Page 37 of The Manor of Dreams

Vivian had grown up hearing about the gold rush: that her father’s great-uncle from Fujian had sailed east to find his fortune, only to never return. When she came over to America, she heard the latter half of the story from her uncle: that one of his sons journeyed over to find him and never did.

“He was looking for mountains of gold,” her aunt said. “That was what they promised him. In his letters he wrote that the gold was all gone, but that there could be work found on the railroads. Then he disappeared into the Sierra Nevada Mountains and no one ever heard from him again.” She clicked her teeth. Vivian had been scrubbing her daughter’s underclothes in the washboard over the sink. She had peered out the window, over Chinatown. The wound of her first husband’s disappearance was still fresh at the time.

But now she was far from that cramped apartment. She’d worked her way tothis. Vivian sent her aunt and uncle a check and helpedthem buy a house in the Richmond district. At the beginning of her marriage, people passed on all sorts of requests through her aunt and uncle: an auntie next door who was short on cash for her emergency surgery, a neighbor who couldn’t make rent, someone’s daughter who needed money for her wedding. Vivian had tried to fulfill them all until her husband stepped in.

“They’re not your family,” he said. “When people think that you have wealth, that’s all you become to them. Someone who has money. If you give it to them now, they’ll never stop asking.”

“But this a-yí’s like family,” Vivian had said. “She always brought Lucille and Ada their favorite treats. She just needs a hundred dollars for rent. I’ll do it just this once.”

“Just this once,” Richard admonished her. “After all the money we put into this house, we need to start saving for our family, darling. We still have three girls to raise. We can be more charitable once we’re more secure.”

The househadbeen expensive to build—and to take care of, even if most of it came from Richard’s trust fund. Now, Vivian parked the convertible her husband had gifted her in the UCLA lot and traipsed across campus through small gatherings of students, who stared at her curiously. She loved the way this college looked, like a little village. All of her daughters would go to college. She would make sure of it.

The library intimidated her. Staring at English books for too long made her head hurt. But when she’d started auditioning for historical roles, she’d taught herself how to do research in the library so she could be prepared. Now, she sifted through catalog cards as she strung the key words together in her head:mining towns, railroads, Chinese workers. She followed the reference numbers deep into the stacks, dimly lit with only bare bulbs. She was poring over pictures of gold mine towns up in Northern California when she saw a familiar name:Dalby.

Vivian paused. Carefully she set her other books aside. She read the passage about Dalby. And then another. Soon after, she abandoned her research for the movie altogether. Dalby was Richard’s mother’s maiden name. Cecilia Dalby Lowell; Vivian had seen it on the wedding invitations.

It wasn’t a particularly unique name. It could be a coincidence.

Vivian scoured the surrounding books and peered carefully at the back indexes. Finally, tucked between dusty biographies with worn covers and pages brittle as dead leaves, she found a thin book about the men behind the Transcontinental Railroad. She flipped to the index, and then to the pages directed.

Dalby, Amos iii, 46–50, 55

Slowly Vivian read all about Amos Dalby. He was one of the first sponsors of the western construction of the railroad, along with his college friend and business partner, William Kerr. In his first unsuccessful bid for state assembly he’d made remarks on “containing the urgent threat of the Chinaman,” a phrase that made Vivian uncomfortable. He paid Chinese rail workers inferior rates and suppressed strikes by withholding their food and wages. He oversaw construction through the High Sierra Mountains amid the most brutal winters and searing summers, pushing all the way to Utah, where the Transcontinental Railroad connected.

She’d heard other stories about the railroad before. An elderly man who owned the medicine shop she’d briefly worked at in San Francisco had talked about it. His father had survived work in the Sierras. “They had to blast dynamite through the mountains,” the apothecary owner said. “And accidents happened all the time. One time there was a misfire and twelve workers were blown out of a cave. It rained blood and flesh. Bà was splattered in their intestines.”

Vivian had felt sick at the gruesome image. “What happened to him?”

The bronze scales clattered as he turned back to Vivian. “He kept working,” he said simply. “Twelve workers replaced the dead ones the next day. But you couldn’t forget about them. Oh, they wouldn’t let you. If you died in that place with no one to take care of you, there was no way to send your remains back home for a proper burial and offerings. Those men became hungry, abandoned ghosts in those cold, cold mountains.??. Pitiful. Bà said he could hear their cries at night in the wind.”

And now she was looking down at the picture of the man who was responsible. She stared into his pale eyes and knew with increasing certainty that this man was related to her husband.

She knew her husband’s family was wealthy, but she never knew it came from the railroads. Was it possible that their families’ paths had crossed before? Could her father’s great-uncle have been one of Dalby’s underpaid workers? What if his disappearance into the mountains meanthe—his spirit, his ghost—was stuck there too?

She could feel the pressure of a headache building behind her eyes, but she kept reading. Amos Dalby crushed unions and assigned the organizers to the most dangerous work in the dead of winter. Despite his public sentiments about the Chinese, he hired many into his house as servants. He threw extravagant parties with his wife, Laura, and his young son, Archibald, in the mansion he built on the outskirts of Los Angeles.

Vivian rocked back on her heels. It was her house. She was sure of it. Nottheirhouse, but a house that had once stood in the same spot, maybe the foundations of the very house she and Richard had built upon and giddily decorated, that they filled with their lives, their family’s life.

She wanted to stop. But now she had to know.

Dalby’s gilded life was also rife with controversy—and later, tragedy. Dalby and his business partner, William Kerr, once close confidants and loyal friends, became bitter rivals when they ran against each other for a state assembly seat, which Dalby lost. There were even rumors that Laura Dalby had an affair with Kerr, which was later confirmed in archived letters.

In the winter of 1889, Kerr died of poisoning at a party hosted at his own residence. One of his servants was charged and convicted of the murder. After a period of mourning, Dalby stepped up to be executive director of the railroad company that following spring and, eventually, ran for the House of Representatives, winning his district.

After Kerr’s death, Dalby’s personal life became more turbulent. His marriage to Laura deteriorated. He was said to have erratic behaviorand outbursts, and he ultimately lost his congressional seat in the next election cycle. In 1894, Dalby was away in Sacramento on a trip with his son, Archie, when their Los Angeles home was broken into. Laura Dalby was found fatally stabbed the next morning. Though there was an extensive search and investigation, the murderer was never found. Bereft over Laura’s death, the Dalby family receded from the public eye.

Ten years later, Dalby’s twenty-four-year-old son, Archie, set out on a grand arts tour of the Mediterranean when a storm sank his ship, leaving no surviving crew. Dalby spent his remaining life alone, dying eighteen months later. The once-great railroad titan and politician is said to have perished of a broken heart in his own garden, leaving behind an estate that would become embroiled in a bitter legal battle before it eventually passed on to his nephew, Thomas Dalby.

She braced a palm against a dusty shelf to steady herself. How much did Richard know about this? She’d only heard his personal history. A private school childhood, a mother who’d moved out East from California, from the same house that Vivian and Richard would eventually tear down to build their own. His mother, who’d once proclaimed to see a ghost. Was it the ghost of Amos?

Vivian had thought that Richard’s family’s misfortunes only extended back forty, fifty years. But now she knew it stretched further into tragedy. A poisoning; a murder; a shipwreck; how much bad luck did this family have? For Amos to see his friends and family die, one by one…

Suddenly what Cecilia told Vivian at the wedding came back to her.

I tried to tell him, but I don’t think he understands.

Richard must have known, or at least been warned. He himself had told her that his family had been out here since the gold rush. That’s why he’d insisted on scrapping the old walls and pillars, maintaining only the foundation, the frames, and structural systems. He wanted to build most everything anew.We don’t want the old walls, he’d reassured her.They’re rotten. And this way we can design it exactly the way you want it.But maybe it went deeper than that. Maybe he’d wanted to wipe the past clean.

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