Authors: Jane Smiley
telescope, in spite of the fog and in spite of the smoke. He wasn't looking for anything,
and he wrote down no findings or observations. He might even have slept--he didn't
know--but the time had passed. Yes, she thought, the time had passed while seeming not
to.
The fires had been burning for four days, but they began hearing some bits of
good news, one of which was that, thanks to the efforts of their own Lieutenant Freeman
(whom Mrs. Lear seemed to know), the contingent from Mare Island had, in fact, saved
the ferry building and quite a few other buildings and docks on the water side of the
Embarcadero, and also managed to keep order and prevent the locals from raiding the
saloons, getting themselves drunk, and falling prey to the fires. With little water but much
ingenuity, they had done a great deal of good for the city (though they had dynamited a
few too many buildings as a precaution, but no one cared about that). That day, they
heard that the fires were abating, turning back upon themselves, or failing to leap over
dynamited areas west of Van Ness. That evening, Margaret was walking down their
street, wondering what they could do, and Hubert Lear called out to her from the upper
balcony of the Lear house. "Ma'am! Ma'am! Mrs. Margaret!" She turned, and he stubbed
out his cigarette. He was standing on the railing, and he took off his cap and dipped his
head. Then he shouted, "Oh, Mrs. Margaret, she was a very nice lady. We are all really
sorry about what happened to her."
"Thank you for your thoughts, Hubert."
"We all prayed for her and the other one by name, every night. But I guess it
didn't work."
"Maybe it still will."
He shook his head, began, "Mama says ...," then fell silent. After a moment, he
said, "Anyway, we all liked her, and we thanked her for the tennis rackets. So she just ..."
But then he seemed embarrassed, and jumped down from the railing and went inside. She
didn't say anything to Andrew about this when she got home, though it was a warm day,
and the windows on that side of the house were open. He could easily have heard their
exchange. But it was for herself that she was grateful to Hubert Lear: the interchange had
woken her up again, reminded her that survival was a task, above all. Nothing more,
really.
Andrew finally got himself to Golden Gate Park. He stayed overnight in one of
the tents, then, starting at daybreak, walked all over the park and up to the Presidio,
asking after, and looking for, the two ladies. When he came home, he was willing to
admit that he had not found them. That afternoon, he telegraphed his brothers again,
saying that he had searched for their mother and Mrs. Hitchens and "not found them."
Margaret was with him as he wrote out the telegram. She saw him write "yet" on the
form, then pause, look at it, cross it out, then look at it again. She didn't say anything. He
sent the telegram that allowed his brothers to infer that the two ladies had perished. By
this time, names of some of those whose remains were being discovered were coming
out. There were not so many--a few hundred, for which the mayor declared himself
relieved and proud. But there were more. Everyone knew there were more. Everyone who
had been there and escaped had seen more with his or her own eyes.
Andrew and Margaret could not stand talking about it anymore. She wrote a long
letter to Lavinia, some sixteen pages, telling her as much about what had happened as she
could, especially everything she knew, or suspected, about Mrs. Early and Mrs. Hitchens.
It would be her mother's responsibility, after all, to fill in all the news and rumors. Even
as she wrote this letter, she could imagine her words flying about the streets of Darlington
and in and out of kitchens and parlors, alarming and electrifying everyone, including
those who knew the Earlys only by sight. As for John Early and his wife, she told her
mother to go to them first, share the letter with them first, so they would be prepared for
the hail of gossip and well-wishing they would have to withstand. The letter took her two
days to write. By the time she sent it off, it was eight days since the earthquake, or a year,
or a lifetime. Then she began going to memorial services--for Mrs. Devlin, for other men
who were lost, for everyone. Andrew went to the naval ones, but he wouldn't agree when
Mrs. Lear asked him if he would like to hold a service for his mother, or to include her in
one.
Margaret had been to many a funeral over the years. She had found, at least back
in Missouri, that a funeral was much like a wedding, in that the display was as important
as the occasion. Everyone knew with a funeral, as with a wedding, that there would be
considerable gossip afterward about the real nature of the deceased and what the funeral
showed about the family--the neighbors could get inside the house and look around while
the family members were distracted. But it was not like this at the memorial services for
the earthquake victims. At these memorial services, people reflected, not upon just
deserts, but upon miracles and tricks of fate, the perfect example of this being the
memorial service for Mrs. Devlin, where her three-and-a-half-year-old daughter sat in the
first row, between her father and her aunt. The weather was beautiful, and the windows
were open to the sounds of birds singing in the trees outside. Prayers were said. Eulogies
were made. Father Nicoll didn't tell the story, but everyone knew what there was to
know: Mr. Devlin, in his hasty trip to the city on the day of the quake, had had no luck,
but later, there Mrs. Devlin was, in the middle of Beale Street, probably felled by bricks-her body was found next to a collapsed house. She was identified by the contents of her
shopping bag, which lay underneath the body, unburned. The child, Emma, turned up in
Folsom Street, many blocks away--almost to Ninth. She was shoeless, and her hair had
been singed, but she was otherwise unhurt, walking about, crying. Had she been carried
there by some kind person, then abandoned? Had she walked there? Every possibility
seemed equally unlikely, and yet here she was, and she had no way of telling what had
happened to her. How she was found was equally unlikely--two drunks, wandering from
saloon to saloon in search of liquor, picked her up and took her with them. At their
second or third stop, Mr. Devlin's cousin, who was a sailor on Lieutenant Freeman's ship,
happened to be in that saloon, rounding up the drunken populace. He didn't recognize
Emma, but she recognized him. The cousin was detailed to take a ferry and bring her
home. It was the very next ferry to arrive after the one carrying a distraught and hopeless
Mr. Devlin. Emma's father was wandering about the wharf, not knowing what to do next,
when his cousin came running up to him and told him that Emma was found. The
operation of larger forces, it seemed to Margaret as she sat at the memorial service,
stripped them for the time being of their own pettiness, in a way that the steady and
predictable stream of deaths she'd grown up with had never done. She had made a few
friends at the memorial services and joined a knitting circle; then she met two other
women who liked to read books.
Andrew did not accompany her to the memorial services, but he did reproduce his
gunshot experiment with Hubert Lear, and he bought a camera and made some plates of
the results. Then he sent it off to
The Astronomical Journal
with dispatch, as if he had
never hesitated. Both Margaret and Andrew knew he was doing it for his mother, but they
didn't speak about it. After that, he devoted himself to investigating the earthquake--he
went to Benicia, he went all over Vallejo, he went up to Napa and overland to Santa
Rosa. He went back to San Francisco and down to Oakland. He corresponded with men
in San Jose and Santa Cruz and Sacramento. He gathered every fact and observation he
could: How had the chimney fallen? Which bricks had toppled, which bricks had
remained in place, which part of the road had sunk, and how far and what was the angle
of the shear? He wanted to see every single thing that the earthquake had done, every
change that it had wrought. He read all the papers and all the reports, but in fact he was
not as interested in the casualties as he was in the killer itself, in its exact portrait. He
walked right up to survivors and asked questions, not about how the survivor was feeling,
but about what, exactly, fell off the shelf and what did not, and how wide the shelf was,
and what it was made of. Which wall collapsed and which did not? What time, to the best
of your estimation, did the fire reach your block, and where were you standing when you
first noticed it, and were you looking toward Second Street or toward Harrison Street-that is, do you think the fire was coming straight toward you or doubling back upon
itself? After the building collapsed, could you actually hear people screaming, and if so,
for how long would you say the screaming lasted? There was a ghoulishness in the
questions he asked (others did, too), but people wanted to answer, no matter what they
had lost.
Later, Margaret thought that, in measuring this bit of subsidence and the cracks in
that tower, and in estimating forces and keeping copious detailed notes, as he knew so
well how to do ("Testimony of Mary Griffin, aged 27, who was residing at 306 Mission
Street at the time of the quake. Miss Griffin was asleep in her bed on the first floor, in the
northeast corner of the house"), Andrew performed the kindest act of his life. And he
carried his camera about with him. He photographed mudflats and rock faces and brick
walls, usually with some easily recognizable object in the photo for scale. During these
investigations, he did not talk much about his mother, but he did exclaim, from time to
time, that now he understood what the earth had done, almost moment by moment. When
the final report about the earthquake came out two years after the earthquake, Andrew put
his copy on the shelf just below his mother's photograph, two thick volumes, her
monument (more so, Margaret thought, than the stone his brothers had erected in the
graveyard, beside the grave of their father). But even the longest book, she now
understood, was the merest reduction of any experience, or any life.
ONE DAY, after this work was finished, Andrew said, "My dear, do you ever
think about the moon?" They were eating supper.
"You mean, about the craters?"
After the article had come out in
The Astronomical Journal
, he had written a more
popular one for the
Examiner
. As a contributor to the investigation of the earthquake, he
was given quite a bit of space to explain his theory. And there was also a picture of
Hubert Lear with his shotgun, sitting nonchalantly on a high branch of a tree, with
Andrew looking up at him from below. The article was a local success, and Mrs. Lear
framed it and hung it beside her front door.
"No, no, no," he said. "Not that. Do you ever think about how the moon came to
be just where it is?"
"Where it is in the sky?"
"More or less, but of course it's not in the sky. It's in space."
She had forgotten this. She considered him actually quite patient with her
continuing, and apparently obdurate, astronomical ignorance.
"I gather that you don't ever wonder about how the moon came to be just where it
is."
"I may have wondered that at some point, but I'm used to it now."
Andrew
laughed.
"So, how did the moon get to be where it is now?"
"Well, you see, that's a question that is not so easy to answer, my dear. In fact,
when I myself asked my astronomy professor that question in college, he told me that it
wasn't worth asking."
"Why
not?"
"Because most people think that it can't be answered."
She said, "It does seem like it
should
be answered."
"Yes, it does." But he fell silent, and it appeared that he didn't have the answer
after all.
A few nights later, she was reading and decided to go to bed. She turned out the
lamp above her chair. The room went dark, and the light through the window silvered
over her book and her lap. She looked up, and there was the moon, just rising, large and
round and friendly. She stood up and went to the door of Andrew's study. When he called
out, "Come in!" she opened the door and said, "All right, where did the moon come
from?"
He grinned and said, "What do you think of this idea--that, long, long ago, the
Earth was not solid but was, instead, fluid and molten, hotter than red hot, more like a
cauldron of molten iron without the cauldron?"
She thought about this. She said, "What would keep it all together if there were no
cauldron?"
"A combination of gravity and centripetal force."
She imagined she understood this.
Then he said, "You know, the moon and the Earth don't remain the same distance
apart. The moon gets farther away."
"It
does?"
"A little bit every day, a very little bit. It's the effect of gravitation. The Earth's
rotation is being slowed down by the moon, and so days are getting longer, while the