After five years, San Francisco had substantially risen from the ashes of the 1906 quake and again bustled like the big city it was. The rubble was gone, new buildings were up, commerce buzzed. In fact, more than simply recovering from the cataclysm, the city had leapt forward. Cable cars were being replaced by streetcars. Motorcars and trucks outnumbered carriages. Tourists and visitors ignorant of the recent history might not even realize that most of the city had been erased on that April day in 1906.
But its residents, the people who’d lived through the horror and the long, dark aftermath, they could see the quake everywhere they looked: Streets that bent differently than they had before. Important buildings replaced. Empty spaces where people had lived and worked. A sheen of bright newness in every direction.
The grandiose palaces that had stood on Nob Hill and loomed over the city, built by the “Big Four” industrialists—Leland Stanford, Mark Hopkins, Charles Crocker, and Collis P. Huntington—had all been swiped from their perch in the great shake. The earth had no more esteem for them than for the lowliest tenement dweller, and had devoured it all just the same.
The Big Four wasn’t the Big Five because Henry Frazier ran his empire with a different attitude. From the time of William’s grandfather, the family’s business principles had been for fair wages and strong representation for their workers, thus the family’s net worth had not been quite as high as the ‘robber barons’ perched on their thrones above the city, and the Fraziers were thought of, on Nob Hill, like an inconvenient relation. The redheaded bastard of the wealthy class.
Raised in the Frazier family ethos, and in the cradle of their substantial wealth, William had always marveled at the idea that all they had—the mansion in Presidio Heights, the ranch in Marin, the ease and comfort within all those walls, not to mention the thriving business itself—might be seen by anyone as not enough.
When he was a boy, his father had taken him for walks through the city, and he’d always stopped and pointed his walking stick at the fairy-tale opulence of Mark Hopkins’ enormous Nob Hill house. Look there, he’d said, and remember. The only thing that thrives in a house like that is isolation. The men who live on that hill don’t remember what it’s like down here on the ground. They’ve forgotten how they gained all they have, and who helped them climb. They go whole days, and weeks, without seeing their families. They forget everything but their own ambition. The need to have more is their only companion, their only comfort, their only purpose. They no longer chase progress, only profit. We have all we could ever want and more. We didn’t achieve it on our own. So why take more when we stand on the shoulders of other men who’ve worked hard for us?
When Nob Hill had been erased, it had been difficult not to think of it as a cosmic rebuke to the greed that had built those ridiculous wedding cake houses.
The Frazier house, in hardly humble Presidio Heights, had been badly damaged in the quake, too, but it hadn’t been destroyed. They’d spent two years living entirely on the ranch while the building had been repaired, refitted, and restored. Christopher Tate had done his convalescing on the ranch, and he and William had become great friends there.
That friendship was over now, of course. Five months had passed since William had taken a stateroom on the Mauritania and sailed away from England and from Nora. He’d had no word from any Tate, but he hadn’t expected one. Beyond the quick note he’d scrawled to Nora and shoved under her door while Chris’s back had been turned, he hadn’t attempted to correspond, either.
He had no idea if she’d found his note, and he had no idea whether it would be better if she hadn’t or if she had. Would her hurt be less if she could think him a rake and turn her feelings against him? Or would knowing his love for her was sincere give her comfort? From the moment he’d pushed the paper under her door, he’d had doubts about the act.
He regretted nearly everything about that time in Dover. If only he’d been stronger and left her room when he should have. If only he hadn’t gone to her room at all. If only he hadn’t lingered so long while he was there. There were so many other possible alternate outcomes to that night, any one of which might have kept him in England, his friendship with Chris and his suit of Nora both intact.
But she’d been so determined, and so demanding. So very beautiful and arousing, full of fire and fury.
And now he was here, alone, and she was there, possibly married already, or about to be.
“Here you are, glowering at my roses again.”
William turned and smiled at the woman he loved more than anyone in the world, save one. “Hello, Mom.”
She turned up her cheek, and he kissed it. “You’re thinking about her again, aren’t you? You always come out and stare daggers at my roses when you want to feel melancholy about your young lady. I’m worried you’ll make them wilt.”
“Actually, I was looking up at Nob Hill, thinking about the Hopkins mansion.”
“Ugh. One of the only good things to come out of that terrible day was the end of that monstrosity. Honestly. Why not simply hang a sign, one of the flashing ones they have at the waterfront, that says ‘I WIN!’”
William laughed and swept his arm around his mother’s slim waist. Tall but fine-boned, her hair yet the rich auburn of her youth, and her hazel eyes sparkling, Angelica Linville Frazier was still, in her mid-fifties, considered one of the great beauties of San Francisco society. Her politics weren’t popular among the movers and shakers, but the whole family was on the wrong side of that equation. They had enough wealth and power to overcome those social disadvantages—and thus, to exploit them. People seemed to roll all their complaints about the family into a sigh of ‘those damned Fraziers’ and accept the inconvenient relatives at the table, because Scot-Western was important in business, and because Mrs. Henry Frazier was beautiful and witty and an excellent adornment to any social function.
“Could you not simply go back to England and face down her family? Make the grand gesture? Chris is a good man, and a good friend to you. Enough time has passed that he can’t still be so angry.”
His mother knew the whole story; racked with howling guilt and disappointment, William had told her almost as soon as he’d stepped off the train. His feelings hadn’t abated much, so he had no reason to believe Chris’s had. “I beat a man into the hospital, Mom. I don’t know what the statute of limitations is on that in England, but until it lapses, if I go back for her, Chris turns that charge loose on me. And does worse to her.” That was the most important problem—what would happen to Nora. The likely worst thing that would happen to him, should he be tried for the crime he’d been charged with, was deportation, maybe a spell in a cell while they worked out the paperwork. Nora, on the other hand, would be ruined.
His mother plucked a rose past its bloom and held it in the palm of her hand. “Why do Frazier men have to solve everything with their fists?”
“They were beating a woman, Mom. A sister in the cause.” He picked up the rose from her hand. Its white petals had curled and browned at the edges, and he pulled a few easily away from the bud. “They wore white roses on their coats. Paper, or fabric. Like brooches.”
“Really? You hadn’t said that before. The Kensington Roses—I know of them, but I don’t think that name is known in England. The clippings I’ve read, they’re called simply The Roses. Our group is in correspondence with them.”
“I only just remembered. Nora knew them, I think. Or of them, maybe.”
“Could you get word to her that way? Through a Rose?”
Plucking away the soft petals, William considered that new option. But he saw the trouble with it right away, and shook his head. “I don’t know if, or how well, she knows any of them, but I do know she wouldn’t want to put them at risk to help her. Besides, she’s adamant that she won’t sneak. She doesn’t want to ‘steal her own future,’ is how she put it.”
His mother took the remnants of the bud from him and dropped it into the gardening basket on her arm. “I would like to meet this brave young lady someday.” Clipping a healthy bud, one just opening into its flower, from the same white rose bush, she handed it to him. “Love will out, William, my dear. Love will out. We will find the way. In the meantime, quit intimidating my roses and go inside. Your father is looking for you. Make sure he doesn’t try to steal you away. This afternoon, I need your ear to practice my talk, and we have the benefit to prepare for.”
William sighed. Since he was no longer interested in the companionship of women not named Nora Tate, his mother had enlisted him as the escort for the disadvantaged women of the San Francisco social class—and in Sacramento as well. He’d spent the past four months taking the arm of every rotund, snaggle-toothed, or unfortunately-voiced young lady of means in Northern California, at balls and galas, benefits and dinners. Tonight was the final benefit gala for the new San Francisco Symphony, which planned to present its first performance later in the year. His mother had been one of the leaders in bringing a symphony orchestra to San Francisco and thus one of the organizers of several galas and dinners to fund the enterprise.
“Who is it tonight?”
“Dottie Langstrom.”
Whose father owned the textile company that was providing the upholstery and drapery fabric to the Symphony at cost. He actually liked Dottie, who had a quick mind and a droll sense of humor. And she was quite pretty. If she hadn’t been about a hundred pounds heavier than most of the other young women her age, she’d have been the toast of San Francisco. “That’s the fourth time with Dottie. People are going to talk. She’s likely to be confused herself.”
“Since when do we care about talk? Dottie is a smart, capable young woman who understands the circumstances perfectly well. And your performance with any of the young ladies I’ve asked you to escort has been distracted at best, so I seriously doubt they’re confused regarding your interest in them.” With an impish quirk of a grin, his mother plucked the rosebud from his hand and slid it into his lapel. “If you weren’t such a dashing devil, I don’t think they’d put up with you. But you are pretty on a lady’s arm.” She patted his chest. “Go see the dashing devil who looks so pretty on my arm.”
“You’re incorrigible,” William chuckled and kissed her cheek.
“Exactly. I cannot be ‘corriged.’ No woman should.”
God, he wanted to bring Nora here, where she could open her wings. The cause was hopeless, but William couldn’t set the want of it aside. All these months later, he thought of her, worried about her, wanted her, no less. Loved her no less.
Leaving his magnificent, incorrigible mother to tend to her roses, William returned to the house to find his dashing father.
William’s father looked over his spectacles when he knocked on the ajar door of his study. “You wanted to see me?”
“Come in, son.” His father set aside the papers he’d been studying. “I want you to meet with Kent tomorrow evening.”
Midway through the act of sitting in one of the leather chairs before his father’s stately mahogany desk, William froze in surprise, then sat. “But Mom’s talk is tomorrow evening.” His mother was speaking in Sacramento, before the Capital Women’s Club, a social group composed of the wives of state politicians and other government officials. The vote for statewide women’s suffrage was on the ballot for the upcoming special election in October, and it had a good but not great chance of success. The suffragists in California planned to push day and night for the next six months to make it happen.
Since his days of short pants, William had served as his mother’s audience for her speeches, whatever the cause she’d championed. As an adult, he’d served also as sounding board, critic, and cheerleader, as well as advertiser, usher, and occasional introducer at her events. The only times he’d missed any of her events, he’d been away on business.
Henry Frazier, though sympathetic to his wife’s causes and supportive of her endeavors, admitted to some frustration with the complications they made in his business. Rare was the industrialist who sided with the liberals, and it made for uncomfortable business relationships. In point of fact, William’s father didn’t consider himself a liberal. He described himself as a Republican in the mold of Theodore Roosevelt—fully behind social progress and natural conservation, and with a keen sense of responsibility to his workers, but sure that his responsibility to his workers meant a responsibility to his company’s financial success. Scot-Western was still privately held—William’s father was deeply suspicious of the stock market—so he carried the responsibility for the business’s substantial reputation on his own shoulders.
William Kent, the man he wanted William to meet, was their representative in Washington D.C. He was also their neighbor in Marin. Kent was new to the House, sworn in only six weeks earlier, but he’d campaigned on his reputation as a Progressive Republican, focused primarily on conserving the redwood forests of Northern California.
He’d also suggested that it was time to build a bridge over the San Francisco Bay, connecting the city to the Marin Headlands. He’d gotten William’s father’s vote on the day he’d made his first remarks on that idea.
“Kent’s in Sacramento for a leadership meeting, and he’s on a train back to Washington the next morning. Tomorrow night is the only time he’s available. I got you a dinner meeting with him at the Hotel Land. I want to feel him out about the bridge. If he’s committed enough, it might be our next thing.”
His father seemed to have hit a kind of crisis in his life. At almost sixty years old, the head of a successful, influential company that had begun as a single railroad and had grown—and continued to grow—to include multiple lines all over the country, as well as a subsidiary company running half the ferries in the Bay and the streetcars in the city, he seemed stymied at the top. Unwilling to expand for expansion’s sake, as many of his compatriots were doing, he wanted the next New Thing. He’d wanted a global presence, but William had failed him in that regard. He’d been interested in the Channel tunnel idea, but William had failed him there, as well.
Failures were fine; they were integral to success. But he needed the next thing to try for, and they hadn’t found it yet.
“What do the engineers say?” William asked. The Bay was notoriously windy, and the currents and tides notoriously strong. The span between the city and the Headlands was more than a mile. In some ways, a thirty-mile tunnel under the English Channel was the easier task. “It would have to be a suspension bridge, but how high, to bear that kind of weight and stress?”
“I talked with Norbert, but I’m not giving his team a project until I know that Kent means what he says. He’s a typical politician, slippery as hell.”
“Even with him on board, it would take forever to break ground. Think of all the people we’d have to have moving this project, Dad—local, state, and federal legislatures. Millions of dollars raised. Years of research, development, and design. This is what I faced in England, and it was impossible.”
“What you faced in England is that you aren’t English. Your tunnel will be built someday, but it was never going to be us who built it.”
William’s jaw dropped in shock. “Then why did you let me chase it?”
“Because it was the first time you showed real vision, William. I wanted you to chase your first big idea, to feel that rush of discovery, and the crush of failure, too.” He grinned. “Besides, your mother thought you’d met someone, and she wanted you to stay and press your suit. She hoped you’d bring a wife home with you. You know she wants grandchildren.”
“How did she know I’d met someone?” Rather than think about the sour ache in his belly at the mention of what he’d almost had, William did a quick riffle through his memories to find something he might have said in a letter home, but nothing sprang up.
His father offered him no answer but an uninterested shrug. “My point is, failure is a chance to learn and do the next thing better. You know that. Do you think your grandfather decided to build a railroad and just started laying track straight up to his empire? Of course not. He failed, and failed, and failed again, and when he succeeded, he was old before he saw the full fruit of it. All massive projects take long years of failure and trial and disappointment. Even if Kent is firm in his intent now, he could bow to pressure, and we’d have to find another champion in Washington. Partners will fall by the wayside. Engineers will leave the project. Designs will be flawed, and we’ll have to start from scratch. That’s how all this works. You’ve been too coddled if you haven’t seen that by now, son. Things have been too easy at Scot-Western in the years you’ve been paying attention.”
It was true that things had been easy in the decade that he’d been at his father’s side in the company. His father had focused on building more rail lines, making travel luxurious for high-end passengers, and expanding the company’s significance in their home city, with streetcars and ferries. Even the earthquake had been a boon for the company, with the transition to streetcars. William had concerned himself with outreach—liaising with the workers and with legislators, managing the company’s public relations, selling his father’s ideas.
The last of his father’s ideas had been global expansion, but it was too soon for that step. Now, he’d turned and faced the other way—not outward, but inward. Not the world, but simply the Bay.
“It has to be spectacular,” William mused. “Not just a bridge, but an attraction. Something people will travel to the city specifically to see. A bridge like no other. People all over the world will see it in photographs, or postcards, and know right away what and where it is.”
Williams father took his spectacles off and grinned broadly at him. “Precisely. That’s my vision as well. I’d like to see it built in my lifetime.”
Representative Kent sat back with a snifter of expensive brandy in his hand. “Do you have plans drawn up? Sketches?”
“We need to know we have an advocate in Washington, and in Sacramento, before we begin material work on the project. If you’re ready to take on the legislative hurdles, then we’re ready to take on the design.”
“I’ve only been in Washington six weeks. As a freshman representative, my pull is limited. But I’m very interested in the project. You know I campaigned on it.”
“And you know the Frazier family gave handsomely to your campaign because you want to build this bridge.”
Kent gave him a politician’s smile. “And here I thought you were just being neighborly.”
William laughed as if he thought Kent had been funny. “That too, of course.”
“Well, we need the senators on board, too. Perkins and Works won’t be easy sells. Perkins is a crusty old bastard, and Works just got to the Senate in March. He won’t want to rock the boat just yet.” Kent leaned forward and set his empty snifter down. “It would help if your father would get your mother in hand.”
Bristling with sudden anger, William let his hands become fists on his thighs, under the tablecloth, and smiled calmly. “Women’s suffrage is polling well. It has an excellent chance.” That was true, in statewide polls. But in the cities, the places where wealth and power congregated, the measure was deadly unpopular. William held back a vexing truth—opposition to the proposition was strongest in the San Francisco Bay area. His mother’s home base.
Kent knew that, of course, but he was gentleman enough not to point it out. “Here in California, possibly. But Mrs. Frazier’s on the national stage, agitating for suffrage in every state, and the movement is anathema elsewhere. In Washington, they speak of your mother almost as often as they speak of Mrs. Catt, and they don’t do it kindly. As long as she’s standing at podiums raising her fist, as she’s doing upstairs right now, the Frazier name will be political poison, I’m sorry to say.”
His mother’s speech before the Capital Women’s Club was scheduled in a meeting room of the same hotel. She’d been disappointed that he wouldn’t be there, but she’d understood. William had actually thought he might invite Mr. Kent to step in and listen to the end of her remarks. Clearly, that wasn’t a good idea.
Now he was angry, nearly violently so, and he called on all of his conversational skill to hide the fact from this politician, whom he needed, despite his cavalier attitude about William’s mother.
They ended the dinner with outward cordiality. Kent invited him to keep him apprised of developments and prepare sketches, but the underlying word was that he wouldn’t work with the Fraziers until the lady of the house ‘sat down and stayed down’—and he doubted anyone else would, either.
William walked him to the main door of the hotel, and let him go with a smile and a wave. As soon as the coast was clear, he wheeled around and stomped to the elevator, letting his ire flow through his veins. The elevator operator flinched when he stormed onto the car. “Second floor.”
“Y-yes sir.” He closed the heavy doors, and the elevator started up. The operator stood stiff as iron and didn’t try to make small talk. Wise man.
On the second floor, William went to the meeting room which a tasteful, discreet placard identified as the April 1911 meeting of the Capital Women’s Club, and their featured guest, Mrs. Henry Frazier, speaking on the topic of ‘The Proper Tone for a Woman’s Voice.”
Despite his anger, William smiled at the placard and its frilly lettering. There were three kinds of speeches or talks his mother and women like her gave. The first was meant to cause a loud ruckus on a wide stage. Those speeches had titles like ’The Time for Women in Politics Is NOW!’ and named her as Angelica Frazier. They were for the public attention as much as they were for persuasion, and her intended audience was mixed. The second was businesslike and direct, and had no title at all. She addressed men in board rooms and state halls, and she laid out the political benefits of the women’s vote. It was men who would decide the question, and she showed them their own interest in the answer. The last was more intimate—in small hotel meeting rooms, or elegant parlors in private homes, or church basements. They had titles like ‘The Proper Tone for a Woman’s Voice’ and identified her as her husband’s wife—signifiers that obscured her true purpose, and thus gave her audience some protection from reprisal from the men in their lives. When his mother gave a talk like this, it wasn’t for the attention or publicity, or even votes. She meant to inspire women and win sisters to the cause.
He opened the door and peeked in. The talk was over, and women stood around the podium, waiting for their chance to talk personally with their guest. William had been present at many such talks—the presence of a sympathetic man often assuaged some of the broader concerns of the hesitant—and he could tell by the mood of the room that this one had gone well.
He stepped out and let the door close, then found a settee nearby where he could sit and think. Would his father ask his mother to ‘sit down and stay down,’ as Kent had so inelegantly put it? William didn’t know. He hoped not. If he did, William would stand in his way.
A bridge across the Bay was a big dream for a far future. Women’s suffrage in California was on the ballot now. The issue was part of the national conversation now. What happened in California could shift the balance.
The time for women in politics was now.