Authors: Jane Smiley
were capable of. It was a clear day, bright and fresh. Margaret was more frightened than
Andrew, but still somewhat invigorated by the very novelty of the thing.
The navy already knew, however, because of wireless transmissions, that part of
San Francisco had crumpled to the ground--all the buildings and tenements down near the
Embarcadero and the wharf. Margaret was relieved, just at the very first, for the briefest
interval, to hear this. Andrew exclaimed, "The Palace Hotel is at Third and Market, quite
a ways from the water." And though buildings were down, not that many deaths had
occurred, except maybe in Chinatown. Chinatown was ten blocks or more from the
Palace Hotel, and the Palace, unlike the buildings in Chinatown, had been built to the
highest standard. For about half an hour, they took comfort in that. They ran to the ferry
landing, as yet somewhat optimistic, but at the ferry landing, they felt an aftershock,
which was more unnerving, in a way, than earlier, stronger shocks. It was this aftershock
that brought on the dread.
Each ferry was more jammed with men, women, and children than the one before
it. Some people were carrying bundles, and some were carrying nothing at all. Almost
everyone was dirty and disheveled, and all were telling of harrowing escapes. Many of
them had no friends or relatives or business in Vallejo; they had just jumped on the first
ferry they could. All the ferries were heading out--to Oakland, Alameda, anywhere away
from the city. Through the afternoon, they expected to see Andrew's mother and Mrs.
Hitchens, a little disarranged, perhaps, but full of energy and curiosity, thrilled to tell
them all about it. Each traveler added to the general knowledge, and with each story they
heard, Margaret was forced to picture the devastation creeping toward Third and Market,
but no one knew for sure whether the Palace Hotel was down or not. And as bad as it was
in San Francisco, it was rumored that conditions were worse to the northwest. Santa Rosa
was flattened, they said. Just about then, with the aftershock and the tales told by the
survivors, Andrew began to get frantic.
The earthquake was succeeded by fire, and the navy was sending three ships,
including a hospital ship, across the bay. Andrew went straight to the Commandant and
forced himself into a meeting--he begged to go on one ship or another, he was tall and
strong, but the Commandant wouldn't hear of it. Then Andrew decided to take one of the
returning ferries, but just then, news came in that the ferry terminal at the foot of Mission
was already burned to the waterline. Mrs. Early and Mrs. Hitchens had not been on any
returning ferry, and of course no one knew them. All Andrew and Margaret could do was
mill about in the crowd and listen. There were miraculous escapes. A fellow from Vallejo
had gone to San Francisco the day before, taken a hotel room, and been put on the fourth
floor; when his hotel collapsed, he had dropped to the ground from his shattered window
and run for his life. Andrew asked him which hotel--the Brunswick. Where was his hotel
from the Palace? Sixth and Howard, four blocks, said Andrew, six at the most, half a mile
as the crow flies. But people had helped this man--he wasn't even wearing his own
clothes. The lesson Andrew took from this conversation was that Mrs. Early and Mrs.
Hitchens could so easily be helped. Statistically, Andrew kept telling her, they were
likely to be safe. The population of San Francisco was over four hundred thousand. By
the end of the afternoon, they had still heard of only a few deaths. Even if four thousand
people died, that was 1 percent. Nothing like four thousand people were going to die,
Andrew thought, but even if they did, his mother and Mrs. Hitchens, separately, had
ninety-nine-to-one odds of surviving, of returning, of having an amazing and astonishing
tale to tell. "My mother," he said, "has never believed she would be struck by lightning.
She doesn't hold out for the fourth ace or the fifty-to-one shot." He said this as if her
predilections were a guarantee that she would eventually be counted among the safe
majority.
They left the ferry building late in the afternoon, and he hurried Margaret out to
the western edge of the island. From there, as dusk closed in, she could see the glow of
the fire far to the southwest--was it twenty miles, or not even? They watched it, though it
was only a glow and did not look like a fire. Even so, they also thought they could smell
the smoke and sense a lurid haze between themselves and the setting sun. As the evening
progressed, the glow became visible from the roof of the Lears' house, and they stood up
there with the boys, gazing at it.
Andrew swore that he would get to the city the next day. Others had gone--Mr.
Devlin, whom Mrs. Lear knew through friends in Vallejo--had gone to find his wife and
child. From a distance, it seemed as if you could do just that. "Or they might have gotten
out by train." Andrew kept saying this. "That would be more efficient. We don't know
how far west the fires have run. They could be in Oakland, but they could also be in San
Jose, or even Santa Cruz." Standing on the roof of the Lears' house, Margaret thought she
heard explosions, distant rumbles, but perhaps she did not. Perhaps, since she knew that
there were explosions (and many of them man-made, as they dynamited much of the city
to make a firebreak), she only thought she heard them.
But every story demonstrated that really you could not go to the city and find a
person, or two people, or entire families. Many stories were not only astonishing, they
were wrenching and terrifying. One man had been out in the early morning, right down
by the ferry building. He said that by ten o'clock Mission Street was an "inferno"-wagons left in the middle of the street burst into flames, and the flames roared and rolled
overhead, as in a furnace. Hotels and boarding houses collapsed, with people inside
screaming, and then burst into flames even as the rescuers were dragging people out. The
hospitals themselves and the refuges had to be evacuated as the flames approached. What
everyone reported as the most terrifying thing was that the rushing wind seemed to be
made of flame, that the winds and the flames together seemed to be stoking themselves
into a kind of whirlwind of fire.
Of course there were those, in the following days, who drew that customary
analogy between the notoriously sinful ways of the people of San Francisco, most
especially those denizens of the Barbary Coast, and those of the people of Sodom and
Gomorrah, which people always draw. And the unnumbered deaths in Chinatown were,
to these people, another piece of evidence for the wrath of God. But if someone dared to
express such sentiments in front of Andrew, he would roar at them, and so even those so
inclined kept these feelings to themselves around him.
On April 20, with the fires still burning, Andrew did manage to get to Sausalito,
but he could get no farther: every boat and ship in the bay was engaged in evacuating
people from the south end of Van Ness Avenue, not in carrying anyone into the city.
When he came home late on the twenty-first, he was convinced that his mother and Mrs.
Hitchens were in Golden Gate Park, or at the Presidio. "Thousands there. Thousands.
Who is more enterprising than my mother, after all?" He sent reassuring telegrams to his
brothers, not exactly saying that he had found the two women, but implying that he
shortly would--though, of course, he knew nothing, had heard nothing. The Palace Hotel?
Entirely gone. But perhaps they had not stayed there. Or not gone to the opera. They
hadn't had tickets yet when they left Vallejo--maybe they had never gotten tickets.
Maybe, upon arriving in San Francisco on the afternoon of the sixteenth, they had
changed their minds entirely. Mrs. Early was a woman of strong impulses and good
instincts. Equipped, Andrew said, to survive. Once, when he was a very little boy, but old
enough to remember, he had been sitting in a wagon and the horses had bolted. At the
very instant the horses lifted their heads and pricked their ears, before the wagon even
started to move, Andrew's mother had stepped over to him and lifted him off the seat,
easy as you please, then stepped backward as the wagon slid by her. It was a frightening
thing when you thought of it--she could have been looking the other way, or not been
quick enough and gone under the wheel, or been distracted by the thought of trying to
stop the horses, but she had done just the rightest, safest thing, purely on intuition, so
gracefully and quickly that no one had been afraid until later.
They did not sleep that night, or even go to bed. All there was to do, really, was to
walk down to the ferry building and back to the house, talk to neighbors and sailors and
officers, watch that glow on the southwestern horizon, and discuss whether it was
brighter or dimmer, and all of these things they could no longer stand to do. At one point,
Andrew, who was pacing from the front door to the back door, said, "I bet I could get to
Oakland. They could well be in Oakland, and it's hard to get from Oakland to here right
now. But Mother is enterprising...." This for the hundredth time.
Margaret's manner with Andrew until this point had been agreeable and
submissive--she was too shocked to behave in any other way, for one thing, and, for
another, he had an answer for every doubt. She thought her own doubts--her own doubts
that were shading into convictions--were best left unspoken. It was bad luck as well as
unloving to say what she thought, especially what she thought when she found out that
the Palace Hotel was down. But now, finally, she said, "Yes, Andrew, your mother is
terrifically enterprising, which is why I think that she would have gotten a message to us
now, somehow, if she--I mean, they did find Mr. Devlin's little girl yesterday, and she's
only three and a half, and they did find that Mrs. Devlin was killed. Lots of news, one
way or the other, has--"
She could see by looking at his face that this very doubt, the doubt that came from
Mrs. Early's everlasting silence, wasn't far from his thoughts, even though he hadn't
expressed it. He shook his head. "I'm sure it's something else."
"I am losing hope."
"But I am not." He walked out the front door. A minute later, he walked back in.
His eyes were bright and his hair was standing on end, as if, while outside, he had torn
his hands through it. He said, "It doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense that they came
out here to California on impulse and therefore died. It makes sense for us to have died,
or people who have lived here for years and years to have died, but not this, this doesn't
make sense."
"Life and death never make sense--"
"I know you think that."
"How can I think otherwise? My brother's friends found a blasting cap down at
the railyard. What made sense about that? The universe makes no sense."
"It does!" He said this so pugnaciously that she nodded in spite of herself, then
reached out and took his hand. She said, "Then I will just say that I don't know what
sense the universe makes, though I might someday, I admit." He glared at her as if
accusing her of making a joke. She said, "I want your mother to turn up somehow. I've
offered all the bargains."
"What do you mean by that?"
"I've cried. I've prayed. I've stared down the street until I thought I could see her
coming. I've opened the door to every room in the house just when I was most clearly
picturing her on the other side. I've imagined a broken arm or a broken leg, if that's the
price we would have to pay. I love your mother, especially now, after her visit."
"She could have lost her memory and her papers."
"Mrs.
Hitchens--"
"Mrs. Hitchens might have died, which might be why she lost her memory. She
could be wandering around."
"She
could
be."
"Someone could be taking care of her and have no idea of who she is or of who I
am or how to find us."
"That could happen. But think about that, Andrew. Is that easier to think about
than death? Is it? Even if it's just in your imagination, do you want to impose days of
suffering on her rather than a simple and sudden death?"
"I don't want any of this."
"Of course not." He went out the front door again. As a rule, she didn't think of
herself as adept at anything, but she saw that early practice had made her more adept than
Andrew at recognizing death when it arrived.
A little while later, Andrew, who had come back in the house but not come into
the bedroom, went out again. It was then, just then, sitting up in bed and listening to his
steps approach and retreat, that she felt the old feeling come on, that of the spectacle
unfolding around her and her own fascinated paralysis. She lay awake most of the night,
remembering what he had said, what she had said, as if she were going over lines in a
play and could not stop. It was strange and horrifying. She thought if he would come
back and speak to her again she could break the spell, but he didn't come back that night.
The next day, he told her that he had gone to the observatory and stared through the