Private Life

by Jane Smiley

  When Andrew and she awakened to the shaking of their little house and the falling of the lamp off the bedside table, he leapt out of bed before the first shake had ended. She stayed where she was, having that strange feeling that the play was commencing all around her, a feeling that immobilized her, until he grabbed her hand and pulled her out of the house. It was just getting light. They stood in the middle of the street—it was impossible to walk—looking first at their own chimney, which did not topple, and then down the street. The buildings and trees seemed to have a haze about them, or to be themselves rendered hazy. Andrew said that this was the effect of the shaking: the eye could not take in the object. The trees seemed not to go back and forth but around in little circles, which Andrew declared was akin to a needle on a piece of paper, and, if it could be measured, would show a great deal about the quake. In the last one, only seven or eight years before, he had been told, almost every building, or at least every brick building, had fallen down or sustained considerable damage—Andrew had read all about it in his voracious way. Since it was unsafe to go back in the house for more than a moment, they decided to pull on their clothes as quickly as they could and then go see what they could see. Andrew was sure that this earthquake, like the one seven years earlier, was a local one—important to Mare Island, and perhaps Vallejo and Benicia, but not much in the larger scheme of things. Naturally, he first checked on the observatory. The telescope was fine—it did not seem to have moved at all. Oddly, though, two picture frames were flipped face to the wall, yet no books or papers had fallen. At first this earthquake merely thrilled Andrew, as an example of what geological dynamics 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, A
ndrew 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 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 exch
ange. 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.