Of all luck, I actually heard from old Hughie two days later and learned that all of them survived. His note was delivered very formally by a member of the U.S. Post Office, and you will not believe it when I tell you it came in the form of a detachable shirt collar! As I later learned, he had been sitting in a park in Chinatown, no paper at hand, and had simply written a message on his collar and handed it to a passing postal worker. Hundreds of such items were mailed from San Francisco in the days after the fire—collars, scraps of paper, empty envelopes, cards, and bits of metal—anything to let their loved ones know they were okay. The post office delivered them all, no postage required. On one side of the collar he had written my name and the Del Monte, and on the
other I read in that familiar, awful writing:
All OK, your mom as well, though your house is gone. Good riddance! Come down and watch the fire with me! We’ll eat, drink, and make merry, for tomorrow we may have to move to Oakland! Love, Hughie
I like to think that it was while I lay there, listening to the murmurs of people in the hall and the clank of broken china, that a small part of that disaster took place. It would have happened at City Hall, which had lost its walls in the quake and, due to an early morning fire, was now smoldering, room by room. I like to think that the Hall of Records caught fire as I lifted myself off the floor, that the letter Tblazed on as I dressed, dazed, and the birth records of Max Tivoli began to smolder in the box.
That’s how I felt, at least. The end of Max; goodbye, old pal, it’s only Asgar now. I stood up and my body seemed as light as Dr. Martin’s balloon, drifting like a teardrop through the rubble and away.
Downstairs, people sat in the stuffed chairs and ottomans of the lobby, stunned as hunted animals, waiting for someone to produce coffee despite shattered china and a broken water main.
It was almost an amusing sight. People who had been awakened by the 5:13 tremor had dressed in the dark, and so most of the elegant men and ladies of the Del Monte wore what we later referred to as “earthquake clothes.” If I had only taken photographs for blackmail now! Exclusive heiresses, trawling for husbands, sat stupefied in evening gowns, riding jackets, and men’s derbies, their bland un-made-up faces set off by their best jewels hanging from their necks and ears. Senators and millionaires sat whispering to each other in opera hats, smoking jackets, pantaloons, and slippers. One financier’s widow sat in opera black, her face still masked with Le Paris night cream. Everyone looked stunned and worried; perhaps they knew that their fortunes lay in bank vaults that, while fireproof, had been so overheated in the blaze that they could not be opened for weeks for fear that the cash would burst into flames. I was staring at people who would soon have no homes and no money. It seems an excellent joke that they had dressed themselves not for the Del Monte, but for a vaudeville version of their lives.
There were rumors everywhere: a fat gentleman in a velvet suit was saying that some ghoulish man was going around San Francisco biting off the fingers of dead women to steal their rings, and that mobs had collected at the U.S. Mint, about to storm the place ahead of the fire and steal millions in gold bullion. One woman, hiding a yapping dog under her quilted robe, told me that regulars deputized as soldiers were walking among the ruins of the city, executing anyone they took for a looter. Children caught stealing were to be beaten, a sign hung around their necks reading THIEF.
“Can you even believe it?” she whispered, and naturally, I could not. I thought once again how stunned and sad and crazy
we had become. Executions, indeed. It would turn out, of course, that she was right.
“Ah, your friends managed to get a car, I see,” she told me, smiling.
“What’s that?”
She motioned towards the window. A simple, ordinary car sat in the driveway, engine idling.
“I suppose they’re not going to the city,” she added.
I said nothing as I watched. A wedding-cake of luggage slipped into the trunk, a soundless slam, a chauffeur dusting off his hands. The crank went into the auto’s silvered yap. I could barely see inside: a picture hat, a feathered fedora. I no longer thought of Hughie, the earthquake, of anyone but myself. Mr. Dollar. For in my panic, my stupidity, I had not listened to Bitsy’s parting words. Pasadena. I watched the car as it began to vibrate, silently coughing, and then made its slow, unsteady movement down the drive and away.
The thought of losing Alice was terrible and petty but it was too much for my monster’s heart. Others around me were chattering and laughing and making plans to find an auto and drive south, loading it with the idiotic junk of their idiotic lives, but I was the King of Fools because I did not want to save a single coin, not a single life; all I wanted was to keep Alice from escaping again. To keep her imprisoned within the mossy walls of my mossy life. Don’t you see? She was not sitting somewhere in the hotel, thinking of Asgar who had kissed her. She was headed down to Pasadena. She was headed away from me, as she had once before, and for all I knew our city had burned to the ground and we would all be scattered across the continent or further and it would take years for me to find her again. A disaster had brought us together
again, and a disaster would now tear us apart. I was a greedy goblin who could not let his maiden go.
I stood and ran through the lobby. You see; I did not have years to find her. Three, perhaps, or five. But not twenty like before, not even ten; it would be too late. My condition would betray me. Because imagine if Alice and her mother fled to Pasadena, then to relatives in Kentucky or Utah, and it took ten years—imagine it!—to find her, it would all be in vain. This was the thought in my head as I pushed aside a musician hugging a viola. Of course in ten years Alice herself might be faded into her forties, in birdlike glasses, stout and unnaturally blond and married with two children toddling by her pinkies, and I would still love her. Of course I would love her! I would still arrive at her door and bow and whisper her name and wait for the blush to cross her breast as it always did. That wasn’t the problem. The problem would be that when she opened that door, it wouldn’t be a man in his mid-forties, bat-mustached, grinning in her doorway. It would be a boy. A boy in his early twenties smiling in his bronze-sun of a face, stretching his sinews within his white tennis shirt. It would be too late; we would be too different. I might seduce her, of course—I might even lure her away from her husband for a weekend in a hotel, days of unspeakable passion—but it would be too late for love. Women don’t lose their hearts to boys. She would drink down my youth and one morning she would pick up her smudged glasses from the bedside table and leave me forever in that rented room, thinking, He’ll recover, he’s young. But I would never recover. No, if I lost her now, I thought as I struggled with the crystal knob of the front door, my chances would die a little more each year as I grew younger. Oh Mary, I remember thinking in my madness, Mary, you were wrong. Time was never on my side.
Mrs. Ramsey, my would-be mother, is in the room with me while supper cooks. Grounded as I am, wings clipped, I am still brazen enough to keep writing while she polishes the piano just a few feet away. Easily irritated by housework, now and then she lifts the lid and plunks out an old melody, and when she does this, she lets out a merry laugh and glances over at me. Oh, Mrs. Ramsey. There is so much I need to tell you, but not yet, of course. Not until I am nearly done.
It’s death to stay so quiet. You don’t know how close you’ve come to hearing it all, Mrs. Ramsey, for my silence nearly falls away from me twenty times a day or more. For instance: when I am reading too late into the night and that voice comes through the half-closed door, telling me in singsong to go right to sleep. When I am ill and you feed me, face-to-worried-face, those bright orange alcohols from your secret cabinet. When we stumble across each other, late at night, and I’m afraid you see through me at last, but you just whisper that you could not sleep yourself and are a little happy for the company. When you burn your awful meat casseroles, announce it will be “breakfast for dinner!” and we boys erupt in applause. When you yell in a motherly rage. When I catch you dancing all alone to the Victrola. When I watch your rapt radio-face, the wrinkles erased and the worry gone just as it was all those years ago. When I see that name on every piece of mail, Mrs. Ramsey, that name a third husband gave you to hide in, Mrs. Ramsey, Mrs. Alice Ramsey.
You cannot hide. I will always recognize you, Alice. I will always find your hiding places, darling. Don’t you know that perfume gives you away?
AUGUST 2, 1930
I
am called to supper.
From what I can smell, Alice Ramsey, you have been cooking Italian again, and waiting for me is the macaroni pie my old wife used to make. The smell of butter and cream, the bowl like a girl’s head of golden curls—a dreamworld of memories. I can hear Sammy already leaping down the stairs; I know for a fact he hasn’t washed his hands. Alice, I hear you speaking with him. Ah, there: the sound of Sammy trudging back again. You are an excellent parent to our son.
So I only have a moment. Not long ago, you stuck your head into the room to see what I was working on and, thinking it a school project of some sort, you gave that raucous laugh of yours. I’m glad I amuse you, Alice. Can you tell that your adopted son is at his happiest, hidden here with you and Sammy? Can you tell there is no more beautiful sight—no moon more full—than your face leaning in from the hall, the skin grown a little soft and gray, webbed with pink across one cheek, the hair now dyed, but the same bright face I knew, laughing at this ridiculous schoolboy who bites his tongue in concentration? At night, when I dream, it’s of that face. You, Alice, grown old in this plain bungalow. In my dreams, though, you are lit by gaslight.
And why do you never mention the earthquake, what happened to you there? I asked you the other day at dinner, and Sammy’s
head popped up from the roast, intrigued, but you picked up your plate, shaking your head. “I’m not the one to ask,” you said.
“But weren’t you there? Didn’t you feel it?” I tried to sound as much like a boy as I could.
You stood, the plate tilted so that it caught the flash of the electric light. “Yes.”
“What did you do?”
“We weren’t in the city. We were in a hotel.”
“Did you leave? Where did you go?”
Alice, you simply nodded your head, smiling, and patted me on the head. “Oh Lord, leave it for the history books,” you told me. “Now let’s get this cleaned up before the radio.”
I think I know your secret, Mrs. Ramsey. You cannot tell any stories about the fire, any stories about the Del Monte at all, because, like the blue threads woven into paper money to stop counterfeiters, there is something so integral that it cannot be removed without suspicion. He is part of every earthquake story you have, but you must leave him out, of course. You must be sure that no one can trace you back to this sweet town where you have hidden yourself and your son; you must give no scent for him to sniff you out. It’s me, isn’t it, Alice? I am your secret; I am your blue thread. How sorry I am that I’ve poisoned your stories so completely, like a well you can no longer draw from. Especially when it is so foolish, so useless, to hide anymore.
Were there still stars in your hair, that morning long ago? When I stepped onto the porte cochere, desperate to catch you? When I yelled to the automobile snorting and chattering along the drive, already too far away to reach, too set in its ways along the carriage ruts of the Del Monte? To my own surprise, I let out a little sob and slumped against a column, watching that gleaming green car leave me behind for Pasadena, dustily speeding through the cypress-stripes of shadow, a little hopeless pathetic sob. Alice, slipped away from me, again. My heart was picked clean at last,
like a bony skull. I turned to face the white-bright sky with its crowds of clouds, its pilgrim birds, its coming locusts, and I looked away, back to the hotel, and there you were. Oh, Alice. Standing there all the time, grinning in your dust hood, lipstick perfectly applied even in the dark of the morning, waiting. Not for coffee, or luggage, or mother. For me.
You said, “Alone at last.”
So plainly, as if you didn’t love me. And then that dear immortal laugh, you prankster.
Weren’t there stars in your hair?
I am called to supper now by two voices: careful Alice and reckless, impatient Sammy. Macaroni pie, a pleasure for an old man in his youth, remembering. I have only a moment to get this down: Alice in the shadow of the arch, willows behind her, laughing, goggles dangling from her fingers. Just waiting in the dustdry air. The shock of that lovely, that priceless face, the one person who did not wish me dead; she had sent her mother to safety. She had stayed for me. At that very moment, her house was being dynamited by soldiers, her small fortune dying in its vault. She did not know it, giving me a flickering grin, holding out her hand. Her friends were all leaving the city, never to return; her mother was already nursing a sickness that would keep her on her deathbed for years. She did not know it. There, on the porch, pulling me towards her with a wink. Alice, whispering nonsense in my ear.
Reader, she married me. Of course she did; I was all she had in the world.
We were wed in May of 1908 and I knew every inch of ecstasy. Picture me on that wonderful day two years after the quake: a black Prince Albert coat, flared at the knee, top hat, pocket watch (hidden) ticking away the minutes until I would have my Alice, a soft
smile on my face, cheeks somewhat inflamed from a departing cold but also, I suspect, from the frightened pleasure of someone about to pull off a heist. Above: the sun moving through the fog like a luminous deep-sea fish. Behind: the ruins of our City Hall, still uncleared, just the coiling staircase of the dome remaining now, the black spine of a dragon. My fiancée stood whispering with the witness—the Widow Levy, all in mauve and feathers—and I stood fretting, crushing my pocket handkerchief into a damp ball. Picture my happy heart pinned to my lapel: a bloody boutonniere.
And Alice, oh picture her, please. A seemingly plain green tunic that revealed, when she took a wide step, the shocking Turkish pants that she wore underneath. Something white in her bouquet (we are not botanists, we men in love), and on her head—my quaint and funny Alice—a tricornered hat all trimmed in lace. I can’t seem to pillage my memory for any image of her face; it has been smudged from too much handling. But I imagine a clever smile bent, at one corner, into something tender.
And picture my city, with banners of celebration still fluttering from the new rooftops and church spires of San Francisco—for only a month before had marked the two-year anniversary of our so-called destruction. An adolescent, impatient town, we rebuilt as quickly as we could, exactly as before, and made all the same impulsive, glittering mistakes of a young man eager to prove he is alive. It was not just rubble that surrounded us. Besides the staircase of City Hall, the world around us looked much as it had before, but this time with new paint, modern electricity, and garages for automobiles. We were not that old San Francisco of gilt-edged gas lamps and velvet walls. We longed—as young men always do—to be modern.
I heard my bride whispering as the judge approached: “I’m so lucky, Asgar, so lucky to have found you …” The rest was drowned out by the black rush of blood in my ears.
I suppose Alice was lucky, in her way, to have her Asgar. I’m sure
her mother, smiling beside us, thought so: he was dependable and kind; he was handsome in an eerie Nordic way; he had been a steady rock through all their troubles; and—most important to Mrs. Levy—Mr. Dollar had an income. It was not a small concern. You see, fate had dealt me one final heart to complete my flush: because of the earthquake, the widows had lost their fortune.
Only six major insurance companies honored their policies in full. The Levys had insured their house with a particular German company that, upon hearing of the earthquake, quickly closed all their business with America and never paid a cent. This was a common story. One German business even posted notices in New York proudly stating they had paid their clients in full when in fact the poor San Franciscans had to settle for a twenty-five percent discount on their losses, as if disaster meant a bulk price. I don’t think Alice missed the house—it was always the elder Levy’s taste—or the land she was forced to sell, but life is different for a woman. They are never as free as my Alice was before the earthquake. Think of it: wealthy, widowed, working at a charity of her own choosing. It was hard for her to realize that she had to depend on a man. That, like any poor and beautiful woman, she had to marry.
But the marvelous part, the part that warms my worst nights, is this: Alice, with a world to pick from, chose to marry
me
.
“We’ll begin,” the judge said, coming towards us with fluttering
Mikado
sleeves. He patted his pockets as if in search of glasses. To my horror, he approached the Widow Levy. “You are the bride?”
“No!” I shouted, perhaps too loudly.
Our witness laughed, as did her daughter. “Dear me, oh no. No, I’m the mother of the bride.”
“It’s me,” said Alice, perfectly serious now, taking my hand.
“I see. Please stand before me.
Dearly beloved …
”
I was secretly happy that Alice wanted a plain wedding, with no guests. After all, there was nobody to come. She had no family
except in far Seattle (all of whom she was sick of, anyway) and I had told her I had no one. She was extremely curious about me, and I eventually had to make up a story about a merchant father who had disappeared and an opera-singing mother who, on a wild trip back from the East, was lost on a sea voyage.
What besides death could keep Mother from my wedding? Here was the impossible—a bride for the hunchback—and I’m sure, if she could have, she would have canceled her life and spent it embroidering napkins and cloths and sheets for our bed, come and counseled Alice on her dress and hat (Mother never would have allowed that bud-green shade) and all the intricacies of married life that my sweet widow, of course, knew all too well. But she did not come. Because I simply never told her.
The greatest cruelties happen slowly. It was easy at first to keep Mother and Mina from my new life: after all, they had settled now in Oakland, an ocean away. Claiming a bad back from dragging her silver through the fire, Mother decided never to make the trip to San Francisco. She said she liked her house in the hills, and could live comfortably on the insurance from our burned and buried South Park. It was more than that, of course. She had loved her old town. She had been born there and seen the gold miners coming down from the hills, the Italians pressing their grapes into Chianti high in North Beach, the maids beating carpets as they sang; she had seen it grow to beauty, and she had seen it fall. So can you blame her if, a witness to death, she did not want to see the bright new life that had taken its place?
By the time I married Alice, Mina had refused to see me. We had told her, back in 1900, the true nature of her Uncle Beebee. She was twelve at the time and had stared at me, fiddling with her bows, not comprehending. “Is he going to die?” she asked, to which Mother replied, “Well, as much as any of us,” and then my sweet sister looked at me with tense black eyes and said, “We can’t tell anyone, don’t tell, please Beebee, don’t tell.” I knew what she
meant. She made me swear it many times over the years. Mina meant that this kind of deformity would reflect badly on the family, especially on her. She cried for her old Beebee. But the creature had to stay in the attic.
What happened, though, was not her fault. Whispering to love-struck admirers, dancing the daring polka at balls in town, no, Mina was not to blame. Nor Mother, staying in her house across the bay, speaking to her spirits. The fault was entirely mine. For I did more than hide my marriage from them. Over a few years, I ceased to return their letters or calls; I made excuses for why I could not join them for holidays or birthdays; I tapered off my visits to brief lunches or walks and then, by the end, to nothing at all. Because I did not want them to break my secret, to destroy the love I had worked so hard to win, I hid my life. I hid myself. I am not the first to do this. Like my father before me, I simply vanished in the snow.
So I was all alone on my wedding day. I came with just my hat, my suit, my heart full of honey. Friendless, orphaned, her Asgar offered himself completely when he slid that ring onto her finger and whispered those little words.
“Well I do too,” said Alice. Our witness wept.
The judge pronounced us wed. Birds, sleeping in the spirals of the ruined stairs, flowed out into the sky above us. Alice’s hand was cold as February.
“Asgar, are you crying?”
“No, no.”
“Oh you are ridiculous. Kiss me.”
I was. I did. For there was nobody left in my life but you, dear Alice. I had sent them all away.
What do we abandon to claim our heart’s desire? What do we become?
As for the wedding night, well. Prurient reader. My son may be reading this, and he will blush, so I must open a peacock screen across the page. Behind it, imagine what you will: fog air beading a body. Phlox-perfumed memory, a teenage prayer answered at twice that age, the whisper of a beloved name, a false one. An exaltation of swallows. And so on.
Much later, in our older years traveling together in an automobile, Hughie asked me why I never asked
him
to the wedding.
“Are you insane?” I said. “You would have blown the whole thing.”
“Max, I would’ve come in disguise. A false beard and a cape. A parasol. Come on, I would have hidden behind a tree.”
“There were no trees left.”
“Behind a stout woman. I would have watched over you as a witness.”