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The San Franciscan
by Niven Busch
Introduction
Because it seems the fashion nowadays to identify characters in fiction with real people, the author feels it appropriate to state that there are no real people in this volume.
All banks, law firms and other business organizations referred to — except for the few specifically designated by their true names — are fictitious. The city of San Francisco is a character in the story, and the city, of course, is real, and the names of its streets are real names, but the addresses of houses on those streets, lived in by the characters, are also fictitious, or are meant to be, since such characters, being substanceless, can have no proper abiding place except in the imagination of the writer or the reader.
"I was told," continued Egremont, "that an impassable gulf divided the Rich from the Poor; I was told that the Privileged and the People formed two nations, governed by different laws, influenced by different manners, and with no thoughts or sympathies in common."
— Benjamin Disraeli
Chapter One
Nobody would ever replace Charlie Yarnum. Nobody ever could. He had been like a great oak tree, with roots spreading in all directions. He had been a castle of refuge. He had been at once a gambler and a prophet, a defender and a comforter, and if some people held that he had also been a thief, that was a matter which had never been proved while he was living and was not likely to be now that he was dead.
Laura, his widow, knew what was being said. You didn't have to stand long in the market place to hear it. Not that she did stand there long or even go there oftener than was necessary to settle her own affairs — if by market place you meant, as most San Franciscans did, Montgomery Street (or for the Yarnum family that portion of it which was occupied by the family bank, the Railroad Bank of San Francisco). Gossip had wings, particularly if it related to business. There were always obliging friends or predatory relatives who would ring up under the guise of sympathy or indignation and chatter away merrily, sometimes for spite, sometimes for envy (for it was still not difficult to be jealous of Charlie or Charlie's widow) and sometimes out of fear. Well, she had thought, let them talk, if that amuses them. One thing they would never do — and even the least well-intentioned of them knew it — was to shake her loyalty to Charles himself or her admiration for what he had stood for.
There is gossip of one sort or another about all successful men. You couldn't succeed in the middle of the twentieth century without making enemies, particularly if people were beholden to you — and the most vengeful enemies of the successful were those who were most beholden, as Charlie himself had pointed out, and he'd been right; he had dropped many such remarks — good-humoredly, yet always with the purpose of teaching her, of fitting her for the job which, since she was so much younger, would someday fall to her: the job of getting along without him. He had never said, "You will inherit this, so you must do thus and so"; he had made her his heir but never nominated her as his successor — he had not been that sort of man. Not Charlie. He had left it up to her to choose what course to follow, and now, due to his training, she knew what must be done, and due to his love she had the strength to do it.
She had thought over the matter carefully before making her decision. Two courses were open to her. She could retire into the security which her estate provided — isolate herself from her relatives, the whole jamming, clamoring clan of them. She could cut herself off, if not on the social level at least to the extent of amputating her contact with their tangled personal rivalries and competing ambitions for power in the bank. She could live for herself. If that seemed luxurious, she had earned the luxury; if it suggested to some that she lacked a sense of responsibility, she could plead that she was not a Yarnum by birth but by marriage and that by nature she was, indeed, ill fitted to be one at all, and was perhaps well advised to get as far away from Yarnums as she could.
Such was course number one. It was not without honor, and it had great appeal.
Course number two was simpler; and like most simple things, it was also difficult. It consisted in remaining where she was now, in Charlie's large house in Pacific Heights, at the center, as it were, of the family's nervous system — of staying there and of doing whatever was required of her for the good of all, in the bank and in the city, in the present emergency. Laura had chosen course number two, and in order to indicate her choice to the Yarnums, she had decided to end her period of mourning by giving a party in her house. To this party on an afternoon in early December, 1949, she invited the entire family including even the sub-Yarnums — the dim Yarnum yeomanry of the suburbs, of Marin, of Burlingame, San Mateo and the Deep Peninsula: remote extensions of kinship which Charlie had called "The Yarnumry."
"Family and a few close friends" was the phrase which Lettie Meeker, society editor of the Day, later used to describe the gathering, and the phrase was accurate enough; what neither Lettie nor any other gazeteer went on to say (there seemed so little need of it) was that the "close friends" were mostly retainers of one kind or another: lawyers, doctors, priests, remaindermen, managers, estate administrators, investment brokers and so forth. Also, on a solider, more congenial plane, officials of the Railroad Bank. Many of these individuals had acquired The Look, or if not precisely that, at least some facet of resemblance to blood kin.
Such identity was not the result of conscious imitation. Its source lay rather in some obscure but well-established law. Just as husbands and wives gradually get to look like each other, though in the features there may be no similarity at all, and as servants of long service in one situation assume the mental attitudes of their employers, and hence in the course of time their faces as well, so these executive staffers, social, financial and spiritual, adopted the coloration which custom had approved for tribal use.
In all families, it goes without saying, there are certain general similarities of body as of face, more or less clearly defined: among the Yarnums the basic characteristics seemed to be an excess of bone, combined with, or perhaps causing, a hollowness of temple and a knobby look in the cheekbones. Eyebrows were apt to be tufty — black in some cases, gingery red in others; prevalent also was a bony, odds-on push of jaw, accentuating the shortness of the tucked-in or clamped-down upper lip found in many members of the clan. These details, however, were just features. They were not The Look. That . . . well, it was a slant: a slanty way of holding the head, as if one was about to duck, or of placing the feet as if to move for a quick escape; it was a way of staring once or twice, boldly and impatiently, into a speaker's eyes, while moving or slanting one's own toward his feet or over his shoulder, examining the immediate surroundings for some intangible threat.
Every Yarnum had it. And today they were all using it. It moved like a wind in a barley field or a reflection in a gallery of mirrors over the faces of the men and women, aunts and cousins, nephews and nieces, children and grandchildren and even great-grandchildren, the men and women talking around the great fireplace under the pictures collected by Charlie's father, Q. R., a railroad financier who had gone bankrupt in the nineties: grenadier charges by Meissonier and shimmering French story-landscapes made of tiny blobs of paint and dotted with picnicking burghers, apple blossoms, and sullen cattle; it flickered avidly across the faces of the elder statesmen and their wives as they rushed, with knives and slabs of bread in their hands, at the platter of turkey which Laura's cook, Chung Sai Wong, had just sent in. You saw it everywhere, its outlines thinned and veneered by current fashion but still authentic, perceptible even among the members of the younger set dancing their cantilever dances to the music of the combo in the hall.
The Look was always there, more in evidence this afternoon than at most times, on account of the special climate of the party with its reminders of the dead leader and the intimations of danger to the commonweal which had become apparent since his death, controllable but menacing, like the reconnaissance patrols sent out by an enemy force, and quickly taken prisoner, but whose presence indicates the imminence of a major engagement. Some families divide when danger appears. Not so the Yarnums. Instead of stealing from each other, as the rich often do, or running off to hide in Europe from court orders or Federal tax collectors, they closed ranks. Such was the family tradition. These solid San Franciscans, with their millions, their banks, their real estate and interlocking directorates, passed help, advice and sustenance down through the chain of command as immigrants, queued up to get through quarantine, might share a loaf of black bread and a cut of sausage. And among them all, saying just the right things, with her black hair, her shapely figure and her small, roughlooking features, moved the young widow, charmingly, yet sparing with her laughter, as became her new condition. The Yarnums were watching her.
Each time she entered or left a group The Look went round. Yet what were you to criticize, except that the party itself, by the canon which set a year for mourning, had come three months too soon? Nothing at all! She remembered first names; she kissed when she should, shook hands when she should, knew when to move on and when to listen; she even, for example, brought Huntley and Palmer biscuits to an old aunt who never touched cold turkey without them. All in all, she stage-managed the gathering as if she'd had lifelong experience at that sort of thing, in the best society, though everybody knew she hadn't.
"But, my dear," said Aunt Glencorra (she of the Huntley and Palmer's) as Laura turned away, "do you realize what day this is?"
She addressed her sister Ada, a person equal in blood but lower in status since Ada's husband, Stiddy van Lenneps, merely voted her stock at the annual stockholders' meeting, whereas Glencorra's husband, Admiral Dover Wilson, USN (ret.), was a member of Railroad's board.
"Why, it's — "
"Go on."
"December second, isn't it? Yes, I'm quite sure, because — "
"That's the date," Glencorra persisted archly. "I said, the day. I mean, with relation to — you know who. What about that, eh? Don't tell me you've forgotten!" she demanded, poking Mrs. van Lenneps in the ribs with a long, silver-pointed fingernail.
Mrs. van Lenneps looked hopelessly around. She was plumper and smaller than Aunt Glencorra, browny-red in skin and dress in contrast to Mrs. Wilson's gray.
"Well, let's see now . . ."
"Her wedding anniversary!"
"Honestly, Glencorra."
"Am I right? The wedding was in nineteen and forty-one. Five days before Pearl Harbor. And the next year they had the first anniversary party, right here. And we were invited."
"I didn't go," Aunt Ada said.
"Well, I did," Aunt Glencorra said. "Not that I approved. It was the day, I'm sure of it."
Aunt Ada conceded the point. "Why do you suppose she'd choose this day, then, to — "
"That's the way she is, that's all."
"But there might be a reason."
"There is. She's odd."
"I wish I knew," Aunt Ada said gently, as if no comment had been made. She was able to stand up to Glencorra now, though sixty years and more ago, when they were girls, she hadn't been. Life made a difference — living it out. She'd done her share.
"What do you wish you knew, dear Ada?"
A tremendous man in a cutaway and striped trousers towered above her, smiling gently and morosely. Judah Yarnum was a younger brother of the late Charles. He had all the family characteristics of temple, cheek and chin, but on a heroic scale, which gave him a kind of Sierra grandeur. He had amplified his holdings in the bank into an independent fortune made in city real estate.
"Why," said Ada, confused, "Glencorra was just saying — "
"It's her wedding anniversary." Glencorra cut in. "Laura's. Were you aware of that, Judah?"
"Well, by God, now," said Judah. He turned to the Admiral, who, seated silently beside his wife, had devoted his time to drinking sour-mash whiskey. "What about that, Dover? Did you remember?"
The Admiral shook his head. A tray was going past.
"Boy!" he barked.
"I was just remarking, Judah," Glencorra said, "that it does seem odd — her choosing such a day to end her mourning. But that's like Laura. Wouldn't you say?"
Judah Yarnum deliberated. Like the men whom he resembled, the pioneer financiers of the nineteenth century, he was slow in speech though not in action. If you asked him the time of day he would reflect ponderously, then qualify his answer. Once when a young cashier, entering a deposit for him, inquired, "How are you, Mr. Yarnum?" Judah had replied implacably, "Wouldn't you like to know?"
Verbs especially gave him trouble. A verb, of all the parts of speech, was most likely to trip you from the path of compromise, spill you head over heels into the pit of commitment.
"I would not exactly, well, not draw any conclusion from — "
"I think there must be a reason," Aunt Ada said.
"Well, for my part," Glencorra said contemptuously, "I hope there is a reason. But I consider it odd, very odd, and just like her, to go and celebrate her marriage to a man who's in his grave. And who's only been there nine months, at that."
There was a stir in the room. Four men had come in from the library. For a moment, near the living room door, they stood together, orienting themselves and adding terminal remarks to the conversation they had been carrying on at the bar.
These four were the bank's executive heads. In spite of the discrepancies of age, they constituted, taken together, "The Younger Generation." They too disclosed family resemblances and traits, but at the same time they all differed physically and in background, training and attitude from the Old Guard.
The basic difference was a matter of their approach to business, hence — since business was the hub of all — to life itself. The older generation, to the extent that they had been bankers at all, had been really finance capitalists of an older breed who had somehow wandered into banking.
The four in the doorway were professional bankers, trained for their jobs, skillful and vigorous, urbane and tough.
Charles's death had given them specific control — though even before his death, in the common interests, they had put pressure on him to relinquish some of it to them: more indeed than he had been quite ready to. That the change had been accomplished by an act of God had not impaired the importance of the result The four men in Laura's doorway had the power and the gold and they knew what to do with it; they had been trained all their lives for this function.
The four were Newhall Chase, Railroad's president, Ollin Pierce, a member of the board, Lansford Yarnum, a cousin of the deceased Charles, and Lansford's son, Gabe II. All of them held sizable holdings of bank stock, and all except Gabe, who was still in his thirties, had built additional independent fortunes of their own by thrift, shrewd investments, and an occasional reckless and successful speculation. None of them were fools, nor were they likely bested at anything they undertook — as for instance, Ollin Pierce, once an obscure Railroad Bank cashier, who had married the daughter of Skeffington Yarnum, Charlie's uncle, and the oldest living member of the clan. During the war he had started a shipyard with his wife's money, apparently as a patriotic service, and emerged with plaudits from all and with enough profits to buy a fair-sized steamship line.
The presence of the four at Laura's party was noteworthy. Without them the occasion would have been a failure; she would have been considered snubbed. With them there, she had been endorsed.
One fact might have been observed in all four: they were smaller than the men of the generation before them, just as Lansford, though of a chunky, middling size, was shorter and slighter than his Uncle Judah. "Tall for getting, short for keeping," Charlie had once remarked when this trait had come up for discussion.
Next to blood and banking, a Yarnum's prestige was defined, in the family hierarchy, by the position and size of his house. All these Yarnums had splendid houses — rugged, defensible salients in the perpetual war of property. Lansford lived on Russian Hill, with Gabe next door, Chase in a white marble pillbox on Telegraph Hill. Ollin Pierce was out in Seacliff, but he had compensated for his choice of this unfashionable neighborhood by giving his arrangement of glass terraces, field-stone walls and redwood siding a formal name, like a country estate: Ocean Watch.
Of the older group, only Judah still lived on Nob Hill. He had a penthouse apartment there, an isolated and incongruous perch for a man who had always preached and believed in land — land above all! However, as he would point out when the subject was broached, he owned the building, so in a way of speaking the whole spidery tower, with its thousand windows, was home to him. And the land under it as well.
Below these points of residence, seldom actually seen but never forgotten, lived an unknown but related and menacing out-family social class — the bank's depositors. They inhabited the dowdy jungles of the Mission, also the lowland of North Beach with its pretty square and white cathedral; they swarmed in the downtown streets slanting west from the Embarcadero and were even still to be met with over on the other side of Market, in the once-bustling Irish colony known as South of the Slot, an ethnic group which had been scattered and driven to new districts by the Fire and Earthquake, but which had kept its own indigenous character and potent voting influence by all sorts of fraternal organizations, picnics, dances, annual parades and what not. Such were the people who had made the bank great: not perhaps in a class with the Crocker, the Hibernia or Wells Fargo or other famous, locally controlled institutions, but formidable nonetheless. It was only in recent years that the larger mercantile houses, heavy industries, breweries, ship lines and out-of-state business firms had used the Railroad Bank. Such enterprises were controlled by the rich, whereas Halsey Yarnum, the original founder of the bank, and later Charlie, had catered to the poor; they had early perceived that a few hundred dollars from a few hundred thousand people were easier to get at than millions from a few hundred; there was less competition for it. Also, the poor, once they started putting in, would take out with great reluctance, and only under duress, unlike the wealthier clients, who might withdraw by noon the treasure they had pounded on the door to deposit before ten. The bank, to defeat this sort of practice, had once had a rule that you had to give a day's notice whenever you wished to withdraw more than a hundred dollars. Accordingly, the South of the Slot customers, who called the poor box in St. Patrick's Church "St. Anthony's Bread," used the same talent for conspicuous epithet to invent a nickname for the Railroad Bank of San Francisco. They called it The Poor Box.
Tourists sometimes came up the hills in buses to look at the big houses. Not so the depositors. They stayed down below. Here, in ways best known to them, though sometimes also traceable in Railroad's loan department, they earned the money which they brought to the bank at intervals, folded in a passbook, as an offering to a church is often placed in the special envelope provided for that purpose. There was indeed more than a superficial parallel between the Railroad Bank and the Church. Charles Yarnum himself, though seldom seen at Mass, recognized this. Once when asked by a friend to make a loan to a San Franciscan whose credit was considered less than first-class and who was, besides, a Protestant, he said blandly, "I won't baptize in the Devil's parish!"
The statement was widely quoted. Rival bankers tried to make capital out of it, suggesting that it showed a narrow point of view: "the arrogance," as a Bank of America man put it, "of a Medici Pope." The Yarnums felt differently. A recognition of the value of the small depositor was not to be mistaken for a longing to exalt the humble or a commitment to convert the infidel. However, a heretic obtained financing at Railroad on the same terms as the most devout believer, provided his credit rating was good enough.
