Thomas had met Caruso three years ago, when the tenor had dined at the De Peyster residence on Fifth Avenue following his New York debut in Rigoletto at the Metropolitan Opera. A major benefactor of the opera company, Thomas’s father had taken pleasure in introducing his twenty-one-year-old son to the singer. But the meeting had made no impression on Caruso. When he had met Thomas again on the train from New York to San Francisco, Caruso’s eyes held no flicker of recognition.
Thomas remembered that performance of Rigoletto well, the audience growing in its appreciation of Caruso’s talents with each aria. By the end of Act III, that cosmopolitan crowd had openly adored the tenor. Here in San Francisco, the adoration was close to idolatry. The audience may have been the nouveau riche heirs of Wild West gold miners, but they pretended, at least, to a sophistication that recognized the operatic brilliance of the great star. When the final notes rang from the stage, the audience surged to its feet, shouting Bravo until they were hoarse and bringing Caruso back for one curtain call after another. Thomas considered trying to follow the tenor when he left the theater with an entourage, bound for Zinkand’s Restaurant—no doubt lured by their plates of spaghetti. But just as he was heading for the stage door, one of the stagehands stopped him, laying a hand on his shoulder.
“We wanted to thank you, sir,” said the man, as several others gathered around him, “so we bought you a little present.”
“That was very kind of you,” said Thomas, again noting the sly smiles on the faces of the men. What sort of presents did stagehands buy for journalists, he wondered.
The men quietly parted, revealing a figure behind them in the shadows. The figure stepped forward and pulled off a hooded cloak to reveal herself. Thomas had seen plenty of prostitutes before, lurking in the dark corners of New York. More than one had approached him with offers of a discount, “if it’s your first time,” but Thomas had always hurried on. He had written many articles about life on the streets of New York, but he had avoided writing about those women in the shadows.
Unlike the often pockmarked and aging whores of the New York streets, who dressed in ragged fashions of years gone by, this woman wore a dress of pale blue trimmed with gold that would have been at home in the audience that could still be heard vacating the theater. She had smooth, olive skin, a cascade of dark hair, and green eyes that sparkled with life. In the eyes of the fallen women of New York, Thomas had only ever detected sadness and despair.
She stepped forward and looked him straight in the eye, reaching out her hand to gently shake his. “Hello, Tom,” she said in that creamy voice he would come to know so well over the next few hours, “my name is Isabella.”
And now she sat before him, posing for his camera, lowering the sheet a few more inches, and daring him to take a photograph that he would never be able to show in respectable society. Thomas centered her in his viewfinder, held his breath, placed his thumb on the shutter lever, and felt the floor fall out from beneath him.
Thomas and his camera fell backward into a chair that slid wildly across the room. Isabella, he saw, clung to the bed, which heaved up and down like the deck of an ocean liner in a storm. The invitation in her eyes had been replaced with terror, and Thomas felt that he saw, for the first time, her true self. In another second, his chair sailed back across the room, crashing into the end of the bed and almost hurling him into her arms. But as he reached for her, the room lurched sideways and he fell to the floor, landing on his back. The room roared, and Isabella screamed. Above him, the gas chandelier swung back and forth in such an arc that Thomas feared it would catch the ceiling on fire. Tables and chairs crashed into walls, and plaster fell around him. Thomas turned over and tried to crawl toward the bed, but just as he reached it, the room tilted again, sending him and much of the furniture smashing against the far wall near the open window. From outside he could hear crashes and the shrieks of men and women, even, he thought, of horses. Clutching a chair that threatened to crush him against the wall, Thomas took a breath and finally formed a cogent thought of a single word. Earthquake. And then it all stopped.
Thomas could still hear screams and the occasional crashing noise in the street and from the direction of the corridor came the sound of slamming doors and shouts, but the room was suddenly still. He pushed the chair away and stood on shaky legs.
“That was a bad one,” said Isabella, who already seemed to have regained her composure. She had pulled a sheet from the bed and wrapped it around herself like a Roman toga.
“Does this happen a lot?” said Thomas, brushing the plaster from his clothes.
“Usually it’s just a little rumble,” said Isabella, crossing the room toward the bay window. “But it sounds like this one might have done some damage.” Thomas stooped to retrieve his camera, pleased to see that it appeared unharmed.
“Dear God,” said Isabella, staring out the window.
“What is it?” said Thomas.
But she did not respond. She only stood, speechless, at the window, leaning slightly outside to see the scene below. Thomas started toward her, dreading what he would see. But he did not make it to the window. As he walked up behind her, Isabella’s head suddenly jerked forward and she collapsed into his arms, as limp and lifeless as a sack of flour. As Thomas caught her and laid her on the floor he felt a wide gash across the back of her head that had already matted her hair with blood. It was far from Thomas’s first experience with a dead body, but he had never held one in his arms, never seen firsthand the death of someone he knew, someone he had, he realized as he looked down on her still perfect face, almost convinced himself he was falling in love with. For a long moment he could not move, could not grasp that in an instant she was gone. Surely, he would awake in a moment from this horrid dream to find Isabella warm and naked beside him. But she did not awaken, and the blood from her head soaked into the carpet as the sounds of despair closed in on him from every direction. Thomas had never felt so helpless, but the day was young.
He walked to the window, being careful not to lean out as Isabella had done. Outside bricks and stones fell from those buildings that were still standing—one of these, he supposed, must have hit Isabella as she leaned out to survey the street. The view that met Thomas was almost incomprehensible. The Palace Hotel—into which Mr. Hearst had booked him because Caruso was staying there—was one of the few buildings in the block not severely damaged, and many of the structures Thomas could see from his fourth-floor window had completely collapsed. The Palace was one of the largest, grandest hotels in the world with its wood paneled “rising rooms” (as they called the elevators), its central garden court, and its hundreds of elegantly furnished suites. Thomas had counted himself lucky to stay here even for a few nights. Now, as he looked out in the predawn light at the yellow cloud of dust that rose from the rubble filling the streets, he realized the Palace—built to resist any disaster—might have saved his life.
The dust floated up toward his window, and Thomas stepped away, still trying to adjust to the reality of a dead woman on the floor and a collapsing city outside. He pulled the window shut, dampening the cries of fear and agony that rose from the street. The shouts within the hotel only seemed more panicked, and Thomas knew he needed to make a plan. The Palace stood for now, but he doubted that any building in the city was safe for long, especially if aftershocks struck. He tried not to look at Isabella’s pale yet still beautiful face as he hastily pulled on his shoes and gathered his notebook and camera. He turned toward the door and then stopped. He could not carry her down four flights of stairs, but he could not leave her like this. She deserved at least a little dignity. The sheet in which she had wrapped herself had become entangled in her legs when she fell, so, not wanting to disturb the body, he took another sheet off the bed and gently covered her, then lifted her onto the bed. He gazed at her outline beneath the sheet in aching disbelief for a moment, then ran from the room and joined the throng rushing down the st
airs, through the garden court, and into the chaos of Market Street.
For several minutes Thomas stood motionless, watching as people poured out of the Palace and the Grand Hotel across the street. Men in nightshirts with looks of terror on their faces rushed to what they hoped was the relative safety of the open air, only to be showered with bricks and mortar when an aftershock shook the ground. Cries came from every side and the helplessness Thomas had felt in his room now froze him to the spot. He was nearly knocked over by a large man rushing out of the hotel past him. Thomas turned toward the man and saw that it was Caruso, hastily dressed and speaking in hurried Italian to a small man who was most certainly his valet. In another moment, the valet rushed back into the building. Thomas thought perhaps he should speak to Caruso, get some sort of scoop for Mr. Hearst—the italian tenor and the great earthquake. But suddenly Thomas had neither the heart nor the energy for writing stories about one wealthy man just to please the whim of another wealthy man.
Thomas made his way through the rubble to the Hearst Building, just two blocks away, but here, as elsewhere, people were coming out of the building, fearing its collapse. Even if Thomas wrote a story, he didn’t know how he could file it. As day broke over the city, the sunlight filtered through the dust and Thomas began to wander. Everywhere he saw people in the streets—some dragging suitcases or trunks or carrying bags of possessions. He passed a woman picking through the remains of her house, looking for anything she might save. He saw a house whose front wall had collapsed, revealing everything from furniture to laundry to portraits hanging on the wallpapered walls. It seemed a horrible invasion of privacy that such things were on display to anyone who happened by.
He had only been in San Francisco for two days, and so did not know the geography of the city. He had no idea where he was when he heard a cry of despair coming from beneath a pile of rubble.
“Someone’s in here,” cried Thomas, rushing to the edge of the pile of bricks and lumber. “Help! Help me get to him.”
Most of the other bystanders paid him no mind. One older man, sweeping the dust from the street with a broom as if that would make any difference, only sighed and remarked, “They’ve already tried. Can’t get to him.”
“But we must get to him,” said Thomas. “We must!”
“Can’t,” said the man, lowering his head and returning to his sweeping. Thomas walked until he could no longer hear the man’s voice, then sat down on a pile of bricks and cried.
And so the day wore on. As he walked, Thomas tried to block out the sounds of people’s cries for help. He learned quickly enough that those who could be helped had been by the time he arrived. To those who still cried out, Thomas was powerless to render aid. Eventually he could cry for them no more—he could only ignore them, bury his own sense of helplessness, and do what his profession demanded of him: Observe events. Thomas had seen children frozen to death on the street; he had seen a man stabbed in the neck in broad daylight; he had seen a woman run from a burning building, flames consuming her hair and clothes; but he had never seen anything like this. A few times, he looked at the horror through his camera and snapped a photograph, but this seemed a violation of human dignity at such a time, and he quickly gave it up.
By late morning the air was filled with the acrid smell of smoke as fires raged across the city. Around midday Thomas found himself back near where he had started and watched as the fire overtook the Palace Hotel and the Hearst Building. On the third floor of the Palace, as flames leapt from the roof and smoke poured out of every opening, he saw a woman appear at a window just below his own. He could not hear her calling for help over the roar of the fire, but even at a distance he could read her lips. He felt impotent but he forced himself to watch as she realized no help would come and finally threw herself, trailing flames from her burning clothing, to the paving stones below.
As the fire raged on, he climbed the city’s hills and saw people sitting in the streets in chairs they had rescued from the ruins of their homes, watching the smoke rise over the city as if it was a sporting event. He stepped over heaps of clothing, pots and pans, luggage, furniture, and all manner of abandoned personal effects. On top of one pile of splintered wood he saw a single book in a red cloth binding. On a whim, he picked it up and slipped it into his pocket.
No matter which way Thomas walked, he found people trapped, sometimes in rubble and sometimes by fire, whom neither he, nor anyone else, could save. By late in the afternoon he felt overcome by the powerlessness that had settled on his shoulders that morning, and almost didn’t notice that, after making his way through a long series of intersections clogged with wagons, horses, and pedestrians, he had arrived at the edge of a large crowd of desperate-looking refugees.
“Where are we?” he managed to mumble to a pair of men in front of him.
“The gates of hell,” said one of them, in a voice that sounded as hollow as Thomas felt.
“Ferry landing,” said the other. “Ferry to Oakland is the only way to get out of the city.”
“For those who have something to get out to,” said another.
Thomas had nothing with him but the clothes on his back, his notebook and camera, and a fifty-dollar cash advance on his salary. Clearly, he would not be taking up work at the Examiner, but unlike many of the newly homeless in the city now burning to the ground, he did have someplace to go. In the crowd that waited for the ferry, he wrote a story, sticking to the facts as he knew them. In short, an earthquake had destroyed much of San Francisco and fires were finishing the job. Hundreds, if not thousands, had died.
After waiting through much of the night, Thomas finally made it to Oakland where he wired his story to New York. He spent the following night on a bench in the train station, returning in the morning to the telegraph office to file a follow-up report about the smoke still rising over San Francisco and the refugees streaming into Oakland. When he handed the story to the telegraph operator, he received, in exchange, a telegram from Mr. Hearst in response to the story he had filed the previous day. too many facts, not enough drama, was the terse response. Thomas slipped the telegram into the rescued book in his pocket. Two hours later, while San Francisco still burned, he boarded a train for New York. At the far end of the car, he spotted a rather haggard Enrico Caruso. But Thomas no longer cared about the tenor. He slid down in his seat and slept. And the nightmares began.
In his dream, Thomas was trapped in a place of darkness. He could see a pinpoint of light far overhead, and he heard a clear voice. He called for help and the voice replied in chilling words: “There is no help for you.” Suddenly flames leapt up on every side of him. The heat was unbearable, and he felt burning on his skin. Again he cried out, and this time the voice echoed back, louder than before: “You are beyond help.” As the flames covered him, Thomas recognized the voice as his own.
Sweat dripping from his brow, he woke in near darkness, thinking he had slept through the day, but in another moment, the train shot out of a tunnel and light flooded the compartment. Below, he saw a steep, rocky slope speckled with pines leading down to a raging river. In no mood to enjoy the spectacular view, Thomas picked up the book in his lap and turned to the title page.
Ragged Dick; or, Street Life in New York with the Boot Blacks. Despite his dour mood, Thomas nearly laughed aloud. That this should be the book he had picked from the rubble seemed both appropriate and horrifying. After all, if not for Ragged Dick, Thomas might never have begun his own life on the streets—a life which had led him to Mr. Hearst’s employ and therefore to San Francisco.
Thomas had been twelve years old, living in luxury in a Fifth Avenue mansion, the son of a banker and a member of one of the oldest families in what had been New Amsterdam when his ancestor Isaac De Peyster had arrived in 1639. The only son in a family with four daughters, Thomas had longed for the companionship of boys his age. He was taught by a governess, dressed by a nurse, and treated like a playthin
g by his older sisters. Only on his highly supervised walks through Central Park did he ever even glimpse such a thing as another boy—usually one looking as starched and miserable as himself. And then, he had discovered Ragged Dick.
Before that fateful day, Thomas was forever reading whatever books his sisters had cast aside—What Katy Did and Elsie Dinsmore and well-thumbed issues of St. Nicholas magazine which included serial stories like “Little Lord Fauntleroy.” He liked the beginning of this story—the part where Cedric Errol lived with his mother in a poor neighborhood of New York. Thomas knew he was lucky to be born into wealth, but he could not squelch his curiosity about what he once heard his mother call “the other half.” Though every book his sisters had abandoned seemed to Thomas to be written for girls, he still preferred this fare to the books his father continually thrust at him—mathematical treatises and biographies of prominent Union generals. “You’re going to take over my business someday,” his father said. “You need to learn about leadership.” Thomas had no idea what he wanted to do when he grew up, but he certainly did not dream of becoming a banker.
Thomas could relate to Elsie Dinsmore, in a way. The scene from the book in which her father insisted that she play the piano and sing for his friends reminded him of how his own father liked to put him on display, trotting him out whenever he hosted a dinner party for his fellow bankers and exhibiting him like a promising Thoroughbred colt. On more than one occasion Thomas had been rousted by his governess from a sound sleep and made to dress in his Sunday best, just so he could stand before a gathering of businessmen for thirty seconds while his father presented “my son.” His father did not, Thomas thought, say these words with any pride—they merely conveyed the information that the future of the De Peyster name was, after a run of four daughters, now safe in the hands of a male heir. At these times, Thomas felt like an inanimate treasure in his own house; he had heard greater delight in his father’s voice when he was showing off one of his rare books or antique paintings.
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