by Tom Murphy
Lily looked at him, so thoroughly astonished she forgot her fear. He was her boys’ age, and scholarly-looking, with gold-rimmed eyeglasses.
“I beg your pardon?”
“No, madame, I beg yours, for I see I have frightened you. But Chinese customs fascinate me, even the cruel ones. You see, they believe that the earth rests on the backs of three giant bulls. So, naturally, when the quake came, it only meant that one of those bulls had gone astray. They were trying to drive it back to its rightful position in the scheme of things.”
“I would wish,” Lily said quietly, thinking of other things, “that it were that simple.”
“And I. Good day to you, madame.”
And he was gone in the smoke.
Lily stepped past the Chinese and their victim and walked on down California Street.
The lower parts of the Chinese sector were nearly abandoned. Everything that could burn had burned, and everything else was a blackened shell of stone or brickwork. In some cases the intense heat had melted the mortar, reduced it to sand, and the bricks came tumbling down of their own weight and the velocity of the fire storm.
The city was drowning in fire, and there seemed to Lily no way at all to save it.
And she knew as she walked through this black, ruined landscape, this three-dimensional, searing, burning, crumbling nightmare, what she would almost surely find at the bottom of Market Street—and what she would not find.
Still, Lily must go there and see for herself.
She walked on, glad of her country walking boots and inconspicuous dress.
The bottom of Market Street was deserted as a stage setting long after the final curtain had been rung down. The skull-eyed, blackened fronts of the once-elegant office buildings seemed to stare at Lily as she picked her lonely way through the ruins.
She hardly recognized the Chaffee Building when she finally got there. She stood for a moment in the street, staring up at the gutted structure, and then, slowly, as if hypnotized by the quiet of the place and the blackness inside it, Lily climbed up the seven marble steps to the empty space that once held the fine mahogany-and-etched-glass door. She paused in the opening, looking down into a blackness where the floor had been, a blackness that might easily have been a grave.
“Brooks? Brooks?”
Her voice rose, and a faint echo came mocking back at her, a ghost’s voice, barely audible above the almost constant rumble of far-off dynamiting.
“Brooks…” whispered the echo. “Brooks…” The echo came from a place that Lily feared more than death itself. The echo seemed to come from the darkest corner of her own heart, that buried, secret place where all along, over all these golden years, she had known the profound and inadmissible truth that the cards had turned up lucky for her one time too many, that she was living upon borrowed luck, that she didn’t deserve Brooks, or his love, or the thousand kinds of happiness that his love had brought her.
That it would all be taken away from her in some evil, unimaginable manner.
Lily turned slowly, and slowly she walked down the rubble-strewn marble stairs. She would try the hospitals. She would try the morgue. Up Market Street she walked, not sure where the hospital was anymore, if indeed it was still standing. Lily walked two blocks alone, then felt the tugging at her sleeve. She looked down and saw a girl, small and thin, no more than eighteen, surely, greatly disheveled, eyes big with the urgency of her mission. The girl wore a bathrobe over a torn nightgown, and she had no shoes at all. In her hand was a small oval photograph of a pretty child, a boy, perhaps two years old. The girl tried to speak, but her voice had been reduced to croaking.
“Have…you seen my boy? Have you seen my little Albert?”
Lily looked at the pathetic creature and thought how very many lives must endure the bottom dropping out from underneath them on this awful day.
“I’m terribly sorry, my dear, but I have not.” The girl just nodded. Lily wondered how many times since dawn she must have asked this question and been disappointed. Lily reached in her purse and found a ten-dollar bill and pressed it into the girl’s hand.
“Buy yourself something to eat, child. Keep your strength up. For Albert’s sake.”
The girl looked at Lily, made a neat little curtsy, smiled a faint thin wire-drawn line of a smile, and said gently, “Have…you seen my boy? Have you seen my little Albert?”
Lily turned away to hide the tears that suddenly filled her eyes. When she had recovered her composure and turned back, the girl was halfway down the block, moving determinedly in the direction of a big fireman. Lily’s ten dollars lay forgotten in the street. She picked up the bill and tucked it in her purse. I should have a picture of him, famous as he is, not everyone in town knows Brooks by sight.
And Lily herself headed for the fireman, who, a study in weariness, muttered that the temporary central hospital in this quarter had been set up in the huge halls of the Mechanics Institute.
Lily stood as tall as fatigue would let her, and carried her head high, and all the way to the Mechanics Institute she forced herself to think of a hundred minor accidents—very minor, please, God!—that could have put Brooks in the hospital and out of communication.
A stray brick, a speeding fire engine, a tumble on a bit of rubble, breaking up a fight, stopping a looter, helping the firemen—there were endless possibilities.
And there were endless possibilities for other, maybe fatal mishaps.
The Mechanics Institute, scene of a thousand balls and banquets, now looked like something imagined by Dante on an especially gloomy midnight. The late-afternoon sunlight was so diminished by the smoke and soot that it could have been nighttime. Inside the vast hall was jammed from wall to wall with hastily improvised cots, with mattresses flung any which way on the floor, with the screams and moanings and prayers of the wounded, with anxious friends and relatives searching, with bloodstained doctors and nurses and volunteers rushing this way and that with never enough time or supplies.
Lily soon realized that only the gravely injured, and women in childbirth, were likely to receive any attention at all.
She stood at one end of the vast chamber and knew what she must do. An hour and a half later Lily had seen every patient in the institute with her own eyes. She had seen men with their legs crushed, children burned black and screaming for want of anesthetics, an entire section of insane people cruelly but necessarily tied to their cots. Lily had seen more kinds of suffering than she had ever imagined or wanted to imagine.
But she had not seen Brooks.
In a daze, she walked out of the door.
More patients were being rushed into nonexistent spaces every minute, but Lily knew that whatever had happened to her husband must have happened long ago—this morning.
This morning! It was longer than long ago, decades it was, a lifetime ago, an eternity.
Now she must go to the morgue.
A policeman told her there was a temporary morgue under tents in a vacant lot three blocks away. She nodded, and thanked him, and started walking, moving mechanically now in her tiredness and despair.
What had been very bad at the hospital was much worse at the morgue, for the quake and the fire and the violence that followed between man and man had worked strange and terrible ends for over a hundred people. The attendant, a police captain, assured Lily that, had Brooks died anywhere downtown, he would have been brought here. At first the basic decencies were observed, but the death toll had mounted through the day, and now there were no sheets to cover them, and no more cots to lay them on; the dead were stacked on the ground like firewood, close, side by side. As she had seen all of the wounded, now Lily saw all of the dead. And Brooks was not among them.
She felt like a ghost herself now, doomed forever to wander among the dead and the dying, seeking what she could never find.
Lily turned and walked the length of the army tents, oblivious of the torn and burned and battered bodies all around her, sick beyond repugnance at the sight of
death or the smell of it.
In the street she paused, holding on to a lamppost, making one last valiant effort to organize her thoughts, to focus what little was left of her energy on the great problem that haunted her, and on the smaller problem of mere survival.
Home. She must go home!
It could be, by a miracle, that he’d gone home and was waiting for her. He’d have the sense not to go looking for her—or would he? Lily looked up the street, up the hill, whose top was obscured in the persistent smoke, steeling herself for the long climb home. If the damned house was still standing! But standing or flaming, that’s where he’d be—if he was capable, anymore, of being anyplace.
Lily walked slowly for half a block. She sensed the shape emerging from the sooty smoke ahead before she actually saw him. She stopped dead, unbelieving. Then he saw her, and ran, shouting, his arms outstretched to catch her.
“Mamma! Thank God! We’ve been frantic.”
Lily looked at her eldest son and smiled, incapable of speaking. He had always looked like his father, and never more than in this moment: tall, was Neddy, and fair—only Katie had inherited her mother’s flame of hair—tall was her Neddy, and beautiful to look on, like his father. So Lily smiled wearily above the knife wound in her heart, for love her son as she surely did, he was not Brooks Chaffee.
Neddy had his motorcar nearby, and he helped her into it. Soon they were up the hill and home. And home was still standing: Brooks’s instructions had worked their wonders, for every house around them had been scorched and gutted. All the servants had pitched in to save the Chaffee mansion, servants upon the rooftops squirting vagrant sparks with seltzer bottles, maids in upstairs bathrooms bailing out the filled-up bathtubs to wet down the walls, an orgy of water-splashing as the flames danced all around the garden walls for hours.
It was only when they were safely inside and Lily had washed and changed and they were sitting in something like comfort, drinking tea, that Neddy broke the news.
An army officer had come looking for Lily and, not finding her, had found Ned.
Lily listened to her son, feeling sorry for him as he spoke the terrible words, knowing what they cost him, anticipating his fears of the effect those words might have on her.
Neddy finished his story and took his mother’s hand, as much to reassure himself as her. “He couldn’t have known what hit him,” he said softly. “At least we can thank God for that.”
“Take me to him.”
“Mamma, he was badly shot.”
“Take me to him.”
They had lain Brooks Chaffee in the dining room. He lay on the big rosewood table, which had been covered by a sheet, and Neddy had somehow found an undertaker to cleanse his father’s body and prepare it for burial.
Lily walked slowly into the room and up to the table.
So he had come home after all.
She looked down at the face she had loved more than any other, loved nearly all her life, loved to distraction, beyond hoping, loved with all that her heart and her mind and body could give. She bent and kissed that dear face, damaged as it was.
Then she turned and left the room. There was so much to be done, so many people to help.
The next three days passed in a blur for Lily and Ned and their servants. The fire raged in every part of the city. Golden Gate Park became one huge refugee camp. There were more deaths, and much illness developed, and Lily would hear of nothing but turning her house into a refuge for the homeless. They all worked virtually around the clock. When the household supplies were exhausted, Lily prevailed upon the army, and more rations were sent. Lily would have helped in any case, but now the work had a new and special meaning for her. The busier she kept, the less chance she had to think about her loss.
She worked herself until the point of mere exhaustion had passed, worked until she could work no more, and then worked longer. She comforted the homeless, sympathized with those who had lost loved ones, played with the children, helped her own staff in the kitchen, got medical aid where it was needed, and organized a remarkably effective intelligence-gathering system about long-range opportunities for the victims under her roof.
And finally, late at night, she would drag herself upstairs to bed, tired beyond thinking: only then Lily would sink into a numbed and dreamless sleep.
On Friday the rain came. The last of the fires sputtered out, and the three days of horror ground painfully to a halt. The human loss and the loss of property could never accurately be calculated, yet already the irrepressible city was bounding back, as it had bounded back many times before, looking only into the future, building with the burnt stones of ruin, leapfrogging the black canyons of despair. Permanent refugee camps were quickly organized, and Lily assisted in evacuating her temporary guests to one of them. For nearly a week she had fed, clothed, sheltered, and comforted more than two hundred refugees. The newspapers that had quickly sprung out of their own ashes made her one of the heroines of the disaster, and when they made reference to her colorful past, it was in the most reverent and symbolic manner, for in Lily Cigar they suddenly saw an image of the city itself, determined, a little brazen, a touch of bawdiness but supremely gallant for all that, and a beauty too, don’t forget it, and with drive and spunk and a loving heart.
That was how the papers described her, and how one more chapter was added to the legend.
But Lily never read those stories.
She had another, more important job to do.
On Wednesday, April 25, just one week after the earthquake, Brooks Chaffee was buried high on a hilltop on the ranch at San Rafael, just down the slope from the getaway cottage on Lily’s Hill. Only Lily and Ned and the servants were there; it was a brief ceremony and a simple one.
Lily stood at the graveside, saying nothing, until the last spadeful of earth had been shoveled on his coffin. And she thought that all she had ever cherished, ever since she could remember, had passed this way, gone to the grave. Then her son’s hand found hers and led her up the slope to the little cottage.
They stood together on the porch, looking out over the hills to the blue sea in the distance. Then she spoke, softly, remembering.
“He was always so happy here.”
Neddy looked at her. “He had good reason to be. Will you be staying here, Mamma?”
Lily looked out at the view, and felt the sun warm on her face. She thought of the days she had spent here with Brooks, and of the time she had come here to lick her wounds when Fergy died.
Then she turned to her son and smiled. “No, darling, there’s far too much for me to do.”
Together they walked down the hill hand in hand, to where the horses were waiting. And Lily, still spry as a girl, climbed up onto her mount and cantered off down the hill to the ranch. She knew as she rode away from his grave that there would be no separation from Brooks, not now or ever, that he would be with her in every word she uttered, in every thought that formed in her mind, in every beat of her heart. For theirs was a love of such depth and sympathy that death was powerless against it.
Ned Chaffee looked at his mother as she rode, rode easily, expertly, enjoying the ride and the day, and suddenly he was smiling too, for he thought what a very lucky man his father had been, to win the love of Lily Cigar.
Epilogue
CHAFFEE-DICKINSON NUPTIALS UNITE PROMINENT PIONEER DYNASTIES
From the San Francisco Chronicle, May 30, 1918:
Perfect weather was the order of the day for what many Bay Area socialites consider the Wedding of the Year 1918, uniting Miss Elizabeth Hudner Chaffee of Nob Hill and San Rafael, and Major Stanford Dickinson III at Miss Chaffee’s grandmother’s ranch in San Rafael. Miss Chaffee wore an heirloom gown of ivory satin reembroidered with antique Point de Venise lace, and a short veil of the same lace, and carried a country bouquet of white roses and stephanotis from her grandmother’s famous garden.
She was attended by five recent debutantes, the Misses Hillary Coit, Malvina Crocker, Judith Wincheste
r, Livia Dickinson (sister of the groom), and Edythe Hitchkok, all of San Francisco.
Major Dickinson had as his best man his younger brother, Jeb Dickinson, and as ushers, five classmates from Yale: Mr. Derek DuBois, Mr. Anton Hartmann, Mr. James Connor, Mr. Jay Cavior, and Mr. Nicholas Crocker.
Both the bride and the groom are descended from third-generation San Francisco families, Mrs. Dickinson being the granddaughter of Mr. Brooks Chaffee, well-known produce tycoon and landowner, whose tragic accidental shooting during the 1906 fire saddened all San Francisco, and his widow, Mrs. Lillian Malone Chaffee, remarkable at age 81, who is active in many local arts and charities to this day. Major Dickinson is the grandson of Stanford Dickinson I and Mrs. Mamie Dickinson, both of San Francisco, both deceased.
When asked to comment upon her granddaughter’s wedding, Mrs. Brooks Chaffee said: “Well, it was absolutely lovely, I’m sure. And young Stanford is a fine lad, very heroic in France, as you know. My one regret,” said Mrs. Chaffee with perhaps the only look of sadness that intruded upon the otherwise joyous occasion, “is that my dear husband didn’t live to see it. And, of course, Stanford and Mamie Dickinson. What would I not give to see the expression on dear Mamie’s face were she here today!”
The bride and bridegroom will spend the first part of their honeymoon in what has come to be known as “The Honeymoon Cottage” high on a hill on the Chaffee ranch, after which they will sail for an extended cruise of the Far East. On returning, Major Dickinson expects to enter the family real-estate business, and to make his home in Hillsborough.
More from Tom Murphy
Ballet!
Two lovers dance at the edge, one step away from immortality, one step away from tragedy.
One by one they died. In Paris. In Switzerland. In Ireland. In California. The most gifted and famous Soviet defectors. Victims of an unknown assassin. Pawns in a monstrous game.
One prize target remains. Dima Lubov. The most celebrated new ballet star. Leaping from triumph to triumph on stage. And plunging into a passionate love affair with Jennifer Hale, the exquisite American prima ballerina who is the perfect partner in his art and in his arms.
