Ahwahnee Hotel, Yosemite National Park
2015
My grandfather was a wealthy man. For most of his life, he didn’t feel guilty about it. Wealth, he believed, was simply something that had happened to him, as bad luck or hardship could have also happened to him. From the outside, it was easy to see how money had formed him into a self-aggrandizing, domineering, and charming if recklessly inconsiderate person. But he wouldn’t have viewed it like that. Instead, he’d drifted through life accepting good fortune the way a person might step out the front door, in temperate Southern California, accepting another decade of spectacular weather.
When he called one afternoon in mid-May to ask if my husband and I could pay him a visit, there was something tense and halting in his tone that made me guess there was more he wanted from us, and my first instinct was to answer evasively, even before hearing the details, already on guard.
“We’d love to, Grandpa,” I said, saving a biochemistry problem set on my laptop, and speaking over the blare of car music outside. “We’re a little busy right now with work and school. But first chance we get. Maybe late June.”
At my dodge, though, he was indignant.
“June?” he cried. “How about Friday?”
He had an urgent matter to discuss, he went on to explain. The conversation had to be in person and it could not wait. Really, I didn’t want to go anywhere. I was nearing the crucial end-of-semester exams week and already feeling behind. But it wasn’t easy to say “no” to my grandfather, not in the least because he happened to be the person footing the bill for the very master’s program that was causing my current anxiety. I spun in my desk chair. I raised my eyebrows, looking across the sun-streaked and cluttered apartment at Owen, who met my gaze from over the dreary stacks of high school essays that he was grading.
“Can we do it?” I whispered, holding the phone away.
A hollow sound: Owen’s pen tapping the top of his papers.
“It’s not convenient,” he finally answered, resigning himself. “But for him, I guess we can manage.”
I swiveled around again. Outside, a light turned green, and the traffic moved forward.
“All right,” I said into the phone, forcing a cheery tone. “Change of plans. We’ll drive up this weekend.”
From there, though, only more stipulations. My grandfather didn’t want to meet us at his ranch near Fresno, where he lived with the irascible woman I thought of only as “Wife Number Six,” but rather at the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite Park, the beloved place of his boyhood vacations, and where, he told me next without a hint of bashfulness, he’d already booked a weekend stay for the three of us.
That Friday, on the wings of a prayer that our declining Toyota Corolla could manage the six-hour drive, Owen and I made our way out of Los Angeles through bright landscapes host to almond orchards and strawberry farms, past rows of tall, swinging oil pumps like herds of mythological creatures dipping their heads to take long thirsty sips from the earth. The route brought us along narrowing roads to shadowy hills of firs, sequoias, cypress, juniper, and dogwood. At seven o’clock, we reached the hotel, and stepped into a world that existed on a scale totally different from the human-made, human-sized spaces we usually occupied. We were tired, bleary-eyed, but alive with the simple enthusiasm of young people happy to be somewhere new.
We walked across the pine-needle strewn parking lot and into the lobby of the Ahwahnee, where we were so awed by the majestic architecture, the dark and stately lodge furniture, that we almost missed the sudden appearance of the tall, elegantly mannered, white-haired man, Peter Bailey, my grandfather, who was striding out of the gift shop at just that moment, carting four brown bags overloaded with purchases.
During the drive, I’d been nervous. Even at age ninety-three, my grandfather was a volatile person, and you could never guess what mood he’d be in. But he appeared to us in high spirits, if not boldly amused with himself. He shook Owen’s hand, kissed my cheek—“Hello, Anna, good to see you, dear”—then led us to a wide leather couch in the lounge area, where he began to unpack, apparently for our benefit, what must have been two thousand dollars’ worth of merchandise.
“Here’s a beauty,” he said, making a grand show of freeing a glass-and-iron hurricane lantern from its brown paper wrapping. “Tell me how you like this.”
In addition to the lantern, he’d bought three decorative baskets, a purse with a braided handle, and a green-and-black Kachina doll, small mouth turned down and arm raised and thrusting a staff. There was also a set of painted bowls, a turquoise bracelet, a pair of wooden serving spoons with bone handles, and a large, stained-glass ornament of an orange sun that you could hang in a window.
To our great surprise, my grandfather announced that these were gifts for us, and began handing them over with an affectation I’d noted in him before: a somewhat off-putting mixture of pomp and self-deprecation.
“These are long overdue,” he said, “and I’m sorry for that. Missing your wedding was one thing. But then I completely forgot to send you a present.”
It was true that, due to a recent diagnosis of congestive heart failure, he had missed our wedding last fall. The flight cross-country to Philadelphia—the city where Owen and I had met during college, and where most of our friends had stayed on—had been deemed too risky for him. But as I reminded him, delicately, a little afraid of rattling him, he’d already sent us a lovely card and also a check that had covered our honeymoon plane tickets and seven nights at the Hotel Fontana, overlooking the Trevi Fountain in Rome.
“My God, I forgot,” he said, slapping his forehead. “I did do that, didn’t I? How extremely generous of me.” Then, recovering himself, and motioning at the bag I was holding, his eyes merry: “In that case,” he teased us, “hand it all back. These presents should go to somebody else.”
The hotel had a restaurant, with several available tables. Owen and I were about to bring the brown bags and also our overnight duffel upstairs, when my grandfather intervened and told us to let the bellhop do it instead, as he was hungry now and wanted to eat. I pointed out that Owen and I should probably change into something more suitable than T-shirts and jeans, but my grandfather waved away this idea, and seemed to find it proof of a fussiness that he did not condone.
So on through the lobby and into the dining room, which was even fancier than what I had feared, with its gleaming table settings and high walls and iron-black chandeliers. I wasn’t used to places like this. Owen was in his second year of teaching tenth-grade civics at Katella High School in Anaheim. I was in my first year of the master’s program in environmental science and ecology at UCLA, a degree that I was hoping to parlay—I couldn’t say exactly how—into some bright future work involving carbon capture and storage. It was true that, in Los Angeles, Owen and I couldn’t help but live in proximity to extreme wealth, but the experience was more of several economic worlds, all layered on top of each other, with only the rare jump like a quick streak of light crossing between them.
As we sat down at the immaculate table, I felt deeply uncomfortable. I was sure that Owen felt deeply uncomfortable. Though my grandfather, also in blue jeans, did not seem to perceive the faux pas.
Was it possible, I wondered idly, while trying to conceal my legs beneath an oversized napkin, fashioning it into a kind of skirt, to reach a point of feeling so superior that no misstep in the social world can embarrass you?
My grandfather didn’t open his menu. Instead, he beckoned the waiter to his side, and said in no hurry:
“Let me ask you something, do you have prime rib back there? Do you have Brussels sprouts?” While the waiter took notes, my grandfather described in detail the meal he expected to see on his plate. He raised one arthritic finger, and said, “Here’s what you’re going to do . . .”
The waiter left at a clip for the kitchen. Meanwhile, Owen, who had grown up the son of socialist-leaning Macy’s salesclerks in Queens, New York, said softly, in a voice that rang with horror: “I’ve never seen someone order like that.”
At this time, I was twenty-seven, recently married, and so—when my grandfather was not immediately forthcoming about his reasons for bringing us here—it felt natural for me to fill in the conversation with anecdotes from that happy event. Though it quickly became clear that my grandfather couldn’t have cared less about our wedding, and it wasn’t long before he was looking askance, taking a long sip of his scotch, and seemingly ready to broach the matter for which he had summoned us. He cleared his throat into his fist, and said finally, in a voice grave and stentorious:
“Now as you know, I asked you here for more than just the food and the hiking. This isn’t easy for me to say, but I’ve been talking to some of the family about it, and it’s time you kids should know too.” Owen lowered his glass, and I did the same. We were both in suspense. “The truth is that—” my grandfather’s voice cracked as he forced the words through. “The truth is that I’m dying.”
I found myself at a complete loss as for how to respond. My grandfather was ninety-three. His heart was failing. Was he expecting this news to be a surprise? I glanced at Owen, who met my eyes only briefly, maybe afraid that a longer look between us would betray something unseemly.
Finally I got a grip on myself. I put my hand to my grandfather’s arm. I said, “No, Grandpa. Don’t talk like that,” as if to admonish him for having said something cruel.
“But I am, I am,” he said, brave and resolute. “I’m not thrilled about it. I’d be very happy to live another ten years. Twenty years. Why not? Of course no one in the world agrees with me. They think that when you hit ninety, you should make your exit without complaining. It’s all right, dear,” he said, patting my hand away. “The end is coming and I’ve looked it in the face. I’ve put my things in order. The houses are clean and organized. Your uncle Craig is already taking care of the dogs. I’ve gone over my will so many times that the lawyers finally wrenched it away from me. They say I’m like a Renaissance painter who can’t put down his brush.”
He paused. Then wiped his napkin across his chapped, pale lips. His expression narrowed slightly.
“But there’s one thing I’m unhappy about,” he said. “That damn will involved a lot of compromise, to put it lightly. And the balance didn’t end up quite right. It takes care of my wife and her kids”—Wife Number Six, he meant, and her two middle-aged sons—“and it’s got a little something in it for my own kids and all you grandchildren”—he had a total of six children from his four middle marriages, fifteen grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren, by my last count—“but there’s one person I was forced to exclude,” my grandfather continued, “and I’m still pretty damn furious with myself for giving up on this point.”
I was pretty sure I knew what was coming. Through multiple channels the gossip had reached me that my grandfather had been in a months-long battle with Wife Number Six over the issue of writing a certain near-stranger into his will: a Tlingit-Hän woman from the Canadian North, whose inclusion—a robust biological progeny was bad enough—would be an insult to her position that Wife Number Six had sworn she could not bear.
“Winifred Lowell,” my grandfather said, confirming my guess. “If I have any unfinished business in my life, it’s with that woman. We never did right by her and her family. I never did. And before they’re handing out the poker chips and I’m room temperature, God knows I would like to do right.”
Again, although his passion ran fresh, my grandfather’s confession did not completely knock me out of my seat. I’d already heard from my relatives about his growing obsession with the Lowells, a family who, in 1898, and very unpropitiously for them, had clashed with my own maternal ancestors, the Bushes and Berrys, during the Klondike Gold Rush. Lately, my grandfather’s ruminations (and this gossip was from my relatives too) had folded all the way back to his own great-uncle and benefactor, Clarence Berry, who had left a dried-out fruit farm in the San Joaquin Valley of California to follow the rumor of gold in the North. There, after several years of prospecting, and against million-to-one odds, Clarence had obtained claims on a lucky creek, hit a prosperous vein, and become widely known as the King of the Klondike for all the gold he’d dug up.
“My great-uncle Clarence was a savvy businessman,” my grandfather explained to us now, answering our warm requests for clarification—what did he mean exactly, about never doing right by the Lowells?—“and I have to credit the man for his nerve. But it’s also the case that the whole damn Berry clan and half of California stampeded into the Yukon without a thought for who or what might be harmed in the process. Winnie’s grandmother, a Native Canadian by the name of Jane Lowell, worked one summer on the Berry claims, and from what I know of it, the poor woman never recovered from the experience. The details have been lost to time, but her brother died in a horrific accident involving none other than Clarence himself, I’m extremely sorry to say.”
“That’s terrible,” Owen responded. For Owen, it was the first he was hearing of this. For me, given the recent talk of the Lowells, it was actually a bit of family history that had lately passed through my mind, though admittedly not in the many years prior. Probably Owen and I would have said more, but at that moment the waiter arrived with our dinners. It was seafood pasta for me and lemon-caper tilapia for Owen, and prime rib for my grandfather, which he sampled and deemed passable before, not bad-naturedly, waving the waiter away.
“When I was twenty,” my grandfather told us, picking up where we’d left off, “I had that same realization. My own grandparents’ generation had begun to die off, and my mother inherited the bulk of the family fortune. But what do you know? No sooner were we being flooded with our rightful inheritance than the genius notion started growing in me that the whole thing was unfair. And the more I came to learn about the roots of the money, all the way back to Clarence’s big gold discovery, the more I became convinced that we owed this Lowell family some kind of restitution. My parents thought I was nuts, but a couple years later, 1944, right in the thick of the fighting, I was with my LST off the coast of Alaska when I managed to maneuver myself to the Navy base in Sitka. One weekend, I showed up at the house of a Native Canadian fellow named Ed Lowell who was none other than Jane Lowell’s grown-up son. My idea was to pay off this fellow’s mortgage. Something flashy like that.”
“That’s nice,” I offered, pausing over my meal, “I never knew that.” But my grandfather shook his head in response.
“I got about one step into the house before the family figured out who I was and kicked me out, and the wife—Marion, I think her name was—told me in words I won’t repeat to mind my own business.”
He laughed a small, sad laugh, toward a long row of dark chandeliers.
“They had a daughter though,” my grandfather continued, shooting a conspiratorial grin to Owen that Owen did not feel compelled to return. “A spunky, very pretty young woman named Winifred who didn’t think I was so bad. After my run-in with her parents, Winnie came to meet me at the Navy base. We went out dancing together two or three nights. Imagine that, proverbial grandson and granddaughter of the gold rush era, spinning and flouncing around. We wrote to each other while I was off in the Pacific. That was the era of love letters, and we were both more than happy to play our parts. We kept in touch, even after we both got involved with other people. I visited her while she was living in Juneau a couple of times. I think the last time I saw her was when she came to LA when we were both about fifty. She was newly divorced then and had her daughter in tow. I remember I offered her a bit of financial help, and she made a joke I found very fresh at the time, about being owed more than a thousand dollars or two, and in response I called her an ingrate or something horrid like that.”
“Oh no,” Owen said.
“You don’t have to tell me.” My grandfather leaned over the table and absentmindedly cut several rough bites of steak. For a moment, I sat watching him eat. I hadn’t realized the extent of my grandfather’s involvement with the Lowells, and with Winnie especially, and I began to wonder what else I was missing. Finally he put down his fork and resumed speaking, now in a deeply serious tone. “We were in and out of touch after that. Honestly, I had enough women in my life to keep me busy. Six wives one after another is a job on its own. Then I got my diagnosis, and it was like the faces of my dead relatives and the whole Lowell family came flooding back into my head. You’re too young to understand this, but when you’re nearing the end, you’re able to see the shape of your life and the people who shared it with you with a new kind of clarity. Unfortunately I’m not sure I like what I see, is what I’m trying to say. I had the chance to set one small thing right with Winnie, and even that I messed up.”
He shook his head, and I had the feeling that he was wondering at himself, at his own remarkable instincts.
“Ed and Marion Lowell must be long dead,” he said. “I’d like to think that Winnie’s alive. She was a few years younger than me. If not, then we can probably track down her daughter. The point is, it’s never too late to do the moral thing. Lucky for procrastinators like me. If Sylvia”—Wife Number Six—“really cannot stand for me to write the Lowells into my will, I’ll give them the money now.”
With surprising rapidity, my grandfather next unleashed for us the nitty-gritty of, not his feelings, but the details of his brokerage accounts. For the last several months, he’d been moving money around. He had built a secret account from various Morgan Stanley investments, to the tune of three and a half million, that he was ready to transfer to Winnie or her descendants—with the slight complication that he hadn’t been in touch with Winnie for decades and had no leads on a current address.
By this time, I was feeling weighed down by the rich dinner, the long day of travel, but even through my fog I was finally starting to understand why my grandfather had invited us here (announcing his imminent death had only been his warm-up) and what he was expecting from us.
A breath later, details began spilling forth, while my thoughts raced, playing catch-up with time. He needed addresses. Signatures. Notarized forms. Then he was discussing the plane tickets he was ready to purchase for a pair of fresh-faced upstarts who might like to help him out on this mission. I was sure that I’d been very specifically targeted. My mother had been his rebel child among a slew of more conservative siblings, and he’d always seemed to view me, not incorrectly, through that particular lens. As for him, he told us now that we were the only people he trusted for the job. We were young, he said, with a good social sense, and boasting the kind of newfangled political leanings he’d guessed would make us look alive at anything involving—what did people call it? he asked—ah, yes, “the redistribution of wealth.” He hadn’t forgotten, he told us, that ambush last Christmas during our annual family gathering when we’d talked his ears off about higher realized gains taxes, environmental protections, and—I kept expecting him to wince—the need for federally funded, universalized healthcare.
“So, refresh my memory, please,” my grandfather said at last, tilting back in his chair. “I sent you lovebirds to Italy, did I?”
“We’re so grateful,” said Owen, clearing his throat, speaking over the last bites of his ravaged tilapia. “We took a million pictures.”
“Well, Rome’s a great place,” my grandfather said. “And the Trevi Fountain is breathtaking. But I think you’d enjoy a bit of rugged adventure, after all that living in luxury.”
Owen and I agreed to the trip. We did it helplessly, almost against our will. Just like we had agreed to this meeting. We said, yes, we will travel to the Yukon and track down the Lowells. We said, if not in quite so many words, yes, we will help you move money from a place of abundance to a place of probable need, so that when you die, and you soon will die, you can do it with the sense of loose ends tied up, and good deeds finally done.
I heard myself say, “We’d love to go, Grandpa.”
I heard Owen say, “I can’t think why not.”
I heard my grandfather say, giddy, “It’s a relief to do it. Isn’t that funny? Look at me. I couldn’t be happier.”
By the time the caramel cake and crème brûlée and chocolate mousse were finished, the basic arrangements were settled. A few dates in June had been laid out for our choosing. Questions of passports and money and hotels had been posed and responded to.
The bill for dinner arrived in a thick leather pouch. Owen and I both reached for our wallets, and my grandfather had his biggest laugh of the night.
Then my grandfather stood, testing his knees, holding the table. Now he wanted a whiskey at the bar, an adjacent room with an impressive six-foot stone fireplace and a roaring, massive fire within. I followed several steps until, thanks to a couple of cues, including his bidding me good night, it dawned on me that my grandfather, who lived according to the social norms of a previous era, expected to have an after-dinner drink with my husband alone. As for me, a young lady, he assumed I should now skip off to bed. Usually I would not acquiesce to such ludicrous sexism. But he was so old, my grandfather. It didn’t seem worth it to teach him a lesson. And so, humoring him, standing in for the female ghosts of his youth, I rose on tiptoes, kissed his cheek, spoke a few cheerful words, and, turning quick on a heel, marched off toward the elevator.
An hour later, I was curled in the soft, massive bed, reading my phone, when the door to the hotel room burst open and Owen strode in, still reeling from what had been asked of us.
“My god, Anna, your grandfather is obsessed with that family,” Owen said, pulling off his shirt and talking to me from the foot of the bed. “He can’t wait to send us up there. He wants to book us the flights over breakfast tomorrow. It’s a little unsettling.”
“We can back out,” I said, sitting up against the headboard and dropping my phone to the bedside table.
My mood, since dinner, had grown subdued. Instead of studying, I’d spent the quiet time alone reading about the Klondike Gold Rush. Though hardly a blip in the story of American history now, it was the phenomenon that had bestowed the words “Klondike” and “Yukon” with the romantic aura that still clung to them today. Historically, it was a summons—and this I did know a bit about—that had brought tens of thousands of prospectors charging into the Canadian North to try their luck in what was, as seems obvious now, a blatant and unrepentant pillaging mission.
Then, in this stately room, with a growing awareness of my moneyed surroundings, of the Kachina doll in a bag on the floor, I’d looked up the Ahwahnee Hotel and come upon information to match my forebodings. These very grounds in fact had once been the home of the Ahwahneechee, a group of Native American survivors who’d retreated deep into the Yosemite Valley during the genocidal violence that accompanied the founding of California. The Ahwahneechee leader, Tenaya, was the namesake of the lake we planned to hike to tomorrow. But—and I’d had no inkling of this, and found both the story and the hiddenness of the story deeply disturbing—it turned out that the lake had been named after him, not in his honor, but as a taunt. A band of newly minted Californians, the Mariposa Battalion, after killing Tenaya’s young son and seizing the camp, had promised to call the lake after him to mark the destruction of what the man had tried to preserve.
“I can tell you’re having second thoughts,” Owen said to me now. He balled up his T-shirt and stuffed it into the side of our duffel bag.
“I am. I feel like my grandfather bullied us into this.”
“Do you want to tell him we changed our minds?”
“No. But not for his sake. If he wants to give this family a chunk of his money, I don’t want to be the reason it doesn’t go through.”
“He has you pegged.” A loving grin, only slightly pitying. “Do you know what your grandfather called you at the bar? A rigorously ethical, anti-materialistic, heart-of-gold idealist.”
“He was probably being sarcastic,” I said, while Owen said, before I’d hardly finished speaking, “He was definitely being sarcastic.”
“What else did you talk about?”
“He was going on about the Klondike,” Owen said with a shrug. “He thinks we’ll like it there. He says he wishes he could go and see it himself.” Then, dropping onto the mattress beside me and crossing his hands behind his head: “Actually, I’m starting to get excited for this trip. It will be fun to see the gold creeks. All the old buildings in Dawson City. It’s this weird, hidden-away corner of the world with a crazy history to match.”
“History is an insufficient word for what went on in that place,” I answered him flatly. “It was a more brutal interaction than what I think you’re imagining.”
Really, I was surprised at Owen. I wouldn’t have expected him to be taken in by my grandfather’s stories: which, as was becoming clear to me—no matter how much my grandfather had sung his regrets over the wrongs done to the Lowells—had lapsed back into the glittering form of a good ol’ rags-to-riches tale, with the added dash of a Northern adventure. Now I could tell that Owen was mulling it over, considering other ways of viewing, which, in fact, given his background, was a reorientation that should have been easy for him.
After all, Owen was no novice to the facts of humanity’s ugliest moments. He literally taught his students a three-month unit on the horrors of warfare. He hailed from two sets of Jewish grandparents, who’d narrowly escaped death in Germany and Poland. Plus he was married to me, who, on my father’s side, was Armenian, a relatively obscure ethnicity (at least in America) that had almost been finished off by ethnic cleansing in Turkey during World War I and its aftermath. It should have been simple work for him, as it was for me, to take my grandfather’s stories, and flip them upside down, and turn them in hand, and see the struggle and the bloodshed that ran through them, as their dominant quality.
“My point is,” I went on, “no matter how much my grandfather goes on about apologies and reparations, there’s still a big part of him that clings to his Klondike stories as this exciting, beautiful history. But the truth is as vicious as it gets. It was all about money.”
“Always is,” Owen said lightly.
“But in this case, really.”
Owen’s bright mood faltered. Then, after a thoughtful pause, it returned, and at triple the wattage. He turned to me. His gaze was warm and insistent. I took the two pillows that had fallen into the space between us and dropped them onto the floor.
“It’s called a gold rush,” he said, sliding over. “Was that your first clue?”
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