by Tom Murphy
Then came the second jolt, more violent than the first. This is no thunder. This is no distant explosion. This is an earthquake! There was a pause, then an enormous crash inside the house that sounded like all the china on a banquet table breaking at once. Lily thought of the great chandelier in the stairwell, with its thousands of crystal pendants. Could it have broken loose and crashed to the marble below? For a moment she lay as if paralyzed, afraid to leave the bed. She reached for Brooks and called his name.
“What happened?” Brooks was out of the bed like a shot, and pulling on a robe. Slowly, moving with the heavy motion of a sleepwalker, Lily got out of bed and put on her robe. “I think,” she said softly, “that we’ve had an earthquake.”
There was a pause while they both seemed to weigh the ominous silence that filled the San Francisco night. Brooks walked to the big French windows and threw them open.
“Don’t! The balcony might be loose.”
Brooks turned quickly and gave her an appraising look, as if to see whether Lily had gone crazy. She wondered whether it would be safe to investigate that terrible crash, and decided to wait: whatever was down, was down.
“I can’t see a thing,” said Brooks, “nor hear anything, either.”
“Then something is very wrong out there.”
“Listen, there’s only the wind.”
“What time is it?” Lily asked, as if that could make some difference.
He went to his dressing chest and lit a match. “Fifteen after five, if this thing’s right.”
“Just a little quake.”
“I’ll never take them for granted, though, there’s something eerie about them. Until I came here, I’d always thought the earth was…well, pretty solid.”
“They come and go so quickly—remember sixty-eight?”
“Sixty-eight was pretty bad, Lily, not the quake, but the fires.”
“Yes, but we have so many more brick and stone buildings now.”
“The instant someone tells me a thing is fireproof, or unbreakable, or warranted forever, I get very suspicious.”
“Stop being so suspicious and come kiss your wife.”
“You,” he said, stooping to kiss her cheek, “are truly warranted forever.”
The next jolt caught him that way, leaning across the bed.
It rocked the room, the house, the hill, and the whole town. There was a violent rumbling, a sound of big rocks rolling downhill. Then silence. Then a series of crashes, tearing, ripping sounds, and a great rushing, heavy-breathing sound as though some incalculably huge giant was drawing in his breath for a final assault upon the wicked city. Brooks lay where he fell on the bed, clutching Lily. If this, he thought instantly, is how we die, then thank God it is together, for what in the world would I do without her?
Brooks thought these things but did not say them, for fear of frightening Lily.
It was impossible for either of them to tell how long he lay there, just holding her, or how long the terrifying stillness lasted.
But a moment came when the stillness slowly altered in texture.
There was no sudden loud sound, but rather a gathering of sounds, a building concerto of doom.
A horse screamed. There were distant rumblings, stone on stone. A man’s hoarse voice pierced the dawn. “Harry?” he cried pitifully, “Harry?”
There was no answer for him.
Brooks stood up and once again went to the window. This time Lily stood too, and joined him there.
They could see some lights flickering in the Fairmont Hotel three blocks to the right.
“Candles,” Brooks said softly. “Their electricity must be cut off.”
“And I don’t see streetlights.”
“If the gas mains burst, that could be real trouble.” And, he thought, but gave the thought no tongue, if the water mains break, too, the whole shooting match could go up in smoke, just like that.
There were people in the streets now, but the darkness conspired with silence to hide the damage. Brooks and Lily could only guess, and wonder, and they had no way of telling how bad it might be. Yet for all the mystery, the worst seemed to be over now. There, out beyond their garden wall, they could begin to see people moving in the slow-gathering dawn. They heard the clatter of a horse-drawn wagon going full tilt, and somehow this reassured them. A soft insistent knocking came at their door.
“Come in.”
It was Mary, Lily’s maid. “Oh, madame, you’re all right.”
“We’re fine, thank you, Mary. And how are you, and the others?”
“None injured, ma’am, but scared, that’s for sure.”
“Well, then,” said Lily smiling with confidence she did not feel, “let us see what damage there is, and how to fix it.”
“The bathrooms, ma’am, the reservoirs, you know, are all overflowed.”
Lily thought of the big brass tanks encased in mahogany that held the flushing water high over the toilets. Of course, they’d be most vulnerable. Lily followed her maid, who chattered to keep her fears at bay.
But Brooks stayed at the window, looking down on the city. There, down by the docks—his docks—he could see the first thin plume of smoke, pale gray as the dawn that bore it, slender it was, and curling upward slowly, gently. The plume of smoke had the false innocence of a cabin’s chimney smoke. But it was just that much wider, and it came just that much faster. This was no one’s chimney.
Instinctively Brooks began dressing, wondering if his country boots were in the closet where he’d left them. Wondering if he could get to the Chaffee Produce offices above the warehouse at the foot of Market Street in time to do any good.
Lily stood at the stair rail looking down fifty feet to the ruins of the immense gilt-bronze-and-crystal chandelier that had once graced the palace of Vaux le Vicomte. The chandelier had survived the wrath of Louis XIV, who had jailed the château’s owner, Fouquet, for fiscal indiscretions. The chandelier had also survived the mobs of the Terror. But it had not survived the wrath of nature in the early morning of April 18, 1906, in San Francisco. It was a sad twisted thing now, its graceful arms awry, its carved and faceted crystals smashed, candles broken. Lily looked at it in awe for a moment that seemed to last an hour.
Then she heard his footsteps on the stairs behind her. Lily turned and saw that he was dressed, but in country clothes, rough clothes, the sort of thing they wore in bad weather at the ranch.
“You’re not going to the ranch?”
“No, my darling, I just want to check the warehouse, and the offices, you just can’t tell from here what the damage might be—and I fear it’s more than we think.”
“Brooks. Don’t go.”
“I’ll be back in a few hours. There may be looting, if there’s enough destruction. I must go, Lily.”
She looked at him and thought: I am acting like the kind of silly, weak-hearted woman I despise most. Of course he must go. Then why does it shake me worse than the damned earthquake? She took a deep breath and tried to regain control of her voice.
“I do understand how you feel, my darling,” she said gently. “But promise me you won’t take foolish chances, and that you’ll come back to me soon.”
“You can,” he replied casually, with an assurance that must have been snatched out of the eerie silence, for it surely did not grow inside him, “count on me for luncheon. The only thing to fear, Lily, is fire. We’re luckier than most, having our own well and our own pump. You must rally the servants and fill every bathtub, every horse trough, and all the biggest pots and pans in the kitchen. ’Tis better, far, to be prepared.”
“I’ll do that.” Lily tried to smile, but the memory of the brushfire on the ranch burned vividly in her mind and heart.
“I won’t be long, my love.” He kissed her and walked down the great staircase, casually as though twenty thousand dollars’ worth of antique chandelier were not lying in fragments on the marble floor below.
Lily stood for a moment watching his fine straight back un
til he vanished from her range of vision. The young maid watched her, awestruck. The madame’s lips were moving, but she said nothing. Lily formed a prayer. Her heart prayed, but she had no strength to give it voice. Then she turned to the maid and briskly commenced her tour of inspection.
Brooks turned toward the stables, and then turned away. With a ground shock as violent as this had been, and maybe more coming, it would be folly to take a carriage out, much less his gleaming new electric motorcar. The roads might well be impassable even on foot. In any event, it wasn’t that much of a walk to his offices; on fine mornings he often did it for pleasure: across Mason to California, then down California, through Chinatown all the way down to its confluence with Market Street near the docks. It was a vibrant half-hour’s stroll downhill, and he had even done the uphill leg a few times, although that, admittedly, was work.
But now, as Brooks turned right at his own front gate and walked along Mason Street, he might have been a visitor from a distant planet, so awed was he by the changes all around him and the anticipation of other, more severe changes soon to be encountered.
The first few houses looked secure enough, but then, this was the richest part of town, and the houses were mostly big and solid and well set back in their gardens. The third house he passed had all its chimneys cut off like mown grass. One chimney, and a big one, had obviously crashed through the roof. Brooks hoped no one was sleeping in the room where it struck. He passed a railroad magnate’s stone château and found himself laughing out loud, for there, having dived headfirst from her pedestal, was a chaste but definitely nude Grecian slave girl in marble, buried to her improbable bosom in a patch of tea roses, her boiled-asparagus legs, whiter than snow, pointing straight up toward the unkind heaven that had wrought such havoc on her calculated sexless dignity.
He paused at the corner of California Street. The wideness of the street and the extreme steepness of its slope allowed the best view in the vicinity: Brooks could see over all the town.
There were six fires now.
Half an hour ago, if that, he had seen two. Part of the town’s lurid history was the history of fire after devastating fire. In the old jerry-built gold-rush days, San Francisco had been leveled five times in ten years by fire, and just as quickly—and shoddily—rebuilt. But they’d learned: the buildings were brick and stucco and stone now, and the biggest of them, like Spreckels’ Call building, were framed in steel on top of that. And the fire department was famous throughout America for its speed and effectiveness.
Six fires. Six columns of smoke. It could only mean that the water mains had been destroyed by the shock. The best fire department in the world was impotent without water.
Brooks Chaffee quickened his pace.
The silence that had marked his first glimpse of the shaken city was still heavy in the air.
There was a startling urgency in the fact that in this boisterous, bustling, booming caldron of a town, and at just the time of day when most people were usually operating at full steam to get their chores started, there was such a cryptic hush. It was not the reassuring calm of a starlit mountain midnight, the kind of lovely stillness that both he and Lily so loved in their little cottage high on Lily’s Hill in San Rafael. This was a stunned silence, the reflexive quiet of someone who has just received a violent, undeserved, and entirely unexpected blow.
The entire city was in shock.
There were people in the streets now, fully dressed, some of them dressed bizarrely, as if for an evening party. One woman wore a gingham housedress and five ropes of pearls. A very fat man stood in silent grandeur wearing an evening tailcoat and miner’s red-flannel long underwear and gleaming English riding boots.
They stood like sentinels, silent, in little clusters or alone, watching. Saying nothing. A few men, like Brooks, seemed to be going about their normal routines.
But no cable cars ran, no electric lights burned, no horse carriages or motorcars could be seen on the streets. There were just the watchers, and the silence.
Now the six plumes of smoke were eight.
Lily’s tour of inspection was quickly over. Big as it was, she knew the mansion well, and all the details of its running were familiar to her. Only the stables and the coachmen’s quarters were a mystery to her, and especially the details of the keeping and running of Brooks’s new Brewster electric automobile, which frightened her still, even though it was far quieter-running than the horrendous gas motors.
The chandelier had been the first casualty of the earthquake, and it remained the most serious one. There was broken glass, naturally, and some broken dishes. But, for the most part, the big stone house seemed intact. Lily obeyed Brooks’s orders to fill every possible receptacle with water. The well and its mechanical pump still worked, although the electrical pump system had failed. None of the electric lights were working, nor the gas lights, either. Lily was pleased that she had such an ample supply of candles: in time, they might need every one of them. Thinking about what they might need in time, if the quake was as bad as Brooks seemed to fear, Lily had a conference with her cook, and sent servants out to buy whatever could be bought in the way of food and canned goods.
It was impossible to tell what kind of siege they might be in for. The larder, needless to say, was tremendously well-stocked. Still and all, who knew how long they might be cut off from gas and electricity and the stores closed? And there might be others to feed, if the quake had done any extensive harm.
For the first time ever, Lily was glad that two of her children were back East, out of the path of this particular danger. And where was Neddy at this moment, and his brood, and how would things be at the ranch?
Lily’s head was filled with questions as she bustled about the big house, checking supplies, calming the servants’ fears, keeping herself very busy for fear of what she might do if she had a moment to think.
Brooks stopped to watch a crew of firemen, sharing their frustration. He was nearing Market Street now, at the corner of California and Front. And there was a wide six-story office building with shops on the street floor, just starting to blaze. The flames were flashing and flickering out the top-story windows. It must have been flying sparks, getting to the roof, to light it from the top like that, Brooks thought almost idly, as though he were observing some scientific phenomenon of passing interest instead of a deadly threat to the whole town. Someone had alerted the firemen, or perhaps they were just patrolling continuously now, for there were so many fires that Brooks had long stopped counting.
The horse-drawn fire wagon came smartly trotting up to the corner, all brass and bright red paint, but Brooks could see the instant it stopped that something was wrong. The something was the men. Their neat uniforms were disheveled, there was soot on their faces, but what startled Brooks to his marrow was something else. The expression on the faces of these brave men was a sad revelation of what was happening to San Francisco. It was an expression of defeat, despair, a hopeless kind of resignation.
Still, they went gamely through the motions.
Here was a fire plug, part of what City Hall claimed was the most extensive, most advanced prevention system of any city in the world.
Up went two men with the threaded hose. They had a special kind of wrench to open the hydrant. Open it they did, and stood there expectantly. Brooks found himself sharing their hopelessness. The open plug gaped black, dry as a lizard’s backside, with not one drop of water to quench the blaze. For one long moment the two firemen simply stood there staring into the dry hydrant in barely repressed despair mixed with rage, for there was nothing in all the world that they could do to stop the ravenous flames.
Finally Brooks walked on, holding his handkerchief to his nose now, for the smoke was ever thicker, and the heat more intense.
After she had seen to the inventory and restocking of her larder, Lily moved on to the linen closets. She could plainly see the ever-building cloud of smoke coming from the city below, and it was in vain that she tried to shut he
r ears to the one rapid system of communication that seemed to be working in the city: the servants’ underground gossip grapevine.
Mary was a good-natured girl, and willing, but she could not, for the life of her, stop chattering. And every time Lily sent the girl on some errand to the kitchen or the stables, back she came bubbling over with fragments of news dire enough to make Cassandra seem optimistic. Cliff House, for sure, had fallen right into the sea, and everyone in it. Martial law was being declared momentarily, to stop the terrible rioting, looting, drinking, and raping that seethed in the streets. Soldiers were marching from the Presidio, with orders to shoot to kill. A woman cooking breakfast had set the chimney on fire over Van Ness Avenue way, and now all that part of the town was in flames, too, the ham-and-eggs fire they were calling it, closing in on Nob Hill from behind. Doomed they all were, and only God could save them.
“Mary, my dear,” said Lily in her gentlest voice, “if you don’t stop chattering, I may strangle you with my own two hands, and surely you would not wish to make a murderess of me, now, would you, dear?”
Mary looked at her mistress, dazed, not knowing if Lily was joking or not. With Lily Cigar, you could never tell.
Lily looked at the blankets, the sheets, the towels. There looked to be enough to serve an army, but an army was exactly what they might end up serving. Even if she discounted half of what Mary said, the situation was bad and building to worse.
Here, in their own walled garden, with their own well and their vast resources for guests and entertaining, they were a kind of island insulated from the rest of Nob Hill even on the finest day of the year. Now that insulation might save them from the fire. Now she must be prepared for refugees: there would surely be hundreds of burned-out families needing care, and especially the women and children.
Suddenly Lily thought of the academy, and wondered how it had fared, and to what use its fine buildings might be put, should the city be overflowing.
