. Nothing but stinkpots–I’m sorry–oil burners. All right–the wharf.”

  He drove the little gig onto the wharf amidst the confusion of the boats unloading their catch, the filly prancing and nervous at the crowds and the smell of the fish. Pete Lomas, his chief mate, caught sight of him and stalked over, so preoccupied with his own anger that he apparently never noticed the girl alongside of Dan, and burst out, “Danny, that mother-fucking sonofabitch Trankas robbed our traps again, and so help me God I’m going to kill that whore’s pup next time I see him!”

  “Pete!”

  He saw Jean and began to apologize, this big bearded man in a wet jersey and rubber boots. She burst out laughing. Dan tried to apologize. Lomas stood there woefully. When they drove off, Dan tried to explain. He stopped the gig in front of his shack and told her, “He didn’t see you. I don’t know what to say.”

  “Dan, he was marvelous. Do you talk the same way when you’re with them?”

  “Sometimes–I guess.”

  “And this is your place,” she said, looking at the shanty.

  “It’s just a shack.” He was suddenly ashamed, cowed by her. Why had he been stupid enough, senseless enough, to bring her down here? He drew a contrast between the leaning, off-center shanty and the magnificent house on Nob Hill, and he felt a sickening emptiness in his stomach.

  “You live here too?”

  He nodded.

  “Show it to me. Please, Dan.”

  “It’s nothing. It’s just an old shack I use for an office. I got a sort of bedroom upstairs where I sleep.”

  “Please show it to me.”

  He sighed, put the iron hitch down for the horse, and helped her out of the gig. They went into the shanty. Feng Wo stood up, smiling as they entered, and Dan said, “This is my bookkeeper, Feng Wo. Feng Wo, this is Miss Jean Seldon.”

  She stiffened. The smile disappeared and the beautiful face became a mask. Outside, she was silent, and as they drove off, he tried to understand what he had done wrong. “I told you it was just a rotten little place,” he said.

  She was still silent, her face set.

  “All right. Everything went wrong today, everything. I’m sorry. You have a right to be angry.”

  “You don’t know why I’m angry?”

  “Yes–no, I don’t.”

  “How could you introduce me to a Chink?” she burst out.

  “What?”

  “You have no sense of what is right or wrong or fitting or unfitting.”

  “I haven’t?”

  “No, you haven’t.”

  He stared at her, and suddenly her anger left her and she smiled. At that moment, he would have laid down his life for her smile.

  “You’re like a little boy who has been scolded and spanked,” she said, and then she leaned over and kissed his cheek, lightly and gently.

  Eight years before, in 1902, Jack Harvey, a young captain, twenty-nine years old, with his wife and his daughter, Clair, sharing his cabin, had sailed the clipper ship Ocean Breeze around the Horn and up the coasts of two continents to San Francisco Bay, where the owners pulled her out of service, berthed her, and let her rot, finally breaking her up for scrap wood. Her day and the day of all the other magnificent Yankee Clippers was over forever. Harvey got drunk and stayed drunk for nine months. His wife, who had been a dance-hall girl before she married him, working in a sailors’ joint in Norfolk, Virginia, and who hated him, the ship, and the sea through every day of the journey to San Francisco, walked out on him and disappeared, leaving her two-year-old daughter in his sodden custody. After that, he stopped drinking, except for an occasional bender, and found a living on the lumber ships that plied the Redwood Coast between the bay and Mendocino City. He kept his daughter with him, because he could find no other solution to the problem of raising her; and since this was not a situation the shipowners found to their liking, he would have periodic layoffs, which he filled with whatever odd jobs he could find. Clair’s schooling was spotty, but she learned to read, and since her father had a passion for novels and since she adored him, she had at the age of ten read everything available to her, from Ned Buntline to Dostoevski.

  When Lars Swenson laid up the Oregon Queen–his “stinking iron scow” as he called it–he offered Harvey the job of caretaker, with the cabin of the ship as his living quarters and a wage of thirty dollars a month. Since Harvey had no berth at the time, and saw this as an opportunity to put Clair into school and keep her there for a while, he accepted the offer.

  When Dan first chanced upon the Oregon Queen, regarding her more as a curiosity than anything else, it was Harvey who enticed him onto the ship, invited him for a drink in the cabin and expanded upon the possibilities of an iron ship. Harvey took a fancy to the tall, good-looking young man, and Clair, a skinny, long-legged, freckled, redheaded girl of ten, was immediately enchanted. She had spent the best part of her young life at sea, and she could scramble up the masts and the rigging like a monkey. Dan became her beau ideal, the personification of a medley of fictional heroes who peopled her world, and he in turn would bring some special gift for her, a model dipper, a dress, a jar of jam, each time he visited the ship. In due time, Harvey told Dan about Swenson’s desperation to be rid of the ship, and it was Harvey’s guess that Swenson would accept an offer of a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Clair, meanwhile, counted the days and the hours between Dan’s departure and his promise of another visit.

  She was thus devastated to see him pull up to the dockside one day and help a beautiful young woman out of a fancy gig. Clair Harvey had neither the anticipation nor the comprehension of the possibility that skinny, long-legged, redheaded kids may evolve into very lovely women. For the first time in her life she engaged in a sexual comparison, herself against this tall, perfect creature whose hand Dan Lavette held; and having made the comparison, she fled into hiding and did not emerge again while Dan and Jean remained on the ship.

  Harvey, a week’s red beard on his face, barefoot in dirty duck trousers, mumbled his apologies and his pleasure and excused himself to look for his daughter, whom Dan had spoken of and whom Jean expected to see. Like his daughter, he disappeared. Jean walked gingerly around the deck, seeing only rust, peeling paint, grease, oil, and varieties of filth that included two foul-smelling cans of garbage–but listening meanwhile to Dan’s dream of a fleet of iron ships and fighting an inner impulse to flee from this strange, crazy boy-man-adolescent who was like no other boy who had ever come into her life. On the other hand, there were compulsions that overran her fears. Since the day she had first seen Dan Lavette, she had been unable to get him out of her mind. She made him the center of her fantasies; she visualized him touching her, making love to her, his sunburned two hundred and ten pounds of bone and muscle pressed down on her white nakedness; and to this fantasy she would respond with a mixture of terror and desire.

  Now he was a king in his own castle. “What do you think of my ship?” he demanded exuberantly.

  “It’s not yours yet–Dan.”

  “If you’re thinking about your father,” he said, misinterpreting her expression of distaste, “don’t worry. I know he won’t give me the loan.”

  “Then how can you buy the ship?”

  “I don’t know. But I will.”

  “But why?” she wondered. “There are people who live without ships and boats–you see, I remembered the difference.”

  “Without ships–” He shook his h
ead. “No. No. I know what my life is. I always knew.”

  In Mark Levy’s store, while Mark waited on another customer, Dan assembled a pile of supplies, boat hooks, lanterns, traps, cordage. When the other customer left, Mark turned to Dan and regarded the growing pile of supplies. “I need everything,” Dan said. “God damn it, Mark, I haven’t got the cash for this. You’ll have to give me credit–at least until the end of the month.”

  “Your credit’s good here. But why? You never wanted credit before.”

  “I’m spending money like a drunken sailor. I guess I can afford it, but I’m running low.”

  Mark studied him thoughtfully, then went to the door, hung up a “closed” sign, and turned the lock. “We’ll have a beer and talk.” Dan followed him into the kitchen. Sarah was peeling potatoes. Martha sat on the floor, happily smearing crayon on a coloring book.

  “Where’s Jake?” Dan asked.

  “At school. That’s a pretty girl, Danny,” Sarah said, watching him.

  “You saw her?”

  “Everyone on the wharf saw her. Who is she?”

  “Her name’s Jean Seldon.”

  “Seldon?” Mark said.

  “That’s right.”

  “Wait a minute.”

  “She’s his daughter.”

  “That’s a lot of class, Danny. Where’d you meet her?”

  “At her house.”

  “And you took her slumming?” Mark grinned.

  “Mark–Sarah–look. Don’t laugh at me. I’m in love. I don’t know what hit me, but ever since I’ve seen that girl, there’s nothing else in the world. I want her like I never wanted anything in my life.”

  “Danny, she’s a nabob.”

  “Leave him alone,” Sarah said to her husband. And then to Dan, “Look, kid, how serious are you?”

  “Serious. I’m going to marry her.”

  “You’re crazy,” Mark said.

  “Maybe he’s not so crazy. But what’s she like, Danny? The top of that hill’s a thousand miles away.”

  “I don’t know what she’s like. I don’t care. I just know that this is it.”

  “How does she feel about you?”

  “God knows. I think she likes me. We’ve been driving twice. I been to her house. I dry up there–the place gives me the chills. But when we’re out in the gig, I can talk to her. All right, just give it time.”

  “O.K.–put your love life aside for a moment,” Mark said. “Sarah and I have a proposition for you.”

  “What kind of a proposition?”

  “Just sit back and listen. The other day, I went out to the Oregon Queen–”

  “I know. Harvey told me. You won’t sell Swenson anything. He’s fed up with the ship, and all he wants is to dump it.”

  “I didn’t go there to sell Swenson anything. I went there to look at the ship.”

  “What do you know about ships?” Dan demanded.

  “Not much, but maybe as much as you do, Danny. I’m a chandler–I been in this all my life. All right, just listen. I agree with you. It’s a damn good ship. Harvey told me about your idea of puffing two boilers on the main deck, and I think that will do it. She has to be scraped and painted and overhauled. Her winches are O.K. She needs new rope, but the engine is good and her generators are good. She’s built to be fired by coal, but we can change that and convert her to automatic oil firing–”

  “What do you mean, we?”

  “Will you just listen. If she’s converted to oil, there’s a fortune in that ship.”

  “How do you know she can be converted?”

  “I don’t know. I think so. Anyway, that’s the future–oil burners. Now Sarah and me, we been talking about this; I guess we talked ourselves dry. Here’s the proposition. The store and the building here are worth maybe sixty, seventy thousand dollars. It’s unmortgaged. You and me become partners. We go to Tony Cassala and get a line of credit against my store and stock and building–up to fifty thousand dollars. Maybe we won’t need that much, but we’ll feel safer with something to fall back on, so we ask for a line up to fifty thousand. Then we buy the Queen, fix her up, and we’re in the shipping business. We draw on the store for supplies, and that’ll cover another two, three thousand dollars. What do you say?” He leaned back and looked at Dan, who was staring, first at Mark and then at his wife.

  “You’d do that for me?” Dan asked softly.

  “For us,” Sarah said.

  “No. It’s a gift. You’re out of your mind. This store is your life.”

  “I hate this store,” Sarah said.

  “You put up your store and building–what do I put up?”

  “You.”

  “What do you mean, me?”

  “I can’t do it,” Mark said. “It scares the hell out of me, the thought of running a ship. I can sell the cargo space, I think, but I can’t operate a ship. I’m not built that way.”

  “What makes you think I can?”

  “I know you can. I watched you operate your fishing boats.”

  “That’s different.”

  “Not so different. And Danny, there’s a fortune in it. You know that, and I know it.”

  “No. No, I can’t take it from you. I never took gifts from anyone in my life. I can’t.”

  “All right,” Mark said, after a long moment. “Throw your boats into the deal. We’ll become partners right down the line.”

  “The boats are mortgaged. You know that.”

  “There’s still an equity. Just think about it, Danny. You got something, we got something. We put it together.”

  Minutes passed. Dan sat in silence, staring at the table. Sarah finished peeling the potatoes and put them on the stove to boil. “You want a beer, Danny, or coffee?”

  “Just coffee.”

  “Black?”

  He nodded, and, almost woefully, he asked, “Why are you doing this for me? I don’t understand.”

  “Maybe we love you,” Sarah said, smiling and putting down the coffee in front of him. “You want a piece of cake, Danny?”

  He shook his head.

  “Well?” Mark asked him.

  “I don’t know. There’s maybe ten thousand dollars of equity in the fishing boats. That gives you eighty percent of the deal.”

  “Fifty, fifty or nothing.”

  “I don’t know how to work out something like this. We’d need lawyers.”

  “Tony knows how, and he’s got lawyers.”

  “My shack’s worth five thousand. That has to be thrown into the pot.”

  “Then it’s a deal?” Mark asked.

  “It’s a deal,” Dan said. They shook hands. “Get a bottle of wine,” Mark cried. “We got to drink to this.”

  Sarah opened a bottle of wine and filled three glasses. Raising his glass, Mark said, “My dear wife, my dear friend, Danny, this is a historic occasion. I offer this toast to Lavette and Levy, shipowners!”

  “No,” Dan said. “Levy and Lavette. That sounds better. Jesus God, Mark, I’m twenty-one years old, and I’m scared.”

  “So am I. Levy and Lavette if you want it that way. Bottoms up!”

  At the age of thirty-six, Anthony Cassala had shed his youth. He would still awaken at night, covered with sweat, caught in the nightmare of being a penniless, hungry, ragged urchin in the slums of Naples. The fact that he had lived through the transition that had turned him into a banker did little to dispel the unreality of the situation. He had experienced not a single day of schooling; he had taught himself to read and write, first in Italian and then in English. He had learned arithmetic under the tutelage of his son, Stephan, who was now fifteen, and still he pored avidly over Stephan’s books to comprehend the mysteries of percentages and fractions. He arose each morning at six o’clock, and before breakfast he read the Chronicle from cover to cover, as well as the Wall Street Journal, four days late, but still to be studied and treasured, and all of this before he touched food. He would then shave, shine his own black shoes, put on his carefully pressed
striped pants and a black frock coat, and then on foot and by cable car go to his office at the Bank of Sonoma on Montgomery Street.

  He always paused outside of the bank to read the gold-leaf letters on the plate-glass window, just as he paused at the door to his office, where small black letters, outlined in gold, bore the legend: ANTHONY CASALLA, PRESIDENT. For all of his wit and intelligence, he was essentially a simple man. When someone flattered him for hard work and its rewards, he shook his head uneasily. He knew what hard work was, recalling all the years he had worked as a laborer and a mason; this was luck and the grace of God. He was a deeply religious man, and at confession he always dwelt on his guilt. Who was he to deserve this? What had he done to make him any different from any other Italian laborer?

  Now, for a whole hour, he had been sitting behind his desk questioning Dan Lavette and Mark Levy. “It is not the money,” he said again and again. “The money is nothing. If I had to empty my pockets, I would find the money for Danny, and such a loan you ask, it’s well secured. But you are boys.”

  “I’m thirty,” Mark said. “That’s not a boy, no, sir.”

  “Danny’s a boy.”

  “To you, maybe,” Dan said. “Tony, we know what we’re doing.”

  “You need organization, office, books, insurance. This Chinese you hire, Danny, he got a head on his shoulders?”

  “Feng Wo’s smarter than I am. He can do anything.”

  “That’s good, fine. You come back tomorrow, ten o’clock, I have Sam Goldberg here. He’s my lawyer, from Goldberg and Benchly–honest man. He draws up the partnership, and you sign the papers.”

  They shook hands then with great formality. Cassala brought out a bottle of brandy and glasses, poured the brandy, and said, “Buona salute, buona vita, buona fortuna e compassione.”

  They drank, and then they shook hands again and left. Out on the street, Mark asked Dan what the toast meant. “Good health, good life, good fortune–and I think he said we should have compassion for each other. Compassione,” Dan said.

  “That’s peculiar.”