Vera Carol Edgarian (great novels of all time txt) 📖

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.

Around the corner in the gold house, I gave Tan first pick of the bedrooms. He chose a small bedroom on the third floor, with a view of the fireplace in the garden. Cap and Valentine took over the two bigger bedrooms on that floor. We left Rose’s room and Pie’s empty, but I used Rose’s study as my office. When I married Hutch, he said he wasn’t going to make love to his wife in an attic, so we stripped everything in Rose’s suite, including the closets, the mirrors, the pink marble bathroom. We made it ours, but I kept the attic for when I needed to be alone. I sat in the rocker and studied the sky out the round window and remembered myself. In time, Tan moved into his own place; Valentine decided to live above the Rogue. I asked Capability if she’d stay with me. She did, till the day she died. When Hutch and I had our babies, Cap and Alma became their godmothers.

So, Bobby made his life with Pie. And I should be glad that they delighted each other—a happiness anybody but a blind ass could see.

Bobby would only accept a loan, which I gladly gave without interest so that they could build a house, a modest place, with a stable in back for Monster. Bobby started a repair shop, for cars and bikes and wagons, and eventually he sold cars.

That first year, we had Sunday dinner when I was in town. At my house, or theirs. Bobby stood at the head of the table and carved the meat—thin, the way I like it. He arranged it on the plate just so, to suit Pie. And for a long string of those Sundays, I would look at him and think, I am the meat.

And maybe we’d exchange a glance, to say: We know what we know.

One afternoon, we took a drive. It was a fair day, dry, and we rode with Rose’s Model F’s canvas top down. Pie and Bobby were in the back seat. Pie was pregnant by then, and the open air put some color in her cheeks. I sat up front, next to Tan.

It was late afternoon, with San Francisco’s tawny sun stretched like a long, lazy tongue down Market Street. The Slot, the steel track that the cable cars ran on, was newly forged in the ground. The sun was so bright you had to squint. Ah, that sun: one of the good, great things.

Now, on both sides of Market the buildings were going up fast, the iron and steel ribs of the new skyscrapers lining the street. The new Call Building, the Emporium with its tall arched windows eye level to the street, and a hundred other structures told the story of a city rising for the sixth time.

I suppose I was rising too. The sun felt glorious on my back. You’d have to be dead not to feel a lift of the heart with that golden light warming your shoulders and kissing the top of your hat.

The road was a hive of motorcars and drays and pedestrians all a jumble, with no one having a bit of sense to look left or right. They never did. And Tan? He drove the car the way he’d commanded the buggy, hissing and scowling, and lurching hell-bent.

In the back seat, Pie was telling us the latest gossip: Eugenie Schmitz had decided to take the veil. She had only to deliver the news to her parents.

I was absorbing that bit, picturing Eugenie Schmitz in a nun’s wimple, when a Packard approached, going the opposite way. I could see at a distance that it was ferrying a grande dame. I