See, they were rich, Jams and Flo, richer than she had thought possible, and the money kept flowing into their lives like the ocean beating upon the shore. When the fifth baby came in ’61, the Worths bought a bigger home on a hilltop overlooking the Golden Gate, stealing the design of the octagon house down on Gough. They dined at Delmonico’s or at the Sutter House when the mood struck and paid no heed to the prices, though would ye believe, near $15 a dinner at the peak. She would regularly take all of the children on an August day to the Fountain Head or the Branch for a cooling glass of ice cream, devil-a-care the expense in dragging out a man and coach just to get them there. On Steamer Days, the thirteenth and twenty-eighth of each month, the ships would come in from the East and bring them treats from New York and Philadelphia. Buttons and bows. Whirligigs and thingamajigs and Dresden dolls and hobby horses. Them babies wanted for nothing, she saw to it, and were it not for the War of Northern Aggression, she would have taken them all to Kentucky for a visit, arrive in style to show her kin and all the girls she’d a-grown up with how fine life had become for those that worked hard. She tried in her daily doings to show the Worth boys the simple truth of this lesson, but Jams and Eben preferred to let the money work for them ’stead of the right way round.
When every last dot of gold had been dug off their lands, they sold off what was played out and let their workers go, with a $20 bonus to the Chinee who so long and honestly served the Worth operations. Piece by piece, the land vanished, and their assets converted to a number in a bank account. She would have preferred to hold on to what was real, stomp on their soil, finger their cold cash, but Jams insisted the figures scratched upon the ledgers was as good as gold. “There’s more to be made in making deals and trading paper,” he told her, “than the capital and labor of the man of trades.” In a single week in ’62, Jamie made a small fortune by buying and then quickly selling the stocks of a company that provided blankets to the Union army when the weather back east suddenly took a chill. His brother, too, became a rich man and lavished upon himself the accoutrements of wealth. Ebenezer wore bespoke suits and studded shirts, shoes imported from far-off Italy and Spain. A suite of rooms at the Parker House and three meals a day at the best restaurants in the city. Nights at the opera and days at the races. A dollar bet on everything from whether the Rebs would hold Shiloh to whether he could teach the yellaman shining his boots to speak a sentence of passable American before he finished both feet. He smoked cigars two bits apiece and had the finest liquor and whores of every color and nationality. It’s a wonder that he could not figure out how to evaporate his fortune despite his best efforts.
With no more gold mines but an excess of enthusiasms, the Worth brothers began to cast about for some other scheme to make money without dampening their brows. They searched no further than over the Sierras, crossed so long ago, and there found the next wave of speculators in the silver mines of Nevada. Giddy as two schoolgirls, they read the papers and heard the rumors in the streets, and the next year set off on expedition to Virginia City to see right close the famous Comstock lode and what prospects Nevada held for men so bold as they. The silver fever was upon them, and no remedy can be had but silver itself.
Upon that aphorism, she paused. With the tweezers of her right thumb and index fingers she dug into the bustline of her blue dress and produced a lit cigarillo, took a deep drag, and blew a jet of smoke in the general direction of the open window. Beckett frowned at her and gestured with his chin to the babe asleep in his arms. “Tut, tut, tut,” he said. Flo grabbed one last puff before extinguishing the cigarillo underneath a stream of water gushing from the sink’s faucet. The room suddenly smelled like a boxing gym or the men’s room at a horseracing track. Had I not been somehow constrained to remain in the house, I would have left, robe and all, for a quick walk around the block and some fresh air. “I wasn’t always like this,” she said and nodded at Alice as apology for smoking in front of the child. “All nervous and all.” She clicked her nails on the edge of the sink in a rhythm reminiscent of a pianist’s flourish. My brother had a similar nervous habit. After ten years of clarinet lessons, he would absentmindedly finger a pencil, performing a melody heard only in his mind. Funny what you remember. I had not thought of the clarinet in ages, despite the fact that it had been the daily music of my youth. My brother struggling to learn and then his sudden mastery, and how he would change the time of almost any song to redefine it: a melancholy Christmas tune, a syncopated Irish reel. Amidst this early morning’s chaos, I can almost hear him again.