Vera, p.28
Vera, page 28
I walked from the gold house down the steep hill to the mayor’s, careful not to trip. Ruef’s Packard was parked at the curb, a chock block wedged under its rear wheel to keep it from rolling down the hill. There were only a few thousand automobiles in the whole of the country then. Rose and the mayor each owned two, and if you added the cars that Abe Ruef possessed—the Rolls, the Packard, and a couple of runabout Fords used to collect the payola—between the three of them, they owned nearly a dozen. Such was the cash that flowed through their respective operations, above and below the sheets, a car then never being just a car: no, a car was cash on wheels.
Two cops sat inside a Ford, also parked at the curb, and another pair guarded the front door. One of San Francisco’s finest lounged in a chair in the foyer. The officer in the hallway stood as I came in.
“Abe,” he shouted, “there’s a young lady here.”
Ruef had been having a late lunch in the kitchen. He hurried to see who it was, his napkin still tucked into his collar, his eyes showing a range of emotions, all fleeting, from contempt to surprise.
“What’s this,” he said.
“Sorry to bother you.” I spoke quickly, so I wouldn’t lose my nerve.
Ruef wiped his chops on Julia Schmitz’s linen napkin and, adjusting his bow tie, this small man in a three-piece brown suit and shined boots tossed the napkin to his guard. “Yes,” he said. “Bother me how?”
“Eugenie Schmitz asked me to come. She left behind some things in her room. She asked if I would fetch them for her. She can’t, well, you understand, she can’t come herself.”
He took notice of Lars Johnson’s valise, the one I’d carried from Francisco Street on the day of the quake.
“Of course,” Ruef said, “have at.” And he waved me on with all the impatience of a man who still had a city to run.
My foot was on the top stair when Ruef called to me.
“I remember you,” he said.
I turned back. “Yes, Mr. Ruef. I remember you too.”
“Beer and ham sandwiches,” he answered, the gears of his massive brain grinding.
“That’s right. And you, you wanted to relocate the Chinese.”
“Ah, lost that one, didn’t I?” He grimaced. “But it was the right idea.”
“Not to the Chinese.”
“Ah, true. True enough,” he agreed. “I wasn’t supposed to be here that day,” he mused, his voice soft, almost nostalgic. “They decided they didn’t want me. Even Gene. Maybe especially Gene. But I came anyway. You bet I did.” He shrugged. “And look at me now, I can’t leave.”
“I suppose, as prisons go, it’s not the worst?” I put it as a question.
He misheard me. “Prison?” he said. “Ha, don’t you worry. I’m not going to prison.”
* * *
Eugenie’s room was as she’d left it: a world of lace—canopies and antimacassars and bows. The wooden cross, the one that always gave me the creeps, with its sad Jesus, still guarded the bed.
First off, I made a loud business of opening and shutting the drawers of Eugenie’s wardrobe. They creaked and thudded. When I felt I’d established sufficient racket, I hurried to the foot of the bed. The carpet was as it had been, covering the spot where the floor had been cut. I rolled it aside and found the hidden metal pull, and lifted the boards. I was so nervous, my hands were clumsy and I kept looking over my shoulder at the door.
I knew enough about Schmitz to understand that he was both reckless and lazy. I guessed that he would have decided against last-ditch measures, and even decided there would be no safer place to store the cash than in a house with half a dozen guards. Besides, if found, couldn’t it be Ruef who stashed it there?
The metal box was unlocked. I lifted the lid to find the red plush lining, and… nothing. The boodle box, as it was later called in the newspaper—a compartment that was never the right shape for storing violins—was empty. I stuck my nose inside the box to be sure.
In my desperation, I pushed on the velvet ends of the box and they gave way just a bit. I pushed harder—the ends had only been tacked in place. Beyond, in the crude space between the floor and ceiling, a second stash was hidden, on either side of the boodle box. I reached as far as my arm would go. The bills had been tied with the same sort of bands that I’d seen used at The Rose. I stuffed the valise till it couldn’t hold any more. Finally, I covered the stash with a dozen of Eugenie Schmitz’s hand-embroidered handkerchiefs and did up the leather straps.
The cop was waiting for me at the top of the stairs. “You need help, there, miss? Come, let me.” Before I could stop him, he took my heavy bag. “Let’s get you down the road, eh,” he said.
All I could think was: I just needed to get past the cops at the curb, then up two blocks to where Tan was waiting for me.
“What’d you find?” Ruef called, hurrying once more from the kitchen. He went as far as the front door and paused, there, at the rim of his cage.
“What’d you get?” He gestured at the valise.
Damn, I thought, the jig is up.
“Keepsakes,” I said. “This and that.”
“Ah, you ladies with your treasures.” Ruef squinted, accustoming his eyes to the bright sun. With his middle finger, he pushed back the bridge of his wire-rimmed glasses. They were always slipping down his nose.
“That’s right,” I agreed.
The cop holding the valise glanced at its worn brass clasps and I feared he had an inkling to cast his eye on what was inside. He set the heavy bag on the walk.
“Vera Johnson!” Ruef exclaimed, laughing.
“What’s this,” the cop said. “Who?”
“Vera goddamn Johnson, Rose’s kid,” he bellowed, and he knocked his fist on the mayor’s door.
“Right,” I agreed. “You got me.”
How pleased Ruef was with himself! To have so cleverly knit the pieces, to have pulled from his capacious memory bank, where the city pols and hookers and saloonkeepers resided, among the upstanding Jews and goys, and those who owed the monthly or weekly or every-so-often payola, and the supervisors of easy virtue and the ones who balked, and his lawyers, his bankers, and Joey, the ruthless, who ran the cribs at the Standard, to Teddy Roosevelt himself, who, on the morning of their meeting, ordered his coffee sweet with seven spoons of sugar, and this was just a fraction of what Abe Ruef kept in that noggin of his, all this and my name.
“See that.” He wagged his finger at the cop, who was still eyeballing my bag, and the other cops in the Ford—reminding them, those sons of bitches, who would sooner see him in jail, that he was the smart guy, the one and only Abe Ruef.
I suppose I looked properly impressed and even embarrassed.
“Give Eugenie my regards,” Ruef said, waving me on. “Tell her I hope she’s praying for me.”
“I expect she’s praying for her father,” I said as I picked up the bag.
“Have you seen him?” Ruef asked. “Have you seen Gene?”
“Not recently,” I said, thinking, Sweet almighty, just ten more steps and I’m free.
But Ruef wasn’t done. The cops were eyeing him, and he wasn’t done. “I told you to go to college, didn’t I, Vera?”
“Yes. Yes, you did.”
“And I was right: you should. Don’t let them hold you back just ’cause you’re a girl.”
* * *
She was a girl too, my city. How perfect that her official seal is that of a phoenix rising. After she burned that sixth time, she was born again—headstrong and whimsical, careless as ever. Her trembling, her desire as elemental as her bedrock and curves.
Ruef’s trial was the sensation of the spring of ’07. The men behind the prosecution included Francis Heney, U.S. district attorney; Fremont Older, editor of the San Francisco Bulletin; and Claus Spreckels, father of Alma’s AB.
During the proceedings, Francis Heney discovered that one of the jurors, a Morris Haas, was a convicted felon. Heney accused Haas of being on Ruef’s payroll. Haas answered the accusation by shooting the district attorney in the face—right there in the courtroom. Incredibly, Heney survived.
The next morning, Morris Haas was found dead in his cell. Everyone suspected Ruef of being the mastermind of a perfectly, audaciously planned execution. The newspapers accused William Biggy, the city sheriff, of negligence. After all, Biggy had allowed a murder to take place in the city jail. Biggy was hounded in the press and on the streets. It was suggested that he too must be on Ruef’s payroll. The stench of corruption was everywhere, as was the outcry that the new San Francisco was proving to be just as dirty as the old.
When Sheriff Biggy’s body was found floating in the bay, it was yet one more seismic shock. It seemed Biggy had fallen off his boat late one night and drowned. An improbable death that had all the markings of Ruef, who was soon sentenced to fourteen years in San Quentin.
Mayor Schmitz’s trial was more straightforward.
On June 13, 1907, fourteen months after the quake, Eugene Schmitz was convicted for extorting twenty-seven hundred dollars from Tony Bloney, proprietor of the Poodle Dog. Schmitz was sentenced to the maximum of five years in San Quentin.
A thousand people gathered in the street to hear the verdict. As it was read, a roar went up. Schmitz turned to his lawyers and said, “What? What happened?”
The mayor’s lawyers appealed immediately, based on lack of evidence. Where was the twenty-seven hundred dollars? they demanded. When Schmitz’s bank accounts were shown to have negligible balances—when the prosecution discovered that the boodle box, hidden in the floor of a bedroom in the mayor’s former house, was empty—his conviction was overturned. The grand house up the hill, yes, the cars, the trips to Europe on a mayor’s modest salary all pointed to obvious corruption, but without a cash trail, there was no real proof.
I hoped I’d never run into Schmitz. But San Francisco has always been a small town. The folks you wish to avoid inevitably are the ones you see.
“Vera!” Schmitz called, laughing like a man who didn’t have the slightest dent in his conscience. “How well you look. Are you still a pagan?” Schmitz was on his way out of church, the granite steps just behind him; he kept glancing over his shoulder to see who was watching him. He had ash on his forehead. Of course, I realized, it was Ash Wednesday.
“It’s the music I love,” he said, as if I’d asked, Why church? He spoke as he always did with me, one step too familiar. I suppose that’s what I was to him, familiar. “Say, I’ll send you an invitation to our premiere. You must have heard from your sister: Eugenie and I have written an opera. Isn’t that something? It isn’t Carmen, of course, but it isn’t half bad.”
“What’s it about?” I asked.
“What’s that? The opera? Oh, I guess the usual fare: God, fate… love, of course.”
Thieves, I thought. Schmitz, you ought to write what you know: cathouses and con men and singers and thieves.
Voile
Here in the home, in what they call the common room, there are sheer voile curtains in the windows. I can’t see out, just the vague outline of green and cars. And no one can see in, but for a nurse’s passing shadow across the halo of the lamp. My memory is like that now. I can see my hand. I can see the sheers. They lead me to the sheers in the parlor windows of the gold house.
All day the nurses come and go. They speak of me, over me. They are kind and unkind, as humans always are, no two exactly alike.
I can’t recall the faces of my children, not as they are in recent years, but I can see them small. I can smell their sweetness as babies; each of the three had a unique, delicious scent. Then I was always in a hurry. Then they played Chopin, badly. In the parlor of that grand gold house, they ran up and down the staircases hollering.
Pie and Bobby made their new life, and so I made mine.
Years later, when I did marry Hutchinson, he would ask me some nights to wear a bit of silk. And I would. I’d put on a little flirty something so he could peel it off me. Ah, Hutch and I had some good, good times. He was bawdy, not tender like Bobby, and that’s exactly what I needed. To laugh ha-ha-ha. Hutch died too young. Leaving me with three kids under the age of seven. In that gold house.
My three husbands were all good men, though none I was so crazy in love with as Bobby. Hutch died in a car wreck. Walt had a heart attack. I divorced Joe. Each time, even when I was the one doing the leaving, the sorrow nearly broke me. Each time, my heart was a boodle box with a lock. But there is something in surviving, I can say that, and in knowing one can.
I’ve always found it to be a compelling mystery when two unlikely souls collide. What did Bobby Del Monte see in that wild-haired girl with the furious scowl? I do not wonder what he saw in Pie.
* * *
I never wished to be a squirrel with that money. Money from then on was just a tool—no more, no less. There was enough to share. That didn’t make the money clean, but it made what passed from me to mine something more.
I had to be very careful, should the police come calling. Tan was the only person I trusted—Tan, after all. The rest of them believed what they saw: I sold the three parcels of The Rose and bought two cheaper plots—one nearby and the other in Chinatown. Both bordered the trolleys.
I paid the taxes and the mortgage, and I took care of the Haj.
Then, at my urging, Tan approached Look Tin Eli, a Chinese banker who was much in the news those days. Tin Eli had a vision for a new Chinatown that would be a tourist destination. Tan asked him for a loan to build a restaurant on our parcel on Clay Street. Tan’s China Empress with its pagoda and a thirty-foot stone dragon guarding the entrance and a menu of spicy, deliciously prepared meats became an instant hit.
In the beginning, Tan and I shared the expenses and profits on the place in Chinatown, as was our custom, but over time, he took over the whole thing. He did more with it than anyone could have done. He stuck, ol’ Tan. He stuck with me, and I with him. The birth records in Chinatown burned in the fire, and no one could prove Tan wasn’t American-born; he could own property and no one could stop him. He became a very rich man. His one sorrow was Lifang. Like Rose, Lifang left and never looked back.
Cap and Valentine ran the jazz hall on what became known as Terrific Street. They were my partners, but didn’t turn tricks. That was my firm rule. No tricks. I’m not opposed to a woman doing what she will with her body, but until the world views men and women as true equals—something I won’t live to see—the money exchanged isn’t fine with me, not if I’m the second- or thirdhand party benefiting. It isn’t fine with me.
We called our new place the Rogue and we offered dancing—the Texas Tommy and the Turkey Trot were big hits—and jazz. Sophie Tucker and Jelly Roll Morton were regulars.
As for Bobby and Pie? Pie didn’t get a rich man, but she got Bobby, and a place where she mattered, at the Ladies’ Protection. She and Bobby had the grace to elope. Bobby took them south to Carmel, to the mission down there, where they said their vows. They stayed for two weeks and I had to hear them in my mind’s eye walking by the sea, laughing. I had to imagine what they were doing in bed at night. I had to feel them doing it. When they came back, I had it so bad I had to disappear. I walked downtown and looked over my dirt. I counted my money, took it in stacks to the office of an architect, and to the surveyor, and to the bank and the tax man. Every day I started work early and kept at it long after dark.
In bed I closed my eyes and imagined Bobby brushing Pie’s hair and I thought, Oh God, oh God, why?
But I’d missed my chance. When you’re young, you think time is like water—you can put your hand in at will and swirl it around. But time isn’t like water. Time is like a quake: irrevocable and crushing. At best you can hope to ride it till it stops.
At my lowest ebb, Alma asked AB to spring for an extra ticket to Paris. I went as her chaperone. We rode the train to New York, and from New York we sailed east on a ship, and I saw that the world was grand. I forgot myself. We were gone for three glorious months.
While we were in Paris, I got in touch with the duke. We had dinner. He was very glad to see me. He’d heard that Rose had died. I didn’t correct him—she was dead to me too.
We talked of San Francisco, and at one point, I showed him the book I’d brought: Khayyam. I think he was glad at the thought of another daughter, but, you know, the duke was broke.
“I don’t need money,” I told him. “It would just be nice to have you as—”
“Amis spéciaux,” he suggested, placing his hands on mine.
So the duke and I became special friends. We had some very fine times—you can imagine how much he loved Alma. He introduced her to all the impoverished artists in Paris. Cézanne had recently died poor, his work ridiculed. He’d been working in a field and caught pneumonia. Alma wired Spreckels asking for money and, as tribute, bought a few of Cézanne’s paintings that had been in his friend Émile Zola’s possession.
Oh, Alma was fierce when she loved someone; that made her a very good friend. She swore that when she got Spreckels to marry her, she’d find a way for us to be neighbors, just so we’d have the pleasure of running into each other on the street again.
She did just that. They bought three adjacent mansions around the corner from me on Washington Street and knocked them all down. She had Spreckels build her a mansion out of white stone that resembled a box of sugar—a palace for the sugar king and his new bride. The neighbors couldn’t stand Alma, no more than they could on Francisco Street. She didn’t care. On the weekends, she threw garage sales in her mansion to benefit poor widows and children. She got Spreckels to build her a museum at Lands End, and there she housed her Cézannes and Rodins. Yes, the Legion of Honor museum was built by a former nudie artists’ model. Until her last days, Alma swam naked every morning in her indoor pool.
