Herma
Page 39
“Martino, did you bring my cigarettes?” said Caruso. “I only have half a box.”
“Oh, Rico,” sighed Beckworth.
“They are in a trunk, Signor. Do you want one now?”
“No, I am only allowed ten a day,” said Caruso.
The wagon made its way down Market only with difficulty. The pavement was jammed with wagons and motorcars, and abandoned cable cars blocked the way in the center. Here and there a building had collapsed and filled half the street with rubble. At least the fire was well behind them now. A small flame nickered in a storefront here and there, where a gas pipe had broken.
Grasse began looking around under his feet.
“I say, here is Rico’s case of champagne. It seems to be Krug Sec. Not the same thing as Veuve Cliquot, but it will do.”
Caruso caught sight of another corpse in a pile of bricks across the street. He pulled the damp towel up over his mouth again. He still held the revolver loosely in his hands between his knees.
Grasse managed to pry the case open. He took out a bottle, and then another. “Watch out, everyone. It’s warm and it’s been agité, jiggled.” He unwound the wires of the first bottle and worked the cork loose. It shot out with a sharp report and the wine foamed after it.
“Morbleu. We don’t have any glasses.”
“Drink it out of the bottle.”
“Ah, no. Krug Sec? What an abomination.”
He stared at the bottle, which was foaming out over his hands. He handed it to Herma.
“Stop,” he told the driver.
He had caught sight of a deserted saloon across the street. The frosted glass windows had fallen out, along with half the front wall. He disappeared into it and came out with five pilsner goblets splayed out in his fingers, two in one hand and three in the other. He handed these up and got back on the wagon.
“I will go crazy,” said Beckworth, clutching his brow.
“We never drank to Herma’s performance,” said Grasse. “Do you remember, Rico? We were going to at Delmonico’s, and then we forgot about it.”
“We didn’t forget. I was still thinking about it.”
“Well, what do you think now?”
“Now that you have the dannato stuff open.”
He accepted a glass, holding it in one hand and retaining the revolver in the other. “Not every day do I drink at eight in the morning. But this is not every day.”
“To Herma.”
They all drank, except Herma. She looked at Caruso holding his revolver.
“Are you going to shoot somebody, Rico, you desperado?”
“I may, if they try to steal my things.”
She could hardly keep from smiling. Instead she began humming under her breath. They were out of the smoke now. The sun had come out and was shining brightly on the wagon and the street. A quarter of a mile ahead of them the Ferry Building was visible, intact, at the end of Market.
She sang, in an exaggerated Western twang.
“Goin’ up the mountain, goin’ out West,
With a thirty-eight special stickin’ out of my vest,
And it’s ride, Railroad Bill.”
Caruso smiled faintly.
“Railroad Bill, Railroad Bill,
He never worked and he never will,
And it’s ride, Railroad Bill.”
“But where did you learn this lingo of cowboy?” he asked her.
“It’s my native dialect,” Herma laughed. “My Aunt Minnie crossed the plains in a wagon.”
She sang the next verse in duet with Grasse, she in cowboy and he in his elegant Parisian accent.
“A thirty-eight special in a forty-five frame,
How in the world can I miss him when I’m takin’ dead aim,
And it’s ride, Railroad Bill.”
Caruso, with a glance at Beekworth, sheepishly put the revolver away in his pocket. “How is it that you too know this, my friend?” he asked Grasse.
“I am very fond of cowboy music. I sing it when I am shaving.”
“Ah? Strano. I sing the ‘Vesti la giubba.’ It makes the hairs stand on their end, so I can shave them easier.”
Grasse filled everybody’s glasses, and Herma sang another verse. They taught it to Caruso, and he joined in with his Italian accent and rich bel canto.
“Railroad Bill, he ain’t so bad,
Blew down his Mama, took a shot at his Dad,
And it’s ride, Railroad Bill.”
And on to the chorus again:
“Railroad Bill, Railroad Bill,
He never worked and he never will,
And it’s ride, Railroad Bill.”
“Beck,” said Caruso,” I have found my voice again.”
“That’s nice, Rico. I thought you would. Don’t hurt it by singing too much of that garbage.”
“And it’s ride, Railroad Bill,” Caruso sang to himself, a little more cautiously, in mezza voce.
The wagon arrived at the Ferry Building and swung on past it to the left along the Embarcadero. There, at an empty space of wharf, it stopped. The main fire south of Market Street was now far behind them. A little farther along the Embarcadero fireboats from Oakland were spraying great streams of Bay water onto the docks and the buildings beyond. Other firemen were pulling up hoses to wet down the Ferry Building. It looked as though the whole waterfront might be saved from the flames.
They all got out. A steam launch with a tall, spindly funnel was tied to the wharf. In the stern was Madame Moellendorf, holding up a parasol. She didn’t speak, since she was still suffering from quinsy if that was what it was, but she stared silently with narrowed eyes at Herma, under the impression that she had encountered her somewhere before.
Martino and the wagon driver began shifting the trunks into the launch. Caruso walked impatiently up and down the wharf, still clutching the photograph. He unwrapped the towel from his neck and threw it away.
“You were a good Violetta, Herma,” he said in an offhand way. “It was right that we drink to you. But you still have to learn much. You should remember my sayings about resonance and the voix dans le masque.”
“I will.”
Out of nowhere two policemen appeared. One of them was stocky and beefy. He seemed to be a sergeant, and did all the talking. The other one swung a club.
“What’s going on here?”
Caruso told him, “We are just getting into this launch to leave your beautiful city, which we enjoyed very much, but we are going on to other cities, which have the advantage of not falling down.”
“No one to leave the city.”
Beckworth stepped forward.” Who says?”
“Mayor’s orders. It’s to avoid panic. The ferries are stopped. You’re not allowed to hire a private boat.”
“I am not at all panicked,” said Caruso. “I am perfectly calm.”
“But we have reservations on a train out of Oakland. We’ve booked compartments,” Beckworth protested.
“You can book the whole train if you like. But you can’t leave the city. It’s martial law.”
“Do you know who this is?” Beckworth asked him.
“He can be the King of Germany for all I care.”
There was a moment of awkward silence. Then Caruso bethought himself of the photograph in the silver frame. He handed it to the sergeant.
The sergeant studied the inscription.
“To my friend
Enrico Caruso
from
Theodore Roosevelt”
He handed back the photograph. “Are you Mr. Caruso?”
“Who else would I be? Would you like me to do the ‘Vesti la giubba’?”
“No, it isn’t necessary. Who are these other people?”
“My manager. And my wife,” he lied blatantly about Lucì.
“Very good, sir.” The sergeant saluted. “Have a nice trip. I’m sorry we had an earthquake just when you were visiting our city.”
“You are not to blame,” said Caruso generously.
Caruso climbed nimbly down into the launch. The pall of smoke over the city was advancing slowly along Market Street.
“A necropolis! I feel I am in the last act of Aïda. I must get out of this tomb. Farewell, Herma.”
“Good-bye.”
“Addìo, Grasse, you bad sensualist.”
“The last night of San Francisco, and you had me sing all night, when I could have been—”
“I know. Farewell.”
The launch pulled away, turning in a half circle toward Oakland. In the stern the Moellendorf was still staring at Herma. Standing on the edge of the wharf, Herma in her clearest and most dulcet tone sang her the last lines of Cherubino’s Canzonetta.
“Voi che sapete
che cosa e amor,
donne, vedete,
s’io l’ho nel cor.”
Then, as the launch dwindled away across the Bay, she turned to Grasse and they walked back together toward the wall of smoke advancing across the city south of Market.
20.
For the next four days and nights Herma did not sleep, except for catnaps in the shelter of a wall, or an hour or two in the corner of somebody’s tent. Most of the time she was not really aware whether it was day or night, Now and then the sun shone, but only briefly. For the most part it was obscured by the blanket of smoke drifting slowly eastward with the sea breeze. The gas mains were broken so there were no street lights, and the dynamos that supplied electricity to the houses and shops had come to a stop long ago. The fire burned for two days, devouring a dream city of eternal twilight, now and then lit by the garish flames of the conflagration, then darkened again by the shreds of smoke drifting overhead and sinking down to fill the streets. The smoke filtered the bright scarlet of the flames to mauve, orange, pink, magenta, all the colors in the gelatine array of the theater lighting director. When the moon appeared through a tatter of clouds it was the same pale blood-red as the flames. In this phantasmagoric light the whole population of the city wandered around through the streets, as though fleeing from a plague but uncertain where to go to flee from it, or how to get there.
There were no more cabs to be had, or wagons or other conveyances. The cable-car system of course was totally disabled. Herma and Grasse made their way on foot up Market Street, skirting around the heaps of rubble that had collapsed onto the pavement. Toward them, down Market, poured a crowd of refugees fleeing from the fire south of the Slot, carrying with them everything they had been able to save: clothing, furniture in pushcarts, wheelbarrows piled with crockery, beds rolled on their casters, baby carriages, sewing machines, and pillowcases filled with the family silver. Women carried bundles of clothing, and more than one father of a family staggered along with a piece of furniture on his back, a bureau or a small table. Children dragged mattresses, and Herma and Grasse passed a whole family of five including a grandmother trundling a piano down the street. Not all of the salvaged objects were valuable. It was important to be carrying something. These objects were the lares and penates of their lost homes. Even a doorknob, or a window frame with the glass in it, showed that you had once had a house. One man had cut down the electric candelabrum—no doubt the pride of the household—and was carrying it in his hand with the dead wire dangling.
A woman sat on the curb of Market wailing, in a monotonous voice, “Oh, my husband is dead, and a young man is dead, and a woman is dead …” The litany was repeated over and over again, connected by “ands.” No one paid any attention to her. A man wandered around asking everybody where he could get a shave. He had gone to his hotel, he said, and to his surprise it wasn’t there anymore. A little farther on there was a small fire in a restaurant and the waiters were using soda siphons to put it out. Everyone stopped to watch this. The fire, extinguished inside the restaurant, reappeared under the eaves out on the sidewalk, and a waiter came out with a stepladder and put this out too. This seemed a purely formal procedure, a gesture of exorcism. From south of the Slot, only a mile or so away, an immense billow of smoke could be seen advancing steadily, vaulting over street after street.
At the corner of Third Street Herma and Grasse stopped. The Grand Opera House was only a block down on Mission. It was afire, but it was emitting only a little smoke and showing almost no flame from the outside. A few yellow tongues darted now and then from the clerestory windows high on the sides. The rear of the building smoked like a hot griddle. Then, instead of bursting into flames as Herma expected, the immense baroque structure simply collapsed. The walls fell inward and the roof came down on top of them in a single slow and graceful motion, accompanied by a prolonged sound like thunder. An instant after the roof struck the ground a million white-hot particles shot up into the air trailing showers of sparks behind them, soaring off in brilliant arcs, like a fabulous and block-long fireworks display for the entertainment of a mad monarch. Once this spectacle was over the remains settled down to burn in a businesslike way, with a loud crackling.
“C’est formidable,” Grasse said, but he spoke almost indifferently. “It is always interesting to watch a fire, even when it is your own house that is burning.”
She realized that she knew almost nothing about his personal life, except that he was a bachelor.
“Where do you live?”
“South of the Slot. It’s gone now. Mrs. Morbihan’s boarding house on Howard.”
“Funny. Do you know Madame Ernestine, the actress?”
He darted a glance at her. “Ah,” he said roguishly. “Everyone knows Ernestine.”
“She’s only lived there a couple of weeks.”
He hesitated for only a moment, then he smiled cryptically. “She makes friends quickly.”
He had nothing more to say on this subject. Herma concealed her own little smile. The more fool Fred, she thought, not without a certain satisfaction. They crossed Market and made their way up Stockton toward Union Square.
The images that remained in Herma’s memory afterward were fragmentary, and their chronology was curiously twisted. It was hard to recall what had come first and what after, or whether some things had happened at all or had only been part of the strange dream—not unpleasant but simply strange—that seemed superimposed on everything, so that there were two levels of events in that four days of wandering about the city, the real and the fabulous. She clearly remembered, for example, seeing a lion and a pair of leopards slinking through the ruins of the Grand Hotel, although someone told her later that there was no zoo in San Francisco. More real, even though somewhat ghostlike, was the undertaker squatting outside his establishment on Lombard Street completely absorbed in the task of polishing coffin handles, or the well-dressed woman who sat in a cable car on Powell Street waiting for it to start, regardless that the pavement around it was twisted into waves like those of the sea. On Nob Hill, in front of a rococo mansion still untouched by the fire, a man offered a thousand dollars for a team of horses. Behind him was a wagon piled high with a Steinway grand piano, rolls of imported Gobelin tapestries, and crates of fine china and crystal. There were no takers.
But, if there was no zoo, there was a madhouse. Its walls had fallen and the inmates had simply walked out into the city. Creeping along Sutter, trailing their hands on the walls as if they wished to reassure themselves that at least part of the world was still standing, came a procession of sunken-eyed fearful men in pyjamas, some with bare feet. There were seven or eight of them. They glanced about like criminals, and said nothing even to each other, although they kept more or less together in a ragged line, with one straggler, a grossly corpulent old man who could walk only with difficulty, bringing up the rear. One of them, the second in line, was absentmindedly carrying a crowbar, as though he had forgotten he had it. He was a powerfully built man with a pink sunburned neck and arms like tree limbs, and he looked as though he might have been a carpenter. As they passed Herma each of the madmen
stared at her, one after the other. A youngish man toward the end, with a soft mustache and anxious guilty eyes, fell out of line and came back to her.
“It’s my fault,” he told her. “Self-abuse. I tried to stop but I couldn’t.” His companion told him, “Come on, Willie.” He turned away and rejoined the others, still looking back at Herma.
A policeman came along Sutter after them at an unhurried pace. When he caught up with them he first took the crowbar from the hand of the carpenter. Then he said, “All right, boys. Come along. We’re going back home.” Docilely they turned and followed him. As they disappeared in the distance the young man with the mustache looked back once more at Herma. His soft eyes were fixed on hers for a moment. Then he turned and went on with the others.
It was on the second day. On the steep hill of California Street a crowd had collected, and Herma and Grasse stopped to watch. A house had collapsed and someone was still buried in a bed under the bricks. A bedpost protruded. The passersby began working to throw out the bricks one by one. Two firemen came up and joined in at the work. The others, a score or more of people, simply stood about on the sidewalk watching.
Herma glanced at Grasse. Then she crossed the sidewalk and clambered down, in her gown by Worth of Paris, into the gulf left by the collapse of the building. Grasse followed her. This encouraged some others to join in. They began throwing out bricks. Herma kept at it for a half an hour without stopping to rest. After five minutes her hands were scraped and bleeding. Three of the four bedposts were visible now, and a leg clad in pyjamas was sticking out at one side. But the bed, with the rest of the furniture, had fallen into the cellar below the level of the street, so that Herma, Grasse, and the others were working at the bottom of a steep and shifty pit lined with loose bricks. The bricks had to be flung up in two or three stages, the last workers at the top slinging them out into the street. But no sooner was a part of the bed uncovered than a landslide of bricks occurred at one side, almost burying it again. The dirty pyjama leg was slowly dripping blood. Did people bleed after they were dead, Herma wondered? She began throwing bricks faster. Her hands and face were grimy and her gown was torn in several places.