The Immigrants (9 page)

“If you will excuse us for a moment, Mr. Lavette,” her mother said, taking her into the living room while Dan waited in the foyer.

“Jean,” she said, “I simply do not understand you.”

“What is there to understand, Mother?”

“To go unchaperoned with a person like that in an open gig for anyone and everyone to see—I don’t un derstand it. I simply do not.”

“What do you mean by a person like that?”

“He has no background, no family, a crude, pushy—”

“Stop that, Mother.”

“You know exactly what I mean.”

“Are you forbidding me to go?”

“No, I won’t have a scene. You’d go anyway.”

“Yes, I would.” She flung open the door, strode into the foyer, took Dan’s arm, and steered him out of the door.

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They drove for a few minutes before she said, “I had a scene with my mother. I’m not cross with you. I’m upset. You might as well know. I have a beastly temper.”

“About me?” he asked.

“Yes, about you.”

“That’s all right,” he said placidly. “I’m not your kind. If I was in her place, I’d probably feel the same.”

“You are the most astonishing young man. Doesn’t anything bother you?”

“Sometimes. But right now, the way I feel, nothing could bother me. Where should I take you?”

“First to see your boats. I am absolutely intrigued with them.”

“They’re just dirty, smelly old fishing boats. Now if this was twenty years ago, it would be different.”

“Why?”

“Because that was the time my father began to fish here. All the Italian fishermen rigged their boats with the same lateen sails they had used in the Bay of Naples and off the coast of Sicily, and they were something to see all right.”

“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 de scription.”

“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 stink pots—I’m sorry—oil burners. All right—the wharf.”

He drove the little gig onto the wharf amidst the con fusion 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

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sight of him and stalked over, so preoccupied with his own anger that he apparently never noticed the girl alongside Dan and burst out. “Danny, that motherfucking 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 be tween the leaning, off-center shanty and the magnificent house on Nob Hill, and he felt a sicken-ing 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

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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 coast 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 Fran cisco, walked out on him and disappeared, leaving

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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 peo pled her world, and he in turn would bring some special gift for her, a model clipper, 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, mean while,

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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 antici pation 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 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 fanta sies; 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, mis interpreting her expression of distaste, “don’t worry. I know he won’t give me the loan.”

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“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 head. “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.”

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“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 driv ing twice.

I’ve 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.

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“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 putting 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 fu ture—oil burners.

Now Sarah and me, we’ve 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.