Authors: Jane Smiley
(Andrew sent it free, of course), and then, within a gratifyingly short time, Pete visited
for the afternoon, just to discuss Andrew's theories. Andrew took this opportunity to walk
Pete over to the observatory and show him the little telescope again. Over supper they
talked about a happy subject, investments--Andrew's had flourished. He bragged a little
that he had turned over his inheritance from his mother almost three times ("That's
geometric, not arithmetic, you know"), and after a while Pete brought the conversation
back around to the extraordinary way Andrew had managed to mesh "the
known
with the
unknown."
This conversation sustained Andrew's buoyant mood for days, and
reconfirmed his sense of Pete's unusual talent. ("Not, perhaps, strictly speaking, genius,
my dear, he's a bit too eclectic for that, but a rare understanding, at the very least. And it's
no secret that Russians are easily distracted.")
DORA was one of several reporters assigned to cover the Preparedness Day
parade--projected to be the biggest parade ever in San Francisco, and, everyone thought,
a kind of ratification that San Francisco had resurrected itself, surpassed itself. Tens of
thousands of people were to march, and fifty bands, ostensibly to show the Europeans
where salvation was to be found, but really, Margaret gathered, to celebrate. Dora was
assigned to ferret out interesting little moments, characteristic bits of San Francisco life.
She persuaded Margaret to stay with her the night before, a Friday, and though she had
not planned a party, the apartment was filled with friends and strangers who spilled into
the hallway, down the stairs, and out into the park across the street, where Margaret saw
Leonora and three women she didn't know gesturing with their glowing cigarettes in the
late twilight.
By midnight, Margaret was sitting on the windowsill in one corner of the
apartment, almost behind a drape, yawning, but enjoying the sparkly bustle in the street
below, where four inebriates were singing "You Made Me Love You," and doing the
harmonies quite nicely. Then Pete showed up, and he did not look happy. Margaret
watched him make his way across the room to Dora, who was standing with Mal Cohen,
and say something. Mal's eyebrows went up and Dora tossed her head, and Pete put his
hands in his pockets. The three of them talked fairly earnestly for a while; then Pete
wandered around the room. He had not taken off his hat. He spoke to this person and that
person. Margaret tried to watch, and to gauge whether he was more interested in any
other woman than he was in Dora, but her back kept crumpling against the window frame
and her eyes kept closing. Perhaps he came up to her. Perhaps she heard his voice and felt
a hand on her shoulder.
In the morning, Dora's attitude about the parade was slightly more subdued. She
was ready to go, but not eager. At one point, she said to Margaret, "Darling, you could
watch it perfectly well from here."
"No, I could not. I couldn't even see it!" exclaimed Margaret, pinning on her hat
in front of Dora's big glass--bigger than any glass on the entire island, probably. Dora
pursed her lips. They went down the staircase and out the front door, and turned toward
the Embarcadero.
Margaret thought she was used to bustle, but she had never seen such a crowd
before in her life, and it daunted her more than she expected. People were everywhere-on the sidewalks, on the streets, sitting in doorways, leaning out of windows. The parade
was to march up Market Street, but it seemed that every street was full. She looked up.
Boys were standing on roofs, and more than a few had shinnied up light poles. Hawkers
peddled everything from umbrellas, to sardines wrapped in slices of bread, to apricot
turnovers. Dora did not even look around as she snaked through the crowd. There were
people tuning up their instruments and tightening their drums. Two ladies in uniforms
marshaled a bunch of orphans into four straight lines, and two of the girls caught
Margaret's eye as she passed. One of them, with blond braids to her waist, smiled.
Margaret gazed at her, wondering how such a pretty girl had ended up at the orphanage.
That was when she lost Dora, who seemed to vanish like a fish through the
surface of a pond. Margaret stopped and looked around. But it was impossible to stand,
too, so she let the crowd move her along, only offering enough resistance so that she
could keep the nearest corner--Battery and Market--in her sights. She and Dora had come
down Bush Street, something of a hill--and it occurred to her that if the crowd got worse
she could retreat back up the hill and still see at least part of the parade. She took a
quarter out of her purse and gave it to a pushcart man. He handed her an appetizinglooking bun, sugar crystals sprinkled on top, but as she took it in her hand she had what
could only be called a "turn," as Lavinia would say. The crowd closed around her and she
began gasping. The man who had sold her the bun looked at her oddly, then said, "Hey,
lady--" She remembered to do what she had thought to do so long before--she retreated
up Bush Street. The effort was successful. Somehow, standing on the hill, seething
though it was, calmed her nerves. She ate her bun.
When the flags and the first groups of horsemen came down the street, she could
see them perfectly. Shouts went up. The ranks of the horsemen and then the first brass
band were impressive--side by side, the trumpets, then the trombones and tubas stretched
across the width of Market Street. Onlookers began to jump up and down, shouting and
screaming. On the roof of the building across from the bottom of Bush Street, boys
seemed to be firing their guns into the air. Margaret backed up a few steps, silly as that
was, and looked upward. A bullet shot into the air, she knew, had to come down again.
Suddenly, maybe at the sight of the boys on the roof, she remembered her father's saying
that to her brother Ben.
The bomb went off right then. She heard it, faintly, and others around her did, too.
Maybe she heard it because she was on the hill rather than down on Market Street. She
didn't know it was a bomb--no one did, until the parade broke up and Market Street
emptied. By that time, the news had circulated through the crowd. A bomb had gone off
down by the Embarcadero, not far from the ferry building. The Wobblies had done it.
They said they were going to and they did. Even as the rumor passed through the crowd
and the crowd began to break apart, Margaret felt herself freeze up and disappear--yes,
one bomb could be followed by others, but that had nothing to do with her. She climbed
Bush Street, and she was hardly conscious of moving, even as she turned down Stockton
toward Union Square. Crowds of people seemed to be pouring toward her from the east,
and as time went on, their faces got more shocked. But they had nothing to do with her,
she had disappeared. She asked two women what had happened, but they couldn't see or
hear her--they didn't answer. Nevertheless, she came to know that the bomb had gone off
on Steuart Street, at the bottom of Market, and there was blood everywhere. The bomb
had been filled with lead sash-weights.
It took her two hours to get back to Dora's apartment, but she was not exactly
frightened, she was too invisible for that, even as she stopped and waited at a Western
Union office, sent Andrew a telegram saying she was fine and would be staying another
night. Once inside Dora's place, she stood at the window, watching. It never occurred to
her to worry about Dora--later, this confidence struck her as strange, but at the time, as
she looked out the window, the havoc seemed to swirl below her, not touching her. It was
Dora herself who brought it home and woke her up.
For something had taken off her hat--she had been standing that close. The flash
and boom of the explosion, a rippling effect in the air, and then her hat flying off her
head, followed by the screaming, the bodies, the dead, the wounded, the plunging horses,
the running, pushing, pummeling people--she had hardly been able to keep her feet in the
crush. But she had stayed there for an hour or more, her eyes peeled, and then slipped
away to the
Examiner
building to write and file her story.
Margaret said, "I'm sorry I wasn't with you."
"I didn't want you with me, and I was right. What took off my hat was a lead
weight of some kind that was packed into the bomb. It might have killed you. I was short
enough to survive." Her tone was businesslike and direct.
After this, they were silent for a long period, sitting in the dark. Still Margaret
wasn't afraid in a way that she recognized--now awake, she was thrilled in a physical
sense, as if all her muscles had been suddenly struck and they were resonating. That bun
she'd bought had frightened her more than the bomb, somehow. It was as if the bomb had
fulfilled the prediction of the bun.
Dora said, "It was Mike Boda, not Sasha Berkman."
"What?"
"Did you see Pete last night? When he came over?"
"Maybe; I was very sleepy."
"He was upset, because he'd heard that Sasha Berkman is around. He shot Frick,
remember that? But he's not a bomb-maker. I'm sure it was the Italians."
"You said the Italians are harmless."
"Our
Italians are harmless. The Italians from Chicago are not harmless."
A long time after that, it occurred to Margaret to ask whether Pete knew Sasha
Berkman--Sasha Berkman was a notorious anarchist. Dora said, "They are not friends by
any means." Margaret saw again that Dora's life opened out like a funnel. She and
Beatrice and Robert sat safely at the narrow tip, while people she would not have dared to
know resided in the perilous and possibly malevolent distance. Still, she felt calm
enough.
When the time came to retire, Dora insisted Margaret take the bed in the bedroom.
She said, "I'm much too wrought up to be that far into the apartment. I might have to go
out in the street and walk about a bit."
But she didn't go out. Margaret lay on her back and listened, a light cotton blanket
pulled up to her chin. A clock struck one, and then another, more distant clock struck, and
then she was dreaming of a crowd, of seeing a multitude of shoes and being unable to lift
her head to look at the faces. One pair of shoes was her own, and another pair, a larger
pair, kept pace with hers. They were walking through flattened grass and wild clover. Her
voice asked where the bomb was, but no voice answered hers. It was the legs of the
horses that made her nervous--she could only see them up to their knees. She asked again
where the bomb was, but, though a hand pushed her from behind, no voice spoke. Now
there was a dog, white with a black tail, and she reached out to touch it. The dog fell
down and there was a gasp, as if all the people around her were watching the dog, and
then she woke up.
The door had opened--she could see the glimmer of the gaslights from the hall,
and, silhouetted in that light, a figure, or, rather (as she woke up more thoroughly), two
figures made one, and then she heard Pete's voice as he said, "I told you not to go!"
Whatever Dora said in reply was muffled by his shoulder, because Margaret saw
that he was holding her in a profound embrace, not even kissing her, but attempting to
press her right into himself, as if in terror rather than in passion. Margaret sat up and
leaned forward to get a better view, not abashed in the slightest, only as curious as she
had ever been about anything. Dora seemed to rest in that embrace. Pete's hand came up
and smoothed her hair. Then there was a sound, and Margaret realized that it was the
sound of Dora weeping. Pete breathed out, "Ah, ah, ah." Margaret lay back down and
turned away from the doorway. Moments passed, and then minutes. The sounds subsided,
then the door was closed, footsteps crossed the room, and the sofa creaked. Sometime
after that, Margaret fell back to sleep. When she got up at what seemed to be dawn, she
could see Dora stretched out on the sofa, a pillow under her head, asleep. Pete was not
there.
ANDREW began talking about how he should have written the book more
clearly, he should have cut a lot of details--the big picture could have been easier for
people to grasp. What if they were getting bogged down in chapter two or three, when the
real meat of his theory was in chapter six and, especially, seven? And he should have put
the equations in an appendix--he hadn't even thought of that, but it was the obvious thing.
He could have written a sort of two-tiered book, with a text for "intelligent but
nonspecialist" readers in one, larger typeface, and another text--essentially, an ongoing
parade of footnotes, but linked, in a smaller typeface, for the ones who could truly
understand what he was getting at ("as few as they may be"). Why had he been so
impatient to get it printed? Another year of work would have enabled him to refine his
theory, to demonstrate it more clearly, and the war over there might have ended, too,
leaving room in the newspapers for a grand conception with long-term implications.
The book had been too advanced for a publisher, he accepted that, but the printer