Victorian San Francisco Stories (2 page)

But it wasn’t Mrs. Fuller’s fault. Six months ago, when Annie arrived at the O’Farrell house, she’d looked like one of the city’s stiff winds could blow her away. Come all the way from Bo
ston on the train, she’d said, and Beatrice doubted she’d had anything to eat the whole way. Poor thing looked like a lost soul. Beatrice didn’t know the whole story of what happened to Annie Fuller back east, but for certain, being widowed when she was only twenty wasn’t the half of it. Thank goodness, with a little of Beatrice’s wholesome food in her, the brave lass had perked right up. Before you knew it, she’d decided to try to make money by taking in boarders, rolling up her sleeves and working right along side Beatrice and Kathleen to get the house ready for people to move in. She even went without to make sure that there was good food, clean linens, and warm fires for her boarders and a decent wage for Beatrice and Kathleen. Beatrice was proud of her young mistress; life had handed her sorrow, but she greeted each day a with smile. If only this daft new plan of hers worked and the gentleman would be the first of many willing to pay good money to have their palms read by a fortune-teller called Madam Sibyl.

*****

Upstairs, on the second floor, Esther Stein frowned over her knitting and said to her husband, “Herman, I just don’t understand how you can be so easy about what Annie is doing…dressing up like a gypsy and pretending to read palms and tell people their futures based on some ridiculous notion that the stars determine your future.”

Esther, whose love of good food and loose corseting meant that her embroidered burgundy silk was tailored more for comfort than fashion, sat across from her husband in one of the two upholstered arm chairs that were grouped beside the sitting room fireplace. This room with the deep-pile Aubusson carpet, ornately carved wooden mantel, and high ceilings with crown mol
ding and plaster medallions, held some of her favorite pieces of furniture from their former home. Esther thought that her old friend Agatha Waterstone, whose sitting room this had been for over a quarter of a century, would approve. Herman had been named executor of the Waterstones’ estate, and when Agatha died, it was he who had tracked down their widowed niece, Mrs. Annie Fuller, to let her know she was the sole beneficiary of that estate.

Unfortunately, after the terrible economic troubles of the mid-seventies, this inheritance had been reduced to only a small amount of capital and the gracious old home that was, however, no longer located in the most fashionable section of the city. It was Herman who’d recommended that Annie try to support herself by taking in boarders, and it was he who convinced Esther to move from their home into this two-room suite last November to help Annie out. And, much to Esther’s surprise, it was also her husband who’d come up with the outrageous idea that Annie could supplement her income by pretending to be a clairvoyant called Madam Sibyl.

Herman, a handsome well-fed man in his sixties, put down the copy of the
Chronicle
he was reading and looked over at her. He had temporarily replaced his coat with a velvet-lapelled brocade smoking jacket that was a birthday present from his wife. However, once it was time to go downstairs to dinner, he would show the proper respect due to Mrs. Fuller’s other boarders by shrugging on his formal black frock coat and straightening his cravat. Picking up the cut-glass tumbler filled with whiskey sitting on the table at his elbow, he took a sip, careful not to soak the full mustache and beard that framed his mouth, and then responded, “Esther, we have been over this before. If Annie were a young man, I could fix her up as a junior partner with one of the brokerage houses in town, J. L. Schmitt, for example. He has offices downstairs from me in the Merchants Exchange Building, and he could use someone with our Annie’s talents.”

“Is she really that good?” She still had trouble understanding how the Waterstones’ lovely niece had come to be some sort of financial savant.

“My dear, I think she might be even better than her father, who was one of the best stockbrokers on the west coast. Does a lot of research—that’s what she learned from her father. But more importantly, she just seems to know what is going to sell, what isn’t. The past few months, she’s already helped me turn a profit on the stocks I bought under her guidance.”

“Well, can’t you just share some of those profits with her, maybe pass on her tips to others, for a small fee?” Esther only vaguely understood her husband’s business as a commission me
rchant, but she knew that it had something to do with charging people money for putting together different financial transactions.

Herman sighed. “I wish that was feasible, but I am out of town so often that I simply don’t have time to run a stockbrokerage firm on top of my own business. I have passed on a few of her tips, to Porter, for one, but just as a favor. I owed him for steering me away from investing in the Pioneer Bank last year. ”

Since she was always telling her husband that he needed to slow down, delegate more responsibility, she nodded at the truth of that statement. “But why can’t you set her up in business on her own?”

“Because she refused me when I offered to! Said she didn’t want to be that beholden to an
yone—ever again. And she knows what a risky proposition it would be—with no guarantee anyone would be willing to take their business to a female stockbroker, which is why I couldn’t convince someone like Schmitt to take her on.”

He stared at the fire for a moment and then chuckled. “Annie also said she didn’t want people thinking I was Cornelius Vanderbuilt to her Victoria Woodhull. Said it would ruin both of our reputations. Said Hetty wouldn’t let me hear the end of it!”

Esther inwardly shuddered. She loved all four of her daughters, but the youngest, Hetty, was becoming too judgmental for her mother’s taste. Esther blamed Hetty’s husband George, a stuffy prig of a man. She could just imagine what George’s opinion was of Victoria Woodhull, a beautiful but notorious young woman who campaigned for women’s rights and even ran for the presidency of the United States. Rumors said it was Vanderbuilt, the millionaire railroad tycoon, who’d set up Woodhull and her sister as New York City stockbrokers some years ago. In short, Woodhull was the exact opposite of George’s ideal of respectable womanhood.

“Well, Herman,” Esther finally responded, “it does Annie credit that she wasn’t willing to risk your money or her reputation. But, speaking of reputations, I don’t see why you aren’t wo
rried about the effect this scheme is going to have on her reputation. I know she says she never wants to remarry, but I would think that making a living as a fortune-teller would be more damaging to her reputation than being a stockbroker. Not that a man like our Hetty’s George would find either occupation acceptable.”

Her husband just raised his eyebrows at her and took another sip of his whiskey. They did not entirely see eye-to-eye on Hetty’s George, who was a rising star in the Merchant’s Exchange Bank where Herman was one of the directors.

When he didn’t say anything, she went on. “I know, you have said no one need know that Madam Sibyl and Mrs. Annie Fuller are one and the same. But that still doesn’t explain to me why you think that she can make money at this endeavor. If no one will take advice from a stockbroker who is a woman, why would they pay money to get the same advice from a female fortune teller?”

Her husband chuckled again, saying, “Because, my dear, we men are not terribly consistent. And we are an irrational lot. Even your hard-headed father wouldn’t walk between two older women if he met them on the sidewalk—because he said it would bring him bad luck for the rest of the day.”

“My father wouldn’t walk between two women on the street because it would be terribly rude, Herman. But you are right about him not being consistent. I know he didn’t make a single important decision, business or otherwise, without consulting my mother, and if she disapproved of something, it just didn’t happen. Yet he told me on my marriage day that I should obey my husband in all things. Not that I listened to him.”

Her husband snorted, then said, “But the point is, in private your father might take his wife’s advice, but he wouldn’t admit to it publicly. However, in the public’s eye, a man who is getting advice from one of these modern trance mediums or an old-fashioned gypsy fortune-teller is ge
tting that advice from the spirit world or the stars, not from the woman who is communicating the advice. So when one of my acquaintances asked me where I got the tip I passed on to Porter, I told him from a clairvoyant named Madam Sibyl who rented a room in my boarding house. And that’s how he came to be Madam Sibyl’s first client.”

*****

The clock on the mantel chimed quarter to four, and Annie made one last circuit around the small parlor, checking to make certain everything was ready. She’d arranged the room the way the clairvoyants she’d visited in Boston arranged theirs. Curtains closed, fire lit, two chairs sitting on either side of a small table covered with a velvet cloth, and a lamp placed to ensure that it would be easy to see the client’s features but difficult for the client to see her face. She’d gone to see these clairvoyants with Lottie Vanderlin, her husband John’s maternal aunt. Lottie’s own husband had died suddenly last winter, and John’s parents had sent Annie to Boston to live with her, with the admonition that Annie keep Lottie out of trouble. She didn’t know what they meant at the time; she was just glad to get some respite from the series of sick rooms where she’d been confined for much of the past few years, attending births, deaths, and every ailment a woman could experience between those two events. She didn’t do the actual nursing, thank heavens, but she’d been the one who spelled the hired nurses, carried out the doctor’s orders, and tried to ease the pain, boredom, and fear that consumed the patients’ waking hours.

Lottie, a healthy woman in her early fifties whose husband had left her very well provided-for, seemed like an easy assignment. In fact, Annie developed a deep affection for the good-natured widow in the six months she lived with her. She soon discovered, however, what John’s parents meant by keeping her out of trouble. Lottie was rapidly throwing her inheritance away on a series of mediums and fortune-tellers who claimed to communicate with her departed husband. It wasn’t the fees she paid these persons that was the main problem. They were certainly no more a drain on Lottie’s substantial income than if her aunt spent her days shopping. No, it was one particular trance medium, who called himself Professor Magnus, who presented the danger. He had convinced Lottie that her departed husband wanted her to invest her capital in a set of very risky investments. Annie feared if the influence of this phony professor wasn’t checked, it would mean financial ruin for Lottie.

Annie initially tried, unsuccessfully, to warn Lottie away from him. Then, out of desperation, she told Lottie that attending all these séances had awakened Annie’s own abilities. She convinced Lottie that she could now communicate with a spirit of her own, Madam Sibyl, who helped her forecast the future. Lottie was delighted. She started hosting small séances in her home, where Annie pretended to communicate with this Madam Sibyl and dispensed advice to Lottie and her friends. Regrettably, Madam Sibyl’s business advice proved so accurate, and Lottie and her friends so pleased, that word reached Annie’s father-in-law. Annie had just been recalled back to New York City by him to “explain herself,” when the letter from Herman Stein reached her, telling her of her inheritance from her Aunt Agatha. Two days later, she was on a transcontinental train to San Francisco, having pawned the last piece of jewelry she owned to pay the fare and baggage costs and leaving her miserable years of dependence on the extended Fuller family behind.

She thought she’d left Madam Sibyl behind as well. In fact, she had forgotten that she’d ever mentioned her brief career in mediumship to the Steins when she first arrived in town. Cons
equently, she was surprised three weeks ago when Herman Stein suggested resurrecting Madam Sibyl. The idea came up during a meeting with him to go over her accounts for the first three months the boarding house was in operation. Double entry book-keeping was no mystery to Annie, but nothing could make the sums add up. The costs of running the boarding house were barely being met by the income she was generating. Even when the remaining large room in the attic was let, this would only provide a tiny margin of safety. She didn’t know what to do, and she hoped Mr. Stein could offer some suggestion of how to better economize.

The Steins had taken her under their wing from the moment she arrived in San Francisco, and she wasn’t sure she could ever repay them for their support, but the last thing she wanted was to feel economically beholden to them. She felt uncomfortable as it was with their decision to move into her boarding house, knowing that they could afford much grander accommodations in one of the better city hotels. Esther Stein assured her that she was more than ready to leave the home they’d been sharing with their youngest son and his wife and small children. Confiding to Annie that she and her newest daughter-in-law did not rub along well together under the same roof, E
sther said, “It wasn’t that I minded handing over the work of running the household, but Myra insisted on asserting her prerogatives as the mistress of the household at every turn. No, it was time for us to move. Our rooms here are just perfect. With Herman off traveling more days than he is home, I would feel so lonely rattling around in some hotel surrounded by strangers. Besides, Mrs. O’Rourke is one of the best cooks in San Francisco.”

Annie smiled, remembering with what relish both Steins enjoyed Beatrice’s pies, and knew that at least in that last statement Esther was telling the truth. But she worried that her motherly friend might be pressuring her husband to loan Annie money, which was why she was nervous about revealing to him the thinness of her profit margin. However, instead of offering to help her, Herman Stein had pulled out a copy of the
San Francisco Chronicle
and placed his finger smack dab in the middle of the front page. She’d leaned over and seen that he was pointing to the section headed “Special Notices” that listed the numerous advertisements by people professing to be clairvoyants of one stripe or the other.